Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

She still refused to go into detail about her own life and her reasons for being in Alcântara—and he had no desire to know more than she wanted to tell him—but proved to be inexhaustible on everything concerning China, a subject on which she had profound and first-hand knowledge. She had conscientiously set about reading Schott’s manuscript, in small doses and, as he understood it, more to satisfy her curiosity about him than about Athanasius Kircher. She told him her thoughts about it and emphasized the difficulties she came across, which allowed Eléazard to refine his notes or even to add a comment on certain passages he had not considered worth dwelling on. Without her he would never have thought it necessary to explain to a potential reader the scourge the Thirty Years’ War had been nor how exotic the simple discovery of Italy had been in the seventeenth century. It came to the point where he was writing his notes purely for her, not giving the matter final approval until it had been tempered by her comments.

  For all that their rapport was something of a miracle, it still remained a provisional pact. Eléazard refused to see the problem from that point of view; he made sparing use of it, with the happiness it brought, as if it would last forever. Afterward he was to reproach himself for not having taken full advantage of what he knew from the start was to be a short-lived encounter.

  He had told her so much about Euclides, his only friend in the area, that she had agreed in principle to meet him. That morning, however, when he wanted to take Loredana to lunch at the doctor’s, neither Alfredo nor Soledade knew where she was. Eléazard had taken the ferry to São Luís with a feeling of irritation that even he eventually saw as both absurd and excessive.

  “I ASSURE YOU the man’s perfectly well mannered. A touch rustic, perhaps. Lacking good taste for certain, but that’s more widespread than anything throughout the world and I would say you couldn’t pride yourself on being the opposite without demonstrating a smugness that is even worse.”

  Eléazard looked doubtful.

  “Yes, I know, I know,” Dr. Euclides went on with a smile. “He’s not really a left-winger, that’s what’s putting you off, isn’t it?”

  “That’s going beyond euphemism, doctor, it’s sarcasm,” Eléazard said, smiling too. “And you’re probably right, I can’t see what I could do if I visited a man like that except insult him right in the middle of the party.”

  “Oh, come now … You’re far too well brought up to indulge in anything so foolish. Just remember I’m asking you as a favor. You can believe me when I say from experience that you won’t regret it; it’s a very instructive milieu, especially for a journalist. And if my company alone isn’t enough, bring your fair Italian, at least it’ll give me the opportunity of meeting her …”

  Eléazard watched the doctor as he took off his pince-nez and cleaned them meticulously on an immaculate handkerchief. Without the magnifying lenses, which made them look unnaturally large, grotesque, like some joke spectacles, his almond-green eyes suddenly revealed their great humanity once more. They had a cheerful look without showing any sign of the amaurosis—Ah, morose is he! Amoroso … a nice name, don’t you think, for the atrophy of the optic nerve—that would soon dim their light entirely. Euclides never combed his hair except with his hand; his thick, unruly gray hair, in a fairly short crew cut, stuck out in all directions, giving the impression of being constantly blown about by invisible gusts of wind. His perfectly straight nose contrasted with a tousled mustache and goatee, yellowed by the tar from his Egyptian cigarettes; the whiskers concealed his mouth and moved mechanically when he spoke, as on a puppet’s face. Chubby without being fat, he always wore dark suits, made to measure, a starched white shirt and a sort of four-leaved bow tie; Eléazard wondered where he managed to get such an old-fashioned item of neckwear. The only extravagance he allowed himself in his dress was in his choice of vests, luxurious accessories with facings embroidered in silk or gold thread, with buttons of mother-of-pearl, marcasite or even delicate enameled miniatures; he had an impressive collection of them. For the rest he possessed an affability à la Flaubert—at least such as his devotees ascribe to him—combined with an unfailing calmness and courtesy. His encyclopedic and perceptive erudition was fascinating.

  “You will be my eyes,” he said, replacing his pince-nez on the hollow the glasses had dug out on the bridge of his nose. “The young eyes of an aging Milton on the decrepitude of this world. O loss of sight, worse than chains, or beggary, or decrepit age!” he said in impeccable English. “A living death, myself my sepulchre.” Or something like that, isn’t it? You must find me very pretentious, comparing myself with such a great poet, but at least we share the same disease and that’s something, you must agree.”

  “How is your sight doing at the moment?” Eléazard said, with a smile at the roguish twinkle in his eye.

  “It’s fine, don’t worry. I can still manage to read, more or less accurately, and that’s the only thing that matters. It’s not the darkness that worries me.” He gathered his thoughts for a moment, eyes closed. Then, pointing to the shelves covering two large walls of the room up to the ceiling, he said, “It’s the silence, their silence … I couldn’t bear it, you know.” He stifled a laugh. “Fortunately I’ve lost my faith, otherwise I might think it was punishment from Bigbeard for what I’ve done. Just think, that would really be real hell, wouldn’t it?”

  Eléazard found it difficult to imagine how Dr. Da Cunha could have been a Jesuit, even in his young days, so far the person smiling before him was from the image we have of a man of the cloth. There was, of course, his biblical knowledge, so rare among laymen, and the fact that he was perfectly at ease with Latin and Greek, but that was not enough to distinguish him from a good teacher of classical languages.

  “One day,” Eléazard said, “you must tell me why you left the profession …” Immediately he tried to correct himself, embarrassed by the unfortunate choice of word. “That is, I mean …”

  “No, you put it very well,” Euclides broke in. “The ‘profession,’ it’s the only word that can take account of the faith—that of a certain Savoyard vicar, if you see what I mean—and the occupation itself, which is too often just a job rather than a state.” He lit a cigarette after having carefully taken it out of his box. “Have I really left it?” he wondered in sincere tones. “I’m still asking myself that. Do you know what word the Jesuits use to describe one of their order who has renounced his vows? They say he has become a ‘satellite,’ by which they mean that despite himself he remains in orbit around the Society, in a trajectory in which the forces of repulsion are in equilibrium with an attraction that he will never manage to eliminate. One doesn’t leave the Society, one moves a greater or lesser distance away without ceasing, basically, to belong to it. And I have to admit that there is some truth in that way of looking at things. One can escape from slavery, although with difficulty, but never from several years of domestication; and that is what it is: training the body and the mind with one aim in view, obedience. So ‘to disobey,’ you know … Under those conditions the word doesn’t make much sense. All it expresses is a mere temporary rejection of the law, a digression to be condemned, true, but that is remissible within the body of obedience itself. And if you think about it, you will have to admit that it’s more or less the same for everyone. Breaking a rule, all the rules, always comes back to choosing new rules, that is, to returning to the bosom of obedience. You have the feeling you are liberating yourself, profoundly changing your being, when all you have done is to change your master. You know, the snake biting its own tail.”

  “Certain masters are more demanding than others, aren’t they?”

  “I agree, my friend, and I do not regret for one second the decision I made at a certain point in my life. I am the better for it in all respects, believe me. But if it is easier to follow laws one has freely chosen—and the very possibility of that choice is far from being as obvious as it seems—the fact remains that they imply submission, obedience, which is all the more dangerous for seeming less res
trictive. I think it was Étienne de La Boétie—in fact, I’m sure it was,” he said, correcting himself with a wink—“who spoke of ‘voluntary servitude’ to castigate the submission of the nations to the tyranny of a single man. But in his argument in favor of freedom, he distinguishes between serving and obeying, that is, between the, to his mind, reprehensible subjection of a serf to his lord and the obedience of a free man to a just government. It is a distinction I have never been able to embrace myself, despite my sympathy for the man. Even when accepted of one’s own free will, and perhaps even more because of that illusion of freedom, all obedience remains servile, humiliating and, more importantly to my mind, sterile. Yes, sterile … The older I grow, the more I am convinced that revolt is the only genuine free and, accordingly, poetic act. It is insubordination that brings about progress in the world because it and it alone produces the poets, the creators, the naughty boys who refuse to obey a code, a state, an ideology, a technique, whatever … to obey anything that presents itself as the ultimate, as the indisputable and infallible outcome of an age.”

  Euclides took a long draw on his cigarette and then, in a cloud of the smoke that was recognizable among all others from its scent of honey and cloves, went on:

  “If there is a concept we ought to analyze a bit more before jettisoning it, as we have done with such haste and relief, it is that of ‘permanent revolution.’ It’s an idea I would prefer to call ‘criticism’ or ‘permanent rebellion’ to avoid the circularity inherent in the first term.”

  Eléazard never loved the old doctor so much as when he poured out his innate anarchism. He saw in it an innocence, a humanism and a youthful spirit that would have seemed exemplary in anyone but were even more so in a man of his age.

  “I didn’t know you had Maoist sympathies,” he said in a jocular tone. Then, more seriously, he went on, “I’ve often thought about the same question myself, but I cannot see an idea that has caused millions of deaths as other than suspect, to say the least.”

  “And that is where you are wrong,” Euclides said, feeling for the ashtray on the table. “It isn’t ideas that kill, it’s men, certain men who manipulate others in the name of an ideal that they consciously betray, and sometimes without even realizing it. All ideas are criminal the moment we persuade ourselves they are absolutely true and set about making everyone share them. Christianity itself—and what could be more inoffensive than the love of one’s fellow man?—Christianity alone is responsible for more deaths than lots of other theories that, on the face of it, are more suspect. But the fault is entirely that of the Christians and not of Christianity! Of those who transformed what ought to have remained just an impulse of the heart into a sectarian doctrine … No, my friend, an idea has never hurt anyone. It is only the truth that kills. And the most murderous truth is certainly one that claims to be rigorously worked out. Metaphysics and politics in the same basket and let’s add the scientistic creed or that smug, blasé despair that nowadays justifies the worst excesses …”

  Every time Eléazard had a discussion with him there came a point where the old man shook him, less by his arguments, however, than by the vehemence with which he put them forward. Without sharing his view of the world, he always ended up yielding to its magnetism, its cold, enduring force.

  “But what a doddering old fart I am,” Euclides said, extricating himself from his armchair with difficulty, “I didn’t even think to get us a glass of cognac. Give me two minutes and I’ll rectify that.”

  It was no use Eléazard protesting, the doctor hurried off to get the necessary from the room where they had had lunch not long before. While he was away the library took on a new, disturbing quality, as if all the books, all the comfortable, old-fashioned bric-à-brac scattered around, had only been waiting to make it clear to the visitor that he was an intruder. The somber light, deliberately maintained by keeping the Venetian blinds closed, so fresh and friendly when emphasizing Euclides’s slow gestures, now seemed aggressive, surly, Cerberus-like in protecting its master’s solitude.

  Situated not far from the Rosary Church, in the seedy part of São Luís, Euclides da Cunha’s house was no different from the other run-down dwellings reeking of boredom and cellars, whose colonial style gave the Rua do Egyto its old-fashioned charm. Eléazard was only acquainted with the hall, which, being very long and having a huge number of chairs neatly arranged along the walls, each with its crocheted antimacassar over the back, resembled nothing more than a waiting room; the library, even more spacious but made to seem cramped by the dark, brocade hangings, the rocking chairs, the heavy neo-Gothic sideboards topped by mirrors, the pedestal tables, the ornate vases, succulent plants, they, too, old-fashioned by mimicry, dusty fans and daguerro-types of old, chubby-cheeked babies and old folk mesmerized by the lens; and the dining room, smaller but that too cluttered up with the stifling hotchpotch aping the fine linen of bourgeois households of the previous century.

  “Ignore this ghastly stuff,” Euclides had said the first time I visited him, “it’s my mother’s world rather than mine. She made me promise to keep it the way it is until she dies and, as you will have noticed, the dear lady is still alive and kicking. Nothing has changed here since I was a child, which, paradoxically, has helped me become aware of my own evolution: as a boy I adored the décor here, I idealized it to the point where I saw it as the ultimate yardstick of aesthetic quality; as I grew up my eyes opened to its sad reality, I came to hate it as the very mark of bad taste—of course, all I was cursing was my transition to adulthood—and then one day I stopped judging, with the result that this ugliness has become familiar, precious to me, and now that it has merged into the mist with the rest of the world, indispensable …”

  Dr. da Cunha’s mother was a very old lady, tiny, bent, dry and twisted as a tree in the Sertão. She was always the one who welcomed Eléazard with a few kind words, made him sit in the hall and insisted he drank a glass of tamarind juice, without which she would have departed from the laws of hospitality. Then she would show him into the library before disappearing into the progressive darkness of a corridor. For all Eléazard knew, she looked after the house on her own, watching over her son like a nun attached to a holy man.

  Hearing the clink of glasses falter in the other room, Eléazard got up to go and help his host.

  “That’s kind of you, thank you,” Euclides said, allowing Eléazard to relieve him of the tray. “I took rather a long time, but my mother absolutely insisted you try her angel’s sighs. It’s a great honor, even I don’t get them every day, you know.”

  They sat down on their sofa again. “Look,” said Euclides, “while you’re seeing to the drinks, I’ll play you a little piece, the score of which I received the other day. If you can guess the compose …”

  “If I guess the composer?” Eléazard asked as Euclides walked slowly over to the piano.

  “You won’t guess it anyway,” he said with a laugh. “But if you should guess it, I’ll put you on an interesting track. Yes indeed, very interesting …”

  Without further ado he lifted the lid of the old Kriegelstein and started to play.

  From the outset Eléazard was surprised by the odd repetitive, staccato rhythm the left hand produced in the low register. When the melody came on top of this strange bass, he very quickly recognized the loose-limbed rhythm of the tango, but a tango that was off beat, retarded, almost parodistic in the way it prolonged the wait, exaggerated the syncopated panting of the music. One, two, three, drowning, oh fan-tastic, yes, two, three, four, a trip to asphyxia … The words emerged, bursting on his lips like bubbles. Sick at heart, sadness weary and profound … Euclides at his keyboard adjusting the slow motion of the stars, regulating it, setting it up for other demands.

  Without being a virtuoso, Euclides played somewhat better than the average amateur—several times Eléazard had heard him give a very decent interpretation of the more difficult pieces of The Well-Tempered Clavier or certain sonatas by Villa-Lobos that were equally
difficult—but it was the first time he had shown such an ability to overturn the secret order of things in his playing. When the piece stopped on a harsh chord, immediately damped, Eléazard had that feeling of sudden disorientation that we sometimes get on waking after the first night in a strange bedroom.

  “Well?” Euclides said, coming back to sit beside him. “As expected, I give up. It’s very beautiful, genuinely very beautiful …”

  “Stravinsky, opus 26. There are certain little pieces like that, beyond categorization like all true masterpieces, that defy understanding. Another time I’ll let you hear what Albéniz or Ginastera managed in the same vein. But have one of these delicious treats,” he said, offering Eléazard the plate of little cakes he’d brought. “They’re very special, something between a host and a meringue, but with orange-flower flavor. Their taste almost matches their pretty name.” Then, without transition, he went on, “Since I’m a decent fellow, although you failed the test lamentably, I’m still going to alert you to the fact that Governor Moreira is preparing something. I don’t know exactly what, but it’s a bit fishy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some people are going around buying up the whole of the Alcântara peninsula, even the uncultivated parts and the properties that don’t bring anything in. I have good reason to believe that it’s Moreira who is behind the various intermediaries carrying out the operation.”

  “But why would he do something like that?” Eléazard asked, suddenly interested.

  “That, my friend, is up to you to discover.” There was a glint of malice in his eyes as he added, “When you accompany me to the Fazenda do Boi, for example.”

  FAZENDA DO BOI: Alcântara International Resort

  “Good. I’ll read that again: Governor José Moreira da Rocha and his wife request the pleasure of the company of—then a blank space, and please allow plenty of room, there’s nothing more annoying than having to squeeze something in between two words—at a reception they are giving on the 28th of April, from seven o’clock onward. Fazenda do Boi and the usual address … Yes, a hundred. Someone will come to collect them tomorrow afternoon. Thank you … Goodbye.”