Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

“Well, you jumped me while Thaïs was still talking to you …”

  “I did that?!”

  “And how!” Thaïs muttered with a laugh. “The worst thing was, she seemed to be enjoying it!”

  “Oh, my God, the shame,” said Roetgen, genuinely conscience-stricken. “I would never have thought I was capable of doing something like that, even blind drunk as I was.”

  “Don’t take it to heart,” Thaïs said in affectionate tones. “I’ve seen plenty of others with her. She’s one hell of a girl, you know. I did try to sleep, but it was impossible, you were making the hut shake with all your humping and grinding, a real earthquake. So then I went to join you and that’s when the branch gave way …”

  “We all fell on top of each other … and you just dropped straight off to sleep. For a moment we thought you’d fainted, but then you started snoring. We almost died laughing.”

  “So we left you on the floor and got into my hammock …”

  “You have to be careful with cachaça, Professor,” Moéma joked. “Especially here, with the sun.”

  “I should have eaten something,” Roetgen said, “that’s the real reason. I didn’t drink all that much.”

  “Fourteen caipirinhas …”

  “Fourteen?!”

  “Exactly. You can trust Seu Juju; he’s well capable of serving a few free drinks but he never forgets a single one of those you ordered.”

  THEIR CLOTHES UNDER their arms, they went to Neosinha’s. She hired out her well and a shack used for ablutions. Roetgen was disappointed by a procedure that clashed with Moéma’s much vaunted “natural hospitality” of the fishing community, never mind having to queue with a dozen other young people. It was like being in a children’s holiday camp or, worse still, a campsite. Since Moéma and Thaïs seemed perfectly at home in these surroundings, he spared them his thoughts.

  To save time, they showered together, each in turn filling an old food tin from the oil drum one of Neosinha’s sons had brought them. Still somewhat under the influence, Roetgen felt no embarrassment in joining in the game that suddenly brought them all together, naked and close enough to brush against each other, as if it were something quite natural.

  Moéma, long legs and muscular buttocks, slim, animal, with her boy’s body and bronze bush; Thaïs with her heavy breasts, more than plump but just as attractive with the luxuriant black triangle emphasizing the creamy skin of her belly …

  Teasing like children in the bath; he never knew whether he was the only one to see its very subtle depravity.

  Moéma having suggested they invite themselves to João’s for dinner, they bought some fish, fizzy drinks and flat bread before going back through the village. The sky was turning black and a wind off the sea was raising swirls of sand as they walked. On either side of the street little lights swayed in the dark holes of the windows.

  “Oh, sugar!” Thaïs exclaimed, “we forgot to buy a lampadinha …”

  Turning back, they bought a liter of paraffin and a tin oil lamp marked with the red and gold logo of a brand of butter.

  “These basic lamps are made from old tins,” Moéma explained, “they’re all different. In the Interior you can unearth some very beautiful ones, really.”

  They found João and his wife swinging idly, each in their own hammock, their children playing in a cluster below them. Maria welcomed the little group effusively and hastened to get the fire in the kitchen going. João came to join them by the hearth a little later. He had a long face: one of the four sailors of the jangada was ill with the result that the fishing trip planned for the next day had been canceled. Roetgen was surprised at the decision. Why not go out all the same?

  “It’s not possible with just three,” the fisherman replied. “It’s a question of the balance of the boat, there’d be a risk of capsizing.”

  “No one can take his place?”

  “The young men don’t want to go out fishing anymore and the others are busy, either on land or on their boats. That’s the way things are, there’s nothing that can be done. In the meantime we’ll continue to go hungry.”

  “I could go in his place, if you want …”

  Moved by the desire to help the family, Roetgen had spoken without thinking. At João’s disbelieving look, he insisted he had plenty of experience of regattas and sea fishing.

  “There’s nothing in the world I like better,” he concluded, as if that were one more argument.

  “We go out for one night and two days, francês, it’s not a pleasure trip.”

  “I’m used to it. Take me and you’ll see. At the very least I can be a counterweight, since that’s the problem.”

  Moéma joined in. “You can trust him,” she said, “I know him. If he offers to come it’s because he’s able to do it.”

  “OK, then, we’ll try it,” João said, suddenly offering him his hand across the hearth. “I’ll have to go and tell the others, I’ll just be two minutes.”

  When he came back a little later, his face was wreathed in smiles. “It’s on,” he said, sitting down again. “We meet here, five o’clock in the morning.”

  They ate the fish with their fingers out of battered aluminium bowls. Every time Roetgen met Moéma’s eye during the meal, while João was telling the latest news of the village, he saw in her look the respect and admiration his gesture inspired.

  “YOU DON’T REMEMBER that either?” Moéma said as they left João’s. “You really are incredible. You even asked him to teach you to dance! I’m sure he’ll be getting ideas …”

  Weary from the all the drink, Roetgen would have preferred to go straight back to their hut, but from what the girls said, he’d promised Marlene and the others he’d meet them at the forró, behind Seu Alcides’ bar.

  “I managed to say a lot of totally stupid things,” he groaned, furious with himself. He found the prospect of having to face Marlene revolting.

  “Don’t worry,” Thaïs said, seeing he was in such a bad mood, “he’ll have sobered up as well.”

  “And if you dance with us, no one will bother you. You’ll see, it’s a super place.”

  “Led by Moéma down the dark street, they walked slowly, passing silent silhouettes or noisy little groups they greeted without identifying them. The wind spattered their bare skin with sand, bringing with it the smell of seaweed or a burning landfill. They started to pick up snatches of frenzied music.

  “The forró,” Moéma said, “is a sort of popular or, rather, rural dance, which only exists in the Sertão. It would be interesting to make a study of it, but that’s just by the way. The word is used for both the event as a whole and the particular dance. That’s why you can get into a muddle; in the Nordeste you can say “to go to the forró” just as well as “to dance” or even “to play a forró.”

  “Forró, forrobodó, arrasta-pé, bate-chinela, gafieira …” Thaïs chanted the list with evident enjoyment. “They’re all the same thing. See the looks on your colleagues faces when you tell them you’ve been to such a den of iniquity. It’s the height of vulgarity, dangerous and all. Nothing in the world would persuade them to set foot in one.”

  When they entered Seu Alcides’s tiny bar, they took a moment to readjust to the light. In contrast to the profound darkness in which the rest of the village was plunged, the few paraffin lamps scattered around gave the room the air of a reredos from a museum. Seu Alcides, an old, potbellied mestizo wearing a pair of glasses without side-pieces held on with a rubber band, lorded it over the place from in front of two sets of shelves that, when necessary, transformed him into a grocer; the ones on the left had a disconcertingly monotonous collection of bottles—on principle Alcides only served cachaça—while those on the right were piled high with household essentials: cans of soya oil, tinned butter, feijão, soap powder, rapadura, all the goods behind him gleaming like gold.

  Leaning on a counter of bare earth, half a dozen caboclos were systematically getting drunk, downing their drinks in one and letting long trails of saliva dr
ip down onto their flip-flops; on a small billiard table that looked as if it had been dredged up from the bottom of the sea, three young men from the village were playing game after noisy game of sinuca, a local version of snooker. Projected onto the wall, their shapeless shadows swayed this way and that with every draft.

  The drinkers shifted to make room for them at the counter.

  “Meladinha for all three of us,” Moéma ordered after being greeted by Alcides like an old friend. “Are you sure?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “I know you and Thaïs can take it, but him”—this with a doubtful look at Roetgen—“do you think he can stay the course? It’s strong, and when you’re not used to it …”

  “He’ll just have to learn. He can’t drink it in Fortaleza.”

  “And mine is the best in the Sertão,” Seu Alcides declared, pouring a finger of a reddish, treacly substance into the bottom of the glasses. “Pure jandaíra honey, it’s my cousin who makes it …”

  “A kind of bee,” Thaïs explained in a whisper to Roetgen while Seu Alcides filled the glasses with a good three ounces of cachaça.

  “That’s one hell of a measure,” Roetgen said apprehensively.

  “A man’s measure,” was Alcides’s lapidary reply as he stirred the mixture with the point of his knife. “That’s how we drink it around here. But you’ll see, son, it does you good where you feel bad.”

  The men beside them burst out into hoarse laughter, each of them making a ribald remark or an obscene gesture.

  All this insistence on virility, Roetgen thought, as if the only consolation for ignorance and poverty were in the obsessive overemphasis on the male sex organ.

  Imitating his companions, he emptied his glass in one go but without being able to bring himself to spit, as they did with an impressive nonchalance. It was sweet, slightly sickly but certainly better than pure cachaça. By the time he’d turned back to the counter the glasses had already been filled again.

  Nobody seemed bothered by the booming music of the forró, which was scarcely muted at all by the wind: accordion, triangle and tambourines accompanied by voices that were husky, rasping, but softened by the drawling inflections of the Nordeste.

  “It works on car batteries,” Moéma said in reply to a question from Roetgen. She was playing a game with Thaïs to see who could be the first to name the group and title of each song as it came. Dominguinho: Pode morrer nessa janela … Oswaldo Bezerra: Encontro fatal, Destino cruel, Falso juramento … Trio Siridó: Vibrando na asa branca, Até o dia amainsá … Like most of the drinkers, they joined in the words without realizing, were ready with the chorus, dancing on the spot. And Roetgen, who would have been incapable of singing a single French song right through, was disturbed by the extraordinary human heat given off by this fusion of everyone with the music, a cohesion that did not come from folklore but from the secret energy of a community of pioneers.

  Now there were incessant comings and goings; young folk drenched in sweat came in from the Forró da Zefa, downed their drink and returned to the dance. Hot from the dance, necks red, hair awry, the young women crossing the bar looked like hallucinating madonnas. Ravishing or hideous, they looked as if they had made love just before coming in. Roetgen was surprised to find he desired them all.

  There was a brief period of silence between two records and, highlighted by the pause, an unusual individual made his entrance. It was an Indian of around twenty whose hairstyle, in imitation of the Xingu tradition, would have been sufficient to make him stand out: cut on a level with his eyebrows, his thick black hair curved in a fringe above his ears before spreading out over his back. Dressed in white—wide trousers knotted at the waist and a very low-cut vest over his smooth, brick-colored chest with delicate tattoos running down from his chin in a symmetrical design of braided cords—he bore his race and his beauty like a flag.

  Looking for someone to share his astonishment, Roetgen turned to Moéma; eyes riveted on the newcomer, she seemed to be absorbing his image. Sensing her look, as if drawn by it, the Indian pushed his way through the crowd until he was beside her. On his shoulder was a smudge of blue ink, the mark stamped by Dona Zefa on dancers going out of her dance hall. He drank his cachaça without a word. The music started up again …

  “Alcéu Valença!” Thaïs exclaimed, abruptly carried away by the opening bars of the song. She started to sing: “Morena tropicana …”

  “Eu quero teu sabor,” the Indian went on, looking Moéma straight in the eye. Then he sketched a smile and left the bar.

  “Funny guy, eh?” Alcides said. He’d missed nothing of the little scene.

  “Who is he?” Moéma asked, as if she wasn’t really interested in the answer.

  “His name’s Aynoré. He’s been hanging around here for two weeks now.” And, spitting on the floor to emphasize his contempt, “Maconheiro, for all I know …”

  “Let’s dance,” Thaïs begged, still taken up with the music and jigging to the rhythm.

  Once out in the street they went to the left of the bar and came to the Forró da Zefa. It was a sort of barn made of clay bricks with a corrugated iron roof proclaiming the relative affluence of its owner. Small windows—without glass, as everywhere in Canoa Quebrada—all along the front let out more hubbub than light. At the only door to this edifice they found Dona Zefa herself, an old mulatto stinking of alcohol and tobacco who immediately attached herself to Roetgen muttering what was clearly a flood of obscenities in a weary voice. She let go of him as soon as he’d managed to extract the few cruzeiros entrance money from his pocket. Behind her, in a hall about thirty yards long on which two gas lamps hanging from the ceiling cast a dim light, a milling crowd was concentrating on criss-crossing all available space on the beaten-earth floor in every direction. Like an intoxicated, teeming swarm, the couples, swift, earnestly bound to their partners, were gyrating their hips rhythmically, feet held to the floor by audible magnetism. Their serious expressions, their uniform gestures in perfect accord with the rhythm of the music, astonished Roetgen more than anything he’d seen so far: a dance in the catacombs, one last cheek-to-cheek before the curfew, acutely aware of their bodies and the imminence of war. Beneath the human voice and the instruments was the constant background noise of sandals on the ground, an incessant rhythmical pulse with all the menace of a silence of the primeval world.

  All at once Marlene popped up in front of them. “Que bom! Welcome to the three of you in the haunt of night,” he said in a grandiloquent manner. “Things are heating up, eh? Now who’m I going to invite to dance?”

  “Me,” said Thaïs giving Roetgen a conspiratorial wink.

  “Now us,” said Moéma as soon as the other two had been absorbed by the Brownian agitation on the dance floor, “two steps to the right, two to the left, try to do the same as me.” Pressing up against him, she dragged him off into the turbulence.

  Roetgen did quite well, at least from what Moéma said. Doing everything he could not to make himself look ridiculous, he gradually became aware of his surroundings: in the dark mass of dancers, who avoided each other with the dexterity of elementary particles, he only saw gaunt, gap-toothed faces and scrawny bodies mostly a good head shorter than he; every time a taller silhouette than the others caught his eye he recognized without a shadow of doubt one of the young city dwellers who had come to Canoa to “recharge their batteries.” They radiated good health, laughed with their white teeth, enjoying themselves as if they were in some nightclub. There were two species there or, worse, two stages of the same humanity far apart in time. Cut off from both sides, but put in the position of the strong despite himself, Roetgen felt he was as wrong, as absurdly comic and out of place, as a parrot in the middle of a flock of crows.

  “It’s not quite there yet,” Moéma laughed, “you’re treading on my toes. You’ll have to get in training if you’re going to try and pick up girls in a forró.”

  “I’m stopping. I’m beat.”

  “OK, let’s go and have a drink.”

/>   They were heading for the exit, their straight line disturbing the mechanics of the swirling eddies, when the Indian appeared. “You dancing?” he asked Moéma coolly, without for a moment seeming to doubt what her answer would be.

  “Why not,” she replied with a touch of arrogance in her voice, enfolding herself in his arms with a promptness and ease that gave the lie to her little coquetry.

  Somewhat disoriented at being left high and dry, Roetgen watched the couple drift along the edge of the whirling mass, ready to be carried away. A moment before they disappeared, he saw Aynoré paw Moéma’s buttocks in a harsh, obscene gesture, pulling her shorts up over her thighs, and her nails digging into the tattoos on his back.

  Roetgen felt as if they had left a symmetrical claw mark on him. He had no right to be jealous, but allowed himself to wallow in a feeling of contempt that encompassed all the women in the world. His mind preoccupied with a thousand variations on his hurt pride, he left the dance hall, duly stamped by Dona Zefa as he passed, and went back to Seu Alcides’s bar.

  This mood affected his view of the drinkers, who seemed to him to have reached the depths of degeneracy. One guy who’d fallen asleep on the billiard table woke with a start every three minutes to offer his cigarettes to no one in particular; another, determined to humiliate himself, was making pipoca to order, blowing out his cheeks excessively to make the sound of popcorn bursting, as if this pitiful buffoonery were the whole justification for his existence. Seu Alcides himself appeared too fat to be honest, especially in comparison with the living skeletons thronging his bar.

  He forced himself to swallow a meladinha. In a direct relationship of cause and effect, the drink set off a fit of stomachache that left him paralyzed, close to fainting. Panicking at the thought that he might not be able to control the disaster in his bowels, he left the bar, urgently hurrying to get to the dunes. Rummaging through his pockets without finding anything to substitute for toilet paper, he ran off into the darkness, sick and despondent.

  When he was sure he’d never reach the sea in time, he turned to the right and walked straight ahead, determined to get as far away from the houses as possible. In the faint light of the stars, a no-man’s-land of rubbish spread out, an unspeakable dump running along the whole length of the road. Plunging into the filth, Roetgen suddenly broke out in a cold sweat and was then overtaken by cramps that bent him double and sent him tumbling to his knees, like someone in despairing prayer. And there, alone, oblivious to everything, overwhelmed by the way his whole being was spinning, he thought he was going to die and that a pig would find him in the morning, bare-assed amid the steaming garbage of the village, a foul thing among the foulness.