Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) (26 page)

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I
n the morning his
throat feels scratchy and his muscles ache. He can't muster the energy to take Beta for a swim and instead falls asleep again listening to her barks of protest. He gets up at midday with the shivers and a runny nose but goes to work anyway. By midafternoon he is shaking with a fever, and Débora sends him home. He leaves instructions on the whiteboard for the few students who still come to swim on the winter afternoons. He stops at the first pharmacy he sees and buys some cold tablets. The hills are no more than shadows in the gray day. He doesn't see a single person on foot, and the few vehicles on the road are all stopped at intersections with their headlights on, unmotivated to drive on or unable to decide which way to go. The town is huddled up with cold in the light rain, and he rides quickly home with the wind making his wet clothes even colder. As he passes the fishing village, he stops in front of the travel agency, and Jasmim comes to the door to talk to him.

Great day for a ride in the rain. Are you trying to prove something?

I'm going home. I'm running a fever, he says sniffing.

I wonder why.

If I'm better by Friday, do you want to go out for some Japanese food?

Go home.

He showers and puts on several layers of clothing. He pours hot water into a mug and adds lime juice, honey, and a citrus fruit tea bag. He swallows a cold tablet, then sips his tea slowly. Beta doesn't even get up from her doggy bed. He blows his nose until his nostrils are raw and his beard is speckled with little white scraps of toilet paper. He cuts slices of ginger and chews on them. Looking out the window, he watches a long-haired man in a sweatshirt and shorts fish with a net from a rock. The net comes back three or four times without any fish. He closes the shutters and window, gets into bed, and falls asleep.

He wakes with a start at the sound of someone knocking on the door. Beta barks. He opens it a crack and sees Jasmim closing her umbrella and taking a step forward with plastic bags hanging from her arm. She dumps everything on the table, takes off her wet backpack, and glances around like a detective looking for clues.

I heard you need a babysitter.

She places her hand on his forehead. He sneezes to one side and goes to get the roll of toilet paper.

Have you taken your temperature?

No.

Do you have a thermometer?

No.

You're pretty hot. Here, take this to bring down your fever. And I've brought you some vitamin C too. I'll leave the packet here for you.

As he watches the tablet fizz and dissolve in a glass of water, she takes a laptop out of her backpack, puts it on the table, opens the lid, and goes to plug it into the nearest socket.

Careful 'cause—

Jasmim shrieks and jumps back.

—you'll get a shock. There's a trick to it. Here, let me do it for you.

He plugs the adapter into the socket. She turns on the computer, and they both wait rather awkwardly for the system to start up, not really sure what to do. She types in a password, waits a little, slides her finger across the touchpad, and clicks a few things. The laptop's weak speakers start to whisper music.

Are you familiar with Kings of Convenience?

No.

It's good. Nice and calm. Have you got a good knife?

What for?

Soup for a dying man.

She turns on the kitchen light and rummages through the cupboards above and below the sink until she finds a large pot. He opens the silverware drawer and takes out the knife he inherited from his dad.

This is the sharpest.

She gives the pot and the dishes piled up in the sink a quick wash. Then she gets the two plastic bags and starts arranging their contents on the counter. A Styrofoam tray of chicken pieces appears, along with a cabbage, onions, potatoes, carrots, a zucchini, half a pumpkin covered with plastic wrap, celery, and a tablet of chicken stock.

I think I bought too much, but this is how I like to make soup: throw everything in. Got any garlic?

He lets his aching body collapse onto the sofa and watches Jasmim chop the vegetables, heat water, pan-fry things in the bottom of the large pot. She sings parts of the songs and sometimes sways her head from side to side and dances with her shoulders.

Is this really happening?

What?

Are you cooking in my kitchen?

She comes over, sits near him on the sofa with her knees pulled up, and stays there without saying a thing. She bites her thumbnail voraciously, turns her head, stares into his eyes for a minute, and goes back to staring at the wall. Her breathing is audible and mingles with the music, the waves, and the bubbling of the pot on a low flame.

Take it easy with that fingernail there—you're going to gnaw your finger off.

She laughs, hides her hand under her arm, and turns to him.

Look, can we try not to talk about it?

About what?

About me being here. About us meeting and anything else that happens from here on. Let's just try not to talk about it. Let's not ask if it's really happening, what our reasons are, if it's going to be like this or like that, what the other person is thinking. I know I must sound mad, but talking about things messes everything up for me. Talking ruins things. As soon as you give something a name, it dies.

She rests her head on his shoulder. Later she serves the soup with bread rolls heated up in the oven, and after dinner she shows him photos on her laptop. Her father is a lawyer and state deputy with the Brazilian Communist Party and her mother runs a restaurant in Tristeza, the neighborhood where she grew up and where her family still lives to this day. There are old photos of a beach house in Tramandaí, a fifteenth-birthday party, a high school volleyball team. He has already told her that his father killed himself, and now he tells her that the woman he used to love traded him for his older brother. Sharing intimate details of his life with her seems like the most obvious thing to do, and he doesn't even think twice. The desire he feels for her is accompanied by a strong unconscious rapport, a symbiosis that develops regardless of what he thinks or wants. Jasmim is the first person he has ever met who knows what prosopagnosia is. It is the kind of thing she studied at university and reads about on Internet sites with an insatiable interest.

So how do you recognize me? she asks.

By your hair, the color of your skin, your hands, lots of things. Normal people never use hands to recognize other people, but I've learned to notice them. After the face, the hands are the most distinguishing aspect of a person. But in your case it isn't necessary. It's really easy to recognize you.

It was meant to be a compliment, but she doesn't seem flattered.

Want to know what I think? I think you refuse to ask people if you know them out of spite. And because it gives you an air of mystery. You're attached to the distance it gives you. You've got this whole self-sufficient, superior thing going on. Like a lion sitting on his throne. And at the same time you're so sweet. You don't make sense.

She plays with his hair until he falls asleep. At one point he wakes up, and she is on the other sofa watching a movie on the computer and gnawing on her thumbnail. He falls back asleep, listening to the English dialogue, and when he wakes up again, he is lying in his bed. He doesn't remember how he got there. He gets up and finds her sleeping on the sofa, rolled up in a blanket that was in the cupboard. She is lying on her back but rolls onto her side when he enters the living room, perhaps disturbed in the depths of sleep by the sound of his footsteps. She doesn't wake up but changes position several times in a row as if she can't get comfortable. She frowns and makes a cage over her face with her hand as if trying to solve a very serious problem.

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.