Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  “God bless you, my dear. Fishing’s not what it used to be, I can’t even feed my children anymore. And Maria’s pregnant again …”

  “They’ve got eight already,” said Moéma with an expression mingling irritation with compassion. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll give José a banana right away,” said João. “He needs vitamins after his accident.”

  “How is he?” Moéma asked as they went into the hut.

  “Not too bad. It’s almost healed over, but there are still some abscesses. Néoshina’s making him some cow-dung poultices. She says they kill off infections.”

  “You must promise me you’ll stop that and give him the tablets I brought you. Two of each, morning and evening. OK?”

  “I promise. Don’t worry.”

  A thin partition of woven palm leaves separated the kitchen from the rest of the hut. Roetgen had the time to observe the tiny seats arranged around the stove—a circle of stones on the sand—two or three smoke-blackened earthenware jugs, strips of dried fish hanging from the roof and, standing on the ground, a little rack of shelves with a can of oil and a meager stock of tins.

  All there was in the other room was a jumble of mats and hammocks slung from the branches of the framework. João cautiously went up to one of them and looked in. “He’s asleep,” he said in a whisper. “That’s better for him.”

  Snotty nosed, his skinny body naked, a baby of one or two was lying on his back, across the canvas sheet. From the elbow down his left arm was bandaged with rags sticky with suppuration.

  “You must change that, João, it’s dangerous.”

  “I know. Maria’s gone to do the washing, she’ll bring back some clean cloths.

  “What happened to him?” Roetgen asked in a low voice.

  “A pig,” João said, gently rocking the hammock.

  “All the kids play on the landfill,” Moéma explained, “even the little ones. A pig chewed his arm. Hunger makes them fierce, it’s not the first time it’s happened.”

  He felt sick, with a lump in his throat as if he’d just eaten a piece of meat his taste buds had suddenly told him was rotten. “C’est abominable,” Roetgen said. “And the pig? They didn’t … I mean, what did they do with it?”

  “And what would you do in their place?” she asked in harsh tones. “Just think a bit before you speak. Do you really believe they can afford to have qualms? Eat or be eaten, there’s no alternative.”

  NOT LONG AFTERWARD they headed back toward their hut to change. Roetgen had withdrawn into a reproachful silence; his expression somber, his eyes fixed on the Atlantic at the bottom of the lane, he abandoned himself to the surrounding desolation.

  “I’m sorry,” Moéma suddenly said without looking at him, “that was unfair of me just now, but there are some things I just can’t take. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “What should I understand?” Roetgen mumbled, still ashamed of having reacted in such a stupid way.

  “Oh come on, stop sulking … You know very well what I mean, it wasn’t you I was getting at. The fact that such situations can exist at all and no one bats an eyelid, everything goes on as usual, that’s what makes me furious. And then I can’t stop myself being annoyed with João for accepting everything that happens as inevitable. It’s stupid.”

  “He has no choice, but you’re right, you can’t do anything on your own. It’s a cliché, but no one seems to want to know nowadays. Everything is geared to make that obvious truth look old hat. It’s the same with the class struggle, resistance, trade unionism … they threw out the baby with the bathwater of Soviet communism. It was perhaps necessary in order to get things back on a sounder basis but until that happens, it stinks … it stinks to high heaven.”

  They’d reached the hut and, inviting him to go in, Moéma placed her hand on his shoulder. She increased the pressure of her fingers until he looked at her in acknowledgment of her gesture of complicity.

  “We’ll have to talk about all that some time. For now we’ll go and have a caipirinha on the beach. That’ll help us to think, won’t it?”

  A sudden twist of the head brought a whole shock of hair tumbling down and she started to rummage in her bag. “OK,” she said, taking out her swimsuit, “you’d better turn around, it’s not a sight for a teacher.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” said Roetgen, tantalized, “but since that’s the way things are, you turn around too and we can get changed together?”

  “OK.”

  They got undressed back-to-back. Less sure of himself than his jokey tone had suggested, Roetgen hurried up as if—as he noticed with amusement—he were afraid of being caught in the act. Once naked, however, he stopped, deliberately prolonging the erotic sensation of being naked back-to-back with a young woman who was also undressed. His tacit promise not to turn around gave way beneath the growing weightlessness of his penis and its untimely twitching; without moving his chest, he took a quick glance and was surprised to see his reflection caught in the mirror of a symmetrical movement. Moéma’s mocking eyes left his and slowly went down, lingered. “Not bad, for a teacher,” she said with a smile. “What about me?”

  With both hands, she gathered up her mane, uncovering the back of her neck. The pose brought out her small, white breasts, with the pallor of flesh, he thought, that has been too long compressed, and the contrast with her skin, tanned everywhere else, made her even more desirable. Her frail, gauche body—you could almost call it prepubescent—had the gracile curves of an Eve by Van der Goes.

  “It’ll do,” said Roetgen, making every effort to maintain the relative propriety of his posture, “for a student, of course.”

  PUTTING ON THEIR swimming things was the work of a moment.

  “You didn’t bring any sandals?” Moéma said in concerned tones when they were ready to go out.

  “No. I like walking barefoot.”

  “It’s my fault, I should have told you. It’s not really advisable here because of the filth all around the village. And then there’s the bicho-do-pé …”

  “What’s that when it’s at home?” Roetgen laughed.

  “A minuscule worm, a parasite, if you prefer. The female gets under your skin, through the pores on your toes, and digs tunnels as it goes deeper. If you don’t spot them right away it can be very difficult to get them out; especially since they lay eggs and—”

  “Stop!” said Roetgen, with a look of revulsion. “And does this thing hurt?”

  “Sometimes it itches a bit, that’s all. But they can pass on an awful lot of diseases.’ Seeing genuine uncertainty in his expression, she hastened to reassure him: ‘Don’t worry, I get some every time I come here and I’ve never caught anything. The important thing is to pick them off as quickly as possible and you can trust me, I’m a real expert. Try not to walk in the crap too much and it should be OK …”

  “I don’t intend to walk in the crap at all.”

  “You’ll tell me how you do, OK? All right, let’s go.”

  Towels over their shoulders, they set off in the sun. The blazing heat made them hurry toward the steep path through the sand leading down to the shore. They’d hardly reached it when Roetgen started to cry out and hop up and down: “The sand! It’s burning my feet.”

  With a sudden idea he threw his towel down and immediately jumped onto it. “It’s unbelievable,” he said after a “Whew!” of relief, “I’ve never come across that before. The sand’s sizzling, I’m sure you could cook an egg on it.”

  “It does happen sometimes,” Moéma said, bursting out laughing.

  He looked ridiculous, stuck on his towel. A fisherman walked past, a cluster of sparkling bonitos at either end of the rod he was balancing on his shoulder.

  “So what now?”

  “I’ve no choice,” he said with a shrug. “Everyone ought to have to cross a desert at least once. See you in the water, if I haven’t been barbecued first. Would you look after my towel, please?”

  Without
waiting for a reply, he plunged off toward the sea, elbows tucked in, back arched. Moéma watched him go; graceful as he set off, his descent quickly started to look like flight as he went down, yelling and taking irregular leaps and bounds.

  Mad, he’s stark, staring mad!

  She laughed.

  FAVELA DE PIRAMBÚ: his face covered in blood, his mouth opened exaggeratedly wide and full of clots of blood

  The sale of the Willis left Nelson feeling he’d been robbed. It was as if his hero had been assassinated a second time, as if injustice had triumphed over the whole of the Earth.

  “Talk to me, son,” Zé said after a long silence. “Tell me you’re not angry with me.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Nelson replied. “I know you’d have kept it if you could. But I want to know who you’ve sold it to.”

  “A collector from São Luís. It seems he already has a dozen vintage cars, Jaguars, Bentleys … The guy at the garage refused to tell me his name.”

  “I’ll find out, I promise you I’ll find out. It was Lampião’s car, don’t you see? Our car. He doesn’t have the right!”

  “Oh, come on, you know people have every right when they’re rich. As for me, it lets me keep my truck. I’ll buy it back one day and give it to you. I swear I will, on the head of padre Cícero.”

  “How much did you get for it?”

  “Three hundred thousand cruzeiros. Peanuts!”

  “That’s the problem … And when you can buy it back—if that ever happens—it’ll be worth three million, perhaps even more. If only they’d all just fucking drop dead. I really wish they’d all just die and good riddance!”

  “Don’t say things like that, son. You’re the one they might bring bad luck. Have a drink instead. To the Willis!”

  “To the Willis,” Nelson said sadly.

  They drained their cachaça and spat the last mouthful on the floor.

  “For the saints,” said Zé.

  “For my sainted aunt!” said Nelson, refilling the glasses. “Don’t mock. You know I don’t like it. The saints have nothing to do with it.”

  “Oh, yes?” said Nelson with tart irony. “And what do they do, apart from drinking cachaça? I shouldn’t think they’ve been sober for centuries. They don’t care, your saints, they’re not interested in us.”

  Zé shook his head with a look of exasperation, but he couldn’t find an answer to the boy’s bitterness. Eventually he said quietly, “When the sea’s fighting the sand, the crab’s the one that gets the worst of it.”

  The expression just came to him—all at once he could see the Super Convair DC-6 that displayed it in yellow letters in the dust of Piauí—but it contained something of what he would have liked to express more clearly. Looking at Nelson’s atrophied legs and his scabby arms, it suddenly occurred to him that the image of the crab might have been hurtful. “I’m not saying that about you, of course … the crab, that’s me, that’s all of us. Just like the crab, all men are in God’s hand. You see what I’m getting at?”

  Nelson didn’t reply. They continued to get drunk in silence. Later in the night at the request of the aleijadinho, who, however, refused to accompany him on the guitar, Zé started to chant João Peitudo, the Son of Lampião and Maria Bonita:

  The Earth goes round and round in space,

  The sun’s rays’ heat is like a stove,

  Some men’s blood is spilled for cash,

  While others meet their end from love,

  But whether poor or reprobate,

  No man can escape from his fate.

  The story I’ll recount today,

  I wouldn’t call it sentimental,

  But it tells, in its own way,

  A tale to thrill, both fierce and gentle:

  The words and deeds of Lampião,

  The legend of the wild Sertão.

  It had more than a hundred and fifty verses … No one can change his destiny was the conclusion of the author of this classical tragedy, no man can live happy in the Sertão when he’s the son of Lampião.

  Half asleep, Nelson was remembering. As every evening, a few minutes before going to sleep he saw the farm at Angicos where the army had finally succeeded in surrounding Lampião and his band. They had been gunned down, one after the other, and when the massacre was over the soldiers had posed for photographs in front of the mutilated corpses. One day he had seen in one of these old sepia photographs—they were regularly exhibited at fairs, along with other equally morbid attractions—the naked and dismembered body of Maria Bonita. Between her splayed legs the huge stake the soldiers had driven up her vagina was sticking out. Beside her, placed on a stone to be in the front row for the performance, Lampião’s head could be seen: his face covered in blood, his mouth opened exaggeratedly wide and full of clots of blood from his shattered jaw, he seemed to be screaming out his hatred for all eternity.

  CHAPTER 8

  The conclusion of Kircher’s confession followed by a description of the Villa Palagonia, its enigmas and its strange owners

  “I HAVE TO admit, Kircher went on, that the sight of those men & the bleeding tuna made me lose my head; I had the feeling I was watching a pagan festival & was considering the unreal side of such a spectacle, when I was almost caught up in something I condemn. Remember, Caspar, there was the fish, the symbol of Our Lord, the blood of sacrifice, love & death mingled in a furious joy & with all the solemn incantation of a sacred ceremony. Suddenly I could understand the trance of the Maenads the classical texts talk of & how they identify with the darkest forces of our being. The intoxication of the senses to the point of madness, Caspar, the obliteration of everything that is not the body & solely the body! For a moment everything else seemed empty to me. In the man who was singing I saw the only priest worthy of that name & in the fury of the sailors the only religious way of belonging to this world. Our Church had lost its way in losing this immediate, sensual contact with things, we could only approach the divine in the real violence of life, not in a puerile simulacrum of it. The one we are struggling against, the frenzied god, the “twice born,” he alone was worthy of our respect, despite our efforts to make him look ridiculous. Dionysus, yes, it was Dionysus whom we ought to worship, just as our ancestors before us did, & I should pick up a pike, lose myself in the mass of bodies, forget myself in the spurting blood until the complete consummation of the sacrifice …

  Athanasius’s admission left me with my head in a whirl. My master had always been very assured in matters of religion; the doubts he had just revealed to me showed, even though they were the product of an oversensitive imagination, that he was as vulnerable as ordinary mortals. His acceptance of human weakness only made me love him all the more.

  Three days after our return to Palermo, a carriage came to the Jesuit College to take us to visit the Prince of Palagonia.

  In keeping with his reputation as an eccentric, the Prince lived outside the town, close to a village called Bagheria, where there was nothing but peasant hovels. When, after several hours, we saw his residence, we could not but admire its style. What the people of Palermo called a villa was a little Palladian palace, such as could be seen in the area around Rome; in truth, however, it was not that that drew our attention: the first thing to strike us was the height of the surrounding wall & the monstrous figures overhanging it for the whole of its circumference. It was as if the house were being attacked by all the demons of hell. The closer we came, the better we could make out these misshapen beings carved out of the porous rock that looked as if they’d come from the imagination of a man possessed by the devil. I crossed myself, calling on the Blessed Virgin while Athanasius seemed greatly perplexed. Our astonishment reached its height when we saw the two gnomes flanking the entrance gate. The one on the right above all impressed by its obvious barbarian nature; as far as one could tell from the unspeakable bulge jutting out from its lower abdomen, it was a seated Priapus, but crooked & distorted. Like the headless Libyans mentioned by Horace, its chest took the pla
ce of its head; a huge head, out of proportion & prolonged by an absurd Pharaoh’s goatee! And if the face’s two almond-shaped eyes looked like two slits opening onto the dark the tiara on top made up for it by being decorated with four pupils, arranged in a triangle, whose evil look made my blood curdle. The Egyptian inspiration for this horrible idol was manifest, but this one made me feel uneasy in a way that none of the sarcophagus figures had, nor the Egyptian grotesques I had seen at Aix-en-Provence in the collection of the late Sieur Peiresc. This disagreeable sensation was only increased by the way the servants hastened to lock the wide wrought-iron gates as soon as we had passed through. All this boded ill for our stay & I found myself deploring my master’s rashness in accepting this invitation.

  “Come, Caspar,” my master said, “summon up all your courage. If my intuition is correct, you’re going to need it to face up to what’s in store for us.” He said this with a little amused smile that frightened me more than all the rest.

  Having driven around the villa, the carriage stopped beside a fine double staircase & we got out. A lackey invited us into the house while another unloaded our baggage. We were taken to an antechamber that was rather dark but richly decorated.

  “I will inform the prince of your arrival,” the servant said, “please make yourselves comfortable.”

  He went out, closing the door behind him; it imitated the marble of the walls so perfectly I would have found it difficult to find my way out of the room if I had been invited to do so.

  “Whatever happens, don’t say a word,” Kircher whispered surreptitiously. I acknowledged this with a nod of the head, repressing my desire to tell him of my concern.

  Athanasius started to stroll around the room. All around us were cartouches, painted in fresco & charmingly rendered, depicting numerous very strange emblems, mottoes or riddles; there were so many it would have taken several days just to read them all.