Ausentes (English Version)

By Edelweis Ritt

São José dos Ausentes - Brazil. A skull found in a creek propels Ana into a manic phase in her cyclothymic mind. With the assistance of her cousin, the town police chief, she investigates a murder.
The geologist Rodrigo disappeared four years before, after a short vacation with his family and having evaluated the presence of rare earth mines.
A cozy mystery with a glimpse into the cultural life of contemporary South Brazilians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edelweis Ritt
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798457628540

Edelweis Ritt

I am a writer, a grandma and a nerd.Fervid reader.Pregnant with lots of books ;)

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Ausentes

Copyright © E. Ritt, 2021

Published in Portuguese by

Editora Coerência

All rights reserved the author

Translated by the author

EDITORIAL DIRECTORATE

Lilian Vaccaro

GRAPHIC PRODUCTION

Giovanna Vaccaro

REVIEW

Portuguese - Bianca Gulim

English - Deborah Kamalach

COVER DESIGN

Décio Gomes

LAYOUT

Bruno Lira

AusentesAusentesAusentesAusentesAusentes

I work early; think early. I am a lark. My husband is a night owl, so we easily miss each other, which is no problem for two self-sufficient individuals like us. We enjoy these moments, but in an unusual way, we enjoy symbiotic and individual moments even more so. We are unusual. My husband is German and came to Brazil, though he doesn’t seem to know why. When we met, I was fascinated by the idea of a German physicist in Rio Grande do Sul, which seemed to me something atypical by its very nature.

Yes, unusual things attract me. First, because I was born different. I have cyclothymia, a milder version of bipolar disorder. Second, because I was born in a small town, where not being like everyone else immediately creates uneasiness.

When I met Frank, I was quickly convinced to abandon a long life of being a confident single businesswoman, a reality which I had already accepted as immutable. I always loved being alone, but only with Frank did I realise that it was possible to be with someone yet alone at the same time. I was in a good place, without any episodes of depression or euphoria, I felt that I was managing well with my diagnosis as a cyclothymic patient.

And there we were, together in the middle of nowhere. Feeling like we’re far away, even though only a few kilometres separated us from the place where I was born: the city of Bom Jesus. We were with our dog, a bulky and bad-tempered English bulldog who shared our slight misanthropy.

The day was cloudy, a cold fog encapsulating the summer, reinforcing the idea of distance; we had left a few days earlier, a Porto Alegre battered by an insalubrious summer. The same high relative humidity that made the sunsets wonderful, made us feel as if we were exposed all the time to the breath of a huge virulent dragon.

In the fields above the mountains, near a New Year’s Eve without fireworks in a rustic, ascetic environment, in a room worthy of a Buddhist monk, there was a dense fog and a pleasant, almost cosy chill.

In the main building of the inn, a shy blue-eyed man brought coffee in an already tired thermos. His wife, I inferred from the context, was a tall girl with manicured fingernails contrasting with the unnatural yellowish streaks in her hair that did not harmonise with her dark eyebrows. She wore cheap, heavy makeup for breakfast, but it highlighted her blue eyes. She appeared with a few dishes and disappeared into the kitchen without comment.

Breakfast was generous. Everything fresh and greasy. Lots of fried stuff with lard, as if we were back in the Middle Ages, which Brazil never welcomed.

Belly full, coats, and dog accustomed to the bungalow, we went for a walk. To understand where we were. To smell a different vegetation. The motivation of two other couples to be there intrigued us as much as our own.

We were a hundred meters away from one of the canyons of Rio Grande do Sul, a place forgotten by civilization, where thousands of years have carved intriguing green abysses. We walked through immense grass, a flat, clean path. The wet grass under my feet reminded me of my childhood. The vegetation, the humidity, and the smell were familiar and had the ability to envelop me like a mother’s womb.

It was important for me to get out of the routine. I love my coffee, but that year the long therapy sessions had drained my energy. I needed a place to completely empty my brain, and focus on how to deal with my ups and downs. I could not imagine living there again, but the region had an intense power to recharge my batteries, rewire some synapses, and release endorphins, at least in the short term.

Until we reached the canyon area, the grass stretched out in a monotonous way, but the clouds were already starting to bring the fog; we were approaching the time when the differences in temperature and pressure enveloped the region by its wet mass. I had seen this phenomenon, known in the region as ‘viração,’ a thousand times in my childhood, but this would be Frank’s second time.

It is not uncommon for rain to follow the viração. So, we walked back through the mist on an unreal walk, as if we were in some Marion Zimmer Bradley novel, in a fairyland. Then the rain came, and it came with a vengeance.

The bungalow was extremely simple, worthy of a penitent anacoreta. The painting by Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench came to my mind, I imagined him inside that room, reading his heavy yellowish book. The tile floor, the cheap finish, the mouldy marks in some spots on the white walls... It all reminded me of the farms of distant relatives I had visited in my childhood. It was not what Frank would expect from a hotel, but he had been in Brazil long enough to know and not comment on it. I think he found it picturesque. Besides, from my point of view, he seemed unchanged in any type of accommodation or environment we found ourselves in, which, even after years of living together, intrigued, and fascinated me.

The cabin must have been about thirty square meters, consisting of a bedroom, living room, and bathroom. A crooked picture on top of the fireplace, with dusty and broken glass, revealed the innkeepers’ lack of care for the whole place. The beds looked clean, and the bathroom was absurdly simple: cold water, electric shower, and cracked windows. However, it was all part of being at the end of the world, where there is no luxury or modernity, but rather an asceticism that was new to Frank and familiar to me.

The owner of the inn came to visit us just before lunch. With his wide-brimmed hat, he looked like all the farm owners I had met in Bom Jesus. To Frank, he looked like some caricature from a Mexican movie. His full, dark eyebrows contrasted with a white moustache, adorned by the two furrows that age, carved into the face of older people. He wore reading glasses that emphasised two smiling green eyes and an excess of skin, especially on the eyelids. He must have been over seventy, but it was hard to say.

Chimarrão¹ in hand, he told us about when he had bought the area and romanticised the narrative with a series of ‘causos²,’ which made us laugh out loud a few times, even though it was clear that the story was under a thick layer of fantasy. He had hoped that, besides the canyons, the region would’ve had some additional value. He told us about when he had the idea for the hotel after health problems made it difficult to do the work in the fields.

While we listened with amusement to the stories full of adventure invented by our new friend, a vibrant red Hilux appeared on the horizon at high speed. Sitting at the wheel, a middle-aged man waved euphorically and disappeared.

That’s my neighbor, Doctor Álvaro. A millionaire, he commented with an air of false reverence, putting his hands in his Bombacha`s³ pockets. I remembered that my mother used to call that fabric by its brand: Tergal. He must be going to prepare the house for the holidays. They say the party is wonderful. He has always invited us, but my wife never wants to attend.

He cleared his throat and poured a cup of chimarrão with thick-fingered hands and battered fingernails. You could see that he tended his land with his own hands.

Too much pomposity, according to her, he commented with a sly smile, showing his irony at his neighbour’s pretentiousness.

He told of some neighbouring farms, where rare-earth reserves were found that made the owners millionaires. Nobody really knew where the deposits were located, buying that land seemed to have been part of some lottery in the near past. In principle, all the deposits seemed to have already been discovered; there were none on the hotel property, much to his misfortune. So, he continued to explore tourism and the view of the canyons.

After lunch, the sun broke through again. I decided to go out with the dog to explore the surroundings, while Frank finished a book he had brought.

I followed the road that had taken us there since the rain had turned the area into a huge mudflat. Only the boulder-strewn road was passable. A small stream followed the road and was so overgrown that if it were not for the sound of running water, I would not have noticed it. Blue-star ferns and delta maidenhair ferns mixed in with the grass and tall weeds made it almost invisible to the eyes of those following the road.

After about thirty minutes of walking, I was convinced that I could let the dog off the leash. I hadn’t seen any humans or vehicles during the entire trip, and he rarely had a chance to run loose in the city, I thought. However, it did not take long for me to realise that this was not a good idea. A skunk decided to show its black and white face full of sharp bush-rat teeth. My dog had sniffed it out even before I realised it, and waded into the stream, barking loudly. He quickly found a spot where he could cross to the other side, moving away from the road with the firm purpose of destroying the skunk, which had already disappeared into the woods, leaving its foul-smelling trail.

Scared that the dog might get lost in the forest, or even bitten by a snake, I tried to follow his route over the heap of garbage and plant debris, but the structure gave way under my weight, and I quickly found myself knee-deep in it. I let out such a different yelp that the dog noticed the urgency and, to my relief, was staring at me with a mixture of strangeness and insecurity. Although my hands were dirty and totally muddy, I managed to laugh at the stupid situation, at my imprudence and lack of common sense for not having tested the ground before stepping on it.

Anyway, I grumbled, resigned, watching the mud drops all over my white blouse.

I had to move around and try to leverage myself among the plants, to get the strength to pull my feet out of the muddy heap. My mind was totally taken by an absurd fear of seeing some water snake wrapped around my foot, and I even imagined being in quicksand, a thought that was frightened away when I remembered that I was in Brazil, where I would find, at most, a quagmire. I tend to imagine absurdly dangerous situations in ordinary incidents.

With my foot, to my surprise, came a heap of dead and sticky leaves, and on top of these, a skull that appeared to me to be human. It was so unexpected that I could not believe my eyes. Another invention of my cyclothymic perception?

I shook my leg and the remains settled in the shallowest part of the stream. The skull lay there, half exposed, facing me. Okay, it was not imagination.

It must be an animal skull because it made no sense to me that there was a human skull in that place. Humans are buried in cemeteries, not left floating around until they are found by unsuspecting tourists.

With the dog on the lead, I walked back along the road to the inn. I even considered taking the skull, but it didn’t seem reasonable to walk around with it in my hands.

My husband looked amused at the deplorable state of my sneakers, which had woken up white in the morning. How foolish I had been not to put on the waterproof boots I had boasted about the day before. I told him about my unexpected discovery; It didn’t even sound convincing to me.

I was in doubt about commenting on it at the inn but eventually decided to tell them, even though we were sure - Frank more than I - that this would be the small joke of this trip.

To our surprise, when we went to breakfast the next day, a police car from Bom Jesus was parked in front of the inn. The skull was, indeed, human.

---

1 Mate tea from South Brazil

2 Untrue stories, changed to sound funny.

3 Gaucho vestment, pants

was parked in front of the inn like an eye sore. Frank could not contain himself as he commented on how much money the local police seemed to have.

A girl wearing rectangular dark-rimmed glasses introduced herself as Fernanda, along with another girl that had soft curls, who kept quiet the whole time after she had introduced herself as Monica. They were there with the forensics team to examine the scene. The skull was human.

I felt a little jolt run through my body. A human skull! It sounded unreal and improbable. I felt a strange unease. I fantasised what had happened. The idea of connecting the skull to a human being who had lived here at some time, perhaps in the distant past, did not seem real to me.

Frank was looking at me, waiting for me to decide something instead of just standing there, watching the commotion with wide yet distant eyes. I know Frank. When his eyes get blue and imperceptibly narrower, he’s impatient. No one else can tell, but I know.

We didn’t go along with the operation. Frank would never have agreed because he learned early on to stay away from accident sites or investigations. A bunch of curious people get in the way, and in German, there is even a word for this: gaffer.

We decided to explore the area by car. Our bulldog hopped the car smiling. My mind was there, with the police, speculating about who the dead man was.

The story had nothing to do with me, except for the fact that I became a witness if you can even call it that. I already felt entitled to know whose skull I bumped into.

I avoided talking about it. After four years of marriage, I know what Frank will welcome and what