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.