Where Tigers Are at Home
Page 13
“You’re as crazy as he is,” Eléazard said, disarmed by this reasoning. “And why do you insist on calling him Xangó?”
“It’s his real name,” she said with a stubborn look, “he told me himself. He doesn’t like the one he’s been given at all. Come, I’ll bandage that for you. That kind of thing can be dangerous, you know.”
Eléazard gave in, overcome by the girl’s touching naïveté, Brazil really was a different world.
“You got back late yesterday,” she said, pressing some cotton wool soaked in alcohol on the wound.
“That hurts! Be gentle now.”
“Gentle doesn’t get you anywhere,” she said, giving him a strange look, a mixture of sweet revenge and irony. “The disinfectant has to get to the bottom of the wound. What’s her name?”
“… Loredana,” he said, after a brief pause of surprise at her perspicacity. “She’s Italian. But how do you know?”
“My little finger told me. Is she beautiful?”
“Not bad. That is, yes, curves in all the right places. She’s got a superb ass,” he added to provoke her a little.
“You’re all the same,” said Soledade as she finished wrapping the Band-Aid round his finger. “But when you go fishing at night, all you catch is eels.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know what I mean. Right, there, that’s done. I’ll go out and do the shopping.”
“Get a bit more in than usual, we might have a guest.”
Soledade nodded like the parrot and gave him a black look.
“Si senhor,” she said, mimicking absolute servility. “But I warn you, don’t expect me to serve at table, O meu computado não fala, computa!”
God knows where she heard that, Eléazard thought as he went back to his study. Spoken in a tone of contempt, it was a sentence that could be understood differently depending on the stress on the last word, either “My computer doesn’t speak, it computes,” or: “My computer doesn’t speak with puta” (i.e., whores). He certainly felt that Soledade was a bit too free and easy, but he liked the pun and tried unsuccessfully to translate it into French in a way that retained its marvelous concision.
Then he immersed himself in Caspar Schott’s manuscript. Rereading his notes on the computer, he decided they were too succinct and slightly prejudiced. The problem was to know whom they were aimed at: an academic familiar with the seventeenth century would doubtless consider them adequate but an ordinary reader wouldn’t find enough in them to satisfy his curiosity fully. But how far should he go? He felt he had so much to say about Kircher’s century, to his mind one of the most notable since Antiquity, that he could easily double or even triple Schott’s text with his notes. As for his prejudice against the man himself, that was something new, resulting entirely from his conversation with Loredana. There was a happy medium to be observed between unquestioning praise and systematic hostility, a balance in which his rancor toward Kircher was muzzled in the right way.
Still stormy, the weather was piling all the sadness of the world on Alcântara. Eléazard wondered whether Loredana would come and see him that morning, as she had promised. The woman was pretty unique of her kind. Now he remembered the night in the Caravela as something intense and poetic, one of those he would like to revive in his life. If she should come that day, he would offer her a genuine apology and tell her how much he wanted her friendship. He found himself imagining her in the alley she would have to go down to come to his house. Impatient, almost anxious, he watched out for her like a teenager on his first date.
I’m like an old child, he told himself with a smile. It’s Moéma who’s right. Down to work, then. In his archives—he’d have to get round to cataloging them one of these days—he’d finally managed to find the article by François Secret that had been missing since he’d edited the notes to chapter three. Secret, what a name for someone who’d devoted his life to hermeneutics! It was enough to make you think surnames could sometimes determine the destiny of those who bore them. Having said that, the study in question, A forgotten episode in the life of Peiresc: the magic sabre of Gustavus Adolphus, did not do much for Kircher since, in the light of the writings of George Wallin, it proved that the sabre he had examined was false. To make matters worse, Wallin quoted De orbibus tribus aureis by the Strasbourg scholar Johannes Scheffer, a book in which Kircher was accused of total ignorance in matters of interpretation for having talked of magic characters when, out of malice, someone had shown him what were merely samples of the Danish language. Of course, as thoroughgoing antipapists, Wallin and Scheffer were trying to rehabilitate Gustavus Adolphus and, through him, Protestantism as a whole; their accusation, along with many other similar ones, cast doubt on the Jesuit’s competence. And this all the more so since his attempts at deciphering the hieroglyphs ended, unquestionably to our eyes, in abject failure.
Eléazard wondered how a person could be so blind. Without being able to say why, he was convinced that Athanasius Kircher had never knowingly cheated. If he could be accused, for his part, of supporting the cause of the Counter-Reformation with a white lie, that motive did not come into question for the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It followed, therefore, that the man must either have been deceiving himself—by autosuggestion? out of madness?—about his abilities or have taken Machiavellianism and a love of fame to a point where it became truly monstrous.
Eléazard edited the note relating to the “magic” sword then continued with the task of putting the text on the computer. He could not, however, stop himself from going to look out of the window from time to time, on the pretext of smoking a cigarette.
Toward ten Soledade came back from shopping with the mail and the newspapers she had gone to collect from the first boat. There was nothing of interest in the dailies. Always the same reports on murders or muggings more or less everywhere in the big cities, all largely drowned in the slush of articles on football, pop singers, provincial social events and ministerial bombast. A VASP plane crashing in the mountains near Fortaleza was the front-page news. Nada restou!—”Nothing left!”—was the expressive summary in one headline. “A hundred and thirty-five dead and two babies” proclaimed another with involuntary cynicism, as if the fact of having avoided the adult sufferings of human beings meant the babies did not have the right to be counted among the dead. There followed, in order, the usual photos to tickle their readers’ taste for blood and gore, a description of the pillage of the wreck before the rescue party arrived, and posthumous praise for the crew.
Eléazard’s attention was drawn by the plundering of the airplane: one more symptom in the long list he kept faithfully up to date. Two months previously several hundred destitute youths had left the favelas of Rio and poured onto the well-known Copacabana beach. They had cleaned out the place to such an extent, leaving the practically naked tourists to get on with their tan, that they had been dubbed grilos, “the locusts.” More or less all over the country gangs were getting together to rob banks, supermarkets, hotels and even restaurants. In the filthy and overfull jails the prisoners were rebelling in such large numbers that the police had started shooting on sight. Every time they were called in it ended with dozens of dead. Corruption had spread to the highest levels of the state and while the mass of people was getting poorer by the day, suffering an alarming resurgence of diseases such as leprosy, cholera and bubonic plague, a tiny number of the nouveaux riches could watch their assets grow in the Miami banks. Brazil, as they say of white dwarfs, was collapsing in on itself and no one could say what “black hole” would be the result of the implosion.
Day after day Eléazard kept sending this prognosis of disaster to his news agency but the old world was too preoccupied with the symptoms of its own breakdown to feel sympathy for the misfortunes of a nation that neither the media nor international travel had managed to bring close to it. Without being pessimistic by nature, Eléazard was starting to have his doubts about the future. Following successive breakups, Europe was becoming
volatile to the extent that it was beginning to resemble the continent that had been torn apart by the Thirty Years’ War. Even worse, actually, since in those days the religious dissension was limited to Catholics against Protestants. And even if the current upheavals should be interpreted as announcing a radical metamorphosis of the West, what could be seen of it at the moment was hardly something to get enthusiastic about.
Eléazard was feeling depressed. He lit a cigarette and was about to read his mail when a voice made him start.
“Eléazard?”
It was Loredana.
“My apologies,” she said, blushing, “the front door was open wide and since no one answered, I took the liberty of coming up.”
“And quite right too,” he said, disturbed by her sudden appearance. “I … I’ve gone native. What the locals do is to clap their hands to announce their presence. It’s more effective than knocking on the door, especially when they’re always open. But please sit down.”
“Isn’t he beautiful!” she said, noticing the parrot. “What’s his name?”
“Heidegger …”
“Heidegger?!” she said with a laugh. “You don’t do things by halves, do you! Hi, Heidegger. Wie geht’s dir, schräger Vogel?”
Reacting to its name, the parrot shook its feathers, puffing out its crop, and uttered the only words it knew.
“What’s he saying?”
“Nonsense. The man who gave him to me, a German friend, had tried to teach him a line by Hölderlin: ‘Man’s dwelling is poetic’ or something like that, but it didn’t work. The stupid bird insists on repeating that ‘Man’s swelling his pointed dick,’ and there’s no way of making him correct it.”
“But why would you want to correct him?” she asked with a glint of irony in her eyes. “He’s only telling the truth. Aren’t you, Heidegger?”
As she spoke, she went over to the animal and now she was scratching its neck in a gentle friendly fashion, something Eléazard had never managed to do in the five years they’d been living together. More than anything else, he found this quiet feat alluring.
SÃO LUÍS, FAZENDA DO BOI: … nothing but the indubitable present moment
When the Colonel’s limousine appeared at the entrance to the fazenda, the guard acknowledged it with a nod of the head as it went through and hurried to close the heavy wrought-iron gate behind it. Then he telephoned the butler to tell him the master was about to arrive home.
The Buick drove silently along the newly asphalted three-mile drive leading to the Governor’s private residence. Through the smoked-glass windows Moreira watched the green expanse of the fields of sugar cane pass, darkly gleaming in the twilight. The long stalks had benefited from the rain and grown even more—twice the height of a man, he thought proudly—and it promised to be a fine harvest, even if it only brought in a supplementary income. He kept this crop out of sentimentality, in memory of a time that had made the reputation and fortune of his family, and enjoyed watching the canes grow to maturity every year. They could reach a height of as much as sixteen feet and he never looked at them without seeing them as the jungle of giant beans they had represented when he was a child. But the days of fairy tales and of agriculture were long gone. He had preferred to invest his money in mines and prawn fishing, while pursuing the political career his ambition demanded. Of the huge stretches of arable land bequeathed him by his father he had agreed to lease a few plots to some ignorant matutos, still in thrall to their out-of-date customs, less for the rent they paid—those peasants were more cunning than foxes and stole from him without batting an eyelid!—than for the sight of them, when he was out on his horse, bent over in his father’s fields. The rest of his property was left lying fallow or used for raising cattle. Like the country squires who were his ancestors, he prided himself on not eating anything that did not come from his own estate.
The Governor closed his eyes. The vision of his land worked like an analgesic, dispelling the tiredness of the day as he came closer to the fazenda. His sense of well-being would have been complete were it not for the prospect of seeing his wife’s sullen face and having to deal with her regular hysterical fits brought on by alcohol. She hadn’t been the same since Mauro had gone off to university in Brazilia. Or perhaps since Manchete had published that photo of a tipsy “Governor Moreira,” shirt undone, nibbling the breast of a second-rate dancer? Carnival fever, the cocktails at the education offices and the stupid challenge of Sílvio Romero, the minister of public works … Yet he had explained the circumstances that had led to his behavior to his wife. At the time she had pretended to understand, to pardon his infidelity and the humiliating scandal that had ensued, but that same evening she swallowed a whole tube of Gardenal with her whiskey. They’d just managed to save her. Menopause problems, it happens more often than you think. Be patient with her, Governor, it’ll only last a few months … Too optimistic, as always, Dr. Euclides, the business had been going on for three years now and the annoying thing was that it was getting worse. Recently Euclides da Cunha had had the idea of advising them to undergo psychoanalytic couples therapy! Not a bad idea for her, certainly, but what was it to do with him?! The doctor was getting old, he’d have to think about consulting someone else. Discreetly, of course.
The Buick had stopped by the flight of steps leading up to the fazenda. The liveried chauffeur came around the car to open the door but the Colonel stayed on the seat for a few moments, contemplating the white façade of the family home, a dreamy look on his face. In the classical style—Moriera maintained, without a shred of evidence, that it had been built to a plan by the French architect, Louis Léger Vauthier—the house was like a little palace. Flanked by two symmetrical wings linked by a covered gallery, the main building had a balustraded upper floor and a triangular pediment. Coming out toward the steps, an imposing portico with three arches emphasized the seigniorial aspect of the building. Lengthened by the setting sun, the shadows of the royal palms were slanting across the pale pink roughcast of the walls, creating a harmonious geometrical network with the semicircular arches of the windows.
On the wide grass borders with their elegant groves of hibiscus, acanthus and laurels, the sprinklers suddenly started their staccato operation, sending out their fine, swirling spray over them. The Colonel checked his watch: seven thirty precisely. Order and progress! The Fazenda do Boi looked good, an image of the opportunities offered by Brazil, the symbol of a success that was open, as in North America, to the lowliest of its citizens, provided they believed in their country more than in their gods and worked to combat Nature’s irrepressible tendency to disorder. What his father had done and his father before him, and what he was doing, in his own way, even more than his forefathers.
“Tell the gardener to mow the grass,” he suddenly said to the chauffeur, who had remained standing stiff, his cap in his hand, beside the portal. “I want a proper lawn, not a meadow.”
Without waiting for a reply, he got out of the car and went up the white stone steps leading to the main entrance.
Ediwaldo, the butler, was there to greet him as he entered the vestibule. “Good evening, sir. Have you had a good day?”
“Exhausting, Ediwaldo, exhausting. If you knew the number of problems I’m supposed to sort out in this state and the number of imbeciles who get together to complicate matters every time they’re in danger of getting a bit too simple …”
“I can imagine, sir.”
“Where is Senhora Moreira?”
“In the chapel, sir. She wanted to collect her thoughts before dinner.”
The Governor’s lips pursed in annoyance. That fucking chapel! Another way of avoiding me … She who never used to set foot in it … Fucking God, dammit! Fucking shit of a woman!
“Has she been drinking?”
“A little too much, sir, if you’ll forgive me saying so.”
Ediwaldo saw the Governor’s jaw set. He hurried to strike a match under the cigarillo that had suddenly appeared between his lips.
“Cutty Sark, as usual?”
“As usual, Ediwaldo, as usual.”
The Colonel slowly climbed the marble staircase leading to the second floor. On the landing he avoided looking at his own reflection in the large baroque mirror with the deep vista of golds and crimson velvet of the reception rooms; purring, with a noise like a crackling fire, a jaguar came crawling toward him.
“Jurupari, my beauty! Juruparinha …” he said lovingly, abandoning his hand to the animal, which licked it eagerly. “Come, querida, come, my lovely.”
Moreira sank back into an ornate sofa—jacaranda wood, arms carved with passion fruit and star fruit, all bought at an exorbitant price from an antiques dealer in Recife. The jaguar had put its front paws on his knees to let him stroke its neck, eyes closed, quivering with pleasure. “Yes, carinha, yes … you’re the loveliest … the most powerful …” Nothing moved him like the taut muscles under its tawny coat, hypnotic, speckled with eyes fixed on him alone. In its universe there are no names, there’s no past, no future, nothing but the indubitable present moment. To think that it needed an Argentine to write that, to tell the truth about wild animals … His fingers could feel the warm gold of the collar in the animal’s fur and, thinking of Anita’s receptive thighs, her secret bush, he put one hand to his nostrils to try and bring back a memory.
Its spine suddenly twisting in a spasm, its ears flattened, the jaguar raised its head, turning its yellow eyes toward one of the drawing-room doors.
“Now, now, Jurupari. Calm down, calm down,” Moreira said, keeping a firm grip on its collar. “It’s only my aperitif.”
“Yes, sir, of course, sir, will that be all, sir?” came his wife’s slurred voice.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Moreira, turning toward her. “But what …”