Blood-drenched Beard : A Novel (9781101635612) (35 page)

A little farther along, the trail is suddenly interrupted by a large boulder. Looking closer, he sees that there is a low passage under the boulder, low enough to force a man to stoop. Around this opening is a small bamboo portal. He stands there listening for a time, but all he hears is rain. He turns off the flashlight. A very tenuous, almost undetectable light leaks through the opening. He stoops and enters.

He stands up inside a kind of rocky antechamber weakly lit by the same light he could see from the trail. On his right is a natural opening invaded by the branches of a tree and partially covered with a wavy sheet of asbestos. A narrow vertical opening leads to another section of the cave. He turns on the flashlight and shines it around a little. At the back is a large turtle shell.

The dog finally decides to enter and, after adjusting to her new surroundings for a few moments, starts to growl. He shines the flashlight on the opening, turns, and passes through it with two sideways steps.

The old man is facing him, watching, sitting on what appears to be an old rocking chair covered with sheepskins, his arms lying on the armrests. The light of a gas lantern hanging on a rock wall immediately reveals the size of the cave but hides its details in the shadows. The old man's gray beard hangs halfway down his chest. He still has a few strands of white hair on the sides of his head. He has a broad face, narrow nose, and deep-set eyes. He is a tall man who has shrunk. His faded and tattered pants, vest, and wool jacket must have been elegant when new. The intensity of his cadaverlike figure is reinforced by the presence of a young mulatto woman, who can't be any more than twenty years old, sitting on a stool close to him, slightly behind the rocking chair. She is wearing a kind of knitted robe in a sandy tone and a diamond tiara that can only be a plastic imitation of the real thing. One of her arms is resting lightly on the old man's shoulder. The two of them stare at the intruder with the same stony gleam in their eyes.

Good evening, he says, pushing back his hood.

The old man turns his head a little like a curious dog and wrinkles his forehead. His bushy eyebrows are gray like his beard, and his skin looks like a leather bag with centuries of use.

The woman's eyes widen suddenly, and she looks frightened. She whispers something in the old man's ear, and he raises his right hand to the height of her face, requesting silence. Then he whispers something in her ear. She gets up, takes a few steps to a dark recess toward the back of the cave, and speaks to someone.

The roof of the cave is an enormous slab of slanting rock that is some ten feet at its highest point and almost touches the ground at its lowest. The cave is dry and warm, and there is a blue tarpaulin sealing an upper corner. Near him, an upright log serves as a table for a perfect sphere of granite about the size of a soccer ball. A flash of lightning reveals two openings, one on his right that leads into the forest, and another behind him, which he figures is the direction of the valley and ocean, but the two or three flares of light that are gone in an instant are not enough for him to identify the third person that the woman just spoke to. The cave dwelling has a clean, mineral smell. He can't detect the smell of people living there. A puddle of water is forming at his feet.

I'm sorry, I'm getting everything wet.

The old man leans forward slightly and summons him closer with his index finger. The rocking chair creaks. He can hear Beta growling in the antechamber. She must be afraid to squeeze through the opening.

He walks three steps closer to the old man. Behind him and the mulatto woman, a girl of about thirteen, with white skin, tangled black hair and a feral look, gets up. She stares at him with uneducated eyes as she listens to instructions muttered by the woman. In the recess from which she has just risen, he can now see another girl, blond and bigger than the first, curled up on a bed of mats and cushions. She has just woken up and rubs her eyes, trying to understand what is going on. The mulatto woman returns to exactly the same position on the stool by the old man, her smooth arm touching his shoulder like a dancing partner's. Her nails are manicured. The wild-looking girl who has just risen goes farther back into the cave to a tiny kitchen, where there are shelves laden with jars and tins and a hotplate perched over a wood-fired oven of stone. The orange and violet embers are still lightly pulsing. She places a teapot on the hotplate.

What do you want with me? says the old man.

It is his father's voice.

I just wanted to meet you.

Have you come to take me away?

No, I've just come to see you. I'm your grandson.

Are you, now? The old man gives an amused snort. How interesting.

He leaves the flashlight turned off on the log next to the sphere of granite and starts taking off his backpack. The old man tenses.

I'm just going to get something out.

He rummages around until he finds the little mirror. It is cracked all over, and the image he sees of his own face is a completely disfigured mosaic. The old man laughs again, more heartily this time, as he runs his hand over his face and beard, trying in vain to remember what he looks like.

I've doubted my image in the mirror, the old man says, but this is the first time my image has doubted itself.

The old man looks serious again. His bare, gnarly feet tap the hard earth floor a few times. The wild girl brings a clay mug of some kind of tea and hands it to the mulatto woman, who in turn places it in the hands of the old man. He noisily sips a little of the hot liquid and hands the mug back to the mulatto woman.

He puts the broken mirror back into his backpack, pulls out his wallet, opens it, and takes out the photograph of his grandfather. The beard is gray, and the man is smaller, shrunk to half his size, but it can only be him. He hands the photograph to the old man. In the meantime, the dog has finally decided to squeeze through the opening. She faces the rocking chair and starts to growl.

The old man doesn't notice the dog. He has stopped laughing and is staring at the photograph. His eyes jump a few times from the picture to the face of the younger man in front of him, and his expression slowly transforms into something more perplexed and threatening. He finally places the photo on his lap and signals for him to come even closer.

He approaches. The mulatto woman gets up from her stool and takes a step backward.

The old man raises his skeletal hand to his face, and he notices that his little finger and ring finger are missing. His remaining fingers are soft and warm, and they trace his cheeks, nose, and eyes. The old man draws his hand back and looks confused.

Are you real?

Yes. I'm your grandson.

The old man rubs his eyes, squeezes the tip of his own nose between his thumb and forefinger, and tries to look again, incredulous. He starts breathing heavily through his nose.

You didn't even know you had a grandson, did you?

You shouldn't be here.

The mulatto woman takes another step back.

I've been trying to discover what happened to you for months, Granddad. Everyone thinks you're dead. I met Santina.

This isn't right. You shouldn't be here.

The old man fidgets a little in his chair and shakes his head, repeating no, no.

The girl who was lying down sits up and looks around in alarm. Her face has some kind of deformity that is hard to make out in the dark. The mulatto woman crouches and makes the two girls lie down again.

The dog barks once, twice, three times, and only now does the old man notice her.

Dad died at the beginning of the year. Your son.

Out
.

Fine, I just—

The old man gets up from his chair and seems to unfold into a man twice as big. His right hand hangs nervously, a short distance from his body, holding a knife. The mulatto woman hugs the two girls and watches the scene over her shoulder.

There's no need for that. I'm leaving.

The old man quickly reaches to one side and turns out the gas lantern.

He manages to grab his arm in the dark but feels the knife nick his waist. He hears Beta lunge at the old man's leg. He shouts for him to stop, but it is obvious that he won't. The girls all scream at the same time and then play dead. He and the old man fall onto the rocking chair and then the kitchen shelves. The embers in the stove are the only source of light in the cave, and he tries to push his grandfather in that direction. The old man doesn't make a sound, just keeps his bony body tensed and keeps attacking tirelessly like a banana spider trying to catch its prey so it can fill it with venom. He manages to shove him onto the hotplate, breaking free of his clutches for long enough to charge toward what he believes to be an exit. He gropes the walls of rock but can't find the opening he came through. A sliver of lightning illuminates the other two openings in the cave, and he throws himself through the closest one. He finds himself on a small promontory, which must offer a view of the valley during the day but is now no more than a parapet to nothing. Afraid the old man will come after him and attack him at any second, he takes off running and tripping down the slope without seeing anything in his path until he runs into the fence and jabs his hands and thighs on the barbed wire. He cries out in pain and is relieved at the same time because from there he can run to the bottom of the valley, to the creek, to the beach.

After putting some more distance between himself and the cave, which makes him feel a little safer, he stops to get the knife with the armadillo-leather handle out of his backpack but realizes that he's left the backpack behind along with the dog. Her name sticks in his throat. Calling out will reveal his whereabouts. The adrenaline is slowly metabolized, and his instinct to flee is replaced with paralysis. He wants to go back to find Beta but doesn't know where he is anymore. The sound of the sea reverberates against the walls of the valley. He touches the place where he felt the knife tear his skin, on the right side of his stomach, and has the impression that it hasn't done too much damage. But it hurts. He starts walking, heedless of the direction, so as not to stay still while he tries to decide what to do, and slips down a small bank and falls into the creek. The direction of the small current allows him to deduce the approximate location of the sea and the sides of the valley. The couple in the tent have a gas lantern. They must have a knife, another flashlight, maybe even a cell phone. He clambers up the slope, praying for more lightning, tugged at by reason on one side and fear on the other. He has the constant impression that the dog has caught up with him, and it is only now, as he reaches the trees on the ridge, that his companion's absence starts to sink in. Finally he works up the courage to shout.

Beta!

He shouts a few times with his hands on either side of his mouth. His calls are lost in the invisible valley.

He keeps looking for the tent among the trees. He can see better with his eyes closed, as if surprised at night by a blackout in his own home. The baby's crying has stopped, or maybe he isn't where he thinks he is. He calls the couple's names, but there is no reply. The trees start to thin, and he picks up his pace in the hope of finding some reference point under the open sky.

A flash of lightning illuminates the cliff, his foot stepping into the void and a stormy sea that is chaos itself extending out on all sides. When everything goes dark again, he is still beginning to fall, and it is only in the middle of the descent that he realizes what is happening. He thanks the lightning. He almost died unseeing, like a blind man. Or perhaps the vanity of death knows no limits, he thinks, and even to the blind, it reveals itself at the last instant so that they'll think about it as it happens. On his way down, the vision of the vortex of waves and foam that will swallow him is emblazoned in his mind with hyperreal clarity, the ocean that he so adores showing its most private and destructive facet, revealed to few men. When he is about to hit the water, he closes his eyes tightly, as one inevitably does when diving.

In the water there is no indication of the ferocity he had glimpsed on the surface. His body is already decelerating when he arrives at the slippery-smooth rocks on the seafloor, and he becomes aware that he is suspended in the muffled murmur of the cold sea, softly rocked by the current. He had learned from his older brother how to duck under the big waves to get past the wave break. No matter how big the wave, Dante had taught him, dive down close to the ocean floor, and swim toward it as fast as possible. The wave will suck you under it, and you'll come out the other side when it breaks. If you try to swim back, it'll come crashing down on your head. If you try to dive into it too near the surface, it'll pick you up and toss you into the blender. You'll break your back or get sliced up by the corals. His brother was already a good surfer as a kid, but he didn't like surfboards himself. He preferred swimming. The first thing he does now, instinctively, before trying to return to the surface, is study the forces of the water until he can say with some certainty in what direction the waves are breaking. He swims a few strokes in the opposite direction to the waves, comes up for air, and returns to the bottom, trying to avoid being dashed against the rocky headland.

The bottom is silence. The water is protective and slows time.

But the surface is hell. Trails of foam appear on all sides, covering his head, and salt water runs down his throat. He grows breathless, freeing himself of the running shoes and jacket that are restricting his movements. He can't see the moon or stars or anything else that might help him get his bearings. His body is lifted up to the crest of waves and then sucked down to the bottom of troughs, and he can't make much out beyond this rise and fall. The clash around him involves familiar natural forces, but there is no easily perceived arena for it. He is an insignificant piece of meat, adrift.

The first flash of lightning after the fall doesn't illuminate anything besides a large uniform cloud that covers the entire dome of the sky and contrasts with the black horizon. He needs to choose a direction and swim parallel to the coast until he comes to a beach. The salt stings his eyes. The strength of his arms seems useless against the violence of the waves, but he knows it isn't true and that if he takes the right current and swims in the right direction, he'll be able to get away from the headland and make it to the sand, even though it may take hours. For the first time he is calm enough to detect the cold that is working its way deeper and deeper into his body. He needs to establish the right pace, which will keep his body warm and allow him to continue swimming for however long is necessary.