Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) (10 page)

You're rotten inside, Bonobo.

I am, and so what? Let's go party.

He laughs until he realizes that Bonobo is serious.

There's a party over at Rosa that must be starting to warm up about now. A sushi bar near my bed-and-breakfast is closing for the season. Let's go back to the kiosk and get my car.

You've got a car?

Yep. Let's go. Get Altair.

They discover that Altair has passed out holding the video game controller. He is half-sitting, half-lying between the wall and the brown-tiled floor with the game stuck on a screen saying Continue? They try to rouse him without success. They pour a glass of water over his head, and Bonobo slaps him about the face a few times. Altair doesn't show any sign of waking up. They decide to leave him in the apartment, lying on his side on the rug in the bedroom, with the spare key placed conspicuously on the table in the living room. He changes his T-shirt and locks the windows while Bonobo tries to contact people on his cell phone. Some girls I know said they were going, he says. The girls aren't answering the phone, but another acquaintance picks up and says that people are arriving. The party is starting to heat up. He lets Beta out and locks the door from the outside. They head quickly down the footpath and over the sand. This time the gulls standing around skitter toward the water, and some take flight. Bonobo glances over his shoulder.

Did you see that your dog got out? She's following us.

No fucking way am I leaving her locked in there with Altair.

It is already past midnight, and the streets are deserted. They walk along the central reservation down the middle of the avenue to what is left of Altair's kiosk. Bonobo crosses the property, kicking empty beer cans aside and hopping about.

What are you doing, you retard? Where's your car?

Bonobo goes over to the old VW Beetle carcass and starts jiggling the door handle.

No way.

What?

Is
that
your car?

Yep. Meet Lockjaw.

That thing there? I thought it was scrap metal.

She's a
mean
machine. Just be careful getting in.

Bonobo manages to open the door on the driver's side and climbs in. He walks around to the other side and tries to open the door on the passenger's side in the narrow space between the car and the wall. The corroded door handle needs to be pressed in a very specific way for the mechanism to work. The car is covered in fractal rust patterns and peeling beige paint. It has a large roof rack capable of holding a small boat. There are holes and jagged edges everywhere. The tires are crooked, bald, and half flat. He climbs in carefully, trying not to cut himself. All that is left of the passenger seat is a frame of iron rods covered with old cushions and a piece of folded cardboard. The back support of soft foam is relatively intact. On the dashboard is a gilded sitting Buddha with a smile at the corner of its mouth and enormous earlobes dangling over its shoulders. He whistles to Beta. She comes around the car and jumps onto his lap. He strokes her, praises her for being a good girl, and settles her on the backseat, which is covered with a Grêmio Football Club sarong. He sees the car battery sitting behind the driver's seat amid a baroque tangle of electrical wires. Bonobo turns the key in the ignition. The engine laughs.

It takes a while to start, but once it does, it doesn't die, says Bonobo.

On the fourth try, the engine starts. Bonobo steps on the accelerator and revs it scandalously until he hears a couple of explosions in the exhaust pipe.

Can you get me my eye patch from the glove box?

Your
what
?

My eye patch.

He opens the glove box and fishes an eye patch made of cloth and black elastic out of a jumble of used tissues, business cards, bars of wax, condoms, a filthy rag, and a pair of broken sunglasses. Bonobo takes the eye patch and adjusts it over his right eye.

It's to stop me seeing double.

Only then does he put the car in first gear. It moves forward. The grass and debris from the kiosk scrape its undercarriage. He feels as if he is riding inside the engine itself. They take the state highway out of Garopaba. A car passes them going in the opposite direction, and the lit-up tarmac looms beneath his feet through a hole in the floor. Bonobo zigzags a little, but considering his degree of intoxication and the state of the vehicle, his driving is actually quite comforting, focused, at a moderate speed, his sight limited by the absurd eye patch. He is hunched so far over the small steering wheel that his simian nose almost touches the windshield. Figures such as cows or cyclists come to life in a flash and go back to being specters in almost the same instant. They turn left onto the road to Rosa Beach. The Beetle needs to halt almost completely before he can drive it over speed bumps. The stone-paved streets give way to steep dirt roads. The car's clutch doesn't disengage automatically. To deal with the problem, Bonobo has tied a length of blue clothesline between the pedal and the door handle. The operation to take his left hand off the steering wheel and tug on the clothesline at the exact moment after each gear change is complicated and requires a certain amount of skill and timing. In more complex maneuvers, Bonobo looks like a puppeteer manipulating a prop car.

The party is on the deck of the sushi bar, and there is hardly anyone there. A hip-hop duo is rapping in the corner of a veranda that has been made into a dance floor. The music is really bad, and there are eight men and two women dancing and talking on the veranda. He takes a look out back and finds a meticulously designed Japanese garden with rock arrangements, a fountain, a lake inhabited by a small gang of carp, and a stream. Three girls are drinking in silence at a table in the garden. That's the extent of the party. He orders a beer and is given a warm can. He is hungry, but there is no sign of food. Bonobo orders a mojito and goes to talk to someone on the dance floor.

He goes back to the Beetle parked near the entrance and lets Beta out. He returns with her to the restaurant and sits in an armchair on the front veranda. Dirty glasses and empty cans left on the tables indicate that a lot of people have already been there and gone. Beta sits next to the armchair, and he stares into the surrounding vegetation to forget the monotonous vocals of the rappers, who don't seem to have the energy to keep up with their rhymes. His cell phone rings. It is Laila, a former student from Porto Alegre who is now his friend. He doesn't find out why she is calling so late because the roaming charges gobble up his credit in seconds.

In his mind he starts putting together the training session he is going to give his students in the pool tomorrow. Meanwhile two men walk onto the veranda talking in low voices, with furtive gestures, their heads hunched down between their shoulders, and it is a while before they notice he is there. They stop talking when they realize they have company. One of them has peroxide-blond hair, and he is almost certain it is the guy who was with Dália at the Pico do Surf the night they met. Peroxide-blond hair is common around here, but the guy gives him a long stare. He begins to feel threatened.

Do we know each other?

The blond guy just stares at him and doesn't answer. He is younger than him, twenty-something, and has obviously been snorting all night. He looks for some other feature to help identify him in the future. He has a shark tattoo covering one whole side of his left calf. The two friends abort whatever they have gone there to do and go back into the restaurant.

He waits a few minutes and goes to look for Bonobo. There is no sign of him. There is no sign of almost anyone. The three girls in the garden have disappeared. The rappers have stopped singing and are talking to the few survivors gathered around the deejay. He leaves the restaurant and sees Lockjaw still parked in the same spot. He puts Beta in the car, closes the door, and goes to the bathroom. When he walks out, he bumps into Bonobo in the corridor. He is accompanied by two girls.

Where you been? slurs Bonobo, completely off his face but still standing, an experienced drunk. I've been looking for you for ages. This is Liz, a really good friend of mine, and this here is Ju.

Bonobo and Ju are in the middle of a conversation dripping with terms such as
soul, impermanence,
and
vanity
. Liz looks as if she is just along for the ride, accompanying her friend. Neither of them seems drunk, and he isn't really sure what's going on but senses that it must be obvious.

Bonobo's bed-and-breakfast is near the sushi bar, and in a few minutes Bonobo's Beetle and the girls' red Parati are driving up a steep, narrow driveway between bamboo fences that leads to a well-tended property with a large two-story building and two smaller cabanas behind it, all built with a combination of bricks, mortar, and wooden logs, with green Portuguese roof tiles and glassed-in verandas. A sign over the front door says
BONOBO'S BED-AND-BREA
KFAST,
and on the adjoining building with French windows another sign says
BONOBO'S CAFÉ
. He climbs out of the Beetle with difficulty. He scratches his forearm on a rusty corner of the door and tries to remember when he had his last tetanus shot.

Bonobo opens the door and tells them all to make themselves at home but asks that they try not to make too much noise because there are guests in one of the upstairs rooms. Downstairs is the reception desk with a cozy sitting room and access to the kitchen, a guest breakfast room, and another room with an engraved wooden sign on the door saying
BONOBO'S BEDROOM
. It isn't long before Bonobo and Ju go into his room. Ju is from Brasília and has large breasts, and that is all he has had time to find out about her.

In the reception area, he sits on a small, comfortable sofa, while Liz sits in the armchair next to him. Liz is a native of Garopaba. She has recently had highlights put in her brown hair and has an athletic body and a slightly masculine face. There is zero attraction. They chat at a calm, tired pace, listening to the reggae music that Bonobo has put on at a low volume in the background. They are songs about the beauty of the moment, the importance of freedom, the need for awareness, about stars and love and the ocean waves. Liz's full name is Elizete, and she hates it. She says there is a whole generation of girls in Garopaba of her age with names that end in
ete,
just as her and her girlfriends' mothers and grandmothers' names end in
ina,
which are so much simpler and sweeter and sound like parents' terms of endearment for their daughters: names like Delfina, Jovina, Celina, Ondina, Etelvina, Clarina, Angelina, Antonina, Vivina, Santina, and the more common ones like Carolina and Regina. But now it is the era of the Elizetes, Claudetes, and Marizetes, with their rather stunted sound. She muses, I wonder why? If I have a daughter, I'm going to call her Marina, or Sabrina, or Florentina—what do you think? He thinks she is right. Her voice is soft and sibilant like that of other locals he has spoken to, including Cecina. Maybe it is a characteristic of Azoreans. After the music stops, they hear only the silence of the night and gusts of intermittent wind rustling the trees and the bamboo thickets. Occasionally the low murmur of a halting conversation comes from Bonobo's room. Beta has fallen asleep on a knitted rug. Liz wants to know something about him, and he talks about swimming, triathlons, how he competed in the Ironman in Hawaii some years ago, and she seems only partially interested but still interested enough. It's almost as if they were intimate and were having one of those conversations that people have before they fall asleep together. I don't have the build to really compete properly, he says. I've got small feet. Liz murmurs things so he'll know she is listening, and he keeps talking. Time flows at the pace that it should always flow, he thinks. A slowness in keeping with his inner discourse. They hear a short moan from Ju, the bed banging against the wall or the floor, then a longer moan, which she tries to muffle unsuccessfully. It goes on for a few minutes. When the door opens, Ju walks out fully dressed and perfectly composed and tells her friend that she needs to go because she has to get up early the next morning. The Parati drives off, and the girls crank up the radio. The beat of the electronic music fades into the distance.

Bonobo comes back from the kitchen with two bottles of Heineken and says, Peace to all beings. They clink their green bottlenecks.

Isn't that what the Buddhists say?

Yep, I'm a Buddhist.

He laughs.

What's so funny?

You don't strike me as a Buddhist.

What's a Buddhist supposed to be like?

I don't know. But you don't strike me as one.

Don't talk crap.

Don't you have to take a vow of chastity, stop drinking, that kind of thing?

Not exactly.

Bonobo says he started becoming familiar with Buddhism in the late nineties, flirting on ICQ with a girl from Curitiba who followed the religion. Ideas such as compassion, nonattachment, and impermanence were new to him. It all made sense right from the start. His eyes light up as he tells the story. Sometimes he stops talking and meditates on what he has just said, nodding his head lightly. He is convinced that if that girl hadn't been open to his silly online advances and spent night after night explaining samsara, karma, and the law of moral causation to him, he probably would have killed someone or been killed himself. Or both. Bonobo invited her to Porto Alegre, and she went. She traveled by bus and stayed in a dive near the bus station. She wanted to go to Garagem Hermética, a nightclub that other online friends of hers frequented. They went together. They saw a band from Esteio that played Smiths covers, and they had a hell of a night. The girl brought him several books as a present and convinced him to learn English. Eva was her name.

The girl studied physics, man. Physics. A nerdy weirdo and totally introverted but an angel in human form. A being of light. We visited the Três Coroas Temple together, and it became a second home to me. I worked as a laborer there and went on several retreats. I wanted to live there, but the lamas wouldn't let me. They said I wasn't ready. And they were right. I wasn't ready for that. Eva never came back again, but we kept in touch online and used to send each other photocopies of philosophical and Buddhist texts in the post. She died of leukemia in 2003.