The Dolphin Who Stayed

In a river village where nobody arrives without a boat, a party ended at four in the morning and a man in white left without anybody seeing which way he went. There was no boat tied at the trapiche that was not a resident's, and no mark of a canoe in the mud at the bank, and bank mud holds a mark two days.

The girl he danced with all night had sewn half the dresses at that party. Nine months later Benício was born.

The village told it two ways, and never stopped telling it. In the afternoon, on the trapiche, the men said it had been the boto, the river dolphin, and they cited three things: the hat he did not take off the whole night, the plate of fish he held and did not eat, and the fact that he went straight to Dalina without making the round a stranger makes at a village party. In the morning, at the igarapé, the women said it lower, and their version explained everything without needing anything from outside, and had one disadvantage nobody said out loud.

THE DOLPHIN WHO STAYED is what that boy did with two versions of himself, told in the order it happened and with the count left in.

A grandmother who taught the girls a rule about the door, and a mother who barred hers with a plank across two crooked nails every night for thirty-three years, and three or four times a year, on a night of hard rain, woke to find the plank outside, propped against the wall with care.

A boy who went into the high water at seven and came back before dawn, sitting on the step, dry, after three hours of rain, and said he had stayed at the house down below.

A fisherman who turned up when the boy was five, taught him everything, never let him swim alone and never said why, and asked his mother for nothing in twenty-eight years.

A bus on its side on an avenue, and a doctor praising a tourniquet nobody had done.

And a man of thirty-three with a diploma, who could not hear his mother say what she said, in a boat, the day before dying, and then leave without verifying. So he made a list of ten lines and went down to a pool with no bottom to check it, and what he found was narrower than he expected and harder to doubt: the water did not take him, and he knew things beforehand, and neither of the two was ever any use for anything large.

It is a book about what a village invents when it has no solution, and about a woman who heard both versions about her own son for thirty-three years and denied neither.

About his mother's reason, he was right. About the rest, he was not.