Where Tigers Are at Home (32 page)

“You know,” said Moéma, “I could spend the whole of my life like this. It’s true, all my sodding life watching the waves, a
cachaça
in my hand …”

Thaïs had cheered up. Stretched out, with her head on Moéma’s stomach, she told Roetgen about their project for a literary bar, getting worked up about the ignorance of the age and the contempt the Brazilian middle classes had for poetry. She got carried away, almost slipping into a condemnation of the whole universe—
O que é isso, companheiro?
Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Fernando Gabeira?—then, brought back by Moéma’s hand, which was stroking her hair, sang in a low voice the bossa novas of João Gilberto and Vinicius, wallowing in the notable melancholy of the lines.
Tristeza não tem fin, felicidade sim …
Had he read, not just listened to, but properly
read
the poems of Vinicius de Moraes, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso? He had to make the effort. And Mário de Andrade? And Guimarães Rosa? He would never understand their world at all if he hadn’t read
Grande Sertão: Veredas
 …

Roetgen mentally noted the titles, despite the instinctive reserve the presence of singers on the list aroused in him.

Marlene returned with his friends and some new faces as well. Not a man to bear a grudge, he demanded the promised drink, bombarded them with quips and smutty insinuations then told Roetgen that three or four hundred yards away there was a secluded part of the beach where the true lovers of Canoa met to practise nudism, play the guitar, smoke joints—a genuine liberty zone! Talking of which, he could supply him with
maconha
if he
wanted. Good stuff, no problem. The
cachaças
followed one after the other until eventually he climbed up onto the table of the hut and, wrapped in several bathing towels, performed a striptease which sent all those who formed the audience of the improvised show into shrieks of laughter.

When, at the end of the afternoon, Roetgen woke in his hammock, on the floor of their hut, his memory seemed to have disintegrated after that scene. He had a vague recollection of having made love to Moéma, but he couldn’t swear to it. All the rest had been swallowed up in a black hole from which all that managed to escape was a few hazy images and an incomprehensible feeling of resentment toward the young girl. Just as he was wondering about his strange position, he saw the grotesque slanting branch hanging down from the roof to the tangle of rope spread over his toes.

Then he heard a voice from a little above him: “Had a good sleep, Dionysus?”

Thaïs’s beaming face appeared from her hammock, followed almost immediately by Moéma’s. Curled up lovingly against her friend, she also appeared to be in a joival mood.

“
WHEN WE DECIDED
to have a siesta, you marched up the dune like a robot without faltering or hurrying up. And the sand was twice as hot as going down. You immediately commandeered my hammock and started to talk about Dionysus … Everything came out, Nietzsche, myth and cult, ‘sacred violence,’ you just went on and on!”

“I hope at least it was interesting?” Roetgen asked, with a doubtful look.

“Super, I assure you,” Thaïs said. “And you were speaking perfect Portuguese, without an accent or anything. Crazy, isn’t it?”

“It was unbelievable,” Moéma said. “It was as if you’d been hypnotized.”

“And then?”

“Then we smoked a joint and … You’re not trying to tell me you can’t recall anything of all this?”

“I swear,” Roetgen lied. “Everything stops with Marlene’s striptease.”

“Well, you jumped me while Thaïs was still talking to you …”

“I did that?!”

“And how!” Thaïs muttered with a laugh. “The worst thing was, she seemed to be enjoying it!”

“Oh, my God, the shame,” said Roetgen, genuinely conscience-stricken. “I would never have thought I was capable of doing something like that, even blind drunk as I was.”

“Don’t take it to heart,” Thaïs said in affectionate tones. “I’ve seen plenty of others with her. She’s one hell of a girl, you know. I did try to sleep, but it was impossible, you were making the hut shake with all your humping and grinding, a real earthquake. So then I went to join you and that’s when the branch gave way …”

“We all fell on top of each other … and you just dropped straight off to sleep. For a moment we thought you’d fainted, but then you started snoring. We almost died laughing.”

“So we left you on the floor and got into my hammock …”

“You have to be careful with
cachaça
, Professor,” Moéma joked. “Especially here, with the sun.”

“I should have eaten something,” Roetgen said, “that’s the real reason. I didn’t drink all that much.”

“Fourteen
caipirinhas
 …”

“Fourteen?!”

“Exactly. You can trust
Seu
Juju; he’s well capable of serving a few free drinks but he never forgets a single one of those you ordered.”

THEIR CLOTHES UNDER
their arms, they went to Neosinha’s. She hired out her well and a shack used for ablutions. Roetgen was disappointed by a procedure that clashed with Moéma’s much vaunted “natural hospitality” of the fishing community, never mind having to queue with a dozen other young people. It was like being in a children’s holiday camp or, worse still, a campsite. Since Moéma and Thaïs seemed perfectly at home in these surroundings, he spared them his thoughts.

To save time, they showered together, each in turn filling an old food tin from the oil drum one of Neosinha’s sons had brought them. Still somewhat under the influence, Roetgen felt no embarrassment in joining in the game that suddenly brought them all together, naked and close enough to brush against each other, as if it were something quite natural.

Moéma, long legs and muscular buttocks, slim, animal, with her boy’s body and bronze bush; Thaïs with her heavy breasts, more than plump but just as attractive with the luxuriant black triangle emphasizing the creamy skin of her belly
 …

Teasing like children in the bath; he never knew whether he was the only one to see its very subtle depravity.

Moéma having suggested they invite themselves to João’s for dinner, they bought some fish, fizzy drinks and flat bread before going back through the village. The sky was turning black and a wind off the sea was raising swirls of sand as they walked. On either side of the street little lights swayed in the dark holes of the windows.

“Oh, sugar!” Thaïs exclaimed, “we forgot to buy a
lampadinha
 …”

Turning back, they bought a liter of paraffin and a tin oil lamp marked with the red and gold logo of a brand of butter.

“These basic lamps are made from old tins,” Moéma explained, “they’re all different. In the Interior you can unearth some very beautiful ones, really.”

They found João and his wife swinging idly, each in their own hammock, their children playing in a cluster below them. Maria welcomed the little group effusively and hastened to get the fire in the kitchen going. João came to join them by the hearth a little later. He had a long face: one of the four sailors of the
jangada
was ill with the result that the fishing trip planned for the next day had been canceled. Roetgen was surprised at the decision. Why not go out all the same?

“It’s not possible with just three,” the fisherman replied. “It’s a question of the balance of the boat, there’d be a risk of capsizing.”

“No one can take his place?”

“The young men don’t want to go out fishing anymore and the others are busy, either on land or on their boats. That’s the way things are, there’s nothing that can be done. In the meantime we’ll continue to go hungry.”

“I could go in his place, if you want …”

Moved by the desire to help the family, Roetgen had spoken without thinking. At João’s disbelieving look, he insisted he had plenty of experience of regattas and sea fishing.

“There’s nothing in the world I like better,” he concluded, as if that were one more argument.

“We go out for one night and two days,
francês
, it’s not a pleasure trip.”

“I’m used to it. Take me and you’ll see. At the very least I can be a counterweight, since that’s the problem.”

Moéma joined in. “You can trust him,” she said, “I know him. If he offers to come it’s because he’s able to do it.”

“OK, then, we’ll try it,” João said, suddenly offering him his hand across the hearth. “I’ll have to go and tell the others, I’ll just be two minutes.”

When he came back a little later, his face was wreathed in smiles. “It’s on,” he said, sitting down again. “We meet here, five o’clock in the morning.”

They ate the fish with their fingers out of battered aluminium bowls. Every time Roetgen met Moéma’s eye during the meal, while João was telling the latest news of the village, he saw in her look the respect and admiration his gesture inspired.

“
YOU DON
’
T REMEMBER
that either?” Moéma said as they left João’s. “You really are incredible. You even asked him to teach you to dance! I’m sure he’ll be getting ideas …”

Weary from the all the drink, Roetgen would have preferred to go straight back to their hut, but from what the girls said, he’d promised Marlene and the others he’d meet them at the
forró
, behind
Seu
Alcides’ bar.

“I managed to say a lot of totally stupid things,” he groaned, furious with himself. He found the prospect of having to face Marlene revolting.

“Don’t worry,” Thaïs said, seeing he was in such a bad mood, “he’ll have sobered up as well.”

“And if you dance with us, no one will bother you. You’ll see, it’s a super place.”

“Led by Moéma down the dark street, they walked slowly, passing silent silhouettes or noisy little groups they greeted without identifying them. The wind spattered their bare skin with sand, bringing with it the smell of seaweed or a burning landfill. They started to pick up snatches of frenzied music.

“The
forró
,” Moéma said, “is a sort of popular or, rather, rural dance, which only exists in the Sertão. It would be interesting to make a study of it, but that’s just by the way. The word is used for both the event as a whole and the particular dance. That’s why
you can get into a muddle; in the
Nordeste
you can say “to go to the
forró
” just as well as “to dance” or even “to play a
forró
.”

“
Forró, forrobodó, arrasta-pé, bate-chinela, gafieira
 …” Thaïs chanted the list with evident enjoyment. “They’re all the same thing. See the looks on your colleagues faces when you tell them you’ve been to such a den of iniquity. It’s the height of vulgarity, dangerous and all. Nothing in the world would persuade them to set foot in one.”

When they entered
Seu
Alcides’s tiny bar, they took a moment to readjust to the light. In contrast to the profound darkness in which the rest of the village was plunged, the few paraffin lamps scattered around gave the room the air of a reredos from a museum.
Seu
Alcides, an old, potbellied mestizo wearing a pair of glasses without side-pieces held on with a rubber band, lorded it over the place from in front of two sets of shelves that, when necessary, transformed him into a grocer; the ones on the left had a disconcertingly monotonous collection of bottles—on principle Alcides only served
cachaça—
while those on the right were piled high with household essentials: cans of soya oil, tinned butter,
feijão
, soap powder,
rapadura
, all the goods behind him gleaming like gold.

Leaning on a counter of bare earth, half a dozen
caboclos
were systematically getting drunk, downing their drinks in one and letting long trails of saliva drip down onto their flip-flops; on a small billiard table that looked as if it had been dredged up from the bottom of the sea, three young men from the village were playing game after noisy game of
sinuca
, a local version of snooker. Projected onto the wall, their shapeless shadows swayed this way and that with every draft.

The drinkers shifted to make room for them at the counter.

“
Meladinha
for all three of us,” Moéma ordered after being greeted by Alcides like an old friend.
“Are you sure?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “I know you and Thaïs can take it, but him”—this with a doubtful look at Roetgen—“do you think he can stay the course? It’s strong, and when you’re not used to it …”

“He’ll just have to learn. He can’t drink it in Fortaleza.”

“And mine is the best in the Sertão,”
Seu
Alcides declared, pouring a finger of a reddish, treacly substance into the bottom of the glasses. “Pure
jandaíra
honey, it’s my cousin who makes it …”

“A kind of bee,” Thaïs explained in a whisper to Roetgen while
Seu
Alcides filled the glasses with a good three ounces of
cachaça
.

“That’s one hell of a measure,” Roetgen said apprehensively.

“A man’s measure,” was Alcides’s lapidary reply as he stirred the mixture with the point of his knife. “That’s how we drink it around here. But you’ll see, son, it does you good where you feel bad.”

The men beside them burst out into hoarse laughter, each of them making a ribald remark or an obscene gesture.

All this insistence on virility, Roetgen thought, as if the only consolation for ignorance and poverty were in the obsessive overemphasis on the male sex organ.

Imitating his companions, he emptied his glass in one go but without being able to bring himself to spit, as they did with an impressive nonchalance. It was sweet, slightly sickly but certainly better than pure
cachaça
. By the time he’d turned back to the counter the glasses had already been filled again.

Nobody seemed bothered by the booming music of the
forró
, which was scarcely muted at all by the wind: accordion, triangle and tambourines accompanied by voices that were husky, rasping, but softened by the drawling inflections of the
Nordeste
.

“It works on car batteries,” Moéma said in reply to a question from Roetgen. She was playing a game with Thaïs to see who could be the first to name the group and title of each song
as it came. Dominguinho:
Pode morrer nessa janela …
Oswaldo Bezerra:
Encontro fatal, Destino cruel, Falso juramento …
Trio Siridó:
Vibrando na asa branca, Até o dia amainsá …
Like most of the drinkers, they joined in the words without realizing, were ready with the chorus, dancing on the spot. And Roetgen, who would have been incapable of singing a single French song right through, was disturbed by the extraordinary human heat given off by this fusion of everyone with the music, a cohesion that did not come from folklore but from the secret energy of a community of pioneers.