Blood-drenched Beard

He gets his wallet from a drawer in the kitchen cupboard. Among his documents and bank cards is a recent passport-size photograph of himself, one of those neutral, bureaucratic photographs whose only function is facial recognition. He is in the habit of carrying this kind of photo around so he can remember his own face, since the photos on his driver’s license and ID card are too small and too out of date, respectively, for this purpose. He takes the photo out of its plastic envelope. He goes into the bedroom, opens his backpack of personal belongings, and takes out his most cherished photo album, the one that serves almost as a catalog of the faces of the greatest sentimental importance to him. He finds the photograph of his grandfather that his father gave him and compares it to his passport photo. Then he goes into the bathroom and holds the photo of his grandfather next to the mirror.

He looks back and forth at his grandfather’s face and his own reflection. He runs his hand over the beard that he has been growing ever since he spoke to his father for the last time. He finds a pair of blunt, slightly rusty scissors in the silverware drawer and, with some difficulty, cuts his grandfather’s portrait down to the size of an ID card and places it in the same plastic envelope in his wallet where he has kept his own picture until now.

THREE

The village cemetery is located on

a square plot of land between two summer homes. Behind it is an abandoned smallholding covered in emerald-green grass and, farther back, Silveira Hill, with a winding dirt driveway announcing a future housing development. The incandescent green of the vegetation makes it look as though it’s about to catch fire under the sun. The graves are blocks of cement, bare or covered with tiles or flagstones, almost devoid of adornment. Here and there is a silver angel statuette or a cross decorated with gold paint or colorful stones. Not many graves have photographs on them, and most of the flowers are plastic. He tries to walk through the middle of the cemetery but can’t. The graves are so close together that the few available passages turn out to be dead-ends. The labyrinthine layout forces him to jump over graves and lean against them as he looks for a way through. More than once he has to retreat and find another path. At times there isn’t even enough space to maneuver and turn around. He tries using the edges of the cemetery, but the graves touch the wall. They appear to have been repositioned throughout the years so that more bodies could be buried there, until every possible space has been used and all that is left are a few holes and furrows, like a faulty puzzle. He spends a long time trying to get to the back of the cemetery, where, craning his neck, he can see the oldest and simplest graves, among which are some small, worn gravestones atop mounds of soil covered with clover and other weeds. From afar, two or three of these gravestones appear not to have any inscriptions. He trips over a grave that is no more than a little fence of bricks and falls onto another, bigger one, smashing a vase of plastic flowers. He picks up the flowers and tries to rearrange them as best he can on the dark slab of imitation marble covering the grave. He looks around for a gravedigger but doesn’t see anyone.

• • •

The sun is almost setting behind the hills in the neighborhood of Ambrósio, and everything in the bay dozes under the rosy light. He pulls on his Speedos, gets his swimming goggles out of a backpack, and takes the stairs down to Baú Rock, feeling the roughness of the cement and warm stone on the unaccustomed soles of his feet. Boats and flocks of gulls bob up and down on the shiny water, and the ocean’s vapors instantly unblock his nasal passages. He jumps carefully from the rock, so as not to cut his feet on the tiny barnacles, and his body is annulled by his own reflection, shattering the water’s filmy surface. His feet disappear with a swallowing noise, and concentric circles ripple out for a few yards before he reappears much farther along, near an anchored boat, and starts swimming out to the deep. He swims following the coast, happy with the freedom of the cold, salty, endless pool, a little wary of the growing darkness and the probable proximity of some marine animal. It is almost night when he leaves the water. He is relieved, still a little giddy from the effort and musing over everything he thought about while swimming. He has decided to sell his car.