Blood-drenched Beard

No, we stayed on for a while longer. About two years. But everything started getting strange. Your granddad was really attached to your grandma. He was the most faithful man I’ve ever known. Unless he was really discreet, had secrets… but it was impossible in a place like that, a small town where everyone knows everything. The women used to fall in love with your granddad. A bold, strapping man, a guitar player. I know because I went to the dances and saw single and married women falling all over him. My mother used to talk about it with her friends too. He could have been the biggest Don Juan in the region and was insanely faithful. Blondes galore all wanting a bit, wives looking for some fun. I myself lived it up. And Dad would give me a piece of his mind. He said I was like a pig wallowing in mud. Ever seen a pig wallowing in mud? It’s the picture of happiness. But your granddad’s moral code was based on the essential, almost maniacal notion that a man had to find a woman who liked him and look after her forever. We used to fight a lot because of it. I actually admired it in him when my mother was still alive, but after she died, he maintained a ridiculous sense of fidelity that no longer served any purpose. It wasn’t exactly mourning, because it wasn’t long before he was back at the dances, livening up barbecues, playing the guitar and getting into fights. He took to drinking more too. The women were all over him like flies on meat, and little by little he let his guard down to this one or that one, but in general he was mysteriously chaste. There was something there that I never understood and never will. We started growing apart, him and me. Not because of that, of course, though we didn’t see eye to eye on how to deal with women. But we started to argue.

Was that when you came to Porto Alegre?

Yeah. I came in ’sixty-five. I’d just turned twenty.

But why did you and Granddad argue?

Well… I don’t really know how to explain it. But the main thing was that he thought I was lazy and a womanizer who didn’t want anything out of life and wasn’t even remotely interested in the farm, work, or moral or religious institutions of any kind. And he was right, though he was a bit over the top in his assessment. I think he just got fed up and couldn’t be bothered trying to set me straight. I wasn’t really such a lost cause, but your granddad… anyway. One day I experienced his famous short fuse first hand. And the upshot was that he sent me away to Porto Alegre.

Did he hit you?

His dad doesn’t answer.

Okay, forget I asked.

We knocked each other about a bit, so to speak. Oh, what the fuck. At this stage in the game, none of it matters anymore. Suffice to say that he gave me a working over. And the next day he apologized but announced that he was sending me to Porto Alegre and that it would be better for me. I’d been to Porto Alegre several times before and knew right away that he was right. I felt big here right from the first day. I went to technical school. In a year and a half I’d opened a printer’s shop over in Azenha. In three years I was making good money writing ads for shock absorbers, crackers, and residential lots. Stylize.

He chuckles.

The glasses for eyes with style. And worse.

Okay. But Granddad was killed.