He’d started drinking with Dietlev and Milton, some time before the meal when the two came down to join him in the saloon. Relaxed, smiling, a glass of aperitif in his hand, Dietlev had inquired about the piranha soup. Herman had noted their submission. Without showing the ill feeling he still harbored, nor his pride in having made them submit so quickly, he’d ordered the stupid Indian to prepare their meager catch then amused himself by explaining the supposed virtues of the soup to Milton. When she came with Mauro, Elaine had asked him nicely for a caipirinha, signalling that she too was determined to forget their recent altercation. In the course of the meal she had even consented to take a sip of the much-vaunted soup and even went so far as to make a complimentary remark about its taste. This ultimate sign of goodwill would almost have mollified him if it hadn’t been for Mauro’s sympathetic look: the snotty-nosed kid was sorry for her because she had to swallow such an affront. Comedia, comediante! They were all mocking him … Seething with rage, he dreamt of the nasty things in his vengeance he would mete out to these shits one by one.
He’d make Yurupig eat his own balls, then he’d throw him to the piranhas, since he was so fond of them. As for Elaine, that would be longer, more complicated … like what he’d seen done to that activist tart, in the good old days of the dictatorship. The cops had taken her out of the van and dragged her off to the Tavarez brothers’ piggery, on the edge of the town. Damned patriots, they were, real varones, with some real meat inside their trousers! If there’d been a few more of their kind, Brazil would never have become this country of beggars and queers. It’d be like Chile … you should see how things worked down there! The Switzerland of South America. Everyone kept their nose clean, everything worked. Even their wine was great … When she went in, the girl had insulted them. They locked the door and got their cocks out.
“Get your clothes off, slut! First of all we’re going to fuck you up the ass to teach you some manners, then you’re going to suck us all off, we’re going to put gallons in your tank. Maybe that’ll make you think before talking crap like that.” She’d started to blubber, standing there, surrounded by the guys. She was shit-scared, the stupid bitch, she implored them, but they put a gun to her head and she’d no choice but to do everything they wanted. Everything. You have to give it to them, they carried out their program to the letter! She screamed, she cried, and they screwed her every which way, and the cachaça flowed—it was ages since they’d had such fucking fun!
Herman closed his eyes tight, concentrating on the visions of horror that were piling up inside his head. He would never forget that girl’s face, but Elaine’s replaced it, fading in and sometimes getting bigger until it filled his whole field of vision. He could see her trembling all over, like the other woman, begging them on her knees, her body filthy, with the swellings from the kicks and cigarette burns. And he lay back, happy just to watch and insult her, inventing new humiliations, new abuses, giving free rein to fantasies from the deepest cesspit of human nature. That would teach her to come and piss people off with her little ass and her film-star tits, shaking it all about as if it were nothing, while talking about her stupid fossils. The other had been just the same, a stuck-up little bitch going on about her “democracy,” her high-falutin ideas, but she let the bastards of her own kind screw her. Mauro’s type, precisely … Long hair, nothing in his pants but goes around shoving his opinions down real men’s throats. That one could wait, with his nancy-boy looks and his bloody Walkman thump-thumping all the time … djim boom boom … djim boom boom … It was enough to drive you mad.
She’d made less of a fuss when Waldemar brought the dog. It was even more excited than the guys, the Doberman was. It had a huge erection, as if it had been trained for that. The cops had tied the girl up in the pigsty with a damned neat system that kept her on all fours, her arms behind her back, legs apart, and there was a thing on her eyes, like they put on pigs when they cut their throats. She was begging them to kill her … There always came a point where they preferred death to all the rest, even to the hope of escaping; that was when it became interesting. And while the dog was screwing her, while she was half suffocating, her mouth and nose in the shit, they’d jerked off on her again. After that, when they’d got fed up with sticking anything they happened to find up her cunt, with pissing on her and whipping her with barbed wire, they’d stopped to have a smoke. No one had any idea how long they’d been there. “Do you know how they kill jaguars without damaging their skin? D’you know that, you cow?” one of the Tavarez brothers asked, the one-eyed one, the one who’d caught the pox in a brothel in Recife. “They trap them alive then stick a white-hot poker up their backside. It hisses, it sizzles, it smells like a churrasco. It’s a beautiful sight …”
He’d started heating the barrel of his hunting rifle right in front of her—a Springfield double-trigger rifle! He must’ve been bombed out of his skull to do that … and he stuck it up her socialist asshole, forcing it as far as he could. Then he calmly fired his two shots—buckshot. After that they all went off to bed. But he’d still had the strength to fuck his negress till the evening. The socialist comrade had ended up in the Tavarez’s lime kiln, no one had come to ask any questions, it was as if she’d never existed. It would be the same for Elaine, exactly the same … As for the others, he wasn’t bothered about them. A bullet in the head, two for Mauro and auf Wiedersehen, Johnny …
Herman shivered. Drenched in sweat, his shirt was sticking to the metal partition. Visions of snow-covered landscapes and battlefields overcame him without warning … abandoning the Mauthausen concentration camp before the Russians arrived, the collapse, the blackish corpses frozen to the road … then all the months in captivity in Warsaw, sick with fear, in the sheet-metal huts the cold made ring like old U-boat hulls. Sobs came, choking him until it hurt in the back of his throat. The images suddenly blurred and from a particular flush on his cheeks, an intolerable feeling of remorse and self-pity, he knew that Esther’s face was going to return to torment him and that neither alcohol nor hate would keep the night free from his recurring nightmare.
Eléazard’s notebooks
IF KIRCHER CLAIMS TO BELIEVE IN the existence of giants, it’s solely so as not to contradict Saint Augustine: one couldn’t cast doubt on the words of one of the fathers of the Church without casting doubt on the Church herself, etc. Willful blindness and lies, comparable on all points with those of Marr or Lysenko in other fields. It’s this kind of terrorism that religions or ideologies lead to that makes me want to puke. Take up the question with Loredana …
REPEATING SIMPLE FACTS: that religion is the opium of the people, the hard drug that for six thousand years has stopped all the pricks from rising up and confronting heaven; that Jesus, the man with the nails—that criminal from a Western kingdom during the Han period as Chinese scholars of the seventeenth century called him, outraged at seeing such a scoundrel deified—has laced our drinks with bromide forever and ever; that our civilization is dying from having learned to feel sorry for itself, to give positive value to defeat and its victims.
THAT WE MUST RETURN to the sources of the sacrifice, to the perception of the right moment and of a balanced relationship with the world. Reinvent the crudest paganism and deny the defixio that nails our penises to the lead curse tablets of the graveyards. That a religion founded on the decaying carcass of a crucified man will inevitably have a worm-eaten view of the world.
A GOLIATH COMPLEX: the giant of Holy Scripture only exists in relationship to David, he is only strong and gigantic so he can die at the hand of the small, weak man. Merely to name any being or object Goliath will of necessity bring the David into the world who will do away with him or it. By its name alone the Titanic was destined to go down with all hands.
FROM A TRIBUTE TO JOËL SCHERK: “How could a beautiful theory be false?” The danger of symmetry and simplicity as arbiters of elegance. Since it’s beautiful, it’s true: a theory of everything or a metaphysical ragbag? If beauty consists of
economizing on concepts, why should asymmetry or complexity be incapable of that? The fact that we find economy of means more satisfying than profusion doesn’t mean it has a greater truth value.
ALL THAT REMAINS of the astronomical observations made by Kircher is the crater that bears his name today. A rut on the surface of the Moon.
LOREDANA TALKING TO HEIDEGGER: “How’s things, you funny old bird?” Her eyes, her Ferdinand Knopff smile. My conjuring tricks seem to work.
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE nineteenth century, at the moment when Egypt became a target for conquest, Buonaparte’s scholars recalled Kircher’s fanciful conjectures. “For the first time, I entered the archives of science and the arts,” Vivant Denon wrote after the discovery of the temple of Dendera. With hindsight, it looks as if the sole purpose of the Egyptian expedition was to unearth the Rosetta Stone and with it the supposed origin of Western Christian wisdom.
“AMONG THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF OCCULTISM” wrote Dr. Papus, “a very special mention is due to Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit who was clever enough to get his works printed by the Vatican; on the pretext of attacking occultism, he gave a very full account of it.” Off the mark, but symptomatic—one charlatan recognizing another. Kircher’s outdated hermeticism, his assertions on the initiatory meaning of the hieroglyphs, his taste for the fantastic, the extraordinary, the mysterious establish esotericism well before Court de Gébelin or Eliphas Levi.
CREDULITY: Against religion, astrology, spiritualism and other twaddle, those varieties of stupidity in which the minds of our contemporaries continue to take refuge.
ARREST OF FRANÇOIS DE SUS: “Condemned to have his hand cut off, then his head, for having, with evil intent, struck a paper crucifix with a dagger two or three times … The same for a Jew for having poured a pot full of piss on a cross that a Christian was carrying in a procession.”
THE ARREST OF ESTIENNE ROCHETTE: “Condemned to the strappado then strangulation and then his body to be burned and his ashes scattered outside said church, for having broken the arms of two or three statues of saints in the church of Saint Julian in Pommiers en Forez.”
IF A BELIEVER FEELS INSULTED because the statue of his god has been mocked, it is at best because he still has doubts about whether his god exists, at worst because he’s stupid enough to identify with him. But when he finds weapons to avenge this offense in the laws of a society, or in going against them, that makes him into a sworn enemy, a wild beast to be locked in a cage.
KIRCHER IS A PERVERSE POLYMATH … He devotes himself to the encyclopedia. An attempt to enumerate the universe. Analogical technique: the whole is contained in each part, as in holograms.
FLYING VISIT TO QUIXADÁ: The night in the monastery of São Esteban, the room where President Castello Branco spent his last night before the airplane accident that wiped him off the surface of the earth once and for all. The pretty nun who showed me all the objects that had been faithfully kept, his sandals, the candle, the bar of soap, the last chair he sat in, the last sheets, covered in transparent plastic, etc. Without having any idea that there was only one thing I wanted: to screw her there, beneath the portrait of Saint Ignatius.
SPALLANZANI: he put trousers on frogs and proved that they had to copulate together to reproduce …
THE WIT OF HINDSIGHT: What I ought to have said to Loredana: “Liu Ling often gave himself up to wine. Free and in high spirits, he would get undressed and walk around his house naked. To those who came to see him and rebuked him for it, he would reply, “I take the sky and the earth for my house and my house for my trousers. What do you think you are doing, Mademoiselle, coming into my trousers like that?”
CHAPTER 7
In which Kircher tames swordfish & the difficulties that led to …
WE FINALLY RETURNED to Palermo, where Kircher was received with great honor. His feat at Syracuse was on everyone’s lips, with the result that all the academies in the town were vying with each other to have him speak to them. He took up his courses at the university again, tackling all subjects as they were suggested to him. In particular he showed how many hairs each man could have on his head—not more than 186,624 for the most fortunate, less than half that for the majority—& that if it was easy to imagine an infinite number by using addition, it was much more difficult, on the other hand, to imagine a similar number using division, for if one accepted that a hair could be divided infinitely, then one would also have to accept that the whole was less than the sum of its parts …
When an old Sicilian scholar rebuked Kircher for his propensity to count hairs & to divide them by four, Athanasius shut him up by reminding him that a good Christian should not be afraid to imitate Divine Providence & that there was nothing on earth or in the heavens that was so tiny or so vile that it did not merit profound speculation. And if the gentleman would like to come to Rome, he would show him, thanks to a magnifying glass of his own invention, how one could enlarge a hair until it looked like a tree, with branches & roots, & how understanding this phenomenon alone merited several whole books. Kircher had won over his audience & the old scholar was left without a leg to stand on.
My master also commented on the assertion of Father Pétau & others that God had started to create the world on October 27 of the year 3488 before Christ, at eight hours and forty-seven seconds after midnight, demonstrating with ease by examining radically different theories about the day & the year that it was presumptuous to decide on that date &, by extension, on that of the Apocalypse.
The Prince of Palagonia had come to attend my master’s lessons again, together with the Duke of Hesse & people of standing in the town. There were various rumors circulating about him & scandalmongers wasted no time in accusing him of the seven deadly sins. They claimed the prince, being of a very jealous nature, kept his wife captive & that his palace was more like a castle inhabited by demons than a true Christian residence. We were also told of various fads that made him sound brain damaged but we paid no heed to them. The prince, like my master, was courtesy itself &, indeed, appeared to be more intelligent and cultivated than most of his fellow citizens. It was, therefore, with pleasure that Athanasius agreed to go & stay with him when he repeated his invitation for Christmas 1637.
There were a few days left before the date appointed by the Prince of Palagonia, when my master, in his insatiable curiosity, decided to cross the sea to Messina. The rector of the university having told him that the fishermen of the district used a certain song to tame the swordfish & thus lead them toward the net, Kircher was absolutely determined to verify this marvel for himself. My reservations, dictated by my fear of seasickness & of Turcoman pirates, had no effect whatsoever; there was nothing for it but to yield to his whim.
I will pass over the details of our crossing to get to the moment when we reached the fishing grounds, marked out by some buoys. Once our boat had anchored, we transferred to one of the six small boats we had been towing, the one belonging to the raïs or captain. He was the only one, we later established, who had the ability to formulate the magic words that attract the fish. The sailors began to row & we had not gone a quarter of a mile when the raïs started to sing. It was an uninterrupted melodic line, sad & haunting, following the cadences of the oars & the rowers’ responses. As soon as the song started, Kircher leant over the gunwale to observe the depths & soon he grasped my arm insistently to force me to look: under the water, which was clear & transparent as crystal, I saw a number of large, silvery fish, moving along slowly, keeping up with our boat. It was such a magnificent spectacle that I did not tire of watching it … As for my master, he feverishly started to note down the marvelous song. After some time, silence suddenly fell. Looking up—Kircher from his notebook, I from the depths of the sea—we were surprised to see that all the little vessels were gathered in a wide circle. The sailors had stopped rowing, they were drawing in a vast net rhythmically, pulling it up foot by foot. The captain began a new song to encourage the fishermen in their exertions & from the way the nets slop
ed toward the center of the circle, I realized it was a huge pocket in which the fish were now caught.
The bottom of the net was soon horizontal below the surface: tuna and swordfish, half out of their element, were making the sea boil with their wild thrashing. I was wondering how the fishermen would get them on board, when they secured the net, to keep it in place, & grasped strong pikes that ended in broad hooks. The raïs intoned a third song, the solemn poignancy of which, chanted like a Dies irae, accorded fully with the slaughter that ensued.
Retching with revulsion, I observed Kircher. His eyes bulging, his hair dishevelled, spattered with blood & water, he was deeply affected by the carnage. I could sense that his every nerve was tingling, & looking at his broad hands gripping the side of the boat, I saw the knuckles go white.
“Pray for my soul, Caspar,” he murmured abruptly, “& stop me if I ever pick up one of those pikes.”
Convinced my master was tempted to berate the men for their cruelty, I gathered all my strength to beg the Lord to protect him &, thanks be to Heaven & perhaps to my prayers, Kircher did not yield to the impulse. Fortunately, for I would hardly have been able to hold him back & save him from eternal damnation given the wretched state I was in.
When all the fish down to the very last one were on board, we climbed back onto the ship & set sail for Messina. Once there, we embarked again almost immediately & it was only when we saw the splendid cliffs above Palermo that my master finally unclenched his teeth.
“Caspar, my friend, you have seen me in a very delicate situation & I will make confession about it to my superiors as soon as we are back in Rome, but before that I am anxious to explain to you what happened. That will perhaps help me to dissipate the shadows clouding my mind …”
Where Tigers Are at Home Page 16