Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

“You’ve no need to worry, Colonel, no one saw them. I’ve done the necessary, they’re safe, in my sitio, in the country, it’ll be absolutely impossible to link them with me, even less with you … Colonel? Are you still there, Colonel?”

  “I’ll see you shortly,” Moreira said in icy tones.

  A little later, when he knocked on Carlotta’s door, he was surprised there was no reply. He left without persisting and never realized that a mechanism had been set in motion that would continue inexorably to its final denouement.

  1 (…) putting their huge penises in the females’ mouth and pouring their urine into it.

  2 At the beginning of the world, fear alone created the gods …

  3 The Persians sacrifice to the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, to fire, water and the winds.

  4 Isolation! Look, this world is fading. What? No, it is not fading, it is just the darkness in it that God is shattering!

  CHAPTER 21

  Athanasius’s mystical night: how Father Kircher journeyed through the skies without leaving his room. The vermicelli of the plague & the story of Count Karnice

  THE STORY I am about to relate is a marvelous example of divine omnipotence & shows how it manifests itself by unfathomable ways in the most virtuous of men.

  After my master had knelt at his prie-dieu, he started to murmur in a plaintive & disjointed manner, as if he were answering someone & commenting, although laboriously, on the images flooding into his mind. I went over with the idea of helping him, but also of hearing what Our Lord had chosen to say to him, so that I could testify to it later. Kircher clutched my hand feverishly; his eyes were wide, moist & clouded, as you see on the pictures of saints, but he nevertheless appeared to recognize me.

  “Ah, Cosmiel!” he exclaimed with delight, trembling all over. “I am so grateful to you for condescending to come to me …”

  “I am merely obeying the All-powerful,” said a low, rumbling voice, grave, distorted & appearing to come from a metal throat.

  I was frightened beyond expression, having in the past seen a man possessed through whom Beelzebub expressed himself in the same way. But I immediately recalled the name of Cosmiel & that calmed my fear somewhat: my master was only possessed by angels or, to be more precise, by the most noble & most learned of the heavenly host.

  “Prepare yourself, Athanasius,” Cosmiel went on through Kircher’s mouth, “you have been chosen & you will have to show that you are worthy of this favor. For though the journey for which Virgil was the guide existed in Dante’s imagination alone, I have truly been sent by God to lead you forward in the knowledge of the universe created by His will. Come now, it is time to set off for infinite space. Open that window, Athanasius, and cling on where you can, while I spread my wings.”

  “I hear & I obey,” Kircher replied in earnest tones.

  He stood up & made his way unsteadily toward the window. I was afraid that he might be going to throw himself out—& that if he had done so I would have not held him back, so sure I was that his faith & the presence of the angel would have prevented him from falling, carrying him through the air much better than my artificial wings had carried me all those years ago—but he did nothing more than contemplate the star-studded night, as if transfixed by the vision of the heavens he was traversing together with Cosmiel.

  From his repeated exclamations I soon realized that my master had reached the moon. He described it in the most minute detail, flying over its seas & mountains with exclamations all the time about the new things he was seeing.

  After the moon Kircher went to the planet Mercury, to Venus, then the Sun, where I really believed he was going to suffocate, such were his sufferings from the great heat there. After that it was Mars, of which Cosmiel maintained it was an evil planet, responsible for the plague & other epidemics on Earth; Jupiter with its satellites &, finally, Saturn with its rainbow-colored rings.

  On each of the planets he visited, something no man had done before, my master was greeted by the angel or archangel governing its influence. Confirming the Scriptures point by point, he met Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, Raguel, Saraquael & Remiel, who spoke directly to him to tell him about the sphere where he was.

  Kircher’s astonishment reached its peak when he came to the Firmament, the region of the fixed stars. Far from being stuck onto a celestial crystal sphere, the innumerable stars moved in the same way as the planets: Aristotle, the prince of philosophers, had been greatly mistaken about the nature of the eighth heaven.

  “Yes, Athanasius,” his guardian angel said, “every star has its own governing intelligence, whose task is to keep its movement within its proper orbit, thus preserving the eternal & immutable laws. Like all the creatures of God, the stars are born & die over the centuries. And the Firmament, as you can see, is neither incorruptible, nor solid, nor finite.”

  I was trembling at the thought that someone other than I might hear these words. They expressed, without circumlocution, the doctrine of the plurality of worlds and the corruptibility of the heavens, a heresy for which Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake a few years previously. A horrible torture that old Galileo had only just escaped, & for the same reasons, by agreeing to recant.

  Kircher was shaken by long shudders, which even made his beard stand on end, but he did not appear to feel any fear. To be honest, the longer he continued in the company of the angel, the more his face was radiant with intense happiness.

  “Look, Athanasius, look carefully. It is at the very heart of this unfathomable abyss that the mystery of the deity is hidden. The soul alone can understand this mystery; for the moment be content with the immense privilege that has been granted you. Praise & worship God in all his blazing glory. Day is breaking, it is time for me to return to the first Choir of the celestial hierarchy. So until we meet again. You will not fail in your mission, for I will be with you.”

  Then it was as if Kircher had been struck by lightning. He fainted and slumped down onto the tiles. I hurriedly shut the window before laying him on his bed & making him inhale some spirits of wine.

  When he recovered consciousness, my master was in a high fever. Streaming with sweat, he was delirious for several hours without my being able to catch a word he was saying. I did not dare seek assistance for fear he might start upholding some heresy more dangerous for his health than this strange ailment to which he had fallen prey.

  But, thanks be to heaven, after a fit of acute euphoria, Athanasius suddenly calmed down. His breathing became normal again, his eyes closed &, clasping his hands on his chest, he muttered a fable, which he assured me was translated from Coptic, stopping after each sentence, as if he were saying a prayer:

  Father Gustave listened to his worthy abbot, John Colobos, dictating the new arrangements he had made: “It is with justification & a very great comfort that, as I set out, you will assume my office while I feed on herbage, following with the utmost rigor the example of my venerable forerunners. Soon I will be alone out in the hindmost parts of the desert.”

  The heat was enough to cremate him, but Abbot John went on his way out onto the sand, a saintly hermit, a psalm on his lips, chanted in a minor key, while chewing on a kebab, which was nourishing and tasty.

  He knelt by the edge of the wadi, and it echoed & echoed to his cry of deepest despair: “Peccavi!” But all at once, e’er the penitent Abbot John had finished his heartfelt confession, a most ghastly, hideous two-horned demon appeared in a blinding light &, with loud, obscene fulminations, proceeded to whip & flay John’s back like a voracious vulture. Thus made aware of his sinful state, his feeble prayers, Abbot John was seized with remorse, knelt down & right urgently began to commend his soul to God, binding himself with vows to extol the Most High by celebrating His great goodness, thus entering that most blessed legion of all the faithful with the noble aim of seeing the conversion of all men.

  “Peccavi?” Kircher repeated, just before falling asleep, & that in a tone of quiet astonishment.

  The reader will u
nderstand my anxiety as I waited for him to wake up. I feared my master would not come out of such a crucial experience unscathed. Even though this vision granted him by God was a great honor, making him even more precious in my eyes than previously, I was still afraid that he might continue talking to the angels for ever.

  Fortunately, when he woke, six hours later, his rapture had left no aftereffects. His eyes were slightly more sunken, proof of the physical fatigue caused by his excursion, but he recognized me immediately & spoke to me in a wholly rational manner. He remembered his night with the angel perfectly, at least in its broad lines; as for the detail, he admitted he was unable to remember a single word of what he had said or heard. This made me more than ever glad I had a good memory & he was delighted to hear these revelations again.

  Kircher confirmed in every respect the impression I had formed during the night. From the very beginning of Christina’s concert in the Farnese Palace, he had felt overwhelmed by the music, as if he could not only perceive the most subtle harmonies but also discover the profound meaning of the universal rhythm. The music produced by the instruments quickly disappeared, to be replaced by innumerable polyphonies instantly created by his imagination. He counted the buttons on his cassock in his head & that produced a chord; he followed the lines of a piece of furniture or a statue in his mind & he heard a melody, as if all the beings and objects in this world were capable of generating their own music, pleasing or dissonant, depending on the extent to which their structure obeyed the golden rule of proportion.

  In the same way, my master had heard the harmony of the celestial spheres as we returned to the College & it was not long before the angel Cosmiel had appeared. Kircher gave me a detailed description of his youthful and surprising beauty; that of the most perfect of da Vinci’s angels would have paled beside him.

  As for his voyage to the stars, Athanasius confessed that he had never experienced anything as marvelous. He took it for granted that it had been just as real as our walk in Sicily, although the knowledge he had harvested from it was much more valuable. Immediately he thought of writing an account of it for the edification of mankind, a project I approved of with all my heart & that I urged him to carry out.

  After another night of rest, Kircher put aside all the studies on which he was engaged in order to start composing the Iter Extaticum Cœleste in which, he told me, new truths about the structure of the universe would be explained in the form of a dialogue between Cosmiel & Theodidact. And in that pseudonym, behind which my master hid, I once more saw all his natural modesty.

  Sixteen fifty-six, alas, was a year that started under very unfavorable auspices: the news came that Naples had been devastated by the plague, which had come from the south. Although it had happened a long time ago, everyone still remembered the epidemic that had carried off three-quarters of the inhabitants of Rome, but such is the frailty of human nature that no one thought the scourge would reach this far again. People were very sorry for the inhabitants of Naples who were dying, but they must have sinned horribly for God to visit such a punishment on them. Protected, they thought, by the presence of the Pope in their city & their presumed virtuousness, the Romans continued to live a life of carefree enjoyment.

  The first cases appeared in January, in the poor districts, without really causing alarm among a population used to all sorts of illnesses & whose shameless debauchery made them likely victims of divine anger. In March three hundred deaths were reported … Alone among the nobility Queen Christina took measures to avoid the threat: alerted by the figures & in less time that it takes my pen to write it down, she left a city that had given her such a magnificent welcome, thus removing to Paris, where Cardinal Mazarin had invited her, the appalling conduct which, even today, I cannot help thinking was the sole cause of the misfortunes that struck our beautiful metropolis.

  In July we finally had to face up to the fact that the Black Death was in Rome, killing and laying waste worse than the most horrible of wars. People were dropping dead like flies, with the result that they had to be buried at night & by the cartload in the common pits hastily dug out by the surrounding lower-class districts. Profiting from a situation that was so favorable for his natural evil, the devil seized the weakest souls & the most execrable heresies reappeared. The healthy, knowing their death probable, if not close at hand, indulged in orgies to the very gates of the graveyard, blaspheming God & defying death to do its worst. Never were so many crimes committed in so few days. Between July & November the epidemic carried off fifteen thousand inhabitants & people thought the end of the world had come.

  During those four months when the world seemed sure to end in madness & torment, Kircher did not spare himself. Volunteering to help the sick, despite his age & our superiors’ desire not to have him exposed unnecessarily, from the very beginning he undertook to work alongside his friend, James Alban Gibbs. We therefore spent most of our time in Christ’s Hospital in the Via Triumphalis.

  To my great shame I have to admit that I was not exactly pleased at a decision that placed my life in such great danger, but my master’s devoted application to looking after those stricken with the plague & to seeking the causes of the implacable disease, the kindness he tirelessly showed in giving moral support to those who needed it & the example of his own courage, quickly revived more Christian feelings in me. I took Kircher as my model & never had reason to regret it.

  Although he admitted such a calamity could sometimes be the result of God’s designs, my master thought that we should see it simply as the result of natural causes, like any other disease. He therefore put all his efforts into seeking out those causes.

  He was fascinated by the speed & effectiveness of the disease. The plague found its way everywhere, striking rich & poor without distinction, without sparing those who thought to defy it by isolating themselves completely in their houses.

  “Exactly like those ants,” Kircher said to me one day, “that invade even the most enclosed places without us being able to say by which way they came …” Just as he was finishing that sentence I saw his eyes light up, then shine: “And why not?” he went on. “Why should the cause not be even tinier animalcules, so small they cannot be seen with the naked eye. Some species of spider or miniature snake whose poison leads to death as surely as that of the most venomous of asps … We must hurry, Caspar, hurry. Run quickly to the College and bring a microscope, I must check this hypothesis immediately.”

  I went immediately. One hour later my master got down to work. Cutting open the most swollen bubo we could find—that was the only operation we could perform to bring some small relief to the dying who flocked to the hospital—he cautiously collected the blood mixed with pus from it. Then he placed a few drops of this foul fluid under the lenses of his instrument.

  “I thank Thee, o Lord!” he exclaimed almost immediately. “I was right, Caspar! There’s an infinite number of vermicules so small I can hardly see them, but they’re milling around like ants in an anthill & pullulating to such an extent that even Lynceus himself would not have been able to count them down to the last one … They’re alive, Caspar! Look yourself & tell me if my eyes are deceiving me.”

  To my amazement, I could only confirm what my master had just described so excitedly. We repeated the experiment several times & with humors from different abscesses, but the results were always the same. While marveling at their extreme vigor, we made several drawings of these creatures that were invisible to the naked eye. I called Alban Gibbs and he came to observe Kircher’s discovery himself.

  “These little worms,” my master told him, “are what propagate the plague. They are so minuscule, so fine and thin, that they can only be seen with the help of a microscope. They are so imperceptible, we could call them ‘atoms,’ but I prefer the Italian word vermicelli, which better describes their nature and their essence. For like shipworms, those dwarf worms that are, however, like elephants beside them, they nibble away from inside with a speed proportionate to their numbe
r & once their ravages are complete, they attack another victim, propagating the pestiferum virus like a mold & destroying the substance of the living organism. It is transmitted by breathing & finds refuge in our most intimate clothing. Even the flies are carriers: they suck at the sick and the corpses, contaminate our food with their excrement & transmit the disease to the humans who eat it.”

  Gibbs was in a fever of excitement about what he’d seen & heard. But bearing in mind that the microscope showed us things a thousand times bigger than they were in reality, he argued that the use of the instrument should be restricted to those, such as Kircher, who were competent to make proper use of the results, knowledge of which should be reserved solis principibus, et summis Viris, Amicisque.1

  Even if the cause of the contagion could finally be attributed to these vermicelli of the plague—which were certainly produced by the corruption of the air brought about by the corpses & which transmitted their mortiferous power by a sort of magnetism, just as a magnet “infects,” so to speak, any piece of metal with which it comes into contact—there was nothing as yet to suggest anything to counter this pullulating species. We therefore had no choice but to continue to use the old remedies, of which we knew only one thing: they worked for some & not for others, which was as good as saying they were ineffective. Under the direction of Gibbs and Kircher, we used toad poison—on the principle that like should be cured by like—the juice of bugloss & scabious root thinned down with a good theriac & many other preparations recommended by Galen, Discorides or more modern authorities. Unfortunately nothing worked, so that more than once I saw my master so discouraged he was brought to tears.

  Dr. Sinibaldus came to work in our hospital at the height of the epidemic. Anxious to atone for his previous errors, he showed admirable zeal in tending the sick & happily God spared him & all his family.

  That was not the case with everyone; the plague carried off the volunteers one after the other, so that of all the doctors who came to work with Gibbs, three-quarters did not live to see the end of the epidemic. As for those who survived, they were often left to mourn the loss of their loved ones. An example is what happened to Count Karnice, a physician at the Russian court who was compelled by the situation to stay in Rome & whose pleasure trip ended in distress & affliction.