Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  The day’s good news was summed up in one word: Petrópolis. That’s it, Barbosa had said on the telephone, it wasn’t easy, but he’s been officially taken off the case and transferred to Petrópolis. With promotion as a nice sweetener … Thanks to you I’ve got the state lawyers’ association on my back … I’ve seen them off, Moreira kept repeating to himself with satisfaction, I’ve seen them off once and for all! Biluquinha had been unusually categorical: they hadn’t been able to establish a prima facie case since there had been a procedural error during the arrest. The case was heading straight for a dismissal. Definitely for Wagner and with a good chance for the two others, since one of them had withdrawn his confession on the grounds that it had been given under duress.

  Edson, the old fox, had not waited long before asking a return favor. The opinion polls had him in front in Ceará State, but not far enough for it to be a foregone conclusion. So he’d had to agree to his request to go and support him in his territory, trying to pull in the floating voters. The idea of going to Fortaleza didn’t particularly appeal to him but it was a case of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” It was the least he could do after the way Barbosa had saved his bacon.

  For a fraction of a second the pain made Moreira freeze. It was as if Carlotta had given his memory a vicious jog. Carlotta … The more things were sorting themselves out, the more determined she was to divorce him. He’d tried to cajole her again, yesterday evening, but she’d refused to give him a hearing. She’d stayed silent, locked in her room, until he’d really seen red. But when he tried to force her door, the jaguar had started growling, arching its spine, as if it were openly taking sides against its master. The son of a bitch! He’d been forced to calm down. He would never have suspected his wife possessed such strength of will. Eventually she had spoken to him, but solely to inform him that a lawyer—“her lawyer”!—would be contacting his shortly. He had been flabbergasted that she had already been to see one of those guys. She who didn’t even known how to fill in a tax return! It was hardly believable.

  He was choked by a profound sense of injustice. He hadn’t worked like a nigger all his life to end up here. She’s suffering from severe depression, he thought, it’s Mauro who’s making her act crazy. As soon as he gets back from his stupid trip everything will sort itself out. But a sharp little voice kept reminding him that he’d insisted on marrying with a prenuptial property agreement. A noble gesture that was threatening to send him back to his state of penniless country bumpkin; if Carlotta remained inflexible, that’s when the real problems were going to start. As far as his feelings were concerned, the idea of a divorce seemed painful but bearable, even attractive given the prospect of regaining his freedom; politically it was a nuisance; financially it was unacceptable. There must be some way of getting out of it, he told himself, his fingers clenched over his stomach, some simple, rational means …

  “A position as clerk or even a court usher, anything as long as he’s a state official. I’m sure you know what I mean, a small salary but regular. I can vouch for him, he won’t cause you any bother … There, that’s it finished. You can rinse out your mouth.”

  Moreira drank the contents of the plastic cup before spitting into the basin. He stretched his jaw then licked his freshly scaled teeth. “Get him to send me a CV,” he said as the chair came up with an electric rumble, “I’ll see what I can do. But don’t expect anything before the elections.”

  CHAPTER 30

  How a fever can give birth to a book; also containing a description of a thinking machine worthy of praise

  WE HAD JUST finished celebrating the New Year when my master fell ill with a very nasty fever that came close to taking his life. Without having had any prior indisposition that would explain his sudden fatigue, he woke one morning with no strength at all. When I saw him confined to his bed for the first time, his gaunt face & pale complexion moved me to pity, though less, however, than the definite change in his accustomed bearing: he had an astonished look on his face, as if he were in the grip of some amusing, secret reverie, while he was actually incapable of thinking of anything at all. The muscles of his face twitched with brusque, convulsive movements, & his arms & hands as well, so that he looked as if he were catching flies.

  The College surgeon, Father Ramón de Adra, was summoned immediately and found that he had milky urine, his lower abdomen tensed & his tongue covered in a yellowish brown sediment. As for his pulse, it was beating much more quickly than normal & was very irregular. Seeing this, he prescribed a light, astringent diet based on vegetable stock, to which the juice of sorrel or lemon, Morello cherries & pomegranates could be added. Father Ramón then bled him as a preventive measure, assuring me the illness would leave no serious aftereffects.

  The next day there was no improvement in his state; on the contrary, Kircher had purplish ulcers, hard to the touch, inside his mouth & on his lips as well as on the glands in his groin & armpits. He had black, fetid diarrhea, which left him so exhausted he was insensible to everything apart from a severe headache that held his forehead in a torturous grip. Seeing these new symptoms, which are characteristic of recurrent fever, Father Ramón could not conceal his anxiety; if Father Kircher were not carried off during the next seven or eight days, he said, there was perhaps some hope that he might recover. So that he had left nothing untried, he prescribed small doses of cream of tartar mixed with ipecacuanha—to curb the violent stomach pains & encourage perspiration—&, alternating with them every two hours, a half dram of snakeroot & ten grains of camphor in order to build up his strength. Regardless of expense, he also gave me an ounce of the best quina, ground up very fine, & several poppy heads to be administered in minimal doses during his bouts of fever. Then he left, but not before having advised me to purify the air in the room by keeping the window open and burning vinegar all the time.

  On the seventh day, since there had been no improvement, Father Ramón authorized me to try a remedy Athanasius had always been against but that his worsening state & approaching end meant we could no longer put off. So I had a live sheep brought in, which we tied to the foot of his bed. And I did well to do so, for on the ninth day—either because the animal had breathed in the poison coming out of my master’s body, thus taking it away from the victim, or because of some happy coincidence—we found the sheep dead & Athanasius well on the way to recovery.

  Less than another week had passed & my master was already proposing to get back to work. Father Ramón argued strongly against this, pointing out that such fevers came first & foremost from enclosed air & excessive confinement in one’s study. For this reason he prescribed frequent walks in the country & a healthy routine regulated by the course of the sun.

  When, however, on our very first outing he introduced me to Agapitus Bernardinis, the young engraver who was to accompany us outside the city walls and whom he praised highly, I realized that my master intended to kill two birds with one stone & had only given way in order to profit from his medically enforced idleness. When I asked him, he readily explained his thinking to me: obsessed with the urgency of completing his archaeological project, he had decided to travel around the whole of old Latium on foot so as to build up a picture of ancient Rome & prove the perfect agreement of Latin history with that of the Bible. Despite my concerns about the possible repercussions of such a plan on his health, I determined to help him as best I could in his enterprise.

  Thus until May arrived we went around all the ruins of the city, both inside and outside the walls, making maps and plans of all the places or buildings that still bore the marks of their great age. Nothing escaped my master’s meticulous curiosity, neither the magnificent remains of the Domus Aurea nor those more modest ones of the Temple of the Tiburtine Sybil, whose oracles had in vain announced the advent of Our Savior to Caesar. At Tusculum, where in the old days Tiberius and Lucullus had taken refuge from the plagues of the city, we went to see a number of villas erected on the same site by the noble families of our time. T
hey all received Kircher as a distinguished guest & graciously did anything they could in their keenness to aid his research. No one, however, treated us with such kindness as old Cardinal Barberini. His house having been built on the ruins of the temple of the goddess Fortuna, Athanasius was able to make a faithful recreation of the appearance of that edifice, the most imposing & most successful of Roman architecture. In the cellars he even had Agapitus copy an original mosaic that showed precisely the blessings of the goddess through a beautiful scene on the Nile. We completed out studious walks on the slopes of Mount Gennaro in order to observe people harvesting manna, Styrax & terebinth resin.

  Back at the Roman College Agapitus’s folders were full to bursting with drawings & my master’s with enough notes for ten volumes on Latium. But however estimable this was for our knowledge of Roman history, the full splendor of Kircher’s study only came with the sagacious conclusions his genius reached: everything vouched for the fact that the tribe of Noah had been the first people to settle in Italy, shortly after the collapse of the Tower of Babel; as for the Roman gods, they were nothing but avatars of Noah himself, that holy man whose memory, distorted by legend & myths, had been preserved in the myriad facets of a grotesque pantheon.

  “Saturn,” Kircher said to me one evening when we were strolling around the Capitol chatting, “the god who himself gave its name to Latium—when Italy was still called Ausonia—Saturn was revered for the golden age his just & peaceful reign had given the Aborigines, that is humanity. This golden age clearly corresponds to the period of abundance established by Noah when he came out of the Ark. And just as Ham, Noah’s son, showed his rebellious spirit in not covering his father’s nakedness on the night when Noah had made himself drunk on wine for the first time, so Jupiter, the son of Saturn, mutilated his father in the place of the organs of generation, thus destroying by that senseless act the happy times of our beginnings. What you must realize, Caspar, is that the gods of paganism are merely mortals who stand out by their qualities or their weaknesses from the common run of men and have been deified through the ignorance of others. Neptune & Pluto, the other two sons of Saturn, thus correspond to Shem & Japheth, & this analogy can be established between all the great figures of the Bible & all the idols past or present of the nations of the Earth.

  By now the fever that had laid my master low was, as you will have been happy to note, nothing more than a distant memory.

  Kircher celebrated his sixtieth birthday in the College and amazed everyone with his renewed vigor. Tanned by the fresh air & sun of the Campagna, he kept on gently teasing our young novices about their pale complexions, all the while drinking quantities of the white wine Father Ramón insisted he take to complete his recovery & guard against a possible relapse. Challenged to arm wrestling by the more vigorous among us, he defeated his adversaries one by one without appearing the least affected by his repeated exertions. I was so happy to see him in this frame of mind that I spent the whole night giving thanks to God.

  After having solved the mystery connected with the poisoning of the Pamphilius fountain & invented the “Tructometer” to prevent a repetition of such an unfortunate happening, my master immersed himself in his work again. At the same time as the Arca Noe he had taken it into his head to write an apology for the Habsburgs of Austria. Rereading his copious correspondence with some of those illustrious personages for this purpose, Kircher came across a letter from the late Emperor Ferdinand III, who had shown exemplary constancy as his patron & friend. A passage in this letter struck my master like a thunderbolt. “He was right,” Kircher muttered, putting the letter down on a table already covered in opened letters & papers. “How could I not see it at once?!”

  Intrigued by my master’s sudden perplexity, I ventured to ask for an explanation.

  “I was thinking of the Art itself, Caspar, & of the marvelous intuition of its inventor: the Ars Magna, that ‘Great Art’ that allows us to combine both things & their ideas thanks to three divine instruments: synthesis, analysis & analogy. By synthesis I can reduce multiplicity to unity; by analysis I can go from unity toward multiplicity; & by analogy I can see not only the original, divine & metaphysical Unity of the world, but also that of knowledge, for I discover the miraculous harmony of the forces and properties that constitute it! The Art of Ramon Lull is not perfect, which is why his discovery proved unusable. But I maintain that this art is possible! It was long ago that I first glimpsed its principles & I use them in practice every day; it is, however, a matter of urgency—I suddenly realized this while rereading the letter from the late Ferdinand III—finally to satisfy the appetite of those less favored among us & to give the more knowledgeable this infallible means of reaching the truth. I insist that any man endowed with reason is capable of acquiring, in a short time, a true if summary vision of the totality of the sciences! I am an old man, Caspar, but I will devote such further days as God will grant me to constructing something no one has ever dared dream of: a machine for thinking! The equivalent, for concepts, of this museum that bears my name & that is nothing other than a visible &, as one might say, palpable encyclopedia & grammar of universal reality!

  I was stunned by my master’s contagious enthusiasm & by the success that promised. In a hurry to start work on revising Ramon Lull’s Ars Magna, Kircher entrusted the final putting together of his Arca Noe and Archetypon Politicum to me in order to concentrate entirely on writing this new book. He had to organize the whole range of human knowledge according to a certain system, derived from the divine order, before setting up the analogical rules & the system of combination that would allow anyone to avail themselves of it for their own use. As arduous an undertaking as one could imagine, but one that my master accomplished with disconcerting ease, without his resolution weakening for one single moment.

  At the very beginning of 1669, while Athanasius was having the pages of his Ars Magna Sciendi taken to the printer’s as he completed them, a controversy arose that was as nasty as it was brazen. Two works were sent to Kircher by Father Francisco Travigno, a colleague and friend from Padua: one was a book by Valeriano Bonvicino, Professor of Physics at the same university as Father Travigno, & the other a copy of a pamphlet, published with the support of several members of the Royal Society of London & written by—Salomon Blauenstein!

  In his Lanx Peripatetica1 Bonvicino strongly criticized Chapter XI of Mundus Subterraneus—in which, as you will recall, Kircher publicly denounced transmutational alchemy—claiming he had been making gold for decades in his house in Padua. As for Blauenstein, that arrant knave who had almost ruined the too-naive Sinibaldus years ago, he repeated the same criticism of my master, but with a biting irony & spite unworthy of any man of science.

  However unfair they were, Kircher was deeply wounded in his pride by these these attacks. His anger did not subside for several days, until one of his detractors was struck down by divine justice & many letters of support from the most eminent scholars started to arrive. Kircher did not let up in his work, however, so that his Ars Magna Sciendi & his Archetypon Politicum appeared simultaneously in the autumn of that year, setting off a wave of admiration among the decent gentlemen of Europe.

  However, the incomparable success of his books was spoiled by a double misfortune that resounded throughout Christendom, like a divine warning not to underestimate for one moment the devilish machinations of the idolators …

  MATO GROSSO: Angels falling …

  Having lost all sense of the passing of the days, the nights, of everything apart from the mechanical resumption of their movements, they penetrated farther and farther into the green depths of the forest. Dietlev’s death was largely responsible for their resignation; it had deprived them of a leader, of a friend for some of them, but equally of the sole grounds for continuing to resist despair. Elaine in particular could not get over it. For some reason none of them could understand, the shaman had refused to bury the body and persisted in addressing long, passionate speeches to it. Adding horror to me
ntal aberration, he continued to have it carried on the stretcher, despite the stench it quickly started to give off. Elaine felt haunted by this ever-present reminder of his death, definitive yet denied. Pursued by the dead man who was no longer the man she loved, but not yet the one whose memory she would one day cherish, she came to understand the haste we have to get the corpses out of our sight; the purpose of the funeral is to get rid of the decay, to prevent this tangible, inhuman anguish from coming to pollute the world of the living. Without a tomb to place these unattached beings firmly in a state of absence, the dead would return.

  At dawn on that morning, when they’d all been walking for an hour, wrapped in freezing mist and in sleep, a murmuring ran through the column, swelling as it progressed. They stopped. Puzzled, Mauro went to the head of the line and saw the wall of black stone blocking the track hacked through the forest. Facing it, the shaman uttered loud invocations then set off again. He followed the cliff until he came to the gap he knew; although vegetation had taken over again, a steep way up could be made out; it had even been improved in places to make it easier to climb. The column entered it, following the shaman who was hurrying, showing clear signs of impatience.

  After a wearying initial climb, they were above the tops of the taller trees and were rewarded with a sight that took their breath away. The mountain rose like a sugarloaf into the clear sky like the background to a Flemish painting: a bare, blackish mass with streaks of white but surmounted by a crown of greenery that seeped down into the smallest rifts in the rock. Below them the jungle they had been making their way through for days stretched out as far as the eye could see, a dark swell flecked with white horses, infinite, as impenetrable as the surface of the oceans.