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

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.