Daniel Galera - Blood-drenched Beard

Where you been? slurs Bonobo, completely off his face but still standing, an experienced drunk. I’ve been looking for you for ages. This is Liz, a really good friend of mine, and this here is Ju.

Bonobo and Ju are in the middle of a conversation dripping with terms such as soul, impermanence, and vanity . Liz looks as if she is just along for the ride, accompanying her friend. Neither of them seems drunk, and he isn’t really sure what’s going on but senses that it must be obvious.

Bonobo’s bed-and-breakfast is near the sushi bar, and in a few minutes Bonobo’s Beetle and the girls’ red Parati are driving up a steep, narrow driveway between bamboo fences that leads to a well-tended property with a large two-story building and two smaller cabanas behind it, all built with a combination of bricks, mortar, and wooden logs, with green Portuguese roof tiles and glassed-in verandas. A sign over the front door says BONOBO’S BED-AND-BREAKFAST, and on the adjoining building with French windows another sign says BONOBO’S CAFÉ. He climbs out of the Beetle with difficulty. He scratches his forearm on a rusty corner of the door and tries to remember when he had his last tetanus shot.

Bonobo opens the door and tells them all to make themselves at home but asks that they try not to make too much noise because there are guests in one of the upstairs rooms. Downstairs is the reception desk with a cozy sitting room and access to the kitchen, a guest breakfast room, and another room with an engraved wooden sign on the door saying BONOBO’S BEDROOM. It isn’t long before Bonobo and Ju go into his room. Ju is from Brasília and has large breasts, and that is all he has had time to find out about her.

In the reception area, he sits on a small, comfortable sofa, while Liz sits in the armchair next to him. Liz is a native of Garopaba. She has recently had highlights put in her brown hair and has an athletic body and a slightly masculine face. There is zero attraction. They chat at a calm, tired pace, listening to the reggae music that Bonobo has put on at a low volume in the background. They are songs about the beauty of the moment, the importance of freedom, the need for awareness, about stars and love and the ocean waves. Liz’s full name is Elizete, and she hates it. She says there is a whole generation of girls in Garopaba of her age with names that end in ete, just as her and her girlfriends’ mothers and grandmothers’ names end in ina, which are so much simpler and sweeter and sound like parents’ terms of endearment for their daughters: names like Delfina, Jovina, Celina, Ondina, Etelvina, Clarina, Angelina, Antonina, Vivina, Santina, and the more common ones like Carolina and Regina. But now it is the era of the Elizetes, Claudetes, and Marizetes, with their rather stunted sound. She muses, I wonder why? If I have a daughter, I’m going to call her Marina, or Sabrina, or Florentina — what do you think? He thinks she is right. Her voice is soft and sibilant like that of other locals he has spoken to, including Cecina. Maybe it is a characteristic of Azoreans. After the music stops, they hear only the silence of the night and gusts of intermittent wind rustling the trees and the bamboo thickets. Occasionally the low murmur of a halting conversation comes from Bonobo’s room. Beta has fallen asleep on a knitted rug. Liz wants to know something about him, and he talks about swimming, triathlons, how he competed in the Ironman in Hawaii some years ago, and she seems only partially interested but still interested enough. It’s almost as if they were intimate and were having one of those conversations that people have before they fall asleep together. I don’t have the build to really compete properly, he says. I’ve got small feet. Liz murmurs things so he’ll know she is listening, and he keeps talking. Time flows at the pace that it should always flow, he thinks. A slowness in keeping with his inner discourse. They hear a short moan from Ju, the bed banging against the wall or the floor, then a longer moan, which she tries to muffle unsuccessfully. It goes on for a few minutes. When the door opens, Ju walks out fully dressed and perfectly composed and tells her friend that she needs to go because she has to get up early the next morning. The Parati drives off, and the girls crank up the radio. The beat of the electronic music fades into the distance.

Bonobo comes back from the kitchen with two bottles of Heineken and says, Peace to all beings. They clink their green bottlenecks.

Isn’t that what the Buddhists say?

Yep, I’m a Buddhist.

He laughs.

What’s so funny?

You don’t strike me as a Buddhist.

What’s a Buddhist supposed to be like?

I don’t know. But you don’t strike me as one.

Don’t talk crap.

Don’t you have to take a vow of chastity, stop drinking, that kind of thing?

Not exactly.

Bonobo says he started becoming familiar with Buddhism in the late nineties, flirting on ICQ with a girl from Curitiba who followed the religion. Ideas such as compassion, nonattachment, and impermanence were new to him. It all made sense right from the start. His eyes light up as he tells the story. Sometimes he stops talking and meditates on what he has just said, nodding his head lightly. He is convinced that if that girl hadn’t been open to his silly online advances and spent night after night explaining samsara, karma, and the law of moral causation to him, he probably would have killed someone or been killed himself. Or both. Bonobo invited her to Porto Alegre, and she went. She traveled by bus and stayed in a dive near the bus station. She wanted to go to Garagem Hermética, a nightclub that other online friends of hers frequented. They went together. They saw a band from Esteio that played Smiths covers, and they had a hell of a night. The girl brought him several books as a present and convinced him to learn English. Eva was her name.

The girl studied physics, man. Physics. A nerdy weirdo and totally introverted but an angel in human form. A being of light. We visited the Três Coroas Temple together, and it became a second home to me. I worked as a laborer there and went on several retreats. I wanted to live there, but the lamas wouldn’t let me. They said I wasn’t ready. And they were right. I wasn’t ready for that. Eva never came back again, but we kept in touch online and used to send each other photocopies of philosophical and Buddhist texts in the post. She died of leukemia in 2003.

Sorry to hear it. That must have been hard to deal with.

A rooster crows once, twice, three times.

It was. But life goes on. Didn’t you like Liz?

She seemed nice. But there was no chemistry.

Chemistry? What sissy talk. Liz is a wild thing — all you had to do was make a move.

I’m tired as fuck.

Uncle Bonobo spoon-fed you, and you—

I’m really drunk.

— give me this shit about—

I stink. We’re revolting.

— chemistry . C’mon now. You left the girl high and dry.

She’ll get over it. What about Ju?

I was teaching her some stuff.

Did she achieve nirvana?

Actually, it’s serious. Ju’s in a really fucked-up cycle of suffering. Her marriage broke up, and she can’t accept it. She needed to talk a little. I think she’s starting to understand the question of impermanence, and it’s helping. I suggested that she visit Lama Palden over in Encantada. But come with me, I want to show you something.

He follows Bonobo into his room. There is a monstrous ball of pillows, sheets, blankets, and items of dirty clothing on the mattress of his double bed. The floor is hidden under a layer of underwear, towels, T-shirts, shorts, and a long black wetsuit. The reigning fragrance is one of rancid human secretions, incense, and wet clothes forgotten in a plastic bag. Two incense sticks are filling the room with a light haze. On one wall are posters of Led Zeppelin and a Buddhist divinity with writing in Tibetan. The desk is completely covered with a printer, an old laptop, a small LCD TV, a jumble of papers, bottles, cans, used glasses, a full bottle of tequila, and a picture frame with a black and white photograph of what looks like a Chinese man in suspenders pointing a revolver at his own head. A shelf on the wall is curved under the weight of a few dozen books.