Salvador

Salvador is the Brazilian city at the center of Emma Valentine’s year abroad, a place where encounters beside a haunted lagoon and in an abandoned factory mark different stages of her experience. The city is not merely a destination in her account: it is where she makes wishes, learns to handle a camera, and chooses how to appear in an image.

Emma’s stay in the city

Emma told Apollo Kagwa that she had bought tickets to move to Salvador, though she did not know how long she would stay. After arriving, she lodged with a host family in Itapuã, a neighborhood with a lagoon called Lagoa do Abaete. Her account gives Salvador a personal geography: the city is encountered through a household, a lagoon, and the people she meets there, rather than through a general description of its streets or landmarks.

Emma later returned to the United States after a year away. She told Apollo that, before leaving for Manaus, she had made three wishes at the lagoon. Her time in Salvador thus falls within a longer journey, but the city remains the setting for experiences she carries back with her.

Lagoa do Abaete and the wishes

Emma’s host family warned her away from a washerwoman at Lagoa do Abaete, calling the woman a witch. Emma nonetheless liked her and began sneaking out of the house to sit beside the lagoon while the woman did her washing. The woman reminded Emma of her mother as she might have been: tough, funny, and unconcerned with other people’s opinions. Their meetings made the lagoon a place of companionship as well as local mystery.

Before Emma left for Manaus, the washerwoman told her to make three wishes for her life and tied a red string around her wrist. Emma was to let the string come apart and fall off on its own; she was not to cut it. When she returned, it had grown stiff and dirty after more than six months on her skin. Though she admitted that she had initially treated the ritual as a bit of fun, she still wanted her wishes to come true and said she believed in magic. Salvador is therefore linked in the novel to a rule Emma chooses to honor even after the charm has become worn and inconvenient.

The factory and Emma’s photograph

About a month before Emma came back to the United States, she met a Dutch photographer in Salvador. They went around the city taking photographs. The photographer repeatedly tried to include Emma in the pictures, but she wanted to learn how to take them rather than simply appear in them. Their collaboration brought her into the role of photographer without displacing her preference to control her own image.

On a trip to an abandoned factory, the photographer left briefly to urinate, and Emma was alone with the equipment. She set up a timer and took a photograph of herself in front of a partly demolished wall. Over her right shoulder, the forest surrounding the factory remained visible: the frame joined a failing human-made structure with the natural world beyond it. The photograph is a precise visual counterpart to her experience in Salvador, where personal choices and encounters unfold amid places shaped by both human use and the surrounding landscape.