Daniel Galera - Blood-drenched Beard

The first whales have been spotted down the coast, near Ibiraquera. People have seen males leaping out of the water a few miles offshore and the first pregnant females spouting near the beach, which has started attracting scientists, tourists, and curious locals.

He continues waking up early and sometimes puts on his wetsuit and goes for a swim. It takes him a little under half an hour to cross the entire bay, and when he is really up to it, he swims back. The running group is starting to dissolve. Only Denise showed up to the last two lessons. She is ready to enter ten-kilometer races, and if she keeps it up, she’ll be able to do a half-marathon by the end of the year. Sara has stopped coming and answers his text messages saying she’s been busy and will have to take a break from running. He is living on his paltry wages from the gym, but the rent is paid for the year, and his expenses are minimal. Beta’s surgery and treatment have already cost him three thousand reais, and he will also have extra bills for her stay at the clinic and her medication.

On the first Saturday in July a game of water volleyball is held in the gym pool. It was an idea he had to bring together students who trained at different times, and everyone opted in. They are all there. He bought the net himself and installed it in the shallower part of the pool. The twins, Rayanne and Tayanne, asked for permission to bring a friend and are the first to arrive. Ivana comes and tells him she is not going to play but ends up being convinced to participate and discovers that she is a good setter. Then Jorge, the rheumatologist, and Tiago, with the enlarged breasts, arrive, followed by Jander and Rigotti, a triathlete who trains with him from time to time. He had asked Débora to call the students who had stopped coming to the pool, and some are there, including Amós, the Rastafarian, who is now married to a hippie woman several years older than himself who speaks slowly and coats each gesture and word with a somewhat disturbing tenderness and calm. The gym owner, Saucepan, also participates. Most of the students already know he can’t remember their faces and identify themselves as they greet him. There are so many in attendance that they have to form three teams and play sets of ten points, in which the winning team remains and the losing team is replaced with the one on the sidelines. He isn’t a good player himself, and they spend the morning teasing him about his disastrous attempts at bump passes in the water. Afterward his younger students decide to dunk him. He spends five minutes trying to get away from them. After the game there is going to be a barbecue at Jander and Greice’s house. As he leaves the dressing room, Débora approaches him. She says the students love him. You know that, don’t you? It makes him bashful, and he says she is exaggerating. At the barbecue Jander shows off the power of his sound system, applying several different equalizer settings to Rush and Pink Floyd CDs, and then puts on a DVD of Charlie Brown Jr.’s MTV Unplugged . Greice comments once again on how well Beta is doing. He visits her every day now, and the vet is more and more confident that she will regain her mobility. Jorge is there with his boyfriend, an American millionaire investor who lives on Silveira Hill and spends half the year in Garopaba and the other half in New York. Everyone has brought meat, and the raw steaks wait their turn to be barbecued, lined up on a wooden platter, which inspires looks of disgust and vegan preaching from Amós’s wife. Only Tracksuit Man and Jander drink heavily, crumpling one can of beer after another. The women have brought red wine. He sticks to sodas himself as he doesn’t like to drink in front of his younger students. At one point he comes out of the bathroom and finds the group gathered on the veranda in a strange silence. Ivana, the spokeswoman, says that everyone there is happy to have him as their swimming instructor and that they forgive him for never remembering their faces. She says he doesn’t need to be ashamed of it because they can tell how much he cares about them, and they are all improving and enjoying swimming more and more. She says they all hope he has a happy life in Garopaba because the town welcomes him with open arms, and he is already a local. Then she says that they all pitched in and bought him a present. The twins appear carrying a paper bag from a sporting goods store. Inside is a Nike windbreaker, for running.

That night after the barbecue he goes to Bonobo’s bed-and-breakfast. Sitting around the kitchen table are Altair, Diego from the gas station, and Jaspion, a large young man with long, straight hair, the son of a Korean father and Brazilian mother. Jaspion lives in Rosa and is a knife maker. He sells his knives, with minutely worked blades and handles of ivory, giraffe bones, and other highly regulated or prohibited materials, for thousands of dollars to collectors and white-arm enthusiasts all over the world. He lives comfortably with his wife and young daughter in a studio-home near the beach and sells only five or six knives a year. Bonobo’s kitchen is hazy with smoke and stinks of Diego’s Indonesian cigarettes and Bonobo’s crappy cigar. Bonobo asks him how his trip to see the police chief in Pato Branco went. He fidgets a little in his chair to reposition the geriatric diaper, which is uncomfortable in the groin area, and narrates his misadventures in the state of Paraná.

Fuck, says Bonobo. God is dead? I couldn’t fuck a chick with that tattooed over her butt.

He replaces two cards and finds himself with three of a kind and a low pair. He doubles the ante. Bonobo folds. Diego folds. Brimming with confidence, Jaspion doubles the ante again, sucking in his top lip, wrinkling his chin, almost smiling, eyes glued to his own cards at all costs. Bluffing, of course. He calls. Jaspion has two high pairs.

Full house.

Fuck, Bonobo, why did you invite this cunt to come and play with us?

Thank you, gentlemen, he says, raking in the matchsticks.

Burning through nine hundred reais in a brothel in Pato Branco is good luck.

It’s not luck, he protests in a solemn tone of voice. You have to know how to read your opponents’ faces and body language.

A john’s luck. It’s classic.

Just look at Altair’s face. I reckon he’s taking a whiz.

I am not.

Are you pissing, man?

No.

But tell me, did the police chief have any light to shed on your granddad?

A little. But I think he was more of a hindrance than a help. I’ve given up trying to get to the bottom of it. It’d end up driving me crazy. I’m just going to forget about it.

Bonobo deals and says he is going on a retreat at the temple in Encantada the following week. A whole week waking up at four-thirty in the morning to stare at the wall and pray. I think you’d like it, swimmer. You should try going on a retreat sometime.

I like staring at walls, but not praying.

Count me out.

Me too.

Why engineers?

Huh?

Nothing, I’m just thinking out loud. The guy at the hotel said fast women, slow horses, and engineers . Doesn’t make any sense.

Shit.

What’s wrong, Altair?

Shit, I’ve got a leak.

Altair gets up and dashes to the bathroom.

Argh, fucking hell.

Life isn’t for amateurs.

T he emaciated dog hobbles over the tiled floor of the pet shop. Her front paws move forward even though one of them is slightly crooked and weak after weeks in plaster. Her back paws can make only short, quick movements that look more like involuntary jerks and sometimes cease altogether. Her tail doesn’t wag. Nevertheless, she is able to move without any help. She is walking. He and the vet are standing side by side, watching. Beta breathes in the cool air with her mouth shut. One of her ears has a ragged edge, and her fur won’t grow back over certain scars, but apart from these things, she is fine, alive. He lets her walk around a little, then picks her up and puts her down somewhere else, provoking her with a toy duck that was sitting on a shelf. She yelps and gives a few shrill barks. Greice provides him with a list of instructions. Beta may experience some incontinence and will have to be given medication for a period of time. She will need physiotherapy to get some of her movement back. As she is, she won’t need a trolley in order to walk, but she can’t move as she would like to either. The vet teaches him some exercises that he can do with her at home. She says they were very lucky. She is emotional and can’t hide it. She uses the word miracle . She takes a while to say good-bye to Beta and smiles that kind of nonstop smile that is an attempt to ward off tears. Before he leaves, he tells her that Beta was his father’s dog for fifteen years. She followed him everywhere like a shadow. If necessary, she’d lie for hours in front of a restaurant or shop until Dad came out. Dad wasn’t the affectionate sort, and he never picked her up or let her lie on his lap or anything like that. He had a gesture of affection that I’ll never forget. He’d give Beta three or four slaps on the ribs with a force that sometimes seemed excessive. At times it would make her skittle sideways, and she’d echo like a small drum. It was obvious that she liked it, something between the two of them. Private codes between close companions always seem somewhat eccentric to anyone looking on. She’s got this shrill bark that can be a bit irritating, but she doesn’t bark much. She likes kids, but she isn’t that fond of other dogs. You have to keep an eye on her, or she’ll lunge at them. She likes to nip at people’s heels too. It’s her breed, I think, the herding instinct. When he’d drive somewhere not too far from home, Dad liked to let her chase the car instead of taking her in it. He’d go at twenty-five, thirty miles an hour, and she’d chase the car to the grocery store or even as far as Trabalhador Highway, which was a few miles away. When I saw Dad more often and Beta was younger, I’d take her running with me sometimes. She’d run five or six miles with me, without a problem, on a leash. She was really depressed when Dad died. I reckon Beta was what kept him alive for his last ten years. I think caring for a dog helped keep his feet on the ground, gave him a sense of responsibility, the will or obligation to care about something. My mother isn’t very fond of her. She calls her a pest. Get that pest out of here.