Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  Athanasius Kircher was dazzled by this figure. At their very first meeting he had no hesitation in confiding all his ideas & projects to him; he described the festivities he had organized in Ingolstadt & quickly convinced Pietro della Valle of his superiority in the matter of hieroglyphs. Impressed by the knowledge of a man who had only traveled in Europe, if at all, & charmed by his nature, della Valle agreed to entrust to him the dictionary that was the envy of all scholars. A detailed study of it convinced my master that Coptic was an indispensable stepping stone to deciphering the hieroglyphs, with the result that at the death of Thomas de Novare in 1635 Pietro della Valle, with the support of Cardinal Barberini, commissioned him to prepare the work for publication on his own.

  Sadly, the following month Athanasius was plunged into mourning by the death of Friedrich von Spee. He had stayed in Germany, where he had continued to fight against the fanaticism of the Inquisition, & he had been carried off by the plague, following the taking of Trier by the Imperial army during which he had treated the wounded who had been struck down with that terrible disease. My master was much affected by this too early death & and it was from that day on that he occasionally kept his sadness at bay by recounting to me the happy episodes connected with the memory of his friend.

  In 1636, after two years of unremitting work, Kircher published a little quarto volume of 330 pages, the Prodomus Copticus Sive Ægyptiacus, in which he set out his ideas on the mysterious language of the Egyptians & the method that would guide his future work. After having established the relationship between Coptic and Greek, he demonstrated the necessity of going through the study of the former if there was to be any hope of one day completely unravelling the hieroglyphs. And he asserted for the first time the great truth that was to bring the success we all know, namely that the hieroglyphs were not some form of writing but a symbolic system capable of expressing the theological ideas of the priests of ancient Egypt with great subtlety.

  The Prodomus was a resounding success; Kircher received enthusiastic letters from all erudite persons of his time, notably the hearty congratulations of Peiresc, who was constantly telling people how, through his mediation, he was to a small extent responsible for my master’s discoveries.

  The year came to a dramatic end: the astrologer Centini and his little entourage of disciples were accused of having plotted to assassinate Pope Urban VIII during black masses, which my sense of propriety forbids me to describe in detail & then tried to poison him. Kircher was charged with analyzing the poisons found in Centini’s house & in the Holy Father’s food. This gave him the opportunity of familiarizing himself with certain remarkable poisons & their degree of toxicity, experience that he later turned to account in one of his publications on the subject. Centini & his acolytes were condemned to death & hung from gallows erected in St. Peter’s Square for the edification of the populace. I almost fainted at the sight of the poor wretches wriggling at the end of their ropes, but Kircher, who was taking notes, reprimanded me sharply:

  “What’s this!” he exclaimed. “You’re trembling like a leaf at a scene that is quite natural. These men schemed to bring about someone else’s death & their just punishment is the fate they planned for him. The more they suffer as they die, the more favorably Our Lord will hear their prayers, especially since they confessed to their crimes & therefore deserve all the mercy due to those who have repented. Instead of bewailing what is nothing more than a swift passage to a better life, you would do better to observe, as I do, the process of asphyxiation & the signs accompanying it.” Thus admonished, I found the courage to watch the execution of these unfortunates to the end, though without managing to remember anything apart from the horrible rictus in which their faces were twisted & and the slate-blue color of their tongues jutting out like the bladder of a fish that has been dragged up from the depths too quickly.

  A few minutes after the death of Centini, as the crowd was already dispersing, Kircher went over to the hanging bodies. Authorized by his ministry, he felt their breeches one after the other. Very satisfied, he made me note the dampness of each body at that place & promised to explain one day how that observation confirmed some of his most secret research.

  But if the year 1636 finished tragically, 1637 began with some important news: the return of Frederick of Hesse, the governor of Hesse-Darmstadt, to the bosom of the Catholic Church. Kircher rejoiced at the news: Fulda was part of the Grand Duchy of Hesse & the conversion of the Grand Duke promised to bring peace to a region that was close to his heart but plunged, alas!, in darkness because of war & privation.

  Thus Frederick of Hesse came to Rome, where he was received with all honor by the Supreme Pontiff & Cardinal Barberini. The Grand Duke having decided to travel through Italy to Sicily & Malta, Kircher was officially appointed his confessor & travelling companion. This time again, my master managed to arrange it so that I was attached to him for the journey.

  A few weeks later, while we were making our final preparations, Athanasius heard that Peiresc had died & at the same time received a letter, a copy of his will. The old Provençal scholar had bequeathed him his entire collection which, duly listed and parcelled, was already on its way to Rome.

  My master was deeply moved as he broke the seal on his friend & protector’s final letter. Having been told of his forthcoming voyage to the south, Peiresc urged him to measure the elevations of the pole down there, to observe Mount Etna & to bring back for him a list of the books in the principal libraries of Sicily, most especially a list of the manuscripts in Caeta Abbey. Athanasius hardly needed these suggestions, having himself worked out a very full program of research, but Peiresc’s posthumous encouragement went straight to his heart & he decided to carry out his observations not as if they were his own, but as a response to the wishes of his dear departed friend.

  As for his collection, which was to arrive in Rome after our departure for Sicily, it filled Kircher with joy. Determined to create his own Wunderkammer, he obtained, thanks to Cardinal Barberini, several rooms in the Roman College to house it. The crates were to be deposited there until he could organize what was later to become the Kircher Museum, which is the most famous collection of curios that ever existed.

  FORTALEZA: O indio não é bicho

  In dark glasses, leather ski pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt to hide the needle marks on her arms—the branch of the Banco do Brazil where she had opened an account was on the university campus—Moéma waited her turn. After having received the check from her father she had quickly sent it on to a certain Alexander Constantinopoulos, the Greek in Rio whose PO Box number she’d gotten from a friend and who undertook to double the amount of any check made out in foreign currency. The bank had just telephoned to say that a transfer had been made to her account by fax. It was magic! Like playing roulette and winning every time. A vaguely guilty feeling brought the note accompanying the check back to mind: “I do worry … Too much, I’m sure. But you’re still my little girl, I can’t change that. Look after yourself, my dear, and remember that I love you more than my own life.” Despite her efforts to keep them down, these words kept rising to the surface, black and swollen, like drowned bodies. Her father hadn’t mentioned the money, nor the bar, but it was precisely his discretion that aroused her indignation. He couldn’t care less what I might be doing, she thought. A few nice words, the dough and that’s it. He’s just a stupid old fool. So sure of himself, especially when he pretends to be in doubt. He’ll never understand anything about anything … “I love you more than my own life …” When I think that he even managed to pull out that old chestnut! I wouldn’t be surprised if he made a rough copy first.

  However, this flood of complaints did not manage to suppress her sense of being in the wrong. “Heidegger’s fine, as far as you can say that of a stupid parrot who’s getting old. He continues to repeat his favorite sentence and to peel anything he can get his beak on, as if it were extremely important for the universe not to leave the least scrap of skin on anything
. To be honest, though, I’m starting to resemble him a bit …” Reading this rather involved confession, Moéma had almost jumped on the first train to go and console her father. But now, standing in the queue that wasn’t moving, she stamped her foot impatiently to help bring back her feeling he was not being straight with her. What an idiot! Would the day ever come when he could say things simply, instead of always hiding behind this literary veil. Why didn’t he write, “I love you, Moéma, I miss you, but I’ll only send you the dough when you’ve proved you’re able to face up to life without having to rely on me …” She immediately realized that didn’t make sense: if that were the case, she wouldn’t be asking him for money, porra! What about: “Give up all these fantasies, Moéma. Grow up, if only for my sake.” That didn’t work either. She had no desire to “grow up,” to be a woman like her mother or like all those adults who progressed step by little step, all buttoned up in their pretension and their certainties. My God, if he knew! she said to herself with an enjoyable shiver of perturbation. A lesbian and a drug addict! Imagining his reaction, she saw herself in her room, with Thaïs, the syringe and all the paraphernalia … and her father arriving without warning. He didn’t say a word but sat down on the bed, beside her, and took her in his arms. Then he stroked her hair, for a long time, and hummed, his mouth closed, with a throaty sound that made his chest resonate like a drum. And there was great comfort in listening to his lullaby, a sweetness that opened all the gates, all her hopes. And then, at the moment when this feeling of accord was at its strongest, her father said:

  “Yes, Madam? I do have other things to do …”

  Caught in her daydream, Moéma had a slight dizzy turn at the counter.

  “Is something wrong? Don’t you feel well?”

  “No, no … I’m sorry,” she said, forcing herself to smile, “I was miles away. I’d like to take out some money.”

  SHE WAS COMING out of the bank when she heard a familiar voice. “Tudo bem?” Roetgen asked, coming over to her.

  “Tudo bom …”

  “You’ve become a stranger … Have you decided to drop out of my course?”

  “No, no, not at all. And if I was going to drop out of a lecturer’s course, it wouldn’t be yours.”

  “So what’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing. I’ve got a few minor personal problems at the moment. And the year’s almost over, isn’t it? There can’t be a lot still going …”

  “That’s true,” Roetgen said with a laugh. “But that’s not a reason for my best student to desert me.” Feeling uncomfortable at not being able to see her eyes, Roetgen took off her glasses. “You know it’s very impolite to keep these on when you’re talking to someone, especially to one of your teachers?”

  He said it in a friendly tone and to tease her a little, and was surprised at the way she shrank back. For a brief moment she seemed so thrown by it, he felt as if he had undressed her. Her big blue eyes looked even stranger than usual; like those of a nocturnal bird suddenly exposed to the full sunlight, they had fixed in a disturbingly vacant and terrified expression.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she said in a harsh voice. “We haven’t slept together as far as I know.”

  Roetgen felt himself blush to the roots of his hair. “You must excuse me,” he said awkwardly, “I don’t know what came over me. But it’s a pity to hide such pretty eyes.”

  “Oh, these Frenchmen, they’re all the same,” Moéma said, smiling at his embarrassment.

  “Don’t think that or you could come in for some unpleasant surprises.” Then, with a glance at the clock on the bank, “Oh là, là, I’m going to be late, I must be off. By the way, there’s an event at the German Cultural Institute this evening, d’you feel like coming? We could have a chat …”

  “All this organized stuff’s just a pain in the ass, nothing but speeches and youth-club entertainment.”

  “This time it’ll be different. You don’t know Andreas, he really wants to get things moving. But if the students don’t come, there’s no point.”

  “I’ll see.”

  “Great. See you this evening then, I hope.”

  Roetgen was what in Brazil is called a profesor visitante, that is, a lecturer on a fixed-term contract within an exchange with a foreign university. A recent graduate—he was almost the same age as his students—with a passionate enthusiasm for the ethnology of the Nordeste, he had come to Fortaleza during the year to give a series of seminars on the “methodology of observation in rural areas.” Somewhat shy and reserved, he had made friends with Andreas Haekner, the director of the German Cultural Institute. And since they were always seen together, the rumor had gone around that they had unmentionable feelings for each other. Moéma laughed with the others at the stream of innuendo the sight of Roetgen could set off, without, however, having seen any signs that would indicate a tendency to homosexuality. He wasn’t one of the family, as she put it, and if by some unlikely chance she was wrong, it was truly a pity for Brazilian women.

  GETTING OFF THE bus at the sea front, just opposite the side street where Thaïs lived, Moéma stopped for a moment. Transformed by her tinted glasses, the Atlantic looked like a lake of molten gold fringed with coconut trees made of tin and leather.

  “They should force people to wear dark glasses,” she said, parting the bead curtain that led directly into Thaïs’s main room. “It might help them use their imagination properly …”

  From the mattress and the cushions they were lounging on, Virgilio, Pablo and Thaïs applauded her assertion. As she joined them Thaïs gave her a querying look. Moéma reassured her with a wink: she’d got the money.

  “Maconheiros!” Moéma said, making a deliberate show of sniffing the air. “You’ve been smoking, you bastards.”

  “We were smoking,” Pablo said with a roguish grin. He turned his right hand so that the palm was facing her and showed her the joint he was holding between his thumb and forefinger. “Would you like some?”

  “I wouldn’t say no,” Moéma said, delicately taking the spliff from him.

  When she’d finished inhaling the smoke from inside her hands cupped around her face, Virgilio couldn’t wait to show her the first issue of the journal he’d been boring them with for several weeks. Its title, with its Shakespearean allusion—Tupí or not Tupí—referred to the Tupí-Guaraní, natives “unsuitable for work” whom the conquistadores had systematically massacred then replaced with slaves brought from Africa. The pamphlet was not particularly large, but it was properly printed and had numerous black-and-white illustrations. In his editorial entitled O indio não é bicho (“The Indian isn’t an animal”), Virgilio set out the aims of the little group around him: to protect the Indians of Brazil—those of Amazonia as well as those of the Mato Grosso—from extermination; to defend their culture, their customs and their territories from invasion by the industrialized world; to assert their history as the best way for Brazilians to resist the takeover of their country by the great powers. This wide-ranging program embraced all the popular cultures of the interior, which had inherited, according to Virgilio, the customs of the indigenous tribes and also included an active defense of the language and oral traditions of Brazil.

  “So what do you think of it?” Virgilio asked, a little anxiously. His thin face covered in acne did him no favors, but he had doelike eyes behind the lenses of his little gold-rimmed glasses. Moéma had a very high opinion of him.

  “Fantastic! I never thought you’d actually get it out. It’s brilliant, Virgilio, something to be proud of.”

  “You must write an article for the next issue. I’ve already got ten subscriptions, not bad for the first day, eh?”

  “And I make eleven. You must tell me how much I owe you.” Then, leafing through the journal, she went on, “The paper on the Xingu tattoos is great. Who is this Sanchez Labrador?”

  “Me,” said Virgilio in apologetic tones. “Also Ignacio Valladolid, Angel Perralta, et cetera. I did everything, including the
drawings. You know how it is, you get promised lots of articles, but when the time comes, no one’s to be found. Of course, now the first issue’s out, I’m snowed under with offers. It makes me sick. People really are unreliable.”

  “That’s true,” said Thaïs as she burned her fingers on the tiny butt from which she was trying to take one last puff.

  “If you want,” Moéma said, “I could do something on the Kadiwéu. We took them as an example this year to study the concept of endorsement. Did you know that they feel responsible for everything, even the sun rising?”

  “Christ, the fools!” said Pablo, bursting into laughter. “I don’t envy them …” Then, seeing Moéma’s furious look, “OK, OK. If you can’t even take a joke! I know nothing about all that old stuff.”

  “Well you ought to make an effort. It’s the present that’s at stake, your present. Every time a tree disappears, an Indian dies; and every time an Indian dies it’s the whole of Brazil that becomes a bit more ignorant, that is, a bit more American. And it’s precisely because there are thousands like you, who couldn’t care less, that the process continues.”

  “Oh, come on, I was only joking …”

  “So was I,” Moéma snapped.

  “You always have to get on your high horse whenever we start talking about Indians. You’re getting tedious, sweetheart, you really are.”

  “OK, that’s enough you two,” said Virgilio in conciliatory tones. “That doesn’t get us anywhere. While you’re getting in each other’s hair our dear president has sold a part of Amazonia the size of the Netherlands to a Texas mining company.”

  “How big is the Netherlands?” Thaïs asked, her speech slurred by the cannabis.

  “Roughly the size of Ceará.”

  “A mining company!” Moéma said in disgust, her whole body racked by a wave of anger.