Daniel Galera - Blood-drenched Beard

A few days later, at Jasmim’s house, a rustic two-story cabin tucked away on a side street just off the road to Ferrugem, surrounded by vegetation, overlooking Garopaba Lagoon, when they sleep together for the first time, he discovers that she is the most agitated sleeper he has ever seen. First she braids her hair so her curls will be intact in the morning, and then she spends half an hour tossing and turning as she tries to fall asleep. One leg gets caught in the sheet, and she kicks with the other, tugs on it, and smooths it back down over the mattress, moaning and babbling things in a limbo between wakefulness and sleep. She isn’t a small woman, but her body doesn’t seem a big enough theater for all the sensations it houses. When she finally falls asleep, the inner narrative of her dreams frees her from outside stimuli. Her body relaxes, but when he least expects it, she changes position again. Sometimes she talks, and he can’t tell if she’s awake. I can hear frogs. Look. I want to sleep. She opens her eyes briefly, murmurs a word or two, or three notes of a melody, and falls back asleep. The second-floor room of her cabin looks like an attic and becomes impregnated with her earthy, citrusy smell the minute she takes her clothes off, a smell that saturates the bed in seconds and invades everything, but it doesn’t survive without her and exits with her when she gets up to go to the bathroom or to make coffee. It leaves no trace of itself, and its absence is concrete and instantaneous. When she falls asleep at his place, she seems a little more peaceful. Maybe it is the sound of the waves. He falls asleep easily but tries to stay awake so he can watch her sleeping, a desert animal in musty sheets. All he has to do is touch her lightly, and she immediately turns and tries to hug him but almost always misses the target and embraces nothing or a pillow.

The late July days become sunny, and the natural light wakes them sometime between eight and nine o’clock in the morning. He and Jasmim go to the beach together on the clear mornings, and she sips maté on the sand, watching him take the dog for a swim before work. They are days that pass quickly, and he can’t remember very well what happened yesterday or imagine a tomorrow very different from today. They almost always come at the same time and rest with their noses and mouths almost touching, breathing in and out in synchrony. She is always cold to the touch, as if her inner heat were dammed up inside. Even when analyzed up close, her irises with streaks of coffee and emerald transmit anticipation and indecision.

One morning he wakes up to find her cleaning his apartment from top to bottom, vigorously mopping the floor, with the rugs hanging over windowsills, the abrasive smell of bleach in strange harmony with the sea breeze and the cold, and when he says it isn’t necessary, that the apartment is already clean, she ignores his comment as if it were irrelevant. The next night he goes to her house and notices how filthy it is but doesn’t say anything.

She likes to be held firmly and fucked hard. He pulls a muscle in his back trying to give her his best and goes down on her so much that he tears his tongue frenulum. She waxes him, promising that he won’t regret it, and he doesn’t. He lies on top of her and presses his chest into her dark, arched back to warm it up. He runs his fingers along her outstretched arm and grips the bouquet of veins and tendons wrapped in the delicate skin of her wrist. What? she asks, and he says, Nothing.

One Sunday they go to Florianópolis by motorbike for a double bill at the cinema and a McDonald’s at the mall. In one of the films, Angelina Jolie is looking for her missing child, and in the other Brad Pitt is born old and dies a child. She cries in both. The sun is setting behind the mountains when they take the road back. The motorbike speeds down the highway at over sixty miles an hour in the places where the tarmac is good, and vibrates docilely between his legs. He clings to her tightly, as if they are a single body traveling at high speed, and daydreams behind the insulation of the helmet. He had thought he’d never fall in love again and was fine with it, believing that once was enough for a whole lifetime, but it is happening again, this feeling a little like a light depression that makes everything that doesn’t have to do with the woman he is hugging unimportant. He is bored when he isn’t with her, and one must either be an adolescent or in love to be bored. He wants her to know it, but he made a promise not to talk about these things for now, and he is going to honor it.

There is a full moon in the clear night sky, and they go down to Ferrugem Beach, where they sit on the steps outside Bar do Zado and admire the blue moonlight reflected by the ocean and the glistening sand. The sand reflects the moonlight in a very particular way, and the blue shine has the artificial quality of a night scene in a film. He tells Jasmim about the strange black clouds that he saw or dreamed he’d seen on that same horizon months earlier.

It wasn’t a dream. I saw it too.

Really? You were here too?

Yep. That was a Fata Morgana. A mirage.

Later, in the cabin, she turns on her laptop and 3G modem and opens several browser tabs with a definition in Wikipedia and photographs in Google Images. It has to do with layers of hot and cold air trading places over the vast surfaces of deserts and oceans. He leans in toward the screen and doesn’t tire of looking at one photograph after another, with his mouth half open. It is exactly what he saw.

• • •

H e is timing a student who is doing a set of twenty-five swim sprints when his cell phone vibrates in his pocket. The screen shows Jasmim’s name and number.

Hi, what are you doing? Could you come over to my place now?

I’m at the pool. I get off in half an hour. What’s up? Is everything okay?

Joaquim showed up at my place with a metal detector, and I can’t get him to leave.

Who?

That old guy I told you about. The one who thinks there’s treasure buried under my house. He’s brought that other guy too, and they won’t leave. I’m a bit scared.

What’s that noise?

It’s this fucking contraption they brought with them. Some kind of homemade metal detector. I don’t know how to explain it any better — it’s too surreal. I’ve already asked them to leave, but it hasn’t made any difference.

Stay calm. Don’t fight with them. I get off at five, and I’ll come straight round.

They dug a hole and found some beer cans. They wanted to tear down my front steps, but I didn’t let them. I’m going to lock myself inside until you get here. Please come quickly.

He hangs up just as Leopoldo, a Buddhist with size-fourteen feet and large, equine lips who moves through the water as if propelled by an outboard motor, touches the edge of the pool and looks up with an expression of panic, wanting to know his time.

What did I do?

Sorry, Buddha, I took a call and got distracted.

You’re kidding, he exclaims with his São Paulo accent. His mouth opens in a half-smile, and he peers at the poolside chronometer through his misted-up goggles.

It was more or less the same as the last one. One twenty-five. Bend your arm a little more in the water. It’s too straight. Ten seconds. On your mark.

Leopoldo turns with a horrendous cry of exhaustion, stares at the lane extending before him in the empty pool, and exhales three times, whistling like a pressure cooker.

Get set…

Leopoldo positions his feet on the wall underwater, raises his torso out of the water, and starts to breathe in.

Go.

Leopoldo sinks under, stretches out his arms, and pushes off the wall without hearing the beep of the chronometer. He emerges a few seconds later, and the warm pavilion is filled with the din of his kicking. He’d be a champion if he trained more often, but he spends two-thirds of the year on travel, fashion, and sports photography assignments all over the world for a number of publications. He attends the Buddhist temple in Encantada with Bonobo. After his workout, they both shower quickly in the dressing room.