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

Mauro felt a twinge of disappointment: he was in love with a woman who could be his mother. That thought threw him back into the uncertainties of youth worse than a rebuff would have.

“At Fortaleza!” he exclaimed, despite himself. “Why so far away?”

“It’s complicated,” Elaine replied after a second’s hesitation. “How shall I put it? In retaliation, I suppose. She was disoriented when I left; she didn’t want to live either with me or with her father.”

“You’re divorced?”

“Not yet,” she said pensively. “It’s in progress.”

Night was beginning to fall, hiding her face.

“Right,” said Mauro, “I’ll go and find a lamp and open a couple of tins. All this has given me an appetite …”

“You stay here, I’ll see to it. It’ll give me a chance to have a quick wash too.”

“As you wish. I’ll call you if he wakes up at all.”

“Thanks,” she said, getting onto her knees before standing up. “I mean thanks for standing by me back there. I was pathetic.”

“Forget it, please. Without Yurupig it wouldn’t have got us anywhere.”

Mechanically she ran her fingertips over his swollen face. “I’ll have a look at that when I come back, when I’ve got some light. Try and get some rest.”

THE BOAT’S BATTERIES gave a feeble light. The pale yellow flickering exaggerated the wreckage in the saloon; the jumbled objects gave off an intense feeling of distress. Going into the kitchen, Elaine suddenly found herself face to face with Yurupig.

“You mustn’t stay here,” he said in a low voice, placing a finger on his lips to tell her to be quiet. “You must come with us, into the forest …”

“But why?” she asked, also in a whisper.

“He’s a bad man. He knows you have no chance. You’ll wait for days and days, and he won’t come back.” Since she still seemed to doubt him, he added, “The water. I saw him, he’s the one who punctured the jerricans.”

AFTER A PERFUNCTORY wash, Elaine put on a clean but damp shirt and jeans and went back up on deck. She took a paraffin lamp and a mess tin of black beans Yurupig had prepared for them. Dietlev had just woken up.

“I can understand drug addicts better now,” he said with a smile that emphasized his cheekbones. “The dreams I’ve had! X-rated stuff!”

“He didn’t want me to tell you,” Mauro said in answer to Elaine’s glance.

“How d’you feel?” she asked, sitting down beside him.

“Oh, never better, it’s as if I’d drunk a whole bottle of schnapps. I only hope I don’t get the hangover to go with it.”

“You must take some anti-inflammatory pills. I’ll get you some.”

“Don’t worry, it’s seen to. I swallowed a small handful when I woke up.”

“Here,” she said, handing Mauro the mess tin, “start eating. It’s Yurupig who made it. I must tell you what I’ve just heard. You won’t believe your ears.” In a few words she explained to Dietlev what had happened while he was asleep, then reported what Yurupig had told her. Mauro could not hold back a few choice words of abuse regarding Petersen.

Dietlev’s face had darkened. “That changes the whole situation,” he said after a brief pause for reflection. “We’ll have to see to it that we do the opposite of what he wants. Yurupig’s on our side, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. But we’ll have to be on our guard, the guy’s capable of anything. Mauro, you’d better get the satellite maps, it looks as if they’re going to be even more useful than I thought.”

Mauro shook his head as he hurriedly swallowed the food he was chewing. “You can forget them, they’re nothing but papier-mâché.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure. They were the first things I looked for when I went down.”

“Get something to write with, then. I’ve still got some details in my head, I’d better tell you them while I can still remember.”

When Mauro had gone, he took Elaine’s hand. “And how are you?”

“I’m surviving, you might say. It’s your leg I’m worried about. It’s all my fault … But I think I would have thrown myself in the water rather than go with that guy.”

“Don’t be stupid. Mauro beat me to it by a few seconds, but I wouldn’t have abandoned you either. The lad did well. As for my leg, it’ll hold out till I get to a hospital, won’t it?”

Elaine looked at him without finding a single word of reassurance.

“If not,” he went on with a smile, “we’ll just have to cut it off and we can forget about it. I’ve always dreamt of having a wooden leg, like Long John Silver. It’ll make me stand out, so to speak.”

“Stop it! I don’t even want to think about it.”

“This is all I could find,” Mauro said reappearing in the light of the lamp. He handed Dietlev two flyleaves torn out of a book and a pencil.

“That’ll do. Help me sit up a bit. Right,” he went on, drawing as he spoke, “let’s recapitulate: there’s the river with the junction and here’s where we were the last time I looked at the map, not long before we reached the crocodile hunters’ camp. You won’t get very far with that,” he said when he’d completed his map, “but this sketch should be enough to stop you going seriously wrong. If you skirt the marshy area you should be able to get back to the river in two or three days, though you may have to double that time because of the difficulties of making your way across this terrain. I’ll make a list of what you have to take.”

“What we have to take,” said Elaine.

“No. I’m staying here, quietly waiting while you’re getting eaten up by mosquitos …”

“Out of the question! We’re taking you with us whether you like it or not.”

“She’s right,” said Mauro. “It’s out of the question.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Dietlev calmly. “I’ve worked everything out, I’m well able to manage on my own, as you’ll see.”

“We’ve said no,” Elaine insisted. “It would be madness.”

“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” said Dietlev, putting an end to the discussion. “In the meantime you’ll pack your rucksacks according to my instructions. And no slipping in anything else at all, OK?”

AFTER THEY’D GOT their things together as Dietlev had ordered, Elaine and Mauro went back on deck. A further morphine injection allowed her to clean Dietlev’s wound and change the dressing. After that she forced herself to try and eat a little, but when the first mouthful turned her stomach, she told Mauro she wanted to get some sleep and stretched out alongside Dietlev.

For what seemed a long half hour she lay there, motionless, her mind fixed on the conviction that she would never get to sleep; once she had accepted this fact, she suddenly woke to the nocturnal din of the forest: still the same guttural cries, closer to or farther from the river, the same overexcited polyphony from the buffalo frogs, the same indistinct calls rendered even more oppressive by their resemblance to familiar noises — castanets, water dripping or a reed pipe. And during the brief islands of silence, Dietlev’s convulsive snores and Mauro’s slow breathing.

The howl of some animal having its throat ripped open made her start. Tomorrow, she thought, they’d be making their way toward these specters with nothing but a compass to guide them. Something deep down inside was making her hope Petersen would force them to stay on the boat. Dietlev shifted in his sleep with the groans of a feverish child.

“Are you asleep, Elaine?” Mauro whispered.

“No, I can’t manage to drop off.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“The questions you ask,” she said in ironic tones. “We get shot at by machine guns, one of us gets killed, Dietlev’s seriously wounded, we’re stranded right in the middle of the Pantanal with a bastard who’s doing all he can to leave us here to rot … and you wonder what’s bothering me?”