Blood-drenched Beard

He falls asleep again and wakes a little later to the sound of voices engaged in animated debate. After urinating and splashing cold water on his face, he opens the shutters, dampened by the sea breeze, and sees a boat anchored right in front of the apartment. Several fishermen are perched on the rocks and footpath. He watches the scene from the window for a few minutes. The night wind has died down, and the sea is smooth and opaque. The water looks hot. A black power cable trails from the back of the boat, suspended over the water, and is wrapped around the trunk of a tree right in front of his building. One of the men is in the boat, another is sitting on the stairs, and the rest are standing around the white fishing net heaped up on the rock. Slowly the fishermen make eye contact with him and nod. He goes inside and makes some coffee. He is sitting at the table eating a sandwich when there is a knock at the door.

Hey, champ. The boss wants to know if we can plug this in here.

The man’s bottom teeth are rotten, and he has a long rodent’s face. He raises a cigarette to his lips with thick, cracked fingers that get thinner at the tips and end in ragged nails. With his other hand he is holding up a plug with two rusted pins and a clump of black electrical tape holding it together. It is the other end of the power cable trailing from the boat.

It’s for the soldering gun, says the man when he sees him hesitate. We’re fixing the boat’s motor over there.

Okay, you can use that socket there.

Thanks, champ. You’re a good man.

In a moment the soldering gun goes into action somewhere in the innards of the boat, a white whaler with decorative yellow and red stripes called Poeta. It must be about forty feet long. Sparks fly from an opening in the deck while the vessel softly rolls from side to side. He leaves the apartment and goes to watch the activity from the footpath. The men on dry land make fun of one another and joke about money. The man who knocked at his door, who looks like a beaver with a long face, is the one who talks the most, and someone calls him Marcelo. It is hard to decipher much of what they say, but he understands that one of them, a fat man who is watching the scene from a certain distance and may be the owner of the boat, has just received an army pension. The others are asking him for money jokingly.

Gimme a hundred bucks.

Haven’t got anything.

Don’t you feel sorry for me? I can’t even afford a packet of crackers.

That’s your problem.

The man who was welding the motor appears on deck and shouts that the soldering gun has stopped working. The others start to examine the cable, looking for the problem. There is a patch on part of the cable, and one of the fishermen takes to it with his pocketknife. In the meantime the boat has drifted closer to the rocks, and the cable that was previously suspended above the water has lost height and is almost completely submerged. The whole situation looks risky, not to say insane.

Do you want me to unplug it?

No, champ, thanks, but it won’t be necessary.

The fisherman somehow manages to reestablish the electrical current by fiddling with his pocketknife in the cable. The soldering gun starts droning and spraying sparks again in the bowels of the boat. The job is quick. Marcelo pulls the plug from the socket and tosses the rolled-up power cable to the man on board. The man takes the cable, collects up his tools, jumps from the whaler into a rowboat, and joins the other men on the rock. He turns out to be the owner of the whaler and is burly, with a sparse beard, curly hair, and impassive facial expression. He introduces himself as Jeremias. He thanks him for the use of his socket with a handshake and says that tonight they are going to sail south, looking for a school of croakers that was sighted in Itapirubá, and that they’ll bring him some croakers the next morning to return the favor.

Jeremias and another fisherman use the rowboat to take one corner of the fishing net to the deck of the whaler. The net is attached to a crank-operated reel, and with the help of this mechanism, they begin to transfer it from the top of the rock to the whaler.