É verão. As praias estão cheias de banhistas e, na praia da Princesinha, coberta de chapéus de sol, já não há espaço para mais ninguém. No café que, no inverno, se enche apenas de nadadores de águas abertas atrevidos — e dos seus sacos de roupa espalhados pelo chão debaixo das mesas — a Vanessa está a ficar louca com tantos pedidos diferentes.
— If only it were November… — she sighs between a double espresso, an Americano, a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich, and who knows what else, glancing at the two retired friends who, every day, take over the little table just outside the café.
One of them is a lifeguard, his face weathered by the sun from so many years at the beach; the other is a former swimmer, one of the first to cross the nearby coast without a wetsuit.
Vanessa was very fond of them and let them stay there playing sueca with other customers or chess, amid shouts insisting that the checkmate wasn’t valid and that the other had tried to cheat him while he was drinking his mazagrã.
Vanessa already knows all the swimmers too. She knows who leaves their car keys at the counter, who keeps a bathrobe there to change after class, and who shows up after training to drink a hot galão, catch up with other students and friends, and—who knows—stay on for a lunch of fresh little fish.
It was during one of those comings and goings, delivering orders, that she overheard a strange conversation: some swimmers were going to do a crossing out in the open sea, between two islands. She didn’t quite understand what that meant. Swimming so many kilometers in Ponta Verde Bay in winter already seemed crazy enough—let alone swimming out there, in the open sea, with unpredictable waves and currents.
Out of curiosity, she checked it out on Maps. When she saw the distance that those people were preparing to swim, she thought it was sheer madness. Still, something about that place began to pique her interest. She remembered having heard, almost by chance, that the previous year some people had gone missing in that area… and that they had been found alive by swimmers, under strange circumstances.
Vanessa, who had always had a soft spot for suspense stories, began looking for more details about that incident. And one question wouldn’t leave her mind: did the swimmers preparing for the crossing know about this story?
Who could they be?
And what, after all, were the names of the islands?
Chiara Bedini