Blood-drenched Beard

He never called again, and I started getting worried. One weekend a few months later, when I hadn’t heard from him, I got on my bike, the Suzuki 50cc I had at the time, and went up to Garopaba. An eight-hour trip on Highway BR-101, against the wind. We’re talking 1967. To get to Garopaba, you had to travel about twelve miles on a dirt road, and in some places it was just sand, and all you saw along the way were half a dozen farmers’ shacks, hills, and vegetation. The people, when you actually saw someone, were all barefoot, and for each motorbike or pickup, there were five ox-drawn carts. The village didn’t appear to have more than a thousand inhabitants and when you got to the beach you didn’t see much more in the way of civilization than a white church on the hill and the fishermen’s sheds and boats. The main village was clustered around the whaling station, and although I didn’t see anything, they still hunted whales in those parts. They were starting to cobble the village’s first streets, and the new square had just been finished. There were cottages and smallholdings on the outskirts of the village, and it was on one of these properties that I found your granddad, after asking around. Oh, Gaudério, said a local. So I went looking for Gaudério and discovered that your granddad had set himself up on a kind of miniature model of the old family farm, about five hundred yards from the beach. He had an old nag, a bunch of chickens, and a vegetable garden that took up most of the land. He got by doing odd jobs and was friendly with the fishermen. He also gathered palm leaves, which were used to fill mattresses. He’d dry the leaves in the sun, then sell them for processing. He’d slept in the fishing sheds until he found a house. I couldn’t imagine my dad sleeping in a hammock, much less in a fishing shed with the waves hammering in his ears. But it was nothing next to the spearfishing. The locals fished for grouper, octopus, and I don’t know what else, diving around the rocks, and even back then there were already groups coming from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo for that kind of fishing. And your granddad told me that one day he’d gone out in a boat with one of these groups, and they’d lent him one of those masks with a tube attached, a snorkel, flippers, and a harpoon. He dived under and didn’t come back up. A guy from São Paulo freaked out and jumped in to look for Dad’s body at the bottom of the sea and found him down on the reefs at the exact moment that he was harpooning a grouper the size of a calf. And that was when they discovered that Gaudério was a born apneist. He knew how to swim and could cross a fast-flowing river without a problem, but he’d never suspected he had such a great lung capacity. You should have seen your granddad back then. In ’sixty-seven he was forty-five or forty-six, or forty-seven, I’ve lost count, but it was something like that, and his health was incredible. He’d never smoked, turned up his nose at cigarettes, and was as hardy as a Crioulo horse. He’d always been strong, but he’d lost weight, and although the signs of aging were all there, wrinkles, thinning gray hair, the marks of working on the land, all he needed was a little polishing up, and he’d have been a seasoned athlete. He had a broad, solid chest. A few weeks before I arrived, a diver about the same age as him, an army officer, I think, had died of a pulmonary embolism trying to match Dad’s diving record. I might be mistaken, as it’s been a while since I heard the story, but it was something like four or five minutes underwater.

So why did they kill him?

I’m getting there. Patience, tchê. I wanted to give you the context. Because it’s a good story, isn’t it? Oh yes. You should’ve seen him back then. It’s not normal for someone to leave one environment and go somewhere really different and adapt like that.

Don’t you have a photo of Granddad somewhere? You showed me one once.

Hmm. I don’t know if I still have it. Do I? I do. I remember where it is. Want to see it?

Yeah. I don’t remember his face, obviously. It’d be nice to look at the photo while you tell me the rest.

His dad disappears into the bedroom for a few minutes, beer in hand, and comes back holding an old photograph with scalloped edges. The black and white image shows a bearded man wrapped in a sheepskin, sitting on a bench beside a kitchen table, starting to raise the straw of a gourd of maté to his lips, looking kind of sideways at the camera, unhappy about being photographed. He is wearing leather boots, bombacha pants, and a sweater with a pattern of squares on it. There is a supermarket calendar with a picture of Sugarloaf Mountain on the wall, and the light is coming from up high, from louver windows that are partially out of frame. There is nothing written on the back.