Blood-drenched Beard

She doesn’t call.

The days tick over, and he tortures himself for not having asked for her number too. At the same time, he can’t bring himself to go to the agency and bother her again, and on the two occasions he ends up passing in front of the office window, he merely waves from the other side of the glass. She waves back but doesn’t call him. He pays extraordinary attention to his cell phone these days, keeping it at hand with the battery charged at all times, with plenty of credit, and checks the screen constantly for messages and missed calls. He hasn’t had any for months and didn’t particularly care until now. He wants her to call, to invite him in. He thinks it’s too risky to make another move. He sees couples in warm clothes by the beach, drinking maté and reading magazines on the sunny mornings, and imagines himself doing the same with her. He imagines them sleeping together in his bed, lulled by the endless percussion of the waves, made drowsy by the combined heat of their bodies. He fantasizes that they are living together and have a child. The more he chides himself and tries to quell these ideas, the more his mind invents them, and the greater the contrast between his fantasies and the mornings when he wakes up alone with the same day in front of him and the same routine that he normally appreciates perpetually overshadowed by a feeling of impotence. He feels sick. On the Friday morning he has the silly idea to buy her a present, and by that afternoon the silly idea has become an inescapable obsession, and at the end of the day he rides around looking for the few shops selling clothes and gifts that are open in midwinter, unable to think of something that she might like. He remembers the bookstore. The sales assistant suggests a handful of best sellers, and there is a shelf of books on psychology, but he doesn’t end up buying anything because it would be too easy to get it wrong with a book, to not know which one to choose, besides which, books say or give away too much, and she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who reads any old thing. He makes one last attempt at a shop selling Balinese decorations at the entrance to the town. There are small decorative objects for the house and kitchen that are affordable. The girl who serves him guarantees that everything comes straight from artisans on the island of Bali. He finds a stunning bedspread with an intricate green and gold pattern that doesn’t cost too much, and he suddenly realizes what he is doing there and leaves. Back at home, he checks the gym roster and discovers that he is down to work on Saturday. He goes to bed early and the next day is at the pool at eight in the morning, but no students show up until the end of his shift at one o’clock. The temperature is below fifty degrees, and it looks as if it is going to rain. Instead of eating lunch, he pulls on his running shoes, shorts, and the jacket his students gave him and runs along the beach to Siriú, intending to think about Jasmim until he forgets her, to accelerate until he blows his engine, to sweat out his relentless desire to see her. It takes him over an hour to start to tire. At some point he starts to feel peaceful. It never fails. He hears a single crack of thunder without lightning somewhere, but it doesn’t rain.