Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) (18 page)

The third-to-last attraction of the evening, before the
pagode
music band and the much-awaited sentimental pop duo Claus & Vanessa, is the folk singer Índio Mascarenhas. The man who climbs onto the stage must be in his early sixties. He is wearing black
bombacha
pants, brown boots, a red handkerchief, and a gaucho hat. Even from afar his indigenous features and solid jaw are striking. A diagonal beam of light exposes his deep wrinkles, like scars. There is an abundance of cartilage in his broad, pockmarked nose and ears. His skin is the color of wood and looks like it is wood. There is no band, just the man and his guitar. Instead of singing, he launches into an interminable speech about his journey as an artist.

I play a different kind of music, from my part of the country, Uruguaiana. 'Round here, you folk listen to music with more of a dancy feel to it. Forgive me, but I'm more of a savage. My hat is different from yours—the brim is broader. Across the road from my house is a church, with a bar on one side and a whorehouse on the other, and I feel happy in all three places.

The audience in the square isn't very enthusiastic about Índio Mascarenhas and starts to disperse. Some teenagers start to curse him. But he is drawn to the figure of the singer and moves closer to the stage. The sob story goes on for several minutes and is self-centered and narcissistic, but it is also sincere and filled with a touching naïveté. The man claims to be tough but seems fragile and exposed. There is an ancestral purity about him. His repetitive speech doesn't come to any kind of conclusion, but he is suddenly satisfied and starts to play. His amped-up guitar is out of tune, and the volume is much higher than it should be, which distorts the sound and makes the amplifiers crackle. Índio Mascarenhas never plucks his instrument. He just strums the strings with a quick, percussive beat that never stops while the fingers of his left hand get tangled in chords that barely sustain the melody. His voice is deep and beautiful but nothing extraordinary. It is his attitude and way of playing that are hypnotic. His father used to have a lot of old records of folk music, and he grew up listening to gaucho classics, but this rustic, somewhat improvised sound is different.

After finishing his first song, as he receives a mixture of applause and booing from the remaining audience, Mascarenhas looks into the crowd and suddenly gives a start, a look of surprise on his face. The singer squints at him, then opens his eyes wide and raises his eyebrows as if he has just seen a ghost.

After the show, he sees Mascarenhas leaning on the counter of a drink stand and walks over. At close range the singer reeks of sour sweat, and it makes him feel dizzy. The singer is drinking cachaça out of a plastic cup. His wide-brimmed hat is on the counter, and his thick hair, a mixture of black and white, is greasy and stuck to his scalp. By his side is a girl of about thirteen with black hair tied up in a ponytail, big, inquisitive eyes, and indigenous features. He is talking to a short man who is also wearing
bombachas
and a brown leather jacket over a long-sleeved shirt. When he sees him approaching, Mascarenhas looks him up and down and goes back to talking to the short man in an attempt to pretend he didn't recognize him earlier. Nevertheless he stops in front of the singer and greets him. Mascarenhas's reply is accompanied by a gust of bad breath that could knock a man down, and his olfactory aggression brings back a detail of his last conversation with his father. The intervening decades apparently haven't diminished the problem at all. To make things worse, Mascarenhas is smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and chewing on handfuls of peanuts from a bowl on the counter.

I really liked your show, he says, holding out his hand.

The singer receives the compliment with his massive, rock-hard hand and smiles.

Thanks, kid.

Without further ado, in his warm voice made hoarse by an incessant regime of boiling-hot maté and hand-rolled cigarettes, Mascarenhas goes straight to the point.

Kid, you look just like a guy I met here in Garopaba many years ago.

Índio's been coming to play here since the sixties, says the short man. This guy here's got stories to tell!

Man, did you give me a fright, Mascarenhas goes on. I thought you were a ghost.

Did you think I was Gaudério?

Mascarenhas frowns and turns his head to one side theatrically. Whoa, he says, and then is unable to say anything else and eats another handful of peanuts.

I'm his grandson. My dad told me about when you met. You guys had a run-in, didn't you?

We did. A run-in, yep, we did. Well, I'll be. It's been a long time. This fair was no more than two stalls and a low stage in the church hall.

The girl tugs on Mascarenhas's sleeve.

What's up, my princess? Hey, this is my daughter. Noeli. She's a bit skittish. She's traveling with her dad, ain't ya? What do you want, my little swamp rose?

The girl asks her dad for some money to go and buy a candy apple on the other side of the square. The short man jumps in, takes a wad of notes from the pocket of his
bombachas,
and gives the girl five
reais
. She thanks him timidly and leaves holding the notes with both hands.

Go around the outside where there ain't as many people! the singer shouts. The crowd has been growing constantly since the beginning of the
pagode
concert.

What an adorable girl, says the short guy.

The kid's never left Bagé before, says Mascarenhas. She used to complain, All you do is travel, Dad! So come with me, then, I told her. Now she's been to Toledo, Cascavel, Pomerode. Today she swam in the cold ocean, and tomorrow we're going to Bom Jesus and then Amaral Ferrador. After that we have to go back 'cause she's got school.

Índio plays all over Brazil, says the short guy. He played in the Amazon at the beginning of the year, didn't you?

Yep.

We used to play together down in Uruguaiana in the seventies.

Yep. Homero here was my partner, and now he's my manager in Garopaba. One of us moved up in life, and the other one's still an artist. I'm going to die a poor old folk singer.

You were going to tell me about Gaudério.

Gaudério. So you're his grandson, are you?

Yes.

Mascarenhas takes a deep drag on his cigarette, making sparks fly, then blows the smoke through his mouth and nose.

Well, I'll be darned. After everything I've seen, the devil still manages to give me a fright. Amazing. Will you accept a drink of cachaça?

Of course.

He takes a sip of the cloudy yellow cachaça. Índio Mascarenhas pushes a shirt sleeve up over his elbow, revealing brown skin like cured leather. He shows him a sinuous scar of about two or three inches that ends in a dark keloid in the middle of his arm. Talking loudly in order to be heard over the music and subjecting him to pungent doses of the fragrance that his grandfather once defined as the smell of a dead pampas fox's ass, Mascarenhas says that it is where Gaudério's knife nicked him at the fair forty years ago. It was an ugly fight, and the only reason someone wasn't killed was because they were quickly pulled apart.

Gaudério was a charming sort who scared folk, if that makes any sense, says the singer. I was young then and stood up for myself when I had to, but your granddad really spooked me even though he was much older than me. We'd had a run-in before, at a dance in a town near the border, I'm not sure which, but I think it might have been Sant'Ana do Livramento. He thought I was competing with him for a girl, but it was all in his head. I didn't take much notice of him the first time. I'd seen even wilder horses around, but the second time, here in this square, it was different. He was a different man, he seemed possessed. It's hard to describe. I think he'd lost his mind. What do you know about your granddad, kid?

Not much. Just what my dad told me and what you're telling me now. I never met him. He disappeared before I was born. Apparently he was killed here.

I'll be darned. You really look like him. I think he was taller. But you're the bastard all over again. His spitting image.

He takes the photograph of his granddad out of his wallet and hands it to Mascarenhas. The singer flicks his cigarette butt onto the grass before taking it carefully with the tips of his fingers. A tambourine solo mixes with a noisy round of fireworks.

That's him all right. A bit different, but I'll never forget that face.

Different how?

I'm not sure. You meet half a dozen individuals in your life who make such a strong impression on you that you never forget them. People who give you the creeps. It's like there's something evil in them, but it's an evil that's only evil in the eyes of mankind, not in the eyes of nature. I remember another man like that who I met a few years back after I sang at a rodeo in São Jerônimo. Know where that is? Down around Pântano Grande, Charqueadas . . . The day after the rodeo I went to see some steers that a guy there wanted to sell to a friend of mine. The place was quite far out, in the hills. The man there said he had something to show me, a man who lived in a hut at the bottom of the valley. We rode down a craggy slope on horseback, and down at the bottom was this hut made of stone and clay, really old and beaten, almost falling apart, and in it lived an old man, hard to say exactly how old, with really wrinkled, dark skin, white hair down to his shoulders like this . . . he lived there without anything. Just a teapot and a dagger. He slept with his pigs. But the man had some money hidden somewhere nearby. I don't know if it was a fortune, but it was a lot for the old guy to have buried. He had a son who had his eye on the money, a son who'd gone to the city and was waiting for his old man to die so he could get his hands on the cash, but the guy didn't want anything to do with his son. He said he was a good-for-nothing and never wanted to set eyes on him again. He said the son had threatened to kill him and he'd been waiting for the son of a bitch to show up there for months. He had one of those turn-of-the-century derringers, falling to pieces, this big. He showed us the weapon. Rusted through. You could see it couldn't fire a bullet anymore. It looked pretty sad, but the guy slept clutching his pistol, waiting for God knows how long for a showdown with his son, living there like a wild animal. And there was something in his eye, deep in his little eyes, that you could barely see. He had small, closed, deep-set eyes, but they gave off a fury that sent shivers down your spine. And your granddad gave me the same impression. Not the first time we met. Just the second, here in Garopaba. He'd changed. Don't ask me what it was. It's the night of the world. The kind of thing that gives me nightmares.

And do you know what happened to him?

To Gaudério?

To the old man in the hut.

He died hugging his derringer and was eaten by his pigs.

Fuck.

The son found his body but didn't find his money. How about that?

And what about my granddad? Did you ever hear of him again?

I never saw him again after our fight. The next time I came here I thought it was strange that there was no sign of him. It wasn't just that he'd disappeared. No one talked about him. No one remembered. But it couldn't be true 'cause he was well known. People were lying. I don't know why. I asked, Where's that son of a bitch that sliced my arm open? I don't know who you're talking about. Gaudério. Did he leave town? Kick the bucket? I don't know who he is, they all said. When you brought the subject up, folks would suddenly go quiet.

Dad said he was killed at a dance. Someone turned out the lights, and they stabbed him to death.

Really?

That's what they told Dad at the time. He'd caused so much trouble, they decided to get rid of him. And they did it in such a way that no one would ever know who did it. Maybe that's why to this day everyone pretends that nothing happened.

Makes sense. I didn't know about that. Did you, Homero?

Nope. I've lived here for twenty-five years, and it's the first time I've heard this story. But this place is full of legends. There's even the ghost of a whale here.

But that kind of explains it, muses Mascarenhas. That could well be what happened. Especially since—

He stops.

Especially since what?

I don't know if it's worth mentioning, because I'm not sure if it happened. But someone must have told me back then, or I wouldn't have remembered it just now. It's not the kind of thing you dream up. They said Gaudério had killed a girl.

Really? Someone from here?

I don't know. It was just something that someone said. I understood that it was a young girl. She'd been found dead, and people were saying that he'd done it.

How was she killed?

Kid, I told you, I really don't know. I don't even know if it's true. But I don't think your granddad was just a thorn in the side of a few people. He may well have done something bad and had it coming, and that's how they settled the score. At the dance. But don't take my word for it. I might be wrong. That's the problem with booze. You get old and can't remember things.

He sits there thinking about it and can't say anything else. He had imagined his grandfather many ways but not as a killer, much less as a psychopath. The idea doesn't sit well in his mind, and his body rejects it.

A girl was killed a few weeks ago in Imbituba, he says suddenly. Did you hear about it?

Índio Mascarenhas and Homero look at him, then at each other, then back at him.

The guy strangled her. Then he pulled out her eyes and cut off her lips.

The singer looks at his plastic cup and downs the remaining liquid in a single gulp.

His daughter reappears with the candy apple and two
reais
in change.

Keep the change, honey, says Homero. If it's okay with your dad.

It's okay. She knows how to handle money. I give her an allowance. There's just one thing missing.