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"The Turtle" (original title in Portuguese: "A Tartaruga"; Braga 1960) is a short story written in 1959 by the Brazilian journalist and writer Rubem Braga. In the text, "Copacabana" is one of Rio de Janeiro's seaside districts, where the world-famous Copacabana Beach is located, and "Cachoeiro" is short for Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, the author's native city in the state of Espirito Santo.
The Turtle
Copacabana dwellers, buy your fish at Bolivar Fish Market, 70 Bolivar Street, owned by Mr. Francisco Mandarino. Because it happens that he is a good man.
The fact is that he was sent a turtle of about 150 kilos, two meters long and (it is said) 200 years old, and he displayed it in his fish market for three days and he did not want to sell it; and he took it up to the beach, and released it into the sea.
There was a poet sleeping within the merchant, and he revered life and freedom in the image of a turtle.
Never kill a turtle.
Once, at my father's house, we killed a turtle. It was a big old sea turtle that a fisherman friend sent to us in Cachoeiro.
Men get together to kill a turtle, and it resists for hours. They cut its head off, it continues to flap its flippers. They rip its heart off, the heart continues to beat. Life is deep-rooted in its tissues with an obstinacy that inspires respect and fear. A cut piece of flesh, thrown on the floor, trembles on its own, all of a sudden. Its agony is as terrible and insistent as a nightmare.
Suddenly the men stop and look at each other with the vague feeling that they are committing a crime.
Copacabana dwellers, buy your fish at Francisco Mandarino's Bolivar Fish Market, because within him, in a beautiful moment of his common life, the poet defeated the merchant. Because he did not kill the turtle.
Rio, July, 1959.
Rubem Braga (1913-1990), widely acknowledged in Brazilian literary circles as a master in the art of writing, produced mainly short stories of a literary genre called in Brazil "crónica", defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as "a short prose sketch integrating elements of essay and fiction" (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008), where the...