Blood-drenched Beard

The girl asks her dad for some money to go and buy a candy apple on the other side of the square. The short man jumps in, takes a wad of notes from the pocket of his bombachas, and gives the girl five reais. She thanks him timidly and leaves holding the notes with both hands.

Go around the outside where there ain’t as many people! the singer shouts. The crowd has been growing constantly since the beginning of the pagode concert.

What an adorable girl, says the short guy.

The kid’s never left Bagé before, says Mascarenhas. She used to complain, All you do is travel, Dad! So come with me, then, I told her. Now she’s been to Toledo, Cascavel, Pomerode. Today she swam in the cold ocean, and tomorrow we’re going to Bom Jesus and then Amaral Ferrador. After that we have to go back ’cause she’s got school.

Índio plays all over Brazil, says the short guy. He played in the Amazon at the beginning of the year, didn’t you?

Yep.

We used to play together down in Uruguaiana in the seventies.

Yep. Homero here was my partner, and now he’s my manager in Garopaba. One of us moved up in life, and the other one’s still an artist. I’m going to die a poor old folk singer.

You were going to tell me about Gaudério.

Gaudério. So you’re his grandson, are you?

Yes.

Mascarenhas takes a deep drag on his cigarette, making sparks fly, then blows the smoke through his mouth and nose.

Well, I’ll be darned. After everything I’ve seen, the devil still manages to give me a fright. Amazing. Will you accept a drink of cachaça?

Of course.

He takes a sip of the cloudy yellow cachaça. Índio Mascarenhas pushes a shirt sleeve up over his elbow, revealing brown skin like cured leather. He shows him a sinuous scar of about two or three inches that ends in a dark keloid in the middle of his arm. Talking loudly in order to be heard over the music and subjecting him to pungent doses of the fragrance that his grandfather once defined as the smell of a dead pampas fox’s ass, Mascarenhas says that it is where Gaudério’s knife nicked him at the fair forty years ago. It was an ugly fight, and the only reason someone wasn’t killed was because they were quickly pulled apart.

Gaudério was a charming sort who scared folk, if that makes any sense, says the singer. I was young then and stood up for myself when I had to, but your granddad really spooked me even though he was much older than me. We’d had a run-in before, at a dance in a town near the border, I’m not sure which, but I think it might have been Sant’Ana do Livramento. He thought I was competing with him for a girl, but it was all in his head. I didn’t take much notice of him the first time. I’d seen even wilder horses around, but the second time, here in this square, it was different. He was a different man, he seemed possessed. It’s hard to describe. I think he’d lost his mind. What do you know about your granddad, kid?

Not much. Just what my dad told me and what you’re telling me now. I never met him. He disappeared before I was born. Apparently he was killed here.

I’ll be darned. You really look like him. I think he was taller. But you’re the bastard all over again. His spitting image.

He takes the photograph of his granddad out of his wallet and hands it to Mascarenhas. The singer flicks his cigarette butt onto the grass before taking it carefully with the tips of his fingers. A tambourine solo mixes with a noisy round of fireworks.

That’s him all right. A bit different, but I’ll never forget that face.

Different how?