Blood-drenched Beard

After Aírton leaves and the laundry lady stops by to pick up his clothes, he takes Beta for a walk along the beach and is still thinking about the course for lifeguards when he remembers a story that was born, lived a long life, and died in his own mind, or at least was dead until now, a story that he had started imagining for no apparent reason when he was about twelve or thirteen and continued imagining until the end of his adolescence. It was just a sketch or daydream that never came to a conclusion worthy of the name but that always began in the same manner. He’d be sitting on the beach looking out to sea, when he’d see someone waving for help out in the deep water. After swimming past the surf, he’d discover that the person drowning was a girl his age, a girl who gradually got older as he imagined the scene year after year. He would pull her out of the sea, and she’d cough up water and lie on the sand, weary and breathless. Sometimes she’d be wearing clothes; other times she’d be in a bikini. Her skin was always very white, her hair always black, straight, and long. Her eyes were blue. She wasn’t anyone he knew or came to know. After recovering enough to stand up and walk, she’d thank him with a hug or just a word and a look, and she’d run off down the beach without looking back, her thin arms swinging, until she disappeared along a path through the dunes. Months would go by, sometimes years. He imagined he was older than he was. These futures varied, but in all of them he’d find the girl again, and she’d be in a terrible state. She had suffered at the hands of men or had become an addict of some sort. A suicide. A wandering orphan. She’d end up crying. Her hair would stick to her cheeks streaked with tears. The slightly older version of himself that was now the protagonist of the story had spent months or years looking for the girl, imagining who she was, how she had come to be out in the deep, where she had gone after disappearing down the beach, and now she reappeared, and he loved her. It was that simple. Nothing easier than loving a nameless girl who was a mere idea, delivered to him by fate, vulnerable and sensuous, ready to be rescued, run away, and reappear. But she hated him. Sometimes she accused him of saving her against her will. Why did you pull me out of the water? You shouldn’t have. More often she would accuse him of abandoning her. How could you have abandoned me? How could you have let me go? But I saved you, he’d argue. She’d shake her head, saying no. Why didn’t you ask my name? Why didn’t you hold my hand? Why didn’t you come running after me? Why did you let me go? You didn’t want me. And to him it all seemed terribly unfair. How was he supposed to have known? He’d done what had to be done. He’d done everything that could have been done. How unfair it was that she could look back after so long and accuse him of not having done something differently at the time. Didn’t she remember running off without a word? Sometimes there was a sexual tension in this conflict, sometimes he felt sheer desperation. It ended in that, in the intrinsic unfairness of the act of looking back, of daring to imagine a past different from the one that had brought him to precisely where he was now. He imagined variations on this story for years on end. In all of them, he ended up alone. It never occurred to him to tell it to someone, write it down, draw it. Why this story? Why any story? Where had it come from, and where had it been all this time?

THIRTEEN

He sees a pair of gray-green eyes above fleshy cheeks with dimples that frame a pearly, expectant smile. Light olive skin and thick, peeling lips almost the same color, just a little rosier. He knows the nose ring in one of the nostrils and the small scar right in the middle of the forehead, but he is unable to retrieve the entire face from memory. Long black hair tumbling over the shoulders. His eyes take in every quadrant of this face in the space of a breath, and he could swear he’s never seen this woman before in his life, but he suddenly knows who she is. Something tells him. He thought about her a few days ago and always knew she would come someday. At the same instant in which he recognizes her, she gets a fright and her smile gives way to a pained expression.

Shit! What happened to you?

I got a little roughed up in a fight, he says smiling.

You never were the brawling sort.

Some guys stole my dog. Beta. I went to get her back, and they didn’t like it.

She tilts her head and narrows her eyes as if she doesn’t believe him. They stare at each other for a while. He feels his body swaying softly to the rhythm of his racing heartbeat and sees Viviane’s chest inflating and emptying like a bellows. Organs working to feed brains at the peak of activity, almost paralyzed by the millions of things to be said.

Did you recognize my face when you opened the door?

No. But I recognized you.

How?

You know how.