Granta 121: Best of Young Brazilian Novelists

by Unknown

  What was the redhead like? You got that weakness from me.

  Dad.

  I’ll tell you in a minute why there’s a pistol on the table, all right? Christ, tchê, can’t you see I’d like to have a bit of a chat first?

  OK.

  Fuck’s sake.

  OK. I’m sorry.

  Want a beer?

  If you’re having one.

  I’m having one.

  His dad extracts himself with some difficulty from his comfy chair. The skin on his arms and neck has taken on a permanent pink tinge over the last few years as well as a texture that reminds him of chickens. He used to be up for a game of football when his elder brother and he were teenagers and was an on/off gym-goer until sometime in his forties, but since then, as if to coincide with his younger son’s growing interest in all manner of sports, he has become a firm believer in a sedentary lifestyle. He had always eaten and drunk like a horse, smoked cigarettes and cigars since he was seventeen and enjoyed cocaine and hallucinogens, which all meant that nowadays he has some difficulty dragging his bones around. Walking towards the kitchen, he passes the wall in the corridor where a dozen of his advertising prizes hang, certificates in glass and brushed metal frames, mostly dating from the eighties when he was riding high as a copywriter. In the living room there are also a few trophies on the top of a low glass-doored mahogany cabinet. Beta follows him on this journey to the fridge. The bitch seems to be as old as her master, a living totem who follows him with a silent and floating gait. His dad’s lumbering past the memories of now distant professional glory, the animal loyally behind him and the lack of meaning on this Sunday afternoon all awake in him a distress that is as puzzling as it is familiar. It’s the feeling he gets sometimes when he sees someone anxiously trying to make a decision or solve a little problem as if the meaning of life depended on it. He sees his dad is right at the utmost limit of his powers, perilously close to giving up. The fridge door opens with a moan, glass tinkles, seconds later he and the dog are coming back, with a lighter step than when they left.

  Farol de Santa Marta – it’s over near Laguna, right?

  Yes.

  They twist off the caps, the gas escapes the bottles with a disdainful pfff!, they toast nothing in particular.

  I regret not having gone more to the beaches in Santa Catarina. Everyone went there in the seventies. Your mum used to go before she met me. I was the one who started taking her south, Uruguay, places like that. The beaches up there disturbed me a bit. My dad died up there, near Laguna, Imbituba. In Garopaba.

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

  Grandad? You always told me you didn’t know how he died.

  I did?

  Several times. That you didn’t know how or where he had died.

  Hmm. Maybe I did. I think I really did.

  Wasn’t it true?

  His dad thinks before replying. He does not look like he is trying to gain time, he really is working something out, digging deep in his memory, or just choosing the right words.

  No, it wasn’t true. I know where he died, and I sort of know how. It was in Garopaba. That’s why I never enjoyed heading that way.

  When?

  It was ’69. He left the farm near Taquara in . . . ’66. He must have ended up at Garopaba about a year later. Lived there for two years, something like that, until they killed him.

  He looks at his dad and a snort of laughter escapes from his nose and the corner of his mouth. His dad looks at him and smiles with him.

  Fuck, Dad. What do you mean, they killed Grandad?

  Know what? Your smile is just like your grandad’s.

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

  His dad says that he and his grandad resembled each other not only in how they smiled, but also in much of their appearance and behaviour, that Grandad had the same nose, narrower than his own. His face was broad, eyes deep-set. The same skin colour. Says that Grandad’s drop of indigenous blood had skipped his son but turned up in his grandson. Your athletic build, says his dad, you can be sure you got that from Grandad. He was taller than you, must have been five foot eleven. Back then no one did sports like you do now, but the way he chopped wood, tamed horses, worked the fields, it would’ve put today’s triathletes to shame. Was my life too, until I was twenty. Don’t think I don’t know what I’m talking about. I worked in the fields with my dad when I was young and was amazed at his strength. Once we went looking for a lost sheep and we found the sick thing almost on the neighbour’s land, two miles from the house. I was wondering how we would get the pickup there to take the sheep home, foreseeing Dad asking me to fetch a horse, but he heaved the creature onto his back, as if it were hugging him round the neck, over his shoulders, and started walking. Those sheep weigh about a hundred pounds and you remember what the land was like out there, just hills, and the ground all stony. I was about seventeen and asked to carry it for a stretch, I wanted to help, but my dad said no, it’s sitting snug now, getting it off and on again is more tiring, let’s keep walking, the main thing is to keep walking. There’s no way I could have borne its weight for more than a minute or two anyway. You and he were cut from a different cloth. And you’ve got similar personalities. Your grandad was on the quiet side, just like you. A silent and disciplined man. He didn’t rabbit on at you. He’d only talk when he needed to and get annoyed by other people when they wouldn’t shut up. But that’s where the similarities end. You’re gentle, well-mannered. Your grandad had a short fuse. God, what an insolent old man he was! He had a well-earned reputation for drawing a knife at the slightest provocation. He’d go to a dance and end up in a fight. And to this day I don’t understand how he got into fights, because he didn’t drink much, he didn’t smoke, gamble or get involved with women. Your grandma almost always went with him and, funny thing is, she didn’t seem to mind this violent side he had. She liked to hear him play. He was one hell of a guitarist. Once my mum told me that he was like that because he had an artist’s soul but had chosen the wrong life. That he should have travelled the world playing music and letting out his philosophical thoughts – that was the expression she used, I remember it clearly – instead of working the land and marrying her, that he squandered his true calling when he was very young and then it was too late, because he was a man of strict principles and to turn back would have been an affront to his principles. That was how she explained his short fuse, and it makes sense to me too, although I never really knew my dad well enough to be sure. I just know that he’d dish out punches left, right and centre.

  Did he kill people?

  Not that I know of. Drawing a knife rarely led to actually knifing someone. He did it more to show off, I think. Nor do I remember him ever coming home wounded. Except when he was shot.

  Shot.

  He was shot in the hand. I’ve already told you that.

  True. Mangled his fingers, didn’t it?

  In one of those fights, he threw himself at a guy and the guy fired a warning shot at him but it brushed his fingers. After that he couldn’t move his pinkie and . . . whatever the fuck that one next to it is called. This was on his left hand – his fingering hand. Weeks later he picked up his guitar again and soon he was playing as well or better than before. Some people said he started playing better. I wouldn’t know. He came up with a crazy fingering technique for playing his milongas and gauderiadas. I don’t think those two fingers are needed much. What do I know. He certainly didn’t need them at all. What really did him in was when your grandma died. I was eighteen. Life was never the same again after that, not for me or him. Peritonitis.

  His dad pauses, takes a sip of beer.

  Did the two of you leave the farm after Grandma died?

  No, we stayed there a bit longer. For about two more years. But everything started to feel odd. Your grandad was really close to your grandma. He was the most
faithful man I’ve known. Unless he was really discreet and had secrets . . . but that was impossible where he lived, a small little town where everyone knew everything. All the women fell for your grandad. That giant of a man, and brave and a guitarist too. I know, because I went to the dances too and saw single and married women throwing themselves at him. My mum would discuss it with her friends too. He could have been the town’s Don Juan but he was faithful to the point of insanity. Plenty of little German blondes around there looking for some action, and wives wanting a fling. I certainly didn’t hold back. And my dad would curse me. Said I was like a pig wallowing in the mud. Have you ever seen a pig wallowing in the mud? It’s the picture of happiness. But your grandad’s morality was based on this essential idea – it was almost maniacal – that a man had to find a woman who liked him and look after her forever. He and I fought a lot because of that. I even admired it in him while my mum was alive, but after she died he carried on nurturing a pretty absurd sense of faithfulness to someone who was no longer there. It wasn’t exactly mourning, because it didn’t take long for him to start going to dances again, stirring up trouble at barbecues, playing the guitar and getting into fights. He started to drink more too. Women swarmed around him like flies around meat and gradually he let down his guard to one, to another, but mostly he stayed mysteriously chaste. It was something I will never understand. And we started to drift apart, him and me. Not exactly because of our conflicting ideas about how to deal with women. But we started to argue.

  And that’s when you went to Porto Alegre?

  Right. I went in ’65. I had just turned twenty.

  But why did you and Grandad argue?

  Well . . . I’m not sure I can explain exactly. But he saw me as a loser and a womanizer, who didn’t want anything from life and wasn’t interested in the farm, in working or in moral or religious institutions of any kind. He was right, although he exaggerated a bit. I think that at some point he had just had enough and couldn’t be bothered carrying on trying to teach me right from wrong. I wasn’t actually such a hopeless case but your grandad . . . well. One day I felt the brunt of his famous short fuse. And the upcome of it all was that he sent me away to Porto Alegre.

  Did he hit you?

  His dad does not reply.

  OK, forget it.

  Let’s say we exchanged a few blows. Oh, fuck it. None of this matters any more. Yes, he beat me. That’s all I’m saying. And the day after that he said sorry, but announced that he was going to send me to Porto Alegre and that it would be for the best. I knew Porto Alegre, having visited quite a few times, and immediately knew he was right. From the first day there I felt big. I got a vocational diploma. In a year and a half I’d opened a print shop in Azenha. I was earning good money for writing ads for shock absorbers, biscuits and residential lots. You didn’t know that life could be so good.

  He laughs.

  Now with added nuts – time to go nuts! And so on. They got worse.

  OK. But Grandad was killed.

  Right. From here on the story gets murky and I heard most of it second-hand. I’m not sure what happened, and maybe nothing specific triggered it, but about a year after I moved to the city your grandad left the farm. I found out when he called me. From abroad. He was in Argentina. In some back-of-beyond nowhere place, I don’t remember its name. He said that he just wanted to go travelling for a while, but at the end of the call he sort of led me to believe that he’d left forever, that he’d send word from time to time and that I shouldn’t worry. I wasn’t worried. I remember thinking that if he ended up dying in a knife fight in some shithole, like the Borges character in that story ‘The South’, it would be wholly fitting. It would be tragic, but fitting. Anyway. I also thought that there was bound to be a woman involved somewhere, well, a 99 per cent chance of it, there’s always a woman behind this kind of thing – and if so, that was a good thing. And over the course of the next year he only called me three more times, if I remember rightly. One of those times he was in the town of Uruguaiana. Another time he was in some small town in Paraná. Then he disappeared for about six months and when he called again he was in a fishing village in Santa Catarina called Garopaba. And although I can’t remember exactly what he said, I remember feeling that something in him had changed. There was something childish about his voice. Some of the things he said were bordering on incomprehensible. His description of the place was incoherent. I just remember one detail from the phone call: he mentioned something about pumpkins and sharks. I thought my old man had lost his faculties or, even harder to believe, had started hanging out with hippies and got his melon in a muddle with some wacky tea. But what he was saying was that he’d seen the fishermen catching sharks by throwing pieces of cooked pumpkin into the sea. The sharks ate the pumpkin and the damn stuff fermented and filled their stomachs until they exploded. And I just said, Ah, got it, Dad, great, take care, and he said bye and hung up.

  Fuck.

  And he didn’t call again. I started to get worried. Some months later, having not heard anything from him, I got on my bike one weekend, the Suzuki 50cc I had back then, and went down to Garopaba. An eight-hour trip on the BR-101 interstate, against the wind. We’re talking 1967. To get to Garopaba you had to take a dirt road for ten, fifteen miles – in some places it was just sand – and all you saw on the way were half a dozen farmers’ shacks and hills and scrub. Anyone you were lucky enough to come across was walking around barefoot, and for every motorbike or pickup you saw, you’d see five ox-drawn carts. It didn’t look like more than a thousand people lived in the village, and when you got to the beach, there wasn’t much more civilization to be seen other than one really white church on the hillside and the sheds and boats of the fishermen. Most of the houses were clustered around the whaling station and, although I didn’t see it for myself, I heard they still hunted whale from there. They were starting to cobble the main roads around the fishermen’s houses and the new square had been finished just weeks before I arrived. Small houses and farmsteads spread out around the village and it was in one of these little farms that I found your grandad, after asking around a bit. Oh, you mean the gaucho, one of the locals said to me. So I went looking for the gaucho and found that your grandad had set himself up in a kind of miniature model of the old family farm, some five hundred yards from the beach. He had an old horse, lots of chickens and a vegetable garden that now took up much of the property. He scraped together a living doing odd jobs and had made friends with the fishermen. He’d slept in a fishing shed until he found a house. I couldn’t imagine my dad sleeping in a hammock, let alone in a fishing shed with the waves hammering in his ears. But this was nothing next to his spearfishing. The locals fished for grouper, octopus and who knows what else, diving around the rocks, and people even came from Rio and São Paulo, even back then, to do this kind of fishing near Garopaba. And your grandad told me how one day he went out in a boat with one of these groups and they lent him one of those tube and mask contraptions, a snorkel, and flippers and a harpoon, and he dived down and didn’t come back up. A guy from São Paulo got terrified and jumped in to look for Dad’s drowned body at the bottom of the sea and found him at the exact moment that he was harpooning a grouper the size of a calf. That’s how they discovered that the gaucho was a natural at apnoea. He had always been a good swimmer, even in flooded rivers, but he hadn’t imagined he could hold his breath so long. You should’ve seen your grandad back then. In ’67 he was forty-five or forty-six, I can’t do the maths, but it doesn’t matter exactly, and his health was ridiculously good. He’d never smoked, would screw up his face in disgust at the idea, and he had the constitution of a criollo horse. He’d always been strong, but he’d lost some weight, and in spite of some signs of ageing, wrinkles, hair thinning and grey, and the marks of his years working in the fields, you would only need to polish him up and he’d be an ironclad athlete. His broad, solid chest. And just weeks before I arrived, a diver who was about his age, I think he was a military man
from Santa Catarina, had died of pulmonary embolism when he tried to match Dad’s dive time. I might be wrong, it’s a long time since I heard the story, but it was something like four, five minutes underwater.

  And why did they kill him?

  I’m getting there. Relax, tchê. I wanted to give you the background. Because it’s a good story, isn’t it? Oh yes it is. You should’ve seen him back in those days. It’s not normal for someone to leave one environment and fall into one that’s so different and adapt as he did.

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

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

  Please. I can’t remember his face. If I could look at the photo while you tell me the rest of the story, I’d like that.

  His dad gets up, bottle in hand, disappears into his room for a few moments and returns holding an old photograph with a serrated edge. The black-and-white image shows a bearded man, sitting on a bench beside a kitchen table, who is just starting to lift the metal straw of a gourd of maté to his lips, looking at the camera with a sideways glance, unhappy at having his photo taken. He is wearing leather boots, bombacha trousers and a woollen shirt with rectangular motifs. There’s a supermarket calendar on the wall with a photograph of Sugarloaf Mountain and the light comes from above, from louvred windows that are partially beyond the top of the photo. There is no note on the back. He gets up and goes to the bathroom. He compares the face on the photo with the face he sees in the mirror. A shiver passes through him. From the nose up, the face in the photo is a darker and slightly more aged copy of the face in the mirror. The only difference worth noting is the beard, but in spite of it, it’s like he is looking at a photo of himself.