Daniel Galera - Blood-drenched Beard

Late in the morning he locks Beta inside and rides his bike down to the fishing village. Another boat has just arrived, and a fisherman is filleting hake and flounder on a wooden cutting board. Gulls and vultures are having a jolly time with shark heads, and tabby cats prowl around the sheds in search of something that appeals to their finicky tastes. A blue plastic drum full of fish offal stinks in the sun. Locals are warming themselves in the sun, sitting on the steps of their houses. The Caminho do Sol travel agency is closed. An old man standing in the doorway of the house next door says they are closed on Mondays. He thinks a little, gazing at the office through the window, then leaves. He rides the entire length of the seaside boulevard and the main avenue to the turnoff to Ferrugem. He pedals down the winding road, passing houses and schools, swamps and thick tangles of vegetation, the sparkling lagoon and hillsides studded with large empty houses, grocery stores, and cattle farms, looking for any woman who might be Jasmim and any red motorbike with a low cylinder capacity, until he gets to the beach, where there are only two women sunbathing and a child digging a channel in the wet sand. He rides back to the entrance to Garopaba, stops at a self-service restaurant, and fills a plate with rice, beans, and grilled fish. His afternoon shift at the gym drags along at a torturously slow pace. The first chance he gets when the pool is empty, he goes to get a juice at the snack bar, and Mila asks what’s wrong. He doesn’t go into detail but asks what she thinks is the best way for a guy to get a woman to like him. The Chilean answers in her melodic mixture of Spanish and Portuguese that she doesn’t know, but she thinks it’s best never to go to any trouble to get someone to like you. Things that require that much effort cause problems later.

He sees Jasmim at dusk the next day after work. She is closing up the agency and treats him with the exact dose of friendliness to insinuate that he is somehow being inconvenient. Her thick, beautiful hair frames her face. When he kisses her cheek in greeting, her dry curls brush against his face, and he smells her sweat and feels a desire to pull her to him then and there. All he can say are banal things about the weather and work. He wishes he had all the time in the world to rediscover her face, but he needs to do it as quickly as possible, preferably without being noticed, or she’ll wonder why he’s staring at her like a moron. She has old acne marks on her cheeks and an oval scar at the top of her collarbone, near where her trapezoid muscle starts. As she gets her helmet from inside the office and locks the glass door, she answers his questions without enthusiasm. Things are very quiet on weekdays — she spends the whole time answering e-mails sent to the agency’s site and scheduling the few customers that show up before Friday afternoon, when business begins to pick up. She climbs onto her motorbike with her pink helmet hanging from her arm and starts to maneuver it. It is a worn-out Honda CG 125cc and must have been bought used. She is wearing canvas shorts, black stockings, and brown boots. Woman and motorbike roll from the pavement onto the cobbled street swaying like a gangly animal. He manages to ask if she’d like to go out sometime. Have a beer now, perhaps? She says she doesn’t drink and drive and steps down on the pedal, but the motorbike doesn’t start. She is about to try again but puts her foot back down on the ground. She takes her cell phone out of her shorts and asks what his number is. I have a mission tonight, she says. I’m going to babysit a friend’s kids ’cause she’s going to the Jack Johnson concert in Florianópolis. But I’ll call you when I can, and we can have a beer, okay? He thinks it’s great. Have fun with the kids. They’re gorgeous, she says, but I hope they go to sleep quickly. I’m taking a book and three DVDs. And I’m going to pick up a bucket of ice cream at Gelomel on the way there. Sounds like a good night, Jasmim. She kick-starts the pedal again, and the motorbike starts. ’Bye then. She puts on the helmet, accelerates slowly, and disappears to the left on the first street after the bridge.

• • •

S he doesn’t call. The days tick over, and he tortures himself for not having asked for her number too. At the same time, he can’t bring himself to go to the agency and bother her again, and on the two occasions he ends up passing in front of the office window, he merely waves from the other side of the glass. She waves back but doesn’t call him. He pays extraordinary attention to his cell phone these days, keeping it at hand with the battery charged at all times, with plenty of credit, and checks the screen constantly for messages and missed calls. He hasn’t had any for months and didn’t particularly care until now. He wants her to call, to invite him in. He thinks it’s too risky to make another move. He sees couples in warm clothes by the beach, drinking maté and reading magazines on the sunny mornings, and imagines himself doing the same with her. He imagines them sleeping together in his bed, lulled by the endless percussion of the waves, made drowsy by the combined heat of their bodies. He fantasizes that they are living together and have a child. The more he chides himself and tries to quell these ideas, the more his mind invents them, and the greater the contrast between his fantasies and the mornings when he wakes up alone with the same day in front of him and the same routine that he normally appreciates perpetually overshadowed by a feeling of impotence. He feels sick. On the Friday morning he has the silly idea to buy her a present, and by that afternoon the silly idea has become an inescapable obsession, and at the end of the day he rides around looking for the few shops selling clothes and gifts that are open in midwinter, unable to think of something that she might like. He remembers the bookstore. The sales assistant suggests a handful of best sellers, and there is a shelf of books on psychology, but he doesn’t end up buying anything because it would be too easy to get it wrong with a book, to not know which one to choose, besides which, books say or give away too much, and she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who reads any old thing. He makes one last attempt at a shop selling Balinese decorations at the entrance to the town. There are small decorative objects for the house and kitchen that are affordable. The girl who serves him guarantees that everything comes straight from artisans on the island of Bali. He finds a stunning bedspread with an intricate green and gold pattern that doesn’t cost too much, and he suddenly realizes what he is doing there and leaves. Back at home, he checks the gym roster and discovers that he is down to work on Saturday. He goes to bed early and the next day is at the pool at eight in the morning, but no students show up until the end of his shift at one o’clock. The temperature is below fifty degrees, and it looks as if it is going to rain. Instead of eating lunch, he pulls on his running shoes, shorts, and the jacket his students gave him and runs along the beach to Siriú, intending to think about Jasmim until he forgets her, to accelerate until he blows his engine, to sweat out his relentless desire to see her. It takes him over an hour to start to tire. At some point he starts to feel peaceful. It never fails. He hears a single crack of thunder without lightning somewhere, but it doesn’t rain.

It is sunny again on the Sunday morning, and he puts Beta to the test in her first long walk since the accident. He carries her to the start of the beach and accompanies her slowly. She has a strange limp. Her fractured front paw is stiff, and her back legs are still a little atrophied, but she walks more quickly than he expected and shows no sign of wanting to give up. On the contrary, she gains confidence. From time to time she wanders close to the water, and on more than one occasion he has to rescue her so that she won’t be knocked down by a wave washing up on the beach with greater momentum. He can hardly believe it, but Beta seems to have developed a taste for the sea. He walks with her to the start of the beach promenade, sits on the steps that lead down to the sand, and strokes her head, thinking he’ll let her rest a little, but she takes off in her jerky trot toward the water. He goes after her, and by the time he catches up, she already has her muzzle in the waves. Hey, crazy girl. He picks her up, returns to the sand, strips down to his black boxer shorts, piles his clothes up on a small dune, and wades into the water with Beta under his arm. The waves are stronger here than at the end of the beach, but she doesn’t seem to mind. It is so cold that it doesn’t even feel like cold water, but more like abrasive heat, as if the outer limits of hot and cold temperatures can’t be told apart. He keeps both hands under her belly the whole time to help her float but lets her work her paws, and the waves wash lightly over her. Beta, you’re a crazy girl, he says through chattering teeth. You think you’re a whale now? Do you want to be the world dog-paddle champion? She sneezes and swims, sneezes and swims. When his limbs start to hurt and tingle, he takes her out of the water and dries her with his T-shirt, then puts the rest of his clothes back on and heads home. He is stiff with cold. A short distance from two fishing boats raised up on planks of wood on the beach, he hears Jasmim’s voice calling his name. She is sitting by herself on a bench on the promenade, drinking maté. Her silhouette is plumped out by a navy-blue padded jacket and a wool scarf wrapped around her neck. She walks over to him.