O Boto — a short story in easy Portuguese

The Boto is the pink river dolphin of the Amazon, and in the legend he is also a man. On the nights of the June festas by the river, a tall, handsome stranger in a white suit and a white hat appears, dances with the prettiest girl, and never takes off his hat, because it hides the hole on top of his head: the dolphin's blowhole. Before dawn he walks back to the river and becomes a boto-cor-de-rosa again. Every riverside village in the Amazon has a version of him, and the real legend was also used, plainly, to explain an unexpected pregnancy: the father was the Boto.

Couto de Magalhães, in O Selvagem (1876), records the Uauiará, the spirit of the fish of the Pará people, who takes human form and turns into the boto, and whose feasts light up the lakes on moonlit nights with songs and the stamping of dances. This retelling keeps the festa junina with its bonfire, the white clothes and the hat, the dancing, the hole, the moonlight and the pink dolphin, and leaves the seduction out: Maria follows him out of curiosity, sees the truth, and goes back to the festa.

The setting is one learners will meet in Brazil: the festa junina in June, with its bunting, bonfire and forró. In the Portuguese, notice todo mundo (everybody), vai atrás de (follows), vai embora (goes away), and nadando rather than nada, which a beginner reads as "nothing".