Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) Page 34

  I got this for you in Siriú.

  He accepts the bottle of mineral water without stopping walking. He tries to twist the top off but can’t.

  Here, let me.

  The man takes the bottle, opens it, and returns it. He takes a series of short gulps. They walk along side by side.

  Thanks.

  Are you going to make it, Tom Hanks? Are you?

  Yep. Especially now, with this water here to save me.

  Want me to help you?

  No, man, finish your run. I’ll make it. I just can’t stop.

  Put your arm here.

  The man offers him his shoulder for support and puts his arm around his waist. They walk together, slowly.

  Stop by the health clinic when you get there. You don’t look well.

  It’ll pass.

  They walk together for more than half an hour. The sun has disappeared again behind thick clouds by the time they arrive at the Garopaba Beach promenade.

  I can make it on my own from here, man.

  Don’t you want to go to the health clinic?

  I want to stop off at home first. I live over there, overlooking Baú Rock. See? In the ground-floor apartment. Thanks for the help, and sorry I spoiled your workout.

  Forget it.

  Is there a swimming test also to be a lifeguard?

  Yep.

  What’s your swimming like?

  Pretty lousy. That’s my problem.

  Stop by my place in a few days’ time, and I’ll give you some tips to help you improve. I’m a swimming instructor.

  Seriously?

  Seriously. Don’t forget. Lifeguards have to swim well.

  Okay, you’re on. See you later, Tom Hanks!

  The man leaves and starts running back toward Siriú again. He continues on his own along the small stretch that remains, eyes trained on his front door. People arriving for lunch at the restaurants on the seafront observe him from afar and take a while to look away. Some fishermen working on their beached boats stop what they are doing to watch him go past. He gives the ones who stare at him longer a quick wave of the hand and gets almost imperceptible nods of the head in return.

  His legs shake on the crumbling steps up to Baú Rock. The water at the end of the bay is incredibly smooth and calm. He enters the dark corridor between the buildings and retrieves the key hidden among the plants. Beta’s absence screams in the silence of the musty living room. He opens the windows, and the light comes in. The humidity is scandalous. Droplets of water slide down the walls and the sides of appliances and into puddles on the tiled floor.

  He goes into the bathroom, looks at himself in the mirror, and sees an old man. He has spent his whole life seeing his face for the first time in his reflection, but now it is different. He can see the contours of his skull behind his forehead and cheekbones. His eyes are sunken in their orbits. His skin looks burned in spite of the weeks with no sunlight. His long beard is full of sand. He doesn’t remember what he looked like before, but he knows it wasn’t like this. He understands now what his grandfather saw. A ghost, a younger version of himself. Something that shouldn’t have been there.

  He takes off his wet clothes and sees his bones trying to poke through his shoulders, his prominent collarbones, and his ribs. He is covered in scratches, but nothing looks serious. The cut at his waist isn’t deep.

  He goes into the kitchen and drinks water from the faucet in short gulps. Some fruit and vegetables have withered or rotted in the fridge. There is a half-full tub of caramelized condensed milk. He rams a spoon into it and devours it in seconds. He wolfs down the rest of a jar of honey with a packet of crackers that was in the cupboard. After eating, he returns to the bathroom and takes a long shower on the highest setting. His tiredness crashes over him in the warm water, and he can barely stay on his feet. He has to sit on the toilet to dry off. Then he rolls himself in every available blanket and quilt and collapses on the bed, thinking that he needs to buy more food. And a toothbrush and toothpaste. And an umbrella.

  • • •

  For two days he spends more time asleep than awake and goes out only to withdraw money and buy some food at the grocery store in the village center. He knows the name, location, and function of every muscle in the human body and knows exactly which ones are hurting at any given time. They all hurt. His face hurts. But the pain is normal. The kind of pain an athlete gets used to. It is always raining when he gets out of bed, and the few boats that haven’t been brought in are always anchored in the same place. The long waves roll up to the doors of the fishing sheds, one after another. The muddy water that washes down the creeks, ditches, and dirt roads invades the green sea, forming large coffee-colored streaks across the entire murky bay.

  Cecina appears on the second day holding a flowery umbrella. He invites her in, but she stays in the doorway with a concerned smile.

  You’re sick, boy. I told you you were sick.

  He coughs before answering.

  I’m fine, Cecina.

  You’re sick. You look like a dead fish. Go to the health clinic.

  I will, don’t worry.

  Where’s the dog?

  I lost her, Cecina.

  Oh dear.

  I know. It’s really hard.

  She lowers her voice.

  Did you talk to Santina?

  I did. She told me everything. Or her version, at least.

  There is no other version. Now you can stop going around asking about it. That’s also why I helped you. To see if you’d get some sense into you and stop.

  I’ve stopped, Cecina. The subject is dead and buried. I owe you a lot. Thank you for helping me.

  She looks at him as if he were a pickpocket offering to help her cross the street.

  You disappeared for a while there.

  I went on a trip.

  A trip where, for heaven’s sake? Everything’s underwater.

  I went to Porto Alegre to resolve a few things. Paperwork to do with my late father, that kind of thing.

  Cecina turns her face a little and doesn’t look convinced. He can imagine what she is thinking. As predicted, all it took was the arrival of winter for the enthusiastic young PE teacher who only wanted to live a simple life in front of the beach, and who could prove his good intentions with a check for thousands of reais, to become a sick, filthy, evasive liar. Drugs, no doubt. She is relieved to have received a year’s rent in advance.

  Did the rain do much damage here, Cecina?

  Not too much. Just holes in the streets. The road to Ferrugem was blocked for a couple of days, but they’ve fixed it. The real problem for us here is that the retaining wall on Cavalos Hill fell again and closed off access to the highway. Did you hear about it? My nephew who’s studying vet science in Florianópolis has been stuck there for two days. Things are pretty ugly in Blumenau and Itajaí. According to yesterday’s Diário Catarinense, the death toll is already sixty-eight. I imagine there’s many more. They just haven’t found the bodies. And I saw on TV that volunteers have been stealing donations. It’s a tragedy. I’ve never seen so much rain in my more than sixty years of life.

  How awful. At least Garopaba was spared.

  We’re blessed here.

  And who won the election?

  There’s going to be a second round. No one got an absolute majority. Weren’t you here?

  No. I’m a bit out of the loop.

  She glances inside the apartment.

  Someone stopped by here looking for you a few days ago.

  Man or woman?

  Man. All he gave me was a nickname. He was fairly dark-skinned, bald. You’re not caught up in drugs, are you?

  Bonobo?

  I think that was it.

  What did he want?

  He was asking after you. I said I hadn’t seen you for sev
eral days.

  He’s a friend. I’ll give him a call. Thanks, Cecina.

  After Cecina says good-bye, he gets his black umbrella and goes to the supermarket again to buy a credit voucher for his cell phone. Halfway there he realizes he’s still walking slowly, at the pace he kept so that Beta could keep up with him. He glances over his shoulder all the time, as if by a miracle she might reappear, limping along behind him. Something clutches at his stomach. What he feels isn’t exactly pain but a kind of revulsion, as if his guts were disgusted at themselves. At the supermarket and in the doorways of some houses, the fishermen and their wives return his greetings as if merely respecting an enemy. He has done nothing to these people, but he understands that his mere presence is an unpleasant specter. He is sick of it and feels a deep sadness. His grandfather must have felt the same sadness, only a thousand times greater. The origin of his superhuman strength.

  When he gets home, he plugs his cell phone into the charger, takes a hot shower, and makes a ham and cheese omelet. Ever since he woke up on the sand of Siriú, he has felt cold to the bone, and nothing seems to warm him up. His tracksuit pants and two wool sweaters aren’t enough. His fits of ragged coughing are becoming more frequent. He rolls himself up in the blanket, sits on the sofa, and dials a number on his cell phone.

  Bonobo.

  Swimmer.

  He invites his friend over to his place for a drink and a chat, but he is in Porto Alegre. Bonobo confirms that he stopped by the apartment a few days earlier to say that he had decided to visit his sick father after something he had said the day they met at Altair’s kiosk. He says he finally met his nine-year-old half-sister for the first time and went to the neighborhood where he grew up to see his blood sister, whom he hadn’t seen in over a year. Bonobo found his father in a fragile state after surviving an aortic rupture. He’d had the incredible luck to be showing a plot of land to a cardiologist when he’d felt sharp pains in his chest and gone into a cold sweat. The cardiologist had detected irregular rhythms in his heartbeat, phoned a colleague, and sent him to hospital by taxi. He was operated on in time. Nevertheless the damage was extensive, and he was very weak. Bonobo’s dad’s new wife begged him not to broach any potentially stressful subjects, which could be lethal, so their conversation was a little stiff and certain things were left unsaid. At any rate, they forgave each other and joked around a little. He hadn’t seen his father in five years.

  But you were right about what you said over in the kiosk, says Bonobo. I’m glad I came. I see myself in the old man. I almost wound up as big a prick as him. But now he’s there with his new family, more laid back, retired, living off all the land he bought in the south zone of the city. His wife and little girl love him. And I’m out of the rut I was in and have a bed-and-breakfast near the beach. I think I surprised him as much as he surprised me. He and I might’ve gone to the grave without ever knowing the whole story. I don’t know if that makes sense to you.

  It does.

  How are things at your end? You haven’t been answering your phone. Your landlady said you’d disappeared.

  I discovered more or less what happened to my granddad, and I found him, still alive, in a cave over near Pinheira.

  No way.

  He was missing two fingers on his right hand, just like Dad said.

  Are you sure you didn’t dream it? It sounds like a dream.

  I’ll tell you more when you get back. I’m almost out of credit. To be honest, I’m calling to ask a favor. I lost Beta up in the hills. I want to go back to look for her.

  Which hills?

  Behind Pinheira Beach. It’s a long story, but I need to go back and look for her. I doubt I’ll find her, but I won’t be able to rest until I’ve tried. I feel like total shit. She was Dad’s dog. And you know, before he died, he asked me to have her put down.

  I get it.

  I screwed everything up.

  Take it easy, man. We’ll find her.

  It’s killing me. I thought we could go to Pinheira together in Lockjaw, and you could give me a hand. I’m not really well enough to go on my own. We can look for her for a couple of days, spend a night there. When do you get back?

  In three days.

  Shit. Any chance you could come back tomorrow?

  I can’t. But if you wait for me, I’ll go with you. I owe you one.

  I’ll wait. Thanks, man.

  I’ll go straight to your place when I get back.

  I’ve missed you, man.

  You too. Hang in there.

  Same to you.

  • • •

  He can barely get out of bed on Saturday morning. His cough has worsened considerably over the last few days, and now he is starting to experience chest pain and shivers. The rain stops at dusk, the sea becomes calm, and a flaming sunset appears and disappears in an instant as if it has walked through the wrong door. His wheezing is noisy in the silence of the night, and he is thinking about dragging himself off to the health clinic when he hears Beta yelping.

  It must be another dog. Or just in his head. But Beta yelps again, this time insistently. The sound is distant and despairing and seems to be coming from the beach, the hills, and the walls of the apartment all at once. He pulls on his sneakers, opens the door, and stands outside. His shivers worsen and run through his body like electric shocks. He wonders if he is mad or delirious with fever. He hears the yelping again. This time he is almost certain that it is coming from the beach or the seaside boulevard.

  He follows the path to Baú Rock without bothering to close the door, arms folded over his chest, listening carefully. He heads down to the beach promenade and is walking in front of the brightly lit, empty restaurants when he hears the barking again, frenetic and incessant. He crosses the street, ignoring an oncoming car, which flashes its headlights and honks twice. The barking is coming from a small bar with outside tables that is famous in summer for its caipirinhas made with bergamot leaves and a dash of curaçao and that opens only occasionally in the off-season, when it is frequented by locals. There are two barmen and another three men sitting at a small wooden table on the sidewalk. One of the barmen has served him on two or three occasions, a middle-aged man with an accent from the Brazil-Uruguay border, a mustache, graying side whiskers and goatee, skin wrinkled from the sun, and a body hypertrophied from decades of weightlifting. A blender is roaring away at top speed, Sublime is playing at a low volume somewhere behind the counter, and someone is smoking marijuana. No one greets him, but they all stop what they are doing for a moment, emphasizing the hostility that has just filled the air. One of the men leaning against the counter turns to face the street and starts drumming heavily on the slats of varnished wood on the facade of the bar.

  Beta is barking loudly and incessantly, but it takes him a while to locate her in the driveway beside the bar behind a low wooden gate. She is tied by the neck with a red rag or item of clothing to the pipe of an outdoor faucet. Her protuberant ribs and cloudy eyes explain why she hasn’t been able to pull the pipe away. When she smells him nearby and finally sees him, her barks grow louder, more broken and sharper, like howls. The improvised cloth collar is strangling her.

  He climbs over the gate, kneels next to her, and focuses all his attention on undoing the knot in the cloth, without wasting time trying to pat or calm her. She stops barking but keeps trying to raise her front paws and lick his face. The gate opens with a creak.

  Leave the dog alone, kid.

  The knot is as hard as cement.

  I said leave her alone.

  A kick in the ribs throws him against the wall between the driveway and a closed shopping arcade. Beta starts barking wildly again. He tries to get up but gets another kick in the stomach, just above his inflamed cut. This time he cries out in pain.

  Who do you think you are, coming in like this and taking my dog, you piece of shit?

  He starts t
o get up again, expecting the next blow, but this time his attacker decides to watch the spectacle of the man slowly picking himself up off the ground. He is a local, unshaven, with an animallike ignorance in his eyes. His blond surfer’s hair is poking out from under his red and white baseball cap and covers his neck and ears. He is tall and fills his baggy jacket and pants well. A hard man to take down.

  Do we know each other?

  Are you retarded?

  I’m serious, I forget people.

  The other men in the bar come over, forming an attentive audience on the sidewalk. One of them opens the gate and enters. The mustached barman hasn’t bothered to come out from behind the counter and can’t see anything. Beta snarls. The local kicks her and then immobilizes her with the makeshift collar.

  ’Course, we know each other, asshole. And if you don’t get out of here right now, you won’t forget me again, believe me.

  The dog’s mine, and you know it.

  I don’t know anything about that. I found her wandering along without a collar on the edge of the beach.

  You’re the dickhead who was after Dália, aren’t you?

  The local gives a little snort of amazement and takes a step forward, letting go of Beta.

  What was that?

  You’ve got a shark tattoo or something like that on your leg, haven’t you? I recognized you by your girly voice.

  Jesus, this guy’s really asking for it.

  He glances around and sees faces hungry for violence. Beta is sitting between him and the local, tired and confused, hungry and strangled, oblivious to the nature of the dispute. The animal his father loved more than anything. On his left, in the distance, a delicate veil of daylight glimmers on the horizon over the ocean. More or less here, on this same stretch of beach, his grandfather sank into the night sea and never returned, after rising up from a pool of blood as a whole town looked on, riddled with a hundred stab wounds, the living-dead going home. Right there where the waves are now breaking, grinning white smiles in the darkness. In the icy-cold water that helped Beta walk again. Beta, the old dog that everyone had given up on. Maybe that was what his father had feared. Not dying easily. Not dying ever.