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

“No, João. We have different animals, but it’s a bit the same as with the fish, there aren’t that many left.”

“Oh, right,” João said, disappointed at a land so lacking in the essentials. “Not even caymans? And mango trees, at least you must have some mango trees?”

We’ve got high-speed trains, the Airbus and rockets, João, computers that can do calculations more quickly than our brains and contain complete encyclopedias. We have an impressive literary and artistic past, the greatest perfume makers, dress designers of genius who make such magnificent negligées if you lived three times over you still wouldn’t have enough to pay for them. We have nuclear power stations that produce waste that will remain deadly for ten thousand years, perhaps more, we don’t really know. Just imagine, João, ten thousand years! As if the first Homo sapiens had bequeathed us rubbish bins that were so contaminated they’d still poison everything around them to this day. We also have tremendous bombs, little marvels capable of wiping out your mango trees, your jaguars and your parrots forever. Capable of putting an end to your race, João, to the whole of the human race! But, thank God, we have a very high opinion of ourselves .

Roetgen knew he would never be able to describe to him a reality that only stood out, he suddenly realized with a feeling of bitterness and deprivation, by its arrogance. Called on to justify Western civilization, and himself with it, he failed to find a single feature likely to interest this man. A man for whom the natural riches of the earth, the warmth of the sun on it, the influence of the moon on this or that animal or plant, still had meaning and value; an intelligent, sensitive person, but living in a world where culture still retained its proper sense, like humus, a piece of land.

Feeling ashamed, humbled before João, like a guilty man facing the judge, he invented an environment that could match up to his. Combining the stories of his childhood with some memories of medieval history, he told of wolves attacking the villages on winter nights and howled, there in the dark hold, as they were supposed to across the snow in the valleys of the French countryside. Encouraged by the fisherman’s continuing attention, he embroidered his story with their shining eyes, their monstrous fangs and even ended up telling the fable of the shepherd boy who cried wolf, at length, as if it were a true story.

“He got what he deserved,” said João after briefly reflecting on the tragic end of the shepherd boy. “It’s sad to say, but that’s the way it is. By lying all the time you end up making the lie into a truth … It’s like my son-in-law. For two years he kept telling people his wife was unfaithful, just to attract attention. Until the day she really did cuckold him. But tell me, françès , your family, where do they live, in a village?”

“No, in a city. In Paris. Have you heard of it?”

“I think so, yes … But I never went to school, you know. It’s near Nova-York , isn’t it?”

“Not exactly,” Roetgen said, fascinated by a view of the world in which geography played such a minor role. “I’ll explain …”

It was no use, however. Neither the map of the world he drew on the floor, nor his attempts to simplify it brought the least sign of understanding on João’s face. He had never traveled anywhere, apart from the three hours’ walk to Aracati to see the jangada owner and, once when he was a child, a pilgrimage to the shrine at Canindé, to thank Saint Francis for having saved his mother from smallpox. Eight hours in a bus, of which his memory was confused but filled with wonder. Unable either to read or write and never having seen a television but for a few moments in the town, his knowledge derived from his own experiences and from the cantadores , who even came as far as the bars of Canoa to sing their laments. He could not imagine that the earth was round either, nor that men had gone to the moon, though he listened to these new facts with perfect politeness. Anything beyond his village, his work or what he had been able to see of Brazil for himself, was enveloped in a hazy mist in which things and places were associated by chance, in the jumble of names that happened to have stuck in his memory: São Paulo, New York, Paris … that is, the Otherworld; a world isolated from his concerns, a beyond with no fixed abode, a blurred virtual world that he assumed it was impossible to know.

“But I’ve told you, it’s impossible to be in one piece after such an explosion. Look, Firmina, be reasonable, even oxen, even elephants would have been made into mincemeat.”

“That’s what you say, but I’m telling you it was the headless mule that caused the massacre. And I know very well who it was, you can trust me …”

It was four in the morning. Since Uncle Zé had come back an hour ago, Nelson and Firmina had been plying him with questions about the disaster. When the emergency services arrived, the corpse-robbers had disappeared as if by magic. From the passenger list it was known that there was a celebrity on board the plane, a poet whose name Zé could no longer remember but whose body the rescue party wanted to identify at all cost. At certain gruesome details she dragged out of her brother, Firmina crossed herself with a terrified look: she had recognized the infernal mark of the mula-sem-cabaça . Only that creature of the devil could have torn them apart like that, and there must certainly have been several of them!

“The headless mule?” Nelson asked, turning to the old woman.

“What?! You’ve never heard of it? Well, when a girl does it before she’s married, or a married woman sleeps with her father, she turns into a headless mule. She appears on Friday nights and starts wandering around the mata . Whenever she meets a living person, she swallows their eyes, nails and all their teeth; sick or dead people she tears apart and scatters the bits along the way. But the result’s the same, no one can escape her.”

“But how can she do that when she hasn’t got a head?” Nelson asked, visibly alarmed.

“No one knows, and that’s the most frightening thing. But never go past a cross at midnight, you’ll make her come right away. And if you should meet her one day — God protect you from that misfortune — roll up in a ball, close your eyes and mouth, hide your nails between your thighs and she’ll leave you in peace.”

“Don’t listen to that nonsense, son,” Uncle Zé said wearily. “She’s old, she doesn’t know what she’s saying anymore.”

“Oh really,” Firmina objected vehemently. “Because Conceição doesn’t sleep with her father, perhaps? Everyone here knows that. It’s difficult not to since he tells everyone who’s willing to listen whenever he’s had one too many.”

“That may be true, but it doesn’t prove anything.”

“And that doesn’t prove anything, all those poor people crushed to a pulp? You’ll see, some of them’ll be found without eyes, without nails and without teeth; and we’ll know they were alive when the headless mule came to take them.”

In the face of his sister’s senile obduracy, Zé gave up, emptied his glass of cachaça and spat on the ground. That way of talking just didn’t make sense, but how could you make her see reason? The old woman always had an answer to everything, he couldn’t see any way of convincing her she was wrong.

“It’s like the sacaolhos ,” Nelson said, reflectively. “They come to the favelas, even in broad daylight, and tear out children’s eyes.”