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

“And if you dance with us, no one will bother you. You’ll see, it’s a super place.”

“Led by Moéma down the dark street, they walked slowly, passing silent silhouettes or noisy little groups they greeted without identifying them. The wind spattered their bare skin with sand, bringing with it the smell of seaweed or a burning landfill. They started to pick up snatches of frenzied music.

“The forró ,” Moéma said, “is a sort of popular or, rather, rural dance, which only exists in the Sertão. It would be interesting to make a study of it, but that’s just by the way. The word is used for both the event as a whole and the particular dance. That’s why you can get into a muddle; in the Nordeste you can say “to go to the forró ” just as well as “to dance” or even “to play a forró .”

“ Forró, forrobodó, arrasta-pé, bate-chinela, gafieira …” Thaïs chanted the list with evident enjoyment. “They’re all the same thing. See the looks on your colleagues faces when you tell them you’ve been to such a den of iniquity. It’s the height of vulgarity, dangerous and all. Nothing in the world would persuade them to set foot in one.”

When they entered Seu Alcides’s tiny bar, they took a moment to readjust to the light. In contrast to the profound darkness in which the rest of the village was plunged, the few paraffin lamps scattered around gave the room the air of a reredos from a museum. Seu Alcides, an old, potbellied mestizo wearing a pair of glasses without side-pieces held on with a rubber band, lorded it over the place from in front of two sets of shelves that, when necessary, transformed him into a grocer; the ones on the left had a disconcertingly monotonous collection of bottles — on principle Alcides only served cachaça— while those on the right were piled high with household essentials: cans of soya oil, tinned butter, feijão , soap powder, rapadura , all the goods behind him gleaming like gold.

Leaning on a counter of bare earth, half a dozen caboclos were systematically getting drunk, downing their drinks in one and letting long trails of saliva drip down onto their flip-flops; on a small billiard table that looked as if it had been dredged up from the bottom of the sea, three young men from the village were playing game after noisy game of sinuca , a local version of snooker. Projected onto the wall, their shapeless shadows swayed this way and that with every draft.

The drinkers shifted to make room for them at the counter.

“ Meladinha for all three of us,” Moéma ordered after being greeted by Alcides like an old friend. “Are you sure?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “I know you and Thaïs can take it, but him”—this with a doubtful look at Roetgen—“do you think he can stay the course? It’s strong, and when you’re not used to it …”

“He’ll just have to learn. He can’t drink it in Fortaleza.”

“And mine is the best in the Sertão,” Seu Alcides declared, pouring a finger of a reddish, treacly substance into the bottom of the glasses. “Pure jandaíra honey, it’s my cousin who makes it …”

“A kind of bee,” Thaïs explained in a whisper to Roetgen while Seu Alcides filled the glasses with a good three ounces of cachaça .

“That’s one hell of a measure,” Roetgen said apprehensively.

“A man’s measure,” was Alcides’s lapidary reply as he stirred the mixture with the point of his knife. “That’s how we drink it around here. But you’ll see, son, it does you good where you feel bad.”

The men beside them burst out into hoarse laughter, each of them making a ribald remark or an obscene gesture.

All this insistence on virility, Roetgen thought, as if the only consolation for ignorance and poverty were in the obsessive overemphasis on the male sex organ.

Imitating his companions, he emptied his glass in one go but without being able to bring himself to spit, as they did with an impressive nonchalance. It was sweet, slightly sickly but certainly better than pure cachaça . By the time he’d turned back to the counter the glasses had already been filled again.

Nobody seemed bothered by the booming music of the forró , which was scarcely muted at all by the wind: accordion, triangle and tambourines accompanied by voices that were husky, rasping, but softened by the drawling inflections of the Nordeste .

“It works on car batteries,” Moéma said in reply to a question from Roetgen. She was playing a game with Thaïs to see who could be the first to name the group and title of each song as it came. Dominguinho: Pode morrer nessa janela … Oswaldo Bezerra: Encontro fatal, Destino cruel, Falso juramento … Trio Siridó: Vibrando na asa branca, Até o dia amainsá … Like most of the drinkers, they joined in the words without realizing, were ready with the chorus, dancing on the spot. And Roetgen, who would have been incapable of singing a single French song right through, was disturbed by the extraordinary human heat given off by this fusion of everyone with the music, a cohesion that did not come from folklore but from the secret energy of a community of pioneers.

Now there were incessant comings and goings; young folk drenched in sweat came in from the Forró da Zefa , downed their drink and returned to the dance. Hot from the dance, necks red, hair awry, the young women crossing the bar looked like hallucinating madonnas. Ravishing or hideous, they looked as if they had made love just before coming in. Roetgen was surprised to find he desired them all.

There was a brief period of silence between two records and, highlighted by the pause, an unusual individual made his entrance. It was an Indian of around twenty whose hairstyle, in imitation of the Xingu tradition, would have been sufficient to make him stand out: cut on a level with his eyebrows, his thick black hair curved in a fringe above his ears before spreading out over his back. Dressed in white — wide trousers knotted at the waist and a very low-cut vest over his smooth, brick-colored chest with delicate tattoos running down from his chin in a symmetrical design of braided cords — he bore his race and his beauty like a flag.

Looking for someone to share his astonishment, Roetgen turned to Moéma; eyes riveted on the newcomer, she seemed to be absorbing his image. Sensing her look, as if drawn by it, the Indian pushed his way through the crowd until he was beside her. On his shoulder was a smudge of blue ink, the mark stamped by Dona Zefa on dancers going out of her dance hall. He drank his cachaça without a word. The music started up again …

“Alcéu Valença!” Thaïs exclaimed, abruptly carried away by the opening bars of the song. She started to sing: “ Morena tropicana …”

“ Eu quero teu sabor ,” the Indian went on, looking Moéma straight in the eye. Then he sketched a smile and left the bar.

“Funny guy, eh?” Alcides said. He’d missed nothing of the little scene.

“Who is he?” Moéma asked, as if she wasn’t really interested in the answer.

“His name’s Aynoré. He’s been hanging around here for two weeks now.” And, spitting on the floor to emphasize his contempt, “ Maconheiro , for all I know …”

“Let’s dance,” Thaïs begged, still taken up with the music and jigging to the rhythm.

Once out in the street they went to the left of the bar and came to the Forró da Zefa . It was a sort of barn made of clay bricks with a corrugated iron roof proclaiming the relative affluence of its owner. Small windows — without glass, as everywhere in Canoa Quebrada — all along the front let out more hubbub than light. At the only door to this edifice they found Dona Zefa herself, an old mulatto stinking of alcohol and tobacco who immediately attached herself to Roetgen muttering what was clearly a flood of obscenities in a weary voice. She let go of him as soon as he’d managed to extract the few cruzeiros entrance money from his pocket. Behind her, in a hall about thirty yards long on which two gas lamps hanging from the ceiling cast a dim light, a milling crowd was concentrating on criss-crossing all available space on the beaten-earth floor in every direction. Like an intoxicated, teeming swarm, the couples, swift, earnestly bound to their partners, were gyrating their hips rhythmically, feet held to the floor by audible magnetism. Their serious expressions, their uniform gestures in perfect accord with the rhythm of the music, astonished Roetgen more than anything he’d seen so far: a dance in the catacombs, one last cheek-to-cheek before the curfew, acutely aware of their bodies and the imminence of war. Beneath the human voice and the instruments was the constant background noise of sandals on the ground, an incessant rhythmical pulse with all the menace of a silence of the primeval world.