Blood-drenched Beard

Some mornings he forgets any modest ambition he may have and doesn’t know how he ended up there. He thinks that deep down there is nothing to uncover or understand no matter what. Mornings like the cloudy one when he sits for a while outside the window with the dog beside him and watches a furious northeasterly whip up the water, which is somewhere between blue and green, with no shine, as if seen through a polarizing filter. The waves explode on the rocks in fans of meringue-white spray, and the thick drops wet his feet and give off a perfume of salt and sulfur. Then the wind turns without warning. Its invisible force reconfigures the entire landscape in moments. Blowing from the south, it stretches the ocean’s agitated surface toward the horizon as if smoothing a crumpled sheet over a bed. The silence contains something of the tension of the previous moment. The water becomes smooth and glossy, and the waves form long, gentle rows that break near the beach, lifting up crests of vapor against the sunlight that has just appeared out of nowhere. The filmlike surface slides over the waves in the opposite direction. The ocean recedes, the exposed strip of beach grows and the temperature drops a little. The sun comes out and encourages a group of kids to go swimming in front of the rock. The four boys, wearing shorts and no T-shirts, quickly dive into the water. They jump off the wharf and swim near the rocks, swearing at one another. The two girls are about twelve or thirteen and walk over the rocks with ease. One is wearing a bikini, and the other, in a white dress with a triangular-shaped hem, has an upturned nose and high forehead. They take red lollipops out of a bag and sit on the rock. The one in the white dress turns her head and briefly looks at him for the first and last time with honest disinterest, emanating at once a precocious sexuality and the profound boredom that prevents her from using it. The boys splash water on them and try to pull them in. They tolerate it as if it were no more than a fleeting interruption and quickly return to their lollipops and monosyllabic conversation. Then the girl in the dress stands and climbs down to a larger rock at the water’s edge. The tame waves wash over her feet. She stares at the sea and the boys playing in the water as if joining them were an inevitability, an implicit obligation of her female existence. The white dress is removed with resignation, folded, and carefully placed on a rock. She turns and looks at her friend. In agreement, the two of them go to meet their destiny. They enter the water at the same time in lookalike black bikinis and are immediately surrounded by the boys. They get water splashed in their faces and are grabbed and dunked mercilessly. The boys fall about laughing, and the girls resist but end up laughing too, the same way that adults laugh when they feel like children. From where he is, he can see the eyes of the girl who was wearing the white dress lit by the reflected sunlight and notices that they are exactly the same color as the ocean that day, the same coppery green and the same translucence that, in the case of the sea, allows him to see pieces of seaweed and little clouds of sand hovering at the bottom. In her case he can’t tell. They are big eyes. He can see them well in spite of the fact that she never looks at him, just as horses and birds watch you without ever looking at you.

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