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

The boy, who had listened attentively to the discussion between the grown-ups, willingly agreed & in the ensuing dialogue made every effort to meet my master’s expectations.

When Moéma woke in the stifling gloom of the shack, the strangeness of the surroundings prolonged the stupefied state she was trying to shake off. Beyond the blurred foliage of her eyelashes she could see large red letters on the boxes making the roof — THIS END UP! — and the broken glass that indicated, without having to resort to language, the extreme fragility of contents deprived of protection. A body, her own body, was wearing a soccer uniform, a jersey and shorts in the colors of the Brazilian team. Leaning over her, a kind of angel was wiping her forehead with a sponge, a young man with a somber face, with big, sad eyes, a sparse, downy beard, one of those Neapolitan ragazzi you can see in the encaustic paintings of the Faiyum Roman mummy portraits. She closed her eyes. Stay like that, don’t say anything, continue to play dead to avoid being hit … The angel was speaking incessantly, in a low voice, a whole rosary of phrases tracing the erratic swirl of the dust. The word “princess” kept recurring in an obsessive way, full of consoling warmth. Moéma remembered having followed this same melody, drawn like a lost ship by the distant promise of calm water. Before that there had been the acid, at Andreas’s place, then that dance where she’d felt so miserable, the rat, the twisting alleys of the favela … A lacework of memories in which she retained the feeling of an intense and thus far unknown ordeal. Of all these incidents, separated by obscure rents, a single one came back to mind with unbearable contours: the one where a white heron had broken the rampart of light that protected her from the world. She saw the features of each one of the bastards who had raped her, heard each one of their insults, suffered one by one each brutal act they had inflicted on her while laughing at her pleas. The effects of the LSD hadn’t worn off yet and its almost undetectable persistence only increased the sensation whenever her mind nosedived into the horrors of the previous night. Her tears returned. Head in her hands, she tried to make herself as small as possible, to gather together at whatever cost the scattered pieces of the thing inside her that had been crushed by the pack of wolves.

She slept again.

Later in the day she found herself alone and took advantage of that to pee in one corner of the hut. Lying on her side, she spent a long time watching an oval of light projected onto the sand through a hole in the roof. Clouds slowly passed across it. She felt terrorized by the “world outside,” out there, immediately beyond the shelter of planks and cardboard boxes. Then she studied the black-and-white magazine photos covering the clay and straw walls by her head: pictures of Lampião for the most part, plus some of a person whose eyes had been scratched out with the point of a knife. Underneath the portrait of a smiling American girl sitting on a four-poster bed with a drill on her lap — the child was surrounded by a heap of scrap iron at the top of which was a celluloid baby doll, riddled with holes like a sieve — it said:

The destructive instinct. Robin Hawkins, just two years old, is already considered a classic case by psychoanalysts. One of her favorite toys is this drill, which she will fight tooth and nail to stop anyone taking from her. During the last few weeks this cute little girl has destroyed a number of things (for example the TV, the fridge, the washing machine, etc.) at an estimated value of over $2,000. Proud of her precocious talent, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins encourage their child to practice this new form of expression. At the moment the only precaution they have taken is to have their bedroom door reinforced with metal plates .

The outside seemed to bounce off her pupils. Her sense of humiliation even extended to her relation to things, she felt impure, dirty, a fly on the surface of the milk. She wished she could be anesthetized for the coming days, which she felt it would be impossible to live through, could wake up a year, two years later — was it something you recovered from anyway? — relieved of this hatred of men that was paralyzing her thighs, of this loathing in which Aynoré, Roetgen and all the rest fused into the object of the same abhorrence.

The angel returned and this time she saw the deformity that forced him to drag himself along the ground when he moved. “His giant’s wings prevent him from walking,” she thought without emotion as if such a metaphor — which Thaïs insisted was taken from Jonathan Livingston Seagull— were patently obvious. The cherub’s lips were still fixed in a touching smile, exaggerating the sense of blissful wonder to such an extent that he looked like a character from a silent film. She allowed him to smear Mercurochrome on her visible cuts. It made the scratches sting a little, but following his movements she could see that she had no serious wounds. After that she bit into the sandwich he offered her, drank out of a bottle of mineral water he unscrewed clumsily and studied his callused hands as he made the motions of rubbing his shoulders and chest with a tube of ointment.

Lying on her back, she listened to him. His voice drew an endless tracery behind her eyes, musical calligraphy that she just had to follow to think of nothing.

THEN THE ANGEL wasn’t there anymore. An angel’s privilege, she was beginning to get used to it. He’d left some new clothes beside her, a T-shirt with an ad for a Swiss brand of crème fraîche across the front, a beige pair of shorts, still folded inside their transparent packing. There was also a beautiful bar of red and gold soap on a new towel.

Have a shower, scour her body from head to toe, disinfect it like a lavatory bowl … Without hesitation she slipped into the little cubicle, open to the sky, behind a sheet of semitransparent plastic against the wall at the far end of the shack. Three pallets stuck in the sand, a rusty barrel, a tin can. Used to the discomforts of Canoa, she took off her clothes and squatted down in the barrel.

Her manic cleaning of her body only ended when the cramp became too painful.

Back in the room, she put on the clothes left by her guardian angel, though not before having rubbed arnica over herself as he had suggested. There was a little mirror with a pale-green plastic frame on a box and she automatically picked it up. Despite her puffy eyelids and a little bruise under her lower lip, her face had not suffered, her hair was sticking up all over the place … Holding the mirror at arm’s length, she tried to assess her general appearance.

Nata Suiça Nata

Suiça Nata Suiça

Nata Suiça Nata

G L O R I A

Suiça Nata Suiça

Nata Suiça Nata

Suiça Nata Suiça

She gasped. Reflected back-to-front in the mirror, the T-shirt had a message that was clearly aimed at her: Athanasius … What was the name of that guy her father used to keep telling her about at one time: Karcher? Kitchener? A rather nice priest whom she used to imagine looking like Fernandel playing Don Camillo. The cat organ, the magic lantern, all the marvelous toys he’d invented for her, night after night, shone once more in the glittery colors of childhood. In her imagination he had been as alive, as exceptionally alive as Baron Munchhausen, Robinson Crusoe or Captain Nemo. Despite the only approximate spelling of the reflection, Moéma found the coincidence disturbing out of all proportion. Magnified by this fortuity, even the brand name, Gloria , took on the appearance of a hieroglyph awaiting translation.

She remembered, doubtless by analogy, the anecdote her father would relate whenever the conversation turned, as it often does after a drink, to omens. One day, as he was about to board the steamship Général Lamauricière , a writer whose name she had forgotten had sensed a supernatural warning: instead of Lamauricière he had read, in a brief moment of extreme anguish and clairvoyance: La mort ici erre . Shaken to read that “death is wandering here” he had resolved to wait for the next ship. One week later the news came that the Général Lamauricière had indeed sunk during the crossing. After having given his audience time to enjoy the punch line, her father would generally add that Samuel Beckett had found himself faced with a similar scenario: “Captain Godot is delighted to welcome you on board,” the loudspeakers had said as the plane was already turning onto the runway to take off. Seized with panic, Beckett had fallen into a real fit of hysterics and had kicked up such a fuss he had forced the crew to turn back and let him get off what could only become his coffin. This time, by contrast, there was no tragedy. Which only proved, according to Beckett — we sometimes have such a strong impression that we have seen through the secret workings of fate, such an urgent need to authenticate our foreboding — not that his fear was groundless but that in getting off the plane he had thwarted a fatal plan and saved the lives of the other passengers at the last minute.