Blood-drenched Beard

His dad extracts his body from the soft armchair with some difficulty. The skin on his arms and neck has taken on a permanent ruddiness in the last few years, along with a rather fowllike texture. His father used to kick a ball around with him and his older brother when they were teenagers, and he frequented gyms on and off until he was forty-something, but since then, as if coinciding with his younger son’s growing interest in all kinds of sports, he has become completely sedentary. He has always eaten and drunk like a horse, smoked cigarettes and cigars since he was sixteen, and indulged in cocaine and hallucinogens, so that it now takes some effort for him to haul his bones around. On his way to the kitchen, he passes the wall in the corridor where a dozen advertising awards hang, glass-framed certificates and brushed-metal plaques dating mostly from the eighties, when he was at the peak of his copywriting career. There are also a couple of trophies at the other end of the living room, on the mahogany top of a low display cabinet. Beta follows him on his journey to the fridge. She looks as old as her master, a living animal totem gliding silently behind him. His dad plodding past the reminders of a distant professional glory, the faithful animal at his heel, and the meaninglessness of the Sunday afternoon all induce an unsettled feeling in him that is as inexplicable as it is familiar, a feeling he sometimes gets when he sees someone fretting over a decision or tiny problem as if the whole house-of-cards meaning of life depended on it. He sees his dad at the limits of his endurance, dangerously close to giving up. The fridge door opens with a squeal of suction, glass clinks, and in seconds he and the dog are back, quicker to return than go.

Farol de Santa Marta is over near Laguna, isn’t it?

Yep.

They twist the caps off their beers, the gas escapes with a derisive hiss, and they toast nothing in particular.

It’s a shame I didn’t get to the coast of Santa Catarina more often. Everyone used to go in the seventies. Your mother did before she met me. I was the one who started taking her down south, to Uruguay and so on. Those beaches have always disturbed me a little. My dad died up there, near Laguna, Imbituba. In Garopaba.

It takes him a few seconds to realize that his dad is talking about his own father, who died before he was born.

Granddad? You always said you didn’t know how he died.

Did I?

Several times. You said you didn’t know how or where he’d died.

Hmm. I may have. I think I did, actually.

Wasn’t it true?

His dad thinks before answering. He doesn’t appear to be stalling for time; rather, he is reasoning, digging around in memory, or just choosing his words.

No, it wasn’t true. I know where he died, and I have a pretty good idea how. It was in Garopaba. That’s why I never liked going to those parts much.

When?

It was in ’sixty-nine. He left the farm in Taquara in… ’sixty-six. He must have wound up in Garopaba about a year later, lived there for around two years, something like that, until they killed him.

A short laugh erupts from his nose and the corner of his mouth. His dad looks at him and smiles too.

What the fuck, Dad? What do you mean, killed him?

You’ve got your granddad’s smile, you know.

No. I don’t know what his smile was like. I don’t know what mine’s like either. I forget.