Where Tigers Are at Home (42 page)

“
Cavala
,” said João when he saw the flash zigzagging up toward the surface. “And a fine one!”

One last jerk and a sort of long bonito landed on the deck with a dull slap. Paralyzed for a moment at this change of environment, it opened its mouth before struggling blindly. If paradise or hell existed, that would be the way the dead would wriggle when they arrived in those murky nightmare regions … João disembowelled it live, chucked its entrails overboard and chopped it up into large quivering slices. Keeping back a few for renewing the bait, he put the rest in the pot to boil.

They all watched it cooking. Once it was done, Paulino took out the slices with a piece of wood and placed them in front of him. The three fishermen fell on the food, burning their fingers to roll pieces in their bag of
farofa
, spitting out the bones into the sea with obvious pleasure, constantly congratulating the
francês
on such an excellent first catch. Roetgen did the same, appreciating each mouthful, convinced he had never tasted anything so delicious.

When they were full, they could finally start fishing. It was four in the afternoon.

Sea bream, albacores, rays, dogfish, dorados … they gathered in the fish in a sustained rhythm. Sometimes it took five or ten minutes, but the line never came up empty. Roetgen discovered a very different world from the one he was familiar with: here there was no pleasure taken in the act of fishing, hauling in a scad was like extracting ore, with no waste of emotions or of time. True, there were occasional exclamations at an exceptional catch, but they
were those of miners discovering an unexpected seam of coal, richer, easier to take out. The animal was knocked on the head and thrown into the basket; when it was full to overflowing, one of the fishermen would wedge his line to the deck and set about salting them: scale and clean them out, cut off the heads, remove the fillets and pile them up in a crate in the prow of the jangada, cover them with a layer of coarse salt … Roetgen made an effort to assimilate this expertise; soon he was able to take his turn with the others. This essential task took a good half hour, at the end your back was aching, your hands scratched and smarting from the salt, but you felt pleased with yourself and a job well done.

Concentrating on his every movement, anxious not to lose the respect of the fishermen, Roetgen made it a point of honor to keep to their rhythm. This gave him no respite, he wasn’t even thinking anymore but fell into the catatonic state he’d been in on the bus ride to Canoa. Moéma, Thaïs, Brazil, everything had gone; his mind clear, he wallowed in work and amnesia.

At sunset the fish became more difficult to take. The sea wind had started to blow, gradually raising a heavy, dangerous-looking swell around the jangada. A bank of leaden cloud, very low on the horizon, seemed to be approaching very quickly. It was an ominous sign, but the fishermen didn’t seem particularly worried about it. Making the most of the last of the light, Paulino and João made fast every last object on the deck, while Isaac was cooking a second bonito they’d kept for themselves. It was put to cool while each rolled up his line and replaced it with a stronger one with larger hooks.

“At night it’s only the big ones that bite,” João explained, “sharks, swordfish, that kind of thing, so just two of us fish, to avoid getting in each other’s way.”

Paulino and Isaac had a bite to eat with them, then went to lie down in the hold. Seeing a hand wedge a bit of cloth between the
hatch cover and the coaming—presumably to let in some air—Roetgen wondered how the two men had been able to squeeze into such a restricted space: as far as he could tell, there was only about twenty inches headroom! At a sign from João, he sat down with his back against the sampson post and, following his example, tied himself to it around his waist and checked his bowline before starting fishing again.

The sea had gotten up to such an extent that occasionally long breakers swept over the boat. Roetgen could see the phosphorescent crests running along high above him in the black of the night, mountains of foaming water that the jangada finally topped just at the moment when it seemed certain they were about to engulf it. Constantly undulating and dragging its anchor—as an experienced seaman, João had made sure he doubled the length of the anchor cable—slipping sideways or brought up suddenly into the wind by the abrupt tautening of the cable, the prow half disappearing into the water, the boat somehow managed to ride out the squall. When the deck was submerged beneath a bigger wave, the two men were left sitting in foaming water like a bubble bath—without the rope cutting into their waists, they would certainly have been swept away—then the exhausting rodeo started up again until another breaker came crashing over them. Soaked from head to toe, eyes stinging, blinded by the spindrift, Roetgen lived through the worst watch of his life. Hardly reassured by
Seu
João’s morose impassibility, he forced himself to fish without managing to free himself from a degrading animal fear. Frozen stiff and deafened by the wind and the roar of the Atlantic, he saw monsters.

WHEN PAULINO AND
Isaac came to relieve them around one in the morning there were hardly any fish in the basket: three swordfish for Roetgen and two for João, plus a hammerhead
shark of about thirty pounds. There was still a heavy sea but the wind was slackening.

“The tide’s turning,” João said to Paulino, “They should start biting a bit more. Don’t forget to take in the anchor cable bit by bit.”

He crawled over to the hatch and held the cover half open and Roetgen slipped inside. “Go on, there’s plenty of room,” he said, seeing Roetgen hesitate. Once he had disappeared, João followed him into the hold and pulled down the hatch behind him, taking care not to close it completely. During the few seconds in which he was shrouded in darkness, in that sea-tossed coffin, he had to keep a grip on himself not to go back up on deck.

João struck a match and lit a little piece of candle wedged in between two sacks of salt, then wriggled to get in a more comfortable position. “
Puxa!
” he muttered, “What filthy weather!”

Stretched out on their sides, on either side of the centerboard case, they were closer to each other than they would ever be up in the open air. João’s face looked as if it were carved from old wood, each of his wrinkles being a separate curve of the grain. The hold had a strong smell of fish and brine.

“Is it often like this?” Roetgen asked.

“From time to time, when the moon’s in the wrong quarter. The problem is that the sharks don’t like …”

“They sell well?”

“Like the others, but there’s more meat on them. And then there’s a bonus for the liver and the fins.”

“What do they do with them?”

“The liver goes to the laboratories. I don’t really know but it seems it’s good for medicines, creams … It’s the Chinese who buy the fins. They’re very partial to them from what people say. Are there some in your part of the world too?”

“Sharks or Chinese?”

“Sharks.”

“Not as many as around here. And they’re farther down, well away from the shore.”

“And sea bream?”

“There’s hardly any left. They’ve been overfished. It’s the same with all the others, certain species have even disappeared entirely.”

“How is that possible?” João cried, suddenly frightened by that prospect.

“I tell you: too much industrial-scale fishing, pollution … it’s a real disaster.”

João clicked his tongue several times to express his disapproval. “God, it’s not possible, things like that! Is it far away where you come from?”

“France, you mean?”

“How should I know? Where you come from, I mean.”

“Three thousand miles, more or less.”

João frowned. “How many hours by bus would that be?” His serious expression made it clear that he had no idea where France was and couldn’t imagine a distance until it was converted into the only yardsticks he was familiar with: days on foot for shorter distances, hours on the bus for longer ones. Caught unprepared, Roetgen gave him a journey time in hours by plane, but the lack of response told him it meant nothing to the fisherman. He therefore made a mental calculation of the distance the jangada could cover in a day and told João: two months sailing to the east, provided there was a constant favorable wind during the whole of the voyage.

“Two months!” João repeated, visibly impressed this time. He was silent for several minutes, thinking it over, before coming back to the subject: “Where you live are there jaguars in the
mata
as well?”

“No.”

“And armadillos?”

“No.”

“Boas, anteaters, parrots?”

“No, João. We have different animals, but it’s a bit the same as with the fish, there aren’t that many left.”

“Oh, right,” João said, disappointed at a land so lacking in the essentials. “Not even caymans? And mango trees, at least you must have some mango trees?”

We’ve got high-speed trains, the Airbus and rockets, João, computers that can do calculations more quickly than our brains and contain complete encyclopedias. We have an impressive literary and artistic past, the greatest perfume makers, dress designers of genius who make such magnificent negligées if you lived three times over you still wouldn’t have enough to pay for them. We have nuclear power stations that produce waste that will remain deadly for ten thousand years, perhaps more, we don’t really know. Just imagine, João, ten thousand years! As if the first
Homo sapiens
had bequeathed us rubbish bins that were so contaminated they’d still poison everything around them to this day. We also have tremendous bombs, little marvels capable of wiping out your mango trees, your jaguars and your parrots forever. Capable of putting an end to your race, João, to the whole of the human race! But, thank God, we have a very high opinion of ourselves
.

Roetgen knew he would never be able to describe to him a reality that only stood out, he suddenly realized with a feeling of bitterness and deprivation, by its arrogance. Called on to justify Western civilization, and himself with it, he failed to find a single feature likely to interest this man. A man for whom the natural riches of the earth, the warmth of the sun on it, the influence of the moon on this or that animal or plant, still had meaning and value; an intelligent, sensitive person, but living in a world where culture still retained its proper sense, like humus, a piece of land.

Feeling ashamed, humbled before João, like a guilty man facing the judge, he invented an environment that could match up to his. Combining the stories of his childhood with some memories of medieval history, he told of wolves attacking the villages on winter nights and howled, there in the dark hold, as they were supposed to across the snow in the valleys of the French countryside. Encouraged by the fisherman’s continuing attention, he embroidered his story with their shining eyes, their monstrous fangs and even ended up telling the fable of the shepherd boy who cried wolf, at length, as if it were a true story.

“He got what he deserved,” said João after briefly reflecting on the tragic end of the shepherd boy. “It’s sad to say, but that’s the way it is. By lying all the time you end up making the lie into a truth … It’s like my son-in-law. For two years he kept telling people his wife was unfaithful, just to attract attention. Until the day she really did cuckold him. But tell me,
françès
, your family, where do they live, in a village?”

“No, in a city. In Paris. Have you heard of it?”

“I think so, yes … But I never went to school, you know. It’s near
Nova-York
, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly,” Roetgen said, fascinated by a view of the world in which geography played such a minor role. “I’ll explain …”

It was no use, however. Neither the map of the world he drew on the floor, nor his attempts to simplify it brought the least sign of understanding on João’s face. He had never traveled anywhere, apart from the three hours’ walk to Aracati to see the jangada owner and, once when he was a child, a pilgrimage to the shrine at Canindé, to thank Saint Francis for having saved his mother from smallpox. Eight hours in a bus, of which his memory was confused but filled with wonder. Unable either to read or write and never having seen a television but for a few moments in the town, his knowledge derived from his own experiences and from
the
cantadores
, who even came as far as the bars of Canoa to sing their laments. He could not imagine that the earth was round either, nor that men had gone to the moon, though he listened to these new facts with perfect politeness. Anything beyond his village, his work or what he had been able to see of Brazil for himself, was enveloped in a hazy mist in which things and places were associated by chance, in the jumble of names that happened to have stuck in his memory: São Paulo, New York, Paris … that is, the Otherworld; a world isolated from his concerns, a beyond with no fixed abode, a blurred virtual world that he assumed it was impossible to know.

“But I’ve told you, it’s impossible to be in one piece after such an explosion. Look, Firmina, be reasonable, even oxen, even elephants would have been made into mincemeat.”

“That’s what
you
say, but I’m telling you it was the headless mule that caused the massacre. And I know very well who it was, you can trust me …”

It was four in the morning. Since Uncle Zé had come back an hour ago, Nelson and Firmina had been plying him with questions about the disaster. When the emergency services arrived, the corpse-robbers had disappeared as if by magic. From the passenger list it was known that there was a celebrity on board the plane, a poet whose name Zé could no longer remember but whose body the rescue party wanted to identify at all cost. At certain gruesome details she dragged out of her brother, Firmina crossed herself with a terrified look: she had recognized the infernal mark of the
mula-sem-cabaça
.
Only that creature of the devil could have torn them apart like that, and there must certainly have been several of them!