Where Tigers Are at Home (33 page)

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.

His last banknotes were hardly enough to wipe away his anguish.

When he was able to get up, he wiped his sticky hands with sand and went back to the road, guided by a twinkling light that was in more or less the right direction. He came to a little window and stopped for a moment: gilded by the chiaroscuro of her lamp, an old black woman was slowly doing a piece of embroidery on a large frame of dark wood. Seeing Roetgen, she gave him a timid smile, pausing in her work. This snapshot of Flemish painting encapsulated the infinite gentleness of mothers and, with that, the sole bastion against the madness of the world.

When Zé had offered to take him to visit his sister in the little house she had in the mountains, not far from Fortaleza, Nelson had been so dead drunk that he couldn’t remember either his friend carrying him out to his truck, or having traveled through the whole night. So when he woke in the middle of a forest of banana trees, he thought it was a dream, one of the most calm and beautiful ones he’d had for a long time. Since he felt a bit cold, he pulled his hammock over him and went back to sleep.

“Come on, up you get, lazybones,” he heard an hour later. “There’s no point in coming to the mountains if you spend all the time sleeping.”

Emerging from his hammock as if from a chrysalis, Nelson saw the smiling face of Uncle Zé. “Just have a look at this paradise,” he said, pointing out of the window. “A bit of a change from Fortaleza, isn’t it?”

Outside there were indeed the banana trees of his dream, a clear sky and the croaking of the buffalo frogs.

“Where are we?” Nelson asked, rubbing his eyes.

“At my sister’s place, for God’s sake! In the Serra de Aratanha. You were in some state last night.”

“I must have been, my head feels like a watermelon.”

“The mountain air’ll sort that out in no time at all, you’ll see. Get up, Firmina’s made us a real country breakfast.”

After a
mingau
of tapioca—a thick porridge of sweetened milk and flour—a good slice of sweet-potato omelette and two bowls of coffee, Nelson felt much better. Then Zé carried him piggyback to a large pond down below where they went fishing. Despite his lack of experience, the
aleijadinho
proved to be more skillful than his teacher and caught two catfish that looked monstrous to him.

When they went back for lunch, around one, it had clouded over, suggesting there would be a heavy shower during the afternoon. They hadn’t finished eating when the storm broke, keeping them inside for the rest of the day. After the siesta, they stayed in their hammocks on the veranda, watching the rain. Then Zé sang from memory the adventures of Prince Roldão, which they’d gotten from a recent
cordel
by João Martins de Athayde. A naive mixture of the
Iliad
and
Orlando furioso
, the story told how the nephew of Charlemagne had managed to rescue his Angelica from the clutches of Abdul Rahman, king of Turkey and thoroughgoing infidel, by hiding, together with his weapons, in a gold lion designed by Richard of Normandy …

When the sun set, the rain finally stopped, leaving a frayed veil of mist. Nelson and Zé went inside to escape the evening humidity and opened a bottle of
cachaça
while old Firmina put the fish they’d brought back a few hours earlier on to stew.

They were in the middle of the meal and—remembering it later, Firmina saw it as a coincidence pregnant with meaning—laughing much too loud, when the sound of jet engines made the glasses on the table tremble, getting louder and louder until they had to draw their heads down into their shoulders, and finishing in an explosion that blew out all the windows in the house: the VASP Boeing 727, coming from Congonhas, had crashed spectacularly in the Serra de Aratanha.

The only one to react, Zé rushed outside. A little farther up the mountain, in the light of trees transformed into torches, a huge plume of black smoke was rising from a new gap in the forest.

“
Meu Deus!
” he said, realizing what had happened, “it almost fell on us.” Then, turning to Nelson and his sister, who had followed him out onto the veranda, “You wait here, I’ll go and see if I can do anything.”

With that, he started to run toward the place where the disaster had happened.

Despite Firmina’s loud cries and without really thinking about what he was doing, Nelson followed, hauling himself along the ground.

When, exhausted and covered from head to toe in red mud from sliding along the path, he reached the place where the plane had crashed, Nelson was petrified at what is generally called an “apocalyptic scene” but of which the horror for him was contained in the simple sight of a woman’s torso still attached by her belt but now apparently sitting on her abundant entrails. All around, scattered over a very large area and highlighted by the fluorescent yellow of the life jackets, the smoking debris of the plane, disembowelled suitcases, an unrecognizable jumble could be seen. And then things that held a grisly fascination: horribly mangled bodies, scraps of flesh hanging from the trees like Tibetan prayers, limbs or organs scattered haphazardly over the soaked ground, obscene in their unaccustomed solitude … a feast of human flesh suddenly delivered to the hungry beasts of the forest. It was as if it had been raining blood, steak and offal, Nelson thought.

Woken by the sudden blaze, the vultures were already fluttering over this manna, nibbling at bared stomachs with their beaks, pecking at the eyes, fighting over the most appetizing carcasses with shrill cries. Nelson was hardly surprised at the number of silhouettes—some armed with torches—who were already busying themselves about the site of the tragedy: with little room for pity for those whom death had released from all need, these poor mountain folk were searching through the remains meticulously, picking out anything of value, with no sense of disgust: money, rings and jewelry but also clothes red with blood, odd shoes and even some pieces of the machine, of which it was impossible to say what use they intended to make.