Where Tigers Are at Home (50 page)

This sent the bashful lover that Sieur Sinibaldus had so far been into a frenzy. Mei-li’s declaration not only assured him of an unhoped-for joy but also of the success of the Great Work. Beside himself, forgetting his wife & his children, he covered Mei-li in kisses, laughing & crying at the same time, declaring the passion he had kept hidden for so many months in the most extravagant terms. He had never loved anyone but her, it was as if the goddess Isis had finally found her Osiris & there could no longer be any doubt that they were blessed by God.

The little hussy feigned surprise, then the most unbridled passion & it was there, on the stone floor, that they disported themselves in their lewd Cyprian acts.

During the two weeks in which they remained locked in the laboratory the emissions of their lust poured out constantly. Mei-li carefully scooped up this disgusting mixture in a porcelain vase, then poured it into little wax figurines they made themselves to represent various Chinese gods, but also Christ & the apostles. They then threw these blasphemous idols into the crucible with all sorts of ceremonies & the orgy started up again. Blinded by passion & pride, Sinibaldus obeyed her in everything without for one moment seeing the abyss into which he was sinking.

At the time he had previously fixed, Salomon Blauenstein returned from his supposed retreat. Sinibaldus, who had gone up to his room a little earlier to allay suspicion, came down to meet him. He was surprised at how pale the alchemist looked & at the evidence of privations written all over his face. As for Blauenstein, who had actually spent the time in a brothel in Travestere, he saw the same signs of exhaustion in his host’s face, although without deceiving himself as to their true origin; from that point on he was in no doubt about the success of his scheme. They greeted each other warmly &, after the alchemist pretended to set his mind at rest concerning the strict obedience to his orders, they went into the laboratory.

In the beginning the world did not exist. Neither darkness, nor light, nor anything that could have taken their place. But there were six
invisible things: little benches, pot stands, gourds, manioc, ipadu leaves that make you dream when you chew them and plugs of tobacco. A woman made herself out of these things, that were floating around, and appeared, all decked out in finery, in her splendid quartz dwelling. Yebá Beló was her name, the ancestral mother, she who was not begotten … In the time it takes to say “Ugh!” she started to think up the world the way it ought to be. And while she was thinking, she chewed ipadu and smoked a magic cigar
.

When the Indian dragged her out of the
Forró da Zefa
, Moéma was under no illusion about what would happen between them that night. Worried by Roetgen’s absence, she spent a few seconds looking for him in the crowd. Not that she felt obliged to explain what she was doing, but she had insisted on bringing him here and felt bad about abandoning him in such cavalier fashion in a world he wasn’t yet familiar with. As for Thaïs, that was both simpler and more awkward: their liaison being based on absolute sexual liberty, Moéma was not committed to anything in that respect. They believed that the love they had for each other—a topic that reappeared in crucial fashion every time one suffered at the other’s escapades—went far beyond physical vagaries. Instead of undermining their relationship, this independence “fertilized” it, enlarged it … Since, however, this naive generosity of spirit could not prevent either jealousy or the anguish of feeling abandoned, they had come to the point where they observed maximum discretion when they went off with someone else. Moéma was therefore hurrying to avoid running into her friend when she saw her dancing with Marlene. Caught out, she replied to Thaïs’ look by fanning herself with her hand, as if to say the heat was too much for her and she was going out for a breath of fresh air. When the response to her bit of playacting was a sad, disbelieving smile, Moéma turned away in irritation.

Once outside, they walked in the darkness, going back up the street to the cabin, since Moéma wanted to collect her supply of
maconha
before going down to the beach.

Beside the water the strength of the wind was visible as it blew away the dunes. Aynoré remained silent; from time to time Moéma felt his hand brush against hers as they continued on their way, staggering as they were hit by gusts. A few hundred yards farther on they sat down on the sand, in the shelter of a jangada pulled up onto the beach. Moéma had rolled a joint. In the deafening roar of the waves, something from the primeval ages of the Earth, an incomprehensible and disturbing din made them snuggle up against each other. She took a drag on the coarse cigarette she had managed to roll despite the wind; Aynoré did the same and started to speak in a low voice: the world had begun in this same way, with a woman emerging from her own night and a magic cigar …

Her thoughts came out in the form of a spherical cloud with a tower on top, a bulge like the excrescence of the navel on the belly of a newborn baby. As it spread out, the bubble of smoke enclosed all the darkness so that it remained captive there. Having done that, Yebá Beló called her dream the “belly of the world” and the belly looked like a large deserted village. So she wanted people there where there was nothing and started to chew ipadu again as she smoked her magic cigar …

Aynoré’s father had been the shaman of his village, somewhere in the Amazonian forest, at the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Madeira. A renowned magician, the religious and political head of the village, he had treated people with tobacco juice and extracts of plants, of which he guarded the secret jealously. It was from his perseverance in recounting his tribe’s epic that this long story with its innumerable ramifications came, a parasitic myth of the origin of the world, which seemed to unfold of
its own accord from the lips of the young Indian, feeding on his memory, establishing itself and multiplying like a virus, as it had been doing for centuries. His father had passed on to Aynoré, who was intended as his successor, all the ancestral knowledge that makes a true
pajé
: he knew the foundation myths of the Mururucu, their rites, their dances, their traditional songs, knew how to invoke the spirits, transformed into so many pebbles in the gourd rattle, and to interpret their messages in the whir of the bullroarer; he also knew how to talk to the animals, how to throw invisible spears that poisoned people or sent them into trances that exorcised them. At the age of six he had gone off in search of his soul and it had entered his body in the form of an anaconda. Like his father, he would have become able to borrow the wings of the kumalak bird and fly over the mountains, if the loggers had not come and turned his life upside down.

And with the loggers there was also an official of FUNAI—“the National Indian Foundation! Just imagine! What would a National Foundation of the White Man do for you, eh? Just think about it for a moment”—and with him the army and with the army the end of everything. The villagers had to be evacuated and go and join the other tribes languishing in the Xingu reservation. His father, leading a few men, had tried to resist and they were all dead, shot like common macaques in the course of a manhunt in the forest.

Aynoré was only twelve, but he refused to go with the others to the Xingu reservation, so the FUNAI official immediately sent him off to the Dominican orphanage in Manaus. He learned to read and write there without ever belonging to the religion in which a puny god allowed himself to be crucified in a land with no jungle and no macaws. Then it was a boarding house run by the same order in Belém. He strung them along for a while, then ran off with the money from the bursar’s office. Skilled with his
hands, he managed to get by making feather necklaces and earrings that he hawked on the streets.

Aynoré stroked Moéma’s hair. Under the influence of his intoxication, his voice took on ceremonial tones, sometimes becoming unrecognizable in the dialogues, high and distorted, like a ventriloquist’s. Moéma listened reverently, images and shivers running through her. Even more than by its poetry, she was carried away by the age-old character of this litany. It was a fascination tinged with venom toward the whites and their wretched slavish devotion to their god. What an incredible mess! From having learned them, to her disgust, at the university, she knew the figures of the atrocity by heart: two million Indians when the Spanish and Portuguese arrived, fewer than a hundred thousand today … “The Indians were innumerable,” she had read in a report by a sixteenth-century traveler, “to such an extent, that if one shot an arrow in the air, it was more likely to end up in an Indian’s head than in the ground.” The author in question was talking about the Várzeas, a tribe that had ceased to exist less than a hundred years after this first attempt at a “census.” The Tupi, Anumaniá, Arupatí, Maritsawá, Iarumá, Aulúta, Tsúva, Naruvôt, Nafuquá, Kutenábu and so many other tribes decimated … More than ninety Amazonian tribes had been wiped out in the course of our century alone … Of what unknown and unknowable lives have we deprived ourselves for good? Of what possible worlds, of what healthy evolutions?

A land without men for men without land
. It was under this generous slogan that the Brazilian government had decided to construct the Transamazonian Highway, three thousand miles of road to give white pioneers new lands to cultivate. Every sixty miles along the road there were 250 acres of virgin land to clear on either side, a hut already built plus six months’ wages and interest-free loans for twenty years; a multitude of half-starved
people from the
Nordeste
had risen to the bait. All this ignoring the fact that this “land without men” was crammed full of Indians, who were given no more consideration than the flora and fauna sacrificed to the program, no more than at the time of the boom in rubber when the clothes handed out with a friendly smile to the naked savages were impregnated with the germs of smallpox or other fatal diseases.

But what no one had anticipated was that the ground taken from the forest would be completely exhausted after the first two harvests and today the cattle barons would be buying up this sterile land at low prices from the colonists, poor devils who, overburdened with debt, prefer the arid misery of the Sertão to the torture of this dripping desert. The funds earmarked for surfacing the road had disappeared, so that in the rainy season the Transamazonian Highway turns into an impassable river of mud, eaten away a little more each day by the determined reprisals of the jungle. In the course of the Americans’ interest in buying several million square miles of land in the Carajás region, rich deposits of iron, nickel, manganese and even gold were discovered in the Serra Plata. The mines and the placers finished by ripping this true paradise apart and everything went up in smoke: the forest, the Indians, dreams of agrarian reform. All that this incredible farce achieved was to make the indestructible caste of bastards a little richer. She felt almost suffocated by a sense of the chronic, oppressive injustice, like a nocturnal asthma attack.

Then the thunder-man came down onto the river of milk where he was transformed into a monstrous snake with a head resembling a boat. The two heroes climbed up onto the snake’s head and started to sail up the left bank of the river. Every time they stopped, they established a house and, thanks to their wealth of magic, filled it with people to live there. Thus gradually, house by house, the mankind of the future developed. And since the vessel went below the surface
,
the houses were under water, so that the first men appeared as fish-men who settled in their underwater houses
.

Nothing was as beautiful as this resplendent story, it gave a glimpse of a world of innocence and quiet freedom, an everyday life in which every moment was special, a supernatural game with creatures and things. The secret of happiness was there, in this preserved speech. To go away with Aynoré and seek his people, to recover together that original communion with the river, the birds, the elements; Moéma felt she was ready for this return to the native soil. Not as an ethnologist, but as an Indian in both heart and mind. As a lover of the things themselves. Living was that or nothing at all.

Thus mankind grew, passing by imperceptible degrees from childhood to adolescence. And when they reached the thirtieth house, that is, the halfway point of their journey, the twins decided it was time to make men speak. That day each performed a ritual with his wife: the first wife smoked the cigar and the second chewed ipadu. The woman who smoked the cigar gave birth to the sacred Caapi, which is even more powerful than ipadu; and the one who had eaten ipadu brought forth the parrots, the toucans and other birds with colored feathers. And from these two women the men came to know trembling, fear, cold, fire and suffering, all things they had seen in them while they were in labor
.

And the power of the infant Caapi was so strong that all mankind had fantastic visions. No one could understand anything about them and each house started to speak a different language. From this sprang many languages: Desana, Tukano, Pira-Tapuia, Barasana, Banwa, Kubewa, Tuyuka, Wanama, Siriana, Maku and, last of all, that of the White Men
.

“Caapi,” Aynoré said, “is a kind of vine. You make a potion from its bark and you have visions. It’s a thousand times stronger than anything you can ever have tried. Among our people the women
are not allowed to drink it. It’s a sacred plant, the vine of the gods, the vine of the soul …” They’d often taken it in the men’s cabin, it was completely crazy: you met the Grand Master of the hunt, you watched extraordinary fights between snakes and jaguars, you discovered the true invisible powers behind the illusion of life. “I had no will of my own,” Aynoré said, “no personal power. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t think; I wasn’t in my body anymore. Purified, I woke up as a sphere of seeds that had burst open in space. And I sang the note that smashes structure to pieces and the one that abolishes chaos and I was covered in blood. I have been with the dead, I have tried the labyrinth …” For there was a world beyond ours, a world both very near and very far away, a world where everything had happened already, where everything was already known. And that world spoke, it had its own language, a subtle idiom of rustlings and colors. Blue, purple or gray visions, like tobacco smoke, which declined the unknown modes of thought; blood-red visions, like a woman’s discharge, her fertility; yellow or off-white visions, similar to semen, the sun, through which the mystical union with the beginning was realized. And everything appeared in an indescribable luminosity, as if detached from its context, charged with new meaning, a new quality. After the ceremony, when they woke from a profound sleep full of dreams, each one of them drew or painted what he had seen. There was not a single decoration, not a single tattoo, that had not been inspired by these journeys through hallucination. And the reason there were so many different languages was to try to say all that, to express again and again the things they were unwilling to leave in the ambiguous silence of images …” A man who has taken Caapi is said to have drowned himself, as if he were returning to the river from which he came, as if he were plunging back into the undifferentiated source … A man who has an orgasm when he possesses a woman is also said to be drowning
himself, but that is to indicate that he is in a state similar to the one produced by Caapi.”