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

MOÉMA HAD GREAT difficulty recounting the sequence of events that had led to her hasty return. One scene kept coming back to mind insistently and tormented her like anything: Aynoré making love to Josefa, the girl with the gold beach buggy. She happened upon them, after her siesta, hardly hidden in the dunes behind the beach. The little tart was jigging about on him, clinging onto his shoulders.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Josefa spat out, “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

Moéma was struck dumb, all she could do was give the Indian an imploring look. If he had come to her at that moment, she would have forgiven him, such was her infatuation. He looked her up and down, as if everything was perfectly normal: “Don’t get all uptight like that, girl. Let me finish, will you.”

It was as if the whole of Amazonia were disintegrating before her very eyes. She started crying, frozen in a stupor at the wreckage of her dream. Just before turning away, she released her fury in an insult she had regretted ever since: “Oh, fuck yourself, you fat slut!”

The reply caught her off guard as she set off running to the beach: “Hey, lezzie! Believe it or not, that’s just what I’m doing!”

Then laughter. The laughter of two people that still tormented her.

SHE FOUND MARLENE on the beach. Seeing the state she was in, the transvestite made her sit down on the sand. With caresses and comforting words, he managed to get her to tell him what was wrong.

“I told you to be careful,” he said, “he’s a dangerous guy, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing. I bet he gave you his shaman spiel?”

She gave him a questioning look, dreading what she was going to hear.

“It’s his trick for getting off with girls, a book he found: Indian legends, shamanic rituals, the flood … everything’s in it. A load of rot, girl. He’s hardly Indian at all and no more a shaman than you or me. His mother was a hostess in a Manaus bar and as for his father, she never knew which one it was of all the drunks she’d slept with …”

“It’s not true,” Moéma sobbed, “you’re lying.”

“Don’t believe me if you don’t want to, but it’s the simple truth. You just have to have a look at the book, I’ll lend it you, if you like: Antes o mundo não existia ; it’s a guy with a real tongue-twister of a name telling the mythology of his tribe. Aynoré’s got nothing to do with the Indians, he told me so himself. His get-up’s just for selling his junk to tourists at the beira-mar . He’s a little bastard, a little shit dealer. He’s not worth crying over, not for a girl like you, Moéma.”

SHE ONLY DRIED her tears after having been forgiven by Thaïs and confirmed her worst fears about Aynoré’s honesty. The book mentioned by Marlene — the first entirely written by a Brazilian Indian — had appeared some twenty years ago; Roetgen remembered it clearly from having studied it to prepare a lecture: everything from the birth of the world and the first cataclysm of fire, right down to details about shamanism was in the book used by the con man.

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.