Where Tigers Are at Home (41 page)

When the alarm on his wristwatch woke him, the first thing Roetgen did was to look at Moéma’s hammock: it was hanging there, slack and empty as a snake’s slough. Thaïs’s face appeared from hers, puffy and smeared with eyeliner. There was a look of panic in her eyes and she started to spew on the sand with the uncontrollable retching of a dying cat.

Outside the world was bathed in that silvery light the night leaves behind after its initial withdrawal. A slug’s trail, Roetgen
thought looking at the sea. The wind could not be felt anymore, it was pushing the blackness, sweeping it into rough piles, out toward the distant horizon. A cock crowed, then broke off right in the middle of a vibrato, as if strangled by the outrage of its own voice.

Roetgen hurried over to João’s hut, wondering where Moéma could have spent the night. Soiled by disgusting objects that had been thrown away—there was even what looked like a sanitary napkin wrapped up in a pair of panties—the street was like a damp beach churned up by some foul storm. As he passed
Seu
Alcides’s bar, Roetgen felt a twinge of regret and looked away.

João was squatting under his awning, checking his fishing equipment. He seemed pleasantly surprised. “
Bom dia, françès
 … I was worried you wouldn’t come,” he said with a smile. “You look like death warmed over.”

“Slept badly … The sea air’ll soon put me right.”

“Well off we go, then. There you are,” he said handing him what looked like a red plastic cannonball, the same as the one he had slung over his shoulder, “I’ve got your things ready. Put everything you’ve got in your pockets in there, everything you don’t want to get wet.”

Looking at it more closely, Roetgen realized that it was an old mooring buoy, probably picked up off the beach; at the top a broad cork stopper had been fitted into a circular opening. A cord attached to either side made it into a waterproof bag.

They walked down the road until they came to a little blue house, which they entered without knocking.

“Morning!” said João to the
caboclo
still half-asleep behind his counter. “Get a move on, the wind’s going to turn.”

Without bothering to reply, the man stood up, muttering indistinctly. With the slowness of an iguana, he gathered together a slab of
rapadura
, a piece of candle, a box of matches and a paper cone of
farinha
.

“Who’s he?” he asked, pointing to Roetgen with his chin.

“Luís’s replacement,” said João irritatedly. “Give him his share.”

“You’re sure?”

“Don’t try to understand. We’ve made an agreement with Luís, I tell you … Get on with it, we’re in a hurry.”

The iguana got moving again and, with a suspicious look, placed the same list of objects as before on the counter.

“Put that in your ball,
rapaz
, we’re off,” João said to Roetgen.

They left without paying, but once they were out in the street, the fisherman explained: the “cooperative” belonged to the owner of the jangadas, a guy who lived in Arcati; for every fishing trip, each of the men was given these paltry supplies free of charge, but on their return their share in the fish was exchanged for credit in the same shop. The system worked without money, increasing the fishermen’s bondage and the owner’s profits.

Appalled, Roetgen wanted to learn more about the owner, but he came up against João’s fatalism: it was the same all along the coast, there was nothing to do but thank God and the guy for giving them the chance to survive.

When they reached the dunes they went along the crest until they came to a place where some scrubby plants grew. Using his machete, João started to chop up the dry brambles.

“It’s for the brazier,” João said, handing Roetgen the first part of his harvest. “There’s already some on board, but it’s better to take a full load. You never know.”

They were going from bush to bush when João pointed out a long trail in the sand, the kind of winding mark you’d leave if you were pulling a garden hose behind you.

“
Cobra de veado
,” he muttered, following its indistinct course. Then he went over to a spiny bush and cautiously pulled the branches aside: coiled up, a fair-sized python was doubtless
digesting that night’s catch. The animal didn’t have the time to wake up before João had decapitated it.

“
Matei o bicho!
I’ve killed the beast,” he exclaimed with a kind of childish pride.

Dumbfounded by the presence of such a snake in the dunes and by the fisherman’s reaction, Roetgen watched as he picked up the corpse, still twisted in impossible knots, and whirled it around like a sling before sending it flying through the air to crash to the ground several yards away.

Saint George killing the dragon, prouder at having overcome his fear than at having triumphed over evil for a brief moment … Or was it rather a sacrifice, a propitiation come from the depths of time to haunt our self-obsessed century?

From the spot where the dunes were spattered with blood they went down to the beach.

The two other fishermen had just finished pushing a coconut log under the spatula-shaped prow of the jangada. Fairly young, with no teeth—Roetgen could never remember Brazil without visualizing these toothless mouths created by starvation—they didn’t seem very communicative: Paulino, bulging muscles, woolly hair browned by the salt; Isaac, frailer, hollow chest caused by a congenital malformation of the sternum.

João put the wood in a basket, checked the position of the log and the four men braced themselves against the boat until it was balanced on the cylinder of wood, keeping it in that position while Paulino placed a second roller under the prow then hurried back to help the others push. As soon as one roller emerged at the back, he took it around to the prow, continuing to do so all the way to the edge of the water. Once the jangada was afloat, Isaac took all the heavy logs far enough back on the sand to be out of the way of the incoming tide, while they held the boat on the waves, immersed up to the waist. As soon as he returned they all heaved
themselves up into the boat together. Grasping the rudder, João immediately hauled on the mainsheet and the jangada started to glide across the sea with the ease and grace of a sailing dinghy.

Behind them the dunes were turning pink as other jangadas, sails unfurled, seemed to be hurrying after them, bumping across the shore like crumpled butterflies.

IN A CROSSWIND
the jangada headed straight for the open sea, with the characteristic lapping of the water against the hull and the gentle swaying that forces the body to adjust its balance all the time. Standing at the stern, his buttocks propped on a sort of narrow bench, João was concentrating on steering, both hands glued firmly to the steering oar. Roetgen was sitting with Isaac and Paulino on the windward side; he’d started nibbling his block of
rapadura
, less from hunger than to fit in with the others. Happy to be at sea, he examined the boat with the keen appreciation of a sailing enthusiast.

About seven yards long and two yards wide, the jangada was of a marvelous technical elegance. Shaped like a decked barge with no handrail or cockpit, the hull narrowed elegantly at either end, making it more like a sailboard than any flat-bottomed vessel. Apart from the thwart, at the stern, and a sort of trestle just in front that was used to wind the sheets around or to lean against when standing up, the only other component was a beam of solid wood supported by rods into which was fitted a detachable, unstayed lateen yard, slender and supple, like the rib of a leaf.

On the dark brown sail, spotted with holes and patches, was an advert in large black letters:
Industria de Extração de Aracati
.

The most astonishing aspect for Roetgen, however, was the exemplary absence of all metal on the sailing boat. Not a shackle, not a nail in the construction … everything was tied or pegged; even
the lateen yard and the boom, each made of several pieces were simply whipped together with fishing line!

The ultimate praise of vegetable matter, an out-of-date hymn to that age of gold that came before the sword, the arquebus, the helmet and armor. There was a time when the Indians of this coast begged forgiveness of the trees before felling them with no other cutting edge than fire and flint
.

As João explained afterward, however fragile the whole might be, it did mean they could repair any damage very quickly with the means on board. This was especially the case since any ruptures always came at the weak points created by the joints and as the rope always gave way before the wood, all they had to do was to lash the pieces that had come apart together again and the boat was as good as new. The same was true of the hull, its simple construction meaning it could be repaired without the need of a carpenter. Nothing escaped this disregard of things metal, not even the anchor, the
tauaçu
, the stone nucleus in a framework of wood hardened by fire: four branches tied together at one end with two others forming a cross to secure the cage and grip the sand or seaweed. Always the same principle—was it economy or did it derive from something unconscious and more decisive?—governing the least of their technical productions: three branches would not have been enough to hold the stone, a fifth would have been superfluous … A theorem to explain why the principal proportions of timber had not changed an inch for thousands of years: a Roman villa or a Provençal farmhouse, a Cathar castle or a Venetian
palazzo
, for comparable buildings the same size of beams and rafters would be found, too thin and the wood gives way, too thick, it’s wasted. Thus the rules of these builders were founded, before all the mathematics of the resistance of materials, on a happy medium that a certain number of lost moorings or collapsed roofs had helped to establish.

A SUDDEN BURST
of activity interrupted Roetgen’s reflections. At an order from João, who immediately unhitched the clew of the mainsail, the two fishermen handed the sail, then quickly spilled the wind by bundling the sail around the mast with the topping lift. Once that was done, João came to help them unstep the lateen yard and lay it down with the boom along the center of the boat. Its wings clipped, the jangada came to a halt on the green water, nothing more than a frail raft encumbered with spars, a piece of flotsam hardly fitted to brave the rigors of the Atlantic. They cast anchor. The sun was rising; all the land around had disappeared.

Paulino and Isaac were sitting on the same side, feet dangling over the edge of the platform; instinctively Roetgen went to the other side, two yards from João. He was wondering what kind of bait they were going to use when he saw him unwind his line without bothering about his hooks at all. The line having quickly reached the bottom—there could only have been about twenty yards of depth—João took it in his fingers and pulled it up and down, as if fishing with a jigger.

“You’ve nothing to use as bait?” Roetgen asked, amazed.

João was surprised anyone could even ask the question. That’s the way it was, no one did it any other way. Attracted by the jerks and the glitter of the hooks, some creature always took it eventually; once they’d hauled it up, it was used as bait for larger catches.

Hours passed, silent, somnolent hours during which the four men pursued the same quest beneath the sun. It was like the summary of an avant-garde play, Roetgen thought, reflecting on the absurdity of their situation: all alone on the Atlantic, four shipwrecked sailors dip their unbaited hooks in the water.

A slack sea, the sun burning their necks, the creak of wood, marionnette-like contortions, out of sync, abrupt at times, like sleeping bodies twitching …

Toward noon they regretted having eaten their supply of sugar so quickly. Imitating the others, Roetgen put pinches of manioc flour in his mouth, just enough to stave off the pangs of hunger and to increase his desire for another drink from the jerrican. As time passed, the expressions on their faces became more feverish, their gestures more febrile, furtive, as if the better to conjure up hope from the depths. They changed arms more often, their muscles growing numb from repeating the same action.

Racked by hunger, four shipwrecked sailors beg the god of the oceans to take pity on them, but in vain … Twitching with nervous tics, four schizophrenics try to trap flies with vinegar … Petrified, four seamen insult God, the sea and fish before deciding to eat the cabin boy …

“
Put that over your head,” João said, handing him a piece of damp sacking, “you’ll get sunstroke.” Only then did he notice the straw hats the three of them were wearing.

Toward three in the afternoon, João let out an oath and pulled in his line as quickly as possible. He’d finally managed to spear a silvery fish hardly bigger than a sprat by the tail. Eight hours, eight hours for this small fry! Immediately there was an amazing bustle of activity on the deck: while João cut his catch up into thin slivers, careful to skim the backbone, Paulino and Isaac lit a fire in an oil can that they placed on the lee side. As soon as the wood was burning, they placed an old billycan filled with seawater on this improvized brazier. You would have sworn the men were going to cook their anchovy to eat it right away. Roetgen would have swallowed it raw, so tormenting were the pangs of hunger he felt. But João shared out the strips of fish he had prepared, so that they could all now bait their lines.

Scarcely five minutes later, a strong bite tugged at his arm. Striking the fish, he started to pull in his line cautiously, terrified he might make a wrong move. João came rushing over, bellowing advice,
ready to take the line out of his hands. Mortified by this lack of confidence in him, Roetgen almost yielded to the fisherman’s mute command, but his instinct took over and he started to talk to the fish in French, mixing insults and cajolery, going along with its attempts to escape, all the better to halt them smoothly after a while, oblivious to everything beyond the living tension at his fingertips.