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

If the inscription in the mirror was a similar phenomenon, of what was it warning her, of what imminent shipwreck? Moéma was lying down again. With a sense of unease, she felt herself being dragged down into obscure depths where the enigma concealed in her T-shirt flickered. Nebulas exploded inside her brain and at the conclusion of a slow dissolve, Eléazard’s face revealed the message she was desperately trying to decipher: it was a cry, an appeal that grabbed her by the throat, making breathing difficult. After her parents’ break-up, she had first of all sided with Elaine, without for one moment concerning herself with what her father might feel. She hadn’t tried to help him, nor even to understand him. You have your own life to live, Moéma , her mother had said when she refused to take her to Brazilia with her, cut the cord. It’s not healthy to stay tied to my apron strings. We’ll become real friends, you’ll see, grown-up friends. But you have to do the same as me, liberate yourself, make a life of your own … The problem was — and it was the first time Moéma had formulated it — that she didn’t feel grown-up at all, that she wanted a father and a mother, not “friends”! Suddenly the fact that Elaine could tell her something so absurd seemed monstrously selfish. Everything became suspect, including her insistence on being called by her Christian name, as if she were ashamed of being her mother … Looked at from this point of view she wasn’t free of blame herself, since she had betrayed her father’s love — a love that neither her whims nor her ingratitude had done anything to lessen! — with at least equal lack of consideration. But perhaps it was time to put things right, to tell him now what he should have been told six months ago. She would go and stay with him in Alcântara, he would be able to put her back on the rails, untangle the mess her life had become. Pity about this year at university, but it was down the drain anyway. She must write to him as soon as possible, tell him about the turnaround that had just taken place. In her distraught state, she thought she had found the solution and held on to it like a life preserver. Dear Papa, if you agree, I’ll come back and live with you. It’s hard to write to your father without having something to ask from him, but I’ll explain everything soon … This time I’m just begging you to forgive me. With love and kisses ,

“Moéma.”

“I’m Nelson,” the angel replied. “I thought you couldn’t speak, you know. Uncle Zé can’t come until tomorrow, but we’ll sort things out.”

Night had fallen, a small oil lamp was burning in the hut. Moéma apologized to him, he’d been asking her what her name was for hours and hours. She wiped away her tears and got him to tell her everything from the start.

THAÏS AND ROETGEN only started to get worried two days after the Náutico episode. They went round to Moéma’s the next day, around noon, then in the evening, without becoming particularly concerned; they assumed she was sleeping off the LSD. They went again the following day, shortly after Xavier left. Finding her door closed again, it occurred to them that she might be incapable of responding to their knock; they asked a neighbor on the same landing and eventually stepped across from his balcony to get into her flat. Roetgen saw that Moéma wasn’t at home and that there was even good reason to believe she hadn’t been back since the evening of the Náutico dance.

“In one way I find that reassuring,” Thaïs said. “It’s not the first time she’s slept out …”

“But where?”

“She could well have gone to a hotel, so as not to be found, or she may have gone back to Canoa … you never know. What is sure is that she’s still got some cash, so there’s no need to worry.”

They both felt guilty about Moéma, which made them blame her apparently casual treatment of them all the more harshly. “Surely she’d realize we’d be worried sick,” Thaïs said.

“Yes, it’s not very considerate. At least she could have left a note.”

A SORT OF euphoria, equally unhealthy, followed the paralysis of the first day. Moéma felt she had been reborn. Galvanized by her decision to leave Fortaleza and go back to her father, she threw off her old self with the vigor of a woman who had come back from the dead. Her traumatic experience still brought on horrifying visions, such as the one in which she was stirring human bones in a huge cauldron that stank of hot fat and corpses. Moéma found herself hesitating as she tried to explain to Nelson what she’d been through. Her memory consisted of disparate images that, paradoxically, were entirely lacking in violence — the heron, a gold tooth, the label on a beer bottle — images from a nightmare that, at the time, we are sure will remain etched on our memory but to which, in the morning, we’ve lost the thread.

She blamed herself now for having wanted to see Aynoré again, for having thought herself strong enough to face the hazardous labyrinth of the favela at night. Her punishment was certainly out of proportion to her error but, ultimately, just as valid as a bad mark on a botched essay. She found it almost impossible to envisage the idea that one day she’d have to leave this refuge of shadow and tenderness where, out of pure animal instinct, she was lying low. In order to postpone that eventuality, she rigorously avoided any questions about her address or identity. There was the world before and the world after; she no longer wanted to hear anything about the former while not yet being ready to face the latter.

Her talk with Uncle Zé was a crucial stage in her metamorphosis. He came to see her in Nelson’s shack late one afternoon and stayed with them the whole evening. “Hi, Princess,” was his simple greeting. “It seems you’ve had a narrow escape.”

Moéma was immediately taken with his affable manner. Already predisposed in his favor by Nelson, she changed this prior esteem into genuine admiration. It was above all thanks to him that she could put a name to the things that had turned her world upside down. In simple words and without abandoning the gentle tone, which was more eloquent than an expression of his rebellion would have been, he lifted the veil on the favelas. This fringe, the existence of which she deplored, this dark, shameful world, had swelled to its full scale, had become embedded in physical reality to the point where it had broken down what she used to feel was her clear conscience. What Nelson showed her merely by his existence as a minor beggar, Zé multiplied by such numbers that she had begun to feel in a minority in her own town. In Fortaleza alone the shantytowns contained over eight hundred thousand inhabitants with no other refuge but the sand and the noisome precariousness of the dunes. Condemned to the clear blue skies of the tropics, irradiated by poverty, these slums spread misfortune with an energy that was constantly renewed: children’s brothels, incest, endemic diseases — the very ones that elsewhere they boast about having eradicated! — hunger that drove people to eat rats or chew the dried soil in the ruts, the inconceivable privations they had to suffer just to obtain a set of tiles necessary for a family’s basic survival: With a roof , Uncle Zé told her, it takes a process lasting six months to flatten an illegal dwelling, when there’s no roof they just have to send in a bulldozer . Those machines arrived without warning, like diarrhea or stomach cramps, they gobbled up everything in their path to clear the dunes for the property developers and to allow them to continue the immense concrete barrier they were erecting along the river bank. Mutterings, protest? They fired on the crowd with the same indifference with which they’d fire on a flock of sparrows. And if that wasn’t enough, there were the continuous brawls among the poverty-stricken inhabitants themselves, alcohol, cocaine, bodies buried sitting up — sometimes you tripped over their heads when you were going for a pee! — the innumerable mad people, the toilet paper on which crooks who claimed to own your hovel would scribble a receipt for rent, infants sold to the rich, to all those worthy souls short of offspring, the harpooners’ beach where everyone pulled their pants down to do their business, the children, boys and girls naked until they were eight, who suddenly dropped dead, with empty stomachs, after feats of endurance a yogi would have been proud of … ninety million blacks with no birth certificate or identity card, more than half the population of Brazil in dire poverty.