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

Yes, she had thought, as she made one of the most beautiful sentences ever written her own, that was what she wanted, to die slowly and attentively, in the same way as a baby sucks at its mother’s breast .

Then a flight of pink flamingos had crossed the sky above some islands, a truly pink cluster of those large, gangling birds. The splendor had been like an electric shock to her. Something had been scrawled on the horizon ordering her to wait longer, to watch these performances life had in store for her to the very end.

Instead of cutting her wrists, she had gone down to the center of the stage and, facing the terracing, had declaimed the only poem she knew by heart:

In questo giorno perfetto

In cui tutto matura

E non l’uva sola s’indora ,

Un raggio di sole è caduto sulla mia vita:

Ho guardato dietro a me ,

Ho guardato fuori ,

Nè mai ho visto tante et cosi buone cose in una volta …

Loredana opened her eyes and looked at her watch: more than five hours till daybreak. She felt guilty about Eléazard. The thought of having to explain herself had made her withdraw at the last moment, but she’d been close to telling him she was going to take the first flight to Rome. She wondered what memories he would have of her brief intrusion in his life. Four years ago she would have tried to make a go of it with him. He was reassuring, solid, even in his way of questioning things …

AFTER A CLOSER analysis of the terms used, Wagner put the anonymous letter in his personal safe. The letter might be just a friendly warning, but it still represented a threat: that someone could know so much about his implication in the triple murder, which was its main topic, came as a shock. As his unknown informant advised him, it was time to take steps before his complicity became general knowledge.

Leaving a secretary to look after the office, Wagner Cascudo jumped into his car. During the drive he kept asking himself what he should do with the hired men who were holed up in his country cottage. Those two cretins had dropped him in it and right up to the neck! The thought that the police might find them made him break out in a cold sweat. He’d just told them to lean on Carneiro to get him to sign the deed of sale, at worst he was looking at a charge of collusion. Unless those morons took it into their heads to accuse him to save their own skins … He had to get them out of his cottage as quickly as possible. What could he have been thinking? And he’d thought himself so clever to hide them in the sitio … He’d stick them on the first bus to Belém and then they’d see. And as soon as he was back in Fortaleza he’d ring the governor. He’d be very surprised if he didn’t manage to sidestep the issue, perhaps he’d even be able to stop the newspapers publishing the devastating article the letter had mentioned …

When, two hours later, he reached the sitio de la Pitombera , he’d almost persuaded himself he had things under control again. When he pushed open the door of the little cottage that, unknown to his wife, he only used for amorous escapades, he found Manuel and Pablo sitting at the table with a bottle of wine.

“Get your stuff together,” he said immediately, “we’re leaving —” It was only after he’d spoken that sentence, which he’d repeated over and over to himself during the last few miles of the journey, that he realized from their evasive looks that something was wrong. At that same moment armed police burst into the room.

OF ALL THE things that happened following this, the only one that Loredana doubtless hadn’t foreseen was the local population’s reaction to the three Americans in the Caravela Hotel. On the day when she came back from São Luís with the ticket for her flight confirmed by Varig Airlines, she met Eléazard and Soledade to attend the funeral of the Carneiro family. It was a rainy morning, making the sad occasion even more dismal. Hundreds of people had come to join the procession organized by the priest of Alcantâra. As it passed, people opened their doors and windows to allow free access to the souls of the dead.

“Give them rest eternal!” a relative or friend would cry. “And light perpetual, O Glorious One. Help them to die!”

And they dropped everything to come out and join the funeral cortege.

“Come, brother of their souls!” the crowd would repeat to welcome the one who’d just joined them.

No one was crying, so as not to make the wings of the little corpse wet and thus stop him from entering paradise. Nicanor! Gilda! Egon! They called on the dead by their Christian names to make them feel lighter in their deal coffins. Lamentations of grief to help the deceased to die, lamentations in the hour of death, lamentations at the moment the cock crowed for the last time, lamentations on the dawn in which the inert parts of the body and every item of clothing are chanted: songs of mourning and litanies flow in one single lament, the echo reverberating from the ruined façades of the town. A long, ochre groan, rust tarnishing the steel of the sky. The men were getting drunk, a drummer was summoning the rain.

Eléazard suspected Alfredo was behind what happened when they got back from the cemetery. Rumors went from mouth to mouth, excitement took over. Like a shoal of fish responding to the strange magnetism governing their least movement, the whole crowd gathered in the square, outside the Caravela Hotel. “Yankees out! Death to the CIA!” An almost mystical frenzy twisted their lips, raised their fists. They thought the three Americans had barricaded themselves in their room, but Alfredo saw them coming back from a bar and approaching the mob with no idea that they themselves were the cause of the commotion. A stone flew, immediately followed by dozens of other projectiles. The man put his hand to his face and stared in amazement at the blood on his fingers. Hardly restrained by the priest, who was exhorting them to remain calm, the people of Alcântara advanced toward the object of their fury. Instinctively the Americans drew back, then started to run, panic-stricken, toward the landing stage. The Dragão do mar was preparing to cast off and the people let them take refuge on board without pursuing them further. Hurrying to the scene, those who had gone into the hotel threw the foreigners’ suitcases toward the boat — not properly closed, they burst open before they reached it. The sea was covered with female clothes and items of underwear, which sent the kids clustering the bank into howls of laughter.

Watching the boat disappear, Loredana said, with a sigh of resignation, “I suppose it was bound to end like that …”

“It’s nice to see, all the same,” said Eléazard, misinterpreting what she had said. “Anyway, they got away, though it was a close shave. Did you see all those panties?”

“I saw them,” she said with a smile. “To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten those clowns …”

Eléazard looked at her, slightly surprised. Her expression showed the kind of embarrassment, tinged with a feeling of unease and vulnerability, that precedes a confession. Later on, when he was going through his memories, he would regret not having embraced her at that moment. It would doubtless have changed the course of events.

“So what were you going to say?” he asked gently.

“It’s not because of the suitcases,” was her enigmatic reply. “There’s not much left of a story when it’s finished. Stuff floating on the sea, like after a shipwreck …”

Still not looking at him, she felt for his hand and took it in hers in a way that was quite natural.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“More than that,” Eléazard said, trying to conceal his emotion, “you know very well …”