Blood-drenched Beard

Students start showing up

in the afternoon at the pool. Some are surfers and tend to have poor technique but excellent fitness, good students to work with as long as they accept that there is room for improvement. This is the case with Jander, a short, stocky, bald guy of about forty who is always sunburned and owns a roadside pet shop and kennel in Palhocinha famous for housing some of the town’s most beloved dogs when their owners are away. Jander surfs, swims, runs, and rides a bike regularly, but without any supervision or method. His incredible endurance is wasted with an ungainly swimming style, and his first few lessons are devoted to trying to make his reddish body turn less in the water and to better synchronize his arms and legs. There is a strapping young Rastafarian surfer named Amós, but he is always off his face and refuses to take any advice. He stops, listens, agrees, and then ignores all instructions. His impermeable hair doesn’t fit in his swimming cap, but Saucepan’s orders are to turn a blind eye. He uses up all his energy in the first two or three sprints of each set and then straggles through the rest of the session, breathless, swallowing water, swimming slower and slower and with ever-more visible suffering. On the third week, a pair of introverted teenage twin girls enrolls, Rayanne and Tayanne, who arrive together, swim bureaucratically with identical black bathing suits on very white, almost identical bodies, and leave together. He tells them about his problem with faces because they suffer from the inverse problem of not being immediately recognized by most people. He thinks it is funny, but they don’t. Two students are triathletes. One is professional, swims like a missile, and comes with his preprepared session written in blue pen on a small white piece of paper that he always leaves stuck to a tile on the edge of the pool when he goes. He doesn’t ask for or need his attention. The other one is a rheumatologist who has seen better days as an athlete. He always brings giant hand paddles that he insists on using every session despite the fact that they are the obvious cause of his constant shoulder pain, probably tears in his supraspinatus tendons. But he’s the doctor. There are two students who can barely stay afloat. One is a corpulent, hairy, bearded man who likes to clown around and showed up on the first day laughing and asking if he could swim in his tracksuit. He calls himself Tracksuit Man and gets a laugh from the twins when he announces his Special Weapon, the Dive Bomb, then leaps into the pool as dramatically as possible. The other one is Tiago, a polite, shy, hard-working seventeen-year-old with a severe case of gynecomastia. His favorite student so far is Ivana, a friendly, plump little woman in her early fifties. At first Ivana struck him as the sedentary sort, but she has proved to be an experienced and dedicated swimmer. She occasionally participates in the Santa Catarina short-distance swim circuit and is interested in training for longer distances. She is a public prosecutor and works in the Garopaba Courthouse. She is one of those people for whom swimming is not a means to an end such as losing weight, curing a disease, or winning medals; rather, it is as much a part of her life as working, eating, and sleeping. She is someone who can’t not swim. In that, they are the same. Swimming for them is a special relationship with the world, the kind of thing that those who understand it don’t need to talk about. Ivana swings her shoulders in an odd way, and he recognizes her by her walk.