CHAPTER 10
In which are recorded word for word the licentious conversations of the guests of the Prince & various ignominious acts that put Caspar Schott in grave danger of damnation …
The conversation turned on trivial topics & every time they looked to Kircher for, if not the last word on the question, at least the most authoritative opinion. This turned into a kind of game among the guests: to see who could put forward an argument that my master would then confirm, reveling in his approval. Since the profusion of dishes suggested it, we discussed the relative qualities of various foods & the strange habits of ancient or far-off peoples. La Mothe Le Vayer reminded us of the abstinence from all meat practised by Pythagoreans & the Brahmins of the Orient, the latter leaving even grass unless it had been dried, the reason being that the soul is in all green growth; the rhizophagi, spermatophagi, hylophagi & foliophagi of Africa, who live solely on seeds, leaves or the heads of plants & leap from branch to branch as nimbly as squirrels. We can read in Mendès Pinto, someone said, that the flesh of asses, dogs, tigers & lions is on sale in the butchers’ shops of China & Tartary. And in Pliny, another said, that the Macrobians owed their long life to the fact that they fed exclusively on vipers, as we know do certain European princes, who have them swallowed by poultry whose flesh they are going to eat subsequently. And what would you say, Kircher added, trumping the lot, of the cynomolgi, who live on the milk of bitches, which they suck? The struthophagi of Deodorus the Sicilian, who eat ostriches, the acridophagi who eat locusts or even the Asian phthirophagi mentioned by Strabo—who are perhaps Herodotus’s Budini—who swallow their lice with great pleasure?
The ladies cried out in disgust at such habits, but it was even worse when La Mothe Le Vayer started talking about the anthropophagi …
Arguing that love was a passion & that this passion could be satisfied either by ourselves or with the help of others, Sieur Jean-Jacques Bouchard analyzed that hoodwinking of the nerves they call “masturbation,” which is an abomination but which he justified with numerous famous examples. In support he called upon Diogenes, of course, Zeno and Sextus Empiricus, who all swore by this method alone because of the independence of others it gave them, & also the entire population of Lydia, which practised this manual operation in broad daylight.
Count Manuel Cuendias, a young Spaniard with a pockmarked face, condemned such conduct, but only to defend love between men. He deluged his audience with a flood of Greek & Latin figures who in the past had all extolled what today we look upon as an act of depravity. Olympus was full of the likes of Ganymede and Antinous, Hercules only had eyes for his Hylas or his Tarostes, Achilles for his Patroclus; the wisest & most highly respected philosophers swore by their catamites: Plato indulged every whim of his Alexis, his Phaedo or his Agathon, Xenophon those of his Clenias; Aristotle went weak at the knees at the sight of Hermias, Empedocles at the sight of Pausanias; Epicurus courted Pytocles, Aristippus crawled for Eurychides …
The female part of the company cried out in indignation at these customs, objecting that humanity would quickly die out if such vile practices should spread excessively; love was really only to be found in the difference between the sexes & not in the androgyny vaunted by that debauchee Plato to justify his vices.
The Prince took up the argument in his own language. “If we are to believe you, mesdames,” he said, “it is only among animals that true love is to be found, for they have the advantage over you of a greater difference & of not philosophizing …”
The Prince said that in such a tone that it was difficult to say whether he was joking or talking seriously. Since he started to smile, however, the assembled company chose to regard it as a witticism & roared with laughter, while the Princess, with tears in her eyes, dug her nails in my hand under the table.
“In that too,” her husband said, “Greek mythology provides us with many examples of this zoophilia, of which I will only mention Pasiphae with her bull, Leda with her swan & Apuleius’s matron with her ass. Which is nothing compared with reality. Any of our shepherds will prefer his nanny goats to the fair sex & in the town of Mendes in Egypt, where the god Pan was revered, the billy goats commonly coupled with the women. It is so widespread in Muscovy that Cyril of Novgorod, when asked if one could drink the milk & eat the flesh of a cow that had been known by a man replied that everyone could, apart from the one who had had commerce with it. In the East Indies the Portuguese enjoy dugongs as if they were women & the negroes of Mozambique are said to find great relief in abusing them even when they are dead. One cannot say that such copulation is simply a result of human depravity, for other animals have the same feelings toward us & the same combinations among themselves. Remember what Pliny has to say about the gosling from Argos that conceived a passion for a girl called Glauce who played the guitar and who was at the same time wooed by a ram that had fallen in love with her. We could also mention the trouble caused by an elephant for the woman who kept a shop in Antioch & that caused by a great ape of Borneo for a priest. As for lions, being in season at the beginning of winter & at their most dangerous then, everyone knows they will spare a woman if she hitches up her skirt & shows them her private parts …”
There were more roars of laughter. Whipped up by the Prince, the badinage became a hubbub of erudite obscenities. Incest was added to the stories of illicit love & for a long time all they would talk about was the demands of Caligula, Nero or Chrysippus, who thought it did not matter if he lay with his mother, his sister or his daughter. Strabo was quoted, who insisted that the magi of Persia & the Egyptians did the same in their temples; Amerigo Vespucci, who maintained that in all the West Indies there was no degree of kinship that forbade fornication; the Emperor Claudius who, having married his niece Agrippina, made the senate authorize incest … Then they set about sullying lawful love & modesty itself, saying they were nothing but an invention of weary nations, since they did not exist in the New World or the Far North, where the tribes willingly lent their wives or daughters to visitors without showing the least shame & copulated in public, just as the Cynic Crates used to screw his Hipparchia right in the middle of the Agora …
Faced with this flood of filth, which made me blush as much as the Princess, I kept giving my master imploring looks, unable to understand how he could retain such regal calm. Not a muscle in his face moved; he wore a good-natured smile, as if he happened to be listening to mere childish prattle. The parish priest had not stayed that long & had made his excuses some time ago on the pretext of his great age & the lateness of the hour. Finally, when I was despairing of ever hearing Kircher speak out against this catalogue of loathsomeness, his voice was suddenly heard:
“I have myself read everything to which you have alluded but, while recognizing your knowledge, I am saddened that no voice has been raised against all these vices, which, even though they exist & continue to proliferate, are no less reprehensible. I would report you all to the Holy Inquisition, as is my duty”—he paused for a moment surveying the company with an icy look. The blue of his eyes had gone pale & I saw several of the guests among those who had previously been most voluble wipe their brows, filled with irrepressible fear—“if I thought for a moment you all held those opinions. But it is, perhaps, worth making certain points clear. The more I extend my knowledge of new things, the more I find confirmed what the wisest of mortals says in Ecclesiastes: ‘There is no new thing under the sun.’ What has happened? The same as will happen again. Persistence in evil, that is, the Fiend, is the cause of all this licentiousness because his sole aim is to fill the world with his vileness. The Evil Architect is still building the house of ancient wickedness. He uses all means, he tempts all persons & all ages. His principal way of deceiving souls & taking them for himself has always been to use their curiosity to attract them & to bring about their downfall with tricks full of superstition and lechery. What can be said is that if the Fiend has captured so many men, it is because he has always used the same means, since the very beginning of time: I am talking about magic & enchantment. Our experience shows that all the gods venerated by the Egyptians & their heirs are still those of the modern barbarians, among whom we can see the signs of the transformation of Isis & Osiris into the Sun & the Moon, & we can still find Bacchus, Hercules & Aesculapius, Serapis & Anubis & monsters similar to those of the Egyptians, although worshipped under other names. Even in China we see children burned alive as an offering to Moloch, blood spilt in disgusting sacrifices & that obscene part of the body the Greeks called the “–øαλλο”1 held in particular veneration. These barbarians of the Orient worship certain animals as if they were gods & the example of the Egyptians has been so important for the outlook of those people that they filled their lands with idols similar to theirs. All the examples you were discussing just now are the fruit of idolatry, the horrible product of the Enemy of human nature. The Fiend is God’s monkey, his serpent’s tail trailing everywhere his spirit of diabolical perversion appears. And although we should not close our eyes to the distorted reflections his mirrors permanently present to us, we must be careful not to take them for reality & to expose his evil snares, which lead straight to eternal damnation …”
Held in restraint for a while by Kircher’s speech, the guests soon let their tongues, loosened by the wine, run free once more. But since we had long since finished eating, the Prince invited us to rise from the table & the company dispersed in small groups in the salons while the servants cleared away.
Princess Alexandra took me to a sofa somewhat apart from the rest. After having discussed the evening’s conversation & expressed in words the disapproval we had conveyed to each other by gestures, we spoke once more of music & harmony. Unaccustomed as I was to drinking that amount of wine, my mind was confused & all I can remember of our conversation was a feeling of sweet communion & the perfect accord of our opinions. Later, when we were once more comparing the respective merits of William Byrd & Gesualdo, the Princess wanted to show me the score of a motet I was unacquainted with & which one could not read, she said, without hearing the most marvelous music there ever was. I therefore followed her eagerly to an alcove not far away, where she kept her music. Hardly were we there than she double-locked the door to stop us being disturbed. I acquiesced in this, flattered by her preference for my company. She quickly found the score & we sat down side by side.
The score did indeed have an extraordinary grace & ardor, so that I was soon humming in a low voice, conquered by the delightful emotion it stirred within me. After a few minutes I felt as if my cheek on the side where the Princess was sitting was on fire. I looked up at her & immediately stopped singing: it was the fixed look in her shining eyes, burning like a glowing ember, that had pierced my skin. Without taking this frighteningly adoring gaze off me, she slowly brought her hand to my face and caressed my lips tremblingly.
“Caspar,” she murmured, “Caspar …”
Her breathing had become irregular, her nostrils were quivering, her lips parted, as if she were trying to moisten her dry throat. Assuming she was about to faint, I half rose to assist her. With a gesture, she indicated she needed air, urging me to unlace her. Since she appeared to be suffering from the stuffy air, I started to open her dress, becoming irritated at all the ribbons I was not used to. No sooner had I undone her bodice a little than she finished loosening her dress herself. But she did not stop where decency & the demands of her faintness would have required, continuing to open her clothes in a kind of frenzy until she displayed her chest to me completely naked! I was stunned by the sight. Never having seen a woman’s breast other than on the corpses we dissected with my master, it seemed to me I had never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. To my alarm, however, the Princess molliter incepit pectus permulcere. Papillae horruere, et ego sub tunica turgescere mentulam sensi.2 The Archenemy! This woman was possessed by the Fiend & I was within an inch of being dragged into the abyss. I crossed myself while reciting an exorcism, but the Princess, no longer herself, divaricata stolam adeo collegit ut madida feminum caro adspici posset.3 Both my mind & my senses were in turmoil. On the one hand I was horrified at the transformation of this woman, to whom I had until then ascribed the virtues & modesty of a saint, & on the other I felt more attracted to her than I had before. With one last spurt of conscience, I moved away from her &, trembling, quaking at the knees, I begged her to return to her senses.
“Stop it, my lady, for pity’s sake,” I said with all the conviction I could muster. “You are risking damnation! You are dragging me to damnation!”
But this reaction seemed to arouse her even more, for she passed her tongue over her lips in an obscene manner. Realizing the door was locked, I rushed over to the bell pull, threatening to call for assistance.
CANOA QUEBRADA: Like a bastion against the madness of the world …
After a long swim, Moéma, Thaïs and Roetgen met on the beach again in the shade of a straw hut where Seu Juju, an ex-fisherman, served stuffed crabs and a cachaça with lime that was so warm it was almost undrinkable. No one had managed to explain to him why young city folk had started visiting this out-of-the-way place, but he accepted his good fortune all the more philosophically in that it enabled him to earn a living without too much effort. Leaning back on palm logs, three young men in swimming trunks were teasing each other amid great bursts of laughter. Wrestlers at leisure, their bodies gleaming with suntan lotion and drops of water, they were playing at anointing their shining skin with sand. Roetgen met the eye of the most voluble of them, a mestizo with perfect teeth who had his hands gracefully draped around the necks or shoulders of his companions and laughed in a shrill voice.
“Eita, mulherzinha!” he exclaimed, standing up immediately to embrace Moéma. Then, taking a step back as if to get a better view of Roetgen, “Where did you find this pretty boy? I’m already getting quite moist …”
“Calm down, and don’t be coarse,” said Moéma, slightly embarrassed. “He’s my professor, so go easy.”
“At least you could introduce me, can’t you? I’m not going to eat him, although …”
“OK … Roetgen, this is Marlene,” Moéma said with a smile. “Just ignore him or he won’t let go of you.”
“Don’t listen to her,” the young man said, holding the hand Roetgen held out to him for longer than necessary. “I’m as gentle and obedient as a little pet lamb. Isn’t that so, girls?”
The two boys he spoke to said nothing but gave him black looks.
“Anaïs and Doralice,” he said with an icy smile. “They’re just jealous and that makes them impolite. It’s always the same old story, not enough hormones …”
It was the first time Roetgen had heard a man speak of himself and his friends in the feminine form. Despite his openness of mind, he felt it as a provocation and didn’t know whether to go along with the game or pretend to ignore it. Despite that, he had a kind of naive admiration for a person who dared to express his sexual preferences so openly. However, in a stupid automatic reaction, a mixture of panic and an old remnant of male pride, he felt the need to differentiate himself.
“I must be a bit odd,” he said, “but I prefer girls … Having said that, it needn’t stop us from having a drink together.”
He immediately bit his tongue, furious with himself for having given way to such easy condescension, surely more offensive than a real insult.
“Pity … You can’t recognize a good thing when you see it,” Marlene said with a touch of contempt in his voice. “If you make the change, come and see me first, I’ll open up a whole universe for you … Come on, girls. Last one in the water’s a woman-fucker.”
As one the three young men immediately set off for the sea.
“I meant no offense,” said Roetgen, dismayed.
“You were quite right,” Moéma assured him, “if you’d given him the least encouragement he’d have been unbearable. He’ll get over it. He’ll do anything for a free drink … Talking of drinks, a glass for each of us, please, Juju.”
After one glass all three were tipsy.
“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.
“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.”
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.
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.
Now there were incessant comings and goings; young folk drenched in sweat came in from the Forró da Zefa, downed their drink and returned to the dance. Hot from the dance, necks red, hair awry, the young women crossing the bar looked like hallucinating madonnas. Ravishing or hideous, they looked as if they had made love just before coming in. Roetgen was surprised to find he desired them all.
There was a brief period of silence between two records and, highlighted by the pause, an unusual individual made his entrance. It was an Indian of around twenty whose hairstyle, in imitation of the Xingu tradition, would have been sufficient to make him stand out: cut on a level with his eyebrows, his thick black hair curved in a fringe above his ears before spreading out over his back. Dressed in white—wide trousers knotted at the waist and a very low-cut vest over his smooth, brick-colored chest with delicate tattoos running down from his chin in a symmetrical design of braided cords—he bore his race and his beauty like a flag.
Looking for someone to share his astonishment, Roetgen turned to Moéma; eyes riveted on the newcomer, she seemed to be absorbing his image. Sensing her look, as if drawn by it, the Indian pushed his way through the crowd until he was beside her. On his shoulder was a smudge of blue ink, the mark stamped by Dona Zefa on dancers going out of her dance hall. He drank his cachaça without a word. The music started up again …
“Alcéu Valença!” Thaïs exclaimed, abruptly carried away by the opening bars of the song. She started to sing: “Morena tropicana …”
“Eu quero teu sabor,” the Indian went on, looking Moéma straight in the eye. Then he sketched a smile and left the bar.
“Funny guy, eh?” Alcides said. He’d missed nothing of the little scene.
“Who is he?” Moéma asked, as if she wasn’t really interested in the answer.
“His name’s Aynoré. He’s been hanging around here for two weeks now.” And, spitting on the floor to emphasize his contempt, “Maconheiro, for all I know …”
“Let’s dance,” Thaïs begged, still taken up with the music and jigging to the rhythm.
Once out in the street they went to the left of the bar and came to the Forró da Zefa. It was a sort of barn made of clay bricks with a corrugated iron roof proclaiming the relative affluence of its owner. Small windows—without glass, as everywhere in Canoa Quebrada—all along the front let out more hubbub than light. At the only door to this edifice they found Dona Zefa herself, an old mulatto stinking of alcohol and tobacco who immediately attached herself to Roetgen muttering what was clearly a flood of obscenities in a weary voice. She let go of him as soon as he’d managed to extract the few cruzeiros entrance money from his pocket. Behind her, in a hall about thirty yards long on which two gas lamps hanging from the ceiling cast a dim light, a milling crowd was concentrating on criss-crossing all available space on the beaten-earth floor in every direction. Like an intoxicated, teeming swarm, the couples, swift, earnestly bound to their partners, were gyrating their hips rhythmically, feet held to the floor by audible magnetism. Their serious expressions, their uniform gestures in perfect accord with the rhythm of the music, astonished Roetgen more than anything he’d seen so far: a dance in the catacombs, one last cheek-to-cheek before the curfew, acutely aware of their bodies and the imminence of war. Beneath the human voice and the instruments was the constant background noise of sandals on the ground, an incessant rhythmical pulse with all the menace of a silence of the primeval world.
All at once Marlene popped up in front of them. “Que bom! Welcome to the three of you in the haunt of night,” he said in a grandiloquent manner. “Things are heating up, eh? Now who’m I going to invite to dance?”
“Me,” said Thaïs giving Roetgen a conspiratorial wink.
“Now us,” said Moéma as soon as the other two had been absorbed by the Brownian agitation on the dance floor, “two steps to the right, two to the left, try to do the same as me.” Pressing up against him, she dragged him off into the turbulence.
Roetgen did quite well, at least from what Moéma said. Doing everything he could not to make himself look ridiculous, he gradually became aware of his surroundings: in the dark mass of dancers, who avoided each other with the dexterity of elementary particles, he only saw gaunt, gap-toothed faces and scrawny bodies mostly a good head shorter than he; every time a taller silhouette than the others caught his eye he recognized without a shadow of doubt one of the young city dwellers who had come to Canoa to “recharge their batteries.” They radiated good health, laughed with their white teeth, enjoying themselves as if they were in some nightclub. There were two species there or, worse, two stages of the same humanity far apart in time. Cut off from both sides, but put in the position of the strong despite himself, Roetgen felt he was as wrong, as absurdly comic and out of place, as a parrot in the middle of a flock of crows.
“It’s not quite there yet,” Moéma laughed, “you’re treading on my toes. You’ll have to get in training if you’re going to try and pick up girls in a forró.”
“I’m stopping. I’m beat.”
“OK, let’s go and have a drink.”
They were heading for the exit, their straight line disturbing the mechanics of the swirling eddies, when the Indian appeared. “You dancing?” he asked Moéma coolly, without for a moment seeming to doubt what her answer would be.
“Why not,” she replied with a touch of arrogance in her voice, enfolding herself in his arms with a promptness and ease that gave the lie to her little coquetry.
Somewhat disoriented at being left high and dry, Roetgen watched the couple drift along the edge of the whirling mass, ready to be carried away. A moment before they disappeared, he saw Aynoré paw Moéma’s buttocks in a harsh, obscene gesture, pulling her shorts up over her thighs, and her nails digging into the tattoos on his back.
Roetgen felt as if they had left a symmetrical claw mark on him. He had no right to be jealous, but allowed himself to wallow in a feeling of contempt that encompassed all the women in the world. His mind preoccupied with a thousand variations on his hurt pride, he left the dance hall, duly stamped by Dona Zefa as he passed, and went back to Seu Alcides’s bar.
This mood affected his view of the drinkers, who seemed to him to have reached the depths of degeneracy. One guy who’d fallen asleep on the billiard table woke with a start every three minutes to offer his cigarettes to no one in particular; another, determined to humiliate himself, was making pipoca to order, blowing out his cheeks excessively to make the sound of popcorn bursting, as if this pitiful buffoonery were the whole justification for his existence. Seu Alcides himself appeared too fat to be honest, especially in comparison with the living skeletons thronging his bar.
He forced himself to swallow a meladinha. In a direct relationship of cause and effect, the drink set off a fit of stomachache that left him paralyzed, close to fainting. Panicking at the thought that he might not be able to control the disaster in his bowels, he left the bar, urgently hurrying to get to the dunes. Rummaging through his pockets without finding anything to substitute for toilet paper, he ran off into the darkness, sick and despondent.
When he was sure he’d never reach the sea in time, he turned to the right and walked straight ahead, determined to get as far away from the houses as possible. In the faint light of the stars, a no-man’s-land of rubbish spread out, an unspeakable dump running along the whole length of the road. Plunging into the filth, Roetgen suddenly broke out in a cold sweat and was then overtaken by cramps that bent him double and sent him tumbling to his knees, like someone in despairing prayer. And there, alone, oblivious to everything, overwhelmed by the way his whole being was spinning, he thought he was going to die and that a pig would find him in the morning, bare-assed amid the steaming garbage of the village, a foul thing among the foulness.
His last banknotes were hardly enough to wipe away his anguish.
When he was able to get up, he wiped his sticky hands with sand and went back to the road, guided by a twinkling light that was in more or less the right direction. He came to a little window and stopped for a moment: gilded by the chiaroscuro of her lamp, an old black woman was slowly doing a piece of embroidery on a large frame of dark wood. Seeing Roetgen, she gave him a timid smile, pausing in her work. This snapshot of Flemish painting encapsulated the infinite gentleness of mothers and, with that, the sole bastion against the madness of the world.
THE TOWN OF PACATUBA: The VASP airplane
When Zé had offered to take him to visit his sister in the little house she had in the mountains, not far from Fortaleza, Nelson had been so dead drunk that he couldn’t remember either his friend carrying him out to his truck, or having traveled through the whole night. So when he woke in the middle of a forest of banana trees, he thought it was a dream, one of the most calm and beautiful ones he’d had for a long time. Since he felt a bit cold, he pulled his hammock over him and went back to sleep.
“Come on, up you get, lazybones,” he heard an hour later. “There’s no point in coming to the mountains if you spend all the time sleeping.”
Emerging from his hammock as if from a chrysalis, Nelson saw the smiling face of Uncle Zé. “Just have a look at this paradise,” he said, pointing out of the window. “A bit of a change from Fortaleza, isn’t it?”
Outside there were indeed the banana trees of his dream, a clear sky and the croaking of the buffalo frogs.
“Where are we?” Nelson asked, rubbing his eyes.
“At my sister’s place, for God’s sake! In the Serra de Aratanha. You were in some state last night.”
“I must have been, my head feels like a watermelon.”
“The mountain air’ll sort that out in no time at all, you’ll see. Get up, Firmina’s made us a real country breakfast.”
After a mingau of tapioca—a thick porridge of sweetened milk and flour—a good slice of sweet-potato omelette and two bowls of coffee, Nelson felt much better. Then Zé carried him piggyback to a large pond down below where they went fishing. Despite his lack of experience, the aleijadinho proved to be more skillful than his teacher and caught two catfish that looked monstrous to him.
When they went back for lunch, around one, it had clouded over, suggesting there would be a heavy shower during the afternoon. They hadn’t finished eating when the storm broke, keeping them inside for the rest of the day. After the siesta, they stayed in their hammocks on the veranda, watching the rain. Then Zé sang from memory the adventures of Prince Roldão, which they’d gotten from a recent cordel by João Martins de Athayde. A naive mixture of the Iliad and Orlando furioso, the story told how the nephew of Charlemagne had managed to rescue his Angelica from the clutches of Abdul Rahman, king of Turkey and thoroughgoing infidel, by hiding, together with his weapons, in a gold lion designed by Richard of Normandy …
When the sun set, the rain finally stopped, leaving a frayed veil of mist. Nelson and Zé went inside to escape the evening humidity and opened a bottle of cachaça while old Firmina put the fish they’d brought back a few hours earlier on to stew.
They were in the middle of the meal and—remembering it later, Firmina saw it as a coincidence pregnant with meaning—laughing much too loud, when the sound of jet engines made the glasses on the table tremble, getting louder and louder until they had to draw their heads down into their shoulders, and finishing in an explosion that blew out all the windows in the house: the VASP Boeing 727, coming from Congonhas, had crashed spectacularly in the Serra de Aratanha.
The only one to react, Zé rushed outside. A little farther up the mountain, in the light of trees transformed into torches, a huge plume of black smoke was rising from a new gap in the forest.
“Meu Deus!” he said, realizing what had happened, “it almost fell on us.” Then, turning to Nelson and his sister, who had followed him out onto the veranda, “You wait here, I’ll go and see if I can do anything.”
With that, he started to run toward the place where the disaster had happened.
Despite Firmina’s loud cries and without really thinking about what he was doing, Nelson followed, hauling himself along the ground.
When, exhausted and covered from head to toe in red mud from sliding along the path, he reached the place where the plane had crashed, Nelson was petrified at what is generally called an “apocalyptic scene” but of which the horror for him was contained in the simple sight of a woman’s torso still attached by her belt but now apparently sitting on her abundant entrails. All around, scattered over a very large area and highlighted by the fluorescent yellow of the life jackets, the smoking debris of the plane, disembowelled suitcases, an unrecognizable jumble could be seen. And then things that held a grisly fascination: horribly mangled bodies, scraps of flesh hanging from the trees like Tibetan prayers, limbs or organs scattered haphazardly over the soaked ground, obscene in their unaccustomed solitude … a feast of human flesh suddenly delivered to the hungry beasts of the forest. It was as if it had been raining blood, steak and offal, Nelson thought.
Woken by the sudden blaze, the vultures were already fluttering over this manna, nibbling at bared stomachs with their beaks, pecking at the eyes, fighting over the most appetizing carcasses with shrill cries. Nelson was hardly surprised at the number of silhouettes—some armed with torches—who were already busying themselves about the site of the tragedy: with little room for pity for those whom death had released from all need, these poor mountain folk were searching through the remains meticulously, picking out anything of value, with no sense of disgust: money, rings and jewelry but also clothes red with blood, odd shoes and even some pieces of the machine, of which it was impossible to say what use they intended to make.
For a brief moment he had been taken with the prospect of finding a well-filled wallet, but Nelson refused to join those robbing the corpses. Looking around for Uncle Zé, he made his way through the debris, The ground was nauseating, saturated with secretions and dubious matter. Crawling around a thicket, he came across what was left of a policeman, a decapitated cop who, absurdly, was still wearing his belt and holster with its pistol.
“You don’t look too clever like that,” Nelson muttered. “Fuck you, son of a bitch.”
Like a divine response to this blasphemy, he felt two hands grasp his shoulders and rolled over, screaming.
“What the hell are you doing here, for God’s sake? What the hell are you doing here?” Uncle Zé bellowed at the shock. “My God, have you seen yourself? You … you … I thought you were a survivor.”
“I followed you …” Nelson stammered, he too trembling.
“I can see you followed me. I told you to stay in the house.”
“Are there any injured?”
Uncle Zé shook his head sadly. “They’re all dead. It’s not possible after a crash like that. I’ll keep looking until the rescue party arrives. And you’re going straight back to the house, understood? I’ll come as soon as I can.”
Nelson stayed by the corpse for a few more minutes, surprised at the perfection of the plan that had formed in his mind. That was the way it would be, that and no other way. There was no other way it could be …
Back at the house, while Firmina, horrified at the state he was in, was heating some water to wash him, Nelson took the loaded gun out of his T-shirt and quickly stowed it in the bottom of his bag.
A little later, in the washtub where Dona Firmina was scrubbing his back while mumbling prayers for the victims, he had an amazing erection, the first hard-on he’d had since his father died.
WHEN WE RETURNED to the great hall, we discovered that a very large table had been set in our absence. Kircher was given the place of honor, opposite the Prince, & I was happy to discover I was seated on the left hand of his wife. The banquet started immediately. To describe the profusion of dishes we were given is beyond the weak power of my memory, especially since I was paying particular attention to what my master & the Princess were saying. I do remember, however, that there was a large amount of seafood, shellfish & lobster, as well as poultry & joints of game, which the guests despatched indifferently. As I was hardly touching the pieces that arrived on my plate, being careful to avoid the sin of gluttony, my master lectured me on the matter, telling me it was a feast day & that there was no harm in rejoicing both in body & in spirit at the birth of Our Lord. I must confess that I followed this advice enthusiastically & did full justice to our hosts’ meal. Our glasses were refilled as soon as they were emptied, the crystal sparkled & the whole table was abuzz with laughter & witty ripostes; the Princess was gracious & amusing & I was happier than I could have imagined when I arrived at this place.