Blood-drenched Beard

A sprint triathlon makes for

a lively morning on the third Saturday in June. The sun is shining, but a bad-tempered northeasterly makes things tough for the athletes. The main avenue has been cordoned off for the cyclists and runners, and in the choppy sea two red buoys mark the triangular swimming circuit. The bicycles are lined up in the transition zone, which has been set up on a cross street a block from the seaside boulevard. Coaches, families, friends, and residents form a crowd behind the yellow tape on the sidewalks of the main avenue to cheer the competitors on. Two of his running students, Sara and Denise, have registered in relay teams for the five-kilometer run. Sara’s shins no longer hurt, and her friend Denise has visibly lost weight and is running a nine-minute mile, which is considerable progress since her first few runs on the beach. He is going to do the 750-meter swim for Sara’s team. On the bicycle is Douglas, Sara’s husband, a cordial man of few words, some ten years older than his wife, hairy and half bald. Douglas has a strong accent from the north zone of Porto Alegre and stays fit by surfing regularly all year round and riding his sprint bike to Highway BR-101 on Sunday mornings.

He knows some of the professional competitors, and his most effusive reunion is with Pedro, sponsored by Paquetá Esportes, who can often be seen collecting prizes on podiums and is ranked eleventh in the country. The night before, at the technical meeting in the Hotel Garopaba dining room, the first thing Pedro asked him was if he was sick. He thought his old training partner looked a little too thin and haggard, not to mention the unruly beard. He assured him he was in good health, and as for the beard, well, he’d got sick of his own face and was conducting an experiment. Pedro got the joke and laughed. They gave each other a tight hug. Pedro had walked over and said, Hi, it’s Pedro. The two of them had great respect for each other. They had spent hundreds of hours together running, riding, and swimming long distances, encouraging and distracting each other, one setting a faster pace for the other, trying to keep up with the other one’s pace, sharing the semimeditative mental state of prolonged exercise. Pedro is the same age as him, thirty-four, but he knows they both look a little older than that. Too much effort, too much sun, too many free radicals in the blood, along with all the physical and emotional problems that everyone else has and which you carry in the body as glaring or subtle marks, sometimes extremely subtle or even invisible, and even then in some way perceptible from the outside. The body is its own time capsule, and its journey is always somewhat public, no matter how hard you try to cover it or hide it behind makeup.

About twenty minutes before the race starts, officials communicate that the water is full of jellyfish. The use of wetsuits is allowed at the last minute, and the swimmers race to get theirs. When the start gun goes off, the athletes run through the sand, leap over the first few waves, dive in, and discover that they will need to forge a path through an enormous soup of gelatinous globules the size of soccer balls. Those who didn’t bring wetsuits or didn’t have time to get them leave the water with stings. One woman gets a tentacle right in the face and is pulled out of the water screaming by the referees in kayaks.

Pedro is the first out of the water that morning. He is third. Douglas rides well but is no match for the better-trained cyclists and loses part of the team’s initial advantage during the twenty-kilometer ride. Sara almost can’t finish the race, but he runs the last half-mile by her side, and she crosses the finish line all red and out of breath. Even so, they place fourth in the relay, right in the middle of the seven teams signed up. An encouraging result. Afterward both amateur and professional athletes float along smiling, high on a mixture of tiredness, euphoria, and relaxation.

Sara and Douglas decide to throw a barbecue for their friends and acquaintances who also entered the race. At Sara’s request, he promises to pitch in with his much-advertised seasoned flank steak, matambre. The delicacy requires some preparation. Chilies, sweet marjoram, thyme, lime juice, rock salt, and at least an hour and a half on the barbecue, rolled up in tinfoil. Douglas climbs onto his bike and rides home on a mission to get the fire started and put the beer on ice. Sara insists on taking him by car to the supermarket to buy the meat and the seasonings, but he says he needs to go home first to shower and change his clothes. She says she’ll drive him there too. No matter how many times he repeats that it isn’t necessary, she pretends not to hear him. Are we a team or not?