It is sunny again on the Sunday morning, and he puts Beta to the test in her first long walk since the accident. He carries her to the start of the beach and accompanies her slowly. She has a strange limp. Her fractured front paw is stiff, and her back legs are still a little atrophied, but she walks more quickly than he expected and shows no sign of wanting to give up. On the contrary, she gains confidence. From time to time she wanders close to the water, and on more than one occasion he has to rescue her so that she won’t be knocked down by a wave washing up on the beach with greater momentum. He can hardly believe it, but Beta seems to have developed a taste for the sea. He walks with her to the start of the beach promenade, sits on the steps that lead down to the sand, and strokes her head, thinking he’ll let her rest a little, but she takes off in her jerky trot toward the water. He goes after her, and by the time he catches up, she already has her muzzle in the waves. Hey, crazy girl. He picks her up, returns to the sand, strips down to his black boxer shorts, piles his clothes up on a small dune, and wades into the water with Beta under his arm. The waves are stronger here than at the end of the beach, but she doesn’t seem to mind. It is so cold that it doesn’t even feel like cold water, but more like abrasive heat, as if the outer limits of hot and cold temperatures can’t be told apart. He keeps both hands under her belly the whole time to help her float but lets her work her paws, and the waves wash lightly over her. Beta, you’re a crazy girl, he says through chattering teeth. You think you’re a whale now? Do you want to be the world dog-paddle champion? She sneezes and swims, sneezes and swims. When his limbs start to hurt and tingle, he takes her out of the water and dries her with his T-shirt, then puts the rest of his clothes back on and heads home. He is stiff with cold. A short distance from two fishing boats raised up on planks of wood on the beach, he hears Jasmim’s voice calling his name. She is sitting by herself on a bench on the promenade, drinking maté. Her silhouette is plumped out by a navy-blue padded jacket and a wool scarf wrapped around her neck. She walks over to him.
There were some guys here staring at the water saying that some lunatic was swimming in his underpants with a dog. I stopped to take a look and thought, hmm, I think I know that guy.
It was me.
Don’t you feel the cold?
I’m freezing. But this sun’s helping a bit.
You’re lucky there’s no wind.
Wasn’t there an excursion today?
No, we didn’t have the numbers. Frota, the owner, stayed in the office, and I went to church early today. I stopped off here for a maté before going home.
Do you go to church?
On Sundays. I’ve been going to the chapel on the square there. It’s gorgeous. Have you ever been inside?
No.
Don’t you have a religion?
No. Do you?
Oh, I believe in God. That’s all. I was brought up that way. Church on Sundays ever since I was a child. It does me good to pray. The act of going and praying. I know it’s irrational. I wish I could stop, but I can’t.
I wanted to believe at some stage, but I couldn’t.
It doesn’t matter. God doesn’t care about that. But I doubt he likes it when people play with life like you do. You’re blue. Blue people tend to wake up in a hospital with hypothermia. You should get home quickly.
I think I’d rather stay here a bit longer.
She stares at him, and despite his best efforts he ends up looking away.
Then have a maté to warm up.
She presses the button on the Thermos, and the stream of steaming-hot water gurgles noisily through the maté leaves and into the gourd. Beta was following her own nose, already a distance away, but now she is returning to her owner with her crippled gait. Jasmim hands him the gourd and watches her, intrigued.
What’s your dog’s name?
Beta.
What’s wrong with her?
She was run over. The vet wanted to put her down, but I didn’t let her, and in the end she pulled through. She’ll have to have physiotherapy to see if she can walk properly again, but I had the idea to put her in the water to exercise. There was a guy that used to come and exercise his pit bull in front of my apartment almost every night. It’d spend hours fetching a plastic bottle from the water. It got me thinking. I know a little about post-op hydrotherapy. It’s helpful with spinal injuries, and it can’t be very different for veterinary purposes. That’s what gave me the idea. I think it was a bit of intuition too. And she reacted well. When she was released from the clinic, she couldn’t even wag her tail. And not only is she improving, but she’s taken a liking to water. Did you see her? She’s learning how to break through the waves.
He sips the hot maté, and his body relaxes a little.
Do you go in the water with her every day?
Yep.
She stares at the dog and doesn’t say anything else until he finishes the maté and returns the gourd.
I have to go now. It’s really cold. Look, I—
I’ll call you next week to arrange something.
I waited for you to call. I don’t have any way to write down your number now, but if you dial my number—
I’ll call you.
I’d like that a lot. Have a good day.
You too. Go and get warm.
• • •
She doesn’t call but two days later shows up without warning at sunset. They sit in front of his building, looking at the ocean and drinking maté until the last scrap of light is absorbed by the night, and then they go inside and continue talking in the living room with the window ajar. She pats Beta and says she misses buying loose yerba maté leaves at the Porto Alegre Public Market. Mixed, you know? Pure leaves with coarsely ground Ximango. She says she isn’t hungry but changes her mind when he starts to inspect the cupboards and fridge and announces that he has a packet of chicken nuggets in the freezer. As a child, she spent her free afternoons watching the afternoon movie on TV and eating nuggets with ketchup. She repeats that she doesn’t drink when she has to ride her motorbike afterward, but she accepts a glass of Chilean red. Jasmim listens to him succinctly narrate his father’s recent suicide with scientific interest and says that there are famous cases of people who killed themselves out of boredom or because they were tired, people who were naturally inclined to see death as a pragmatic issue. Live as long as it’s worth it, as long as it’s useful. She is interested in suicides. People think that those who kill themselves are depressed, have given up, or can’t take things anymore, but there are many kinds of suicide, such as honor suicide, kamikaze suicide, suicide for the benefit of others, suicide because of old age, suicide because of an incurable chronic disease, suicide to prove an intellectual argument or promote an idea, protest suicide. She tells him about the recent case of a young American psychologist who killed himself in the middle of the street and left an almost two-thousand-page suicide note talking about Auschwitz and the rise of a technological God engendered by mankind, a huge philosophical, theological, sociological, and scientific argument to give meaning to a bullet through his brain. She read about two hundred pages of it. The whole thing is on the Internet. Then he tells her what he knows about his grandfather, and she tells him to be careful poking into that kind of old story involving death and mystery because the people of Garopaba are very superstitious, and she has had problems with it herself because of a local legend about buried treasure. They say that when someone dreams three times that there is treasure buried in a certain place, it’s because there is, but if the person who dreamed about it digs up the treasure, they die. Just ask around — there are people who really believe it. They say a guy died last year over in Ouvidor because of it. He dug a hole in the place he had dreamed about, found something, and died at home for no apparent reason. She says that these cursed treasures were supposedly buried by Jesuits who were here in the seventeenth century, before the region was colonized, to catechize the Carijó Indians and take them to Rio de Janeiro. Did you know that the town of Tubarão is named after an Indian chief who refused to be converted? He said that God hadn’t made him for heaven, but to live on the earth.