Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) Page 11

  Okay. What about it?

  Is what his friend did wrong? Did he betray the writer?

  I don’t follow. Do you have a writer friend?

  No. Fuck. Hold on.

  What’s it got to do with religion?

  Wait. I’m going to change the question.

  Bonobo’s cell phone beeps, but he doesn’t get up to check the message.

  The only thing I don’t get is why the writer left the manuscript with the guy if he didn’t want to publish it. Why didn’t he just burn it?

  No, forget the writer. Let’s say that a guy has a father who’s really attached to his dog. Really attached. He’s had the dog since it was a pup, and he loves it more than people, more than his wife and kids. The father decides to kill himself and asks his son to have the dog put down after he’s dead, because he doesn’t have the courage to do it himself and he knows the dog will suffer without him. He manages to convince his son to do it and makes him promise. The son does, more or less. The father kills himself, but the son doesn’t take the dog to the vet to have it put down. He keeps the dog and decides to look after it.

  Was that what happened to you?

  It’s just a random example that I made up.

  Ah. Right. I get it.

  Bonobo hiccups and burps inwardly.

  What do you think?

  I think the dad’s a prick.

  Okay, but that’s not the question. Do you think the son betrayed him?

  If the son made a promise and didn’t keep it, then he betrayed him, didn’t he? Just like the friend who publishes the masterpiece against the writer’s wishes.

  And what does a Buddhist think of it?

  Bonobo laughs.

  Look, I can’t speak for all Buddhists, but if you want to know my opinion, the betrayal is what matters the least in this story. What does matter is the result of his decision. How are the person’s actions going to affect everyone involved? After the dog’s owner kills himself, it doesn’t make much difference to him what happens to the dog, right? He doesn’t exist anymore, at least not in this life. What matters now is how breaking the promise will affect the son’s and the dog’s lives and the lives of everyone directly or indirectly involved. Whether it increases or decreases people’s overall suffering.

  No, but it’s just that—

  Let’s suppose, purely as a completely hypothetical exercise of the imagination, that the dog in this story is the dog sleeping over there on the rug. She looks well fed. Her coat’s shiny. She’s even got some flesh on her. She’s sleeping now, but when she was awake, she struck me as perky and proud. I’d even go as far as to say that she’s belonged to you since she was born. And I get the impression that her company is good for you too. If she were the dog in your story, then I’d say that only good things had come of the broken promise. In which case, it’s all good.

  But even so it’s a betrayal. And I don’t see how it can be ignored. It doesn’t matter that the father is dead. A promise was broken, and it’s never going to stop being part of the story. Maybe it’d be better if the dog were dead. The son wouldn’t even know what life would have been like with the dog, but he’d know he’d fulfilled his father’s last wish. These things matter. Don’t they?

  Bonobo thinks a little.

  Yeah. It’s never easy.

  Because it doesn’t make any difference that the father is dead and doesn’t exist anymore and has no way of knowing he was betrayed. Understand? It’s a betrayal. The thing is there. Forever.

  I understand. I don’t agree, but I understand. I don’t know what to tell you, sorry.

  Bonobo picks up the spear gun and starts winding up the spool.

  About three years ago a curious thing happened here in Garopaba. A guy used to go spearfishing with his son almost every week. One day they were snorkeling off the coast between Ferrugem and Silveira beaches at a place called Saco da Cobra. The guy dived down really deep and at some point saw a giant grouper hiding. The water was very clear that day and with several yards of visibility. The fish was monstrous, a size you don’t see anymore, and just stared at him from inside its hole, moving its jaw. The following week he went diving at the same spot and found the fish in the same hole. He decided to harpoon it at any cost. He became obsessed with it and couldn’t think about anything else. Whenever the conditions were right, he and his son went out in the boat. But the hole was too deep, and the grouper was flighty. Sometimes it didn’t appear, and when it did, it just wouldn’t let itself be harpooned. No other diver had seen the fish with his own eyes—they had only heard about it. A few weeks later he went out with his son again to fish. He went down the first time without any equipment. He surfaced a few minutes later and told his son he had found the fish. He put on all his equipment, got his spear gun, and went down again. And he didn’t come back.

  Bonobo places the spear in the gun and aims at the kitchen.

  When his son realized something was wrong, he tried to go and help his dad but couldn’t get down that far. He left and came back with the coast guard and divers. They went down and found the guy’s body with his arm tangled in the cord of the spear gun and the spear through the grouper’s tail. The fish was alive, but maimed. The spear had pierced its spine. The guy had tried to pull the fish until he blacked out and drowned tied to it. They took them out of the water together. They say it was the biggest grouper ever caught in Garopaba. It weighed over a hundred and eighty pounds.

  What made you remember that now?

  Still sitting on the sofa, Bonobo twists around and points the spear gun at one of the armchairs.

  It’s like a fable. The guy and the grouper were connected in some way, like you and the dog. We can’t understand why exactly—we can’t see the whole path that the two beings have traveled to that point. But things like that make you think, don’t they? It can’t just be chance. There’s a whole history of many rebirths that has brought the two beings to a situation like that.

  Nonsense. Are you talking about reincarnation?

  Bonobo fires at the backrest of the armchair but misses, and the spear hits the wall behind it with a sharp crack.

  Fuck! Careful with that shit.

  It’s not reincarnation—it’s rebirth. It has more to do with the propagation of states of mind through time. What you understand to be your mind, which is really an illusion, also continues acting in the world after your physical death and comes back to manifest itself. They’re cycles. The mind continues on, mixes, recombines, and reemerges.

  But my mind isn’t mine, man. You just said so yourself. How can I say that some part of me will be reborn sometime in the future? It doesn’t make sense. It’s just things mixing and recombining.

  So we have a materialist swimmer. In which case I think it’s funny that you’re so worried about what your dead father would think about what you have or haven’t done with his dog. Since death is death. I mean, if that’s how it is, why worry? Why not be selfish and wild and live it up as much as possible until you die a little desperate?

  ’Cause it’s important. ’Cause only an asshole wouldn’t care. Death isn’t an excuse to be an asshole.

  We have an existentialist-materialist swimmer.

  You making fun of me?

  No. I’m still a bit drunk. So are you. Go on.

  I don’t know if I agree with this idea of yours that I can know what the best decision is based only on the amount of suffering that it does or doesn’t cause. Suffering isn’t always an indicator of what is best or worst. Sometimes the right thing to do causes suffering. Suffering is bad, but it’s a part of life.

  Now try to decide the right thing to do based on those principles. Good luck.

  Bonobo stands and goes to check the messages on his cell phone.

  Altair texted me. He left your place and is back at the kiosk to finish knocking it down.

&nbs
p; Shit, I just remembered I left my bike there.

  I’ve got to buy things for breakfast. I can give you a lift in Lockjaw.

  Nah, I’ll find my own way back.

  I insist. It’ll be my good deed for the day. My debt is big, swimmer. I’ve got an overdraft, credit cards covering credit cards, loans, money in my underpants, everything. I’ll be paying it off for many lifetimes. Besides, the road’s beautiful this time of day.

  • • •

  Before the long weekend in early May, he comes across a week-old edition of a local newspaper with news of a murder stamped across the front page. It says that the body of a sixteen-year-old girl from Praia da Pinheira has been found in some vegetation near Highway BR-101, just north of Paulo Lopes, a few miles past the turnoff to Garopaba. Her eyes and lips are missing, and there are clear signs of strangulation, the probable cause of death. The forensic expert suspects or wants to believe that the mutilations on the victim’s face were made after death, and the missing body parts have not been found. She wasn’t wearing a blouse, but it still hasn’t been confirmed if there was any sexual violence. There is also considerable evidence that she was dragged, leading the police to believe that she was murdered elsewhere, probably in an area of dense vegetation and rocks, then moved by one or more people who couldn’t or didn’t want to carry her and dragged her instead. The story was published two days after the discovery of the body. A photograph shows the victim covered with a small, light-colored blanket or sheet. All that can be seen of her are her hands with bent fingers, wrists, and part of her arms, up by her head like a baby in a crib. When he looks at the photo, he suddenly imagines the girl’s face under the blanket or sheet like a hideous flashback in a horror movie, and the image haunts him for a few days. Experts have discarded the theory that her eyes and lips were eaten by an animal because of the precision of the wounds: almost clinical incisions, made with a sharp object. The girl told her parents that she was going camping with friends at a waterfall in the region, and her friends actually did go camping but said she hadn’t shown up at the agreed time and place so they had gone without her. The police are working on the hypothesis of a revenge crime but stress that they are still examining all the evidence and anything is possible. The story doesn’t go into any more detail.

  The newspaper was lying on a bench in the gym dressing room as if someone had left it in their backpack and relieved themselves of it days later without going to the trouble of putting it in the trash. It strikes him as odd that no one at the gym, at the beach, at Pablo’s school, in restaurants, bars, or the Internet café, not even Cecina or Renato or Dália, or the grocer or the fishermen, has mentioned such a heinous crime, something that happened so close to their beautiful, happy little coastal town, a town that appears to have been abandoned for good by the tourists, at least until next summer, and now looks more like a pavilion of closed shops and empty houses, entire blocks deserted except for the very occasional visit of a caretaker to trim a tree. The sudden emptying of the town, the arrival of the cold weather, the brutal murder of a teenage girl not far from there, nothing that he finds worthy of note seems to worry the locals. They talk about how this year’s mullet season is going to be an even bigger disaster than the last, and the population in general concerns itself with what to do with the money earned during a tourist season that has been well and truly left behind and already feels like a distant memory, a time when they worked so hard amid so many people from elsewhere that they barely managed to see one another and talk to their own friends and family, months spent less like residents and more like the employees of an enormous convention center in the midst of a megaevent. In the streets people are also talking about a municipal election that won’t take place until September. He has the impression that everyone is merely hoping to rest up and breeze through the cold, sunny days during which nothing will happen. They say the calm will bring boredom and sadness and that the cold and solitude will resuscitate all the familiar ghosts of the season and some unfamiliar ones too, but they say it as if it’s still a long way off and there is plenty of time to prepare for it.

  Part Two

  FIVE

  In the first few days of May, he sees something that he will later suspect was a dream. It is a muggy afternoon, and since Pablo has gone to spend the long weekend with his dad in Criciúma and Dália has gone with her mother to Caçador, he gets on his bike after his shift at the pool and rides to Ferrugem Beach, where he hopes to find some good waves for bodysurfing. The beach is empty, and its coppery sands are warm and still scarred from the last influx of tourists. The Bar do Zado is open as always, but there are no customers, not even the occasional surfer or pot smoker contemplating the waves from one of the wooden tables. An adolescent tends the bar while watching a game of European soccer on the TV on the wall and later, still glued to the screen, now for the UFC, will say he saw nothing. The sky is overcast, and someone in one of the houses or bed-and-breakfasts behind the dunes is trying to drill through something very tough, perhaps a tile. An early fog is covering part of the sand, and a smell of decomposing sea creatures hangs in the air. He leans his bike and backpack against the wooden wall of the bar and heads down to the water’s edge. The water is freezing cold, but he enters nonetheless. He swims out to the sandbar in a few strokes, then wades into the water on the other side and dives in again, swimming vigorously to where the waves are breaking. His lungs fill in desperation and squeeze every bit of air out of their alveoli in reaction to the freezing temperature. His skin burns, his head throbs, and his body just won’t warm up. Afraid of taking a bad turn, he catches the first wave back to the sandbar and gets out. The transition from the icy water to the warm air perks him up, and he decides to walk until he is dry. The fog disappears as he walks along the beach and is there again when he reaches Índio Hill, at the end, and looks back. The mouth of Encantada Lagoon is silted up with sand, so he is able to walk across it to Barra Beach, which he also walks end to end, and returns. He sits on the sand and stares out to sea, then lies down and shuts his eyes.

  He gets up a while later, not really sure if he dozed off or not. Something important has changed in the atmosphere, but it is hard to tell what. The clouds have grown thicker, and the dusk is colorless. The fog has disappeared. He looks at the horizon and feels a chill run down his spine. A terrifying storm is gathering out at sea. Dark clouds rise up like mountains advancing toward the beach, an ominous wall that extends along almost the entire visible horizon, but something about it doesn’t seem right. The storm moves and doesn’t move at the same time. It changes shape, but the transition from one state to the other can’t be perceived. The more he looks, the more unsure he is that they are storm clouds. There is no lightning or thunder. The dark mountain range is mirrored by the horizon and deformed here and there as it compresses and stretches. Its shapes appear both close and blurred by the distance. They are somewhat holographic. If they are as close as they look, he’ll be engulfed by a typhoon before he can run to shelter. If they are as distant as they also look, they must be of gigantic, otherworldly dimensions. He thinks he might be watching a tidal wave roll in. The effect of an apocalyptic meteorite in the heart of the Atlantic. The end of the world approaching in silence. He is hypnotized as he watches the phenomenon change shape, float, always looking like it is arriving without drawing any closer. Shortly before nightfall the vision begins to fade and disappears uneventfully.

  • • •

  Students start showing up in the afternoon at the pool. Some are surfers and tend to have poor technique but excellent fitness, good students to work with as long as they accept that there is room for improvement. This is the case with Jander, a short, stocky, bald guy of about forty who is always sunburned and owns a roadside pet shop and kennel in Palhocinha famous for housing some of the town’s most beloved dogs when their owners are away. Jander surfs, swims, runs, and rides a bike regularly, but without any supervision or method. His incredible endurance is
wasted with an ungainly swimming style, and his first few lessons are devoted to trying to make his reddish body turn less in the water and to better synchronize his arms and legs. There is a strapping young Rastafarian surfer named Amós, but he is always off his face and refuses to take any advice. He stops, listens, agrees, and then ignores all instructions. His impermeable hair doesn’t fit in his swimming cap, but Saucepan’s orders are to turn a blind eye. He uses up all his energy in the first two or three sprints of each set and then straggles through the rest of the session, breathless, swallowing water, swimming slower and slower and with ever-more visible suffering. On the third week, a pair of introverted teenage twin girls enrolls, Rayanne and Tayanne, who arrive together, swim bureaucratically with identical black bathing suits on very white, almost identical bodies, and leave together. He tells them about his problem with faces because they suffer from the inverse problem of not being immediately recognized by most people. He thinks it is funny, but they don’t. Two students are triathletes. One is professional, swims like a missile, and comes with his preprepared session written in blue pen on a small white piece of paper that he always leaves stuck to a tile on the edge of the pool when he goes. He doesn’t ask for or need his attention. The other one is a rheumatologist who has seen better days as an athlete. He always brings giant hand paddles that he insists on using every session despite the fact that they are the obvious cause of his constant shoulder pain, probably tears in his supraspinatus tendons. But he’s the doctor. There are two students who can barely stay afloat. One is a corpulent, hairy, bearded man who likes to clown around and showed up on the first day laughing and asking if he could swim in his tracksuit. He calls himself Tracksuit Man and gets a laugh from the twins when he announces his Special Weapon, the Dive Bomb, then leaps into the pool as dramatically as possible. The other one is Tiago, a polite, shy, hard-working seventeen-year-old with a severe case of gynecomastia. His favorite student so far is Ivana, a friendly, plump little woman in her early fifties. At first Ivana struck him as the sedentary sort, but she has proved to be an experienced and dedicated swimmer. She occasionally participates in the Santa Catarina short-distance swim circuit and is interested in training for longer distances. She is a public prosecutor and works in the Garopaba Courthouse. She is one of those people for whom swimming is not a means to an end such as losing weight, curing a disease, or winning medals; rather, it is as much a part of her life as working, eating, and sleeping. She is someone who can’t not swim. In that, they are the same. Swimming for them is a special relationship with the world, the kind of thing that those who understand it don’t need to talk about. Ivana swings her shoulders in an odd way, and he recognizes her by her walk.