Daniel Galera - Blood-drenched Beard

What do you want with me? says the old man.

It is his father’s voice.

I just wanted to meet you.

Have you come to take me away?

No, I’ve just come to see you. I’m your grandson.

Are you, now? The old man gives an amused snort. How interesting.

He leaves the flashlight turned off on the log next to the sphere of granite and starts taking off his backpack. The old man tenses.

I’m just going to get something out.

He rummages around until he finds the little mirror. It is cracked all over, and the image he sees of his own face is a completely disfigured mosaic. The old man laughs again, more heartily this time, as he runs his hand over his face and beard, trying in vain to remember what he looks like.

I’ve doubted my image in the mirror, the old man says, but this is the first time my image has doubted itself.

The old man looks serious again. His bare, gnarly feet tap the hard earth floor a few times. The wild girl brings a clay mug of some kind of tea and hands it to the mulatto woman, who in turn places it in the hands of the old man. He noisily sips a little of the hot liquid and hands the mug back to the mulatto woman.

He puts the broken mirror back into his backpack, pulls out his wallet, opens it, and takes out the photograph of his grandfather. The beard is gray, and the man is smaller, shrunk to half his size, but it can only be him. He hands the photograph to the old man. In the meantime, the dog has finally decided to squeeze through the opening. She faces the rocking chair and starts to growl.

The old man doesn’t notice the dog. He has stopped laughing and is staring at the photograph. His eyes jump a few times from the picture to the face of the younger man in front of him, and his expression slowly transforms into something more perplexed and threatening. He finally places the photo on his lap and signals for him to come even closer.

He approaches. The mulatto woman gets up from her stool and takes a step backward.

The old man raises his skeletal hand to his face, and he notices that his little finger and ring finger are missing. His remaining fingers are soft and warm, and they trace his cheeks, nose, and eyes. The old man draws his hand back and looks confused.

Are you real?

Yes. I’m your grandson.

The old man rubs his eyes, squeezes the tip of his own nose between his thumb and forefinger, and tries to look again, incredulous. He starts breathing heavily through his nose.

You didn’t even know you had a grandson, did you?

You shouldn’t be here.

The mulatto woman takes another step back.

I’ve been trying to discover what happened to you for months, Granddad. Everyone thinks you’re dead. I met Santina.

This isn’t right. You shouldn’t be here.

The old man fidgets a little in his chair and shakes his head, repeating no, no.

The girl who was lying down sits up and looks around in alarm. Her face has some kind of deformity that is hard to make out in the dark. The mulatto woman crouches and makes the two girls lie down again.

The dog barks once, twice, three times, and only now does the old man notice her.

Dad died at the beginning of the year. Your son.

Out .

Fine, I just—

The old man gets up from his chair and seems to unfold into a man twice as big. His right hand hangs nervously, a short distance from his body, holding a knife. The mulatto woman hugs the two girls and watches the scene over her shoulder.

There’s no need for that. I’m leaving.

The old man quickly reaches to one side and turns out the gas lantern.

He manages to grab his arm in the dark but feels the knife nick his waist. He hears Beta lunge at the old man’s leg. He shouts for him to stop, but it is obvious that he won’t. The girls all scream at the same time and then play dead. He and the old man fall onto the rocking chair and then the kitchen shelves. The embers in the stove are the only source of light in the cave, and he tries to push his grandfather in that direction. The old man doesn’t make a sound, just keeps his bony body tensed and keeps attacking tirelessly like a banana spider trying to catch its prey so it can fill it with venom. He manages to shove him onto the hotplate, breaking free of his clutches for long enough to charge toward what he believes to be an exit. He gropes the walls of rock but can’t find the opening he came through. A sliver of lightning illuminates the other two openings in the cave, and he throws himself through the closest one. He finds himself on a small promontory, which must offer a view of the valley during the day but is now no more than a parapet to nothing. Afraid the old man will come after him and attack him at any second, he takes off running and tripping down the slope without seeing anything in his path until he runs into the fence and jabs his hands and thighs on the barbed wire. He cries out in pain and is relieved at the same time because from there he can run to the bottom of the valley, to the creek, to the beach.

After putting some more distance between himself and the cave, which makes him feel a little safer, he stops to get the knife with the armadillo-leather handle out of his backpack but realizes that he’s left the backpack behind along with the dog. Her name sticks in his throat. Calling out will reveal his whereabouts. The adrenaline is slowly metabolized, and his instinct to flee is replaced with paralysis. He wants to go back to find Beta but doesn’t know where he is anymore. The sound of the sea reverberates against the walls of the valley. He touches the place where he felt the knife tear his skin, on the right side of his stomach, and has the impression that it hasn’t done too much damage. But it hurts. He starts walking, heedless of the direction, so as not to stay still while he tries to decide what to do, and slips down a small bank and falls into the creek. The direction of the small current allows him to deduce the approximate location of the sea and the sides of the valley. The couple in the tent have a gas lantern. They must have a knife, another flashlight, maybe even a cell phone. He clambers up the slope, praying for more lightning, tugged at by reason on one side and fear on the other. He has the constant impression that the dog has caught up with him, and it is only now, as he reaches the trees on the ridge, that his companion’s absence starts to sink in. Finally he works up the courage to shout.

Beta!

He shouts a few times with his hands on either side of his mouth. His calls are lost in the invisible valley.

He keeps looking for the tent among the trees. He can see better with his eyes closed, as if surprised at night by a blackout in his own home. The baby’s crying has stopped, or maybe he isn’t where he thinks he is. He calls the couple’s names, but there is no reply. The trees start to thin, and he picks up his pace in the hope of finding some reference point under the open sky.

A flash of lightning illuminates the cliff, his foot stepping into the void and a stormy sea that is chaos itself extending out on all sides. When everything goes dark again, he is still beginning to fall, and it is only in the middle of the descent that he realizes what is happening. He thanks the lightning. He almost died unseeing, like a blind man. Or perhaps the vanity of death knows no limits, he thinks, and even to the blind, it reveals itself at the last instant so that they’ll think about it as it happens. On his way down, the vision of the vortex of waves and foam that will swallow him is emblazoned in his mind with hyperreal clarity, the ocean that he so adores showing its most private and destructive facet, revealed to few men. When he is about to hit the water, he closes his eyes tightly, as one inevitably does when diving.