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

Once outside, they walked in the darkness, going back up the street to the cabin, since Moéma wanted to collect her supply of maconha before going down to the beach.

Beside the water the strength of the wind was visible as it blew away the dunes. Aynoré remained silent; from time to time Moéma felt his hand brush against hers as they continued on their way, staggering as they were hit by gusts. A few hundred yards farther on they sat down on the sand, in the shelter of a jangada pulled up onto the beach. Moéma had rolled a joint. In the deafening roar of the waves, something from the primeval ages of the Earth, an incomprehensible and disturbing din made them snuggle up against each other. She took a drag on the coarse cigarette she had managed to roll despite the wind; Aynoré did the same and started to speak in a low voice: the world had begun in this same way, with a woman emerging from her own night and a magic cigar …

Her thoughts came out in the form of a spherical cloud with a tower on top, a bulge like the excrescence of the navel on the belly of a newborn baby. As it spread out, the bubble of smoke enclosed all the darkness so that it remained captive there. Having done that, Yebá Beló called her dream the “belly of the world” and the belly looked like a large deserted village. So she wanted people there where there was nothing and started to chew ipadu again as she smoked her magic cigar …

Aynoré’s father had been the shaman of his village, somewhere in the Amazonian forest, at the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Madeira. A renowned magician, the religious and political head of the village, he had treated people with tobacco juice and extracts of plants, of which he guarded the secret jealously. It was from his perseverance in recounting his tribe’s epic that this long story with its innumerable ramifications came, a parasitic myth of the origin of the world, which seemed to unfold of its own accord from the lips of the young Indian, feeding on his memory, establishing itself and multiplying like a virus, as it had been doing for centuries. His father had passed on to Aynoré, who was intended as his successor, all the ancestral knowledge that makes a true pajé : he knew the foundation myths of the Mururucu, their rites, their dances, their traditional songs, knew how to invoke the spirits, transformed into so many pebbles in the gourd rattle, and to interpret their messages in the whir of the bullroarer; he also knew how to talk to the animals, how to throw invisible spears that poisoned people or sent them into trances that exorcised them. At the age of six he had gone off in search of his soul and it had entered his body in the form of an anaconda. Like his father, he would have become able to borrow the wings of the kumalak bird and fly over the mountains, if the loggers had not come and turned his life upside down.

And with the loggers there was also an official of FUNAI—“the National Indian Foundation! Just imagine! What would a National Foundation of the White Man do for you, eh? Just think about it for a moment”—and with him the army and with the army the end of everything. The villagers had to be evacuated and go and join the other tribes languishing in the Xingu reservation. His father, leading a few men, had tried to resist and they were all dead, shot like common macaques in the course of a manhunt in the forest.

Aynoré was only twelve, but he refused to go with the others to the Xingu reservation, so the FUNAI official immediately sent him off to the Dominican orphanage in Manaus. He learned to read and write there without ever belonging to the religion in which a puny god allowed himself to be crucified in a land with no jungle and no macaws. Then it was a boarding house run by the same order in Belém. He strung them along for a while, then ran off with the money from the bursar’s office. Skilled with his hands, he managed to get by making feather necklaces and earrings that he hawked on the streets.

Aynoré stroked Moéma’s hair. Under the influence of his intoxication, his voice took on ceremonial tones, sometimes becoming unrecognizable in the dialogues, high and distorted, like a ventriloquist’s. Moéma listened reverently, images and shivers running through her. Even more than by its poetry, she was carried away by the age-old character of this litany. It was a fascination tinged with venom toward the whites and their wretched slavish devotion to their god. What an incredible mess! From having learned them, to her disgust, at the university, she knew the figures of the atrocity by heart: two million Indians when the Spanish and Portuguese arrived, fewer than a hundred thousand today … “The Indians were innumerable,” she had read in a report by a sixteenth-century traveler, “to such an extent, that if one shot an arrow in the air, it was more likely to end up in an Indian’s head than in the ground.” The author in question was talking about the Várzeas, a tribe that had ceased to exist less than a hundred years after this first attempt at a “census.” The Tupi, Anumaniá, Arupatí, Maritsawá, Iarumá, Aulúta, Tsúva, Naruvôt, Nafuquá, Kutenábu and so many other tribes decimated … More than ninety Amazonian tribes had been wiped out in the course of our century alone … Of what unknown and unknowable lives have we deprived ourselves for good? Of what possible worlds, of what healthy evolutions?

A land without men for men without land . It was under this generous slogan that the Brazilian government had decided to construct the Transamazonian Highway, three thousand miles of road to give white pioneers new lands to cultivate. Every sixty miles along the road there were 250 acres of virgin land to clear on either side, a hut already built plus six months’ wages and interest-free loans for twenty years; a multitude of half-starved people from the Nordeste had risen to the bait. All this ignoring the fact that this “land without men” was crammed full of Indians, who were given no more consideration than the flora and fauna sacrificed to the program, no more than at the time of the boom in rubber when the clothes handed out with a friendly smile to the naked savages were impregnated with the germs of smallpox or other fatal diseases.

But what no one had anticipated was that the ground taken from the forest would be completely exhausted after the first two harvests and today the cattle barons would be buying up this sterile land at low prices from the colonists, poor devils who, overburdened with debt, prefer the arid misery of the Sertão to the torture of this dripping desert. The funds earmarked for surfacing the road had disappeared, so that in the rainy season the Transamazonian Highway turns into an impassable river of mud, eaten away a little more each day by the determined reprisals of the jungle. In the course of the Americans’ interest in buying several million square miles of land in the Carajás region, rich deposits of iron, nickel, manganese and even gold were discovered in the Serra Plata. The mines and the placers finished by ripping this true paradise apart and everything went up in smoke: the forest, the Indians, dreams of agrarian reform. All that this incredible farce achieved was to make the indestructible caste of bastards a little richer. She felt almost suffocated by a sense of the chronic, oppressive injustice, like a nocturnal asthma attack.

Then the thunder-man came down onto the river of milk where he was transformed into a monstrous snake with a head resembling a boat. The two heroes climbed up onto the snake’s head and started to sail up the left bank of the river. Every time they stopped, they established a house and, thanks to their wealth of magic, filled it with people to live there. Thus gradually, house by house, the mankind of the future developed. And since the vessel went below the surface, the houses were under water, so that the first men appeared as fish-men who settled in their underwater houses .