Where Tigers Are at Home
Page 38
As we only learned much later, Sieur Sinibaldus was outraged by Kircher’s attitude. He could not understand how someone could dispute something, regard it with such skepticism, without even having taken the trouble to check the facts. As soon as he left the College, he determined to show my master how blind he had been. To do that he hurried off to said Blauenstein, whom he persuaded—not without difficulty, for the fellow pretended to be reluctant—to come and live with him. He placed both his laboratory & his whole fortune at his disposition, provided he would teach him to make the stone or the powder of projection, the mere contact with which, as he had established de visu, turned the basest matter into gold.
Blauenstein’s wife was a young Chinese woman called Mei-li, whose mysterious, silent beauty contributed to the alchemist’s aura of unsuspected powers. Mei-li, Blauenstein said—while maintaining a discreet silence about how he had met her during a journey to China—was the sister of the “Grand Imperial Physician attached to the Chamber of Remedies,” a man who was versed in the art of alchemy & had taught him many secrets taken from ancient grimoires. To anyone who flattered him enough, Blauenstein would willingly, but with many signs of respect & precautions, show a pile of notebooks covered in Chinese characters that he claimed, with no great danger of contradiction, were a compendium of alchemical knowledge.
This strange couple thus settled bag & baggage in the luxurious apartment Sieur Sinibaldus put at their disposal in his own mansion. No sooner had they arrived than a new athanor had to be constructed for the laboratory, the old one not being suitable, & a number of very rare & very expensive ingredients had to be ordered to start the long process that would lead to the Great Work.
When Sinibaldus admitted his ignorance of the products required & of the means of procuring them, Blauenstein offered to obtain them himself & at the best price, solely out of friendship for his host. The good doctor’s moneybags suffered a severe flux, but the alchemist insisted, despite his victim’s protestations of trust, on producing all the bills justifying his expenses: fifty thousand ducats for a pound of Persian zingar & ten ounces of powdered scolopendra; eighty-five thousand ducats for realgar, orpiment & indigo; the same amount for a small piece of bezoar from a llama; a hundred thousand ducats for tacamahac resin, Turkestan salt & green alum plus a quantity of other materials that were less rare but hardly less expensive, such as cinnabar, powdered mummy & rhinoceros horn, fresh sparrow-hawk feces or wolves’ testicles … Although substantial, Sinibaldus’s resources were dwindling dangerously; &, as if by an effect of Divine Providence, those of the alchemist were increasing proportionately.
During Blauenstein’s planned absences, supposedly to seek out these inestimable materials but in reality to salt away the ducats he saved on his purchases, Mei-li & Sinibaldus had the task of looking after the alchemical furnace & watching over the slow sublimation of sulphur & mercury. Using the heat of the laboratory as an excuse, the beautiful Chinese always appeared in a silk négligée, which would fall open at the slightest movement, revealing, as if inadvertently, quivering charms deliberately left free. Her hair, exquisitely combed & tied at the back, was covered in pearls & topped with a little bamboo bonnet, with an outer shell of silk from which a tuft of red horsehair stuck up. In this transparent semiundress, she would prostrate herself, with much waggling of the rump, before a little altar she had made herself with Christ alongside hideous idols from her own country; also—still in order to encourage heaven to look favorably on the Great Work—she would shamelessly engage in lascivious & languorous dances.
It was not long before poor Sinibaldus was captivated by all this. Only three months after having taken the devil into his home, half-ruined, his willpower paralyzed by love, his senses inflamed by her courtesan’s tricks, he would have sold his soul for a kiss. But, although keeping his passion at boiling point with a thousand lubricious wiles, the hussy was careful not to allow him the least liberty; with her simpering ways, she seemed made to show the extent to which intemperate desires can be aroused when self-interest & avarice lend a hand.
These machinations lasted until the dupe was judged ready for culling & on St. John’s Eve Blauenstein announced that the Great Work was entering its final stage. All the necessary ingredients had been meticulously weighed out, filtered & decanted prior to being added to the broth of sulphur, mercury & antimony that had been simmering in the crucible for so long.
“In two weeks to the day and the hour the mixture will have attained the sublime perfection extolled by the Ancients. Then all that will be left will be to precipitate this liquid matter with the bezoar stone & you will see—born before your very eyes!—the famous “Green Lion,” the wonderful substance that assures you both wealth & immortality. But the alchemical process is not simply a question of purifying inert materials, in order to work it requires an analogous decantation of the body & the mind without which we will not be able to witness the final miracle. To this end I am going to retire to a monastery with the bezoar stone & will pray without cease for these two weeks. My wife, who was initiated into the most divine secrets by her brother, will tend the alchemical vessel on her own. As for you, my dear friend & benefactor, you will retire to your room to pray, merely taking some food to Mei-li twice a day. The slightest infraction of these simple rules will put an end to our hopes for good …”
Much moved by this, Sinibaldus swore that it would be as the alchemist desired & that he would spare neither mortification of the flesh nor prayers to purify his soul.
Blauenstein spent the rest of the night “rectifying” the laboratory: with his wife & Sinibaldus on their knees, he drew on the floor & the walls all kinds of magic pentacles to prevent demons entering the room, recited a number of formulae taken from the Chinese cabbala & placed the furnace under the protection of at least three dozen “sephirotic spirits.” Gesticulating & chanting himself hoarse in the thick clouds of incense he had burning all the time, the alchemist seemed to Sinibaldus like the very incarnation of Trismegistus.
In the early hours of the morning Blauenstein locked his wife in the laboratory, then ceremonially handed the keys over to his host, repeated his orders of the previous evening & left. Exhausted by the sleepless night, Sinibaldus went to his bedroom, where he soon fell asleep, lulled by fond hopes and delusions, beside himself with joy.
Waking around one o’clock, he immediately had a meal prepared, which he took himself to the fair Mei-li. Respecting the alchemist’s orders, he kept his eyes lowered & closed the door immediately after having placed the tray of food on the floor. Back in his bedroom, he flagellated himself for a good while, then immersed himself in prayer until the evening.
Returning to the laboratory with another meal at dinner time, he was so surprised to find the morning’s tray untouched that he could not resist taking a glance inside the chamber: only dimly lit by the reddish light from a little stained-glass lamp, Mei-li was lying at the foot of the altar. Was she ill? Perhaps dying?! Locking the door behind him, Sinibaldus dashed over to the young Chinese woman …
He had hardly shaken her than she opened eyes full of tears. Clinging to his neck with her head between his arms, she started to sob. Although reassured about her state of health, Sinibaldus was concerned by these irresistible tears. For a moment he thought she had committed some irreparable fault in keeping watch over the Great Work & turned to look at the crucible: the furnace was roaring as it ought to, nothing needed to keep it going seemed to have been omitted. His fears on that point calmed, he set about comforting this magnificent creature, who was leaning against his shoulder giving rein to the most intense sorrow. After many friendly words and chaste caresses he managed to get Mei-li to dry her tears & give him an explanation of her despair.
“Oh, signore,” she said, her voice still broken by sobs, “how can I tell you that without earning your contempt? You who are so good & have shown us such trust. I’d rather die a thousand deaths … Why must I be the one to suffer such shame and misfortune?”
When she saw that he had reached that state, the wily woman finally agreed to explain the reason for her despair: Salomon Blauenstein was a saintly man, a gentle, considerate husband, an alchemist unique in his knowledge & experience, but he would never manage to produce the elixir of life without one requirement she alone knew about. She had never had the courage to tell her husband about it, so certain she was that he would have renounced his quest rather than obey it. To bring about the true transformation, not that of gold, which presented no difficulty at all, but that of the elixir of youth, something other than inert matter was necessary.
“How could something without life,” the bewitching Chinese said, “produce immortality? You will clearly see that that is impossible & that is the reason why all alchemists had failed up to now. All, that is, apart from certain masters in my country who were aware of the truth & made use of it for their great good fortune.”
“But this ingredient, signora? Tell me, I beg you.”
“This secret ingredient, signore, the true materia prima, without which no transformation can be completed, is human seed, that metaphysical concentrate of divine power thanks to which life is created & renewed. Even that is not of itself sufficient, it also requires love, the passion whose heat alone indissolubly unites man’s seed to woman’s & allows the Stone to coagulate at the last stage of the Great Work. That is the cause, the sole cause of my despair.”
Once more Mei-li burst out sobbing & it was only with the greatest of difficulty that Sinibaldus managed to draw these final words, punctuated by hiccups, out of her: ‘I respect my husband, my feelings for him are those of infinite friendship & gratitude, but … I do not love him. That essential ardor, that inclination, I have not felt until now … until now that … now that you have aroused it in me, monsieur. To my misfortune, to yours & that of my husband, I can see, alas, that you are far from sharing that emotion & that henceforward nothing can save our joint enterprise. It was for you that I was crying, imagining your disappointment after so many hopes, so many illusions; as for myself, I will not survive this calamity …”
This sent the bashful lover that Sieur Sinibaldus had so far been into a frenzy. Mei-li’s declaration not only assured him of an unhoped-for joy but also of the success of the Great Work. Beside himself, forgetting his wife & his children, he covered Mei-li in kisses, laughing & crying at the same time, declaring the passion he had kept hidden for so many months in the most extravagant terms. He had never loved anyone but her, it was as if the goddess Isis had finally found her Osiris & there could no longer be any doubt that they were blessed by God.
The little hussy feigned surprise, then the most unbridled passion & it was there, on the stone floor, that they disported themselves in their lewd Cyprian acts.
During the two weeks in which they remained locked in the laboratory the emissions of their lust poured out constantly. Mei-li carefully scooped up this disgusting mixture in a porcelain vase, then poured it into little wax figurines they made themselves to represent various Chinese gods, but also Christ & the apostles. They then threw these blasphemous idols into the crucible with all sorts of ceremonies & the orgy started up again. Blinded by passion & pride, Sinibaldus obeyed her in everything without for one moment seeing the abyss into which he was sinking.
At the time he had previously fixed, Salomon Blauenstein returned from his supposed retreat. Sinibaldus, who had gone up to his room a little earlier to allay suspicion, came down to meet him. He was surprised at how pale the alchemist looked & at the evidence of privations written all over his face. As for Blauenstein, who had actually spent the time in a brothel in Travestere, he saw the same signs of exhaustion in his host’s face, although without deceiving himself as to their true origin; from that point on he was in no doubt about the success of his scheme. They greeted each other warmly &, after the alchemist pretended to set his mind at rest concerning the strict obedience to his orders, they went into the laboratory.
CANOA QUEBRADA: And for him war was like a merry game …
In the beginning the world did not exist. Neither darkness, nor light, nor anything that could have taken their place. But there were six invisible things: little benches, pot stands, gourds, manioc, ipadu leaves that make you dream when you chew them and plugs of tobacco. A woman made herself out of these things, that were floating around, and appeared, all decked out in finery, in her splendid quartz dwelling. Yebá Beló was her name, the ancestral mother, she who was not begotten … In the time it takes to say “Ugh!” she started to think up the world the way it ought to be. And while she was thinking, she chewed ipadu and smoked a magic cigar.
When the Indian dragged her out of the Forró da Zefa, Moéma was under no illusion about what would happen between them that night. Worried by Roetgen’s absence, she spent a few seconds looking for him in the crowd. Not that she felt obliged to explain what she was doing, but she had insisted on bringing him here and felt bad about abandoning him in such cavalier fashion in a world he wasn’t yet familiar with. As for Thaïs, that was both simpler and more awkward: their liaison being based on absolute sexual liberty, Moéma was not committed to anything in that respect. They believed that the love they had for each other—a topic that reappeared in crucial fashion every time one suffered at the other’s escapades—went far beyond physical vagaries. Instead of undermining their relationship, this independence “fertilized” it, enlarged it … Since, however, this naive generosity of spirit could not prevent either jealousy or the anguish of feeling abandoned, they had come to the point where they observed maximum discretion when they went off with someone else. Moéma was therefore hurrying to avoid running into her friend when she saw her dancing with Marlene. Caught out, she replied to Thaïs’ look by fanning herself with her hand, as if to say the heat was too much for her and she was going out for a breath of fresh air. When the response to her bit of playacting was a sad, disbelieving smile, Moéma turned away in irritation.
Once outside, they walked in the darkness, going back up the street to the cabin, since Moéma wanted to collect her supply of maconha before going down to the beach.
Beside the water the strength of the wind was visible as it blew away the dunes. Aynoré remained silent; from time to time Moéma felt his hand brush against hers as they continued on their way, staggering as they were hit by gusts. A few hundred yards farther on they sat down on the sand, in the shelter of a jangada pulled up onto the beach. Moéma had rolled a joint. In the deafening roar of the waves, something from the primeval ages of the Earth, an incomprehensible and disturbing din made them snuggle up against each other. She took a drag on the coarse cigarette she had managed to roll despite the wind; Aynoré did the same and started to speak in a low voice: the world had begun in this same way, with a woman emerging from her own night and a magic cigar …
Her thoughts came out in the form of a spherical cloud with a tower on top, a bulge like the excrescence of the navel on the belly of a newborn baby. As it spread out, the bubble of smoke enclosed all the darkness so that it remained captive there. Having done that, Yebá Beló called her dream the “belly of the world” and the belly looked like a large deserted village. So she wanted people there where there was nothing and started to chew ipadu again as she smoked her magic cigar …<
br />
Aynoré’s father had been the shaman of his village, somewhere in the Amazonian forest, at the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Madeira. A renowned magician, the religious and political head of the village, he had treated people with tobacco juice and extracts of plants, of which he guarded the secret jealously. It was from his perseverance in recounting his tribe’s epic that this long story with its innumerable ramifications came, a parasitic myth of the origin of the world, which seemed to unfold of its own accord from the lips of the young Indian, feeding on his memory, establishing itself and multiplying like a virus, as it had been doing for centuries. His father had passed on to Aynoré, who was intended as his successor, all the ancestral knowledge that makes a true pajé: he knew the foundation myths of the Mururucu, their rites, their dances, their traditional songs, knew how to invoke the spirits, transformed into so many pebbles in the gourd rattle, and to interpret their messages in the whir of the bullroarer; he also knew how to talk to the animals, how to throw invisible spears that poisoned people or sent them into trances that exorcised them. At the age of six he had gone off in search of his soul and it had entered his body in the form of an anaconda. Like his father, he would have become able to borrow the wings of the kumalak bird and fly over the mountains, if the loggers had not come and turned his life upside down.
And with the loggers there was also an official of FUNAI—“the National Indian Foundation! Just imagine! What would a National Foundation of the White Man do for you, eh? Just think about it for a moment”—and with him the army and with the army the end of everything. The villagers had to be evacuated and go and join the other tribes languishing in the Xingu reservation. His father, leading a few men, had tried to resist and they were all dead, shot like common macaques in the course of a manhunt in the forest.