Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  She blamed herself now for having wanted to see Aynoré again, for having thought herself strong enough to face the hazardous labyrinth of the favela at night. Her punishment was certainly out of proportion to her error but, ultimately, just as valid as a bad mark on a botched essay. She found it almost impossible to envisage the idea that one day she’d have to leave this refuge of shadow and tenderness where, out of pure animal instinct, she was lying low. In order to postpone that eventuality, she rigorously avoided any questions about her address or identity. There was the world before and the world after; she no longer wanted to hear anything about the former while not yet being ready to face the latter.

  Her talk with Uncle Zé was a crucial stage in her metamorphosis. He came to see her in Nelson’s shack late one afternoon and stayed with them the whole evening. “Hi, Princess,” was his simple greeting. “It seems you’ve had a narrow escape.”

  Moéma was immediately taken with his affable manner. Already predisposed in his favor by Nelson, she changed this prior esteem into genuine admiration. It was above all thanks to him that she could put a name to the things that had turned her world upside down. In simple words and without abandoning the gentle tone, which was more eloquent than an expression of his rebellion would have been, he lifted the veil on the favelas. This fringe, the existence of which she deplored, this dark, shameful world, had swelled to its full scale, had become embedded in physical reality to the point where it had broken down what she used to feel was her clear conscience. What Nelson showed her merely by his existence as a minor beggar, Zé multiplied by such numbers that she had begun to feel in a minority in her own town. In Fortaleza alone the shantytowns contained over eight hundred thousand inhabitants with no other refuge but the sand and the noisome precariousness of the dunes. Condemned to the clear blue skies of the tropics, irradiated by poverty, these slums spread misfortune with an energy that was constantly renewed: children’s brothels, incest, endemic diseases—the very ones that elsewhere they boast about having eradicated!—hunger that drove people to eat rats or chew the dried soil in the ruts, the inconceivable privations they had to suffer just to obtain a set of tiles necessary for a family’s basic survival: With a roof, Uncle Zé told her, it takes a process lasting six months to flatten an illegal dwelling, when there’s no roof they just have to send in a bulldozer. Those machines arrived without warning, like diarrhea or stomach cramps, they gobbled up everything in their path to clear the dunes for the property developers and to allow them to continue the immense concrete barrier they were erecting along the river bank. Mutterings, protest? They fired on the crowd with the same indifference with which they’d fire on a flock of sparrows. And if that wasn’t enough, there were the continuous brawls among the poverty-stricken inhabitants themselves, alcohol, cocaine, bodies buried sitting up—sometimes you tripped over their heads when you were going for a pee!—the innumerable mad people, the toilet paper on which crooks who claimed to own your hovel would scribble a receipt for rent, infants sold to the rich, to all those worthy souls short of offspring, the harpooners’ beach where everyone pulled their pants down to do their business, the children, boys and girls naked until they were eight, who suddenly dropped dead, with empty stomachs, after feats of endurance a yogi would have been proud of … ninety million blacks with no birth certificate or identity card, more than half the population of Brazil in dire poverty.

  “Not even slaves, hardly human but still human beings, that’s Brazil, Princess. Not that you can see it out of your window.”

  “The last time they sent in the ’dozers,” Nelson added, “everyone thought they’d come to clear up the rubbish. But the rubbish was us, if you get what I mean.”

  What she had thought was the ultimate in deprivation among the fishermen of Canoa suddenly seemed an enviable situation, unattainable luxury.

  THERE WERE FAINT signs of resistance, however, thanks to the work of a few visionaries—saints, Princess, veritable saints!—who had come to live in the heart of the favela and share the wretched conditions of its inhabitants. Somehow first-aid posts had been set up, embryonic health centers where people could see a doctor free, get together, talk. Organizations such as the Hole in the Sky, Our Lady of the Graces, the Guava Community taught children to read and write, distributed food to the ten families who arrived on the dunes every day, forced into exile by the drought in the Sertão or the rapacity of the landowners. They were helped to build makeshift shelters to give them a foothold in the area. Gradually the people of Pirambú were rediscovering solidarity, the strength of united action. Charitable souls donated provisions, medicine, large sheets of plastic packaging to insulate the roofs or, fastened between four posts, to make the walls of an umpteenth shack. In the favela of Cuatro-Varas, for example, there was a committee, the first of its kind, a little group of elected representatives that dealt with local problems and represented the interests of the shantytown with the authorities. All that wasn’t much but it did have the great advantage of actually existing.

  “He’s the one who built the house for me. And sometimes he swipes a few tiles from the depot. Just like that, for others. He even gives Manoelzinho a tip to get him to fill my water tank every day!”

  Embarrassed, Uncle Zé gave Nelson a sign to shut up and changed the subject. It was true, nevertheless. Among the crazy people who were not indifferent to what went on in the world, there were those who were committed, one way or the other, to try to change things and those who were happy to modify what they could see around them, bit by bit, in their own way. The two attitudes were probably complementary, as Moéma was realizing now; she had adopted neither the one nor the other and that was something else she would need forgiveness for one day. What had she done for all those Indians, whose genocide she so smugly condemned, apart from taking them as a pretext for her own malaise, her own moaning. Was there anything, any single thing she could point to that gave her the right to speak, to exercise that right with a minimum of justification?

  “It’s just not possible,” said Uncle Zé. “We’ve reached the year 2000 and three-quarters of the world’s still starving to death! Tell me, what’s the point of this fuss about 2000? Things are just going to get worse, my girl, even worse than people think. We haven’t made the slightest progress, not the slightest. It’ll all end in tears, you mark my words.”

  Now it wasn’t just the Yanomami or the Kadiweu who were screaming revolution in Moéma’s guilty conscience but the innumerable tribe of the destitute. It was obvious what she had to do: the last vestiges of humanity within us and on earth had to be preserved, at all cost, to allow a true world to develop, so that no one in the future could look back on us with contempt for not having done anything when everything was still possible.

  “Even Father Leonardo was silenced by the Pope. He was a Franciscan, a real one … That cunt of a Pope—forgive me, Princess—should have his balls torn off for doing that. It’s criminal … There’s millions and millions of people who died because of him!”

  MOÉMA’S EYES WERE being opened all the time, she felt guilty of nonlove, of criminal negligence. But Uncle Zé had given her a gentle reproof for indulging in self-flagellation: “When you break a glass, Princess, it’s still a broken glass, even if you stick the pieces together again. It’s best to buy a new glass, if you see what I mean.”

  She saw. To repair her life, her illusion of being alive must be to set up something new, to make a complete change in the way she was with others. But how? She hadn’t got things clear in her mind yet but the first step was to go back to her father, to the house. After that she’d comes back and offer her services, in this favela or another, work for the FUNAI with the Indians, in the Xingu reservation. UNESCO, UNO, an NGO perhaps? It’s crazy the kind of shit they send us, single shoes, teddy bears, glasses that saw Christ walking on water … Anything they’ve no use for anymore! Why should we have a use for it, eh? And when it’s money, we only see the check in the papers … But there were a thousand ways
of making oneself useful. And she thought: of finding forgiveness, without seeing that first of all she had to forgive herself, that her good resolutions would remain ineffective, even pointless without that essential preliminary.

  Having donned the prestigious uniform of the humanitarian legion was already making her feel redeemed. Her enthusiasm intensified. Expressions such as “a new beginning” or “back to square one” were going round and round in her head as persistently as the nagging awareness of her responsibility. When Zé mentioned the Feast of Yemanjá and his difficulty finding a girl worthy of representing the goddess, Moéma immediately offered to help. Uncle Zé explained what she was getting herself into and arranged to meet her in two days’ time at the terreiro of Mata Escura.

  FAVELA DO PIRAMBÚ: I saw her and I didn’t see her …

  After uncle Zé had taken Moéma back to the town center, Nelson curled up in his hammock. He should have taken advantage of the truck to go begging on the sea front, but the departure of his princess had caught him unprepared. “I’m like a werewolf at the full moon,” he told himself, somewhat bewildered, “there’s something wrong with me.” Everything in his hut reminded him of the young woman who had been there, tiny changes, objects he had deliberately not moved so as to prolong the spell her presence had cast. Frowning and staring at the ceiling, he tried to relive his past happiness, visualizing two or three specific scenes; these few days could be summed up in the feeling that for a brief moment the world had brightened up but now it was dark. It wasn’t possible his memory could be playing such tricks on him, not about that, for God’s sake! He wriggled in the canvas, changed position. And how would he manage if the police turned up to interrogate him, eh? He couldn’t just give them the shit that was left inside his loaf: the light’s gone out of my life. The cop would give him a clip on the ear right away. And then another, straight after, just to get rid of his fancy ideas …

  “So has that cleared the shit out of your head, half-pint? A bit clearer about things now, are we? What the fuck was a tart like that doing here?”

  “I went to see the train go past and she was there, fighting, but not with anyone. It was obvious someone had hurt her.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “She’d nothing on and she was crying. It was as if she was out of her mind …”

  “And you, of course, tried to screw her …”

  “I swear I didn’t, comandante. To me it was as if she was wearing a blue satin gown with flounces … a king’s daughter, so beautiful it knocked you over on your backside! I wouldn’t have touched her, not for anything in the world. I brought her back here to protect her from the dragon.”

  Wham! Another clout. He’d done nothing to deserve that one either. The bloody cop didn’t understand that she came out of a cordel, she was the Princess of the Kingdom-where-no-one-goes. At the same time he wasn’t daft, he knew very well it wasn’t her. But he’d never for a moment thought that she came from Pirambú: even completely naked as she was, you could see she belonged to the soçaite, the crème de la crème.

  “What time was it?”

  “Dunno … three or four in the morning. I couldn’t leave her like that, but I never touched her, never even looked at her. I gave her the only things I’ve got, apart from what I’m wearing, my soccer uniform, with Zico’s number! And as soon as it was light I went off into the town to buy her the very best. I’ve never spent so much money in all my life, chefe. The T-shirt I got for almost nothing, at the Legion of Support against Infantile Diarrhea, but the shorts, the towel … Puxa! I even got rose-scented soap. Phebo de Luxe, manufactured according to the English system, the most famous speciality of Brazilian industry. The soap of choice for persons of good taste—that was written on the wrapper—it swathes the body in an aura of elegance. An aura, comandante, I couldn’t invent something like that! Insisted on by the world of fashion—and I’m not lying.”

  Following a sudden inspiration, Nelson went to fetch the soap and climbed back into the dream-inducing nest in his hammock. His nose on the translucent bar of soap and the towel Moéma had used, he was in a hurry to return to the scene he had evoked.

  “It’ll come back to me, I promise.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I treated her wounds as best I could and I watched her sleeping. When she woke up, I showed her the place where she could wash. I told her she should put some ointment on her bruises, I hadn’t done that, out of respect for her, well, you know … There was no way I could get a word out of her. She was looking right through me, as if I was a shop window or a windscreen. Then I could tell she had the encosto. She was possessed, ill. I even thought she’d never been able to speak … So I spoke for both of us. I made some questions and the answers, then I told her all the stories I’d promised … ’cause I’m sure that’s what got her to come. What are you called, Princess? Where’s your kingdom? Things like that … She opened her eyes, then she went back to sleep. There must have been several of them had a go at her.”

  “Oh yes? And why didn’t you tell the police?”

  “With all due respect, comandante, the less we see of the cops, the better off we are, as they say. Anyway, they wouldn’t have come, they’re a load of cretins … (This time I’d duck just at the right moment and his fist would go over my head.) I called Uncle Zé, from a telephone booth. It was a bit of luck that he was there at all, at the depot. I can only come tomorrow evening, he said, I’ve a delivery for João Pessoa. In the meantime keep a good eye on her. So I came back home, on the double, around the back way, because it’s shorter. And there I saw she was washing herself: just her arm came out to get some water from the can … You can se a bit of what’s going on through the pallets, if you look—”

  “And you got an eyeful, viado!”

  “No I didn’t, sir. It was the same as the first time, I saw her and I didn’t see her … I can’t really explain it. She didn’t stop washing herself, she wasn’t paying attention to anything else. But all I saw was little bits of her and I couldn’t go in because of the curtain. I didn’t want her to think I’d been watching her.”

  “But you still had a hard-on, eh, you swine?”

  So then he took out his switchblade and stuck it in the stupid pig, right in the belly and ripped it open. You just couldn’t allow people to say things like that to you. To be honest, though, seeing her like that had turned him on. But not like at the VASP plane. He’d felt like a man, how should he put it, like a man who’d controlled himself. Zé had told him that it had happened to him once, when he was looking at a statue of the Virgin. Well, it was that kind of thing. You know, feelings … But, shit, that cop’s intestines in the hammock, that just made it impossible for him to think … The damn corpse was taking up all the space, he’d have to put it back up on its feet, with the knife in its stomach, as of nothing had happened …

  “OK, then … But there must have come a moment when she’d finished washing herself?”

  “Yes, but I still waited. Quite a while, even, to let her get dressed, instead of pretending I wasn’t looking … Well, I know what I mean. When I went in she was lying down again. It was just like before, except that she smelled good, meu Deus! A baby all cleaned up, the arnica … But what had happened to her still had her in its grip, she didn’t see me, so I went on talking to her, all the time, until the evening … And then suddenly she spoke to me: ‘Moéma’—that was even better than Alzira or Theodora. She could hardly remember anything. I told her what I knew, how I’d found her and then what I’ve told you. But for her, it was all dammed up inside her. She just wanted to stay there, she was afraid of going out, of people finding her … like a wounded animal. She wanted me to tell her about myself, so I did. Everything, my father, who was dead and converted into a rail, my saving for the wheelchair, I even showed her the place so that she knew I trusted her …”

  “And the pistol? You told her about the pistol?”

  No, it was stupid, the fat slob couldn’t know th
at. And anyway, he’d kept the story of the pistol to himself. What might she have thought, eh? It wasn’t good that he’d kept it from her, but above all he hadn’t wanted to frighten her.

  “OK … And once you’d finished telling her your life story?”

  “After that there was Uncle Zé. It was he who did everything. I mean … he’s a bit of a paï de santo, a father of saints, he knows how to deal with minds. He told her about Pirambú, a load of things about us lot, the faveleros. And I don’t know how, but it took the hurt away. She kept on saying she’d come back, that she’d found something to do with her life. Zé, I know him, didn’t really believe that but he knew it was definitely doing her good, ’cause he didn’t contradict her; as for me, I’m sure she was being honest. And then … he came for her this morning. As she left, she said she’d bring back the things I’d bought for her. I’d meant them as a gift, but I said nothing, to make sure she’d come back …”

  The sound of a loudspeaker burst the bubble of his memories—surely they hadn’t decided to flatten the whole favela today?! Nelson hurried out to see what was going on, but it was just an election agent, with a loudspeaker in his hand, come to sell his tawdry wares. People had gathered around the van, aware that this kind of thing always ended with a handout.

  “Who got the bus shelter in Goiavera built?” the guy with the smallpox-ravaged cheeks was asking. “Edson Barbosa, Jr.! Who’s been fighting for four years to get mains drainage in Pirambú? Edson Barbosa, Jr.! Who allowed the building of the Health Centre for All? Edson Barbosa, Jr.! Who spoke to the Pope about your situation, in a personal audience, if you please? Edson Barbosa, Jr. again! The other candidates promise all sorts of things, but they don’t do anything. Only Edson Barbosa, Jr. has slaved away to make life better for you all! And this time he has some great news for you—if you want to know what it is, come to the big meeting that will be held tomorrow on the Future Beach. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed! And in addition everyone wearing one of these baseball caps or one of these magnificent T-shirts will be entitled to a basket of food! That is Edson Barbosa, Jr., generosity in person! Vote for him or get others to vote for him and these baskets will multiply! There’ll be so many you won’t know what to do with them! Come to Edson Barbosa, Jr.’s meeting for the feast of Yemanjá, the patron saint of Pirambú. Even the governor of Maranhão is taking the trouble to come. Just think, his Excellency José Moreira da Rocha will be there to support your candidate! José Moreira da Rocha, the big industrialist! José Moreira da Rocha, the millionaire who talks to our beloved president just as I’m talking to you. The one they call ‘the Benefactor’ because he did away with the favelas of San Luís. It’s as true as I’m standing here, go and see for yourselves if you don’t believe me: no shantytown, not a single shack left! May God give me a deadly dose of cholera if I’m spinning you a yarn! All the poor have been rehoused in permanent homes, everyone’s got a regular job and can eat their fill! And this is the man who has come to advise our governor so he can do the same in Fortaleza! José Moreira da Rocha and Edson Barbosa, Jr. on the Future Beach—for your future, my friends! And it starts tomorrow!