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

Sea bream, albacores, rays, dogfish, dorados … they gathered in the fish in a sustained rhythm. Sometimes it took five or ten minutes, but the line never came up empty. Roetgen discovered a very different world from the one he was familiar with: here there was no pleasure taken in the act of fishing, hauling in a scad was like extracting ore, with no waste of emotions or of time. True, there were occasional exclamations at an exceptional catch, but they were those of miners discovering an unexpected seam of coal, richer, easier to take out. The animal was knocked on the head and thrown into the basket; when it was full to overflowing, one of the fishermen would wedge his line to the deck and set about salting them: scale and clean them out, cut off the heads, remove the fillets and pile them up in a crate in the prow of the jangada, cover them with a layer of coarse salt … Roetgen made an effort to assimilate this expertise; soon he was able to take his turn with the others. This essential task took a good half hour, at the end your back was aching, your hands scratched and smarting from the salt, but you felt pleased with yourself and a job well done.

Concentrating on his every movement, anxious not to lose the respect of the fishermen, Roetgen made it a point of honor to keep to their rhythm. This gave him no respite, he wasn’t even thinking anymore but fell into the catatonic state he’d been in on the bus ride to Canoa. Moéma, Thaïs, Brazil, everything had gone; his mind clear, he wallowed in work and amnesia.

At sunset the fish became more difficult to take. The sea wind had started to blow, gradually raising a heavy, dangerous-looking swell around the jangada. A bank of leaden cloud, very low on the horizon, seemed to be approaching very quickly. It was an ominous sign, but the fishermen didn’t seem particularly worried about it. Making the most of the last of the light, Paulino and João made fast every last object on the deck, while Isaac was cooking a second bonito they’d kept for themselves. It was put to cool while each rolled up his line and replaced it with a stronger one with larger hooks.

“At night it’s only the big ones that bite,” João explained, “sharks, swordfish, that kind of thing, so just two of us fish, to avoid getting in each other’s way.”

Paulino and Isaac had a bite to eat with them, then went to lie down in the hold. Seeing a hand wedge a bit of cloth between the hatch cover and the coaming — presumably to let in some air — Roetgen wondered how the two men had been able to squeeze into such a restricted space: as far as he could tell, there was only about twenty inches headroom! At a sign from João, he sat down with his back against the sampson post and, following his example, tied himself to it around his waist and checked his bowline before starting fishing again.

The sea had gotten up to such an extent that occasionally long breakers swept over the boat. Roetgen could see the phosphorescent crests running along high above him in the black of the night, mountains of foaming water that the jangada finally topped just at the moment when it seemed certain they were about to engulf it. Constantly undulating and dragging its anchor — as an experienced seaman, João had made sure he doubled the length of the anchor cable — slipping sideways or brought up suddenly into the wind by the abrupt tautening of the cable, the prow half disappearing into the water, the boat somehow managed to ride out the squall. When the deck was submerged beneath a bigger wave, the two men were left sitting in foaming water like a bubble bath — without the rope cutting into their waists, they would certainly have been swept away — then the exhausting rodeo started up again until another breaker came crashing over them. Soaked from head to toe, eyes stinging, blinded by the spindrift, Roetgen lived through the worst watch of his life. Hardly reassured by Seu João’s morose impassibility, he forced himself to fish without managing to free himself from a degrading animal fear. Frozen stiff and deafened by the wind and the roar of the Atlantic, he saw monsters.

WHEN PAULINO AND Isaac came to relieve them around one in the morning there were hardly any fish in the basket: three swordfish for Roetgen and two for João, plus a hammerhead shark of about thirty pounds. There was still a heavy sea but the wind was slackening.

“The tide’s turning,” João said to Paulino, “They should start biting a bit more. Don’t forget to take in the anchor cable bit by bit.”

He crawled over to the hatch and held the cover half open and Roetgen slipped inside. “Go on, there’s plenty of room,” he said, seeing Roetgen hesitate. Once he had disappeared, João followed him into the hold and pulled down the hatch behind him, taking care not to close it completely. During the few seconds in which he was shrouded in darkness, in that sea-tossed coffin, he had to keep a grip on himself not to go back up on deck.

João struck a match and lit a little piece of candle wedged in between two sacks of salt, then wriggled to get in a more comfortable position. “ Puxa! ” he muttered, “What filthy weather!”

Stretched out on their sides, on either side of the centerboard case, they were closer to each other than they would ever be up in the open air. João’s face looked as if it were carved from old wood, each of his wrinkles being a separate curve of the grain. The hold had a strong smell of fish and brine.

“Is it often like this?” Roetgen asked.

“From time to time, when the moon’s in the wrong quarter. The problem is that the sharks don’t like …”

“They sell well?”

“Like the others, but there’s more meat on them. And then there’s a bonus for the liver and the fins.”

“What do they do with them?”

“The liver goes to the laboratories. I don’t really know but it seems it’s good for medicines, creams … It’s the Chinese who buy the fins. They’re very partial to them from what people say. Are there some in your part of the world too?”

“Sharks or Chinese?”

“Sharks.”

“Not as many as around here. And they’re farther down, well away from the shore.”

“And sea bream?”

“There’s hardly any left. They’ve been overfished. It’s the same with all the others, certain species have even disappeared entirely.”

“How is that possible?” João cried, suddenly frightened by that prospect.

“I tell you: too much industrial-scale fishing, pollution … it’s a real disaster.”

João clicked his tongue several times to express his disapproval. “God, it’s not possible, things like that! Is it far away where you come from?”

“France, you mean?”

“How should I know? Where you come from, I mean.”

“Three thousand miles, more or less.”

João frowned. “How many hours by bus would that be?” His serious expression made it clear that he had no idea where France was and couldn’t imagine a distance until it was converted into the only yardsticks he was familiar with: days on foot for shorter distances, hours on the bus for longer ones. Caught unprepared, Roetgen gave him a journey time in hours by plane, but the lack of response told him it meant nothing to the fisherman. He therefore made a mental calculation of the distance the jangada could cover in a day and told João: two months sailing to the east, provided there was a constant favorable wind during the whole of the voyage.

“Two months!” João repeated, visibly impressed this time. He was silent for several minutes, thinking it over, before coming back to the subject: “Where you live are there jaguars in the mata as well?”

“No.”

“And armadillos?”

“No.”

“Boas, anteaters, parrots?”