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

Situated not far from the Rosary Church, in the seedy part of São Luís, Euclides da Cunha’s house was no different from the other run-down dwellings reeking of boredom and cellars, whose colonial style gave the Rua do Egyto its old-fashioned charm. Eléazard was only acquainted with the hall, which, being very long and having a huge number of chairs neatly arranged along the walls, each with its crocheted antimacassar over the back, resembled nothing more than a waiting room; the library, even more spacious but made to seem cramped by the dark, brocade hangings, the rocking chairs, the heavy neo-Gothic sideboards topped by mirrors, the pedestal tables, the ornate vases, succulent plants, they, too, old-fashioned by mimicry, dusty fans and daguerro-types of old, chubby-cheeked babies and old folk mesmerized by the lens; and the dining room, smaller but that too cluttered up with the stifling hotchpotch aping the fine linen of bourgeois households of the previous century.

“Ignore this ghastly stuff,” Euclides had said the first time I visited him, “it’s my mother’s world rather than mine. She made me promise to keep it the way it is until she dies and, as you will have noticed, the dear lady is still alive and kicking. Nothing has changed here since I was a child, which, paradoxically, has helped me become aware of my own evolution: as a boy I adored the décor here, I idealized it to the point where I saw it as the ultimate yardstick of aesthetic quality; as I grew up my eyes opened to its sad reality, I came to hate it as the very mark of bad taste — of course, all I was cursing was my transition to adulthood — and then one day I stopped judging, with the result that this ugliness has become familiar, precious to me, and now that it has merged into the mist with the rest of the world, indispensable …”

Dr. da Cunha’s mother was a very old lady, tiny, bent, dry and twisted as a tree in the Sertão. She was always the one who welcomed Eléazard with a few kind words, made him sit in the hall and insisted he drank a glass of tamarind juice, without which she would have departed from the laws of hospitality. Then she would show him into the library before disappearing into the progressive darkness of a corridor. For all Eléazard knew, she looked after the house on her own, watching over her son like a nun attached to a holy man.

Hearing the clink of glasses falter in the other room, Eléazard got up to go and help his host.

“That’s kind of you, thank you,” Euclides said, allowing Eléazard to relieve him of the tray. “I took rather a long time, but my mother absolutely insisted you try her angel’s sighs. It’s a great honor, even I don’t get them every day, you know.”

They sat down on their sofa again. “Look,” said Euclides, “while you’re seeing to the drinks, I’ll play you a little piece, the score of which I received the other day. If you can guess the compose …”

“If I guess the composer?” Eléazard asked as Euclides walked slowly over to the piano.

“You won’t guess it anyway,” he said with a laugh. “But if you should guess it, I’ll put you on an interesting track. Yes indeed, very interesting …”

Without further ado he lifted the lid of the old Kriegelstein and started to play.

From the outset Eléazard was surprised by the odd repetitive, staccato rhythm the left hand produced in the low register. When the melody came on top of this strange bass, he very quickly recognized the loose-limbed rhythm of the tango, but a tango that was off beat, retarded, almost parodistic in the way it prolonged the wait, exaggerated the syncopated panting of the music. One, two, three, drowning, oh fan-tastic, yes, two, three, four, a trip to asphyxia … The words emerged, bursting on his lips like bubbles. Sick at heart, sadness weary and profound … Euclides at his keyboard adjusting the slow motion of the stars, regulating it, setting it up for other demands.

Without being a virtuoso, Euclides played somewhat better than the average amateur — several times Eléazard had heard him give a very decent interpretation of the more difficult pieces of The Well-Tempered Clavier or certain sonatas by Villa-Lobos that were equally difficult — but it was the first time he had shown such an ability to overturn the secret order of things in his playing. When the piece stopped on a harsh chord, immediately damped, Eléazard had that feeling of sudden disorientation that we sometimes get on waking after the first night in a strange bedroom.

“Well?” Euclides said, coming back to sit beside him. “As expected, I give up. It’s very beautiful, genuinely very beautiful …”

“Stravinsky, opus 26. There are certain little pieces like that, beyond categorization like all true masterpieces, that defy understanding. Another time I’ll let you hear what Albéniz or Ginastera managed in the same vein. But have one of these delicious treats,” he said, offering Eléazard the plate of little cakes he’d brought. “They’re very special, something between a host and a meringue, but with orange-flower flavor. Their taste almost matches their pretty name.” Then, without transition, he went on, “Since I’m a decent fellow, although you failed the test lamentably, I’m still going to alert you to the fact that Governor Moreira is preparing something. I don’t know exactly what, but it’s a bit fishy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some people are going around buying up the whole of the Alcântara peninsula, even the uncultivated parts and the properties that don’t bring anything in. I have good reason to believe that it’s Moreira who is behind the various intermediaries carrying out the operation.”

“But why would he do something like that?” Eléazard asked, suddenly interested.

“That, my friend, is up to you to discover.” There was a glint of malice in his eyes as he added, “When you accompany me to the Fazenda do Boi , for example.”

“Good. I’ll read that again: Governor José Moreira da Rocha and his wife request the pleasure of the company of— then a blank space, and please allow plenty of room, there’s nothing more annoying than having to squeeze something in between two words —at a reception they are giving on the 28th of April, from seven o’clock onward. Fazenda do Boi and the usual address … Yes, a hundred. Someone will come to collect them tomorrow afternoon. Thank you … Goodbye.”

Carlotta replaced the receiver with a sigh of relief. She held out her hands over the telephone and watched them trembling with a faint mocking smile. You drink too much, old girl … Where’s it going to get you? Don’t you think getting old’s enough in itself? And immediately the irrepressible desire came to pour herself a glass, the first of the day, just so she felt better, just to escape the nagging fear the only answer to which was an infinity of questions. An abyss was opening up before her, making her heart beat irregularly, accelerating the unbearable collapse of her whole being. In a compromise with her morning resolutions, she swallowed a quarter of a Lexomil tablet and dropped into an armchair, opposite the beheading of Saint John the Baptist that took pride of place in her bedroom. It was a large picture, too academic, despite certain qualities in the treatment of light, to retain attention apart from by the signature: Vítor Meireles, the Brazilian painter who had devoted his work to the glorification of the Empire and brought out for the first time certain Indian motifs, though very discreetly and without calling into question the validity of the conquest of souls by the Christian religion. Of all the pictures she had inherited from her family it was Carlotta’s favorite, her great-grandmother, Countess Isabella de Algezul, having posed for the figure of Salome in 1880. When she was young, Carlotta’s resemblance to her great-grandmother had been so striking, had given rise to so many rapturous comments, that as an adolescent she had taken delight in doing her hair in the same style as the Jewish princess in the picture, imitating her regal bearing and lowering her eyes with the same disgusted sadness on the plates of cocktail snacks she was offering her parents’ guests. Yes, she had so resembled her in body and spirit that she had made some doubt the authenticity of the picture and brought some others to the brink of madness … Salome victorious and Victorian, the nymph Echo from a dream in moist collodion with her heavy chignon of red hair, her ghost’s face in which emotion expressed itself in sickly blotches; for a long time her only way of blushing had been this sort of allergic reaction to the brutal contact with stupidity.