Blood-drenched Beard

A female voice sings “Listen to your heaaart” in his ear, and the weight of a body shakes the seat cushion on the sofa. The smell of cinnamon chewing gum reaches his nostrils.

I was hoping you’d call me.

I like your boots. What’s your name?

Honey.

Your real name.

That’s something you don’t ask, handsome.

He stares into her eyes. Blue irises, heavy mascara. Bloodred lipstick. A small mole on her left cheekbone. It is all he can make out in the half-light.

It’s Andreia.

Have a seat, Andreia. I’ll talk to you properly in a minute. I just need to finish talking to my friend here.

Can I order a drink?

What would you like?

Wine.

Go ahead and order one.

Zenão gives him a little slap on the knee.

Doesn’t she look a bit like a young Anjelica Huston?

Who?

Your girl there.

She looks like who?

Anjelica Huston. The actress. You know?

He doesn’t but he looks at Andreia and pretends to be considering it.

I think she does a bit. But anyway. At the end of ’sixty-nine.

I remember that story about the guy who was killed in Garopaba. It was one of the weirdest cases I’d ever come across, which is probably why the investigations didn’t get very far.

Weird why?

Because there was no body.

My dad told me the same thing. That when he got there, he couldn’t find out where they’d buried my granddad. There was a beggar’s grave with grass growing over it. It didn’t look recent.

Come again? Your dad? What are you talking about?

His name was Hélio. He was the one who told me the story.

Ah, his son. From Porto Alegre. That’s right, we managed to track him down a few days later. He came. Blond hair, smoked like a chimney.

That’s him.

I remember him. But anyway. The mystery is that there was no body when I got there.

Who’d they bury then?

Dunno. Listen. I got a tip-off by telegraph. There were no phones in Garopaba back then. I think they only got phone lines in the mid-seventies. Sometimes they’d call the station in Laguna and ask us to come and investigate more serious crimes in the region. Garopaba had been a separate municipality since the early sixties. The municipalities had their own police commissioners, but it was all a bit primitive. I saw the lockup once, a little guard post with iron bars where they’d hold their criminals. It was near the parish church. The guy would spend a day in the lockup, and then he’d have to pull weeds in the square in the presence of the police chief or officer. I was called in a few times to resolve things there. Murders, violent rapes, arson.

Arson?

Garopaba has a long tradition of arson.

Were there many murders? One local told me no one had ever been killed in Garopaba.

People are killed everywhere. There were lots of problems when the gauchos started moving there. There was an invasion of them overnight. They’d come to camp, surf. Hippies. A lot of them stayed on, and the place was overrun with them. They started to get involved in money, property, power. There was even a gaucho killer. His name was Corporal Freitas. He was kept in work for many years until someone took him out too. He was a walking archive.

Andreia nuzzles up to him.

Move closer.

Her breath now smells of sweet wine.

Put your hand on my leg.

He obeys and feels her fishnet tights. Her cold thighs pin his fingers.

So my granddad wasn’t the only one.

Far from it. But your granddad’s story was different. We got a telegram on a Monday saying a man had been killed the night before. We didn’t even get wind of most crimes. There was a lot of local justice. There were hardly any police in the region, and people took matters into their own hands. I left Laguna by car on the Tuesday morning. Rain pissing down. There was lightning on the highway, a huge owl hit my windshield and cracked the glass, and then there was that dirt road, which was atrocious in those days. I arrived in Garopaba town center after noon and went to talk to people. First they told me that nothing had happened. The town’s only policeman didn’t know what was going on, and I started to realize that the person who’d sent the telegram had done so of their own initiative. Maybe even in secret. No one had been expecting a police chief to show up there. But I let them know who was boss, and they saw that they weren’t going to get rid of me that easily and told me the story about the lights going out at the dance. When they came on again, the guy was dead. Gaudério. No suspect, of course. There wasn’t a trace of blood in the hall by the time I got there, or the murder weapon, nothing. The body had disappeared. I spent the day trying to find out what I could, but there wasn’t much to be done. Night fell, and I was about to leave when a woman came to talk to me and said she’d sent the telegram.

Who was she?