Where Tigers Are at Home (56 page)

By five in the afternoon the green shade had become too dense to continue so that they had to set about looking for a place to camp fairly early to give them time to clear their chosen spot, hang their hammocks off the ground and collect some dead wood. Elaine would never have thought it could be so difficult to find something that would burn in the middle of the forest: the wood was spongy. Full of mosses, of fermented sap, ant and termite nests, lived in, alive, as combustible as a sponge full of water. The hissing fire they gathered round when night had fallen was thanks to Yurupig alone.

They had agreed that Elaine would bring up the rear, in order to save her as far as possible from the ambushes of the forest; their progress disturbed a large number of animals, which they only saw as they took flight, but having seen a little coral snake disappear more or less from under her feet, she knew she was as exposed to danger as the others. However much she kept her eyes fixed on the ground, every tree trunk, every crevice remained a deadly trap she had to beware of. Just as in a ghost train at the fair, the immense webs of the bird-eating spiders would suddenly stick to her face like candy floss, an an aggressive rustling close by would send her heart racing, everything seemed to be conspiring against the intruders, to be uniting to swallow them up.

Yurupig and Petersen were more at ease in this ordeal. They both knew a thousand and one tricks to find drinking water or to make the trees ‘sing’ before attaching their hammocks. Petersen was grumbling all the time, reviling the world and its creatures, while the Indian moved silently, all senses on the alert, a hunter through and through. For the first two days the German had sullenly refused to speak to them but then, without anyone really understanding the reason for this sudden change, recovered his spirits and a certain comradeship with the group.

When they gathered around the fire on the evening of the third day, all hope of reaching the junction of the river soon had vanished. “We’re going to have to ration the food a bit more,” Mauro said. “At this rate it won’t last much longer.”

“How far would you say we’ve been today?” Elaine asked.

“No idea … A mile at most. But I’m as exhausted as if we’d done seventy.” His hand inside the collar of his T-shirt, Mauro was scratching his chest frenziedly, then examined the little scab he’d managed to bring out: a kind of tiny spider, swollen with blood, seemed to be enclosed in the dead skin.

“Oh no, I don’t believe it!” he said with revulsion. “What the hell’s this bug?”

“
Carrapato
,” said Yurupig without even glancing at it.

“A tick,” Dietlev said in a weary voice. “The pubic louse of the bush. Don’t worry, we’ve all got some and they won’t be easy to remove even when we can get down to it seriously. It was one of the surprises I was keeping in store for you.”

Revolted, Elaine thought she could feel even more itchiness in the pubic area and under her armpits. “It’s one I’d have happily done without,” she said, sketching a smile. “All right then, ‘operation scratches’ … Who wants to go first?”

“Me,” said Mauro, lifting up his trouser legs. “These bloody things sting.”

His heels, lacerated by the sharp-edged grasses, were covered in red streaks. Elaine smeared them with Mercurochrome then treated his neck and forearms. Yurupig had a nasty gash across his cheek disinfected, while Petersen refused all help, muttering that he’d seen worse than that and there was no point anyway. After that Mauro dealt with Elaine’s cuts.

“Don’t we look great,” he said when he’d finished daubing red over them. “We’ll soon be terrorizing the monkeys.”

“Please, Mauro, could you …,” Dietlev said.

He stood up immediately, as did Yurupig. They lifted up the stretcher and carried it out of the circles of light cast by the fire. Elaine concentrated on her medicine bag without even paying any attention to the patter of urine on the leaves; only a few days ago she would have been horribly embarrassed by this lack of privacy, but this wasn’t the time or place for niceties. When she’d undone the bandage, Dietlev’s wound was crawling with maggots; the big flies that tormented them while they were walking had managed to lay their eggs in his skin, despite the care she took to protect the wound. His leg was a blackish color, taut, ready to burst. The leg of a drowned corpse. The gangrene was rising inexorably. Three ampoules of morphine, one bubble pack of sulphonamide tablets … it wouldn’t be enough, she realized to her dismay, to contain the infection. The thought went through her mind that Dietlev would not make it back to Brazilia with them, but she dismissed it at once, for fear it would bring him bad luck. To imagine the worst was to hold a platinum rod up at the lightning … She couldn’t remember who had said that, but she believed the precept as if it were a commandment.

When Mauro and Yurupig brought the stretcher back close to the fire, Dietlev was shivering with pain. The sweat was streaming down his face.

“Do you want an injection?” she asked, wiping his forehead.

“Not yet, it’ll go away … Petersen, come and have a look at this.”

“Here I am,
amigo
. How can I be of service?”

Dietlev unfolded the piece of paper on which he’d sketched his map. “By my estimation we’re somewhere in this area,” he said, pointing to a zone to the southwest of the swamps, on the first quarter of their approximate route to the river junction. “You agree?”

‘Yes,” said Petersen after a brief glance at the map. “More or less, I imagine. We should get to the swamps soon. It’ll be easier to find our way, but it’s likely to make walking more difficult.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Dietlev said to Elaine. “It’s going to take us ten more days or so; I’m sorry, but it’s a lot more than I was reckoning on.”

Petersen shrugged his shoulders and drew the snot up his nose noisily. “You should have waited for me on the boat, like I said. Going through the jungle with a woman, a boy and a stretcher … Talk about a useless crew!”

“Shut it!” Mauro said venomously. “You’re the one responsible for whatever happens to us.”

“He’s going to die,” Petersen replied, shrugging his shoulders. “He’s going to die, and you as well. You make me sick, so there!” He turned his back on them and climbed into his hammock. They heard him sniff loudly again under his mosquito net.

“He’s not entirely wrong,” Dietlev said apologetically. “If you’d left me back there, you’d get on two or three times as quickly. Of course, one solution would be to take me back to the boat, but—”

“
But
there’s no question of that,” Mauro broke in calmly. “We’re going to get there and no one’s going to die, trust me. I promised my mother I’d be in Fortaleza for Christmas and I will be. And that’s that.”

“Then there’s no point in arguing,” said Elaine, giving him an affectionate smile. “In bed everyone, we need our rest.”

Mauro and Yurupig put Dietlev in his hammock, while Elaine held his leg. Despite their attempts to avoid even the slightest jolt, he was almost crying with pain. Elaine waited a few moments and then, when he asked, gave him a dose of morphine. Once he’d calmed down, she gave him a quick kiss on the lips and put the tarpaulin over him.

Elaine had gone out like a light and slept like a log. In the middle of the night she woke from a dream with the feeling she’d crashed on the ground after a vertiginous fall. Still half-asleep, she stretched out her arm, looking for Eléazard’s shoulder, his warmth, and woke fully to find herself in the prison of her hammock. Through the invisible wall of the mosquito net the red glow of a few embers could still be seen, without standing out clearly from the surrounding gloom. The silence had the inexplicable opacity of the blackness. Drifting on the surface of the dark, Elaine suddenly had a vision of their encampment: a collection of fragile cocoons suspended in the void, tiny, exposed to the blind trampling of the throng. To her amazement, she heard the noise of a demonstration approaching, chants, then the roar of a stadium as the whole crowd lets out its disappointment. Then a squall sent a crackling through the whole jungle and the patter of the rain on the roof of the hammock finally dispersed her hallucination. Frozen stiff, Elaine curled up, desperate to get back to sleep, shutting out the images of death that came knocking at her mosquito net. With all her heart she longed for daybreak.

AT FIRST LIGHT
, when Yurupig clapped his hands to wake them, the rain had stopped. Still half-asleep, Mauro forgot to push the tarpaulin back before opening the zip, so that he got the quarts of water that had accumulated above him full in the
face and, clutching the Kalashnikov, shot out of his hammock like a scalded cat. His misfortune even drew a titter from the Indian, something unusual for him. Despite the nocturnal drenching the forest had received, he’d managed to light a fire; Mauro went to warm himself at it, at the same time drying the gun with a handkerchief.

“If you don’t strip it down completely,” Petersen said scornfully, “the breech will rust up and it’ll be no good for anything but cracking nuts.”

“In my opinion,” Mauro replied without looking at him, “the water didn’t have time to get inside. But we can always try it out,” he added, cocking the rifle and aiming it at the old German.

“Stop it!” Dietlev said firmly. “I don’t want to see you playing with that gun, understood? Come and help me get out of this thing instead, I’m frozen.”

Elaine had slipped behind a tree; she came out and helped Mauro and Yurupig to carry Dietlev to the stretcher.

“How do you feel?” she asked, once he was by the fire.

“Like a baked Alaska, hot on the outside, icy inside. But there’s no pain, I’m still a bit stoned.”

“There was a lot of rain last night,” Yurupig said, handing him a mug of coffee. “Not good for us.”

“But surely it’s not the rainy season,” Mauro said, attempting a joke.

“No,” Dietlev replied, “that’s in four, six weeks. There’s no danger in that respect. A good shower from time to time, especially at night, that’s all we have to fear at the moment.”

Pity, Mauro thought. He was beginning to enjoy the adventure and, despite their concern about Dietlev, felt on a high.

Not long afterward, once the mist had cleared, the little expedition set off again.

THEY
’
D BEEN WALKING
for two hours, Petersen and Yurupig carrying the stretcher, when Mauro sank up to his knees in sticky mud hidden underneath the grass. He called to Yurupig to help him out of the marsh and came back with him to join the others.

“We’ve reached the swamp,” he announced gaily, “that’s worth a celebratory rest, isn’t it? What do you think Dietlev?” He turned toward him and suddenly his smile vanished. “Dietlev?”

Elaine, who had sat down on a stump behind the group, hurried over to the stretcher: eyes half-closed, a feverish glow on his face, Dietlev was having difficulty breathing. Far away from her, in another world, beyond suffering and language, he didn’t reply to her anxious questions.

“Get me some water, Yurupig.” She dissolved a large dose of aspirin in a cup and forced Dietlev to swallow it. Petersen came over as Elaine hurriedly uncovered the wound. It was crawling with maggots again, fewer than previously, but his leg had swollen even more and his thigh was mottled with dark patches.

“It’ll have to be amputated pronto,” Petersen said.

Elaine turned toward him as if he’d said something obscene, but he met her look with no show of emotion. His eyes were shining, his pupils abnormally dilated deep within his wizened face. “The gangrene’s rising. If we don’t cut off his leg, he’s fucked and that’s it. It’s up to you to decide.”

Elaine realized at once that he was right, even before she saw the sad look on Yurupig’s face; the tears immediately came to her eyes, not because of the amputation, which she accepted was imperative, but because she knew she was incapable of performing it.

“I can see to it, if you want,” Petersen said. “I’ve already done that on the Russian front.”

“You?!” Mauro exclaimed, taken aback. “And why would you do that, eh?” Falling into the familiar form to express his contempt, his voice hoarse with fury, he went on, “After all your
scheming to get us to stay on the boat, you want us to believe that you’re … You bastard. You want to kill him, that’s it.”

Petersen thought of replying that you could very well kill someone in cold blood without being able to bring yourself to let him die like a dog, but it was too complicated, so he went back to the fire.

“It
has
to be amputated, don’t you see that?” Elaine said to Mauro gently. “Now look at me: would you do it? Would you?” Her eyes probed his expression as he struggled to find the words, a helpless look on his face.

“Don’t worry,” she said, putting her arms round him, “if he wanted to harm him, all he had to do was to hold his tongue. Now pull yourself together, Dietlev’s going to need us.”

She went back to Petersen. “Get on with it, then. I’ll take the responsibility.”

“So that’s it, is it? I’m not a murdering bastard anymore. You have to make up your minds one way or another.” She gave him a pleading look.

“OK, off we go. But I’m doing it for you, for you alone.”

THEY RETRACED THEIR
steps until they found a more open space. At Petersen’s orders Yurupig made a fire big enough to boil the water and sterilize the blades. When everything was ready, Herman left them for a few minutes; he was sniffing when he came back. Dietlev was lying on the ground, half-unconscious because of the morphine injection Elaine had just given him.

“You, you little brat,” he said to Mauro, “you hold his shoulders. Yurupig, you see to his other leg.”

“What about me?” Elaine asked.

“You’ll do what I tell you as we go along. There’ll be just the tourniquet to hold and the arteries to ligature, if they’re visible.”

WHEN PETERSEN TACKLED
Dietlev’s femur with the saw blade from the survival kit, Dietlev screamed, just once, a long scream from the depths of his coma. The retraction of the muscles around the exposed bone, Dietlev’s abrupt jerks … Elaine found that all less horrifying than the sight of his leg, detached, obscene, alongside his body while she was containing the hemorrhage.