Where Tigers Are at Home (76 page)

LYING ON HER
back at the end of a jetty stretching far out into the sea on its metal supports, Moéma was looking at the sky. Exaggerated by the acid, the ocean swell was making the rickety structure vibrate. She could feel it rolling in underneath her like the spine of a voluptuous tiger. The Southern Cross started to sway from one side to the other, then to come closer, pulling the whole of the zodiac behind it in its train. Struck with fear, Moéma headed back. The wind off the sea was scourging her with stars.

Avoid the metal struts, step between the gaps over the foaming Atlantic, get out of this scene full of pitfalls … Thaïs and the others must still be dancing in that shitty club … 
Náutico Atlético Cearense …
Athletic my ass! Roetgen had renounced her, for good. She’d heard him making a declaration to Thaïs … The
professor …
It was as if he’d been kissing her with words. There wouldn’t have been anything worth making a song and dance about if she hadn’t seen the same abandonment in Thaïs’s eyes that she kept for their own intimate moments … Nothing to do with the way she looked when the three of them slept together. Let them dance, let them screw themselves silly, she no longer cared. Was this what was meant by “hitting rock bottom”? Wanting and
no longer wanting, dying and not dying? The guardrail of direct, immediate perception of appearances was missing. This permanent suspicion, this way she had of never taking things literally, of suspecting other levels of meaning! When a door was opened, there was always another one, then another, an infinitude of doors pushing farther and farther away the serene correspondence between a being and its name. All at once she felt sure an Indian never saw himself thinking, that he would open a door, just the one, and see the thing naked before him, without a further skin to peel off. What had Aynoré done but open her eyes wide to that obvious fact? Be more cool about things … accept anything that wasn’t prohibited by any law … As long as an individual’s actions didn’t endanger the world order, they were allowed: why couldn’t the relaxed moral attitudes of the Amazonian tribes apply to our society? The way we experienced love, with suffering, jealousy and resentment, derived from Judeo-Christian emotionalism. It was just as pointless as a Romantic devotion to ruins and the patina on statues …

Back at the
beira-mar
, deserted at this late hour, Moéma strode along under the yellow streetlights. Scattered all along the pavement, going about their rodent business, the rats hardly moved out of her way at all.

To plant the sequoia … To walk along, pockets full of seeds, casually sowing the tarmac until the day when the young shoots dislocated the town with the force of a cataclysm … To create innumerable openings bursting with sap in the concrete of the metropolises … The gaps between the stones, between people, that empty space between bones that allows the butcher to cut up the carcass without blunting the edge of his knife. Salvation lying in the interstices … Come on, Jesus, put an end to all this internationalist Western bullshit! Restore a jungle virginity to
these coasts polluted by the tumescent cross of the Jesuits and the conquistadors. Look what they’d made of this new, improbable, unconsidered world! It was as if they’d crapped on the lawn as soon as they arrived in paradise …

A big rat didn’t move out of her way quickly enough, she made to step on it, as people usually did with pigeons, knowing they would fly away before being touched. But her foot caught the animal on the back of its neck; she watched it in its death throes right there in front of her, sickened by the twitching of its paws. The coconut trees were twisting as well, seized with reptilian convulsions. Her head spinning from the return in force of the hallucinations, she lay down on the pavement for a few moments, amused by the idea that she might be found there, in the gutter. Then she got up again and continued her forced march toward the northern end of the avenue.

Get out of the town, turn toward the jungle of the favelas … Aynoré had told her he was a regular at the
Terra e Mar
, that was where she’d go. It was a goal like any other, a reason for living that was, if anything, better than the others. Go back to Aynoré, make love with the handsome Indian who was so natural in the way he used his freedom, take up her dream again where she’d left off.

She felt as if she’d been walking for hours. Little streets lined with houses, waste ground … the tarmac replaced by sand and dust, a proliferation of shacks with no order in the middle of refuse, the rats becoming arrogant.

“It’s not the place for you, Snow White.”

“What the fuck’s it got to do with you? Tell me where it is and I’ll give you my lighter. Look, it’s almost new.”

“You haven’t got the cigarettes to go with it, have you, my lovely?… OK. You follow the railway and it’s to the left of the signal. A green signal, you’ll see, perhaps red, whatever …”

Fights between stray cats, the stench of sewers and rotting fish. Walled in but open to the sky. Where I live is a cursed place, she told herself, which locusts darken with swarms like iron filings. Cold sweat made her T-shirt stick to her skin … From what even blacker underground abode did this anguish come? Thaïs had moved away from her too quickly, from her and from what they had been through together … She saw herself raising a glass to her lips and breaking it with her teeth, like biting into half a chocolate egg. The shard of glass made a kind of sparkling dagger. Thaïs, naked under her silk dress, a nacreous gleam covering her forehead … Escaped eagles were running, clumsily, after her shadow.

Blown along by the breeze, a piece of paper stuck to her ankle. Instinctively she bent down and picked it up. An election pamphlet. The bluish light the moon cast over the favela made the letters bob up and down before her eyes:

THE STATE OF CEARÁ DESERVES
A DEPUTY WHO IS:

AN ARMED ROBBER
 (SEARS store, Rio de Janeiro)

A TERRORIST
 (Guarapes Airport, Pernambuco)

A HIJACKER
 (Cruzeiro do Sul plane bound for Cuba)

ANGELO SISOES RIBIERA

It was like a letter sent by the dark. There was a motif across the page, hammers and sickles on a red background. A guarantee that the guy didn’t lie, never had lied. He displayed his crimes like stripes to the world at large … She folded the leaflet and smiled as she slipped it into the back pocket of her shorts. There was still hope for this country.

Then all at once she saw him coming out of
Terra e Mar
, clearly tipsy, with a group of his pals. When they saw the young woman, three of them immediately approached her; they had the muscles and supple movement of men who practised
capoeira
.

“Hey, look what’s turned up, a little darling looking for a hunk …”

“And who doesn’t look as if she really knows how far gone she is … I’m sure she’d like to smoke one last joint before going to bed …”

“And where’s Little Red Riding Hood heading for? In the middle of Pirambú with those tits that’re likely to cause an accident …”

They had surrounded her. Hands were placed on her shoulders, stroked the curve of her back. One of the guys touched his penis as he stared at her.

“Aynoré!” she begged, unable to find a way out of her despair.

“You know her,
Indio?
”

“A real pain in the ass,” the Indian said, spitting on the ground. “Go ahead, I’ll leave her to you.”

The silhouettes that picked up Moéma left long luminous trails behind them. The spaces between their bodies had started to vibrate, she could feel it, like a magnetic aura, a shield it was impossible to get past.

On the slope where they laid her, a white heron seemed to be pacing up and down the rubbish as cautiously as an Egyptian hieroglyph.

A good day … It was no use people having bearskin wallets, they always opened them eventually. It was all a matter of patience and know-how. Nelson counted the banknotes again, divided the little bundle into two equal parts and dug up the iron box where he kept his savings. Having checked that his nest egg in its plastic bag hadn’t been spoiled by dampness, he added that day’s haul, then quickly buried the lot again. A hundred and fifty-three thousand cruzeiros … He needed another three hundred thousand to buy the wheelchair he dreamt of. A splendid machine he’d seen in the town, in the wealthy districts, three years ago. Chrome hubcaps, indicators, four-cylinder Honda engine … a little jewel that could be steered with one hand and do up to twenty-five miles an hour. Nelson had made every effort to find the shop that sold this marvel and went there from time to time to admire it in the window and check the price: when he’d started saving up, almost immediately after he’d seen it for the first time, it cost 145 thousand cruzeiros. Now it cost three times as much. The thought that he could have bought it with the money he had in his box now, made him feel sick. It was almost as if it were being done deliberately: the more he saved, the more the price rose. It made you think someone was doing their utmost to keep it inaccessible. However, against all reason Nelson did not lose heart; one day he’d stick his ass on that chair and go off to beg like a young lord. Zé would help him soup up the engine, he might be able to hit thirty-five, or even forty! Everything would be so much easier. With a blanket, no one would see he had the legs of a stillborn calf instead of proper human ones.

This glorious vision upset him. He decided to go and watch the freight train pass; the sight of the engine splashing sparks and
flickering lights all over the darkness was something that always calmed him down.

He went out of his shack, without replacing the sheet of cardboard that blocked the doorway. He lived in a world where even the poor stole from each other; it was better to leave it open, with the lamp lit to make it look as if someone was inside. The railway was three hundred yards away and he dragged himself there quickly, unconcerned about the rats that his deformity seemed to frighten off almost as much as humans.

The best place was just behind Juvenal’s hut. From the little pile of almost clean sand beside it, he could watch the train approaching, see it slow down at the signal and go past less than three yards from where he was. Juvenal had eventually become accustomed to it: nothing could wake him apart from the smell of
cachaça
. He dreamed of earthquakes and would spend the whole night running to avoid the yawning cracks splitting the shantytown apart beneath his feet.

Nelson was going through his own victories in marathons, all those occasions on which he entered the stadium and put on a spurt to the cheers of the crowd, when the train emerged from the ambiguity of the shadows. The engine sputtered out a compact beam of darkness, its two eyes fixed on the track; its wheels chewed away at the rails, spilling out on either side the reddish glow of crackling fountains of hydrogen welding …

That was the moment at which Nelson saw her spring up from the slope and attack the monster. She kicked and hit the moving carapace of the trucks with all her might, in a fit of madness, determined to smash her fists on its crude bulk. Each time she assaulted it, she was thrown back; she swayed to and fro, raised her arms, yelled again and, head lowered, returned to the duel. The train raised its voice, again, and then again, in a deafening outburst of fury. The young princess was going to get herself knocked
flat! Nelson crawled toward her as fast as he could, shouting to her to move away.

When she saw this nightmare freak appear, there, in the never-ending infernal racket grinding away at the horizon, Moéma was stricken with panic. She wanted to run away, but collapsed, overwhelmed, exhausted.

Nelson could not believe his eyes, his princess was sobbing, calling for her mother in a plaintive voice, curled up, her hands between her thighs. Apart from her T-shirt, which was ripped right down and only held on by the seams at the neck, she was completely naked, her body was covered in patches of blood and black grease, all over, on her face, on her stomach … her breasts were disfigured by large aubergine-colored bruises.

Lying beside her without touching her, Nelson spoke for a long time, just so she could hear his murmurs of compassion, so she would gradually overcome her fear:

“Don’t cry, things’ll sort themselves out, you’ll see … My name is Nelson, I was born like this, with my legs all crooked … There’s no need to be afraid, at least I can’t do you any harm. Who’s the bastard who put you in this state? I’ll find him, I swear, we’ll make him pay … Look, take my shirt and cover yourself up, princess. Come on, you can stay with me until the morning … You can’t stay here in this state, that’s for sure … I’ll go and tell Uncle Zé and he’ll sort everything out, I promise … come on, don’t stay there … I’ll tell you stories, I know piles of them … 
John the Bold and the Princess of the Kingdom-where-no-one-goes, Snow White and the Soldier of the Foreign Legion, The Ballad of the Mysterious Peacock …”

He moved away a few yards to encourage her to follow him, then returned to the attack, gabbling all the
cordel
titles he could remember, baptizing her with all their luminous promise:
The Goddess of Maranhão. The Story of the Seven Cities and the King
of Magic, Mariana and the Ship’s Captain, Ronaldo and Susana on the River Miramar, The Sufferings of Alzira the Fairy, Rachel and the Dragon, The Unprecedented Fate of Princess Eliza, The Story of Song of Fire and His Will, The Duchess of Sodom, Rose of Milan and Princess Christine, João Mimoso and the Enchanted Castle, Prince Oscar and the Queen of the Waters, Lindalva and Juracy the Indian …

THERE WERE EXCLAMATIONS
and grimaces of disgust all around the table. Bernini swore by all the gods that he would never go to China for fear of falling ill & having to be treated there. Kircher nodded, invoking Galen & Discorides; as for myself, I prayed to God that this wonderful evening would never end, so delighted I was by the conversation.