Where Tigers Are at Home (12 page)

However, this flood of complaints did not manage to suppress her sense of being in the wrong. “
Heidegger’s fine, as far as you can say that of a stupid parrot who’s getting old. He continues to repeat his favorite sentence and to peel anything he can get his beak on, as if it were extremely important for the universe not to leave the least scrap of skin on anything. To be honest, though, I’m starting to resemble him a bit …”
Reading this rather involved confession, Moéma had almost jumped on the first train to go and console her father. But now, standing in the queue that wasn’t moving, she stamped her foot impatiently to help bring back her feeling he was not being straight with her. What an idiot! Would the day ever come when he could say things simply, instead of always hiding behind this literary veil. Why didn’t he write, “I love you, Moéma, I miss you, but I’ll only send you the dough when you’ve proved you’re able to face up to life without having to rely on me …” She immediately realized that didn’t make sense: if that were the case, she wouldn’t be asking him for money,
porra!
What about: “Give up all these fantasies, Moéma. Grow up, if only for my sake.” That didn’t work either. She had no desire to “grow up,” to be a woman like her mother or like all those adults who progressed step by little step, all buttoned up in their pretension and their certainties. My God, if he knew! she said to herself with an enjoyable shiver of perturbation. A lesbian and a drug addict! Imagining his reaction, she saw herself in her room, with Thaïs, the syringe and all the paraphernalia … and her father arriving without warning. He didn’t say a word but sat down on the bed, beside her, and took her in his arms. Then he stroked her hair, for a long time, and hummed, his mouth closed, with a throaty sound that made his chest resonate
like a drum. And there was great comfort in listening to his lullaby, a sweetness that opened all the gates, all her hopes. And then, at the moment when this feeling of accord was at its strongest, her father said:

“Yes, Madam? I do have other things to do …”

Caught in her daydream, Moéma had a slight dizzy turn at the counter.

“Is something wrong? Don’t you feel well?”

“No, no … I’m sorry,” she said, forcing herself to smile, “I was miles away. I’d like to take out some money.”

SHE WAS COMING
out of the bank when she heard a familiar voice. “
Tudo bem?”
Roetgen asked, coming over to her.

“
Tudo bom
 …”

“You’ve become a stranger … Have you decided to drop out of my course?”

“No, no, not at all. And if I was going to drop out of a lecturer’s course, it wouldn’t be yours.”

“So what’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing. I’ve got a few minor personal problems at the moment. And the year’s almost over, isn’t it? There can’t be a lot still going …”

“That’s true,” Roetgen said with a laugh. “But that’s not a reason for my best student to desert me.” Feeling uncomfortable at not being able to see her eyes, Roetgen took off her glasses. “You know it’s very impolite to keep these on when you’re talking to someone, especially to one of your teachers?”

He said it in a friendly tone and to tease her a little, and was surprised at the way she shrank back. For a brief moment she seemed so thrown by it, he felt as if he had undressed her. Her big blue eyes looked even stranger than usual; like those of a nocturnal
bird suddenly exposed to the full sunlight, they had fixed in a disturbingly vacant and terrified expression.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said in a harsh voice. “We haven’t slept together as far as I know.”

Roetgen felt himself blush to the roots of his hair. “You must excuse me,” he said awkwardly, “I don’t know what came over me. But it’s a pity to hide such pretty eyes.”

“Oh, these Frenchmen, they’re all the same,” Moéma said, smiling at his embarrassment.

“Don’t think that or you could come in for some unpleasant surprises.” Then, with a glance at the clock on the bank, “Oh
là, là
, I’m going to be late, I must be off. By the way, there’s an event at the German Cultural Institute this evening, d’you feel like coming? We could have a chat …”

“All this organized stuff’s just a pain in the ass, nothing but speeches and youth-club entertainment.”

“This time it’ll be different. You don’t know Andreas, he really wants to get things moving. But if the students don’t come, there’s no point.”

“I’ll see.”

“Great. See you this evening then, I hope.”

Roetgen was what in Brazil is called a
profesor visitante
, that is, a lecturer on a fixed-term contract within an exchange with a foreign university. A recent graduate—he was almost the same age as his students—with a passionate enthusiasm for the ethnology of the
Nordeste
, he had come to Fortaleza during the year to give a series of seminars on the “methodology of observation in rural areas.” Somewhat shy and reserved, he had made friends with Andreas Haekner, the director of the German Cultural Institute. And since they were always seen together, the rumor had gone around that they had unmentionable feelings for each other. Moéma laughed with the others at the stream of innuendo the
sight of Roetgen could set off, without, however, having seen any signs that would indicate a tendency to homosexuality. He wasn’t
one of the family
, as she put it, and if by some unlikely chance she was wrong, it was truly a pity for Brazilian women.

GETTING OFF THE
bus at the sea front, just opposite the side street where Thaïs lived, Moéma stopped for a moment. Transformed by her tinted glasses, the Atlantic looked like a lake of molten gold fringed with coconut trees made of tin and leather.

“They should force people to wear dark glasses,” she said, parting the bead curtain that led directly into Thaïs’s main room. “It might help them use their imagination properly …”

From the mattress and the cushions they were lounging on, Virgilio, Pablo and Thaïs applauded her assertion. As she joined them Thaïs gave her a querying look. Moéma reassured her with a wink: she’d got the money.

“
Maconheiros!
” Moéma said, making a deliberate show of sniffing the air. “You’ve been smoking, you bastards.”

“We
were
smoking,” Pablo said with a roguish grin. He turned his right hand so that the palm was facing her and showed her the joint he was holding between his thumb and forefinger. “Would you like some?”

“I wouldn’t say no,” Moéma said, delicately taking the spliff from him.

When she’d finished inhaling the smoke from inside her hands cupped around her face, Virgilio couldn’t wait to show her the first issue of the journal he’d been boring them with for several weeks. Its title, with its Shakespearean allusion—
Tupí or not Tupí—
referred to the Tupí-Guaraní, natives “unsuitable for work” whom the conquistadores had systematically massacred then replaced with slaves brought from Africa. The pamphlet
was not particularly large, but it was properly printed and had numerous black-and-white illustrations. In his editorial entitled
O indio não é bicho
(“The Indian isn’t an animal”), Virgilio set out the aims of the little group around him: to protect the Indians of Brazil—those of Amazonia as well as those of the Mato Grosso—from extermination; to defend their culture, their customs and their territories from invasion by the industrialized world; to assert their history as the best way for Brazilians to resist the takeover of their country by the great powers. This wide-ranging program embraced all the popular cultures of the interior, which had inherited, according to Virgilio, the customs of the indigenous tribes and also included an active defense of the language and oral traditions of Brazil.

“So what do you think of it?” Virgilio asked, a little anxiously. His thin face covered in acne did him no favors, but he had doelike eyes behind the lenses of his little gold-rimmed glasses. Moéma had a very high opinion of him.

“Fantastic! I never thought you’d actually get it out. It’s brilliant, Virgilio, something to be proud of.”

“You must write an article for the next issue. I’ve already got ten subscriptions, not bad for the first day, eh?”

“And I make eleven. You must tell me how much I owe you.” Then, leafing through the journal, she went on, “The paper on the Xingu tattoos is great. Who is this Sanchez Labrador?”

“Me,” said Virgilio in apologetic tones. “Also Ignacio Valladolid, Angel Perralta, et cetera. I did everything, including the drawings. You know how it is, you get promised lots of articles, but when the time comes, no one’s to be found. Of course, now the first issue’s out, I’m snowed under with offers. It makes me sick. People really are unreliable.”

“That’s true,” said Thaïs as she burned her fingers on the tiny butt from which she was trying to take one last puff.

“If you want,” Moéma said, “I could do something on the Kadiwéu. We took them as an example this year to study the concept of endorsement. Did you know that they feel responsible for everything, even the sun rising?”

“Christ, the fools!” said Pablo, bursting into laughter. “I don’t envy them …” Then, seeing Moéma’s furious look, “OK, OK. If you can’t even take a joke! I know nothing about all that old stuff.”

“Well you ought to make an effort. It’s the present that’s at stake, your present. Every time a tree disappears, an Indian dies; and every time an Indian dies it’s the whole of Brazil that becomes a bit more ignorant, that is, a bit more American. And it’s precisely because there are thousands like you, who couldn’t care less, that the process continues.”

“Oh, come on, I was only joking …”

“So was I,” Moéma snapped.

“You always have to get on your high horse whenever we start talking about Indians. You’re getting tedious, sweetheart, you really are.”

“OK, that’s enough you two,” said Virgilio in conciliatory tones. “That doesn’t get us anywhere. While you’re getting in each other’s hair our dear president has sold a part of Amazonia the size of the Netherlands to a Texas mining company.”

“How big is the Netherlands?” Thaïs asked, her speech slurred by the cannabis.

“Roughly the size of Ceará.”

“A mining company!” Moéma said in disgust, her whole body racked by a wave of anger.

“I heard it this morning. On the radio, so it must be official.”

In the profound silence that followed Moéma felt terribly impotent. She felt like being sick.

“Right,” said Pablo, “then we’ll have to get up our strength for the fight. Can I have this thing, Thaïs?” Without waiting for a
reply, he took a little clip-frame with a picture of Saint Sebastian bristling with arrows off the wall.

“What are you doing?” Thaïs asked, uneasy. Without being religious herself, she didn’t like people playing with religious objects. Such color prints could be found in all the shops selling religious bric-a-brac, but she was fond of this Saint Sebastian because of his sad smile and beautiful androgynous face. Less innocent was the way the drops of crimson blood dripping down from his wounds secretly excited her to the extent that she always saw this image at a particular moment of pleasure during lovemaking.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” said Pablo, carefully opening a film-roll box and pouring the contents onto the clip-frame, “it’s on the house.”

“Wow!” Thaïs exclaimed, seeing the large lumps of cocaine rolling a cross the glass. “It’s Christmas,
Mãe de Deus!
”

“Goodness!” Moéma said, just as fascinated by this sudden abundance. “Where did you find that amazing stuff?”

“I’ve just got it. When it’s like that, in little crystals, it means it’s not been cut. It’s the purest of the pure, ladies.”

Closely watched by the two girls, Pablo started by crumbling up the lumps with a razor blade. Once the cocaine had been reduced to powder, he divided it up into four equal parts, which he then deftly drew out into a number of parallel lines.

“Leave me out,” Virgilio said suddenly, standing up. “Sorry but I have to go.”

“See you this evening, at the
Casa de Cultura Alemã?
”

“Yes—if you’re still in a fit state to go anywhere by then.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

“Good. See you, then. But be careful, that stuff’s shit.”

He hadn’t even left before Pablo had shifted his share of the powder to the other three lines. “Your little journalist doesn’t know what he’s missing. Is he afraid or what?”

“Leave it, Pablo,” Moéma said icily, “he’s OK.”

“Fine, fine, I didn’t say anything. Off you go, you lead the way.”

He handed her the clip-frame and the 100-cruzeiro note he had just rolled up into a tube. Leaning over the picture of Saint Sebastian, Moéma put the improvised straw up one of her nostrils, blocking the other with her forefinger. She snorted half the line steadily and confidently, then repeated the process. After having sniffed it all back, she tapped the glass to pick up the last crystals on the tip of her finger and rub them vigorously on her gums.

“
Que bom!
” she said, closing her eyes. The heat came in stronger and stronger waves; an odd taste, slightly bitter, was making her mouth numb.

“Well then?” Pablo asked, while Thaïs hurried to go through the same ritual.

“You’re right, it’s good stuff, very good stuff.”

“If you want some, tell me now. It’s going to disappear very quickly.”

“How much?”

“For you, the price is the same as the last time: ten thousand a gram.”

Cooled down by a burst of guilty conscience, Moéma almost refused the offer, but the idea exasperated her. The feeling it gave her of being under surveillance, judged in advance by the paternal tribunal. When was she going to make up her mind to accept the choices she’d made? With the money she’d exchanged she’d enough cash to renew her supply of coke—she’d almost none left since the other night—and to pay the first expenses for setting up the bar. She calculated that two grams would be sufficient to see her through to the end of the month. And she suddenly felt so good, so much mistress of herself and her destiny …

“Share mine with me, I already snorted a bit too much for today,” Pablo said with a smile.