Blood-drenched Beard

There’s the thing. This is where the story gets a bit nebulous, and I heard most of it second hand. I’m not exactly sure what happened, and it may be that nothing specific prompted it, but about a year after I came to the city, your granddad left the farm. I only found out when I got a call from him. International. He was in Argentina. In some armpit of the world whose name I don’t remember. He said he just wanted to travel around a bit, but at the end of the call, he kind of let on that he had gone for good, that he’d keep in touch and that I shouldn’t worry. I didn’t. Not much. I remember thinking that if he ended up dying in a knife fight in some shithole, like the character in that Borges story “The South,” nothing could be more appropriate. Tragic, but appropriate. Anyway. I also thought there had to be a woman in the story, or at least there was a ninety-nine percent chance of it, there’s always a woman in these cases, and if there was, it was a good thing. And over the course of the following year he called me three more times, if memory serves me. One time he was in Uruguaiana. The next he was in some town in Paraná. Then he disappeared for about six months, and when he called again, he was in a fishing village in Santa Catarina called Garopaba. And even though I don’t remember exactly what he said, I remember sensing that something about him had changed. There was a youthful ring to his voice, and some of what he said was nigh incomprehensible. His description of the place was incoherent. I just remember one detail: he said something about pumpkins and sharks. I thought my old man had lost it or, even harder to believe, that he’d started hanging out with hippies and got his head in a scramble with some kind of tea. But what he was saying was that he’d seen the fishermen catching sharks by throwing cooked pumpkin into the sea. The sharks would eat the pumpkin, and that shit would ferment and swell up in their bellies until they exploded. And I said, Yeah right, Dad, great, take care, and he said bye and hung up.

Fuck.