Blood-drenched Beard

The main avenue ends in a curve to the right and turns into the seaside boulevard. He parks diagonally between other cars in the parking spaces facing the beach. The sun beats down on the Fiesta. He walks around the car and opens the passenger door. Beta raises her head but doesn’t move. Just as on the other three stops he made during the journey, he has to pick her up and set her down on her feet on the ground before she decides to lap up the warm water he pours from a family-size plastic bottle into an empty ice cream tub. He takes the last few swigs from the same bottle. He takes off his shirt and sneakers, leaving on only his swimming trunks. He locks the car and heads down the cement ramp next to the Embarcação Restaurant to the sand, carrying Beta. Groups of off-season tourists enjoy themselves on the spacious beach. He approaches a woman who is smoking and reading a book by herself under a beach umbrella. The book’s cover is purple. Her knees are dark, her toenails are painted with pearly nail polish, and she is wearing a delicate gold anklet. The umbrella is blue with an insurance company logo on it, and the sunlight that manages to pass through it gives her bare legs a green hue. He memorizes all this so he’ll be able to remember her later.

Hi. Would you mind watching my dog for a bit?

She lifts up her sunglasses and gazes a moment at the animal in his arms.

Can’t he walk?

She can walk, but she’s a bit tired. If I could put her in the shade here, she’ll just lie there until I get back.

Okay, you can leave her. But I’m not chasing after her if she runs away.

She won’t run away. And if she does, just let her go. I’ll find her afterward.

What’s her name?

Beta.

He settles the dog in the shade of the beach umbrella and walks toward the water, feeling the cold, squishy sand on the soles of his feet. The bay is calm, ruffled by a weak southerly breeze that makes the small waves break with fine, almost foamless crests over a smooth, glassy surface. The clear, icy water wets his belly, and he raises his arms in a reflex action. He plunges his hands into the water to wet his pulses and minimize the thermal shock, something he learned from his dad. It doesn’t work, but he always does it anyway. On days like this the ocean resuscitates in him a childhood vision that miniaturizes everything. Tiny waves seen with his eyes at surface level are mythological tidal waves breaking over his head. The sinuous sand at the bottom is a scale model of a great desert where a crab’s chitinous shell looks like the bones of some giant creature extinct many eras ago. Scraping his chest against the sandy seabed, holding his breath and with his eyes wide open, he sees the landscape of tiny dunes rippling out until they disappear in the opacity of the blue-green water. The vision is crystalline and silent, and farther up the sun refracts on the surface in shards of white, flickering in a scramble of geometric patterns. Back at the surface, he swims out deep with long strokes, testing the resistance of the salt water. His muscles, aching with cold, slowly relax. When he stops swimming, his body is warm, and the ocean floor is already out of reach. He sees Coral Island on the horizon, with its white lighthouse almost indistinguishable in the distance, and much farther away the south of Santa Catarina Island, with its hazy green mountains dissolving into the atmosphere. A seagull almost touches the water in a low flight toward Vigia Cove where, among a dozen fishing boats, a two-masted schooner, with the name Lendário in large red letters on its white hull, softly rocks near a wooden jetty. He turns his back to the ocean and looks at the beach. He has swum out farther than he thought. He sees the row of fishermen’s sheds facing the waves with their fronts of grayish wood or painted in soft tones, the beach promenade lined with bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants, the pine trees in the seaside camping ground being targeted by solitary swallows that appear from all directions, Siriú Hill, and, behind it, the creamy dunes of Siriú Beach extending for a few miles toward the cliffs that hide the tranquil Gamboa Beach. A world of gold, blue, and green. The windshields of the cars coming around the bend at the beginning of the seaside boulevard reflect the sunlight in flashes that blind him. Tired of the excess of light, he takes a deep breath and lets the air out little by little, letting his body sink vertically. He keeps his eyes open at the bottom as long as his lungs can bear it, feeling protected from everything. Then he holds his nose above water and moves his feet and hands just enough to float upright in an almost imperceptible rise and fall, his body already used to the temperature, experiencing the salty taste, mineral smell, and sticky texture of the water. He doesn’t notice the time passing and remembers to get out only when he starts to feel his forehead stinging in the sun.