Frontier patrol

Donana came to talk to me and didn't seem to disguise her surprise much when she saw me on the farm Teixeira this morning. It was the surprise of one who hadn't seen me in a while, perhaps since my definitive return from Santos to Taurinos.

We two talked briefly. Asked about Renan and she told me he had been in his room in silence since yesterday, only coming out for the meals. She asked me to talk to the boy, whom she found to be sad. A mother knows her son, she knows or imagines she knows what he's been going through even though she might not know the real cause of his sadness.

I went to his room only to find him looking through the window and through everything he could see through the window. No sound came from him. He seemed aware of my presence right behind him, maybe for having seen me in the mirror the glass of the window pane formed against darker surfaces on the landscape outside.

"Renan", I said all of a sudden.

No reply at all. He wouldn't move. He was there, silent, unmoving as if nothing had really happened. If I come to think of it, what had really happened?

"Renan", I insisted, "I've come here to talk to you."

"And so what?", he turned to me as if he had been struck by lightning, "why should I talk to you? Why were you so afraid of me yesterday?"

I showed him the papers with Meire's emails printed. He read the emails and was alternating reading with looking at me with a bewildered expression.

"You knew, I myself told you they were from Santos and were after you" he said dryly with a scowl at me.

"Whatever you did to them had physical consequences; it just made me afraid of you and not only you, but the consequences that might come from this. Can't you see what the point is? We are able, somehow we are able to translate things happening here into something physical in Santos and God knows where else."

"Mithra knows", he corrected me, still not showing a friendly face.

"Oh, come on, it amounts to just the same…"

"Mithra is His name. His name is alive. You're a Mithraist yourself, no? Act like one."

Now if Renan decides to become a fundamentalist we'll be neck-deep in shit. He went on to tell me he didn't know his attitudes had a physical counterpart, but it was probably true. What it boiled down to, according to Renan, was that he was doing it all to protect me. He told me he never did it until I came to town. He saw outsiders in town for the first time after I had first set foot in Taurinos in February and didn't know why, but he knew he had to eliminate those people lest they did me harm. He never quite understood why he had to protect me, but understood it was vital for him. He was moved to eliminate those people as he was moved to eat; there was something in him like a hunger for killing them.

"I had no clue who you were, only knew I had to protect you from the outsiders. No one comes to Taurinos without me knowing they're here. I "see" the person as they cross the city limits. The only person I didn't "see" was you. Now I know it was because you were different from the people who started showing up here. You draw people here like a magnet, you know."

I never imagined this. That I could attract people here and stuff. I wonder if the first outsiders killed here had something to do with me. Renan said he didn't know and I asked him why they had been killed anyhow. He told me they had been in town for seven days even though they had been advised to go. I found it way radical. Renan explained that no one staying in town that long could have good intentions. Their ill intentions could be measured by their time of permanence in town. There were not many examples of that, since the phenomenon was recent, only dating back to my first coming to town. There were seven people killed. Seven days. Seven is a number that seems unbreakable here in Taurinos and I wouldn't be surprised if Arthur's theory on why the ceremony didn't work out were completely baseless.

Renan looked better when I left him. Duílio's car's horn was heard outside calling me back to the farm Taurinos. When I got in the car, saw that Andrés had come along to fetch me from the farm Teixeira to take me home.

"You need to have more understanding, though I know it is hard for you too as it is for him", Andrés told me while the car departed, "Renan was created to protect the city limits and yourself. He does it automatically, there's no holding him because this is the reason why he was created. He's a miniature frontier police, but you can't be fooled by that baby-faced plump little fella. He's a fierce dog protecting the town and you. Before you first came here he had never done it because without knowing he was waiting for his fierceness to be useful somehow. Now that he knows what he is really about there's no stopping him anymore. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, he'll keep doing it whenever outsiders step in town."

Death on four legs | Obscure Police

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