Daniel Galera: Blood-drenched Beard

Did he ever kill anyone?

Not that I know of. Producing his knife rarely meant stabbing someone. He did it more to show off, I think. I don’t remember him coming home hurt, either. Except that time he got shot.

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 with 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.