Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  Eléazard reappeared with two glasses and a bottle of champagne. He was accompanied by an amused waiter carrying a tray with enough to satisfy their appetite and more.

  “Ah, there you are, ‘the beautiful Italian who’s dying of thirst,’ ” he said putting the plates on the table. “Help yourself, miss, there’s everything you need,” adding, with a wink in the direction of the bottle, “I’ve put three others on the side, just in case …”

  “Thanks again, rapaz. And don’t let them push you around,” said Eléazard, slipping a banknote into the boy’s pocket. “They’re white, but it’s because they’re shit-scared.”

  “You’re one of a kind,” said the waiter, bursting out laughing. “I’ve never seen any like you before.” With conspiratorial look, he pretended to sew up his mouth, gave them another wink and went back to the buffet.

  “You know him?” Loredana asked, surprised and amused by the little scene.

  “For all of ten minutes. I got to know him behind the buffet table.”

  “And what did you say to him to get all this?”

  “Oh, not much. A lot of good things about you, and a load of obscene things about the old fogeys around us. But I was preaching to the converted, he and his pals had already noticed you; if you must know, they think you’ve got curves in all the right places, you’re something else and not the least bit of a prude …”

  “You’re making it up.”

  “Not at all. They don’t miss a thing, you know. It’s a matter of practice. Those are the people—I mean the assistants, the café waiters, barmaids—for a psychological assessment of our world, they know more about it than anyone else.”

  “You can add the check-out women in the big stores, hairdressers, grocers, doctors, priests … it all adds up to quite a few ‘experts’ at the end of the day. A few too many, perhaps?”

  “Not at all,” Eléazard objected with a smile. “I agree about the doctors; they even have one advantage over barmen in that they don’t just lay bare their patients’ secrets but actually strip them naked. Ask Euclides and you’ll see. Nudity has the same effect as alcohol, it produces a state of intoxication that encourages confession, a mental and linguistic brazenness analogous to the body’s lack of modesty. The priests have missed the boat; if they’d compelled their flock to enter the confessional drunk and naked, they wouldn’t have had to yield their prerogatives. The dimmest of waiters or doctors know more about their fellow citizens than the most charismatic of confessors. The psychoanalysts have got the right idea, but they stopped halfway. They put their clients on a couch to encourage them to speak, but they really ought to make them strip.”

  “Come on,” Loredana broke in, “open the bottle instead of talking rubbish.”

  “It’s not rubbish,” Eléazard said, doing as she asked. “Just think about it and you’ll see that I’m right.”

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong. It just that I simply believe no one ever knows anything about anyone. There’s no mathematics of the human brain; it’s not an area with true or false, just masks and fancy dress. Anyone who can look at others believing, honestly or dishonestly, he can escape manipulation is putting on an act; anyone who lets others look at him is putting on an act as well. There’s no way out of it …”

  “It seems to me you’re pretty much a pessimist.” He poured the champagne, careful to check the flow as the foam rose. “Anyway, it’s not something that can be proved either way. But there is at least one thing I know about you, you’re even more beautiful in the torchlight.” As if to stop her replying, he stood up on tiptoe, fiddled with a branch above him and placed a stalk with three long, blood-colored flowers in front of Loredana.

  She was very close to thinking him corny. However, she decided to assume the compliment was naive and merely shrugged her shoulders, as if to say “isn’t that just typical of you” and clinked her glass lightly against his.

  “To Brazil,” she said, without much conviction. Then, briefly looking him in the eye, “And to Father Kircher.”

  “To Brazil,” Eléazard repeated, a shadow suddenly passing over his expression. Without really knowing why, though fully aware how absurd his insistence was, he refused to toast the poor Jesuit.

  Loredana made no comment and he was grateful for her show of tact. Elaine wouldn’t have hesitated to rub salt in the wound, putting forward all sorts of explanations, going on at him until she made him say something or other, anything just to get rid of her obstinate determination to find a reason for his silence.

  They drank at the same time and as Loredana seemed resolved to empty her glass in one gulp, Eléazard did the same, after a brief moment of hesitation.

  “Ancóra,” she said, wiping her lips with the back of her fingers. “That was just for the thirst.”

  AN HOUR PASSED, devoted entirely to knocking back champagne and running down others. Then they talked about Socorró again and her dealings with the unsavory family of Americans who had just moved into the hotel, wondering what would be the best way of putting an end to such an awkward situation. The second bottle of champagne was almost empty when Loredana held the flowers up to look at them against the light.

  “You know what they are?” she asked, her thoughts elsewhere.

  “No,” Eléazard admitted, “but they’re not grown for their fragrance, that’s for sure.”

  “Brugmansia sanguinea, a tropical species of datura. It’s hallucinogenic, fatal in large doses. Some Indians still use it to communicate with their ancestors; in the past they also used to employ it to drug the women who were to be burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyre …”

  “You mean all I managed to give you was some poison?” Eléazard joked, putting on a look of annoyance. “And may one hear how you come to know such things?”

  Their conversation was cut short by the Countess’s voice behind them: ‘Here I am again. You must excuse me for having monopolized Euclides for so long … He’s waiting for you in the garage.” With a grimace of contempt and looking up at the heavens, she explained, “My husband absolutely insists on showing his collection of cars to anyone who hasn’t seen it before. It’s tedious, but he does it every time. I’ll take you there, if you don’t mind.”

  As they stood up to follow her, Carlotta gave the bottle of champagne a quick glance and smiled at Eléazard. “You’re French, I believe?”

  While congratulating himself on having hidden the first bottle in the bushes, Eléazard felt a sudden itching sensation in his scalp.

  “Don’t worry,” she assured him, taking his arm, “the champagne’s there to be drunk. I’m just glad it’s appreciated.” Her breath stank of alcohol, showing that she, like them, had drunk more than was sensible.

  “Tell me, Monsieur Von … Wogau—I hope I’ve got it right?” And after he had confirmed she had not mispronounced his name, she went on, “Would you be related to Elaine von Wogau, a professor at the University of Brazilia?”

  Eléazard felt his heart start to pound. A sour taste came up into his mouth. Making an effort to control his voice, he replied in an offhand way, “We’re in the middle of a divorce. If we ever were a ‘family’ it’s in a pretty bad way now.”

  He saw the amused look in Loredana’s eyes.

  “Oh, do forgive me,” the Countess said looking seriously embarrassed. “It’s … I just thought … Oh my God, I really am sorry.”

  “No harm done, I assure you,” he said, smiling at her consternation as if it had surprised him. “It’s ancient history by now, or at least well on its way. You know her?”

  “Not personally, no. It’s my son who spoke about her, he works with her, at the university. But if I’d known, really …”

  “There’s no need to apologize, it’s not important, believe me. So you’ve a son who’s a geologist?”

  “Yes, and a brilliant one, from what people say. He was chosen to take part in an expedition to the Mato Grosso with your … I mean with his professor—Oh, God, I really am confused!—a
nd we’ve had no news from him since they left. I know there’s nothing to fear, but you know how it is, you can’t stop yourself worrying.”

  “I hadn’t heard about it. My daughter doesn’t tell me anything about her mother. Doubtless she thinks she’s being diplomatic, at least that’s what I tell myself. But there’s no need to worry, my wife—after all, she is still my wife—” he added in a bantering tone, “my wife is very competent, your boy’s in safe hands with her …”

  Loredana observed all this as if she were watching a drawing room comedy. She followed in their wake as a path opened up for the Countess and Eléazard through the crowd of guests. The atmosphere had relaxed: stimulated by the wine, the penguins of both sexes—she clearly recalled their affected airs behind the misted glass in Milan Zoo—seemed less stiff. Having established a sort of territory, they cackled and prattled away with gay abandon, chests puffed out, beaks half-open. They strutted around, they choked with laughter, subject to quiverings and sudden flushes, they confronted each other, crop against crop; under the impassive gaze of the waiters, they revealed important penguin secrets, enjoying a delightful feeling, a mixture of the sense of their own superiority and the pleasure of cornering others in the sad servility of gratitude. The ladies were talking breeding, hatching and nestlings, preening their feathers with knowing looks. A glass accidentally dropped opened up a crater in the throng from which shrill cries flew out but which closed up again almost immediately, like a viscous bubble on the surface of the magma. They discussed strategies for the ice floes, while quaking at the thought of the invisible proximity of killer whales, they worked themselves up into fears as great as the hole in the ozone layer, as torrid as the greenhouse effect, as drenching as global warming. Some were up in arms against the policies of the bears, others, flapping their wings in argument-clinching fashion, denounced the fishes’ unreasonable demands or expressed paternal sympathy with the distant and pathetic caricature of the species on the other pole. But they were unanimous in their admiration for the gulls’ fantastic ability to fly, not without hinting that there was no doubt that with a little more order, morality and conscientiousness the penguins themselves would have taken flight … Everywhere there was the glint of little stupid eyes inside dark rings.

  Leaving the entrance hall by a side door, they walked along under the arcades of a gallery covered in the pink effervescence of bougainvillea. With the servants keeping people out, this part of the fazenda was deserted and hardly lit, so that the Southern Cross could be clearly seen, isolated amid myriads of less bright stars.

  The Countess stopped for a moment to look at the sky. “All these people make me feel sick,” she said to Loredana, taking a deep breath of the night air, as if to clear her mind and body of the fumes of the party. “I wouldn’t mind a glass of champagne … I don’t imagine you’re in a hurry to see those bloody cars?”

  Eléazard offered to go and get a glass and the two women sat on the little wall between the columns. “He’s nice,” the Countess said when they were alone. “I’m annoyed with myself for saying the wrong thing back there.”

  “Don’t worry, I don’t think he was offended. Having said that, he never talks about it, which shows it must still touch a raw nerve.”

  “Are you an item?”

  Surprised by such a direct question, Loredana put her head on one side slightly. “You don’t beat about the bush, do you?” she smiled, knitting her brows. After a short pause for thought, she went on, “No, at least not at the moment … but to tell the truth, I like him well enough for that to be conceivable …”

  This declaration left her speechless. She had just expressed, out loud and to someone who was more or less a stranger, a desire she had never admitted so directly to herself yet. While recognizing the reality of her attraction to Eléazard, she was annoyed with herself for having forgotten, if only for a moment, the impossibility of a liaison with him.

  “I must be more drunk than I thought to say things like that,” she admitted with an embarrassed laugh.

  “Don’t worry, you’re still less drunk than I am,” the Countess said, taking her hand. “that’s one of the advantages of champagne, it loosens your tongue, or rather, it frees it from the bars imposed on it by convention. I like you, both of you, you’d make a lovely couple.”

  Almost completely cloaked in the bougainvillea, the governor’s wife seemed like a pagan idol, a calm and thoughtful prophetess whose words had the force of an oracle. She must have been very beautiful, Loredana thought, scrutinizing the lines of her face.

  “If you knew how weary I am, sick and tired of everything,” the Countess suddenly said in a tone of profound helplessness. “I’ve only met you this evening, but these are things one can only admit in the combined intoxication and miracle of a meeting of minds. My husband doesn’t love me anymore, or not enough to stop me from hating him, my son’s far away and I’m getting old”—she gave a smile of self-deprecation—“like a pot in a corner of the dresser.”

  Guessed, other people’s distress is almost always moving, even if the emotion only results in purely formal compassion; brazenly expressed, it inevitably provokes irritation. How feeble, Loredana thought, how self-indulgent! What was the bitterness of a grand lady compared with the threat that had been hanging over her for months? Did we have to be irrevocably deprived of our freedom before we could finally see its workings, before we could discover the value of the simple fact of being alive, of still existing?

  Disconcerted, she abruptly lit a cigarette in an attempt to prolong the silence rather than continue a conversation she was no longer interested in. However, Carlotta eventually managed to get her to look at her. “Please don’t get me wrong,” she said in friendly tones, “I’m not looking for your pity. If you’d said the least word along those lines, I’d have left you right away. I’m well aware that we all have to sort out our own problems.”

  “What is it you want, then?” Loredana asked, somewhat brusquely.

  With a smile on her lips, the Countess gave a long sigh expressing maternal patience and indulgence. “Let’s say some Italian conversation. Would that suit you?” But her look begged, “Frank, open, irreverent conversation. Young conversation, my child.”

  1 I pushed my tongue into the Princess’s mouth and my lance penetrated her womb. Our limbs were dripping with our fluids, they made the same sucking noise. Sometimes I let my slippery rod macerate inside, sometimes I pulled it out quickly. My scrotum was tossed hither and thither. The princess raised her quivering legs, giving off a most sweet smell. I punctuated novenas of deep thrusts with single short ones.

  2 We both groaned, our chests heaving.

  3 And my semen flowed into the depths of her vagina.

  4 I had to lift up her feet and place them on my shoulders, then I placed my penis on her anus and plunged into the interior of that hidden and burning retreat. Then for a long time I enjoyed fellatio as she sucked my member. I needed to urinate. “O my Caspar,” she said to me, “however much you piss, my mouth can take it!”

  5 I flooded her face with my water …

  CHAPTER 12

  In which are described the Kircher Museum & the magnetic oracle

  KIRCHER RESUMED HIS studies, only breaking off from them to receive people who brought him curious animal, vegetable or mineral objects, knowing he was making a collection of them. It was thus that he extended his harvest of anamorphic rocks considerably; he was given stones or sections of minerals in which nature herself had depicted many easily recognizable shapes: dogs, cats, horses, rams, owls, storks & snakes; men & women could also be clearly seen in them, sometimes whole towns with all their parts, their particular domes & belfries. Similarly there were certain sections of branches or tree trunks that had emblems, portraits, even scenes illustrating precisely all the fables of Aesop beautifully engraved on them without recourse to art. The most precious find in Kircher’s eyes was without doubt that series of twenty-one flints where one could very distinctly see each
of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet formed by the internal structure of the stone!

  “The unique language,” Kircher said, “the memory of the universal language given by God to Adam, with its magnificent descriptive power & the thousand & one arcana of its numerological structure. See what we can find in the most ordinary pebbles of the road, Caspar. In His divine goodness, the Creator had given us the means of finding Him in objects themselves; for nature has certainly drawn for us this symbolic Ariadne’s thread to help us find our way in the labyrinth of the world.”

  Thanks to Kircher I came to see how the cosmos had been made on the analogy & in the image of the supreme archetype. From the summit down to the tiniest being everything was in absolute proportion and reciprocal conformity & yet, as Saint Paul testified, things invisible could be perceived by our intellect through material things …

  From that day onward I put my heart even more fully into my work & into our search for the emblematic letters that would help us to go back in time to the origin of things.

  “Research,” said Kircher, “is collecting. It is to gather together as many of these undeciphered wonders in order to reconstitute the perfection of the initial encyclopedia; it is to reconstruct the Ark with the same concern for completeness & urgency as Noah showed. And I will accomplish this holy task, Caspar. With your aid & God’s.”

  My master confided in me more & more, exhibiting a trust in me of which I ever strove to prove myself worthy. I can testify that at that time, at the age of just thirty-six, he had a view of the world that had reached a state of clarity & complexity that he then simply proceeded to develop. Henceforth omnia in omnibus, “everything is in everything,” was his motto, meaning that there was no thing in the world that did not correspond to all the others according to a certain proportion & analogy.