Daniel Galera - Blood-drenched Beard

Are you inviting me to live with you?

Yes. If you want to.

And what would our house be like? Do you think we could find some land on a hill? I like living on a hill. It doesn’t need to be very high up or anything.

They fantasize about the house for a while until her beautiful, monotonous voice grows rubbery and weak and then disappears completely. It is the first time she has fallen asleep next to him without the long preamble of kicking and muttering. He knows that she is mentally and physically exhausted but lets himself believe it is something else.

In the morning he sees her for the last time. He wakes up earlier than usual and shakes her lightly. He whispers in her ear that he needs to go home and asks her to call him as soon as she gets up. She grumbles and nods. He rides home. Beta has piddled on the bathroom floor. He gives her food and water, then takes her for a walk on the beach. He lets her go into the water by herself and keeps an eye on her. She is hardworking, and her swimming is incredibly efficient. She faces the backwash in the shallows bravely and allows the water to wash over her, shaking her head and blowing the water with her nose. After a few minutes she returns to the sand and comes trotting over with her limited movements, using her front paw for balance only when necessary. Since Jasmim hasn’t called by eleven, he tries to call her, but she doesn’t pick up. He comes to the conclusion that she must have left her cell phone on silent mode but keeps trying her every ten minutes until he starts getting a message saying that it is out of range or off. He realizes he is late for work. Throughout his entire afternoon shift at the pool, he tries to call her and even calls Bonobo to ask him to drive over to her place to see if everything is all right, but Bonobo is at the federal police in Florianópolis getting his passport renewed. At five o’clock he gets on his bike and pedals over to Ferrugem. The cabin is locked, and her motorbike is gone. He still can’t get through on her cell phone.

He drops by the cabin over the next couple of days and sees no sign of her. The neighbors haven’t seen her coming or going. On the third day, a new girl appears at the travel agency counter and says that no one there has the slightest idea what happened to Jasmim, but she didn’t come to work on the Tuesday, nor did she leave a message, which is pretty strange because she hasn’t collected last week’s pay. On the fourth day, he goes to the police to file a missing person report. The police officers say they are going to look into the case informally and initiate a search if she hasn’t reappeared within a week. He doesn’t know her full name, but he gives them the name of her father, who is a state deputy in Porto Alegre, and says that she did some research at the Center for Psychological and Social Assistance and in municipal health clinics in the region. He also tells them that an old Ferrugem resident by the name of Joaquim was prowling around her cabin recently, but he decides not to mention the legends and treasure for the time being.

On the fifth day, he and Bonobo prise open the shutters on one of the cabin’s windows. As far as he can tell with his problematic memory, the inside of the cabin is intact and things are in the same places as they were on the Monday morning when he left her sleeping there alone, the only difference being that the box containing the candlestick and the goblet is gone from the cupboard under the sink. On the sixth day, he stops by there again on his own and finds Joaquim and his grandson or great-grandson snooping around the back of the house. He asks if they know where she is.

I thought you’d know that, says Joaquim, and points at the window. Somebody broke in.

That was me. Get off this land, and don’t come back. If I catch either of you here again, things are going to get ugly.

You found it, didn’t you?

Out of here.

He takes Joaquim by the arm and leads him toward the gate for a few yards. The young man puts his cap on backward and glares at him as if reinforcing a curse before following the old man and disappearing up the driveway.

• • •

O n the seventh day, Jasmim sends him a text message saying that she is in Porto Alegre, that she needs to think, and that she’ll call him as soon as she gets back, which should be in the next few days. He texts her back asking if he can call, but she doesn’t answer. He tries anyway, but she doesn’t pick up. He calls five times in a row until she turns off her cell phone. He goes to the police station and withdraws the missing person report. She’s at her parents’ place in Porto Alegre. The officer says it’s always like that.

She doesn’t call until mid-August. She and a cousin visited the cabin in Ferrugem two days earlier to pack up her things, put everything in a small removal van, and hand over the keys to the owner. She is already back in Porto Alegre. She apologizes for not calling and for disappearing without an explanation in the first place. She doesn’t want to live in Garopaba anymore and doesn’t intend to finish her master’s. She was lost for a long time and didn’t realize it. She is going to live with her parents for a while until she gets back on her feet and finds a new direction for herself. At one stage she thought she might fall in love with him, but she warned him, didn’t she? She doesn’t know how to really love someone. She says he’s a good guy. Handsome, affectionate, and a good guy. She hopes he hasn’t fallen in love for real. It’s always hard to do what has to be done, to break up with someone nice, even when you’re sure it’s for the best. She says she felt she had no choice. That morning, after digging up the treasure, she woke up alone and in a panic at around ten o’clock and felt an urgent need to get out of there. The objects were no longer on the counter, but when she saw the blender on top of the fridge, she figured it out and hunted for the box until she found it under the sink. She put on warm clothes, boots, and gloves, attached the cargo box to her motorbike, put the candlestick and goblet inside it, got her handbag, and left, determined to rid herself of the objects in the most remote, out-of-the-way place she could get to with the fuel in the tank. She took Highway BR-101 south, and the farther she sped down the road, leaving Garopaba behind, the more she felt that she wouldn’t be coming back, because she was somehow going to die before she could get rid of the accursed treasure that was like a grenade without a pin in the back of her old motorbike, and in those final moments of clarity that precede death, a clarity brought on by desperation and fatalism, she perceived the size of the farce she had been living for the last few years. She felt as if the years, after she’d turned twenty, had lost the unique personality that they’d had when she was younger and become nothing more than vague references to the passing of time. She didn’t want to believe that anymore. She didn’t want to live on her own in a cabin by a lagoon or keep asking people if they took medicine and were happy and then go and design Excel spreadsheets and graphs and not come to any conclusions. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, but it wasn’t that. She wasn’t like him, who seemed to belong there. She would never belong and had been there long enough to learn this last lesson, the only one still available to her. Before she knew it, she was near Criciúma, and without thinking too much, she decided to take the first exit on her right and keep going as far as she could. The road narrowed, and the postapocalyptic towns on the edge of the BR-101 gave way to simple villages and green farms, while the monstrous mountain walls of the Serra Geral loomed ahead. She saw parrots and toucans flying close to the forest and filled her tank in a small town called Timbé do Sul, where the gas station attendant suggested that the remote place she was looking for might be at the top of the Serra da Rocinha Mountains, and that was where she headed after drinking a Coke and eating a packet of Ruffles and turning off her cell phone, when she saw that he’d sent several messages and tried to call numerous times. If she replied to him at that moment, she’d be putting everything at risk. The dirt road was extremely steep and extremely dangerous, and after a few miles in first gear, riding over huge stones and using her legs to stop the bike from plunging into terrifying abysses, praying on the hairpin bends with limited visibility that she wouldn’t be hit by a cargo truck lurching down the hill without brakes, she stopped at a kind of natural lookout where she could see everything from the canyon walls and the coastal plains to the ocean itself, took the candlestick and goblet out of the cargo box, and hurled them with all her strength, one after the other, into the closest ravine, where the dense forest swallowed them without a sound. Then she continued up the mountainside thinking that maybe now she was free of the curse, and by the time she got to the top, she didn’t believe in legends anymore and realized that her terror was of another nature and that the curse had just been something to blame. She could see everything from up high and far away and was free. An afternoon fog was beginning to condense on the canyon slopes, forming prodigious clouds of white vapor that curled and twisted before her eyes and soon threatened to engulf the whole edge of the mountain range. She started up her bike and rode along dirt roads covered in thick gravel. She crossed hills and aqua-green, almost oceanic fields, slightly burned by the frost, feeling cold to the bone, until she came to São José dos Ausentes and then Bom Jesus, where she rented a hotel room for twenty-five reais and collapsed onto the wool bedspread, completely exhausted and happy. The next day she took the paved roads down to Porto Alegre on a beautiful five-hour journey that ended at her parents’ house, and after a few days of reflection and listening to advice, she decided to cut her ties with Garopaba and everything there because she was already a new person and couldn’t live there anymore — it no longer made sense. She didn’t answer him or call because she didn’t have the words to explain what was going on and because she thought that perhaps it was better like that. How sad it is to talk about things, to try to explain yourself, try to express yourself. As soon as you name things, they die. Does he understand? Does he forgive her? Is everything okay?