Blood-drenched Beard

In the reception area, he sits on a small, comfortable sofa, while Liz sits in the armchair next to him. Liz is a native of Garopaba. She has recently had highlights put in her brown hair and has an athletic body and a slightly masculine face. There is zero attraction. They chat at a calm, tired pace, listening to the reggae music that Bonobo has put on at a low volume in the background. They are songs about the beauty of the moment, the importance of freedom, the need for awareness, about stars and love and the ocean waves. Liz’s full name is Elizete, and she hates it. She says there is a whole generation of girls in Garopaba of her age with names that end in ete, just as her and her girlfriends’ mothers and grandmothers’ names end in ina, which are so much simpler and sweeter and sound like parents’ terms of endearment for their daughters: names like Delfina, Jovina, Celina, Ondina, Etelvina, Clarina, Angelina, Antonina, Vivina, Santina, and the more common ones like Carolina and Regina. But now it is the era of the Elizetes, Claudetes, and Marizetes, with their rather stunted sound. She muses, I wonder why? If I have a daughter, I’m going to call her Marina, or Sabrina, or Florentina — what do you think? He thinks she is right. Her voice is soft and sibilant like that of other locals he has spoken to, including Cecina. Maybe it is a characteristic of Azoreans. After the music stops, they hear only the silence of the night and gusts of intermittent wind rustling the trees and the bamboo thickets. Occasionally the low murmur of a halting conversation comes from Bonobo’s room. Beta has fallen asleep on a knitted rug. Liz wants to know something about him, and he talks about swimming, triathlons, how he competed in the Ironman in Hawaii some years ago, and she seems only partially interested but still interested enough. It’s almost as if they were intimate and were having one of those conversations that people have before they fall asleep together. I don’t have the build to really compete properly, he says. I’ve got small feet. Liz murmurs things so he’ll know she is listening, and he keeps talking. Time flows at the pace that it should always flow, he thinks. A slowness in keeping with his inner discourse. They hear a short moan from Ju, the bed banging against the wall or the floor, then a longer moan, which she tries to muffle unsuccessfully. It goes on for a few minutes. When the door opens, Ju walks out fully dressed and perfectly composed and tells her friend that she needs to go because she has to get up early the next morning. The Parati drives off, and the girls crank up the radio. The beat of the electronic music fades into the distance.

Bonobo comes back from the kitchen with two bottles of Heineken and says, Peace to all beings. They clink their green bottlenecks.

Isn’t that what the Buddhists say?

Yep, I’m a Buddhist.

He laughs.

What’s so funny?

You don’t strike me as a Buddhist.

What’s a Buddhist supposed to be like?

I don’t know. But you don’t strike me as one.

Don’t talk crap.

Don’t you have to take a vow of chastity, stop drinking, that kind of thing?

Not exactly.

Bonobo says he started becoming familiar with Buddhism in the late nineties, flirting on ICQ with a girl from Curitiba who followed the religion. Ideas such as compassion, nonattachment, and impermanence were new to him. It all made sense right from the start. His eyes light up as he tells the story. Sometimes he stops talking and meditates on what he has just said, nodding his head lightly. He is convinced that if that girl hadn’t been open to his silly online advances and spent night after night explaining samsara, karma, and the law of moral causation to him, he probably would have killed someone or been killed himself. Or both. Bonobo invited her to Porto Alegre, and she went. She traveled by bus and stayed in a dive near the bus station. She wanted to go to Garagem Hermética, a nightclub that other online friends of hers frequented. They went together. They saw a band from Esteio that played Smiths covers, and they had a hell of a night. The girl brought him several books as a present and convinced him to learn English. Eva was her name.

The girl studied physics, man. Physics. A nerdy weirdo and totally introverted but an angel in human form. A being of light. We visited the Três Coroas Temple together, and it became a second home to me. I worked as a laborer there and went on several retreats. I wanted to live there, but the lamas wouldn’t let me. They said I wasn’t ready. And they were right. I wasn’t ready for that. Eva never came back again, but we kept in touch online and used to send each other photocopies of philosophical and Buddhist texts in the post. She died of leukemia in 2003.

Sorry to hear it. That must have been hard to deal with.

A rooster crows once, twice, three times.

It was. But life goes on. Didn’t you like Liz?

She seemed nice. But there was no chemistry.