Where Tigers Are at Home Read Online Free PDF

contact gave her. Thaïs bit her on the lip, at the same time stroking her clitoris and rubbing her own genitals against her thigh. Life exploded in all its restored beauty; it had a lovely smell of Givenchy.
FAVELA DE PIRAMBÚ:
L’aleijadinho
    A nasty play on words between
aleijado
(handicapped) and
alijado
(reduced) meant that he was called “Reduced Nelson” or, more often, simply “Reduced.” He was a boy of about fifteen, perhaps older, who seemed to have the gift of ubiquity. Wherever you went in the streets of Fortaleza you always ended up seeing him between cars, in the middle of the road, begging for a fewcruzeiros. Down as far as the groin he was a complete and, if anything, attractive boy with his shoulder-length hair, his big brown eyes and the beginnings of a mustache; he was only “reduced” in his lower limbs: with the bones of his two legs fused and his feet just stumps, he moved around like an animal, using his arms. Always dressed the same in a shapeless loincloth, like someone being crucified, rather than shorts, and a striped football shirt that he rolled up above his breasts, in the fashion of the
Nordeste
, he popped up everywhere, dragging himself along quite nimbly through the dust of the streets. Forced by his disability to perform ungainly acrobatics, from a distance he looked like a velvet crab or, to be more precise, a robber crab.
    Since the heat in the town forced people to drive with their windows open, he would take up position at the main crossroads and wait for the lights to turn red before launching his attack on the vehicles. Suddenly two callused hands would grasp the bottom of the window, then a head with a fearsome look would appear while repulsively crooked limbs thumped the windscreen or threatened to invade the interior of the car. “Have pity, for the love of God, have pity!” the
aleijadinho
would cry, in menacing tones that sent shivers down your spine. Springing up from the depths of the earth, this apparition almost always produced the desired effect: the drivers would fumble with their wallets or rummage around nervously in the jumble of the side pockets to get rid of the nightmare as quickly as possible. And since his hands were occupied, Nelson would order them to place the grimy banknote they’d managed to unearth in his mouth. Then he would slip down onto the road and transfer the money to his trunks after having given it a quick glance.
    “God bless you,” he would say between his teeth as the car was about to set off again; and such was the scorn he put into the words that it sounded like “Go to the devil.”
    He filled women drivers with terror. But when you got to know him a bit and handed him his alms even before he had to beg, saving him having to climb up onto your car, he would thank you with a smile that was worth any number of blessings.
    On bad days he would go thieving rather than fight with the vultures at the municipal rubbish dump for a piece of rotten fruit or a bone to gnaw. Usually he only stole things he could eat and that was a real torment for him because of his great fear of the savage violence of the police. The last time he’d been caught, for the theft of three bananas, the pigs had humiliated him until he couldn’t take any more, calling him a half-pint; they’d forced him to take off all his clothes, supposedly to search him, in reality to mock his atrophied organs even more cruelly and to tell him again and again that Brazil ought to be purged of such unnatural monsters. Then they locked him up for the night in a cell with a
cascavel
, one of the most poisonous snakes of the region, in order to cause “a regrettable accident.” By some miracle the serpent had left him in peace but Nelson had spent terrified hours sobbing and vomiting until he fainted. Even now the
cascavel
still haunted his nights. Fortunately Zé, “the truck driver,” had come in the morning to bail him out, so he had escaped the worst.
    Nelson’s admiration