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

“No problem for me,” Xavier said, in cheerful tones. But they could tell that, instead of reducing his apprehension, the little exhortation had increased it.

Thaïs and Roetgen went to sit with them under the green arbor. They brought a tray with some white wine and nibbles. It was early afternoon. On the other side of the road, fifty yards away, they could see the beira-mar and, through a gap in the curtain of coconut trees, the blue-green ocean with the sail of a jangada passing.

“I hope your friend has a good supply of wine,” Thaïs said to Roetgen, “because acid makes you thirsty.”

“There’s more than we need,” Roetgen said. “And if not, I’ll go and buy some.”

“You’ll see,” Moéma went on to Xavier, “it comes in waves. You think it’s stopping, but it starts up again, even stronger.”

“How long does it last?” Roetgen asked.

“Twenty-four hours, more or less. Why d’you ask? You’re worried, aren’t you?”

“A bit. It’s Xavier I’m thinking of …”

“Don’t worry,” Xavier said in reassuring tones. “If I don’t set off in the morning, it’ll be in the evening or tomorrow. I never takes risks with the sea, it’s too dangerous.”

Roetgen said nothing. When you saw the wreck in which the guy had crossed the Atlantic, you wondered whether he was as cautious as he claimed.

“You know he went out for two days on a jangada?” Moéma said.

Roetgen could see from her look that she immediately regretted having mentioned the episode. To Xavier, who asked if it hadn’t been pretty difficult, he replied coolly, “Not really. It’s getting back to normal afterward that’s hardest.”

This reply was so obviously addressed to Moéma, that Xavier dropped the subject. If those two had something to sort out between them, that wasn’t his problem. Thaïs gave Roetgen a hard look to tell him it was better to leave it be, given the situation.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a while, taking Moéma’s hand under the armrest of the lounger. “It just came out like that. I’ve no hard feelings, I swear …”

Moéma’s reply was a simple squeeze of the hand. She seemed fascinated by a cargo ship that was scarcely visible on the horizon.

THOSE FIRST HOURS were peaceful, though ambiguous, listless and ashen, like those you have to spend visiting a patient in the hospital. Thaïs and Roetgen whispered, took little sips of cold white wine, all the while keeping an eye on their companions immured in the isolation of LSD. All around was a feast of light and warmth that kept them glued to their deck chairs.

Their conversation proceeded with the interminable slowness of a drip feed. Fascinated by parapsychology, and more generally by everything that seemed to defy understanding, Thaïs was full of anecdotes illustrating her naive belief in the supernatural, little real-life experiences for the most part, which she recounted in her singsong voice and in the confidential tones of testimony more captivating than their content.

Roetgen was delighted at her wonderment, at the openness with which Thaïs talked to him. It was something new in their relationship. Contrary to Moéma, who would dig her heels in on such occasions and refuse even to contemplate the slightest dent in her beliefs, she showed a flexibility that worked to his advantage. Not that she was convinced by the arguments Roetgen deployed, but she listened, weighed the pros and cons, and tried to defend her position without once asserting the a priori existence of the supernatural , or the powers of the mind that fascinated her. Their conversation quietly touched on all the standard features of this material — the tarot, clairvoyance, horoscopes, telepathy, flowers responding to being talked to and other contemporary superstitions — without arousing the usual irritation in Roetgen. She confided in him her desire to have a child. He confessed to her that he wrote poems. It was becoming very suggestive when Moéma interrupted them. “What’s the time?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the patch of light quivering by her feet. “I mean do the Indians ever ask that kind of question? How do they manage to have a notion of time. I’m serious, professor , I’m not joking …”

Roetgen gave a long reply with many illustrations taken from his lectures. Above all, he talked about the banana calendar, without realizing he was talking to Thaïs and not to the one who had asked for enlightenment on the subject.

Then there was a resplendent sunset over the beira-mar , when they all concentrated on trying to see the “green flash.” Finally Xavier stood up, saying he was fed up with sitting down and it was perhaps time to think about having a bite to eat if they weren’t going to wither away, slowly but surely, on these bloody loungers.

“Corpse,” he declaimed bombastically, “that something that has no name in any language! Tertullian quoted by Bossuet: La-garde et Michard, seventeenth century, page 267 …”

“What’s he talking about?” Thaïs asked.

“Some thing he picked up in a school textbook, but it’s too long to explain,” Roetgen said with a laugh. “But to put it briefly, we’re off.”

WITH MOÉMA AND Xavier behaving like little children attracted by the least colored object on the seaside stalls or falling into interminable fits of wild laughter, it was getting on toward nine by the time they reached the Náutico . The pretentious pink edifice was teeming; people around the immense pool were yelling as a swimming final was taking place. Farther away, under the floodlights, some aged blacks were rolling the red shale of the tennis courts.

Moéma insisted she wanted to dance.

“Go easy, please,” Roetgen begged as she dragged Xavier off toward the music, “there’re people who know me around here.”

“I will, and that’s a promise,” Moéma said in a tone that suggested the opposite.

“We’d better follow them,” Thaïs advised.

They found a little table that was free that gave them a view of the dance floor. Roetgen ordered a selection of snacks, a bottle of vodka and some orange juice. After the second glass no one could remember the precise chronology of events. The fact is that there was a moment when all four drank a toast to the departing Xavier, another when Roetgen, completely drunk, made a declaration of love to Thaïs and a final one, much later when they realized there were only three of them left.

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 …