Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  Lying face down on the warm roof of the gunboat, carried along by the river and hypnotized by its immense labyrinth of arms and channels, Elaine abandoned herself to a delightful drowsiness. Soothed by the absolute calm of the Pantanal—though the previous evening Petersen had assured her that the wind and floods could set off huge waves on this glossy plain—she played a game of focusing, as if with a camera, on various images in the exuberance of the virgin forest. The blood-red splash of a pair of parrots in flight, the delayed take-off of a white heron, very high up on the top of a tree, the gap-toothed smile of a naked child, squatting behind his father in the pirogue gliding along the riverbank, an unmoving swirl of yellow mud right in the middle of the river … And each time she made a little click with her tongue, taking delight in the fact that she hadn’t thought of bringing her camera: for one second later the parrots set off a flight of budgerigars in a cacophony of vivid greens and screeches; the white heron suddenly opened its wings like flapping sails and gave a long cry, its neck stretched out toward the sun; the kid’s smile vanished; when he saw her, his father, with a feverish look, paused in his paddle stroke; the wake of the boat released the clawed skeleton of a tree stump that had been held up in its journey to the south. Even a camera would have misrepresented these free images of the River Paraguay by isolating them from their coexistence with all the other observed moments. Eléazard would approve, she thought, he who made it a matter of principle never to capture anything on film.

  Elaine closed her eyes, lulled by the regular throb of the engine. Suddenly she felt once more the extreme weariness that, one day, had alienated her from Eléazard. There was nothing specific that had motivated her departure, unless it was her final survival reflex that had compelled her to flee a man being slowly but surely killed by his cynicism. Eléazard was being eaten away by his excessive clarity about people and things. She was angry with him because he didn’t believe in anything anymore, not even in his own abilities. His dissertation on Kircher had long since been abandoned, his desire to write anything other than dull agency dispatches had long since withered, and if he still seemed to be interested in what was going on in the world, it was simply in order to make a list of its defects. How often had he mocked her for claiming to understand it, to define the laws by which it operated? She thought she could still hear him: ‘Science is just one ideology among others, neither more nor less effective than any of its fellow ideologies. It just works on different areas but misses the truth by as wide a margin as religion or politics. Sending a missionary to convert the Chinese or a cosmonaut to the moon is exactly the same thing: it derives from the same desire to govern the world, to confine it within the limits of doctrinaire knowledge that each time presents itself as definitive. However improbable it might have appeared, Francis Xavier went to Asia and really did convert thousands of Chinese; the American, Armstrong—a soldier, by the way, if you see what I’m getting at—trampled the old lunar myth underfoot, but what do these two actions give us, apart from themselves? They don’t teach us anything, since all they do is confirm something we already knew, namely that the Chinese are convertible and the moon tramplable … Both of them are nothing more than the same sign of men’s self-satisfaction at any given moment in history.”

  One day she couldn’t bear these cracks in the blind wall of certainties any longer. Alcântara had come to seem like the exact reflection of Eléazard: a heap of contagious ruins she had to get away from at all cost. She felt herself threatened by her husband’s morbid interest in that sad failure, Athanasius Kircher. That was what she had fled from, that insidious sense of abandonment. Divorce had doubtless been going too far, but it had been a necessary step on the way to breaking once and for all the spells that kept her captive, to be alone, in tune with life, with the very ordinary happiness at being alive.

  The noise of the engine stopped abruptly. As the boat continued to drift along in silence, Elaine could hear the clamor from the aviary of the jungle. From her post she watched Yurupig go to the prow and release the anchor chain. For a moment the clatter of the links halted the chatter of the invisible monkeys on the bank. Herman Petersen appeared on deck, carrying a bucket and a basket.

  “What’s up?” Dietlev asked, a look of concern on his face. “Some problem with the engine?”

  “Nothing to get worried about, amigo. It’s just that night falls quickly and round here it’s not a good idea to keep going in the dark. We could have gone for maybe an hour, but we wouldn’t have been sure of being able to anchor. And anyway, there isn’t a better place for dourados on the whole river.”

  “What are they, dourados?” Mauro asked.

  “Salmidus brevidens,” Dietlev replied immediately, as if it was obvious. “A kind of golden salmon that can weigh up to forty-five pounds. I had some last year, it’s delicious.”

  “To work, then,” said Herman, taking several lines out of his basket. “If you want some for supper, now’s the time to show what you can do.”

  “Can I try?” Elaine said from up on her perch.

  “But of course, senhora. I was wondering where you’d got to.”

  “I have to tell you,” she said as she came down on deck, “I’ve never fished before.”

  “It’s easy, I’ll show you,” said Herman. “That’s the bait,” he added, pointing at the bucket. “Piramboias, there’s nothing better.”

  Elaine came to look. She shrank back slightly when she saw the short, compact creatures it was teeming with. “Snakes?” she said with a look of disgust.

  “Almost. But you’d better not stick your hands in,” he said, wrapping a cloth round his hand to grasp one of the eels.

  With one slash of his knife he cut it in two and stuck one of the wriggling pieces on a hook. After having thrown it in the river, just a few yards from the boat, he handed the line to Elaine. “There you are. All you need now is patience. If there’s a tug, you pull it in; there’s nothing more to it than that.”

  “Do these things stay alive for long,” she asked, pointing with her chin at the pool of blood where the piramboia tail was still writhing.

  “For hours. They’re indestructible, that’s what makes them so attractive—no fish can resist a bit of meat like that. Especially the females …”

  He said it in suggestive tones, his dull, watery eyes fixed on Elaine’s breasts. She pretended not to hear and turned to look at the river.

  “What about you, Mauro? D’you feel like a go?”

  “Why not? I’ll try anything once.”

  “Come and get your line, then.”

  Dietlev having declined the same offer, Petersen went to fish with the others.

  They only had a few minutes to wait. Elaine suddenly had a violent bite but when she pulled in her line, it was empty—it had been cut off just above the hook. The same thing happened almost immediately to Herman and Mauro.

  “Shit!” Herman exclaimed in disgust. “Piranhas. The fishing’s over, guys. When they’re about it’s no good for catching anything else. Too greedy, the little bastards … But just a minute, my dears. Since that’s the way things are we’ll get a few for the soup. I’ll put some steel hook lengths on the lines, that’ll give them something to think about.”

  The first to have one of these, Elaine was soon struggling with a catch; the line was stretched almost to breaking point, zigzagging unpredictably through the yellow water.

  “Go on, pull,” Herman shouted, also busy trying to land a fish. “It won’t break, pull, dammit! But be careful when it’s on the deck. Let Yurupig deal with it, they can cut off your fingers, no problem.”

  Flashes of gold appeared in the disturbingly opaque river. With a great heave into which she put all her strength, Elaine brought a gleaming piranha flying onto the deck. The Indian rushed forward: two powerful blows with his club and that was the end of its convulsive twitchings she was trying awkwardly to avoid.

  “Look, belleza,” Herman said. He had just landed a piranha and had managed to get it o
n his left hand, still alive, so that Elaine couldn’t tell whether he was taking a liberty in the way he addressed her or talking about the fish. She watched as Petersen inserted the point of his knife into its prognathous jaw; the two rows of triangular teeth—truly monstrous fangs—quickly closed on the blade, several times in succession, like a little stapler. With a cracking of bone that sent shivers down her spine, and with the help of Herman levering with his knife, the piranha broke its teeth one by one on the metal.

  “After that he won’t have to go to the dentist again,” Herman guffawed, proud of his demonstration. “Just imagine what they can do under water … A shoal of them can eat up an ox in no time at all. D’you know what piranha means in Tupi-Guarani? It means ‘scissors fish.’ Not bad, eh?”

  Despite the fish’s repulsiveness, Elaine was appalled at the pointless torture Petersen was inflicting on it. She corrected herself immediately: it was oafish, obnoxious or anything you like from the catalog of human stupidity, but certainly not “pointless,” given that the word suggested there were tortures that were sometimes justified. She was about to tell Herman to stop his cruel sport when Yurupig went up to him.

  “Let go of it,” he said calmly, but in a threatening tone. “At once!”

  The two men stared at each other for a moment. Herman decided to smile as if it were nothing. “I’ll do even more than that,” he said, turning to Elaine, “I’ll let it go free. Just to please the fair lady …” And with an affected gesture, he threw the bleeding piranha back into the river.

  Yurupig turned toward the concentric circles on the surface of the water that were already becoming less distinct and, holding up the palms of his hands to the sky, muttered a few incomprehensible phrases. Having done that, he went back inside without a word.

  “I’ve got one, I’ve got one!” came a sudden shout from Mauro, who had missed the whole incident. Herman took the opportunity to turn his attention to him. When the fish was on the deck, he simply clubbed it without further ado.

  “Come on then,” he said cheerfully, “two or three more and that’ll be our soup.”

  While he was baiting more lines, Elaine went to him. “What did he say?”

  “Who?”

  “Stop acting stupid. Yurupig, of course!”

  “A load of nonsense. Indian stuff … It’s not important.”

  “He was praying for the fish,” Dietlev suddenly said solemnly. “I couldn’t understand everything, but he invoked the law of the river and asked to be forgiven the death of the poor animal.”

  “But it was still alive,” Elaine said. “I saw it swim off.”

  “That’s the worst thing about it. It was alive, but injured from the hook and incapable of catching its prey thanks to this … to this ‘gentleman.’ We can only hope the others ate it at once, otherwise it’ll spend days dying.”

  Elaine gave Herman a look of contempt, her eyes flashing angrily. “You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “So what? What does it matter? Don’t give me all that crap for a lousy fucking piranha! You’ll have to calm down a bit, the whole lot of you … Otherwise …”

  “Otherwise what?” Dietlev asked, looking him straight in the eye. “I must point out that you’ve already been paid, so it’s you who’re going to calm down, and pretty quick too.”

  Herman’s eyes seemed to clear under the impact of his rage. He said nothing, just shrugged his shoulders and turned his back on them. The saloon door slammed shut behind him.

  “I DIDN’T KNOW you could speak Tupí,” Elaine said to Dietlev after this outburst. “Where did you learn it?”

  “I can’t really speak it properly,” Dietlev said, “just enough to deal with any situation with the Indians. I did some courses at the university in Brazilia, it’s often helped me to locate a deposit or collect fossils in the back of beyond. You should think about learning it too.”

  “You’re right. I’ll see about it when we get back.”

  Yurupig’s attitude had made a deep impression on her. She only realized now that it was the first time since they’d left that she’d heard his voice. In her mind’s eye she could see a sharp image of his profile as he confronted Petersen: his copper complexion, almond eyes, slightly slanting under the bulge of his lids, a very flat nose, without any obvious cartilage but which made you feel like kneading the flesh to give it shape, and thick lips that he hardly moved when he spoke. Dressed in overalls thick with dirt and grease, he never seemed to be without a baseball cap worn back to front with a quiff of hair sticking out like a tuft of black feathers over his forehead. Elaine thought he was utterly beautiful, especially when he made his moving prayer to the piranhas.

  “What’s happened?” Mauro asked, intrigued by Herman’s abrupt departure and the look of annoyance on his teachers’ faces. Elaine told him briefly what had happened.

  “Hmm, not the best of starts, then?” he said, scratching his head. “The swine deserves to be thrown in the water himself and we’ll carry on without him.”

  “I don’t really trust him …” said Elaine, as if talking to herself. And turning to Dietlev: ‘You know what? He’s hanging around me all the time and it’s obvious why. I get suggestive remarks every couple of minutes.”

  “I don’t believe it!” said Mauro, in a blaze of anger. “That drunkard! That … that Nazi bastard!”

  “Be careful what you say,” Dietlev said firmly. “It’s only a rumor, I really ought to have held my tongue. Anyway, don’t forget that our expedition depends on him and on his boat. That goes for you too, Elaine. We’re going to be together for the next two or three weeks so we’ll have to soft-pedal a bit, all of us. I don’t know what there is between him and that Indian, but it’s none of our business.”

  “You saw how he humiliated him!” Elaine objected, outraged.

  “Yes, I did, and it’s not to his credit, but for the moment let’s not exaggerate: it was just a piranha put back in the water.”

  “That’s worst of all!” said Mauro, clenching his fists.

  “That’s enough! I don’t want to hear any more about the incident. And not a word to Milton, understood?”

  “What’s this, what’s this? Hiding things from me, from what I hear.” Milton’s voice was suddenly heard behind them. “I don’t like that, you know …”

  During a couple of seconds of guilty silence, Dietlev desperately looked for a way out of the situation, then Elaine came to the rescue. “OK, OK,” she said, with a disappointed look, “that’s our surprise down the drain. It’s a pity, but since you heard everything …”

  “What surprise?” He stifled a yawn. “Pardon me, I slept like a log. Too much wine at lunch, it’s never a good idea. So what is it you’re not to tell old Milton, guys?”

  “That we’re having piranha soup for dinner …” said Elaine, not knowing how she was going to get out of it.

  “… ?!”

  “Yes,” she went on, seized with consternation at the difficulty of thinking up anything convincing, “… and, well, Petersen maintains that piranha soup has a certain … aphrodisiac quality …”

  Mauro leapt in. “And we’d decided to do a ‘blind’ experiment, as they say,” he said, putting on an embarrassed look. “A student joke, it was my idea. We’d have come clean about it tomorrow …”

  “I see you’re enjoying yourselves behind my back,” said Milton with a chuckle. “But I can assure you I’ve no need of that kind of thing, thank God; despite my age, I’m still perfectly capable in that respect.”

  A little later, when Milton had gone off with Dietlev, Elaine thanked Mauro for his contribution. “I’d no idea how to extricate myself from the lie,” she said with a laugh. “I’m really very grateful.”

  “It wasn’t much,” said Mauro, blushing. “I surprised myself, I’m not usually known for my quick-wittedness. I’m still wondering how he managed to swallow it.”

  “The brilliant idea was to take everything on yourself. I have the impression he’d forgive you anything.
”

  Mauro thought over the comment for a moment. Put like that, it seemed obvious. “I don’t like him very much, you know,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, neither do I,” she replied in confidential tones. “He’s not a bad guy, but his career comes before everything and for me that’s not worthy of a scientist.”

  Mauro contemplated the river. The sun, having gone down, had set the whole sky ablaze: the giant trees stood out against docile cumulus clouds with fiery outlines. The louder and louder chirring of insects was gradually replacing the wailing of stray birds, expressing one last time their apprehension of the night. On the bank, only a few yards from the boat, furtive rustlings in the bushes kept exciting his alert senses. A burst of exultation, inexplicably combined with a feeling of sadness, loosened his tongue. “On the other hand, I like you very much,” he said to Elaine, without daring to look at her. “Well, a lot, I mean …”

  Moved by this disguised avowal, Elaine ruffled his hair, as she would have done to Moéma in similar circumstances. And at the very moment when, both delighted and offended by this disconcerting response, he felt her hand in his hair, they heard for the first time the hoarse double cry of the caymans.

  HALF-STRETCHED-OUT on his bunk, his back against the metal wall of the cabin, Herman Petersen tried to grab the bottle of cachaça he’d been making every effort to finish for what would soon be two hours; just the attempt set a dizzying rotation of his field of vision in motion and, seeing the storm lantern swirling around him for no good reason, he accepted that he was drunk. Resisting the desire, irrepressible though it was, for another swig, he closed his eyes in the vague hope it might stop his head spinning. The images continued to harass him.