Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  “That’s what I’ve been doing all the time,” Mauro said with some irritation. “They generally grow facing the sun, thus indicating south—”

  “Well done, sonny, except that you’ve got the wrong hemisphere and it’s the exact opposite. We’ve been heading due northwest since the start. I waited until I was absolutely certain before telling you.”

  “But what does that matter?” Mauro replied. “The important thing is that they’re taking us somewhere; the actual place doesn’t really matter as long as there’s some means of contacting the emergency services.”

  “Northwest, you said?” Elaine asked.

  “Yes, senhora. And not deviating by even a hair’s breadth.”

  Elaine vainly tried to visualize the map. Only Dietlev could have said what there might be in that direction. “And have you any idea what we might find going in that direction?” she asked.

  “Not the least,” Herman said with a shrug. “The farther we go to the northwest, the deeper we go into the jungle, full stop. There’s never been anything up there, never will be. A blank space on the map, there’s quite a lot of that round here.”

  Elaine did indeed recall those gaps, so attractive that she’d had dreams about them during the preparations for the expedition. And now that she was near them, they brought tears to her eyes.

  Mauro was making every effort to fight off a sense of discouragement. “Assuming you’re right,” he said a little less aggressively, “why would they take us with them in the jungle? It’s a question of logic: they surely won’t have left the village just for fun, will they? What you’re saying just doesn’t stand up …”

  “And Yurupig?” Petersen asked. “What was that for? You know what goes on inside their heads, do you? If I had a compass I swear I’d try to give them the slip—and as soon as possible!”

  “What’s stopping you, since you know exactly where we’re heading? Off you go, don’t worry about us.”

  Petersen ignored his mockery. Apart from the fact that it was impossible to make headway through the jungle without a machete and other equipment, he was exhausted. His body was cracking up all over. If the cocaine had allowed him to look as if he were taking it all in his stride during the first few days, now it was making him suffer rather than helping him. As its effects wore off he was prey to such weakness and depression that he had to take another dose, with increasing frequency and in greater and greater quantities.

  “We’ll discuss it later,” he said eventually, “but I’ll be damned if we see even the shadow of a white man in that area.”

  Elaine knew that she would not be able to just set off for the river. Whatever destination the Indians had in mind, they had to trust them—or see themselves, she suddenly realized, as their prisoners. Despite what they’d done to Yurupig, she found it impossible to feel in danger with them. The whole tribe continued to treat them with perfect consideration; there were even men or women coming up to them to touch Dietlev’s stretcher in a gesture that was clearly compassionate. Each time she tried to say a friendly word, to put on an inviting look, but the Indians were too overawed, just one little girl had returned her smile.

  THEY FINALLY STOPPED at around four in the afternoon. The whole tribe seemed to have great fun searching the undergrowth for a place to camp for the night. Lean-tos of a sort were erected with amazing rapidity—four poles supporting a crude roof of palm leaves beneath which each family quickly spread out their mats and hammocks. Blowing on the embers, the men lit fires in the middle of these shelters. By a stroke of luck three howler monkeys and a coati were shot; a worm-eaten tree trunk provided an abundance of big grubs; the girls brought back some honeypot ants, some honey and the pith of young palm trees cut up by the adults. Wild oranges appeared as if by magic.

  Dietlev still hadn’t woken; Elaine cleaned up the stump of his leg as best she could then gave in to her weariness. Mauro and Petersen slumped down beside the fire as well, they too exhausted by the day’s walk. Plagued by insects that the smoke hadn’t yet managed to drive off, they nibbled on some beans from a tin they’d opened, not being able to bring themselves to eat the food the shaman had sent to them. Mauro tried the oranges, but they were so bitter they were sickening. As for the honey, it was used to thicken a kind of porridge which, seething with grubs, produced the same effect.

  The Indians observed them with a discreetness that was in inverse proportion to their curiosity: the more marvels they showed—tins of food, knives or matches, fantastic objects that flew across their field of vision like breathtaking comets—the more they pretended not to be interested. They were not intimidated by those-who-had-come-out-of-the-night, but basic politeness toward the newcomers—even if they were supernatural beings—demanded this friendly reserve. To look a woman in the eye was to sleep with her, to stare at a man made him a mortal enemy; between seduction and combat there was no room left to follow impulse without jeopardizing the whole social order.

  Elaine noticed this feigned indifference without understanding its motivation. Too tired to think and uneasy at the feeling of being spied on, she drifted off into memories, mingling vague images of Eléazard with those of Moéma. With Caetano Veloso filling his ears, Mauro watched her daydreaming; the splashes of mud on her face, her damp, dirty, tangled hair, the weariness visible under her eyes made her more beautiful, more desirable than ever. He envied Dietlev for having held this woman in his arms, while wondering what could have attracted her to a man with such an ungainly physique. Not being able to imagine them in the same bed in a way that wasn’t ugly made him irritated with her, despite having a clear sense that it was just an expression of resentment, both puerile and unwarranted.

  Petersen was already asleep, or pretending to be.

  In the last shafts of daylight between the trees a flight of parakeets splashed the space above them with blood.

  A little boy had come up to them, fascinated by Mauro’s Walkman. Very gently he put the phones over the head of the boy, who initially reacted with alarm then, very quickly, with a joyful smile. His father came to tell him to stop pestering the strangers but, overcome with curiosity, he acquiesced when the boy wanted to share his discovery with him, Hardly had he clumsily put the headphones to his ears, however, than he threw them to the ground, punched the child on the head and was seized by a fit of rage. Dumbfounded by the violence of this response, Mauro curled up: the Indian was threatening to bludgeon him with his bow and would certainly have done so if the shaman, alerted by his furious cries, had not quickly caught his arm. The old man must have found the right words to explain the magic, for the Indian calmed down almost immediately. His wife had run over and soothed him by massaging his neck and shoulders while he continued to clean out his ears with his little finger to rid them of the voices contaminating his memory with their verminous parasites.

  ELAINE WOKE DURING the night. There was hardly any glow at all from the fire but there was a halo of cold light shimmering beside her: unrecognizable under the phosphorescent nimbus it was giving off, Dietlev’s body was shining like a mirror struck by the sun!

  Despite its improbable, dreamlike quality, the vision seemed so real that Elaine stretched out her hand toward the brightness. A cloud of fireflies flew up from the corpse, riddling the darkness with thousands of slivers of glass.

  Eléazard’s notebooks

  LOREDANA talking about Moreira: “He’s got a head you could stick in a pair of trousers …” Chuang-tzu lives!

  KIRCHER associated with Poussin, Rubens, Bernini … Could someone these exceptional artists regarded as their master and their friend be fundamentally narrow-minded or a simple mediocrity?

  NEWTON practised alchemy, Kepler speculated on the music of the spheres …

  “MY AIM IS TO reconstruct the museum assembled by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, author of Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1646) and inventor of the ‘polydiptic theater’ in which about sixty little mirrors lining the inside of a large box transform a bough into a forest, a l
ead soldier into an army, a booklet into a library. (…) If I were not afraid of being misunderstood, I would have nothing against reconstructing, in my house, the room completely lined with mirrors according to Kircher’s design, in which I would see myself walking on the ceiling, head down, as if I were flying upward from the depths of the floor.” (Italo Calvino: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, tr. William Weaver)

  EVERYTHING IS DONE in our world to eliminate the spoken word as far as possible. The solitude of everyone in the midst of everyone: clubbing in one’s own night, practicing epilepsy as an alternative to despair. The mirrors, present everywhere, allow each one to dance alone, facing themselves. Sexual displays, anonymous, the narcissistic seduction of one’s reflection. Four hours of glory a week, all the rest is merely a deferred suicide.

  THREE LINES from the 200 pages of the Voynich manuscript:

  BSOOM.FZCO.FSO9.SOBS9.8OE82.8EO8

  OE.SC9.S9.Q9.SFSOR.ZCO.SCOR9.SOE89

  SO.ZO.SAM.ZAM.8AM.4O8AM.O.AR.AJ.

  What delusion could compel a man to encrypt his own writings so that they are illegible to anyone but himself? The absolute necessity for them to remain secret. What reason could demand that their content be hidden to such an extent? Fear of death or of being plundered? There were different ways of risking one’s life in the thirteenth century, but the surest of all was heresy. As for losing some treasure, the least the man must have done would have been to have achieved the transmutation of lead into gold or found some elixir of immortality. A heretical cosmogony, an alchemical treatise? In the first case we’re dealing with a coward, in the second with a skinflint; and in both with an imbecile.

  Was he even able to reread them himself?

  A BASE ACT: I WASN’T SINCERE, I only smiled at Alfredo for my smile to ricochet off toward Loredana. A common smile of complicity designed to reinforce my own superiority.

  EVEN ROGER CAILLOIS finds things in Kircher’s works to stimulate his own imagination: “For the same reasons I have particularly high regard for a Noah’s Ark illustrating one of the numerous works of P. Athanasius Kircher, an unknown grandmaster in the realm of the unusual. In front of the floating barn, among rumps and limbs of men and horses, fish are dying, monstrous ones with two heads or eyes surrounded by petals of cruciferous plants, themselves overwhelmed by the irresistible flood and as if suffocated by their natural element. The horrible aspect is that they appear to be spared by the rain, which, falling from frightening storm clouds, mysteriously stops before the terrified shoal of this animate flotsam and jetsam. No one thought that the deluge must have destroyed even these aquatic creatures.”

  FLAUBERT, CALVINO, CAILLOIS …

  WHAT DID I LIKE IN KIRCHER, if not what fascinated him himself: this kaleidoscopic world, its infinite ability to produce the fabulous. A Wunderkammer: a gallery of curiosities, a collection of fairy tales … an attic, a box-room, a toy chest with our first marvelings curled up inside, our first frail steps as discoverers.

  “THE KIRCHER EFFECT”: the baroque. Or, as Flaubert put it, that desperate need to say what cannot be said …

  WITH GREAT LAMENTATION and to help him to die more quickly, young men saw wood—the wood of his coffin—outside the door of a dying man. They are sawing the old man.

  I’VE MISSED OUT ON EVERYTHING through not taking part in society …

  IT’S HIGH TIME I asked myself what I expect from my work on this manuscript … Schott’s manuscript is so hagiographic he’s almost comic; I probably am just as much because of my skepticism …

  THE ONLY POSSIBLE TRANSCENDENCE is when a man surpasses himself to find an excess of humanity in himself or in others.

  LOREDANA is wrong, for once …

  ON THE INDIANS who every day compel the sun to appear: what is important is their self-possession, their certainty that they are making the sun rise for others, while they themselves are convinced that this world rises on its own. Beating the drum for dawn; making morning break against all odds while people are sleeping.

  CHAPTER 28

  In which Kircher explains the symbolism of the elephant, hears alarming news from China & trembles for his collections because of the King of Spain

  “NO OTHER BEAST is as knowledgeable as the elephant,” Kircher repeated. “But also there is none more powerful on earth, even the tiger has to give way to its power & its redoubtable defenses. And yet this animal lives on plants alone & is of such a noble disposition that it never attacks others except to punish those who, out of malice or ignorance, disturb the peace of its kingdom. And it only does that with extreme prudence, knowing, as every true monarch ought to, that one must consider one’s actions & words, distrust everyone & look after one’s own security as well as that of one’s subjects. Julius Caesar was well aware of all this, for he had his medals engraved with the image of the Ethiopian mastodon instead of his own. As an emblem it is even more pregnant with meaning for, according to Servius, the word for elephant in the Punic language is ‘kaïsar’ … As for Pliny, he regards the animal as an Egyptian symbol of piety; indeed, does he not tell us that elephants, impelled by some natural & mysterious intelligence, carry the branches they have torn from the forest where they graze, raise them up in their trunks & turn their eyes toward the new moon, gently waving the branches as if they were praying to the goddess Isis that she may look favorably on them?…”

  “Not forgetting,” Grueber said, “—& this is what I had in mind when I took the liberty of interrupting—the qualities given it by the inhabitants of Asia. For they say that the elephant, just like Atlas, supports the world: its legs are to the mass of its body as the four columns that support the celestial sphere. The Brahmins & the Tibetans worship it under the name of Ganesh & the Chinese, in the legend recounting their origin, make it give to the god Fo-hi. If, then, you place this obelisk on its back, as can be seen in the illustration to the Dream of Poliphilius—”

  “We will have,” Kircher broke in excitedly, “the appropriate hieroglyph: intelligence, power, prudence & piety supporting the cosmic universe but surmounted by divine omniscience; that is, the Church as the support of God, or the Supreme Pontiff as well, making it possible, through his powers & his generosity, finally to restore the wisdom of the ancient world! And never will there have been a better symbol to honor Minerva, to whom the square is dedicated!”

  “Wonderful!” Bernini exclaimed. “But where will I find an elephant?”

  “At the Coliseum, of course,” Grueber replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Then, seeing the sculptor’s baffled look, he added, “A troop of gypsies is showing wild animals for a few coppers; you’ll find the one you’re looking for there.”

  “I’m off, then,” Bernini said without further thought. “I want to get down to work as quickly as possible.”

  After Bernini had left, my master heaped praise on Father Grueber for his quick-wittedness. The more he thought about it, he said, the richer in symbolic meaning the animal they had chosen seemed to him. Following his first three interpretations, he elaborated others, less obvious but just as rigorous, emphasizing the analogy between the papal ministry & the influence of Mophta, the supreme spirit, on our sublunar world.

  “If I weren’t sure that it would offend Alexander’s natural modesty,” he told us, “I would call this monument ‘Osiris Resuscitated’ & everything would be expressed with sublime concision.”

  Two weeks later Cavaliere Bernini had enough sketches of elephants for the project to be submitted to the Supreme Pontiff, who accepted it unreservedly & our sculptor immediately set out in search of a suitable block of marble in the quarries of Florence. As for my master, he burned the midnight oil even more so that he could finish the work that was to accompany the erection of the monument.

  It was, therefore, in February 1666, at the same time as Bernini’s magnificent sculpture was revealed to the public, that Obeliscus Alexandrinus appeared, a little book in which my master once more displayed his profound knowledge of Egypt &
its hieroglyphs. Naturally it contained a translation, with commentary, of the Egyptian text, but also an ideal reconstruction of the great Temple of Isis in Rome, the building to which the obelisk had originally belonged. Not wanting to repeat what he had already dealt with at length in his Obeliscus Pamphilius & Œdipus Ægyptiacus, in this work Kircher limited himself to restoring & interpreting numerous objects from his museum & emphasizing the importance of Egyptian cults in ancient Rome. He finished by elaborating in detail the symbolism of the monument itself in the way it demonstrated to the whole world the achievements of the Supreme Pontiff in upholding and diffusing the Christian religion. May this obelisk of the ancient sages, my master wrote, erected to make the glory of thy name shine out, go to the four corners of the globe & speak to all of Alexander, under whose auspices it has been brought back to life!

  In those days Rome, thanks to the Vicar of Christ & his missionaries, cast its glorious light over the whole world, as Heliopolis had done in the past. And I can assure you, dear reader, that the dedication & genius of Athanasius Kircher were not without having played a part in its success.

  Grueber having left us to return to Austria, Kircher continued to work on his book about China. Father Heinrich Roth was invaluable for his knowledge of India & of Sanskrit, the language of the Brahmins, but my master very soon admitted to me that his dry conversation made him miss that of Grueber more every day.

  It was during this period that we received a very alarming letter from Father Ferdinand Verbiest, the auxiliary closest to Adam Schall in our Peking mission. Kircher was deeply affected by the sad news it contained. Several times the disappearance of Adam Schall, an old friend whom he had in his youth sincerely hoped to accompany to China, moved him to tears of sadness. Sadness which sometimes gave way to sudden outbursts of rage.