Where Tigers Are at Home (4 page)

All the visible space outside the French window in the living room was filled by the royal-blue night, which had a strong smell of ozone and jasmine. Sitting, naked, on the large straw mat that covered the floor, Moéma’s teeth chattered as she reread her letter. Sudden shivers ran down her spine; she was sweating copiously. She’d have to do something about that pretty quick. She put the letter in an envelope, stuck on a stamp then wrote her father’s address, forcing herself not to tremble. Going back into the bedroom, she stopped on the threshold a moment to look at Thaïs stretched out, naked as well, on the sheets. Her eyes were closed and her full figure was prey to the same icy waves that were making Moéma’s own skin contract from time to time. Through the Persian blinds, the moon cast soothing stripes over her body.

Moéma sat down on the edge of the bed; she ran her fingers through the girl’s thick hair.

“Have you done it?” Thaïs asked, opening her eyes.

“Yes, that’s it. I’m sure he’ll send me the dosh. After all, he never refuses me anything.”

“I’m speeding a bit, you know.”

“Me too, but I’ll sort it out.”

Moéma turned to the bedside table and took out the little ebony box containing the coke. With a strip of cardboard she took out a pinch of powder and poured it into a soup spoon;
the
spoon with the twisted handle that kept it perfectly horizontal. Deciding the quantity was too great, she put some of it back in the box before mixing the rest with a little water from a dropper.

“You’ll be careful, yes?” Thaïs whispered, watching her.

“Don’t worry, I’ve no desire to die, even less to kill you,” Moéma replied, heating the contents of the spoon over a lighter. “I’m not as crazy as I seem.”

After having drawn up the mixture, Moéma gave several taps to the fine syringe they had used four hours ago, gently pressed
the plunger, checking that there were no air bubbles left, then picked up the delicate dressing-gown belt lying on the floor.

“Off we go, sweetheart.”

Thaïs sat up and held out her chubby arm. Moéma wrapped the belt twice around her biceps, then pulled it tight until a vein swelled up in the crook of her arm.

“Clench your fist,” she said, leaving Thaïs herself to keep the tourniquet tight. She soaked a piece of cotton wool in perfume then rubbed it over her arm. Holding her breath in an attempt to curb her trembling, she cautiously brought the needle up to the chosen vein.

“How lucky you are to have such large veins; with me it’s always a big production …”

Thaïs closed her eyes. She couldn’t stand the sight of the last part of these preparations, the moment when Moéma drew out the plunger a little: a tiny jet of black blood spurted into the syringe, as if life itself, escaping from her body, were spreading out in there in thin, deadly curls. The first time, two months ago, she had almost fainted.

“Now, unclench your fist slowly,” said Moéma, starting the injection. When she’d half emptied the syringe, she pulled the needle out and bent Thaïs’ arm over on a wad of cotton wool.

“Oh my God! Oh, the shit, my God, the white shit!” the girl repeated, slumping down on her back.

“Are you OK, Thaïs? Say something! Thaïs?!”

“It’s OK … Don’t worry … Come and join me, quick,” she said, articulating with difficulty.

Reassured, Moéma put the belt around her left arm, holding it in place with her teeth. Now her hand was trembling uncontrollably. Clenching her fist as tight as she could, she pricked herself several times without managing to find a vein in the bluish network scarcely visible under her skin. In desperation, she ended up sticking the needle in a blood-filled bulge in her wrist.

Even before injecting the rest of the syringe, she had a strong taste of ether and perfume in her mouth; and as the aperture on the world gradually closed, she felt herself cut off from the living, cast back into the darkness of her own being. A metallic rumbling swelled up abruptly inside her head, a kind of continuing echo, muffled, such as you hear during a dive when your cylinder hits the rusty metal of an old ship. And along with this shipwreck’s wail came fear. A terrible fear of dying, of not being able to turn back. But right at the bottom of this panic was a couldn’t-care-less attitude to death, a sort of defiance that was almost clear-headed, despairing.

Sensing that she was coming close to the very mystery of existence, she followed the progressive disappearance of everything that was not of the body, of her body and her own will to merge with another body eager for sensual pleasure, with all the bodies present in the world.

Moéma felt Thaïs’ hand on her chest, pulling her down. She stretched out, immediately concentrating on the exquisitely voluptuous enjoyment the contact gave her. Thaïs bit her on the lip, at the same time stroking her clitoris and rubbing her own genitals against her thigh. Life exploded in all its restored beauty; it had a lovely smell of Givenchy.

A nasty play on words between
aleijado
(handicapped) and
alijado
(reduced) meant that he was called “Reduced Nelson” or, more often, simply “Reduced.” He was a boy of about fifteen, perhaps older, who seemed to have the gift of ubiquity. Wherever you went in the streets of Fortaleza you always ended up seeing him between cars, in the middle of the road, begging for a few
cruzeiros. Down as far as the groin he was a complete and, if anything, attractive boy with his shoulder-length hair, his big brown eyes and the beginnings of a mustache; he was only “reduced” in his lower limbs: with the bones of his two legs fused and his feet just stumps, he moved around like an animal, using his arms. Always dressed the same in a shapeless loincloth, like someone being crucified, rather than shorts, and a striped football shirt that he rolled up above his breasts, in the fashion of the
Nordeste
, he popped up everywhere, dragging himself along quite nimbly through the dust of the streets. Forced by his disability to perform ungainly acrobatics, from a distance he looked like a velvet crab or, to be more precise, a robber crab.

Since the heat in the town forced people to drive with their windows open, he would take up position at the main crossroads and wait for the lights to turn red before launching his attack on the vehicles. Suddenly two callused hands would grasp the bottom of the window, then a head with a fearsome look would appear while repulsively crooked limbs thumped the windscreen or threatened to invade the interior of the car. “Have pity, for the love of God, have pity!” the
aleijadinho
would cry, in menacing tones that sent shivers down your spine. Springing up from the depths of the earth, this apparition almost always produced the desired effect: the drivers would fumble with their wallets or rummage around nervously in the jumble of the side pockets to get rid of the nightmare as quickly as possible. And since his hands were occupied, Nelson would order them to place the grimy banknote they’d managed to unearth in his mouth. Then he would slip down onto the road and transfer the money to his trunks after having given it a quick glance.

“God bless you,” he would say between his teeth as the car was about to set off again; and such was the scorn he put into the words that it sounded like “Go to the devil.”

He filled women drivers with terror. But when you got to know him a bit and handed him his alms even before he had to beg, saving him having to climb up onto your car, he would thank you with a smile that was worth any number of blessings.

On bad days he would go thieving rather than fight with the vultures at the municipal rubbish dump for a piece of rotten fruit or a bone to gnaw. Usually he only stole things he could eat and that was a real torment for him because of his great fear of the savage violence of the police. The last time he’d been caught, for the theft of three bananas, the pigs had humiliated him until he couldn’t take any more, calling him a half-pint; they’d forced him to take off all his clothes, supposedly to search him, in reality to mock his atrophied organs even more cruelly and to tell him again and again that Brazil ought to be purged of such unnatural monsters. Then they locked him up for the night in a cell with a
cascavel
, one of the most poisonous snakes of the region, in order to cause “a regrettable accident.” By some miracle the serpent had left him in peace but Nelson had spent terrified hours sobbing and vomiting until he fainted. Even now the
cascavel
still haunted his nights. Fortunately Zé, “the truck driver,” had come in the morning to bail him out, so he had escaped the worst.

Nelson’s admiration and gratitude for this odd fellow knew no bounds. Zé, always in a jovial mood, had befriended him and came to the
favela
to see him from time to time. He always had some new story to tell and even took the
aleijadinho
in his truck for trips to the seaside. Not only was Zé—Uncle Zé as he called him—tall and strong and drove around the world in his huge, brightly colored truck, he possessed what in Nelson’s eyes was a genuine treasure: Lampião’s nephew’s car! It was a white Willis that Zé had shown him one day. It didn’t go anymore, but he looked after it carefully; Nelson had never been so happy as the day he had been allowed to sit inside it. Famous spoils of war! Virgulino Ferreira da Silva,
alias Lampião, who had become an outlaw after his father was killed by the police and spent almost twenty years leading them by the nose, had taken it from Antônio Gurgel, a rich landowner who had ventured into the Sertão. Lampião had attacked it on horseback with his band as if it were an ordinary stagecoach and Gurgel had only come out of it alive by paying a large ransom. Nelson knew all the history of the
cangaço
and of the men who were called
cangaceiros
because they carried their rifles across their spine, the way harnessed oxen bore the
cangalho
, the yoke. They had thrown off the yoke of oppression to live the life of free men in the Sertão, and if their Winchesters weighed heavy on their shoulders, at least it was in a good cause, the cause of justice. Fascinated, like all the boys in the
Nordeste
, by the figure of Lampião, Nelson had done everything he could to collect material about this Robin Hood of the great estates. The sheet-metal and plywood walls of his lair in the
favela
of Pirambú were papered with numerous photos cut out from
Manchete
or
Veja
. They showed Lampião at all ages and in all aspects of his career, also his companion in his adventures, Maria Bonita, and his principal lieutenants: Chico Pereira, Antônio Porcino, José Saturnino, Jararaca … all of whose exploits Nelson knew by heart, holy martyrs whom he often called upon for protection.

Zé having promised he would come by that evening, Nelson had gone back to the
favela
a little earlier than usual. He’d bought a litre of
cachaça
from Terra e Mar and filled the two little paraffin lamps he’d made out of old tin cans. Performing contortions, he had even managed to level out the sand in his room, after having cleared away all his cigarette butts. Now, as he waited for Uncle Zé, he looked at his father gleaming in the half-light. Oh, no one could say that he neglected him: the steel bar had been cleaned as if it were a silver candlestick; oiled and rubbed day after day, it
reflected the flame of the night-light on it that he kept lit all the time.

Like many men from the
Nordeste
, his father used to work in a steelworks of the Minas Geraís. Every evening he would tell him about the hell of the blast furnaces, of the dangers the workers were exposed to because of the rapacity of the owner, Colonel José Moreira de Rocha. One day he didn’t come home. At nightfall a fat oaf in a suit and two foremen had come to see him in the shack, unfit for human habitation, that the boss generously granted each of his employees. They talked of an accident, describing in detail how his father, his own father, had fallen into a vat of molten metal. There was nothing left of him apart from this symbolic piece of rail, which they had insisted on bringing with them. There were sure to be a few atoms of his father spread through it, they said; it weighed 143 pounds, exactly the same as his father, so it could be given a church funeral. And for good measure they added that, since he no longer had any claim on the house, he was being asked to quit the property.

Nelson was ten years old. His mother had died when he was born and having no other family, he found himself on the street at a moment’s notice. Through all his trials and tribulations he had held on to the piece of rail and lavished care on it as his most precious possession.

The Colonel was a bastard, a son of a whore eaten away by the pox.

“Don’t you worry, Daddy,” Nelson murmured, turning to the steel bar, “I’ll get him, you can be sure of that; sooner or later that swine will feel the vengeance of the
cangaço
.

ATHANASIUS HAD JUST
started his study of physics when war came to Paderborn. When, on January 6, 1622, Johann Copper gave his flock the order to flee, it was almost too late: the rabble had already surrounded the buildings. Relying solely on his courage & his faith in Our Lord, the principal of the college went out to meet the mercenaries & urge them to show mercy. They flung a flaming torch in his face. He managed to avoid it but the Lutheran fiends threw themselves on the holy man; he was given a thorough thrashing, insulted & humiliated before being tied up like an animal & dragged off to prison. He was fortunate not to be taken straight to the scaffold, on which many other Catholics no more culpable than he ended their days.