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

He’d make Yurupig eat his own balls, then he’d throw him to the piranhas, since he was so fond of them. As for Elaine, that would be longer, more complicated … like what he’d seen done to that activist tart, in the good old days of the dictatorship. The cops had taken her out of the van and dragged her off to the Tavarez brothers’ piggery, on the edge of the town. Damned patriots, they were, real varones , with some real meat inside their trousers! If there’d been a few more of their kind, Brazil would never have become this country of beggars and queers. It’d be like Chile … you should see how things worked down there! The Switzerland of South America. Everyone kept their nose clean, everything worked. Even their wine was great … When she went in, the girl had insulted them. They locked the door and got their cocks out.

“Get your clothes off, slut! First of all we’re going to fuck you up the ass to teach you some manners, then you’re going to suck us all off, we’re going to put gallons in your tank. Maybe that’ll make you think before talking crap like that.” She’d started to blubber, standing there, surrounded by the guys. She was shit-scared, the stupid bitch, she implored them, but they put a gun to her head and she’d no choice but to do everything they wanted. Everything. You have to give it to them, they carried out their program to the letter! She screamed, she cried, and they screwed her every which way, and the cachaça flowed — it was ages since they’d had such fucking fun!

Herman closed his eyes tight, concentrating on the visions of horror that were piling up inside his head. He would never forget that girl’s face, but Elaine’s replaced it, fading in and sometimes getting bigger until it filled his whole field of vision. He could see her trembling all over, like the other woman, begging them on her knees, her body filthy, with the swellings from the kicks and cigarette burns. And he lay back, happy just to watch and insult her, inventing new humiliations, new abuses, giving free rein to fantasies from the deepest cesspit of human nature. That would teach her to come and piss people off with her little ass and her film-star tits, shaking it all about as if it were nothing, while talking about her stupid fossils. The other had been just the same, a stuck-up little bitch going on about her “democracy,” her high-falutin ideas, but she let the bastards of her own kind screw her. Mauro’s type, precisely … Long hair, nothing in his pants but goes around shoving his opinions down real men’s throats. That one could wait, with his nancy-boy looks and his bloody Walkman thump-thumping all the time … djim boom boom … djim boom boom … It was enough to drive you mad.

She’d made less of a fuss when Waldemar brought the dog. It was even more excited than the guys, the Doberman was. It had a huge erection, as if it had been trained for that. The cops had tied the girl up in the pigsty with a damned neat system that kept her on all fours, her arms behind her back, legs apart, and there was a thing on her eyes, like they put on pigs when they cut their throats. She was begging them to kill her … There always came a point where they preferred death to all the rest, even to the hope of escaping; that was when it became interesting. And while the dog was screwing her, while she was half suffocating, her mouth and nose in the shit, they’d jerked off on her again. After that, when they’d got fed up with sticking anything they happened to find up her cunt, with pissing on her and whipping her with barbed wire, they’d stopped to have a smoke. No one had any idea how long they’d been there. “Do you know how they kill jaguars without damaging their skin? D’you know that, you cow?” one of the Tavarez brothers asked, the one-eyed one, the one who’d caught the pox in a brothel in Recife. “They trap them alive then stick a white-hot poker up their backside. It hisses, it sizzles, it smells like a churrasco . It’s a beautiful sight …”

He’d started heating the barrel of his hunting rifle right in front of her — a Springfield double-trigger rifle! He must’ve been bombed out of his skull to do that … and he stuck it up her socialist asshole, forcing it as far as he could. Then he calmly fired his two shots — buckshot. After that they all went off to bed. But he’d still had the strength to fuck his negress till the evening. The socialist comrade had ended up in the Tavarez’s lime kiln, no one had come to ask any questions, it was as if she’d never existed. It would be the same for Elaine, exactly the same … As for the others, he wasn’t bothered about them. A bullet in the head, two for Mauro and auf Wiedersehen, Johnny …

Herman shivered. Drenched in sweat, his shirt was sticking to the metal partition. Visions of snow-covered landscapes and battlefields overcame him without warning … abandoning the Mauthausen concentration camp before the Russians arrived, the collapse, the blackish corpses frozen to the road … then all the months in captivity in Warsaw, sick with fear, in the sheet-metal huts the cold made ring like old U-boat hulls. Sobs came, choking him until it hurt in the back of his throat. The images suddenly blurred and from a particular flush on his cheeks, an intolerable feeling of remorse and self-pity, he knew that Esther’s face was going to return to torment him and that neither alcohol nor hate would keep the night free from his recurring nightmare.

IF KIRCHER CLAIMS TO BELIEVE IN the existence of giants, it’s solely so as not to contradict Saint Augustine: one couldn’t cast doubt on the words of one of the fathers of the Church without casting doubt on the Church herself, etc. Willful blindness and lies, comparable on all points with those of Marr or Lysenko in other fields. It’s this kind of terrorism that religions or ideologies lead to that makes me want to puke. Take up the question with Loredana …

REPEATING SIMPLE FACTS: that religion is the opium of the people, the hard drug that for six thousand years has stopped all the pricks from rising up and confronting heaven; that Jesus, the man with the nails— that criminal from a Western kingdom during the Han period as Chinese scholars of the seventeenth century called him, outraged at seeing such a scoundrel deified — has laced our drinks with bromide forever and ever; that our civilization is dying from having learned to feel sorry for itself, to give positive value to defeat and its victims.

THAT WE MUST RETURN to the sources of the sacrifice, to the perception of the right moment and of a balanced relationship with the world. Reinvent the crudest paganism and deny the defixio that nails our penises to the lead curse tablets of the graveyards. That a religion founded on the decaying carcass of a crucified man will inevitably have a worm-eaten view of the world.

A GOLIATH COMPLEX: the giant of Holy Scripture only exists in relationship to David, he is only strong and gigantic so he can die at the hand of the small, weak man. Merely to name any being or object Goliath will of necessity bring the David into the world who will do away with him or it. By its name alone the Titanic was destined to go down with all hands.

FROM A TRIBUTE TO JOËL SCHERK: “How could a beautiful theory be false?” The danger of symmetry and simplicity as arbiters of elegance. Since it’s beautiful, it’s true: a theory of everything or a metaphysical ragbag? If beauty consists of economizing on concepts, why should asymmetry or complexity be incapable of that? The fact that we find economy of means more satisfying than profusion doesn’t mean it has a greater truth value.

ALL THAT REMAINS of the astronomical observations made by Kircher is the crater that bears his name today. A rut on the surface of the Moon.