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

The bottom of the net was soon horizontal below the surface: tuna and swordfish, half out of their element, were making the sea boil with their wild thrashing. I was wondering how the fishermen would get them on board, when they secured the net, to keep it in place, & grasped strong pikes that ended in broad hooks. The raïs intoned a third song, the solemn poignancy of which, chanted like a Dies irae , accorded fully with the slaughter that ensued.

Retching with revulsion, I observed Kircher. His eyes bulging, his hair dishevelled, spattered with blood & water, he was deeply affected by the carnage. I could sense that his every nerve was tingling, & looking at his broad hands gripping the side of the boat, I saw the knuckles go white.

“Pray for my soul, Caspar,” he murmured abruptly, “& stop me if I ever pick up one of those pikes.”

Convinced my master was tempted to berate the men for their cruelty, I gathered all my strength to beg the Lord to protect him &, thanks be to Heaven & perhaps to my prayers, Kircher did not yield to the impulse. Fortunately, for I would hardly have been able to hold him back & save him from eternal damnation given the wretched state I was in.

When all the fish down to the very last one were on board, we climbed back onto the ship & set sail for Messina. Once there, we embarked again almost immediately & it was only when we saw the splendid cliffs above Palermo that my master finally unclenched his teeth.

“Caspar, my friend, you have seen me in a very delicate situation & I will make confession about it to my superiors as soon as we are back in Rome, but before that I am anxious to explain to you what happened. That will perhaps help me to dissipate the shadows clouding my mind …”

Every time Roetgen felt overtaken by circumstances he would, as he put it himself, “go cataleptic.” After a period of intense concentration he would manage, without great difficulty, to paralyze his faculty of judgment and keep himself in a state close to complete detachment. Having put himself, by his own decree, in a position where anything could happen without him consenting to appear affected by it, nothing did actually affect him anymore. The worst worries simply slid off the invisible walls of his apparent serenity. He could have been in a Boeing in free fall or facing a raging lunatic armed with a gun and not a muscle in his body would have twitched; he would have died, if that should happen, with a lemming-like indifference.

Standing in the aisle, toward the back of the bus, his arms fused in a cross to the tarnished steel bars, squashed on all sides by the passengers clustering around him, jostled and jolted, dazed by the heat and the noise, Roetgen held his course like a sailing ship heading into a storm. Each time the driver was forced to suddenly slow down to avoid animals, kids or objects that appeared in front of his vehicle, as if on the screen of a video game, he sent a battering ram of the flesh and sweat of fifty people thumping into Roetgen. The desert landscape of the Sertão, occasionally glimpsed through the heaving mass, filled him with a sense of its desolation.

He felt a gentle tug on his shirt. “Are you OK? You wouldn’t like to sit down a bit in my seat?” Moéma managed to say, craning her neck to see him.

“No problem,” he said in resigned tones. “I can last a good five minutes before I collapse.”

“It’s almost over,” she said with a sweet smile, “we get there in half an hour.”

When Moéma had arrived at the German Cultural Institute she had appeared surprised to see Roetgen helping Andreas and a few other lecturers putting the chairs away.

“But what time is it?” she’d asked Roetgen when he came over to her.

“One o’clock. I’d given you up. So had a certain Virgilio. He left just ten minutes ago.”

“Damn! I’m hopeless, really. I just wasn’t aware of the time passing. She seemed stranger than when she’d been coming out of the bank, her breath smelled of alcohol.

“Would you like a drink? Andreas always has a bottle of whiskey in his desk.”

“No thanks, I can’t,” she replied after a brief moment of hesitation. With a glance at the little group of women lecturers bustling about under the mango tree, she went on, “They’d have a fit, it would be very bad for your reputation. In Brazil the teaching staff aren’t in the habit of having a drink with their students, especially not their female students.”

“I couldn’t care less about my reputation, so if that’s all it is …”

“No, no, it’s not possible,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t … Tell me, what do you do on weekends? In general, I mean?”

Roetgen had resisted smiling at the young girl’s obvious embarrassment. Was she getting in a tangle at the last moment as she was about to go on to something she’d prepared in advance or was this first step that defied the conventions an improvisation. He had already been drawn to her by her wild side, the glint of revolt and irony in her look when he met her eye at the back of the class, everything that calls attention to a person to the point where they intrude on our dreams, our thoughts, infiltrating them, casting a mysteriously persistent light on them; he was beside himself with joy at this stumbling approach.

“On weekends? Not much. I read, play chess. And then there’s Andreas, you know him, we often go for walks together with his two children.”

“Where?”

“More or less everywhere. In the “Interior,” as you call it here, more often to Porto das Dunas. We have a glass of wine, we talk … Nothing very original, as you can see.”

“Do you know Canoa Quebrada?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s a little fishing village, completely isolated in the dunes, about two hundred miles from here. It’s preserved, you know … cool . No hotels, no tourists, no electricity even. The most beautiful spot in the Nordeste in my opinion. I’m going there with a girlfriend tomorrow, d’you feel like coming with us?”

He’d grabbed the chance. Moéma had arranged a rendezvous, advising him to bring a hammock, then slipped off into the fragrant darkness of the campus.

Very early the next morning Roetgen had met the two girls at the Radoviária , the huge bus station in Oswaldo Studart Street. Thaïs had seen to the tickets, so all he’d had to do was get on the Fortaleza-Mossoró bus that was sputtering in the square. Even before leaving the town, the bus had filled up with a boisterous motley crowd whose one topic of conversation was the airplane accident on the front page of the newspapers. Just a quarter hour into the journey Roetgen had given up his seat to an old lady — he would have put her at sixty until Moéma convinced him she was pregnant! — and for three hours now he’d been trying to ignore his nagging regret at his own courtesy.

Iguape, Caponga, Cascavel, Beberibe, Sucatinga, Prarjuru … presumably Moéma had told the driver, for shortly after Aracati the bus stopped out in the middle of the countryside, where the road crossed a little track, rutted but dead straight, which rose imperceptibly toward a horizon of scrub and gaunt carnaúba palms.

“So that’s that,” said Moéma when the bus had left in a cloud of dust. “An hour’s walk, and we’ll be there.”

“An hour’s walk?!” Roetgen protested. “You didn’t mention that.”

“I thought it might put you off,” said Moéma, putting her sunglasses on. Then, with her most disarming smile, “I did warn you that it was off the beaten track. You have to earn paradise.”

“Off we go to paradise, then. I hope at least we can bathe when we get there.”