Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) (19 page)

Thank you, she recites.

What about you, Gaudério's grandson? What brought you to these parts?

I decided I wanted to live by the beach after my dad died. I'm a PE teacher. I'm a running and swimming coach.

Nice, nice . . . this is a good place to practice a sport, isn't it? Mascarenhas smiles without a trace of sarcasm. His watery eyes are childlike and transmit a naïveté that contrasts with his figure. He doesn't appear to have noticed the sudden change of subject and the small talk that has taken over the conversation.

This is paradise, says Homero. If you want quality of life, there's no better place.

The sea is the primordial soup, says Índio Mascarenhas in a loud voice. The source of all life. From the sea we come, and to the sea we return.

True, he says, to be polite. Then the two men excuse themselves and say good-bye cordially. Homero says he has matters to see to later that night, and Mascarenhas, if he understood properly, is going to take his daughter through the crowd on his shoulders to the front of the main stage so she won't miss the start of the Claus & Vanessa concert.

A
man in a green and black
camouflage wetsuit is carrying a bag of equipment out to a yellow boat waiting in the shallow water in front of Baú Rock. Another man is sitting in the boat, also wearing a wetsuit, holding the rudder in one hand and a spear gun in the other. He heads down the steps to talk to them. They are leaving to go fishing around the reefs a mile offshore. Although he doesn't have a full set of spearfishing equipment, he asks if he can go with them, and they say yes. He goes inside and gets his vulcanized rubber flippers, swimming goggles, a packet of cream-filled cookies, and the harpoon that Bonobo gave him. He rubs sunscreen on his face and pulls on his Speedos and an old long-sleeved T-shirt. He locks the windows of the apartment, picks his way over the rocks, and wades out to the boat. The man in the camouflage wetsuit says he'll be cold and lends him a waterproof jacket. The motor wakes up, gurgles, and begins to rumble, propelling the boat into the green waves. He asks their names and only now discovers that the one in the camouflage wetsuit, with his local accent and round face, is Matias, Cecina's oldest son. The afternoon sky is heavy with clouds, and the wind picks up as they draw closer to Vigia Point. Antenor, Matias's friend from Rio Grande do Sul, with a rock-star quiff and long face, accelerates the boat as fast as it can go. It skips over the ramps formed by the waves, slapping the ocean. He grips the safety ropes tightly and wedges his feet between the floor and the inflatable sides of the boat, feeling the cold water pelt his face. Matias offers him a seasickness tablet. He thanks him but refuses. The town disappears into the distance, and it becomes increasingly evident why the bay is considered a refuge from the violence of the open sea, why sailors, shoals of fish and whales converge on that stretch of coast seeking a calm that those on the land take for granted. The waves that seemed large from a distance look mountainous on the open sea, and a feeling of abandonment sets in as the continent grows distant. Foam sprays up over the rocky faces of the headland with gusto. Soon the reefs are visible. Few rocks actually break the surface, but around them is a large area of smaller waves. Black frigatebirds glide overhead with their narrow wings and forked tail feathers, scrutinizing the ocean and diving into the water like arrows.

Antenor reduces the speed and slowly approaches the area of underwater rocks as he and Matias discuss the best place to anchor. Matias points at a place almost inside the reef. The two of them ready their spear guns, pull on flippers, secure knives in their shin supports, and put on snorkels. Matias is the first in and swims a short distance toward the reef, towing the signaling buoy behind him, before going under for the first time. It is one minute and fifteen seconds before he surfaces. Then Antenor jumps out of the boat and swims to the left, looking for a different place to fish, then dives down with the help of twenty-pound diving weights attached to his wetsuit. He watches the two men for a few minutes, feeling the rocking of the boat, then puts on his goggles and swimming flippers, much shorter than the ones used for diving, takes off his shirt, gets his spear gun, and slips into the cold sea.

When he is close to the rocks, he holds his breath, dives under and hears the tremulous symphony of the shellfish, a sound he has heard before when swimming near rocks on some beaches but never with this intensity. The clattering of the shellfish is frightening, as if billions of pinchers or teeth are chattering and reverberating in hollow caverns. His swimming goggles allow him to see only the closest rocks. The clamor ceases entirely when he raises his head out of the water, and not even the murmuring of the ocean and wind disrupt the sudden impression of silence. Two distinct worlds.

In the murky seascape of rocks and corals, he sees shellfish and some fish he can't identify. No sign of shoals of fish, much less groupers, which is what they were hoping to find. Matias had told him to look in holes and crevices, where they like to rest. Most groupers nowadays weigh about five pounds, sometimes ten, with a lot of luck fifteen. More than twenty is a trophy. Nothing compared to what his granddad must have caught several decades earlier, when they often weighed sixty or seventy pounds. He dives down a dozen times but doesn't see any holes or caves or groupers. He doesn't see anything that deserves to be the target of a spear gun.

He returns to the boat, and when he comes up, he sees a storm approaching from the south, covering the hills of Ibiraquera and Rosa Beach. Matias and Antenor are still underwater, among the rocks. Their yellow buoys vanish and reappear in the rise and fall of the waves. They don't seem concerned about the leaden clouds that are drawing near, or about the wind that is whistling louder and louder. They're the experts. He leaves the spear gun in the bottom of the boat and dives down again. He tries to measure the depth at that point. He descends until his ears hurt from the pressure, and he can see large yellow rocks at the bottom. They must be some fifteen to twenty feet below the surface. He swims back to the reef. At some points the rocks almost reach the surface, and he is able to stand on them.

According to his dad, his granddad was able to hold his breath for three or four minutes or even more. Another diver had died of a pulmonary embolism trying to match his time. He dives under, swims around the rocks a little, checking the time on his watch, and emerges only when he starts to feel the terrifying throbbing behind his eyes that is brought on by a lack of oxygen. One minute and five seconds. On his next attempt he sees a purple octopus dragging itself along the bottom, stirring up a small cloud of sand before hiding under a rock. The duration of this dive is only forty-eight seconds. He decides to rest for a moment. The wind churns the waves. On his third attempt, he stays down for one minute and six seconds and decides to call it a day. He doesn't have his granddad's lungs.

He returns to the boat, puts on the waterproof jacket in a useless attempt to warm up a little, and tries to measure how long his companions are able to hold their breath. One of Matias's dives lasts one minute and forty seconds. He hasn't been there long when Antenor swims back to the boat and climbs in with difficulty. When he goes to help him, he sees that his snorkeling mask is full of blood. Antenor takes off the mask and blood streams down his face and neck.

I've burst something, he says, holding his nose. Fuck, it hurts like shit. I think I've got sinusitis.

The bleeding stops, and Antenor starts feeling nauseous.

Fuck, fuck, he stammers. I don't feel well.

He opens his packet of strawberry-cream-filled cookies and offers some to Antenor. Large waves toss the boat about violently. The temperature has plummeted at least ten degrees, and the entire horizon has disappeared in the approaching storm. The wind roars and flings fans of spray into the air. The birds are all long gone. Antenor glances uneasily toward the reef.

Matias found a big grouper in a hole and won't come back until he's got it. I know him.

But soon, to their relief, Matias is swimming toward the boat. After climbing in, he tugs on a rope and pulls two copper-colored groupers out of the water, a large one weighing some eighteen pounds, and a small one of about five and a half. He poses holding the larger of the two by its enormous, scary-looking jaws with both hands, and Antenor takes a photograph. The camera's flash lights up the bright red interior of its mouth and rings of sharp little teeth. It starts to rain. Matias pulls a tube of condensed milk out of his bag and starts eating the sugary goo. Antenor starts the motor and the boat tears off toward the bay, fleeing the storm.

 • • • 

A
sprint triathlon makes for
a lively morning on the third Saturday in June. The sun is shining, but a bad-tempered northeasterly makes things tough for the athletes. The main avenue has been cordoned off for the cyclists and runners, and in the choppy sea two red buoys mark the triangular swimming circuit. The bicycles are lined up in the transition zone, which has been set up on a cross street a block from the seaside boulevard. Coaches, families, friends, and residents form a crowd behind the yellow tape on the sidewalks of the main avenue to cheer the competitors on. Two of his running students, Sara and Denise, have registered in relay teams for the five-kilometer run. Sara's shins no longer hurt, and her friend Denise has visibly lost weight and is running a nine-minute mile, which is considerable progress since her first few runs on the beach. He is going to do the 750-meter swim for Sara's team. On the bicycle is Douglas, Sara's husband, a cordial man of few words, some ten years older than his wife, hairy and half bald. Douglas has a strong accent from the north zone of Porto Alegre and stays fit by surfing regularly all year round and riding his sprint bike to Highway BR-101 on Sunday mornings.

He knows some of the professional competitors, and his most effusive reunion is with Pedro, sponsored by Paquetá Esportes, who can often be seen collecting prizes on podiums and is ranked eleventh in the country. The night before, at the technical meeting in the Hotel Garopaba dining room, the first thing Pedro asked him was if he was sick. He thought his old training partner looked a little too thin and haggard, not to mention the unruly beard. He assured him he was in good health, and as for the beard, well, he'd got sick of his own face and was conducting an experiment. Pedro got the joke and laughed. They gave each other a tight hug. Pedro had walked over and said, Hi, it's Pedro. The two of them had great respect for each other. They had spent hundreds of hours together running, riding, and swimming long distances, encouraging and distracting each other, one setting a faster pace for the other, trying to keep up with the other one's pace, sharing the semimeditative mental state of prolonged exercise. Pedro is the same age as him, thirty-four, but he knows they both look a little older than that. Too much effort, too much sun, too many free radicals in the blood, along with all the physical and emotional problems that everyone else has and which you carry in the body as glaring or subtle marks, sometimes extremely subtle or even invisible, and even then in some way perceptible from the outside. The body is its own time capsule, and its journey is always somewhat public, no matter how hard you try to cover it or hide it behind makeup.

About twenty minutes before the race starts, officials communicate that the water is full of jellyfish. The use of wetsuits is allowed at the last minute, and the swimmers race to get theirs. When the start gun goes off, the athletes run through the sand, leap over the first few waves, dive in, and discover that they will need to forge a path through an enormous soup of gelatinous globules the size of soccer balls. Those who didn't bring wetsuits or didn't have time to get them leave the water with stings. One woman gets a tentacle right in the face and is pulled out of the water screaming by the referees in kayaks.

Pedro is the first out of the water that morning. He is third. Douglas rides well but is no match for the better-trained cyclists and loses part of the team's initial advantage during the twenty-kilometer ride. Sara almost can't finish the race, but he runs the last half-mile by her side, and she crosses the finish line all red and out of breath. Even so, they place fourth in the relay, right in the middle of the seven teams signed up. An encouraging result. Afterward both amateur and professional athletes float along smiling, high on a mixture of tiredness, euphoria, and relaxation.

Sara and Douglas decide to throw a barbecue for their friends and acquaintances who also entered the race. At Sara's request, he promises to pitch in with his much-advertised seasoned flank steak,
matambre
. The delicacy requires some preparation. Chilies, sweet marjoram, thyme, lime juice, rock salt, and at least an hour and a half on the barbecue, rolled up in tinfoil. Douglas climbs onto his bike and rides home on a mission to get the fire started and put the beer on ice. Sara insists on taking him by car to the supermarket to buy the meat and the seasonings, but he says he needs to go home first to shower and change his clothes. She says she'll drive him there too. No matter how many times he repeats that it isn't necessary, she pretends not to hear him. Are we a team or not?

When they walk into his apartment, Sara does what he felt was coming and did nothing to stop. He has barely shut the door when she takes off her running shoes and tracksuit bottoms and stands there in her blue shorts with her hands on her jacket, as if she is about to unzip it.

Whoa. Sara. Hang on.

Fuck me.

I can't.

You can't or you don't want to?

I can't.

Of course you can, she says, walking over to him. Look at me.

He looks.

You can, okay? She pushes him lightly, making him fall into a sitting position on the hard yellow sofa. She is about to mount him, but he holds her by the waist to stop her.

You'll regret it.

No, I won't.

But I will.

You definitely won't.

People walk down the path outside the closed shutters. He presses a finger to his lips, asking her to be quiet.

Anyone you know?

I don't know. But everyone sees everything here.

Don't be paranoid.

She bends her head toward him and whispers.

It'll just be once. I've never done this before.

He remains sitting, she remains standing. Her thighs, speckled like chocolate chip ice cream, try to move forward. She runs one of her hands down from her waist to her leg and raises it to place her foot on the sofa. Her smell floods the dark, moist apartment. He can feel the pulsing of their bodies. Tiny tremors.

Better not.

Well, what are you going to do with that bulge there?

He leans his forehead against the waistband of her shorts and sighs.

That's it, she says.

His cell phone starts to ring.

Don't answer it.

On the fourth ring he slowly pushes her away and picks up the phone. It is Gonçalo.