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

Moéma sat down on the edge of the bed; she ran her fingers through the girl’s thick hair.

“Have you done it?” Thaïs asked, opening her eyes.

“Yes, that’s it. I’m sure he’ll send me the dosh. After all, he never refuses me anything.”

“I’m speeding a bit, you know.”

“Me too, but I’ll sort it out.”

Moéma turned to the bedside table and took out the little ebony box containing the coke. With a strip of cardboard she took out a pinch of powder and poured it into a soup spoon; the spoon with the twisted handle that kept it perfectly horizontal. Deciding the quantity was too great, she put some of it back in the box before mixing the rest with a little water from a dropper.

“You’ll be careful, yes?” Thaïs whispered, watching her.

“Don’t worry, I’ve no desire to die, even less to kill you,” Moéma replied, heating the contents of the spoon over a lighter. “I’m not as crazy as I seem.”

After having drawn up the mixture, Moéma gave several taps to the fine syringe they had used four hours ago, gently pressed the plunger, checking that there were no air bubbles left, then picked up the delicate dressing-gown belt lying on the floor.

“Off we go, sweetheart.”

Thaïs sat up and held out her chubby arm. Moéma wrapped the belt twice around her biceps, then pulled it tight until a vein swelled up in the crook of her arm.

“Clench your fist,” she said, leaving Thaïs herself to keep the tourniquet tight. She soaked a piece of cotton wool in perfume then rubbed it over her arm. Holding her breath in an attempt to curb her trembling, she cautiously brought the needle up to the chosen vein.

“How lucky you are to have such large veins; with me it’s always a big production …”

Thaïs closed her eyes. She couldn’t stand the sight of the last part of these preparations, the moment when Moéma drew out the plunger a little: a tiny jet of black blood spurted into the syringe, as if life itself, escaping from her body, were spreading out in there in thin, deadly curls. The first time, two months ago, she had almost fainted.

“Now, unclench your fist slowly,” said Moéma, starting the injection. When she’d half emptied the syringe, she pulled the needle out and bent Thaïs’ arm over on a wad of cotton wool.

“Oh my God! Oh, the shit, my God, the white shit!” the girl repeated, slumping down on her back.

“Are you OK, Thaïs? Say something! Thaïs?!”

“It’s OK … Don’t worry … Come and join me, quick,” she said, articulating with difficulty.

Reassured, Moéma put the belt around her left arm, holding it in place with her teeth. Now her hand was trembling uncontrollably. Clenching her fist as tight as she could, she pricked herself several times without managing to find a vein in the bluish network scarcely visible under her skin. In desperation, she ended up sticking the needle in a blood-filled bulge in her wrist.

Even before injecting the rest of the syringe, she had a strong taste of ether and perfume in her mouth; and as the aperture on the world gradually closed, she felt herself cut off from the living, cast back into the darkness of her own being. A metallic rumbling swelled up abruptly inside her head, a kind of continuing echo, muffled, such as you hear during a dive when your cylinder hits the rusty metal of an old ship. And along with this shipwreck’s wail came fear. A terrible fear of dying, of not being able to turn back. But right at the bottom of this panic was a couldn’t-care-less attitude to death, a sort of defiance that was almost clear-headed, despairing.

Sensing that she was coming close to the very mystery of existence, she followed the progressive disappearance of everything that was not of the body, of her body and her own will to merge with another body eager for sensual pleasure, with all the bodies present in the world.

Moéma felt Thaïs’ hand on her chest, pulling her down. She stretched out, immediately concentrating on the exquisitely voluptuous enjoyment the contact gave her. Thaïs bit her on the lip, at the same time stroking her clitoris and rubbing her own genitals against her thigh. Life exploded in all its restored beauty; it had a lovely smell of Givenchy.

A nasty play on words between aleijado (handicapped) and alijado (reduced) meant that he was called “Reduced Nelson” or, more often, simply “Reduced.” He was a boy of about fifteen, perhaps older, who seemed to have the gift of ubiquity. Wherever you went in the streets of Fortaleza you always ended up seeing him between cars, in the middle of the road, begging for a few cruzeiros. Down as far as the groin he was a complete and, if anything, attractive boy with his shoulder-length hair, his big brown eyes and the beginnings of a mustache; he was only “reduced” in his lower limbs: with the bones of his two legs fused and his feet just stumps, he moved around like an animal, using his arms. Always dressed the same in a shapeless loincloth, like someone being crucified, rather than shorts, and a striped football shirt that he rolled up above his breasts, in the fashion of the Nordeste , he popped up everywhere, dragging himself along quite nimbly through the dust of the streets. Forced by his disability to perform ungainly acrobatics, from a distance he looked like a velvet crab or, to be more precise, a robber crab.

Since the heat in the town forced people to drive with their windows open, he would take up position at the main crossroads and wait for the lights to turn red before launching his attack on the vehicles. Suddenly two callused hands would grasp the bottom of the window, then a head with a fearsome look would appear while repulsively crooked limbs thumped the windscreen or threatened to invade the interior of the car. “Have pity, for the love of God, have pity!” the aleijadinho would cry, in menacing tones that sent shivers down your spine. Springing up from the depths of the earth, this apparition almost always produced the desired effect: the drivers would fumble with their wallets or rummage around nervously in the jumble of the side pockets to get rid of the nightmare as quickly as possible. And since his hands were occupied, Nelson would order them to place the grimy banknote they’d managed to unearth in his mouth. Then he would slip down onto the road and transfer the money to his trunks after having given it a quick glance.

“God bless you,” he would say between his teeth as the car was about to set off again; and such was the scorn he put into the words that it sounded like “Go to the devil.”

He filled women drivers with terror. But when you got to know him a bit and handed him his alms even before he had to beg, saving him having to climb up onto your car, he would thank you with a smile that was worth any number of blessings.

On bad days he would go thieving rather than fight with the vultures at the municipal rubbish dump for a piece of rotten fruit or a bone to gnaw. Usually he only stole things he could eat and that was a real torment for him because of his great fear of the savage violence of the police. The last time he’d been caught, for the theft of three bananas, the pigs had humiliated him until he couldn’t take any more, calling him a half-pint; they’d forced him to take off all his clothes, supposedly to search him, in reality to mock his atrophied organs even more cruelly and to tell him again and again that Brazil ought to be purged of such unnatural monsters. Then they locked him up for the night in a cell with a cascavel , one of the most poisonous snakes of the region, in order to cause “a regrettable accident.” By some miracle the serpent had left him in peace but Nelson had spent terrified hours sobbing and vomiting until he fainted. Even now the cascavel still haunted his nights. Fortunately Zé, “the truck driver,” had come in the morning to bail him out, so he had escaped the worst.