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.
Thank you, she recites.
What about you, Gaudério’s grandson? What brought you to these parts?
I decided I wanted to live by the beach after my dad died. I’m a PE teacher. I’m a running and swimming coach.
Nice, nice… this is a good place to practice a sport, isn’t it? Mascarenhas smiles without a trace of sarcasm. His watery eyes are childlike and transmit a naïveté that contrasts with his figure. He doesn’t appear to have noticed the sudden change of subject and the small talk that has taken over the conversation.
This is paradise, says Homero. If you want quality of life, there’s no better place.
The sea is the primordial soup, says Índio Mascarenhas in a loud voice. The source of all life. From the sea we come, and to the sea we return.
True, he says, to be polite. Then the two men excuse themselves and say good-bye cordially. Homero says he has matters to see to later that night, and Mascarenhas, if he understood properly, is going to take his daughter through the crowd on his shoulders to the front of the main stage so she won’t miss the start of the Claus & Vanessa concert.
SEVEN
A man in a green and black camouflage wetsuit is carrying a bag of equipment out to a yellow boat waiting in the shallow water in front of Baú Rock. Another man is sitting in the boat, also wearing a wetsuit, holding the rudder in one hand and a spear gun in the other. He heads down the steps to talk to them. They are leaving to go fishing around the reefs a mile offshore. Although he doesn’t have a full set of spearfishing equipment, he asks if he can go with them, and they say yes. He goes inside and gets his vulcanized rubber flippers, swimming goggles, a packet of cream-filled cookies, and the harpoon that Bonobo gave him. He rubs sunscreen on his face and pulls on his Speedos and an old long-sleeved T-shirt. He locks the windows of the apartment, picks his way over the rocks, and wades out to the boat. The man in the camouflage wetsuit says he’ll be cold and lends him a waterproof jacket. The motor wakes up, gurgles, and begins to rumble, propelling the boat into the green waves. He asks their names and only now discovers that the one in the camouflage wetsuit, with his local accent and round face, is Matias, Cecina’s oldest son. The afternoon sky is heavy with clouds, and the wind picks up as they draw closer to Vigia Point. Antenor, Matias’s friend from Rio Grande do Sul, with a rock-star quiff and long face, accelerates the boat as fast as it can go. It skips over the ramps formed by the waves, slapping the ocean. He grips the safety ropes tightly and wedges his feet between the floor and the inflatable sides of the boat, feeling the cold water pelt his face. Matias offers him a seasickness tablet. He thanks him but refuses. The town disappears into the distance, and it becomes increasingly evident why the bay is considered a refuge from the violence of the open sea, why sailors, shoals of fish and whales converge on that stretch of coast seeking a calm that those on the land take for granted. The waves that seemed large from a distance look mountainous on the open sea, and a feeling of abandonment sets in as the continent grows distant. Foam sprays up over the rocky faces of the headland with gusto. Soon the reefs are visible. Few rocks actually break the surface, but around them is a large area of smaller waves. Black frigatebirds glide overhead with their narrow wings and forked tail feathers, scrutinizing the ocean and diving into the water like arrows.
Antenor reduces the speed and slowly approaches the area of underwater rocks as he and Matias discuss the best place to anchor. Matias points at a place almost inside the reef. The two of them ready their spear guns, pull on flippers, secure knives in their shin supports, and put on snorkels. Matias is the first in and swims a short distance toward the reef, towing the signaling buoy behind him, before going under for the first time. It is one minute and fifteen seconds before he surfaces. Then Antenor jumps out of the boat and swims to the left, looking for a different place to fish, then dives down with the help of twenty-pound diving weights attached to his wetsuit. He watches the two men for a few minutes, feeling the rocking of the boat, then puts on his goggles and swimming flippers, much shorter than the ones used for diving, takes off his shirt, gets his spear gun, and slips into the cold sea.
When he is close to the rocks, he holds his breath, dives under and hears the tremulous symphony of the shellfish, a sound he has heard before when swimming near rocks on some beaches but never with this intensity. The clattering of the shellfish is frightening, as if billions of pinchers or teeth are chattering and reverberating in hollow caverns. His swimming goggles allow him to see only the closest rocks. The clamor ceases entirely when he raises his head out of the water, and not even the murmuring of the ocean and wind disrupt the sudden impression of silence. Two distinct worlds.
In the murky seascape of rocks and corals, he sees shellfish and some fish he can’t identify. No sign of shoals of fish, much less groupers, which is what they were hoping to find. Matias had told him to look in holes and crevices, where they like to rest. Most groupers nowadays weigh about five pounds, sometimes ten, with a lot of luck fifteen. More than twenty is a trophy. Nothing compared to what his granddad must have caught several decades earlier, when they often weighed sixty or seventy pounds. He dives down a dozen times but doesn’t see any holes or caves or groupers. He doesn’t see anything that deserves to be the target of a spear gun.
He returns to the boat, and when he comes up, he sees a storm approaching from the south, covering the hills of Ibiraquera and Rosa Beach. Matias and Antenor are still underwater, among the rocks. Their yellow buoys vanish and reappear in the rise and fall of the waves. They don’t seem concerned about the leaden clouds that are drawing near, or about the wind that is whistling louder and louder. They’re the experts. He leaves the spear gun in the bottom of the boat and dives down again. He tries to measure the depth at that point. He descends until his ears hurt from the pressure, and he can see large yellow rocks at the bottom. They must be some fifteen to twenty feet below the surface. He swims back to the reef. At some points the rocks almost reach the surface, and he is able to stand on them.
According to his dad, his granddad was able to hold his breath for three or four minutes or even more. Another diver had died of a pulmonary embolism trying to match his time. He dives under, swims around the rocks a little, checking the time on his watch, and emerges only when he starts to feel the terrifying throbbing behind his eyes that is brought on by a lack of oxygen. One minute and five seconds. On his next attempt he sees a purple octopus dragging itself along the bottom, stirring up a small cloud of sand before hiding under a rock. The duration of this dive is only forty-eight seconds. He decides to rest for a moment. The wind churns the waves. On his third attempt, he stays down for one minute and six seconds and decides to call it a day. He doesn’t have his granddad’s lungs.