Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  Athanasius was particularly fond of tragedy & at the age of thirteen his father gave him, as a reward for a particularly brilliant translation from Hebrew, permission to go to Aschaffenburg with his classmates to see a play: a company of wandering players were putting on Flavius Mauricius, Emperor of the East there. Johannes Kircher sent the little band in the care of a local farmer who was going to the town—two days’ walk away from Geisa—by cart & was to bring them home once the performance was over.

  Athanasius was carried away by the talent of the actors & their truly magic ability to bring to life a figure he had always admired. On the boards, before his very eyes, the valiant successor to Tiberius once more defeated the Persians amid sound & fury; he harangued his troops, drove the Slavs & the Avars back over the Danube, eventually reestablishing the greatness of the Empire. And in the last act, when the traitor Phocas killed this model Christian most horribly without sparing either his wife or his sons, the crowd very nearly tore the poor actor playing the role of the vile centurion to pieces.

  Athanasius took up Mauricius’s cause with all the hotheadedness of youth & when it was time to return to Geisa our madcap refused to go in the cart with his companions. The farmer who was in charge of the children tried in vain to hold him back: aspiring to an heroic death & ablaze with desire to emulate the virtue of his model, Athanasius Kircher had decided to go alone, like a hero of Antiquity, to face the Spessart forest, which was notorious not only for its highwaymen but also for the wild beasts that were to be found there.

  Once in the forest, it took less than two hours for him to get lost. He spent all day wandering to & fro, trying to find the road they had taken on the way there, but the virgin forest grew thicker & thicker & he was seized with dread as night approached. Terrified by the phantasms his imagination saw in the darkness & cursing the stupid pride that had sent him on this adventure, Athanasius climbed to the top of a tree so that he would at least be safe from the wild beasts. He spent the night clutching onto a branch, praying to God with all his heart, trembling with fear & remorse. In the morning, more dead than alive from weariness & trepidation, he plunged deeper into the forest. He had continued like that for nine hours, dragging himself from tree to tree, when the forest started to thin out, revealing a large meadow. Joyfully Kircher went to find out where he was from the laborers who were gathering in the harvest—the place he was looking for was still two days’ walk away! Furnishing him with some provisions, they set him on the right path & it was five days after leaving Aschaffenburg that he returned to Geisa, to the great relief of his parents, who thought they had lost him for good.

  Having exhausted his father’s patience, Athanasius was sent to continue his education as a boarder at the Jesuit college in Fulda.

  True, discipline there was stricter than in the little school at Geisa, but the masters were more competent & were able to satisfy the young Kircher’s insatiable curiosity. There was also the town itself, so rich in history & architecture, the church of St. Michael, with its two asymmetrical towers, & above all the library, the one founded with his own books by Rabanus Maurus so long ago & where Athanasius spent most of his free time. Apart from Maurus’s own works, in particular the original copies of De Universo & of De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis, it contained all sorts of rare manuscripts, for example the Song of Hildebrand, the Codex Ragyndrudis, the Panarion of Epiphanius of Constantia, the Summa Logicae of William of Ockham & even a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, which Athanasius could never open without a shudder.

  He often talked to me about that last book, every time he recalled his childhood friend, Friedrich von Spee Langenfeld. He was a young teacher at the Fulda seminary &, recognizing in Kircher the qualities that distinguished him from his fellow students, it was not long before he became attached to him. It was through him that Athanasius discovered the darker side of the library: Martial, Terence, Petronius … Von Spee introduced him to all these authors, whom propriety insists should not be read by innocent souls; & if the pupil emerged from this dubious trial strengthened in his aspiration to virtue, that still does not exonerate his master, for “vice is like pitch, as soon as you touch it, it sticks to your fingers.” We are, however, all the more willing to forgive him this slight bending of the rules of morality because his influence on Kircher was solely beneficial: did he not go out with him every Sunday to the Frauenberg, the Hill of Our Lady, to relax in the abandoned monastery & talk about the world as they contemplated the mountains and the town below?

  As for the Malleus Maleficarum, Athanasius well remembered his young mentor’s anger at the cruelty and arbitrariness of the treatment inflicted on those supposedly possessed by the devil who were caught in the net of the Inquisition.

  “How can you not confess to having killed your mother & father or fornicated with the devil,” he said, “when your feet are being crushed in steel shoes or they’re sticking long needles into you all over your body to find the witches’ mark, which does not feel pain and which proves, according to the fools, that you have had dealings with the devil?”

  And it was the student who felt the need to calm his master down, urging him to be more prudent in what he said. Then Von Spee would start to whisper, out there on the hillside, quoting Ponzibinio, Weier or Cornelius Loos in support of his outburst. He was not the first, he insisted, to criticize the inhuman methods of the inquisitors; in 1584 Johann Ervich had denounced the ordeal by water, Jordaneus the witches’ mark, & as he said this Von Spee got carried away again, raising his voice and striking terror to the heart of the young Athanasius, who admired him all the more for his reckless courage.

  “You see, my friend,” Von Spee cried, his eyes shining, “for one genuine witch—& I am prepared to doubt whether there ever was one—there are three thousand feeble-minded simpletons & three thousand raving madmen whose problems fall into the competence of doctors rather than inquisitors. It is the pretext that these things concern God & religion that allows these cruel supposed experts to have their way. But all they reveal is their own ignorance & if they attribute all these events to supernatural causes, it is because they are ignorant of the natural reasons governing things!”

  Throughout his life Kircher repeatedly told me of his fascination for this man & the influence he had had on his intellectual development. Occasionally the young teacher would read him some of the magnificent poems he was writing at the time, those that were collected after his death under the titles of Counter-nightingale & Golden Book of Virtue. Athanasius knew several of them by heart & on certain evenings of anguish in Rome, he would declaim some in a low voice, as you would say a prayer. He had a marked preference for The Idolater, a poem the Egyptian coloring of which he found particularly delightful. I feel as if I can still hear his resonant voice reciting it in a solemn, restrained style:

  O mighty pennate Ishtar, adorèd, benefic,

  Wellspring, lunar brilliance, cat-queen edenic!

  With the salamander, live adornment of thee,

  Fluorescent sea!

  Androgynous, its lip tingled: Tutankhamun,

  Hermes, puppets, sibyls lie carolling welcome

  loyalties, elders deploying stichomythia.

  He would finish with his eyes closed & remain silent, absorbed by the beauty of the lines or some memory connected with the text. I would take advantage of that to slip away, sure as I was that I would find him on the morrow back in his usual high spirits.

  In 1616 Von Spee was transferred to the Jesuit college in Paderborn, where he was to complete his noviciate, & Athanasius, suddenly tired of Fulda, decided to go to Mainz to study philosophy. The winter of 1617 was particularly hard. Mainz was buried beneath the snow, all the rivers around were frozen over. Athanasius had flung himself wholeheartedly into the study of philosophy, above all that of Aristotle, which he loved & assimilated with astonishing rapidity. But having learned from his experiences at Fulda, where his fellow students had sometimes reacted brutally to his subtlety of mind, Athanasius worked in se
cret & refused to reveal how much he had learned. Feigning humility & even stupidity, he was looked upon as an industrious pupil limited by his lack of understanding.

  A few months after his arrival in Mainz, Kircher expressed the desire to enter the Society of Jesus. Since he was not, to all appearances, intellectually gifted, it took an approach by his father to Johann Copper, the Jesuits’ superior in the Rhineland, before the latter accepted his candidacy. His departure for the noviciate in Paderborn was put off until the autumn of 1618, after he had taken his final exams in philosophy. Athanasius was delighted by the news, doubtless in part at the prospect of seeing his friend Von Spee again.

  That winter ice-skating was all the rage; Athanasius developed such skill in this activity that he derived sinful satisfaction from showing off in front of his companions. Filled with vanity, he liked to use his agility & the length of his slides to leave them behind. One day, when he was trying to skate faster than one of his fellow students, he realized he could not stop on the ice: his legs went in different directions & he took a severe fall on the hard-frozen ground. This fall, which was a just punishment for his conceit, left Kircher with a nasty hernia & various abrasions to his legs, which the same pride made him keep hidden.

  By February these wounds had become infected. Not having been treated, they started to suppurate badly & in a few days poor Athanasius’ legs had swollen so much that he could only walk with extreme difficulty. As the winter intensified, Athanasius continued to study in the worst conditions of cold & discomfort imaginable. Afraid of being rejected by the Jesuit college, where he had only been accepted with great difficulty, he remained silent about his state, with the result that his legs got progressively worse, right up to the day he was to leave for Paderborn.

  His journey on foot across the Hesse countryside was veritable torture. In the course of the days & nights of the walk Athanasius recalled his conversations with Friedrich von Spee about the tortures inflicted by the inquisitors on those accused of witchcraft: that was what he was having to endure & it was only his faith in Jesus & the prospect of soon being reunited with his friend that helped him to withstand as best he could the sufferings of the flesh. Limping terribly, he reached the Jesuit college in Paderborn on October 2, 1618. Immediately after they had expressed their delight at seeing each other again, Von Spee, who was there to receive him, squeezed his secret out of him. A surgeon, who was called urgently, was horrified at the state of his legs; he found them already gangrenous and declared Kircher beyond hope. Thinking an incurable sickness was enough in itself, Kircher said nothing about his hernia. The superior of the college, Johann Copper, came to tell him gently that he would have to return home if his health had not improved within the month. However, he called all the novices together in prayer to ask God to relieve the poor neophyte.

  After several days during which Athanasius’s agonies only increased, Von Spee advised his protégé to appeal to the Virgin, who had always watched over him. In the church in Paderborn there was a very old statue of the Virgin Mary, which was said to have miraculous powers. Its fame was widespread among the ordinary folk of the region. Kircher had himself taken to the church & for a whole night he begged the Madonna to look down mercifully on the affliction of her sick child. Toward the twelfth hour he tried out his limbs to see if his supplication had been granted & was filled with a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. No longer doubting that he would be healed, he continued to pray until morning.

  Waking a few hours later from a dreamless sleep, he found that both legs had healed & that his hernia had gone!

  Look as he might through his spectacles, the surgeon was forced to admit the miracle had happened: to his great astonishment he only found scars & no trace of the infection that ought to have utterly destroyed his patient. Thus we can well understand the special devotion Athanasius retained throughout his life for Our Lady, who had succored him in his ordeal, indicating how Kircher was predestined to serve God within the Society.

  ON THE WAY TO CORUMBÁ: “The Death Train”

  Uncomfortable on the hard seat in her compartment, Elaine looked out of the window and watched the landscape passing by. She was a beautiful woman of thirty-five, with long, brown, curly hair that she wore in a loose, artistically tousled chignon. She was wearing a lightweight, beige safari jacket and matching skirt; she had crossed her legs in such a way that, without her noticing or perhaps without thinking it important, revealed rather more than she should of the suntanned skin of her left thigh. She was smoking a long menthol cigarette with the touch of affectation that revealed her lack of experience of that kind of thing. On the other seat, almost opposite her, Mauro had made himself comfortable: legs stretched out under the seat across the compartment, hands behind his neck, headset over his ears, he was listening to the cassette of Caetano Veloso, swaying his head in time to the music. Taking advantage of the fact that Elaine was turned to the window, he looked at her thighs with pleasure. It was not every day that one had the opportunity to admire the more intimate anatomy of Profesora Von Wogau, and many students at the University of Brazilia would have liked to be in his place. But he was the one she’d chosen to accompany her to the Pantanal because of his brilliant performance in his defense of his doctoral thesis in geology—passed with distinction, if you please!—because he had the handsome looks of an unrepentant Don Juan, and also perhaps, though to his mind it really didn’t come into consideration, because his father was governor of the state of Maranhão. “Cavaleiro de Jorge, seu chapéu azul, cruzeiro do sul no peito …” Mauro increased the volume, as he did every time his favorite tune came on. Carried away by the beat of the song, he started humming the words, drawing out the final “oo” sound as Caetano used to. Elaine’s thighs quivered a little every time the train jolted; inwardly he rejoiced.

  Disturbed in her daydream by her companion’s irritating chirping, Elaine suddenly looked over and caught him examining her thighs.

  “You’d do better to show an interest in the landscape we’re passing through,” she said, uncrossing her legs and pulling her skirt down.

  Mauro switched off his Walkman at once and took out his earphones. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear. What did you say?”

  “It’s not important,” she said with a smile, touched by Mauro’s worried expression. He was sweet with his dishevelled hair and the embarrassed look of a child caught in the act. “Look,” she went on, pointing out of the window, “there are geologists who come from all over the world to see that.”

  Mauro glanced at the lunar landscape moving almost imperceptibly across the window frame; bizarre lumps of red sandstone looking as if they’d been dropped there, haphazardly, by some gigantic creature. “Precambrian ruiniform reliefs, highly eroded,” he said with a slight frown, as if reciting a lesson.

  “Not bad … But you could have added, ‘A magnificent prospect with a savage beauty that gives humans a sense of their fragility here on Earth.’ Unfortunately that’s never in the geology manuals, not even in another form.”

  “You’re just making fun of me, as usual,” Mauro sighed. “You know very well that I’m sensitive to that aspect of landscape; otherwise I’d have chosen history or math. To tell the truth, I’m starting to get tired.”

  “Me too, I have to admit. This journey’s interminable, but remember that we’re going back to Brazilia by plane. The Department hasn’t a lot of money, so we had to come to a compromise. Having said that, I’m not at all unhappy that we’re taking this train, it’s something I’ve been dreaming about for ages. A bit in the same way as I dream of going on the Trans-Siberian Railway some day.”

  “The Death Train!” said Mauro in funereal tones. “The only train in the world where you never know if it’s going to arrive …”

  “Oh, don’t start that, Mauro,” Elaine said with a laugh. “You’ll bring us bad luck.”

  The Death Train, so called because there were always accidents happening or an armed attack, linked Campo Grande with Santa Cruz in
Bolivia. Just before the border it stopped at Corumbá, the small town where the two travellers were to meet up with the rest of the team, two professors from the University of Brazilia: Dietlev H. G. Walde, a specialist in palaeozoology, and Milton Tavares, Jr., head of the Department of Geology. To economize on cost, Elaine and Mauro had gone by van to Campo Grande, the last town accessible by road before the Mato Grosso. They had left the van in a garage—Dietlev and Milton, who had done the first stage by plane, were to pick it up on the way back—and waited at the station until dawn. The train was a veritable antique on wheels, with a steam engine worthy of the Far West, slatted-wood carriages in faded colors and arched windows. The compartments resembled ships’ cabins with their mahogany veneer and a tiny cubicle with a little washbasin in pink marble. In one corner there was even a nickel-plated steel fan mounted on a universal joint, which at the time it was built must have been the height of luxury. Now the tap, eaten away by rust, merely managed a hint of moisture, the handle for opening the window went round and round without engaging, the wires of the fan seemed to have been torn off years ago and there was so much grime everywhere, and the felt of the seats was so badly torn it was impossible to imagine at what distant time in the past all this could have been the very latest in up-to-date comfort.

  The heat was starting to get uncomfortable; Elaine wiped her forehead and unscrewed her water bottle. Under Mauro’s amiable gaze she was trying to avoid spilling water over herself every time the train jolted when they heard angry shouts from the corridor. Drowning out the racket from the axles, a woman’s voice seemed to be trying to rouse the whole world. They saw several people rush toward the rear of the train, followed by an obese conductor, uniform unbuttoned, cap askew, who stopped for a moment, panting, by the open door of their compartment. The shouts continued even louder, until they were cut off abruptly by two dull thuds that shook the partition and made the window and the fan vibrate.