Daniel Galera - Blood-drenched Beard

Weird why?

Because there was no body.

My dad told me the same thing. That when he got there, he couldn’t find out where they’d buried my granddad. There was a beggar’s grave with grass growing over it. It didn’t look recent.

Come again? Your dad? What are you talking about?

His name was Hélio. He was the one who told me the story.

Ah, his son. From Porto Alegre. That’s right, we managed to track him down a few days later. He came. Blond hair, smoked like a chimney.

That’s him.

I remember him. But anyway. The mystery is that there was no body when I got there.

Who’d they bury then?

Dunno. Listen. I got a tip-off by telegraph. There were no phones in Garopaba back then. I think they only got phone lines in the mid-seventies. Sometimes they’d call the station in Laguna and ask us to come and investigate more serious crimes in the region. Garopaba had been a separate municipality since the early sixties. The municipalities had their own police commissioners, but it was all a bit primitive. I saw the lockup once, a little guard post with iron bars where they’d hold their criminals. It was near the parish church. The guy would spend a day in the lockup, and then he’d have to pull weeds in the square in the presence of the police chief or officer. I was called in a few times to resolve things there. Murders, violent rapes, arson.

Arson?

Garopaba has a long tradition of arson.

Were there many murders? One local told me no one had ever been killed in Garopaba.

People are killed everywhere. There were lots of problems when the gauchos started moving there. There was an invasion of them overnight. They’d come to camp, surf. Hippies. A lot of them stayed on, and the place was overrun with them. They started to get involved in money, property, power. There was even a gaucho killer. His name was Corporal Freitas. He was kept in work for many years until someone took him out too. He was a walking archive.

Andreia nuzzles up to him.

Move closer.

Her breath now smells of sweet wine.

Put your hand on my leg.

He obeys and feels her fishnet tights. Her cold thighs pin his fingers.

So my granddad wasn’t the only one.

Far from it. But your granddad’s story was different. We got a telegram on a Monday saying a man had been killed the night before. We didn’t even get wind of most crimes. There was a lot of local justice. There were hardly any police in the region, and people took matters into their own hands. I left Laguna by car on the Tuesday morning. Rain pissing down. There was lightning on the highway, a huge owl hit my windshield and cracked the glass, and then there was that dirt road, which was atrocious in those days. I arrived in Garopaba town center after noon and went to talk to people. First they told me that nothing had happened. The town’s only policeman didn’t know what was going on, and I started to realize that the person who’d sent the telegram had done so of their own initiative. Maybe even in secret. No one had been expecting a police chief to show up there. But I let them know who was boss, and they saw that they weren’t going to get rid of me that easily and told me the story about the lights going out at the dance. When they came on again, the guy was dead. Gaudério. No suspect, of course. There wasn’t a trace of blood in the hall by the time I got there, or the murder weapon, nothing. The body had disappeared. I spent the day trying to find out what I could, but there wasn’t much to be done. Night fell, and I was about to leave when a woman came to talk to me and said she’d sent the telegram.

Who was she?

If I understood right, she was your granddad’s girlfriend. A local girl of Azorian descent, quite young, about twenty years old. She hadn’t gone to the dance because she’d had stomach cramps, but someone had gone to tell her about the commotion in the town, and she’d run to the hall to see what had happened. The scene she described didn’t make sense. The hall was empty, but there was a huge pool of blood on the ground and signs of a fight, overturned tables and chairs, broken glasses. She said there were women crying in the street, with children fanning them. All she understood was that Gaudério had been killed. She was told not to get involved and they dragged her back home.

What was her name?

I forget. Soraia? Sabrina? I think it started with an S . But it’s a guess. I’m not sure, it’s been a long time. She must have loved your granddad. To contact a police chief under those circumstances. I promised her that I’d look for his body. I ordered a search over the next few days, and nothing was found. I closed the case.

My dad said there was a grave in the cemetery.

Yes. A few days after wrapping up the case, I found your dad because the girl knew he lived in Porto Alegre and that his family was from a small town, Taquara, I think. Was that it? He went to Garopaba and called me that afternoon saying his dad was buried in the cemetery. It can’t be, I said. We didn’t find a body. Your people didn’t, he said, but apparently someone here did. He’s in a pauper’s grave. I didn’t know. I had a look myself sometime later, and there really was a grave there that people said was Gaudério’s. It was a lie, of course. They had to show the man’s son something. Truth is, a body was never found. They must have dumped it way out at sea.

Something about this story doesn’t gel.

Nothing does. I think there’s some mystery there that no one’ll ever know. When I got there to investigate the crime, it made a really strong impression on me. There was a sinister atmosphere about the place. The locals were nervous. Another thing that the girl who sent the telegram said was that when she got to the hall, the people had already left, and they were all on the beach, about a hundred yards from there, staring out to sea. I noticed the same thing over the next few days. It wasn’t as if they were waiting for a boat or looking for a school of fish, but as if the ocean had turned against them. As if they suddenly wished it wasn’t there.

That doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t.

Wasn’t there an inquiry?

No.

But—

He feels confused and doesn’t really know what to ask.

Can I order some more wine? asks Andreia. She massages his neck, and he feels her long nails on his skin.

Have you already finished the bottle?

Almost, sexy.

Give me a sip.

She slides the glass over to him and plunges her hand between his legs. The wine is syrupy-sweet, and the glass smells of cigarette smoke.

I’m going to order one more, okay? she says as she signals to the waiter.

Don’t drink that rotgut, son. Have some of my whiskey.

Zenão asks the waiter for another glass. It arrives in an instant with three ice cubes, and the former police chief fills it halfway. They clink glasses, and he takes a sip of whiskey. Meanwhile the albino girl gets up, climbs over his legs, and sits next to Andreia. They start to whisper.

There’s something else I want to ask you. I heard there was a rumor going around at the time that Gaudério had killed a girl.

The waiter leaves a new bottle of wine on the table. Zenão answers by raising his head and repositioning himself on the sofa, giving the impression that the conversation has arrived where he wanted it to.

It’s true. That was one of the things that came up during my interrogations. You didn’t know your granddad, did you? If there was one thing that was clear to me, it was that he was a troublemaker. There was an unsolved murder of a girl some months before he was killed. I think the community suspected your granddad, and they may have finished him off because of it. Whether it was him is another kettle of fish.