A delegation from the gym comes to visit on his third day in hospital. Débora, Mila, the twins, Jander, and Greice arrive with flowers and a bag of homemade ginger candies from Celma, who couldn’t make it because she is at a reiki conference in São Paulo. They name themselves to spare him the trouble of recognizing them. Débora cries when she sees the state he is in but tells him not to mind her, it’s nothing, she cries easily. Jander and Greice ask about Beta and are relieved to hear that she is being looked after by someone he trusts, and they offer the kennel if he needs it. That dog’s a miracle, says Greice. Rayanne and Tayanne say that the new swimming instructor isn’t as nice as him. I mean, he’s nice, says one of them — he can no longer remember which — but he doesn’t teach us. He just tells us what to do. When we say we’ve finished warming up, he points at the whiteboard and says, okay, now you can kick your legs. We finish kicking our legs, he says, okay, now do your sets. He just repeats everything that’s on the whiteboard. Whenever I ask if I’m swimming correctly, he says yes, but he doesn’t even look. We miss you. It’s no fun without someone correcting us, encouraging us, and getting on our case all the time. He says that maybe the new instructor is right. Maybe you’re swimming so well that you don’t need someone to correct you all the time. You just need to synchronize your arms and legs well, lengthen your strokes, and feel that you are moving, gliding through the water. And work hard, of course, to get better and better. I think you’re ready, girls. Look, says one twin. That’s what we’re talking about. Get better quickly, and come back to the pool, says the other. Is there any chance you’ll come back? I don’t know, he says. Ask Débora there. The secretary shrugs and says they’ll have to ask Saucepan. When they leave, he is assailed by memories of old friends, faceless figures who are recognizable from shared experiences, and fantasizes about visits and reunions until his daydreaming is interrupted by Natália, who brings him a little cup of pills and asks if it is true that the friend who came to visit yesterday has a bed-and-breakfast in Rosa.
He stays in hospital for eleven days.
The morning he is released, he uses the money that Dália brought him to catch a bus to the Florianópolis bus station, where he has lunch and buys a ticket to Garopaba. When he arrives, he goes straight to Dália’s house, although she is still at work in Imbituba. Beta prances about when she sees him, and Dália’s mother says that she gave her a lot of food so she’d regain her weight. She starts relaying another dream she had about him, but he stops her and says he already knows. This time a woman with black hair comes out of a swamp with a child. She stares at him in silence. That’s what you dreamed, right? She nods. You shouldn’t waste your time dreaming about me, ma’am. He downs the last sip of coffee, thanks her for everything several times, and congratulates her on her daughter’s engagement. He promises to return to pay her back for the dog food.
He passes through the middle of the fishing village at dusk, Beta close at heel, with fresh nicks on his face from the nurse who shaved him that morning. He goes into the supermarket and spends the rest of the money in his pocket on bread, butter, coffee, a bunch of bananas, and a credit voucher for his cell phone. Several locals are out on the sidewalks and on the verandas of their homes after the day of sun. Clothes and pillows are being taken in from windows, fences, and clotheslines. The air is filled with the smells of the salty breeze, fish gravy, and corn cakes coming out of the oven. The ocean looks like a stained-glass window in motion, as if the light of the setting sun were coming from underwater and the beach were the inside of a church, but the water smells of oil and sewage. And there, perched on the hill, is the apartment he wanted so badly to live in and did. He opens the shutters to let air into the living room and stays there in the dark until the streetlight in front of his window comes on and casts its light inside. He doesn’t feel like he is returning home. Jasmim was wrong about that. He doesn’t belong here. There are two possible places for a person. Family is one. The other is the whole world. Sometimes it isn’t easy to figure out which one we are in.