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

Nothing was as beautiful as this resplendent story, it gave a glimpse of a world of innocence and quiet freedom, an everyday life in which every moment was special, a supernatural game with creatures and things. The secret of happiness was there, in this preserved speech. To go away with Aynoré and seek his people, to recover together that original communion with the river, the birds, the elements; Moéma felt she was ready for this return to the native soil. Not as an ethnologist, but as an Indian in both heart and mind. As a lover of the things themselves. Living was that or nothing at all.

Thus mankind grew, passing by imperceptible degrees from childhood to adolescence. And when they reached the thirtieth house, that is, the halfway point of their journey, the twins decided it was time to make men speak. That day each performed a ritual with his wife: the first wife smoked the cigar and the second chewed ipadu. The woman who smoked the cigar gave birth to the sacred Caapi, which is even more powerful than ipadu; and the one who had eaten ipadu brought forth the parrots, the toucans and other birds with colored feathers. And from these two women the men came to know trembling, fear, cold, fire and suffering, all things they had seen in them while they were in labor .

And the power of the infant Caapi was so strong that all mankind had fantastic visions. No one could understand anything about them and each house started to speak a different language. From this sprang many languages: Desana, Tukano, Pira-Tapuia, Barasana, Banwa, Kubewa, Tuyuka, Wanama, Siriana, Maku and, last of all, that of the White Men .

“Caapi,” Aynoré said, “is a kind of vine. You make a potion from its bark and you have visions. It’s a thousand times stronger than anything you can ever have tried. Among our people the women are not allowed to drink it. It’s a sacred plant, the vine of the gods, the vine of the soul …” They’d often taken it in the men’s cabin, it was completely crazy: you met the Grand Master of the hunt, you watched extraordinary fights between snakes and jaguars, you discovered the true invisible powers behind the illusion of life. “I had no will of my own,” Aynoré said, “no personal power. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t think; I wasn’t in my body anymore. Purified, I woke up as a sphere of seeds that had burst open in space. And I sang the note that smashes structure to pieces and the one that abolishes chaos and I was covered in blood. I have been with the dead, I have tried the labyrinth …” For there was a world beyond ours, a world both very near and very far away, a world where everything had happened already, where everything was already known. And that world spoke, it had its own language, a subtle idiom of rustlings and colors. Blue, purple or gray visions, like tobacco smoke, which declined the unknown modes of thought; blood-red visions, like a woman’s discharge, her fertility; yellow or off-white visions, similar to semen, the sun, through which the mystical union with the beginning was realized. And everything appeared in an indescribable luminosity, as if detached from its context, charged with new meaning, a new quality. After the ceremony, when they woke from a profound sleep full of dreams, each one of them drew or painted what he had seen. There was not a single decoration, not a single tattoo, that had not been inspired by these journeys through hallucination. And the reason there were so many different languages was to try to say all that, to express again and again the things they were unwilling to leave in the ambiguous silence of images …” A man who has taken Caapi is said to have drowned himself, as if he were returning to the river from which he came, as if he were plunging back into the undifferentiated source … A man who has an orgasm when he possesses a woman is also said to be drowning himself, but that is to indicate that he is in a state similar to the one produced by Caapi.”

The eighth and last ancestor was the priest. And he came out of the water with his book in his hand, and he was as sterile as a castrated pig. So the Creator commanded him to stay with the Whites, and that is why we knew nothing of the existence of the priests until they came with you from the East. At the fifty-seventh house the men were grown up and they could start to shorten the rites. Thus the twins continued to people the rivers until the sixty-seventh house, down toward Peru, then returned to the fifty-sixth, the one from which men had first appeared on earth .

“You, the Whites,” Aynoré went on, “you go into your churches and you talk about your lousy god for an hour; we, the Indians, go into the jungle and talk with ours, with all our gods, for whole days …”

By carrying out the ceremonial rites, each house had its own function and each could finally occupy the world, just as the armadillo fills its shell .

That is the way our ancestors spoke. But the work of the Creator did not go on forever, for there were three great disasters: two fires and a flood. And each time Ngnoaman had to start again from scratch. After the flood he established a fourth mankind, the one we are part of, and declared, “It’s too much work for me to redo everything each time. From now on, I will leave men in peace, they’re plenty big enough to punish themselves … And that is the story of the great start, the origin of the first beginnings.”

Moéma couldn’t think anymore, so vivid were the colors lighting up her night. The Garden of Eden really had existed, somewhere between the tropics and the equator. “You are the whirling woman of the whirlwinds, you are the woman who rumbles, the woman who rings, the spider, the toucan and the hummingbird …” She didn’t know whether Aynoré said that or simply thought it, but when they made love on the deck of the jangada, among the stench of brine and fish, their bare skin spattered with sand, and she concentrated on the elastic center of their yoked genitals, she thought she could grasp all the words of this flowing language, of this constant murmur that finally reconciled her with men: Nitio oatarara, irara. Mamoaùpe, jandaia, saci peirerê? We have time, honey-eater … Where do you come from, little yellow parrot, nocturnal sprite?”

At the same moment, up in the bluish semidark of the cabin, Thaïs leaned out of her hammock to be sick.

Zé had brought him back to the favela very early, before setting off on a delivery trip that would last three days. By seven in the morning Nelson was already at his post where the Avenue Duque de Caxias and the Avenue Luciano Carneiro crossed. Impervious to the nauseating stench of the exhaust fumes — fuel made from cane-sugar alcohol, on the contrary, used by a considerable number of cars, left a pleasant scent in his nostrils, as if all the inhabitants had taken part in a massive booze-up the previous evening and were exuding cachaça from every pore — deaf to the cacophony of horns and the roar of the engines, Nelson went about his begging with the casual assurance of a true specialist. Toward nine, when the stream of motorists going to work was replaced by taxis and vans, he went to the beira-mar to work on the tourists who were starting to venture out of their hotels. His feelings for them were a mixture of contempt and pity: contempt for their arrogance of holidaymakers with nothing better to do than to waste their dough on pointless purchases, and pity for the palefaces, flayed alive by the scorching sun, making them look like people with third-degree burns rather bewildered at finding themselves without their bandages. Unlike the lepers, whom hardly anyone went near out of instinctive repugnance and fear of contagion, or even the legless cripples and the blind who were less mobile than he was, his handicap was useful: just as it allowed him to attack cars, it made it possible for him to storm the entrances of luxury hotels, and even if he did have to use a bit of cunning not to get thrown out by the commissionaires — some of whom turned a blind eye to his game for a percentage of his takings — it was rare for tourists, taken by surprise as they left the Imperial Orthon Palace or the Colonial, not to quickly give a few coppers to blot out this disturbing piece of bad taste in a day devoted to pleasure.