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

“Caspar,” she murmured, “Caspar …”

Her breathing had become irregular, her nostrils were quivering, her lips parted, as if she were trying to moisten her dry throat. Assuming she was about to faint, I half rose to assist her. With a gesture, she indicated she needed air, urging me to unlace her. Since she appeared to be suffering from the stuffy air, I started to open her dress, becoming irritated at all the ribbons I was not used to. No sooner had I undone her bodice a little than she finished loosening her dress herself. But she did not stop where decency & the demands of her faintness would have required, continuing to open her clothes in a kind of frenzy until she displayed her chest to me completely naked! I was stunned by the sight. Never having seen a woman’s breast other than on the corpses we dissected with my master, it seemed to me I had never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. To my alarm, however, the Princess molliter incepit pectus permulcere. Papillae horruere, et ego sub tunica turgescere mentulam sensi . 2The Archenemy! This woman was possessed by the Fiend & I was within an inch of being dragged into the abyss. I crossed myself while reciting an exorcism, but the Princess, no longer herself, divaricata stolam adeo collegit ut madida feminum caro adspici posset . 3Both my mind & my senses were in turmoil. On the one hand I was horrified at the transformation of this woman, to whom I had until then ascribed the virtues & modesty of a saint, & on the other I felt more attracted to her than I had before. With one last spurt of conscience, I moved away from her &, trembling, quaking at the knees, I begged her to return to her senses.

“Stop it, my lady, for pity’s sake,” I said with all the conviction I could muster. “You are risking damnation! You are dragging me to damnation!”

But this reaction seemed to arouse her even more, for she passed her tongue over her lips in an obscene manner. Realizing the door was locked, I rushed over to the bell pull, threatening to call for assistance.

After a long swim, Moéma, Thaïs and Roetgen met on the beach again in the shade of a straw hut where Seu Juju, an ex-fisherman, served stuffed crabs and a cachaça with lime that was so warm it was almost undrinkable. No one had managed to explain to him why young city folk had started visiting this out-of-the-way place, but he accepted his good fortune all the more philosophically in that it enabled him to earn a living without too much effort. Leaning back on palm logs, three young men in swimming trunks were teasing each other amid great bursts of laughter. Wrestlers at leisure, their bodies gleaming with suntan lotion and drops of water, they were playing at anointing their shining skin with sand. Roetgen met the eye of the most voluble of them, a mestizo with perfect teeth who had his hands gracefully draped around the necks or shoulders of his companions and laughed in a shrill voice.

“ Eita, mulherzinha!” he exclaimed, standing up immediately to embrace Moéma. Then, taking a step back as if to get a better view of Roetgen, “Where did you find this pretty boy? I’m already getting quite moist …”

“Calm down, and don’t be coarse,” said Moéma, slightly embarrassed. “He’s my professor, so go easy.”

“At least you could introduce me, can’t you? I’m not going to eat him, although …”

“OK … Roetgen, this is Marlene,” Moéma said with a smile. “Just ignore him or he won’t let go of you.”

“Don’t listen to her,” the young man said, holding the hand Roetgen held out to him for longer than necessary. “I’m as gentle and obedient as a little pet lamb. Isn’t that so, girls?”

The two boys he spoke to said nothing but gave him black looks.

“Anaïs and Doralice,” he said with an icy smile. “They’re just jealous and that makes them impolite. It’s always the same old story, not enough hormones …”

It was the first time Roetgen had heard a man speak of himself and his friends in the feminine form. Despite his openness of mind, he felt it as a provocation and didn’t know whether to go along with the game or pretend to ignore it. Despite that, he had a kind of naive admiration for a person who dared to express his sexual preferences so openly. However, in a stupid automatic reaction, a mixture of panic and an old remnant of male pride, he felt the need to differentiate himself.

“I must be a bit odd,” he said, “but I prefer girls … Having said that, it needn’t stop us from having a drink together.”

He immediately bit his tongue, furious with himself for having given way to such easy condescension, surely more offensive than a real insult.

“Pity … You can’t recognize a good thing when you see it,” Marlene said with a touch of contempt in his voice. “If you make the change, come and see me first, I’ll open up a whole universe for you … Come on, girls. Last one in the water’s a woman-fucker.”

As one the three young men immediately set off for the sea.

“I meant no offense,” said Roetgen, dismayed.

“You were quite right,” Moéma assured him, “if you’d given him the least encouragement he’d have been unbearable. He’ll get over it. He’ll do anything for a free drink … Talking of drinks, a glass for each of us, please, Juju.”

After one glass all three were tipsy.

WITH JUST A touch of pink in the distance, the beach disappeared on either side of their field of vision in a vast, dazzling haze. On the washed-out blue of the Atlantic, long rollers broke slowly with the sound of a torrential stream. A few jangadas drawn up high on the shore, a sparse scattering of bathers — there was nothing to impinge on their sense of being away from it all, at the back of beyond, in one of those moments outside time when the mind, at peace and with memory miraculously erased, is suddenly at one with itself.

“You know,” said Moéma, “I could spend the whole of my life like this. It’s true, all my sodding life watching the waves, a cachaça in my hand …”

Thaïs had cheered up. Stretched out, with her head on Moéma’s stomach, she told Roetgen about their project for a literary bar, getting worked up about the ignorance of the age and the contempt the Brazilian middle classes had for poetry. She got carried away, almost slipping into a condemnation of the whole universe— O que é isso, companheiro? Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Fernando Gabeira? — then, brought back by Moéma’s hand, which was stroking her hair, sang in a low voice the bossa novas of João Gilberto and Vinicius, wallowing in the notable melancholy of the lines. Tristeza não tem fin, felicidade sim … Had he read, not just listened to, but properly read the poems of Vinicius de Moraes, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso? He had to make the effort. And Mário de Andrade? And Guimarães Rosa? He would never understand their world at all if he hadn’t read Grande Sertão: Veredas …

Roetgen mentally noted the titles, despite the instinctive reserve the presence of singers on the list aroused in him.

Marlene returned with his friends and some new faces as well. Not a man to bear a grudge, he demanded the promised drink, bombarded them with quips and smutty insinuations then told Roetgen that three or four hundred yards away there was a secluded part of the beach where the true lovers of Canoa met to practise nudism, play the guitar, smoke joints — a genuine liberty zone! Talking of which, he could supply him with maconha if he wanted. Good stuff, no problem. The cachaças followed one after the other until eventually he climbed up onto the table of the hut and, wrapped in several bathing towels, performed a striptease which sent all those who formed the audience of the improvised show into shrieks of laughter.