Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) Page 36

  A delegation from the gym comes to visit on his third day in hospital. Débora, Mila, the twins, Jander, and Greice arrive with flowers and a bag of homemade ginger candies from Celma, who couldn’t make it because she is at a reiki conference in São Paulo. They name themselves to spare him the trouble of recognizing them. Débora cries when she sees the state he is in but tells him not to mind her, it’s nothing, she cries easily. Jander and Greice ask about Beta and are relieved to hear that she is being looked after by someone he trusts, and they offer the kennel if he needs it. That dog’s a miracle, says Greice. Rayanne and Tayanne say that the new swimming instructor isn’t as nice as him. I mean, he’s nice, says one of them—he can no longer remember which—but he doesn’t teach us. He just tells us what to do. When we say we’ve finished warming up, he points at the whiteboard and says, okay, now you can kick your legs. We finish kicking our legs, he says, okay, now do your sets. He just repeats everything that’s on the whiteboard. Whenever I ask if I’m swimming correctly, he says yes, but he doesn’t even look. We miss you. It’s no fun without someone correcting us, encouraging us, and getting on our case all the time. He says that maybe the new instructor is right. Maybe you’re swimming so well that you don’t need someone to correct you all the time. You just need to synchronize your arms and legs well, lengthen your strokes, and feel that you are moving, gliding through the water. And work hard, of course, to get better and better. I think you’re ready, girls. Look, says one twin. That’s what we’re talking about. Get better quickly, and come back to the pool, says the other. Is there any chance you’ll come back? I don’t know, he says. Ask Débora there. The secretary shrugs and says they’ll have to ask Saucepan. When they leave, he is assailed by memories of old friends, faceless figures who are recognizable from shared experiences, and fantasizes about visits and reunions until his daydreaming is interrupted by Natália, who brings him a little cup of pills and asks if it is true that the friend who came to visit yesterday has a bed-and-breakfast in Rosa.

  He stays in hospital for eleven days.

  The morning he is released, he uses the money that Dália brought him to catch a bus to the Florianópolis bus station, where he has lunch and buys a ticket to Garopaba. When he arrives, he goes straight to Dália’s house, although she is still at work in Imbituba. Beta prances about when she sees him, and Dália’s mother says that she gave her a lot of food so she’d regain her weight. She starts relaying another dream she had about him, but he stops her and says he already knows. This time a woman with black hair comes out of a swamp with a child. She stares at him in silence. That’s what you dreamed, right? She nods. You shouldn’t waste your time dreaming about me, ma’am. He downs the last sip of coffee, thanks her for everything several times, and congratulates her on her daughter’s engagement. He promises to return to pay her back for the dog food.

  He passes through the middle of the fishing village at dusk, Beta close at heel, with fresh nicks on his face from the nurse who shaved him that morning. He goes into the supermarket and spends the rest of the money in his pocket on bread, butter, coffee, a bunch of bananas, and a credit voucher for his cell phone. Several locals are out on the sidewalks and on the verandas of their homes after the day of sun. Clothes and pillows are being taken in from windows, fences, and clotheslines. The air is filled with the smells of the salty breeze, fish gravy, and corn cakes coming out of the oven. The ocean looks like a stained-glass window in motion, as if the light of the setting sun were coming from underwater and the beach were the inside of a church, but the water smells of oil and sewage. And there, perched on the hill, is the apartment he wanted so badly to live in and did. He opens the shutters to let air into the living room and stays there in the dark until the streetlight in front of his window comes on and casts its light inside. He doesn’t feel like he is returning home. Jasmim was wrong about that. He doesn’t belong here. There are two possible places for a person. Family is one. The other is the whole world. Sometimes it isn’t easy to figure out which one we are in.

  After a night of sleep like any other, he wakes up on October 30, 2008, in a dirty, mold-infested apartment, with no money and no job but with no fear either. He phones a laundry service and arranges to have them pick up his dirty clothes. He phones Saucepan, who tells him that at the moment there is no way he can have his old job as swimming instructor back. The new instructor is doing well, and he has no reason to replace him. Besides which, it wouldn’t be fair to the guy. The number of people using the pool has actually picked up a little. He tells Saucepan that it’s not a problem and congratulates him on the success of the gym. Then he goes out for lunch and stops at an ATM to withdraw the last of his savings. He phones Sara and asks if she thinks Douglas would agree to fix his teeth and let him pay the following month, presuming he doesn’t know anything about the day of the barbecue, etc. She calls him back a few minutes later with an appointment time. Back at the apartment, he starts cleaning. He is scrubbing the floor with bleach when he hears someone clapping to get his attention outside the window. He doesn’t recognize the strong, tanned young man smiling at him.

  Good afternoon.

  Afternoon. Who are you?

  Don’t you remember me, Tom Hanks?

  He invites the man in.

  All I can offer you is cold water.

  No problem. I stopped by here a few days ago to see if you’d survived, but the windows were shut. Are you okay?

  I’m still a bit weak. I spent a few days in the hospital. I had a bad bout of pneumonia.

  Do you remember what happened that day on the beach?

  Yep. I fell off a headland near Pinheira in the middle of the storm and swam all night trying to get to a beach.

  And you ended up on Siriú? From Pinheira to Siriú?

  I guess so. I must have caught a current.

  Beta comes through the door and goes to drink water from her bowl.

  So that’s the dog you went to get back from the guy.

  You hear about it?

  Everyone heard about it. They told me not to come and see you.

  Huh? Why?

  I dunno. People invent stories.

  What stories?

  The man raises his eyebrows.

  Forget it, he says. Tell me something, when’s that course for volunteer lifeguards that you told me about?

  End of November. It runs for three weeks. There’s a theoretical component and a practical one. The problem’s the practical component. They put you through the wringer.

  But if you pass, you’ll have work all summer?

  It starts just before Christmas and goes until Carnival, at least.

  How much does it pay?

  It’s pretty good. A hundred reais a day. Even counting days off, you bring in over two thousand a month. Did you mean what you said? About giving me a hand with my swimming?

  I meant it. But I want to do the course too. Where do you sign up?

  At the fire department. Over in Palhocinha.

  Great. Just give me a few more days ’cause I’m still a bit weak, but we can start next week. Meet me here at eight in the morning, even if it’s raining, if there’s a northeasterly blowing, whatever. What’s your name?

  Aírton. Are you going to charge me for it?

  Absolutely not. Take down my phone number.

  After Aírton leaves and the laundry lady stops by to pick up his clothes, he takes Beta for a walk along the beach and is still thinking about the course for lifeguards when he remembers a story that was born, lived a long life, and died in his own mind, or at least was dead until now, a story that he had started imagining for no apparent reason when he was about twelve or thirteen and continued imagining until the end of his adolescence. It was just a sketch or daydream that never came to a conclusion worthy of the name but that always began in the same manner. He’d be sitting on the beach looking out to sea, when he’d see some
one waving for help out in the deep water. After swimming past the surf, he’d discover that the person drowning was a girl his age, a girl who gradually got older as he imagined the scene year after year. He would pull her out of the sea, and she’d cough up water and lie on the sand, weary and breathless. Sometimes she’d be wearing clothes; other times she’d be in a bikini. Her skin was always very white, her hair always black, straight, and long. Her eyes were blue. She wasn’t anyone he knew or came to know. After recovering enough to stand up and walk, she’d thank him with a hug or just a word and a look, and she’d run off down the beach without looking back, her thin arms swinging, until she disappeared along a path through the dunes. Months would go by, sometimes years. He imagined he was older than he was. These futures varied, but in all of them he’d find the girl again, and she’d be in a terrible state. She had suffered at the hands of men or had become an addict of some sort. A suicide. A wandering orphan. She’d end up crying. Her hair would stick to her cheeks streaked with tears. The slightly older version of himself that was now the protagonist of the story had spent months or years looking for the girl, imagining who she was, how she had come to be out in the deep, where she had gone after disappearing down the beach, and now she reappeared, and he loved her. It was that simple. Nothing easier than loving a nameless girl who was a mere idea, delivered to him by fate, vulnerable and sensuous, ready to be rescued, run away, and reappear. But she hated him. Sometimes she accused him of saving her against her will. Why did you pull me out of the water? You shouldn’t have. More often she would accuse him of abandoning her. How could you have abandoned me? How could you have let me go? But I saved you, he’d argue. She’d shake her head, saying no. Why didn’t you ask my name? Why didn’t you hold my hand? Why didn’t you come running after me? Why did you let me go? You didn’t want me. And to him it all seemed terribly unfair. How was he supposed to have known? He’d done what had to be done. He’d done everything that could have been done. How unfair it was that she could look back after so long and accuse him of not having done something differently at the time. Didn’t she remember running off without a word? Sometimes there was a sexual tension in this conflict, sometimes he felt sheer desperation. It ended in that, in the intrinsic unfairness of the act of looking back, of daring to imagine a past different from the one that had brought him to precisely where he was now. He imagined variations on this story for years on end. In all of them, he ended up alone. It never occurred to him to tell it to someone, write it down, draw it. Why this story? Why any story? Where had it come from, and where had it been all this time?

  THIRTEEN

  He sees a pair of gray-green eyes above fleshy cheeks with dimples that frame a pearly, expectant smile. Light olive skin and thick, peeling lips almost the same color, just a little rosier. He knows the nose ring in one of the nostrils and the small scar right in the middle of the forehead, but he is unable to retrieve the entire face from memory. Long black hair tumbling over the shoulders. His eyes take in every quadrant of this face in the space of a breath, and he could swear he’s never seen this woman before in his life, but he suddenly knows who she is. Something tells him. He thought about her a few days ago and always knew she would come someday. At the same instant in which he recognizes her, she gets a fright and her smile gives way to a pained expression.

  Shit! What happened to you?

  I got a little roughed up in a fight, he says smiling.

  You never were the brawling sort.

  Some guys stole my dog. Beta. I went to get her back, and they didn’t like it.

  She tilts her head and narrows her eyes as if she doesn’t believe him. They stare at each other for a while. He feels his body swaying softly to the rhythm of his racing heartbeat and sees Viviane’s chest inflating and emptying like a bellows. Organs working to feed brains at the peak of activity, almost paralyzed by the millions of things to be said.

  Did you recognize my face when you opened the door?

  No. But I recognized you.

  How?

  You know how.

  She nods and tries to blow away some hairs that are falling over her face. He realizes that both of her hands are occupied with some kind of frame wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

  Even after all this time?

  Guess so.

  Well, I almost didn’t recognize you. You’re so thin.

  I know. There are several reasons. Among which pneumonia.

  Pneumonia? You never used to get sick. Just colds.

  I got water in my lungs.

  How did that happen?

  I fell off the top of a headland and had to swim all night to get to a beach.

  You can’t be serious.

  You look beautiful. You seem happy. I look at your photos sometimes.

  Are you going to let me in?

  She is wearing a military-looking burgundy coat with large pockets and a belt of the same color at the waist. Black jeans and boots adorned with metallic buckles. Everything looks expensive and elegant, different from the little summer dresses and department store tracksuits that clothe the image of her that inhabits his memory. She takes a few steps into the living room and looks around. Her tall figure in the morning light looks like something straight out of a fashion magazine and contrasts with the secondhand furniture of the apartment.

  Your mother told me you were living in front of the beach, but I imagined something different. This is practically in the water. What an incredible view. You could just about swim out the door, couldn’t you?

  It’s what I do almost every day. Have a seat. I’ll make us some coffee.

  She leans the frame against the arm of the smaller sofa and sits. He fills the kettle with tap water.

  When did you get here?

  Last night. I got to Florianópolis in the afternoon and rented a car. I got a room in a bed-and-breakfast in front of the beach. It’s so cheap in the off-season! The room’s really nice. I think I’m the only guest.

  You came alone, didn’t you?

  Yes.

  He goes through four matches trying to light the stove.

  I wanted to call to let you know I was coming, but your mother said your phone had been off or out of range for several days, and you closed your Facebook account too. Though you never did answer my messages anyway. Did you even see them? I sent you some text messages too, but you didn’t answer. In the end I decided to come anyway because I’d already scheduled the time off from work, and I wasn’t going to have another opportunity so soon. I hope it’s not a problem. I don’t want to be a bother.

  No problem. I’ve been a bit out of touch with the world.

  You never answered any of my messages. I came to the conclusion you didn’t want to have any contact with me. But I came anyway. Because, after all, I know how things work with you. If I were to wait for a reply . . .

  It’s nice to see you. I think—

  He considers what to say as he spoons coffee into the filter.

  —I read your messages for a while, but I dunno, Viv. I didn’t really feel like chatting on Facebook. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk to you.

  No, I understand.

  It was great to open the door and see you. Really great. It’s nice to see you in person.

  I’ve been worried about you. Everyone has. Especially after all this rain, the flooding. And then you up and disappear all of a sudden. Was there a lot of damage here?

  Not here.

  I kept seeing all those people dying on TV. They say it was the biggest flood in the history of Santa Catarina. There was all that construction work on the highway. I’m glad it didn’t affect you.

  He hears Beta’s paws as she comes out of the bedroom.

  Beta, look who came to visit us. Someone you know.

  Beta comes limping into the living room. She looks at Viviane and sniffs the air but doesn’t
approach her.

  She got hit by a car, but she’s okay now.

  Viviane snaps her fingers and makes some sounds without much conviction to call Beta, but the dog just stands there in the middle of the room, out of reach. The two of them stare in silence at Beta, who in turn stares at nothing. Everything is frozen for a few seconds. The kettle starts to whistle.

  So how are you holding up?

  I’m fine. They messed up my face a bit. The worst thing was the pneumonia, but I’m over it.

  After your dad’s death, I mean.

  Oh. I’m okay. I miss him. But that’s to be expected.

  I wanted to go to his funeral, but I’d just started my new job and couldn’t get the time off.

  You told me on the phone. You don’t have to justify yourself. Everything’s okay, really. What’s done is done. Keeping Beta has helped me deal with it. Sometimes I remember him, and I feel sad, but we didn’t even visit each other all that often, you know? He was in pretty poor health. But he had a good heart. After he killed himself, I think that became clearer. He was good for everyone in his own twisted way. We never wanted for anything, if you think about it. I remember him holding me by the scruff of the neck and giving me advice. He’d hold on tight and start telling me some home truths. Dad always knew what he was doing. He made quick decisions and never went back on them. He made a decision.

  Dante was really upset. He can’t accept it.