Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  Aynoré was only twelve, but he refused to go with the others to the Xingu reservation, so the FUNAI official immediately sent him off to the Dominican orphanage in Manaus. He learned to read and write there without ever belonging to the religion in which a puny god allowed himself to be crucified in a land with no jungle and no macaws. Then it was a boarding house run by the same order in Belém. He strung them along for a while, then ran off with the money from the bursar’s office. Skilled with his hands, he managed to get by making feather necklaces and earrings that he hawked on the streets.

  Aynoré stroked Moéma’s hair. Under the influence of his intoxication, his voice took on ceremonial tones, sometimes becoming unrecognizable in the dialogues, high and distorted, like a ventriloquist’s. Moéma listened reverently, images and shivers running through her. Even more than by its poetry, she was carried away by the age-old character of this litany. It was a fascination tinged with venom toward the whites and their wretched slavish devotion to their god. What an incredible mess! From having learned them, to her disgust, at the university, she knew the figures of the atrocity by heart: two million Indians when the Spanish and Portuguese arrived, fewer than a hundred thousand today … “The Indians were innumerable,” she had read in a report by a sixteenth-century traveler, “to such an extent, that if one shot an arrow in the air, it was more likely to end up in an Indian’s head than in the ground.” The author in question was talking about the Várzeas, a tribe that had ceased to exist less than a hundred years after this first attempt at a “census.” The Tupi, Anumaniá, Arupatí, Maritsawá, Iarumá, Aulúta, Tsúva, Naruvôt, Nafuquá, Kutenábu and so many other tribes decimated … More than ninety Amazonian tribes had been wiped out in the course of our century alone … Of what unknown and unknowable lives have we deprived ourselves for good? Of what possible worlds, of what healthy evolutions?

  A land without men for men without land. It was under this generous slogan that the Brazilian government had decided to construct the Transamazonian Highway, three thousand miles of road to give white pioneers new lands to cultivate. Every sixty miles along the road there were 250 acres of virgin land to clear on either side, a hut already built plus six months’ wages and interest-free loans for twenty years; a multitude of half-starved people from the Nordeste had risen to the bait. All this ignoring the fact that this “land without men” was crammed full of Indians, who were given no more consideration than the flora and fauna sacrificed to the program, no more than at the time of the boom in rubber when the clothes handed out with a friendly smile to the naked savages were impregnated with the germs of smallpox or other fatal diseases.

  But what no one had anticipated was that the ground taken from the forest would be completely exhausted after the first two harvests and today the cattle barons would be buying up this sterile land at low prices from the colonists, poor devils who, overburdened with debt, prefer the arid misery of the Sertão to the torture of this dripping desert. The funds earmarked for surfacing the road had disappeared, so that in the rainy season the Transamazonian Highway turns into an impassable river of mud, eaten away a little more each day by the determined reprisals of the jungle. In the course of the Americans’ interest in buying several million square miles of land in the Carajás region, rich deposits of iron, nickel, manganese and even gold were discovered in the Serra Plata. The mines and the placers finished by ripping this true paradise apart and everything went up in smoke: the forest, the Indians, dreams of agrarian reform. All that this incredible farce achieved was to make the indestructible caste of bastards a little richer. She felt almost suffocated by a sense of the chronic, oppressive injustice, like a nocturnal asthma attack.

  Then the thunder-man came down onto the river of milk where he was transformed into a monstrous snake with a head resembling a boat. The two heroes climbed up onto the snake’s head and started to sail up the left bank of the river. Every time they stopped, they established a house and, thanks to their wealth of magic, filled it with people to live there. Thus gradually, house by house, the mankind of the future developed. And since the vessel went below the surface, the houses were under water, so that the first men appeared as fish-men who settled in their underwater houses.

  Nothing was as beautiful as this resplendent story, it gave a glimpse of a world of innocence and quiet freedom, an everyday life in which every moment was special, a supernatural game with creatures and things. The secret of happiness was there, in this preserved speech. To go away with Aynoré and seek his people, to recover together that original communion with the river, the birds, the elements; Moéma felt she was ready for this return to the native soil. Not as an ethnologist, but as an Indian in both heart and mind. As a lover of the things themselves. Living was that or nothing at all.

  Thus mankind grew, passing by imperceptible degrees from childhood to adolescence. And when they reached the thirtieth house, that is, the halfway point of their journey, the twins decided it was time to make men speak. That day each performed a ritual with his wife: the first wife smoked the cigar and the second chewed ipadu. The woman who smoked the cigar gave birth to the sacred Caapi, which is even more powerful than ipadu; and the one who had eaten ipadu brought forth the parrots, the toucans and other birds with colored feathers. And from these two women the men came to know trembling, fear, cold, fire and suffering, all things they had seen in them while they were in labor.

  And the power of the infant Caapi was so strong that all mankind had fantastic visions. No one could understand anything about them and each house started to speak a different language. From this sprang many languages: Desana, Tukano, Pira-Tapuia, Barasana, Banwa, Kubewa, Tuyuka, Wanama, Siriana, Maku and, last of all, that of the White Men.

  “Caapi,” Aynoré said, “is a kind of vine. You make a potion from its bark and you have visions. It’s a thousand times stronger than anything you can ever have tried. Among our people the women are not allowed to drink it. It’s a sacred plant, the vine of the gods, the vine of the soul …” They’d often taken it in the men’s cabin, it was completely crazy: you met the Grand Master of the hunt, you watched extraordinary fights between snakes and jaguars, you discovered the true invisible powers behind the illusion of life. “I had no will of my own,” Aynoré said, “no personal power. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t think; I wasn’t in my body anymore. Purified, I woke up as a sphere of seeds that had burst open in space. And I sang the note that smashes structure to pieces and the one that abolishes chaos and I was covered in blood. I have been with the dead, I have tried the labyrinth …” For there was a world beyond ours, a world both very near and very far away, a world where everything had happened already, where everything was already known. And that world spoke, it had its own language, a subtle idiom of rustlings and colors. Blue, purple or gray visions, like tobacco smoke, which declined the unknown modes of thought; blood-red visions, like a woman’s discharge, her fertility; yellow or off-white visions, similar to semen, the sun, through which the mystical union with the beginning was realized. And everything appeared in an indescribable luminosity, as if detached from its context, charged with new meaning, a new quality. After the ceremony, when they woke from a profound sleep full of dreams, each one of them drew or painted what he had seen. There was not a single decoration, not a single tattoo, that had not been inspired by these journeys through hallucination. And the reason there were so many different languages was to try to say all that, to express again and again the things they were unwilling to leave in the ambiguous silence of images …” A man who has taken Caapi is said to have drowned himself, as if he were returning to the river from which he came, as if he were plunging back into the undifferentiated source … A man who has an orgasm when he possesses a woman is also said to be drowning himself, but that is to indicate that he is in a state similar to the one produced by Caapi.”

  The eighth and last ancestor was the priest. And he came out of the water with his book in his hand, and he was as sterile as a c
astrated pig. So the Creator commanded him to stay with the Whites, and that is why we knew nothing of the existence of the priests until they came with you from the East. At the fifty-seventh house the men were grown up and they could start to shorten the rites. Thus the twins continued to people the rivers until the sixty-seventh house, down toward Peru, then returned to the fifty-sixth, the one from which men had first appeared on earth.

  “You, the Whites,” Aynoré went on, “you go into your churches and you talk about your lousy god for an hour; we, the Indians, go into the jungle and talk with ours, with all our gods, for whole days …”

  By carrying out the ceremonial rites, each house had its own function and each could finally occupy the world, just as the armadillo fills its shell.

  That is the way our ancestors spoke. But the work of the Creator did not go on forever, for there were three great disasters: two fires and a flood. And each time Ngnoaman had to start again from scratch. After the flood he established a fourth mankind, the one we are part of, and declared, “It’s too much work for me to redo everything each time. From now on, I will leave men in peace, they’re plenty big enough to punish themselves … And that is the story of the great start, the origin of the first beginnings.”

  Moéma couldn’t think anymore, so vivid were the colors lighting up her night. The Garden of Eden really had existed, somewhere between the tropics and the equator. “You are the whirling woman of the whirlwinds, you are the woman who rumbles, the woman who rings, the spider, the toucan and the hummingbird …” She didn’t know whether Aynoré said that or simply thought it, but when they made love on the deck of the jangada, among the stench of brine and fish, their bare skin spattered with sand, and she concentrated on the elastic center of their yoked genitals, she thought she could grasp all the words of this flowing language, of this constant murmur that finally reconciled her with men: Nitio oatarara, irara. Mamoaùpe, jandaia, saci peirerê? We have time, honey-eater … Where do you come from, little yellow parrot, nocturnal sprite?”

  At the same moment, up in the bluish semidark of the cabin, Thaïs leaned out of her hammock to be sick.

  Fortaleza: I’m not a snake but I go, full of venom …

  Zé had brought him back to the favela very early, before setting off on a delivery trip that would last three days. By seven in the morning Nelson was already at his post where the Avenue Duque de Caxias and the Avenue Luciano Carneiro crossed. Impervious to the nauseating stench of the exhaust fumes—fuel made from cane-sugar alcohol, on the contrary, used by a considerable number of cars, left a pleasant scent in his nostrils, as if all the inhabitants had taken part in a massive booze-up the previous evening and were exuding cachaça from every pore—deaf to the cacophony of horns and the roar of the engines, Nelson went about his begging with the casual assurance of a true specialist. Toward nine, when the stream of motorists going to work was replaced by taxis and vans, he went to the beira-mar to work on the tourists who were starting to venture out of their hotels. His feelings for them were a mixture of contempt and pity: contempt for their arrogance of holidaymakers with nothing better to do than to waste their dough on pointless purchases, and pity for the palefaces, flayed alive by the scorching sun, making them look like people with third-degree burns rather bewildered at finding themselves without their bandages. Unlike the lepers, whom hardly anyone went near out of instinctive repugnance and fear of contagion, or even the legless cripples and the blind who were less mobile than he was, his handicap was useful: just as it allowed him to attack cars, it made it possible for him to storm the entrances of luxury hotels, and even if he did have to use a bit of cunning not to get thrown out by the commissionaires—some of whom turned a blind eye to his game for a percentage of his takings—it was rare for tourists, taken by surprise as they left the Imperial Orthon Palace or the Colonial, not to quickly give a few coppers to blot out this disturbing piece of bad taste in a day devoted to pleasure.

  It was almost midday when Nelson decided to take the bus to Aldeota, the posh district of the town. Not that there was any chance of getting a single cruzeiro there—the rich were barricaded in their fortress-like villas and it was teeming with vigilantes, often more dangerous than the cops themselves—but Zé had finally given him the address of the garage that had acquired the Willis. He intended to ferret around a bit up there.

  At the José de Alcanar Garage Nelson observed an employee half-heartedly polishing a radiator grille; taking advantage of his inattention, he slipped under one of the cars parked inside the garage building. A Mercedes agent, the owner had specialized in classic cars. Nelson’s eye was caught by a splendid front-wheel-drive Citroën whose polished chrome parts seemed to him as beautiful as monstrances. Crawling under the cars with the litheness of a Sioux, he reached the shelter of the Citroën without mishap and, stretched out on his back, his nose glued to the rear axle, closed his eyes the better to savor the smells of oil and rubber.

  He couldn’t have said how much time had passed when he was roused from his half sleep by loud claps. “Hello! Is anyone there?” said a deep, imperious voice.

  “Sim senhor. I’ll be right with you,” the garage-hand replied.

  “I’m Deputado Jefferson Vasconscelos. Go and fetch your boss, I want to see his old cars.”

  “Right away, sir. Have a look around, he’ll be here in a moment.”

  Nelson heard the garage-hand run off and, a few seconds later, the steps of the garage-owner hurrying to see his customer.

  “Floriano Duarte, at your service, sir. Pleased to meet you, senhor deputado.”

  “Yes, yes …” came the irritated voice of the member of parliament. “To put it briefly, I’m in a great hurry. I promised to buy my son a car for his eighteenth birthday and he’s taken it into his head to ask for an old model instead of the Golf I was going to give him, and I can’t get him to change his mind …”

  “I know how it is, sir. It’s impossible to go against fashion and young people are crazy about those cars and, with all due respect, I think they’re right. And I’m not saying that just because I sell them, mind you, since I also sell Mercedes. Modern cars look like suppositories or, at best, like bars of soap: bathroom design, no imagination, no beauty. It’s as if all the manufacturers are in it together. Whereas in the old days they used to deck them out like carriages, like cathedral altars! And I’m not just talking about your Hispano-Suizas, your Delahayes or Bugattis, mind you—look at the Plymouths, the Hotchkisses, the Chryslers. People pamper them, exhibit them in museums like works of art while they’re still working, often better than lots of others! This model, for example. Please, come and have a look.”

  Two pairs of feet came up to the car under which Nelson was hiding. He immediately identified those of the deputado by the perfect cut of his trousers over his polished casuals. He could touch them if he stretched out his hand.

  “A 1953 front-wheel-drive Citroën. Look at this little jewel! Six cylinders, fifteen hp, floating engine with wet-lined cylinders, eighty miles an hour in twenty-seven seconds! What do you say to that? Come closer, no need to be afraid! Now tell me honestly: doesn’t that scream class, style? Look at the curve of those wings, of the bumper. A Volkswagen and a marvel of engineering like that—there’s simply no comparison! It’s more than just a car, it’s a symbol, a way of life—”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” the deputado said, the nervous tapping of his foot indicating his irritation, “but I’ve not come here to buy a symbol, I just want a car that will keep going without breaking down every five minutes. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

  “Do you know what this model was called, senhor deputado?” Duarte said, in offended tones. “ ‘The Queen of the Road’! I don’t know if you realize what that means. During the last war the Germans requisitioned all of them; believe me, they did thousands of miles without the slightest hiccup. May I remind you that it’s engines like this that did the Croisière Jaune from Beirut to Peking or crossed Africa.”<
br />
  “Precisely, senhor—What did you say your name was?”

  “Duarte, Floriano Duarte.”

  “Precisely, Senhor Duarte, precisely. All these engines have done far too much. How many miles does this marvel of engineering have on the clock?”

  “None,” Duarte replied proudly.

  “What d’you mean, none? Are you putting me on?”

  “Not at all, senhor deputado, I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ve completely rebuilt the engine using a batch of original parts: this car might well be old, but its engine is as new as if it was straight out of the factory. Your son can drive to Belém and back, if he feels like it, and I will guarantee he’ll have no problems. Not to mention the comfort,” he said, opening the door, “velvet interior trim, rebuilt suspension, plenty of room in the trunk. It’s a little gem, senhor deputado. Get in and see for yourself.”

  Realizing his legs might be trapped if someone got in the car, Nelson twisted around so he would be able to escape at the last moment.

  “I haven’t the time,” the other replied. “Let’s get down to the painful part: how much does it cost?”

  “The same as a Golf, senhor deputado. Exactly the amount you intended to pay for that car.”

  “The same as a Golf? For this pile of scrap metal? What do you take me for?”

  “For a man who wants to buy his son a car while getting a bargain at the same time. I will guarantee this Citroën for three years, labor and parts included, and I promise to find you a buyer at the same price if you should decide to sell it. As you know as well as I do, a new car loses something of its value with every day that passes. With quality old models it’s exactly the opposite. Instead of squandering your money on a simple whim, you would be making a very good investment. And you should note that I’m doing you a personal favor with my guarantee: true collectors don’t demand anything like that, I can assure you. Only last week I sold a 1930 Willis without even seeing the purchaser. And it cost twice as much as the Citroën! It was Colonel José de Moreira who bought it from me, I’m sure you know him …”