Blood-drenched Beard

About me being here. About us meeting and anything else that happens from here on. Let’s just try not to talk about it. Let’s not ask if it’s really happening, what our reasons are, if it’s going to be like this or like that, what the other person is thinking. I know I must sound mad, but talking about things messes everything up for me. Talking ruins things. As soon as you give something a name, it dies.

She rests her head on his shoulder. Later she serves the soup with bread rolls heated up in the oven, and after dinner she shows him photos on her laptop. Her father is a lawyer and state deputy with the Brazilian Communist Party and her mother runs a restaurant in Tristeza, the neighborhood where she grew up and where her family still lives to this day. There are old photos of a beach house in Tramandaí, a fifteenth-birthday party, a high school volleyball team. He has already told her that his father killed himself, and now he tells her that the woman he used to love traded him for his older brother. Sharing intimate details of his life with her seems like the most obvious thing to do, and he doesn’t even think twice. The desire he feels for her is accompanied by a strong unconscious rapport, a symbiosis that develops regardless of what he thinks or wants. Jasmim is the first person he has ever met who knows what prosopagnosia is. It is the kind of thing she studied at university and reads about on Internet sites with an insatiable interest.

So how do you recognize me? she asks.

By your hair, the color of your skin, your hands, lots of things. Normal people never use hands to recognize other people, but I’ve learned to notice them. After the face, the hands are the most distinguishing aspect of a person. But in your case it isn’t necessary. It’s really easy to recognize you.

It was meant to be a compliment, but she doesn’t seem flattered.

Want to know what I think? I think you refuse to ask people if you know them out of spite. And because it gives you an air of mystery. You’re attached to the distance it gives you. You’ve got this whole self-sufficient, superior thing going on. Like a lion sitting on his throne. And at the same time you’re so sweet. You don’t make sense.

She plays with his hair until he falls asleep. At one point he wakes up, and she is on the other sofa watching a movie on the computer and gnawing on her thumbnail. He falls back asleep, listening to the English dialogue, and when he wakes up again, he is lying in his bed. He doesn’t remember how he got there. He gets up and finds her sleeping on the sofa, rolled up in a blanket that was in the cupboard. She is lying on her back but rolls onto her side when he enters the living room, perhaps disturbed in the depths of sleep by the sound of his footsteps. She doesn’t wake up but changes position several times in a row as if she can’t get comfortable. She frowns and makes a cage over her face with her hand as if trying to solve a very serious problem.

A few days later, at Jasmim’s house, a rustic two-story cabin tucked away on a side street just off the road to Ferrugem, surrounded by vegetation, overlooking Garopaba Lagoon, when they sleep together for the first time, he discovers that she is the most agitated sleeper he has ever seen. First she braids her hair so her curls will be intact in the morning, and then she spends half an hour tossing and turning as she tries to fall asleep. One leg gets caught in the sheet, and she kicks with the other, tugs on it, and smooths it back down over the mattress, moaning and babbling things in a limbo between wakefulness and sleep. She isn’t a small woman, but her body doesn’t seem a big enough theater for all the sensations it houses. When she finally falls asleep, the inner narrative of her dreams frees her from outside stimuli. Her body relaxes, but when he least expects it, she changes position again. Sometimes she talks, and he can’t tell if she’s awake. I can hear frogs. Look. I want to sleep. She opens her eyes briefly, murmurs a word or two, or three notes of a melody, and falls back asleep. The second-floor room of her cabin looks like an attic and becomes impregnated with her earthy, citrusy smell the minute she takes her clothes off, a smell that saturates the bed in seconds and invades everything, but it doesn’t survive without her and exits with her when she gets up to go to the bathroom or to make coffee. It leaves no trace of itself, and its absence is concrete and instantaneous. When she falls asleep at his place, she seems a little more peaceful. Maybe it is the sound of the waves. He falls asleep easily but tries to stay awake so he can watch her sleeping, a desert animal in musty sheets. All he has to do is touch her lightly, and she immediately turns and tries to hug him but almost always misses the target and embraces nothing or a pillow.