Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

Roetgen returned to his teaching with the uncomfortable feeling that he had only just escaped all sorts of complications. By transgressing the tacit rules associated with his status as lecturer he had exposed himself to professional problems whose seriousness he only now appreciated. Despite his hurt pride and the obsessive image of Moéma, he was astonished he had come out of it so lightly: what madness, he said to himself, to have yielded to that girl’s advances. I really was a fool. She only has to tell people half of what happened on that beach and I can pack my bags.

Without feeling embarrassed at what he’d done — you had to take people and things as they were and not be afraid of having your senses disturbed if it was in the interest of ethnography — he saw himself in danger of stubbornly denying his mistakes, of declaring, in outraged tones, that people shouldn’t cast slurs on his reputation simply because of malicious student gossip, that it was too easy … But the various scenarios in which he rehearsed his defense did not reassure him, so that he basked in the warmth of the flattering memory of his outing in the jangada, reducing his stay at the seaside to that exploit alone.

Happening to meet him on campus, he told Andreas of his adventures. “You’re crazy,” was his smiling reaction, “but I don’t think I could have resisted either … Still, you’ll have to be careful, they can’t stop themselves gossiping. Not out of malice, that’s the odd thing about it, but because they have a taste for it, for the sheer enjoyment of the fofocas … Tittle-tattle, it’s almost a way of life here! You’d think they couldn’t communicate in any other way. And I have to agree that it’s quite nice: the mystery ends up giving a kind of density to human relationships. You can be sure you’ll be rumored to have done a lot more things than you would ever do, so, a bit more, a bit less, you’ve no need to worry as long as you’re not sleeping with the principal’s wife. And even then you’d have to be caught in the act!”

He put a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Tell me, do I know the girl?”

“She doesn’t exactly hide her light under a bushel. Moéma von something, I can’t remember what, something that sounds German.”

“Moéma von Wogau?”

“That’s it,” Roetgen said in amazement. “You know who she is?”

“I know her father, an old university friend. He’s a journalist, a foreign correspondent in Alcantâra. I even palmed my parrot off on him. He stays with us when his work brings him here. He told me his daughter was coming to the university here, I was supposed to keep a bit of an eye on her, but I have to admit I’ve completely forgotten.”

“Why didn’t she go to São Luís?”

“Her parents are in the middle of a divorce, it could well be that it’s already gone through. As I understand it, the girl’s taking it rather badly. The mother’s a Brazilian, a lecturer at Brazilia; she’s making a name for herself in palaeontology, always on the move. She’s the one who left. As for her father, I quite like him but he can be unbearable. The kind of guy who’s always preoccupied with the world and with himself and despite that not very perceptive about other people. For all that, a brilliant guy. I’ve never understood why he was so determined to ruin his life. And from what you say, the girl’s got problems too …”

“You can say that again,” Roetgen agreed.

With this verdict he was back in the comfort zone of a dominant position and ready to forgive Moéma her infatuation with the Indian. The fact that she had ‘problems’ changed everything; from a nympho she became a child who needed help.

That same evening, after turning it over in his mind again and again in the little attic flat he rented in a modern block, Roetgen decided to go and see Thaïs. She’d given him her address on the bus journey back. Three days had passed since then.

Having knocked on the little door in Bolivar Street with no response, he was about to leave when Thaïs’s head popped through the bead curtain over the window. “Oh, it’s you!” she said cheerfully. “Come in, just give me a few seconds.”

Roetgen noted the dark red blotches on her cheeks and the top of her chest. He must have surprised her in the middle of her frolics with a new lover. She’s consoled herself pretty quickly, he thought with a touch of disdain. He was then all the more astounded to see her reappear, knotting an extravagant kimono with a multicolored floral pattern round her buxom figure and leading in a young man with a large blond mustache, very thin, who did not seem the least embarrassed by his scanty attire — just a pair of boxer shorts.

“This is Xavier,” Thaïs said, pronouncing the “x” aspirated in the Portuguese manner. “He disembarked yesterday. You can talk French with him; if I’ve understood correctly he made the crossing from Toulon in a sailing boat. I think he’s going to stay here for a few days …”

They were both wearing rather inane smiles. The room was stinking of grass. Roetgen introduced himself coolly to his compatriot.

“Anything new?” Thaïs asked, rolling a joint.

“Nothing. Lectures, the university, routine …”

He looked her in the eye and took the plunge: ‘Heard anything of Moéma?”

Immediately Thaïs’s face darkened. “Nothing at all. She must be in Canoa with that goddamn Indian. You wouldn’t believe she’d pull a trick like that on us.”

Roetgen was surprised but flattered to see himself included in their relationship. “These things happen,” he said.

“You’re in love with her as well, eh? I mean, it’s serious, I haven’t got it wrong, have I?”

“More than anything,” Roetgen replied, alarmed. It is often our lips that decide between truth and falsehood. Roetgen couldn’t say whether he was lying in order to attract sympathy and take center stage in the matter or whether his unconsidered reply was more of a revelation of the truth. He detected overexcitement in it, the kind that goads us, when we’re in a confession situation, into going for the full pathos rather than some banal, inglorious suffering.

“At least, I think so,” he said, trying to collect his thoughts. “She … How should I put it? I miss her.”

“I knew it,” Thaïs said, passing him the maconha joint. “It’s the same with me. We’re up the creek, cara . Up shit creek. I’ve never seen her like that before. It’s as if the bastard had put a spell on her.”

Xavier couldn’t understand a word of what was being said and looked as if he couldn’t care less. Sprawled out on the cushions, unruffled, his face wreathed in smiles, he puffed at his joint, scrutinizing the walls of the little room.

“It’s not normal,” Roetgen went on, “I can’t stop thinking about her, ever since I got back to Fortaleza. About you too, be it said. It’s extraordinary the things we went through together down there.” Against all expectation, he found Thaïs much more alluring than at Canoa. A gleam in her eye — and perhaps also the fact that she hadn’t fastened the top of her kimono, revealing a little more than she should have of her ample bosom — assured him that the attraction was indubitably shared.

That was the point their mutual titillation had reached when the curtain over the front door was pushed aside. It was Moéma. Puffy-eyed, holding back her tears, she fixed a look of mute entreaty on her friend. Thaïs immediately stood up and, ignoring the two men, drew the prodigal into her room.

“Some great girls round here,” Xavier said as soon as Thaïs had closed the door. Then, with a wink, “I’ve a feeling it’s some time since you had any French mustard, am I right? But I’ve got some whiskey as well, if you prefer, Johnnie Walker Black Label. It’s no great shakes, but it’s all they had at Cape Verde.”