Where Tigers Are at Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

and gratitude for this odd fellow knew no bounds. Zé, always in a jovial mood, had befriended him and came to the
favela
to see him from time to time. He always had some new story to tell and even took the
aleijadinho
in his truck for trips to the seaside. Not only was Zé—Uncle Zé as he called him—tall and strong and drove around the world in his huge, brightly colored truck, he possessed what in Nelson’s eyes was a genuine treasure: Lampião’s nephew’s car! It was a white Willis that Zé had shown him one day. It didn’t go anymore, but he looked after it carefully; Nelson had never been so happy as the day he had been allowed to sit inside it. Famous spoils of war! Virgulino Ferreira da Silva,alias Lampião, who had become an outlaw after his father was killed by the police and spent almost twenty years leading them by the nose, had taken it from Antônio Gurgel, a rich landowner who had ventured into the Sertão. Lampião had attacked it on horseback with his band as if it were an ordinary stagecoach and Gurgel had only come out of it alive by paying a large ransom. Nelson knew all the history of the
cangaço
and of the men who were called
cangaceiros
because they carried their rifles across their spine, the way harnessed oxen bore the
cangalho
, the yoke. They had thrown off the yoke of oppression to live the life of free men in the Sertão, and if their Winchesters weighed heavy on their shoulders, at least it was in a good cause, the cause of justice. Fascinated, like all the boys in the
Nordeste
, by the figure of Lampião, Nelson had done everything he could to collect material about this Robin Hood of the great estates. The sheet-metal and plywood walls of his lair in the
favela
of Pirambú were papered with numerous photos cut out from
Manchete
or
Veja
. They showed Lampião at all ages and in all aspects of his career, also his companion in his adventures, Maria Bonita, and his principal lieutenants: Chico Pereira, Antônio Porcino, José Saturnino, Jararaca … all of whose exploits Nelson knew by heart, holy martyrs whom he often called upon for protection.
    Zé having promised he would come by that evening, Nelson had gone back to the
favela
a little earlier than usual. He’d bought a litre of
cachaça
from Terra e Mar and filled the two little paraffin lamps he’d made out of old tin cans. Performing contortions, he had even managed to level out the sand in his room, after having cleared away all his cigarette butts. Now, as he waited for Uncle Zé, he looked at his father gleaming in the half-light. Oh, no one could say that he neglected him: the steel bar had been cleaned as if it were a silver candlestick; oiled and rubbed day after day, itreflected the flame of the night-light on it that he kept lit all the time.
    Like many men from the
Nordeste
, his father used to work in a steelworks of the Minas Geraís. Every evening he would tell him about the hell of the blast furnaces, of the dangers the workers were exposed to because of the rapacity of the owner, Colonel José Moreira de Rocha. One day he didn’t come home. At nightfall a fat oaf in a suit and two foremen had come to see him in the shack, unfit for human habitation, that the boss generously granted each of his employees. They talked of an accident, describing in detail how his father, his own father, had fallen into a vat of molten metal. There was nothing left of him apart from this symbolic piece of rail, which they had insisted on bringing with them. There were sure to be a few atoms of his father spread through it, they said; it weighed 143 pounds, exactly the same as his father, so it could be given a church funeral. And for good measure they added that, since he no longer had any claim on the house, he was being asked to quit the property.
    Nelson was ten years old. His mother had died when he was born and having no other family, he found himself on the street at a moment’s notice. Through all his trials and tribulations