How’s life, son?
Why the revolver? Pistol.
You look tired.
I am, a bit. I’m coaching a guy for the Ironman. A doctor. He’s good. Great swimmer, and he’s doing okay in the rest. He’s got one of those bikes that weighs fifteen pounds, including the tires. They cost about fifteen grand. He wants to enter next year and qualify for the world championship in three years max. He’ll make it. But he’s a fucking pain in the ass, and I have to put up with him. I haven’t had much sleep, but it’s worth it. The pay’s good. I’m still teaching swimming. I finally managed to get the bodywork done on my car. Good as new. It cost two grand. And last month I went to the coast, spent a week in Farol with Antônia. The redhead. Oh, wait, you never met her. Too late, we had a fight in Farol. And that’s about it, Dad. Everything else is the same as always. What’s that pistol doing there?
Tell me about the redhead. You got that weakness from me.
Dad.
I’ll tell you what the pistol’s doing there in a minute, okay? Jesus, tchê, can’t you see I’m in the mood for a bit of a chat first?
Fine.
For fuck’s sake.
Fine, I’m sorry.
Want a beer?
If you’re having one.
I am.
His dad extracts his body from the soft armchair with some difficulty. The skin on his arms and neck has taken on a permanent ruddiness in the last few years, along with a rather fowllike texture. His father used to kick a ball around with him and his older brother when they were teenagers, and he frequented gyms on and off until he was forty-something, but since then, as if coinciding with his younger son’s growing interest in all kinds of sports, he has become completely sedentary. He has always eaten and drunk like a horse, smoked cigarettes and cigars since he was sixteen, and indulged in cocaine and hallucinogens, so that it now takes some effort for him to haul his bones around. On his way to the kitchen, he passes the wall in the corridor where a dozen advertising awards hang, glass-framed certificates and brushed-metal plaques dating mostly from the eighties, when he was at the peak of his copywriting career. There are also a couple of trophies at the other end of the living room, on the mahogany top of a low display cabinet. Beta follows him on his journey to the fridge. She looks as old as her master, a living animal totem gliding silently behind him. His dad plodding past the reminders of a distant professional glory, the faithful animal at his heel, and the meaninglessness of the Sunday afternoon all induce an unsettled feeling in him that is as inexplicable as it is familiar, a feeling he sometimes gets when he sees someone fretting over a decision or tiny problem as if the whole house-of-cards meaning of life depended on it. He sees his dad at the limits of his endurance, dangerously close to giving up. The fridge door opens with a squeal of suction, glass clinks, and in seconds he and the dog are back, quicker to return than go.
Farol de Santa Marta is over near Laguna, isn’t it?
Yep.
They twist the caps off their beers, the gas escapes with a derisive hiss, and they toast nothing in particular.
It’s a shame I didn’t get to the coast of Santa Catarina more often. Everyone used to go in the seventies. Your mother did before she met me. I was the one who started taking her down south, to Uruguay and so on. Those beaches have always disturbed me a little. My dad died up there, near Laguna, Imbituba. In Garopaba.
It takes him a few seconds to realize that his dad is talking about his own father, who died before he was born.
Granddad? You always said you didn’t know how he died.
Did I?
Several times. You said you didn’t know how or where he’d died.
Hmm. I may have. I think I did, actually.
Wasn’t it true?
His dad thinks before answering. He doesn’t appear to be stalling for time; rather, he is reasoning, digging around in memory, or just choosing his words.
No, it wasn’t true. I know where he died, and I have a pretty good idea how. It was in Garopaba. That’s why I never liked going to those parts much.
When?
It was in ’sixty-nine. He left the farm in Taquara in… ’sixty-six. He must have wound up in Garopaba about a year later, lived there for around two years, something like that, until they killed him.
A short laugh erupts from his nose and the corner of his mouth. His dad looks at him and smiles too.
What the fuck, Dad? What do you mean, killed him?
You’ve got your granddad’s smile, you know.
No. I don’t know what his smile was like. I don’t know what mine’s like either. I forget.
His dad says that he and his granddad resemble each other not just in their smiles but in many other physical and behavioral traits. He says his dad had the same nose, narrower than his own. The wide face, the deep-set eyes. The same skin color. The granddad’s indigenous blood had skipped his son and come out in his grandson. Your athletic build, he says, that came from your granddad for sure. He was taller than you, about six foot. Back then no one practiced sports like you do, but the way he chopped wood, tamed horses, tilled the soil, he’d have given today’s triathletes a run for their money. That was my life too until I was twenty. Don’t think I don’t know what I’m talking about. I used to work on the land with Dad when I was young, and I was impressed by his strength. Once we went looking for a lost sheep, and we found it over near the fence, almost on the neighbor’s side, in a bad way. About two miles from the house. I was wondering how we were going to get the pickup there to take it home, already imagining that Dad was going to send me to get a horse, but he hoisted the ewe onto his shoulders, as if it were hugging his neck, and started walking. A sheep like that weighs ninety to a hundred pounds, and you remember what it’s like out there: all hills and rocky ground. I was about seventeen and asked to help carry it, ’cause I wanted to help, but Dad said no, she’s in place now. Taking her off and putting her back will just be more tiring. Let’s keep walking, the important thing is to keep walking. I probably wouldn’t have been able to bear that animal on my back for more than one or two minutes anyway. I was never scrawny, but you two are a different breed. You’re even alike in your temperament. Your granddad was pretty quiet, like you. The silent, disciplined sort. He wasn’t one for idle chatter, spoke only when he had to, and was annoyed by people who didn’t know when to shut up. But that’s where the similarities end. You’re gentle-natured, polite. Your granddad had a short fuse. What a cantankerous old man he was! He was famous for pulling out his knife over any little thing. He’d go to a dance and wind up in a brawl. To this day I don’t know how he got into so many fights, because he didn’t drink much, didn’t smoke, didn’t gamble, and didn’t mess around with other women. Your grandma almost always went out with him, and it’s funny, she didn’t seem bothered by this violent side of his. She liked to listen to him play. He was one hell of a guitar player. She once told me he was the way he was because he had an artist’s soul but had chosen the wrong life. She said he should have traveled the world playing music and letting out his philosophical sentiments — that was the expression she used, I remember clearly — instead of working the land and marrying her, but he had missed his true calling when he was very young, and then it was too late, because he was a man of principles and changing his mind would have been a violation of those principles. That was her explanation for his short fuse, and it makes sense to me, though I never knew my dad well enough to be sure. All I know is that he was forever dealing out punches and whacking people with the broad side of his knife.
Did he ever kill anyone?
Not that I know of. Producing his knife rarely meant stabbing someone. He did it more to show off, I think. I don’t remember him coming home hurt, either. Except that time he got shot.