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

On the screen the final battle has started. Davy Crockett starts to retreat under the number of attackers, his companions falling one by one around him. In the burning fort the last barricade gives way under the repeated charges of the cavalry. “Adelante!” With fixed bayonets, a mass of hussars, a white cross on their chests, advances inch by inch, making the screen bristle. “Does that mean what I think it does?” a man gasps as he collapses onto a wounded soldier with a fur hat. “It sure does,” the other replies, looking the man who’s about to finish them off straight in the eye. Leaving the rampart, where he was firing the last cannon, Davy Crockett starts to run toward the powder magazine, his torch in his hand. Before going in, he turns round and a hussar takes advantage of his movement to nail him to the door with his bayonet. He pulls himself free, staggers for a moment … Despite his screams, you can still believe in a miracle, but there’s a large dark patch on his back, identical to the one on the wood of the door, just at the place where he had been. You see him make one last effort and throw his torch on the powder kegs then disappear in the magazine. Everything explodes, but you know very well that John Wayne has died for nothing .

Without being capable of appreciating the ridiculous nature of the situation, Loredana sensed its absurdity: it was like a nightmare, one of those you get after eating too much or bringing home a bad report. Insidious and hostile, Father Montefiascone’s voice mingled with the tumult of the battle.

Jim Bowie, stiff leg stretched out on his bed in the ruined chapel where the wounded are sheltering. Watching over him is his old black slave, given his freedom before the attack and whose first gesture as a free man was to face death to defend his liberty. A wave of Mexicans; the two men fire their guns: rifle, blunderbuss and pistols. The bayonets approach Jim Bowie, they’re going to run him through … No! The old slave has thrown himself over his master, the blades sink into this last shield. Body on body … His knife! Entangled with the corpse as he is, Bowie still manages to cut the throat of one more assailant. His face in close-up: the bayonets are stuck in the adobe either side of him. We see those that miss the hero, but we hear those that kill him: the cry of a stuck pig, a gurgling noise, retching, mouth open … Naked death, in all its ugliness .

The world wasn’t full of sunshine anymore, it was gray, unjust, evil-smelling … a huge conspiracy since the beginning of time to bring about the death of Davy Crockett and his faithful companions. When the time came, Loredana heard herself confessing to a few venial sins then, in a toneless voice, in a silence broken only by the flapping of the flags, to having slept with her father.

The whole Mexican army standing to attention to salute the two survivors of the massacre: a mother and her little daughter riding on a mule, like Mary on the road to Bethlehem. They leave, defeated, pale images of misfortune and reproach, while stupid trumpets are sounding in their honor. When they pass General Santana — despite his cocked hat he’s the spitting image of Father Montefiascone — the mother cannot resist giving him a defiant look. The little girl’s stronger, she ignores him, him and his world. She’s beyond hatred and scorn. Ready for the Red Brigades …

“With your father!” the priest exclaims, turning toward her for the first time. Yes, with my father. Above all, don’t flinch, stand up to the interrogation with grandeur and dignity, ready to die like John Wayne and Richard Widmark. Yes, in his bed … That night when the village policeman’s house was struck by lightning. Yes, my mother was there as well … You’re too big to sleep in your parents’ bed, Father Montefiascone said, reassured by this willing extension of the sin. Dominus, abracadabrum sanctus, te absolvo , it was over. “Sleeping” with your father, and even with your mother was allowed, for all the consequences it had: three Ave Marias , so why not, you left washed clean of the worst atrocities, without a glance at the bodies of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.

That evening Loredana had learned that man is a creature without shelter, exposed to injustice, suffering and decay. Having died for the first time at the Alamo, she had never afterward seen a monk or a soldier without mentally spitting in his face.

“WE’RE ALL GOING to die,” Soledade said, switching off the television.

Despite her determination not to give in to emotion, Loredana was hurt by this apparent coldness. Something in her bearing must have alerted Soledade to this, for she went on in gentle tones: the question wasn’t to know when or how we were going to die, but to live at such an intensity that we had no regrets when the time came. She wasn’t saying that out of a lack of compassion. If Loredana was serious, what was she doing here in Brazil, far from her family and friends?

Since their first meeting, and the time when they had become friends while talking about everything and anything in the kitchen, what Loredana liked about the young mestizo was her total lack of romanticism, a fault she herself had to beware of all the time. The fact that she wrote her love on the walls did not stem from an indulgence in a feeling of abandonment but was an example of sympathetic magic, a relic of her African inheritance that made her eat handfuls of earth when she was sad or turn the little rutting monkey, which Eléazard had placed in a prominent position on one of his shelves, to face the wall.

“I just don’t know anymore,” she eventually admitted, her voice choking with an irrepressible desire to cry. “I’m afraid of dying.”

Soledade took her in her arms. “I know what you need,” she said, stroking her hair. “We’ll go and see Mariazinha … She’s a mãe-de-santo , a ‘mother of saints,’ she’s the only person who can help you.” And then, in confidential tones, “I’ve seen her make a lemon tree die, just by looking at it!”

For months he had only seen Carlotta in her dressing gown and in a state of intoxication that accentuated the slovenliness of her dress, so the Colonel was agreeably surprised that evening to find his wife in a Chanel suit, makeup and jewelry. For a moment he hoped their relationship might be revived, but when she curtly refused to have a glass with him and informed him that they had to talk, he was immediately on his guard.

“I came across this by chance, the other day,” she said, tossing a file onto the low table in the drawing room.

Recognizing the shiny cover of the finance plan, Moreira concentrated for a moment on the brown spots disfiguring Carlotta’s hands, noting those freckles that could no longer be explained by overexposure to the sun, and prepared himself for the worst.

Two hours later he took refuge in his office, on the first floor, his mouth dry from having vainly defended himself; he poured himself a whiskey and spent a long time scratching the little scab on one eyebrow that was irritating him. He had not for one moment imagined that the “worst” could reach such proportions! That his wife should make a scene because he had used her money without her approval was perfectly foreseeable. That she should be in such a huff as to want to cancel the land purchases done in her name was something he would never have imagined. Swindler, crook, unscrupulous developer … he had come in for the whole catalog of insults and accusations. Even at times when she’d threatened to press charges for misusing his power of attorney, she had never abandoned the impressive calm in which he saw the Carlotta of the old days, the one he still loved despite the domestic hell she made him suffer since the business of the photo. A girl he hadn’t even kissed! You had to see the funny side.