Where Tigers Are at Home

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Where Tigers Are at Home Page 47

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

Christina of Sweden was delighted with this learned dissertation. She promised my master her support in maintaining & enhancing his museum, then left. My master was exhausted, but pleased to have withstood this little storm so well; he slept solidly for eight hours, something that hadn’t happened for a long time.

  Kircher had acquitted himself well & returned to his studies without delay. He continued to be inundated by the wave of celebrity unleashed by the publication of Œdipus Ægyptiacus, with the result that there were not enough hours in the day for him to reply to all the questions & honors that came flooding in from all over the world. It was during this period, if I remember rightly, that a certain Marcus, a native of Prague, paid tribute by sending him a manuscript that was extremely rare but indecipherable, since it was written in a language that was entirely made up. Athanasius recognized it as the missing part of the Opus Tertium by the philosopher Roger Bacon; he put off the translation until later &, unfortunately, never found the opportunity to complete it.

  The next year, 1656, flew by like a dream. There was nothing to disturb my master’s good humor, apart from the most disquieting rumors from the Farnese palace. Christina was living in grand style, with no regard for Roman sensitivities, & this set the tongues wagging. The sole woman among the hundred or so men of which her court consisted, she threw herself unreservedly into any fancy her imagination suggested. On her orders, the fig leaves had been removed from the statues in her palace, the pictures lent her by the Pope—all with devout or instructive subjects—had been replaced by mythological scenes more fitting for a brothel than the residence of a new convert, & her courtiers did not hesitate, to the despair of the majordomo Giandemaria, to strip bare the palace of the unfortunate Duke of Parma, even removing the trimmings from chairs & brocade curtains to sell to wealthy commoners in the city. Cardinal Colonna had become so infatuated with the young Queen that he had to be sent to his house in the country & a young nun, to whom she had taken such a fancy she wanted to remove her from Our Lord’s service, had to change convents!

  It was at this time that my master caught a stomach chill, from having eaten too much fruit, as he thought, during Lent. This indisposition was unfortunate, Christina having invited us, along with various other ecclesiastics, to a concert she had arranged as a sign of contrition. Having, since the early morning, tried all known remedies with no improvement, Kircher was in despair. Fortunately, just as he was coming to a decision to decline such a prestigious invitation, my master remembered a vial he had recently been sent by a missionary in Brazil, Father Yves d’Évreux. This vial, the Jesuit had said in his letter, contained a sovereign powder for all ailments that, in addition, helped to restore the vigor of a mind exhausted by study; he had, he said, often observed its effects both on the Tupinamba Indians, from whom he had obtained it, & on himself. As far as he had been able to ascertain, this remedy came from a certain liana they called Guaraná; it was mixed with rye flour, the sole purpose of which was to make it into little balls that were easier to swallow.

  In this dire situation, Kircher did not hesitate for one moment; following Father d’Évreux’s instructions to the letter, he ate one of the pastilles I made up for him with a little holy water. And where all the secrets of our pharmacopoeia had failed, the savages’ medicine produced a miraculous result: less than an hour after he had taken it, my master felt better. His stomachache and the fluxion disappeared, the color returned to his cheeks & he found he was humming a cheerful tune. He felt he had recovered not only his health but also the energy & sharpness of mind of his younger days. There was never anything so surprising as this metamorphosis & we were grateful to the Indians for the gift of this providential cure from so far away.

  Kircher was making jokes all the way to the Farnese palace. His good humor was so infectious that we both fell about laughing several times at trifles that weren’t really that funny.

  As usual Michele Angelo Rossi, Laelius Chorista & Salvatore Mazelli, the three musicians who were performing Frescobaldi at Queen Christina’s concert that evening, played impeccably, but their music struck an unexpected chord in my master. Hardly had they started to play, than I saw him close his eyes & fall into a reverie that lasted the whole concert. Sometimes he gave little exclamations of joy, which told me he was not asleep but plunged in the most marvelous rapture.

  When Athanasius looked at me, long after the last note had been played, I thought his illness had returned, so strangely fixed was his look. His eyes, moist with tears, went through me without seeing me … From the few incoherent phrases he managed to utter, I realized my master was immersed in the most absolute voluptuous delight, but words seemed to have extreme difficulty passing his lips, which made me very apprehensive.

  “Abgeschiedenheit!” he murmured with a singular smile. “I am naked, I am blind & I am no longer alone … Schau, Caspar, diese Welt vergeht. Was? Sie vergeht auch nicht, es ist nur Finsternis, was Gott in ihr zerbricht!4 Yes, burn! Burn me with your love!”

  As he said this, he moved his hands & feet involuntarily, just as if they were touching burning coals. By these signs I recognized the divine presence & the immense privilege accorded Kircher at that moment. But I could also see that he was in such a state of ecstatic beatitude that he would be incapable of social intercourse, so I thought it my duty to take him back to the College at once.

  In his room, to which I had to lead him like a little child, Kircher knelt down at his prie-dieu: far from fading, his rapture took a remarkable &, in many respects, frightening turn …

  ALCNTARA: Something terrible and obscure …

  Loredana did not regret having confided in Soledade, but the soul searching her admission had forced on her had left her not knowing where to turn.

  Two days later, when Soledade told her Mariazinha was expecting them that same evening, it took her a while to remember where she had heard the name. She was no longer at all attracted by the idea of meeting this woman who was supposed to be able to cure her of all her ills, but she accepted it out of consideration for Soledade, who had gone to great lengths to get Mariazinha to agree to the meeting and seemed very proud of her efforts as a go-between.

  She came for her in the late afternoon and they left right away, without having been seen by anyone in the hotel. As they walked, Loredana got dribs and drabs of information from the vague replies to the questions that were going through her mind: they were heading for the terreiro of Sakpata, where there was to be a gathering that evening, a macumba; they would see the ‘mother of saints’ before that, because it wasn’t certain that, as a stranger, she would be able to attend the ceremony. As to learning what exactly a terreiro or a macumba was, what sort of cult was being celebrated, Loredana had to give up on that since Soledade confessed that she was forbidden to reveal such details. Since, in contrast to her usual affability, she had assumed an air of obstinacy, Loredana left her in peace.

  They left the main street, then the last permanent houses, and plunged into the peninsula on a footpath bordered by the occasional shack surrounded by babaçus. Despite the lack of rain over the last few days, the red soil still stuck to their sandals, making walking an effort. A zebu standing still, its ribs sticking out; a dog, nothing but skin and bones, too weak to bark as they passed; half-starved figures dressed in colorless rags, looking lost, with big, shining eyes focused on nothing … It was a vision of impoverishment beyond anything Loredana had previously seen, oppressive destitution, a storm ready to break, more visible here than in the streets of Alcântara or San Luís. The path grew narrower and narrower, the darkness was beginning to make the dark-green coat of the tall trees quiver: for a moment Loredana had the feeling they were somehow going to meet the night.

  After three-quarters of an hour they found themselves beneath a huge mango tree, its bloated trunk, enlarged by its own shoots, twisting like Laocoön assailed by snakes. A fairy-tale tree, greenish, shining, sprawling and large enough to serve as a hiding place for a whole tribe of witches.

 
“We’re almost there,” Soledade said, taking a little track hidden by the roots.

  Mariazinha’s house appeared among the trees in the hollow of a perfectly leveled clearing that was so well maintained it looked unreal after the postwar landscape they had just come through. The façade was white, turning to dirty ochre, and Loredana was struck by the lack of windows and, as she approached, the remains of a stone cross above the door.

  Hardly had they crossed the threshold than a little girl came to meet them. She showed them into a room that gave Loredana the shivers, so much did the furnishings recall the jumble of red and gold in Tibetan temples. Lit by a multitude of oil lamps, the place was crammed with fetishes in painted plaster: Indian chiefs, laughing demons, sirens, dogs barking at the moon. The walls were covered with sorry-looking lithographs indicating an ill-considered enthusiasm for the spiritualist Allan Kardec. Hanging from the ceiling was a whole network of scraps of red paper, prayer ribbons and banknotes. Surmounted by a statue of St. Roc—his name was written on the base so no one could miss it—and surrounded by plastic flowers, a large wicker chair seemed to form the heart of the sanctuary. Ensconced in it was an old woman.

  Mariazinha was small, plump and of an ugliness that her great age had almost turned into an advantage. Her cast-iron complexion clashed with her frizzy white hair done up in a bun on top of her head; her goat’s eyes only seemed to look at people or things to see through them; her artificial voice, the rictus, caused by the paralysis of one side, which twisted her lips when she spoke, everything about her appearance gave her the frightening attraction that hideousness sometimes arouses in us. Very skeptical as to the supposed powers of the woman, Loredana was playing along out of politeness. Mariazinha just stared at her, straight in the eye, while muttering some incomprehensible litany, a flood of words completely separate, dissociated from her look, a little like when playing a piano the right and left hands can manage to break the natural symmetry there is at work in the body. She was scrutinizing the stranger, reading her, like a sculptor studying the faults in the unworked stone, so that for a moment Loredana felt as if she were being divested of her own image.

  “You’re ill, very ill,” the old woman eventually said, her look softening.

  Oh, fantastic! Loredana thought, disappointed by the charlatanism of this oracle. It was obvious Soledade must have informed her of her condition.

  “And I knew nothing of your affliction,” Mariazinha went on, as if in response to Loredana’s visible mistrust. “All the girl said to me was, ‘She needs you.’ Omulú wishes you well, he will save you if you are willing to receive him.”

  “Should I go back to my country?” Loredana asked abruptly, as a challenge, the way skeptics will sometimes look at a chance cut of the cards or the conjunction of the stars to back up a decision.

  “Your country? We all return to our point of departure one day … That is not what is important, which is to know where it is. If Omulú can help you, he will, he is the doctor of the poor, the lord of the earth and the graveyards. Eu seu caboclinha, eu só visto pena, eu só vim en terra prá beber jurema …” She drank straight from a large bottle she handed to Loredana: “There, you have a drink as well. May the spirit of jurema purify you.”

  Overcoming her revulsion at the sight of the dirty bottle and the small quantity of thick, red liquid left in it, she forced herself to swallow a mouthful. It was acrid, very high in alcohol, with an indefinable taste of green leaves and cough syrup. Mariazinha must be completely inebriated to drink something like that.

  It was at that moment that she heard the drums, very close, beating out the rhythm of the samba.

  “Go and sit down,” Mariazinha said, taking them out of the room. “And you,” she added to Loredana, “try to do as the others do, don’t resist anything the night will bring.”

  “Come on, it’s this way,” Soledade said, once they were alone, “I didn’t think she was going to let you attend the macumba, it’s super! You’ll see, you haven’t got anything like this in Italy …”

  Loredana followed her to a door leading out behind the house. She stared, open-mouthed, at the sight that greeted her: there were about fifty people there, men and women, sitting on the ground or on low benches around a wide rectangle of swept earth. An old telegraph pole had been placed at the intersection of the diagonals; several strings of fairy lights spread out from it, making a canopy of light above the audience. Standing behind their instruments, three young drummers seemed to be getting a kick out of their own virtuosity.

  To Loredana’s great relief, the people paid no attention to them. They moved aside quite naturally to let them sit down on the edge of the terreiro. The crowd was buzzing: the dispossessed, marked by privation and fate, ghostly beings, their swarthy skin shining in the many-colored lights. Certain mulatto women were wearing long white dresses that made them look like Tahitians in their Sunday best. On the other side of the area Loredana saw Socorró. Their eyes met without her showing any reaction at all. She was more saddened than surprised by this disdain; the old woman must find the presence of a stranger unseemly in that place. Even Soledade’s attitude to her had changed. She sensed that she was distant, reserved, despite the occasional whispered remark:

  “The silent queen,” she said, pointing to a slatternly adolescent who was holding out a calabash filled with jurema to them.

  It was Mariazinha’s niece, a mute girl whose job it was to serve the gathered crowd. She drew the drink from a large bucket with a tin jug eaten away with rust that dribbled the red liquid over her calves. Equally silent, and resigned, was the cluster of black hens tied by their legs to the central post. Crude pipes were being passed round; they were filled with a mixture of tobacco and pot which made your head spin with every puff. Kept at ground level by the nocturnal humidity, the smoke hung around like mist, giving off a scent of eucalyptus.

  The rhythm of the drums quickened as some men placed Mariazinha’s wicker throne, with its back to the darkness, between two pyres on the side of the yard that had been left free. Then they brought in a little table, on which the silent queen placed a white cloth and a covered object, which she handled with an indefinable look of fear. Bowls of popcorn and manioc also appeared, the traditional offerings to Omulú, as well as the array of his attributes: a kind of loincloth with an openwork bonnet and the xaxará, the bundle of reeds tied by rings made of cowrie shells, which Soledade explained as a kind of scepter imbued with magic power. The fires on either side of this altar were lit, the drums fell silent, and all eyes turned toward the house.

  Her bottle of jurema in her hand, Mariazinha went to the middle of the terreiro; she walked in a bizarre manner, taking little hurried steps, as if her ankles were hobbled with invisible chains. Close to the central post, she stopped to take a mouthful of jurema, which she sprayed over the hens. After having put her bottle down, she took a bag of ash from beside the altar, made a hole in it and started to draw large figures on the ground. In a loud voice she uttered invocations that the crowd immediately took up with fervor:

  São-Bento ê ê, São-Bento ê á!

  Omulú Jesus Maria,

  Eu venho de Aloanda.

  No caminho de Aloanda,

  Jesus São-Bento, Jesus São-Bento!

  Behind her she left geometrical figures, stars and black-headed snakes.

  Then she went to the edge of the arena and had another drink and puffed a pipe, blowing the smoke into the faces of the onlookers. She was reeling now, but in an artificial way, imitating the confused walk of drunks. Back at the altar, not far from where Soledade and Loredana were sitting, she put a tremulous hand toward the covered object that drew wild-eyed stares. With one movement, she lifted off the cloth and stepped back, as if repelled by a magnetic force; the drums started up again louder than ever.

  Loredana looked at the shiny wooden statuette that had set off murmuring among the crowd. It was a sort of horned Buddha, seated in the posture of abandonment—under its tucked-up leg a littl
e monkey carved in bas-relief seemed to be making a penis bigger than itself on a wheel—with a goat’s face that expressed a strange mixture of gentleness and severity. Hanging round the neck of this Asiatic Beelzebub, a human thumb swung to and fro for a few seconds before coming to rest. Eidos, eidôlon, image, ghost of a thing … an idol! With a sense of disgust, Loredana became aware of what that word must have meant for generations of horrified Hebrews or Christians, of what it still meant for all the people around her. Something dark and terrible invested by the god with his power like a second skin, like his very form.

  A long groan ran through the crowd; Mariazinha had started to tremble all over her body, her arms extended before the idol. Her eyelids were fluttering, very quickly, sending out flashes from her rolled eyeballs. A little foam formed on her lips as she was carefully carried to her chair. She sat there, motionless, paralyzed by her trance, then relaxed, opened her hands. She smiled. But with what eyes and what a smile! Her face had taken on the serenity of Khmer statues, of the most enigmatic Greek statues of young girls. However, it was another memory that came to dominate, that of certain features glimpsed in a film seen a few years previously. The director—Loredana had forgotten his name—had had the idea of filming, one after the other, thousands of passport photographs, men and women mixed, with no distinction of race, age or hairiness. Once a certain projection speed had been reached, the improbable happened: out of this crowd of successive individuals one face took shape, one single calm, unreal face—nowadays people would call it “virtual”—which was neither the sum, nor a résumé of the photos that had been put together, but something that transcended them, their common base, that of a humanity that was shown for the very first time there. It was as if the door to the secret had been left ajar or one of her own dreams had been projected before her. Loredana had thought of God. When the film had begun to slow down and the vision disappeared to be replaced by a simple stroboscopic effect, then by images in which she started to see the features of each individual again, she had felt extremely frustrated. She would have liked to have kept the epiphany before her eyes for ever, to feed on it in eternal contemplation, not living anymore, such was the way it fulfilled all expectation, deprived the senses of all desire. And here it had manifested itself again, stuck on Mariazinha’s face like a glass mask … Ialorixá! Loredana proclaimed her joy at the same time as the congregation, moved to tears by the coincidence of this sudden fusion with all the others. She had not been alone in recognizing the Unnamable, seated on the wicker throne.

 

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