Where Tigers Are at Home (68 page)

Disenchanted, then furious, Moéma never alluded to him again, not even in her own thoughts, without inventing some new insult:
that no-good Indian
she would say in disillusioned tones, or
that two-faced bastard, when I think I fell for him hook, line and sinker … the swine!
It made things easier, at least at the beginning.

After the few hours it took to sort out Moéma’s disappointment, Roetgen made a suggestion that swept away the last remaining tensions. At the end of the week a ten-day holiday started, what did they say to all going to the annual pilgrimage at Juazeiro? It would give Moéma and himself the chance to observe the survival of indigenous cults in the devotion of the people of the
Nordeste
to Padre Cícero; as for the other two—Xavier was invited,
of course—they would have a superb excursion in the Sertão. He’d hire a car, they’d sleep outdoors, improvising as they went along …

They were all enthusiastic about the idea and three days later they were singing their heads off in a Chevrolet Andreas had lent them. All in dark glasses, they were chanting in chorus a Rolling Stones song, bellowing out of the open window their inability to get satisfaction.

They were crazy days, off-the-rails days suffused by alcohol with a vague sense of depravity. The drugs as well, which they took all the time, detached them from the real world, confining them within the limits of immediate experience. Not much older than his three companions—the seven years between him and Moéma weighed more than he would have thought—Roetgen took charge. He was the only one who drove, the only one with money, the only one who still kept a cool head. If he did snort a few lines of coke, smoke a few joints, it was above all so as not to stand out and because his scorn for drugs told him that this excess was merely a tropical diversion in the course of his life, a necessary experience from which he would emerge unscathed. He made up for it by drinking a lot and it was just by luck that he avoided any accidents while they were driving. Remaining faithful to what he had been surprised to find himself admitting to Thaïs, he cultivated his “love” for Moéma. A strange attachment that he did not bother to analyze but that made him suffer regularly, for example, every time she slept alone with Thaïs and he attempted to dull the humiliation by chatting with Xavier.

Despite her apparent unconcern, Moéma was still suffering the effects of her disappointment with Aynoré. She wasn’t lying when she told Thaïs that nothing could separate them anymore, or when she told Roetgen she couldn’t contemplate losing him, she was so happy in his arms. From the depths of her hatred for
the Indian came the clearer and clearer feeling that her liaison with him had been of a different type. The harsher her acrimony toward him became, the closer she edged toward the other two, as if to protect herself from the abyss still yawning at Canoa.

Unlike Roetgen, who had no idea what was going on, Thaïs had not forgiven her friend her infidelity. She knew for a terrible fact that, for all her protestations, the bond between them had been broken. And if she slept with Xavier just for fun, but knowing it wouldn’t last, it was above all to get at Moéma. Not nastily or out of resentment but out of a feeling of desolation. Of the party, she was probably the only one who was really suffering because she was the only one who loved with no other perspective than her love itself.

As for Xavier, the
Atomic Mosquito
, he was there without being there, without making any judgments, without the least awareness of what was happening to them all. He never sobered up, smoked joint after joint, laughed a lot. A seagull drawn by the horizon, a fanatic of the ephemeral, he was soaring far above them. A very strange bird of passage, a sort of angel, puny but ready for anything, whom the three others pampered, knowing very well that he would soon take flight. An angel, yes. A phantom angel. A mustachioed smile worthy of the most beautiful dreams of Alice Liddell.

For whatever reason, our four dopeheads forged on regardless with an exuberance that resulted in them doing the most stupid things. At Canindé, where they stopped to see the shrine of St. Francis, the priest gave them permission to take any of the hundreds of votive offerings heaped up behind a grating. Placed by supplicants at the foot of the miracle-working statue, copies of all parts of the body were piled up to waist height: breasts, legs, skulls, intestines, genitals, carved in wood or wax. If you had prostate problems or an ulcer, if you were afraid of an operation or a wedding night, all you had to do was to make a model of the part in question for St. Francis to effect a supernatural cure.

“I have to burn the lot once a month,” the old priest whose siesta they’d disturbed told them. “Take anything you find interesting and bring back the key when you’ve finished.”

After having made fun of the naive pictures covering the walls of the church, attesting the wonders worked by the indefatigable patron saint of Canindé—“Thank you, São Francisco, for having allowed my little girl to excrete the house keys without hurting herself”—the two couples made love right in the middle of the votive offerings, half-buried under the crudely hewn heads, members and organs of these imaginary bodies. They left slightly disgusted but proud of an exploit that had the feel of sacrilege.

“Surrealistic!” was the one word on Thaïs’s lips to express her astonishment at everything they saw. Through a slit in the glass coffin harboring the statue of a pale and gaunt Christ, the pilgrims would slip small banknotes as offerings: a transparent money box with the hideous corpse of a shipwrecked sailor just about floating on the green mold of the banknotes. They dropped some playing cards onto it, a condom, some greasy paper and several pages out of a notebook covered in vile blasphemies.

Dead drunk, they posed in front of one of the canvases with the figure of St. Francis that half-starved itinerants had put up around most of the square outside. They had agreed to silently utter some intimate secret just as the photographer released the shutter. As they watched the black-and-white pictures being developed in a galvanized tank, they were enchanted by their lack of lips.

It was a Lourdes or a Benares, whichever you prefer, and the crowds from the Sertão engulfed the town in their misery: lepers dragging their supplications on their knees through the dust; the bedridden, black with sores; cripples; people with improbable mutilations, monsters you couldn’t bear to look at; men and women with their eyes swollen with tears—all these unfortunates queuing at the confessionals set up, like country urinals, against
the church walls, struggling with each other to make their way toward the plaster idol, fainting at the flaking picture of his bare feet. The stalls were selling good-luck ribbons arranged in multicolored armfuls, vignettes, holy pictures—a collection of junk on which the people of the
Nordeste
wasted their last cruzeiros. In all this display of misfortune there was an exhibitionism that they eventually found irritating.

In the zoo there all they saw was a pair of armadillos desperately masturbating and a sheep painted blue. Before leaving they bought leather hats and long cowherd’s knives. The car was full of assorted votive offerings chosen for their aesthetic qualities or their involuntary humor: heads whitened with lime and seeds for eyes or tufts of human hair stuck on top, twisted torsos, carbuncular buttocks mounted on flimsy stilts … the Chevrolet looked like an anatomical display case.

They were caught in a storm on the way to Juazeiro. It was such a violent downpour Roetgen had to pull over to the shoulder. A donkey emerged from the void and galloped past, braying with terror, its four iron shoes skidding on the red mud covering the tarmac. Overawed by this infernal vision and weary of the proximity of destitution, they took the first excuse to abandon their plan: “How about going to the brothels in Recife?” Moéma said.

Roetgen did a U-turn and headed off to the southwest, in the direction of Pernambuco.

“What are you going to do with this, son?”

“It’s my business. You can lend it to me or not, but no questions, OK?”

Uncle Zé had been intrigued. His look had gone blank in an odd way, proof that he suspected something. But what? No one could guess, not even Uncle Zé. No one. Just like Lampião … They were waiting for him in Bahia and he popped up in Sergipe; they laid an ambush for him at Rio Grande do Norte and there he was at home having his photo taken by the journalists of the
Diário de Notícias
. He drove them crazy, every one of them. That wasn’t what he wanted to do to old Zé, but it was better if he wasn’t in on it. Fortunately he’d brought the contraption, after all it was easier using it and you could do a better job. The whole business had taken him several days … above all because of the mold. He’d sweated his guts out for that mold, he really had, but he’d found a solution in the end and it was all done two days ago when the old guy had turned up to take him out for an ice cream. Pink mango and passion fruit … If it was up to him he’d eat nothing else, it was so good! Zé hadn’t even mentioned it again, he was so busy getting ready for the Feast of Yemanjá: this year he was organizing everything for Dadá Cotinha at the Mata Escura
terreiro
. Dadá, that was the same name as Corisco’s wife, wasn’t it? Those bastards had smashed one of her legs with their machine guns. Four hundred miles in the back of a truck with her leg just attached by the tendons … Fucking hell! He had to remember that, he mustn’t forget a single murder, a single humiliation because those meters weren’t reset at zero, definitely not! Uncle Zé had problems. Not big ones, nothing at all even, compared to his truck, but he couldn’t find a girl to sit on Yemanjá’s throne. Corta Braço, Beco de Chinelo, Amaralinha, all the other
terreiros
in the district had already got the prettiest girls. All that was left were the old ones or the fat lumps. Crazy, old Zé said, how many fat lumps there are around! And they all come to see me, one after the other: Choose me, Zé, with the gown and the wig no one will be able to tell I’m a bit overweight … And even worse was what
they were offering to get him to choose them … It was unbelievable. I’d rather die, old Zé told them, can’t you see you’ll frighten the little kids? If I choose you for the procession no one’ll come within miles. He’s not stupid, old Zé. He knows how to get things done when he puts his mind to it. I should never have agreed to see to all that, he kept saying. I’ve got the costumes for everyone, the band, the
cachaça …
but if I don’t find a girl with a good figure for Yemanjá, what are we going to look like, eh? It was in the almanac … Just a minute and I’ll show you … here, look: unlucky days January 12, May 4, August 15! You can keep it, I want nothing more to do with this bird of ill omen … 
The coming year for the
Nordeste:
horoscope for all
. A fat pamphlet, yellow, one of those that cost 200 cruzeiros! Crazy what you could find in an almanac like that and not just predictions, loads of stuff and all spot-on … 
Anyone who does not have God deep in their heart will not have Him anywhere else
. Well put, eh? You could twist the words whichever way you liked, it hit the mark: God deep in your throat, God in your lungs—that must make you cough your guts out! God behind your ear, God deep in your ass … No, only the heart, nothing else was possible.
The intelligent man: an intelligent person doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t judge and doesn’t argue
. Drinking and smoking, OK, but he couldn’t stop himself. Judging? How can we not judge? Not judge the rich, the stupid, the Yanks, the murderers? Not judge men who gouge people’s eyes out, and what else then? And arguing was the same … Your “intelligent man” wouldn’t happen to be dead, would he, or is it just that I really am stupid?
Champions at starving: the flea—can live for several months without food. The armadillo—almost a year without eating. The snake—more than a year feeding on its poison alone. The people of the Nordeste—spend all their days living on hope
. The guy who thought that up was intelligent, no question. “Spend all their days living on hope”—too fucking right! And there was plenty more
stuff like that, at the bottom of every page … 
Without food a man can live for up to three weeks; without water for up to a week; and without air for five to six minutes. In the human body there are 2016 pores allowing the body to perspire and refresh the blood, which irrigates the heart after it has been filtered 120 times by the kidneys. The heart beats 103,700 times in twenty-four hours, a woman’s heart even more. At the age of seventy the human heart has, on average, already beat more than three billion times. The energy used over seventy years of life is sufficient to send a train and ten wagons loaded with pickaxes to a height of five hundred yards.—Puxa!
That was talking! And him too, cripple that he was … And if they all set about it, the people of the favelas, those of the Sertão, they could send thousands of trains loaded with pickaxes up into the air. What a bloody mess that would make, eh? And a fucking metal downpour when it all started falling … Or perhaps it would be better to team up and dispatch just one, but much higher. To send it into orbit, the bloody train with its load of pickaxes, you’d see it go past in the night, among the stars. It’s the Pirambú train, people would say … There’d be messages in large letters on the wagons, just like on the tractor trailers … 
The rich can go to hell! Signed: Nelson, the aleijadinho
. That’s what they’d write on his wagon. And in luminous paint so that it could be clearly seen in the darkness … 
Aquarius (Mars). You are idealistic. You love freedom and you do everything you can not to be pushed around. When you’re frustrated that makes you ultranervous, and you put yourself in danger. You panic at the thought of poverty but you like to remember the past. Beware of your instinct for independence. In general the year is favorable for your projects …
Now if that wasn’t a good horoscope, what was, for fuck’s sake! There it was in black and white, he just had to sit back and wait for it to come.