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

All at once Marlene popped up in front of them. “ Que bom! Welcome to the three of you in the haunt of night,” he said in a grandiloquent manner. “Things are heating up, eh? Now who’m I going to invite to dance?”

“Me,” said Thaïs giving Roetgen a conspiratorial wink.

“Now us,” said Moéma as soon as the other two had been absorbed by the Brownian agitation on the dance floor, “two steps to the right, two to the left, try to do the same as me.” Pressing up against him, she dragged him off into the turbulence.

Roetgen did quite well, at least from what Moéma said. Doing everything he could not to make himself look ridiculous, he gradually became aware of his surroundings: in the dark mass of dancers, who avoided each other with the dexterity of elementary particles, he only saw gaunt, gap-toothed faces and scrawny bodies mostly a good head shorter than he; every time a taller silhouette than the others caught his eye he recognized without a shadow of doubt one of the young city dwellers who had come to Canoa to “recharge their batteries.” They radiated good health, laughed with their white teeth, enjoying themselves as if they were in some nightclub. There were two species there or, worse, two stages of the same humanity far apart in time. Cut off from both sides, but put in the position of the strong despite himself, Roetgen felt he was as wrong, as absurdly comic and out of place, as a parrot in the middle of a flock of crows.

“It’s not quite there yet,” Moéma laughed, “you’re treading on my toes. You’ll have to get in training if you’re going to try and pick up girls in a forró .”

“I’m stopping. I’m beat.”

“OK, let’s go and have a drink.”

They were heading for the exit, their straight line disturbing the mechanics of the swirling eddies, when the Indian appeared. “You dancing?” he asked Moéma coolly, without for a moment seeming to doubt what her answer would be.

“Why not,” she replied with a touch of arrogance in her voice, enfolding herself in his arms with a promptness and ease that gave the lie to her little coquetry.

Somewhat disoriented at being left high and dry, Roetgen watched the couple drift along the edge of the whirling mass, ready to be carried away. A moment before they disappeared, he saw Aynoré paw Moéma’s buttocks in a harsh, obscene gesture, pulling her shorts up over her thighs, and her nails digging into the tattoos on his back.

Roetgen felt as if they had left a symmetrical claw mark on him. He had no right to be jealous, but allowed himself to wallow in a feeling of contempt that encompassed all the women in the world. His mind preoccupied with a thousand variations on his hurt pride, he left the dance hall, duly stamped by Dona Zefa as he passed, and went back to Seu Alcides’s bar.

This mood affected his view of the drinkers, who seemed to him to have reached the depths of degeneracy. One guy who’d fallen asleep on the billiard table woke with a start every three minutes to offer his cigarettes to no one in particular; another, determined to humiliate himself, was making pipoca to order, blowing out his cheeks excessively to make the sound of popcorn bursting, as if this pitiful buffoonery were the whole justification for his existence. Seu Alcides himself appeared too fat to be honest, especially in comparison with the living skeletons thronging his bar.

He forced himself to swallow a meladinha . In a direct relationship of cause and effect, the drink set off a fit of stomachache that left him paralyzed, close to fainting. Panicking at the thought that he might not be able to control the disaster in his bowels, he left the bar, urgently hurrying to get to the dunes. Rummaging through his pockets without finding anything to substitute for toilet paper, he ran off into the darkness, sick and despondent.

When he was sure he’d never reach the sea in time, he turned to the right and walked straight ahead, determined to get as far away from the houses as possible. In the faint light of the stars, a no-man’s-land of rubbish spread out, an unspeakable dump running along the whole length of the road. Plunging into the filth, Roetgen suddenly broke out in a cold sweat and was then overtaken by cramps that bent him double and sent him tumbling to his knees, like someone in despairing prayer. And there, alone, oblivious to everything, overwhelmed by the way his whole being was spinning, he thought he was going to die and that a pig would find him in the morning, bare-assed amid the steaming garbage of the village, a foul thing among the foulness.

His last banknotes were hardly enough to wipe away his anguish.

When he was able to get up, he wiped his sticky hands with sand and went back to the road, guided by a twinkling light that was in more or less the right direction. He came to a little window and stopped for a moment: gilded by the chiaroscuro of her lamp, an old black woman was slowly doing a piece of embroidery on a large frame of dark wood. Seeing Roetgen, she gave him a timid smile, pausing in her work. This snapshot of Flemish painting encapsulated the infinite gentleness of mothers and, with that, the sole bastion against the madness of the world.

When Zé had offered to take him to visit his sister in the little house she had in the mountains, not far from Fortaleza, Nelson had been so dead drunk that he couldn’t remember either his friend carrying him out to his truck, or having traveled through the whole night. So when he woke in the middle of a forest of banana trees, he thought it was a dream, one of the most calm and beautiful ones he’d had for a long time. Since he felt a bit cold, he pulled his hammock over him and went back to sleep.

“Come on, up you get, lazybones,” he heard an hour later. “There’s no point in coming to the mountains if you spend all the time sleeping.”

Emerging from his hammock as if from a chrysalis, Nelson saw the smiling face of Uncle Zé. “Just have a look at this paradise,” he said, pointing out of the window. “A bit of a change from Fortaleza, isn’t it?”

Outside there were indeed the banana trees of his dream, a clear sky and the croaking of the buffalo frogs.

“Where are we?” Nelson asked, rubbing his eyes.

“At my sister’s place, for God’s sake! In the Serra de Aratanha. You were in some state last night.”

“I must have been, my head feels like a watermelon.”

“The mountain air’ll sort that out in no time at all, you’ll see. Get up, Firmina’s made us a real country breakfast.”

After a mingau of tapioca — a thick porridge of sweetened milk and flour — a good slice of sweet-potato omelette and two bowls of coffee, Nelson felt much better. Then Zé carried him piggyback to a large pond down below where they went fishing. Despite his lack of experience, the aleijadinho proved to be more skillful than his teacher and caught two catfish that looked monstrous to him.

When they went back for lunch, around one, it had clouded over, suggesting there would be a heavy shower during the afternoon. They hadn’t finished eating when the storm broke, keeping them inside for the rest of the day. After the siesta, they stayed in their hammocks on the veranda, watching the rain. Then Zé sang from memory the adventures of Prince Roldão, which they’d gotten from a recent cordel by João Martins de Athayde. A naive mixture of the Iliad and Orlando furioso , the story told how the nephew of Charlemagne had managed to rescue his Angelica from the clutches of Abdul Rahman, king of Turkey and thoroughgoing infidel, by hiding, together with his weapons, in a gold lion designed by Richard of Normandy …