Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  Nelson didn’t even try to get a cap in the throng that formed around the political huckster. He had fled back to his hut, quivering with emotion. Moreira da Rocha … The almanac hadn’t lied … Laudato seja Deus! His wheel of destiny had suddenly engaged like the cogs in a gearbox. He felt drunk with a terrible joy, it was like a boiler roaring inside his head as he tried to calm himself down by slashing the pictures of the governor.

  “Should we reject Marxism, abandon the struggle against oppression, our hope of the Great Day, just because the Communists fell in Russia?” Uncle Zé had said only yesterday. “No, Princess, that would suit too many people down to the ground. It’s not clear at all. They strut about today, but all they’ve managed to develop is underdevelopment, if you want my opinion. Even the aid to third-world countries, you know how that works? They take the dough from the poor of rich countries to give it to the rich of the poor countries … It’s just going round in circles … I’m not a Communist, but the only political action for a fly is to get off the flypaper and no one will persuade me any different …”

  I’m not a Communist either, Nelson said to himself, I’m not much at all … I’m not even a fly, I’m just a cockroach. But I’m going to show them what a cockroach can do! What it can do to get out of the insect trap.

  The words of the only song ever composed by Lampião came back to mind: Olé, Mulher Rendeira, olé Mulher renda! Tu me ensinas a fazer renda, que eu te ensino a namorar …

  The Future Beach. He’d be there for sure!

  CHAPTER 29

  Which tells how Kircher delivered young Don Luis Camacho of some essential truths of which he had knowledge without knowing it

  “I THINK HERE is no better way to start,” Kircher said after a brief moment of reflection, “than by asking you a very simple question: what, according to you, is the task of a teacher? Try to reply simply & not using any faculty other than common sense.”

  “I think I would not be wrong,” Don Luis Camacho said earnestly, “if I said his task was to instruct. Is that not the case?”

  “Very good; but to instruct in what?”

  “Some area of knowledge … or, at least, one he is reputed to have mastered.”

  “Of course. And I think we can say that so far you haven’t made the slightest mistake. However, there are thousands of kinds of knowledge & I imagine you will agree that they are not all of equal importance. One man might know the art of making mirrors, another that of tailoring a fine suit or of concocting a sovereign remedy for gout. Which would you say are essential to the student to attain understanding?”

  “For anyone who wants to learn a trade, that of apothecary, tailor or mirror-maker, knowledge of each of these arts is essential. However, it is clear that anyone who aspires to universal understanding of things & to acquire the wellspring from which these rivers & their innumerable tributaries flow, so to speak, will have to learn the sciences …”

  “Well thought out, Don Luis. But what do we mean by ‘sciences’? Would it be alchemy, magic or the art of predicting the future you were thinking of?”

  “Obviously not. What I had in mind was the exact sciences, the ones that can be verified by experiment or by reason & that no one could doubt, as for example mathematics, logic, physics, mechanics …”

  “Ah yes, definitely! However, we also need to define what is meant by ‘verify by experiment or reason’ in a way that does not give rise to criticism.”

  “It means to go back from the effect to the cause so that we can understand the true principles at work in the world. In this I’m just repeating what I have heard people say, but it seems correct to me.”

  “Absolutely correct, my son. It would be impossible to define science better than you have done. By the very act of drawing the world out of chaos, God created the principles necessary to maintain the universe and ensure that it runs harmoniously. Now, would this teacher not be at fault if he stopped halfway & did not go back to the celestial origin of these principles? Should he not, on the contrary, make every effort to show how the laws of physics, as those of the other sciences, ultimately rest on the will of the Creator alone?”

  “Indeed—”

  “And what is it that teaches us this holy truth, more essential than all the others? Is it the Mohammedans, the bonzes of the Buddhists or the Brahmins of China?”

  “Definitely not! For it is the Bible & the Gospels, that alone contain the word of God, the Church, in that she is the principal support of the Christian religion, & her theologians, who are better equipped than anyone to understand the mysteries …”

  “Well, my son, you could not define the task of a teacher more correctly: a master worthy of that name is not simply someone who teaches the true sciences, he must also expound the true religion, which is the foundation on which the laws and natural principles rest. Imagine that you are one of our missionaries. There you are in Peking, charged with both practicing & inculcating that true science which is astronomy. But one of your Chinese students makes a mistake in predicting an eclipse of the moon. What do you need to teach him?”

  “The correct way of pursuing astronomy; that is, the laws regulating the movements of the planets & allowing us to calculate their courses.”

  “Very good. But is that sufficient? Will your pupil not be mistaken if, predicting a new eclipse accurately, he attributes the ultimate cause of this phenomenon to some occult power of the god Fo-hi?”

  “Of course. It would be my duty to get him to see that he was just as mistaken in believing in a false god as he was in his false astronomy.”

  “Very good. And how should one proceed if not by using the same rule of returning to the origins, to the first principles of all things? What is valid for the sciences is equally valid for theology. So how would you go about making him see his error?”

  “It seems to me that I would go back in time & the history of mankind to stand at the period of the creation of the world in order to show him by logical deduction that his god, Fo-hi, is a later invention & has never existed except in the imagination of ignorant men.”

  “True. But are we here talking of history as conceived by Herodotus or Pausanias, that is, of true accounts, and fairly recent ones at that? No. What we need, as you see, is knowledge of the origins or, to put it in Greek, an ‘archaeology.’ And to whom or to what must we turn in order to acquire this science of first principles?”

  “To the Holy Bible &, more specifically, to the chapter in Genesis that deals with these questions.”

  “Exactly. But we must go further & ask what, in Genesis, are the crucial moments, those that set all the rest in motion?”

  Don Luis Camacho concentrated for a long time, counting on his fingers the stages as they came back to mind. “There are five,” he said with the assurance of youth, “the creation of man by God, the Fall, the murder of Abel by Cain, the Flood & the confusion of tongues at the building of the Tower of Babel.”

  “Well done, my son. Your answer is worthy of a most eminent historian. Having said that, can you not distinguish, among these original moments, any that we could establish with all the marks of certainty, as knowledge with the same degree of assurance as that which persuades us to believe the stories of Herodotus, since we can still see today the animals or the monuments he described four hundred and forty-five years before the birth of Our Lord?”

  “I have to admit I can’t. My mind is suddenly a blank & …” Don Luis Camacho’s pretty face turned crimson, such was the distress his inability to answer caused him.

  Kircher got up to look for something in the gallery where we were & came back to us with various objects, which he put down on the table. “Here,” my master said, showing Don Luis Camacho the selection he had made from among his collections, “here are several pieces that should help you to solve the problem you have just been set. Do these stone fish and shells not look as if they had been sculpted intaglio by an artist with a wonderful skill at representing this kind of creature?”

&nbs
p; “Definitely!” the boy replied admiringly. “I have never seen any so perfectly copied.”

  “And with good reason,” Kircher went on with a smile, “for these are genuine marine animals brought back by various missionary friends of mine. They were found, trapped in the rock, on the summits of some of the highest mountains on Earth; in Asia, in Africa & in America. How would you explain their presence so far from their habitual element?”

  “I don’t know … They must have been carried up there for some reason or other … or at some very ancient time the sea must have been very high &—oh, my God, I think I’ve got it! Could it be the Flood?”

  “Excellent! Did I not say you would find the answer yourself, on condition that you had a subject that would allow full scope to your intellect? Yes, the Flood. For there is no other possible explanation for the presence of so many aquatic animals on the summits. There is in this a clear relationship of cause and effect that verifies not only the text of the Bible but all subsequent writings that recall that terrible cataclysm. I am thinking, of course, of Plato who, in the dialogues of the Critias & the Timaeus, describes how Atlantis was engulfed, but also of a number of other traditions that recount the same flood, though also distorting it. The Brahmins, from what Father Roth says, testify to it in their rituals & the priests of Zoroaster do the same in the Kingdom of Persia; Father Walter Sonnenberg, who is in Manila, says the same of all the tribes of the Asian archipelagos, Saint Francis Xavier of the negroes of Malacca, Valentin Stansel of the Topinambus of Brazil, Alejandro Fabiàn of the Mexicans, Lejeune & Sagard of the Hurons of Canada … For God wanted all these peoples to retain, even in the depths of their idolatry, the memory of the punishment inflicted on them in the past for their disobedience. These proofs are amply sufficient, but if they should not suffice, here is something that would win over the most obdurate of unbelievers.”

  Opening a precious casket and unfolding the cloth protecting it with infinite caution, Kircher showed us a very old piece of wood. “This fragment of cedar,” he said, “so uninteresting at first sight, was taken by Father Boym, during his journey in Armenia, from a very old piece of wreckage he discovered on top of a mountain the people of that country call Ararat …”

  “Mount Ararat?! Are you suggesting that this is—”

  “A genuine fragment from Noah’s Ark. Yes my son. The ark was the miracle of the world, the universe in microcosm, the seedbed of all living, sentient nature, the refuge of a world about to perish & a favorable omen for a world that was reborn. Just remember, its length was ten times that of its height, proportions that are exactly those of a human body with arms outstretched or, rather, a crucified body! The wood of the Ark is comparable to that of the Cross: for Noah as for Christ it was the instrument of salvation, of redemption offered to mankind. And this ark, outside which there is no salvation, is the Church! Tossed to and fro like a fragile ship in the tempest of the centuries & heresies, loaded with men who, truly, have the ferocity of lions, the greed of wolves, the cunning of foxes, who are lustful as swine & as prone to anger as dogs, the Church resists the flood of passions & remains, thanks to God, free, intact and invincible.”

  “Magnificent, that is truly magnificent!” Father Nithard exclaimed. “What do you think, your Highness?”

  I could not tell whether the Queen Mother had enough Latin to follow the finer points of Kircher’s argumentation, but she gravely nodded her approval.

  “I will continue, then. If we can prove, as I have just done, the reality of the Flood, that is to say that all the lands were actually submerged & mankind disappeared completely for a year, apart from Noah & his family, should we not consider the history of the world as beginning again from that moment, that is, according to my calculations, in the 1657th year after the Creation or 2396 years before the birth of Our Lord?”

  “It seems to me—”

  “We can pursue the same reasoning starting out from the ruins of Babel, of which I have a stone here that Signore Pietro della Valle brought to me as evidence of his discovery. To prove that the Tower of Babel truly existed is to demonstrate the truth of the Bible regarding what came before and what followed it. More than any other science, it is archaeology that will change the face of the world by restoring the lost unity, the original paradise! That is what I came to understand last night when I found myself prey to the most terrible doubt—”

  “Excuse my interruption,” Father Nithhard ventured to say, “but how can you prove the reality of Babel with the same certitude as that of the Flood? As you are well aware, a simple stone, however well its provenance is testified would not be sufficient to convince the unbelievers …”

  “Of course not, your remark is very perspicacious. But if, starting out from the present diversity of languages and their phenomenal multiplicity—I have counted a thousand and seventy different ones!—I managed to show that they all derive from five roots instilled by the angels after the destruction of the Tower, that is, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German & Illyrian, which themselves derive from the Adamic language that Noah & his descendants spoke, would I not have proved the historical truth of the confusion of tongues? And by the deduction that men were separated in families, because they suddenly found it impossible to understand each other, would I not also have proved the ensuing dispersal of the tribes, which contributed to the debasement of God and the Bible in their minds?”

  “Who would doubt it, Reverend Father?”

  “Accordingly, & in order to provide a solid foundation for the historical chapters of my book on China, I have decided to devote my latter days to two books of sacred archaeology that will silence the most obstinate of the idolaters: one on Noah’s Ark, the other on the Tower of Babel. These books will be the touchstone of all my work—” Kircher turned to Maria Anna of Austria, “& if your Highness will grant me that signal favor, they will be dedicated to your son, the king.”

  In the name of her son, the Queen Mother declared herself honored by this tribute. She thanked my master warmly & promised to finance the publication of said books. Kircher congratulated Don Luis Camacho on his excellence in dialectics. As a souvenir of their dialogue, he gave him one of the fossil fish, whose significance he had appreciated, & enjoined the boy to apply himself to the study of nature.

  At the end of that October the proofs of China Monumentis began to arrive in a constant stream. My master devoted his days to them, at the same time preparing the material destined for his Arca Noe & Turris Babel. I had never seen him take so much pleasure in the planning of a work & I was not mistaken in predicting that they would give as much to their readers a few years later.

  The following year was remarkable in many respects; at the very moment when China Monumentis, which had finally come off the press, was going from hand to hand to an unfailing chorus of praise, our Holy Father departed this life with laudable acceptance & obedience. His family was greatly afflicted, especially his beloved brother, Cardinal Orlando Chigi. I well remember the beautiful words of consolation my master addressed to him at this sad time: “You have suffered a great loss,” he wrote, “& the Church an even greater one, but what right had you to hope that you would never suffer it? I have heard tell of several people who had received remarkable gifts from heaven, but you cannot say that God gave them the gift of never dying. I beg you, Monsignore, to call to mind all the families of your acquaintance, you will not find one where you have not seen tears shed for the same reason that is causing yours. There are lead lines to sound the abysses of the sea, but none for the secrets of God, so do not question them; accept what has happened to you with reverence & you will calm your troubled mind. I am not telling you anything that you do not know better than I, but the tokens of respect you have always shown me oblige me to make a contribution to the relief of your sorrow & to express the gratitude with which I remain, yours faithfully, etc., etc.”

  On June 20, 1667 his Eminence Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi was elected by the conclave under the name of Clement IX, but his advan
ced age gave rise to fears that he would not stay on St. Peter’s throne for long.

  As well as China Monumentis—to which book my master had added the first Latin & Chinese dictionary ever to appear in the West & which was a great help to those of our Society who were preparing to go to China—Kircher presented to the learned world a Magneticum Naturae Regnum that was remarkable despite its brevity. In it he had gathered together, for pedagogical purposes, all possible experiments concerning the attraction between things with the result that the book was a great success for the ease with which it allowed both neophytes and scholars to study these matters with no other guide.