Blood-drenched Beard

The newspaper was lying on a bench in the gym dressing room as if someone had left it in their backpack and relieved themselves of it days later without going to the trouble of putting it in the trash. It strikes him as odd that no one at the gym, at the beach, at Pablo’s school, in restaurants, bars, or the Internet café, not even Cecina or Renato or Dália, or the grocer or the fishermen, has mentioned such a heinous crime, something that happened so close to their beautiful, happy little coastal town, a town that appears to have been abandoned for good by the tourists, at least until next summer, and now looks more like a pavilion of closed shops and empty houses, entire blocks deserted except for the very occasional visit of a caretaker to trim a tree. The sudden emptying of the town, the arrival of the cold weather, the brutal murder of a teenage girl not far from there, nothing that he finds worthy of note seems to worry the locals. They talk about how this year’s mullet season is going to be an even bigger disaster than the last, and the population in general concerns itself with what to do with the money earned during a tourist season that has been well and truly left behind and already feels like a distant memory, a time when they worked so hard amid so many people from elsewhere that they barely managed to see one another and talk to their own friends and family, months spent less like residents and more like the employees of an enormous convention center in the midst of a megaevent. In the streets people are also talking about a municipal election that won’t take place until September. He has the impression that everyone is merely hoping to rest up and breeze through the cold, sunny days during which nothing will happen. They say the calm will bring boredom and sadness and that the cold and solitude will resuscitate all the familiar ghosts of the season and some unfamiliar ones too, but they say it as if it’s still a long way off and there is plenty of time to prepare for it.

Part Two

FIVE

In the first few days of May, he sees something that he will later suspect was a dream. It is a muggy afternoon, and since Pablo has gone to spend the long weekend with his dad in Criciúma and Dália has gone with her mother to Caçador, he gets on his bike after his shift at the pool and rides to Ferrugem Beach, where he hopes to find some good waves for bodysurfing. The beach is empty, and its coppery sands are warm and still scarred from the last influx of tourists. The Bar do Zado is open as always, but there are no customers, not even the occasional surfer or pot smoker contemplating the waves from one of the wooden tables. An adolescent tends the bar while watching a game of European soccer on the TV on the wall and later, still glued to the screen, now for the UFC, will say he saw nothing. The sky is overcast, and someone in one of the houses or bed-and-breakfasts behind the dunes is trying to drill through something very tough, perhaps a tile. An early fog is covering part of the sand, and a smell of decomposing sea creatures hangs in the air. He leans his bike and backpack against the wooden wall of the bar and heads down to the water’s edge. The water is freezing cold, but he enters nonetheless. He swims out to the sandbar in a few strokes, then wades into the water on the other side and dives in again, swimming vigorously to where the waves are breaking. His lungs fill in desperation and squeeze every bit of air out of their alveoli in reaction to the freezing temperature. His skin burns, his head throbs, and his body just won’t warm up. Afraid of taking a bad turn, he catches the first wave back to the sandbar and gets out. The transition from the icy water to the warm air perks him up, and he decides to walk until he is dry. The fog disappears as he walks along the beach and is there again when he reaches Índio Hill, at the end, and looks back. The mouth of Encantada Lagoon is silted up with sand, so he is able to walk across it to Barra Beach, which he also walks end to end, and returns. He sits on the sand and stares out to sea, then lies down and shuts his eyes.