Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) Read online

  Shot?

  He was shot in the hand. I told you about that.

  True. He lost his fingers, didn’t he?

  In one of these fights, he lunged at a guy, and the guy fired his gun to give him a fright. The bullet grazed Dad’s fingers. He lost a bit of two fingers, the little finger and the one next to it. On his left hand, the one he used for picking. A few weeks later he decided to take up the guitar again, and in no time he was playing just as well as he always had or better. Some people said he’d improved. I can’t say. He developed a crazy picking technique for his milongas. I guess those two fingers don’t make much difference. I don’t know. They certainly didn’t make any difference for him. What really did him in was when your grandma died of peritonitis. I was eighteen. Life was never the same again, not for me or for him.

  His dad pauses and takes a sip of beer.

  Did you leave the farm after Grandma died?

  No, we stayed on for a while longer. About two years. But everything started getting strange. Your granddad was really attached to your grandma. He was the most faithful man I’ve ever known. Unless he was really discreet, had secrets . . . but it was impossible in a place like that, a small town where everyone knows everything. The women used to fall in love with your granddad. A bold, strapping man, a guitar player. I know because I went to the dances and saw single and married women falling all over him. My mother used to talk about it with her friends too. He could have been the biggest Don Juan in the region and was insanely faithful. Blondes galore all wanting a bit, wives looking for some fun. I myself lived it up. And Dad would give me a piece of his mind. He said I was like a pig wallowing in mud. Ever seen a pig wallowing in mud? It’s the picture of happiness. But your granddad’s moral code was based on the essential, almost maniacal notion that a man had to find a woman who liked him and look after her forever. We used to fight a lot because of it. I actually admired it in him when my mother was still alive, but after she died, he maintained a ridiculous sense of fidelity that no longer served any purpose. It wasn’t exactly mourning, because it wasn’t long before he was back at the dances, livening up barbecues, playing the guitar and getting into fights. He took to drinking more too. The women were all over him like flies on meat, and little by little he let his guard down to this one or that one, but in general he was mysteriously chaste. There was something there that I never understood and never will. We started growing apart, him and me. Not because of that, of course, though we didn’t see eye to eye on how to deal with women. But we started to argue.

  Was that when you came to Porto Alegre?

  Yeah. I came in ’sixty-five. I’d just turned twenty.

  But why did you and Granddad argue?

  Well . . . I don’t really know how to explain it. But the main thing was that he thought I was lazy and a womanizer who didn’t want anything out of life and wasn’t even remotely interested in the farm, work, or moral or religious institutions of any kind. And he was right, though he was a bit over the top in his assessment. I think he just got fed up and couldn’t be bothered trying to set me straight. I wasn’t really such a lost cause, but your granddad . . . anyway. One day I experienced his famous short fuse first hand. And the upshot was that he sent me away to Porto Alegre.

  Did he hit you?

  His dad doesn’t answer.

  Okay, forget I asked.

  We knocked each other about a bit, so to speak. Oh, what the fuck. At this stage in the game, none of it matters anymore. Suffice to say that he gave me a working over. And the next day he apologized but announced that he was sending me to Porto Alegre and that it would be better for me. I’d been to Porto Alegre several times before and knew right away that he was right. I felt big here right from the first day. I went to technical school. In a year and a half I’d opened a printer’s shop over in Azenha. In three years I was making good money writing ads for shock absorbers, crackers, and residential lots. Stylize.

  He chuckles.

  The glasses for eyes with style. And worse.

  Okay. But Granddad was killed.

  There’s the thing. This is where the story gets a bit nebulous, and I heard most of it second hand. I’m not exactly sure what happened, and it may be that nothing specific prompted it, but about a year after I came to the city, your granddad left the farm. I only found out when I got a call from him. International. He was in Argentina. In some armpit of the world whose name I don’t remember. He said he just wanted to travel around a bit, but at the end of the call, he kind of let on that he had gone for good, that he’d keep in touch and that I shouldn’t worry. I didn’t. Not much. I remember thinking that if he ended up dying in a knife fight in some shithole, like the character in that Borges story “The South,” nothing could be more appropriate. Tragic, but appropriate. Anyway. I also thought there had to be a woman in the story, or at least there was a ninety-nine percent chance of it, there’s always a woman in these cases, and if there was, it was a good thing. And over the course of the following year he called me three more times, if memory serves me. One time he was in Uruguaiana. The next he was in some town in Paraná. Then he disappeared for about six months, and when he called again, he was in a fishing village in Santa Catarina called Garopaba. And even though I don’t remember exactly what he said, I remember sensing that something about him had changed. There was a youthful ring to his voice, and some of what he said was nigh incomprehensible. His description of the place was incoherent. I just remember one detail: he said something about pumpkins and sharks. I thought my old man had lost it or, even harder to believe, that he’d started hanging out with hippies and got his head in a scramble with some kind of tea. But what he was saying was that he’d seen the fishermen catching sharks by throwing cooked pumpkin into the sea. The sharks would eat the pumpkin, and that shit would ferment and swell up in their bellies until they exploded. And I said, Yeah right, Dad, great, take care, and he said bye and hung up.

  Fuck.

  He never called again, and I started getting worried. One weekend a few months later, when I hadn’t heard from him, I got on my bike, the Suzuki 50cc I had at the time, and went up to Garopaba. An eight-hour trip on Highway BR-101, against the wind. We’re talking 1967. To get to Garopaba, you had to travel about twelve miles on a dirt road, and in some places it was just sand, and all you saw along the way were half a dozen farmers’ shacks, hills, and vegetation. The people, when you actually saw someone, were all barefoot, and for each motorbike or pickup, there were five ox-drawn carts. The village didn’t appear to have more than a thousand inhabitants and when you got to the beach you didn’t see much more in the way of civilization than a white church on the hill and the fishermen’s sheds and boats. The main village was clustered around the whaling station, and although I didn’t see anything, they still hunted whales in those parts. They were starting to cobble the village’s first streets, and the new square had just been finished. There were cottages and smallholdings on the outskirts of the village, and it was on one of these properties that I found your granddad, after asking around. Oh, Gaudério, said a local. So I went looking for Gaudério and discovered that your granddad had set himself up on a kind of miniature model of the old family farm, about five hundred yards from the beach. He had an old nag, a bunch of chickens, and a vegetable garden that took up most of the land. He got by doing odd jobs and was friendly with the fishermen. He also gathered palm leaves, which were used to fill mattresses. He’d dry the leaves in the sun, then sell them for processing. He’d slept in the fishing sheds until he found a house. I couldn’t imagine my dad sleeping in a hammock, much less in a fishing shed with the waves hammering in his ears. But it was nothing next to the spearfishing. The locals fished for grouper, octopus, and I don’t know what else, diving around the rocks, and even back then there were already groups coming from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo for that kind of fishing. And your granddad told me that one day he’d gone out in a boat w
ith one of these groups, and they’d lent him one of those masks with a tube attached, a snorkel, flippers, and a harpoon. He dived under and didn’t come back up. A guy from São Paulo freaked out and jumped in to look for Dad’s body at the bottom of the sea and found him down on the reefs at the exact moment that he was harpooning a grouper the size of a calf. And that was when they discovered that Gaudério was a born apneist. He knew how to swim and could cross a fast-flowing river without a problem, but he’d never suspected he had such a great lung capacity. You should have seen your granddad back then. In ’sixty-seven he was forty-five or forty-six, or forty-seven, I’ve lost count, but it was something like that, and his health was incredible. He’d never smoked, turned up his nose at cigarettes, and was as hardy as a Crioulo horse. He’d always been strong, but he’d lost weight, and although the signs of aging were all there, wrinkles, thinning gray hair, the marks of working on the land, all he needed was a little polishing up, and he’d have been a seasoned athlete. He had a broad, solid chest. A few weeks before I arrived, a diver about the same age as him, an army officer, I think, had died of a pulmonary embolism trying to match Dad’s diving record. I might be mistaken, as it’s been a while since I heard the story, but it was something like four or five minutes underwater.

  So why did they kill him?

  I’m getting there. Patience, tchê. I wanted to give you the context. Because it’s a good story, isn’t it? Oh yes. You should’ve seen him back then. It’s not normal for someone to leave one environment and go somewhere really different and adapt like that.

  Don’t you have a photo of Granddad somewhere? You showed me one once.

  Hmm. I don’t know if I still have it. Do I? I do. I remember where it is. Want to see it?

  Yeah. I don’t remember his face, obviously. It’d be nice to look at the photo while you tell me the rest.

  His dad disappears into the bedroom for a few minutes, beer in hand, and comes back holding an old photograph with scalloped edges. The black and white image shows a bearded man wrapped in a sheepskin, sitting on a bench beside a kitchen table, starting to raise the straw of a gourd of maté to his lips, looking kind of sideways at the camera, unhappy about being photographed. He is wearing leather boots, bombacha pants, and a sweater with a pattern of squares on it. There is a supermarket calendar with a picture of Sugarloaf Mountain on the wall, and the light is coming from up high, from louver windows that are partially out of frame. There is nothing written on the back.

  He gets up and goes to the bathroom. He compares the face in the photograph with the face in the mirror and feels a shiver run through him. From the nose up, the face in the photo is a darker and slightly older copy of the face in the mirror. The only difference worthy of note is his granddad’s beard, but he feels like he is looking at a photograph of himself in spite of it.

  I’d like to keep this photo, he says as he settles back on the sofa.

  His dad nods.

  I visited your granddad in Garopaba one more time, and it was the last. It was in June, during the church fair, which is quite an event there. Music, dance performances, everyone stuffing their faces with fresh fish, and so on. One night a folk singer from Uruguaiana got up on stage, a big kid of about twenty-five, and your granddad took an immediate dislike to him. He said he knew the guy, he’d seen him play over near the border, and he was crap. I remember liking him. He plucked at the strings vigorously, made deep-and-meaningful expressions as he played, and told rehearsed jokes between songs. Dad thought he was a clown with a lot of technique and not much feeling. It wouldn’t have gone any further, but after the show the singer was having some mulled wine at a stall, and someone thought it would be nice to introduce them, seeing as they were both gauchos in baggy pants. The guy took the singer by the arm and brought him over to Dad, and the two of them quickly locked horns. I found out later that it was much more than a question of musical quality, but at first they pretended they didn’t know each other, out of respect for the guy who was so excited to introduce them. But the guy made the mistake of asking Dad point-blank if he’d liked the music, and Dad was the sort who, if you asked, you got his honest opinion. His answer made the singer furious. They started to argue, and Dad told him to turn his face away because his breath smelled like a dead pampas fox’s ass. Several people heard him and laughed. The singer got nasty, of course, and then it wasn’t long before Dad whipped out his knife. The singer let it go, and that was the end of it, but the thing I remember was the reaction of the crowd that had gathered around. It wasn’t just that they were curious about the fight. They were looking sideways at your granddad, whispering and shaking their heads. I realized that in the time between my visits they’d started to disapprove of him. I mean, nobody wants a bad-mannered, knife-wielding gaucho around. I told him to cool it, but it was useless with your granddad. He wasn’t even aware of his own stupidity. The people here are scared of you, I told him. That’s not good. You’re going to get yourself into some serious trouble. I left and didn’t hear from him for ages. At the time I was kind of stuck in Porto Alegre, working a lot, and it was also when I started seeing your mother. We dated for four years and she left me three times before we got married. But anyway, I didn’t visit your granddad for quite a while, and several months later I got a call from a police chief in Laguna saying he’d been murdered. There had been a Sunday dance at some community hall, the kind where the whole town goes. When the dance was in full swing, the lights go off. When they come back on a minute later, there’s a gaucho lying in the middle of the hall in a pool of blood, with dozens and dozens of stab wounds. Everyone killed him; that is, no one person killed him. The town killed him. That’s what the police chief told me. Everyone was there, entire families, probably even the priest. They turned out the lights, no one saw a thing. The people weren’t afraid of your granddad. They hated him.

  They both take a swig of beer. His dad empties his bottle and looks at him, almost smiling.

  Except that I don’t believe that story.

  Huh? Why not?

  Because there was no body.

  But wasn’t it him lying there all cut up?

  That’s what they told me. But I never saw the body. When the police chief called me, it had all been more or less wrapped up. They said it had taken weeks to track me down. They had gone looking for me in Taquara, as someone in Garopaba knew he was from there. They found someone who recognized Dad from their description and knew my name. By the time they called me, he’d already been buried.

  Where?

  There in Garopaba. In the little village cemetery. It’s a stone with nothing written on it, at the back of the cemetery.

  Did you go there?

  I did. I visited the grave and took care of some paperwork in Laguna. It was all very strange. I had the strongest feeling it wasn’t him in that hole. The grass growing over the grave was pretty tall. I remember thinking, I’ll be damned if this here was dug the week before last. And I couldn’t find anyone who could confirm the story. It was as if it hadn’t happened. The story of the crime itself was plausible, and the villagers’ silence made sense, but the way I found out about it, what the police chief told me, that awful stone with no name on it . . . I was never really convinced. But at any rate, whatever happened to your granddad, it was bound to happen. People meet the death they’re due in most cases. He met his.

  Have you ever thought about having the grave opened? There must be a legal way to go about it.

  His dad glances away, annoyed. He sighs.

  Listen. I’ve never told this story to anyone. Your mother doesn’t know. If you ask her, she’ll say your granddad disappeared, because that’s what I told her. As far as I was concerned, he really had disappeared. I left it at that. I didn’t give it any more thought. If you think it’s horrible, that’s too bad. The way I was at that age, the life I had back then . . . it’d be hard to make you understand now.

  I
don’t think it’s horrible. Relax.

  His dad fidgets in his armchair. Beta gets up and with a small lurch puts her front paws on her master’s leg. He grabs and holds her face as if muzzling her, lowering his head to look her in the eye. When he lets go, she lies down next to the armchair again. It is one of many inscrutable rituals that are a part of his dad’s relationship with the animal.

  So why are you telling me this now?

  You haven’t read that short story by Borges that I mentioned earlier, have you?

  No.

  “The South.”

  I haven’t read anything by Borges.

  ’Course you haven’t, you read fuck all.

  Dad. The pistol.

  Right.

  His dad opens the bottle of cognac, fills a small glass, and downs it in one go. He doesn’t offer him any. He picks up the pistol and examines it for a minute. He releases the magazine and clicks it back into place, as if to show that it isn’t loaded. A single bead of sweat runs down his forehead, drawing attention to the fact that he is no longer sweating all over. A minute earlier he was covered in sweat. He tucks the pistol into the waistband of his slacks and looks at him.

  I’m going to kill myself tomorrow.

  He thinks about what he’s just heard for a good while, listening to his irregular breathing leaving his nostrils in short puffs. An immense tiredness weighs suddenly on his shoulders. He stuffs the photo of his granddad into his pocket, dries his hands on his Bermuda shorts, gets up, and heads for the front door.

  Come back here.

  What for? What do you want me to do after hearing that kind of shit? Either you’re serious and want me to convince you to change your mind, which would be the most fucked-up thing you’ve ever asked me to do, or you’re having a laugh at my expense, which would be so pathetic that I don’t even want to find out. ’Bye.