Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  “Poor Isis, in despair but still in love, set about finding the pieces of her husband. Through her persistence, she managed to find almost all of them, for the fish of the Nile treated him with respect & spared them. There was just one missing, a dainty morsel the oxyrhynch had not been able to resist … & this piece, my little doll, the one that Isis, as a true woman, preferred above all, was his gherkin, his big bird, his engine, his tassel, his family organ, his Don Cypriano, his awl, his chitterling, his fiddle bow, his syringe, his ploughshare, his Polyphemus, his father confessor, his lance, his yard, his pintle, his drumstick, his coney-catcher &, in a word, his sweetmeat! Yes, my lovelies, his sweetmeat!”

  This tirade drew laughter and chuckles from all sides & even Kircher congratulated him on the richness of his vocabulary.

  “A tragedy, then,” the laughing sculptor went on, “for the widow Isis, but that would be to ignore her—very understandable—persistence, for the queen, aided by her sister & by Anubis, reconstructed her husband’s member with river silt and spittle, stuck it on him in the right place &, thanks to heaven & various practices, brought it back to life. And since, as it seems to me, this new instrument worked better than his previous one, Isis soon found she was pregnant. She gave birth to a boy, who was called Harpocrates and became king in his turn, while Osiris, the first mortal ever to be recovered from a definitive death, was enjoying a happy eternity in the Fields of Iaru, the Egyptian paradise …”

  The company was fascinated by Bernini’s story & asked many questions, principally regarding its truth.

  “The Egyptian priests,” my master said, “following the doctrine passed on by the patriarchs of antiquity, were convinced that God was to be found everywhere & they aimed at finding His manifestations hidden in natural entities &, once they had been discovered, showing them in symbols derived from nature. The story of Osiris is a fable, of course, a discreet veil beneath which the sages were, according to the testimony of Iamblichus, endeavoring to express the most profound mysteries of the deity, the world, angels & demons.”

  “Oh, come on, Reverend Father,” Bernini mocked. “Who do you take us for? Next you’ll be asking us to accept that your pharaohs believed in the one God & the Holy Trinity!”

  “You don’t know how right you are …”

  “How is it then that the entire world isn’t Christian?” Bernini asked in more serious tones than before.

  “The malice of the Devil is infinite &, moreover, it was greatly aided by the confusion of languages following the fall of the Tower of Babel, by the nations moving farther & farther away & the perversion of rites to which that led. All idolatrous religions are nothing but more or less recognizable anamorphoses of Christianity. The Egyptians, who, thanks to Hermes, still retained the greatest secrets of universal knowledge, passed them on throughout the world as far as China & the Americas, where they were gradually transformed, growing paler like those foxes that lose their natural color & take on that of the ice or the desert where they live. But the Egyptians knew that truth as well, for what is the dismemberment of Osiris by Typhon & Isis’s patient search other than an image of idolatry itself, a misfortune that divine wisdom remedied by reuniting the scattered parts of the archetype in a single mystical body? Look around you: nothing stays the same, nothing lasts, no peace can be guaranteed by laws that are so strong they will not collapse. War is everywhere! And it is up to us, the priests & missionaries, to seek, through suffering & martyrdom, that lost stability …”

  MATO GROSSO: What comes knocking at night on the meshes of the mosquito nets …

  On the third day of their journey on foot through the jungle it became clear to all that their progress would be much slower than expected. Yurupig, Mauro & Petersen took it in turns to carry Dietlev’s stretcher, but the most they could do in a straight line in the forest was about ten yards, so frequent were the tangles of branches and succulents, dark undergrowth and luxuriant, impenetrable foliage. Occasionally the person opening up a path managed to make a passage with the machete, but almost always they had to go round the obstacle, clamber over a fallen tree trunk, which would disintegrate into sawdust under their weight, thread their way as best they could through the rigging of the intertwined lianas or even crawl, when a way forward could be vaguely discerned behind an arching root. Constantly diverted from their ideal line, they concentrated on following natural gaps oriented toward the northeast quarter of the compass. This course, however, remained largely theoretical inasmuch as they were sometimes forced to turn back and try another route that was less obvious but better suited to their goal. They had the impression they were treading on an immense mass of decaying material that collapsed, liquefied under their feet, an elastic, aromatic humus from which the trampled vegetation immediately sprang up again, made stronger, denser by its own decomposition. Bromeliads and rubber plants suffering from gigantism with nothing in common with the plants Elaine knew by those names from the florist’s, vegetable columns, smooth or ringed, recalling the impossible combinations of computer-generated images: root-stilts, strangler fig trees, all kinds of parasites, a Chinese box of jungles, one inside the other at the very heart of the jungle. An indefinable cacophony came down from above, filling the space all round them, a shrill, discordant hubbub in which Yurupig and Petersen alone were able to pick out the howl of a capuchin monkey, the castanets of a toucan’s beak, the sudden hysterical shriek of a great macaw … The mystery of life seemed to have concentrated in this primordial crucible teeming with mosquitos and insects.

  By five in the afternoon the green shade had become too dense to continue so that they had to set about looking for a place to camp fairly early to give them time to clear their chosen spot, hang their hammocks off the ground and collect some dead wood. Elaine would never have thought it could be so difficult to find something that would burn in the middle of the forest: the wood was spongy. Full of mosses, of fermented sap, ant and termite nests, lived in, alive, as combustible as a sponge full of water. The hissing fire they gathered round when night had fallen was thanks to Yurupig alone.

  They had agreed that Elaine would bring up the rear, in order to save her as far as possible from the ambushes of the forest; their progress disturbed a large number of animals, which they only saw as they took flight, but having seen a little coral snake disappear more or less from under her feet, she knew she was as exposed to danger as the others. However much she kept her eyes fixed on the ground, every tree trunk, every crevice remained a deadly trap she had to beware of. Just as in a ghost train at the fair, the immense webs of the bird-eating spiders would suddenly stick to her face like candy floss, an an aggressive rustling close by would send her heart racing, everything seemed to be conspiring against the intruders, to be uniting to swallow them up.

  Yurupig and Petersen were more at ease in this ordeal. They both knew a thousand and one tricks to find drinking water or to make the trees ‘sing’ before attaching their hammocks. Petersen was grumbling all the time, reviling the world and its creatures, while the Indian moved silently, all senses on the alert, a hunter through and through. For the first two days the German had sullenly refused to speak to them but then, without anyone really understanding the reason for this sudden change, recovered his spirits and a certain comradeship with the group.

  When they gathered around the fire on the evening of the third day, all hope of reaching the junction of the river soon had vanished. “We’re going to have to ration the food a bit more,” Mauro said. “At this rate it won’t last much longer.”

  “How far would you say we’ve been today?” Elaine asked.

  “No idea … A mile at most. But I’m as exhausted as if we’d done seventy.” His hand inside the collar of his T-shirt, Mauro was scratching his chest frenziedly, then examined the little scab he’d managed to bring out: a kind of tiny spider, swollen with blood, seemed to be enclosed in the dead skin.

  “Oh no, I don’t believe it!” he said with revulsion. “What the hell’s this bug
?”

  “Carrapato,” said Yurupig without even glancing at it.

  “A tick,” Dietlev said in a weary voice. “The pubic louse of the bush. Don’t worry, we’ve all got some and they won’t be easy to remove even when we can get down to it seriously. It was one of the surprises I was keeping in store for you.”

  Revolted, Elaine thought she could feel even more itchiness in the pubic area and under her armpits. “It’s one I’d have happily done without,” she said, sketching a smile. “All right then, ‘operation scratches’ … Who wants to go first?”

  “Me,” said Mauro, lifting up his trouser legs. “These bloody things sting.”

  His heels, lacerated by the sharp-edged grasses, were covered in red streaks. Elaine smeared them with Mercurochrome then treated his neck and forearms. Yurupig had a nasty gash across his cheek disinfected, while Petersen refused all help, muttering that he’d seen worse than that and there was no point anyway. After that Mauro dealt with Elaine’s cuts.

  “Don’t we look great,” he said when he’d finished daubing red over them. “We’ll soon be terrorizing the monkeys.”

  “Please, Mauro, could you …,” Dietlev said.

  He stood up immediately, as did Yurupig. They lifted up the stretcher and carried it out of the circles of light cast by the fire. Elaine concentrated on her medicine bag without even paying any attention to the patter of urine on the leaves; only a few days ago she would have been horribly embarrassed by this lack of privacy, but this wasn’t the time or place for niceties. When she’d undone the bandage, Dietlev’s wound was crawling with maggots; the big flies that tormented them while they were walking had managed to lay their eggs in his skin, despite the care she took to protect the wound. His leg was a blackish color, taut, ready to burst. The leg of a drowned corpse. The gangrene was rising inexorably. Three ampoules of morphine, one bubble pack of sulphonamide tablets … it wouldn’t be enough, she realized to her dismay, to contain the infection. The thought went through her mind that Dietlev would not make it back to Brazilia with them, but she dismissed it at once, for fear it would bring him bad luck. To imagine the worst was to hold a platinum rod up at the lightning … She couldn’t remember who had said that, but she believed the precept as if it were a commandment.

  When Mauro and Yurupig brought the stretcher back close to the fire, Dietlev was shivering with pain. The sweat was streaming down his face.

  “Do you want an injection?” she asked, wiping his forehead.

  “Not yet, it’ll go away … Petersen, come and have a look at this.”

  “Here I am, amigo. How can I be of service?”

  Dietlev unfolded the piece of paper on which he’d sketched his map. “By my estimation we’re somewhere in this area,” he said, pointing to a zone to the southwest of the swamps, on the first quarter of their approximate route to the river junction. “You agree?”

  ‘Yes,” said Petersen after a brief glance at the map. “More or less, I imagine. We should get to the swamps soon. It’ll be easier to find our way, but it’s likely to make walking more difficult.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Dietlev said to Elaine. “It’s going to take us ten more days or so; I’m sorry, but it’s a lot more than I was reckoning on.”

  Petersen shrugged his shoulders and drew the snot up his nose noisily. “You should have waited for me on the boat, like I said. Going through the jungle with a woman, a boy and a stretcher … Talk about a useless crew!”

  “Shut it!” Mauro said venomously. “You’re the one responsible for whatever happens to us.”

  “He’s going to die,” Petersen replied, shrugging his shoulders. “He’s going to die, and you as well. You make me sick, so there!” He turned his back on them and climbed into his hammock. They heard him sniff loudly again under his mosquito net.

  “He’s not entirely wrong,” Dietlev said apologetically. “If you’d left me back there, you’d get on two or three times as quickly. Of course, one solution would be to take me back to the boat, but—”

  “But there’s no question of that,” Mauro broke in calmly. “We’re going to get there and no one’s going to die, trust me. I promised my mother I’d be in Fortaleza for Christmas and I will be. And that’s that.”

  “Then there’s no point in arguing,” said Elaine, giving him an affectionate smile. “In bed everyone, we need our rest.”

  Mauro and Yurupig put Dietlev in his hammock, while Elaine held his leg. Despite their attempts to avoid even the slightest jolt, he was almost crying with pain. Elaine waited a few moments and then, when he asked, gave him a dose of morphine. Once he’d calmed down, she gave him a quick kiss on the lips and put the tarpaulin over him.

  Elaine had gone out like a light and slept like a log. In the middle of the night she woke from a dream with the feeling she’d crashed on the ground after a vertiginous fall. Still half-asleep, she stretched out her arm, looking for Eléazard’s shoulder, his warmth, and woke fully to find herself in the prison of her hammock. Through the invisible wall of the mosquito net the red glow of a few embers could still be seen, without standing out clearly from the surrounding gloom. The silence had the inexplicable opacity of the blackness. Drifting on the surface of the dark, Elaine suddenly had a vision of their encampment: a collection of fragile cocoons suspended in the void, tiny, exposed to the blind trampling of the throng. To her amazement, she heard the noise of a demonstration approaching, chants, then the roar of a stadium as the whole crowd lets out its disappointment. Then a squall sent a crackling through the whole jungle and the patter of the rain on the roof of the hammock finally dispersed her hallucination. Frozen stiff, Elaine curled up, desperate to get back to sleep, shutting out the images of death that came knocking at her mosquito net. With all her heart she longed for daybreak.

  AT FIRST LIGHT, when Yurupig clapped his hands to wake them, the rain had stopped. Still half-asleep, Mauro forgot to push the tarpaulin back before opening the zip, so that he got the quarts of water that had accumulated above him full in the face and, clutching the Kalashnikov, shot out of his hammock like a scalded cat. His misfortune even drew a titter from the Indian, something unusual for him. Despite the nocturnal drenching the forest had received, he’d managed to light a fire; Mauro went to warm himself at it, at the same time drying the gun with a handkerchief.

  “If you don’t strip it down completely,” Petersen said scornfully, “the breech will rust up and it’ll be no good for anything but cracking nuts.”

  “In my opinion,” Mauro replied without looking at him, “the water didn’t have time to get inside. But we can always try it out,” he added, cocking the rifle and aiming it at the old German.

  “Stop it!” Dietlev said firmly. “I don’t want to see you playing with that gun, understood? Come and help me get out of this thing instead, I’m frozen.”

  Elaine had slipped behind a tree; she came out and helped Mauro and Yurupig to carry Dietlev to the stretcher.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, once he was by the fire.

  “Like a baked Alaska, hot on the outside, icy inside. But there’s no pain, I’m still a bit stoned.”

  “There was a lot of rain last night,” Yurupig said, handing him a mug of coffee. “Not good for us.”

  “But surely it’s not the rainy season,” Mauro said, attempting a joke.

  “No,” Dietlev replied, “that’s in four, six weeks. There’s no danger in that respect. A good shower from time to time, especially at night, that’s all we have to fear at the moment.”

  Pity, Mauro thought. He was beginning to enjoy the adventure and, despite their concern about Dietlev, felt on a high.

  Not long afterward, once the mist had cleared, the little expedition set off again.

  THEY’D BEEN WALKING for two hours, Petersen and Yurupig carrying the stretcher, when Mauro sank up to his knees in sticky mud hidden underneath the grass. He called to Yurupig to help him out of the marsh and came back with him to join the others.
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  “We’ve reached the swamp,” he announced gaily, “that’s worth a celebratory rest, isn’t it? What do you think Dietlev?” He turned toward him and suddenly his smile vanished. “Dietlev?”

  Elaine, who had sat down on a stump behind the group, hurried over to the stretcher: eyes half-closed, a feverish glow on his face, Dietlev was having difficulty breathing. Far away from her, in another world, beyond suffering and language, he didn’t reply to her anxious questions.

  “Get me some water, Yurupig.” She dissolved a large dose of aspirin in a cup and forced Dietlev to swallow it. Petersen came over as Elaine hurriedly uncovered the wound. It was crawling with maggots again, fewer than previously, but his leg had swollen even more and his thigh was mottled with dark patches.

  “It’ll have to be amputated pronto,” Petersen said.

  Elaine turned toward him as if he’d said something obscene, but he met her look with no show of emotion. His eyes were shining, his pupils abnormally dilated deep within his wizened face. “The gangrene’s rising. If we don’t cut off his leg, he’s fucked and that’s it. It’s up to you to decide.”

  Elaine realized at once that he was right, even before she saw the sad look on Yurupig’s face; the tears immediately came to her eyes, not because of the amputation, which she accepted was imperative, but because she knew she was incapable of performing it.

  “I can see to it, if you want,” Petersen said. “I’ve already done that on the Russian front.”

  “You?!” Mauro exclaimed, taken aback. “And why would you do that, eh?” Falling into the familiar form to express his contempt, his voice hoarse with fury, he went on, “After all your scheming to get us to stay on the boat, you want us to believe that you’re … You bastard. You want to kill him, that’s it.”