Illustrations by Oliver Munday.

An adapted excerpt of the novella by Daniel Galera, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches.

Manuela hates that it’s taking so long. For the past two weeks, she’s hauled her belly up and down the stairs of their building, and along sidewalks where dirty water from the last October rainfall still splashes against her swollen ankles—and she’s sick of it. She wants to sleep belly-down, without pillows to support her. She wants to get up from the toilet without needing to hold on to the sink, to stop being kicked on the inside of her ribs, to have normal sex again. And Lucas, who’s always thought of himself as the kind of guy who can fight off exhaustion, confident in the perpetuum mobile of stamina that’s stored in his guts and keeps him in action no matter how badly he’s being pounded—lately, Lucas has been feeling paralyzed by a fear that he can’t fully understand. He’s scared he won’t make enough money to cover the basics, that Manuela will get hurt, that he’ll have a stroke or a heart attack, that come Monday morning the country will be at war with itself. The autobiography he’d spent six months ghostwriting was published in June, and the book’s subject, a young businessman who competed in ultramarathons all over the world and had a near-death experience in the Atacama Desert, finally wired him the last installment of his advance just a week ago. Now Lucas, who in the past few years has found himself having to settle for more and more freelance assignments, each less inspired than the last, is barely working. He often wonders whether he should finally give up journalism and take a job doing public relations for a construction company, just so they won’t have to move out of the city to the countryside. Maybe, he now realizes, it was a matter of inertia. It’s as if he had wanted to take things slowly for a couple of years to savor the last dregs of inactivity, to ease into this unplanned fatherhood. Some days, he feels sure that he’s done everything he could have, but the truth of the matter is that he’s been in a state of denial. He should have said yes to every depressing, low-paid gig that came his way. He should have harassed his contacts and past clients until he had more work than he knew what to do with. He’s been attending boxing classes religiously at a cheap, dungeon-like gym near Avenida Goethe, where bald, middle-aged bodybuilders give him lip because when they look at him, all they see is a communist hippie who probably took a wrong turn somewhere. In the past few months, he’s exercised even more than usual, as though in response to the fact that his body, unlike Manuela’s, refuses to change. But he knows he’s too old for all of this hard work to make a real difference. Ever since they decided their apartment would be mostly a cigarette-free zone, he’s been going out to smoke at a small square two blocks from the house, where he does pull-ups on the steel bar of the swing set, making everyone around him feel awkward. Not long ago, he’d caught himself smoking and doing pull-ups at the same time, taking a drag of his Camel on the way down and blowing out smoke on the way up, all while his mind fabricated soothing, hyperrealistic scenes in which he died by illness, accident, or suicide. Read More