O Lobisomem — a short story in easy Portuguese

The Lobisomem is Brazil's werewolf. The legend came from Portugal and settled in the countryside: the seventh son of a family turns into a wolf on Friday nights, above all under a full moon, roams until dawn and comes home pale and tired, with scratches. He raids the henhouses. In the old tellings he can be freed by a small wound that draws a drop of blood, or recognised the next day by a mark.

Monteiro Lobato, in O Saci (1921), describes a wolf far bigger than a wolf, and the rule of the seventh son; the readers who wrote to his 1918 inquiry describe a big dog with enormous ears that clap as he runs, who loses his double nature at dawn. This retelling keeps the seventh son, Friday night, the full moon, the henhouse, the huge wolf with a dog's ears and the tired man with a scratch the next morning, and leaves out everything violent: nobody cuts off a paw, and the wolf is hungry rather than vicious. The townspeople's suspicion of a quiet man is their gossip, never the narrator's fact; the story sides with Lia's kindness and the secret she keeps.

The setting is a Brazilian cidadezinha: the padaria, the pão francês, the henhouse in the backyard. In the Portuguese, notice vira (turns into), Seu for Mr, ninguém fala nada (nobody says anything), and that hens go có-có-có while the rooster goes cocoricó.