Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  “Thank you, Santos, thank you.”

  The red sign at eye level sent him plunging back into the mire of remorse: Life jacket is under your seat. What he was going to do on Monday morning was heartbreaking but it was a question of survival, the only thing left that could save him from certain disaster. Just as he was repairing the damage caused by the murder of the Carneiros, another breach had opened that was threatening to engulf him. The Americans were starting to become concerned: pressure from the Brazilian ecologists—manipulated by those idiots of the Workers’ Party, that was patently obvious—murders, riots on the site, rumors of land speculation … the situation no longer seemed that favorable for their projects. A commission was preparing to send a hostile report to Washington. “I smell trouble,” his contact at the Defense Ministry had told him. “It won’t take much more and they’ll be choosing another site, you know. Chile’s putting itself forward, it could all happen very quickly. You’ve got to keep your nose clean: there’s a small fortune hanging on this, the President hasn’t calmed down yet …” It was the worst that could happen, an eventuality he had never envisaged, even in his nightmares. Ruin, his personal ruin. Even if he were reelected that would do nothing to solve the problem; without the profits he was counting on, the whole arrangement would collapse. The foreign banks would fall on him like piranhas so they could pull out. His own assets would never be sufficient to cover his debts …

  “Everything will go,” Wagner had told him, lowering his eyes, “the fazenda, the furniture, the cars—unless you can continue to manage your wife’s fortune, of course. But for that, unfortunately, we’d have to … no, it’s unthinkable.”

  “What would we have to do, Wagner? Stop beating about the bush.”

  For that, his legal adviser had told him, it would be enough to have Carlotta declared incompetent. A medical report, confinement not in a lunatic asylum, that was quite clear, but in a clinic or a convalescent home, then they’d get the divorce proceedings canceled and he would have not simply the right, but the duty, to manage his wife’s savings until she was cured.

  Eleven o’clock on Monday. He had to be there when the two psychiatrists arrived. He was dumbfounded that Wagner could find two guys like that so quickly. But he wouldn’t leave her in the hospital for long, just long enough to put his affairs in order, he told himself to get rid of the stifling feeling of self-loathing. He raised his arm to try and direct some fresh air onto his face. A little sleep therapy would do him no harm, it would give him time to think it over. Perhaps she’d even go back on her decision. It’s the only way I can get out of it, he thought, turning to look out of the window, the only way …

  The plane was passing through a stream of fluffy clouds, out of place in the blue sky, like pieces of shrapnel.

  1 Tyerno Aliou Fougoumba [the real name of Chus], the man you have killed …

  SAD EPILOGUE

  As its name indicates, alas …

  I KNOW TOO well what I owe to Kircher, because after God I owe everything to him, not to dread the task incumbent on me at present, & no one can be more deeply moved that I am at this moment when I must recall the circumstances of his death. But we must bear our cross like a treasure, since by that we render ourselves worthy of Our Lord & comply with his demands.

  Less than fifteen minutes after the fit my master had suffered, I was administering extreme unction with all the grief and sorrow one can imagine. Father Ramón would never admit defeat & despite his grim prognosis he took a pint & a half of blood from Kircher’s arm to relieve, as far as possible, his brain of its humors. After having placed a little ivory crucifix in his hands, I started to pray with the doctor, whilst all the priests & novices made the College resound with their prayers.

  In the early morning my master’s groans gradually grew less frequent until they disappeared, then he closed his eyes, his fingers relaxed & I saw them let go of the cross they had been clutching until then. I burst out sobbing, convinced that I had witnessed his last breath; would God that it had been so … But Father Ramón, who had immediately attended to him, quickly rescued me from the abyss of despair into which I had plunged: Kircher had fallen asleep; his pulse, although slow, as is natural with old men, was no longer convulsive, which gave us grounds, against all reason, to hope he might be cured!

  Our Lord desiring to make his most faithful servant undergo the worst of ordeals, Kircher did not die that time; but he did not come back to life either. As Herodian rightly says, .1 When he woke from his sleep, when he opened his eyes and looked at me, I realized with horror that he was incapable of moving or even of speaking. Paralytic! My master was paralytic.

  Nothing was more unbearable during the following week than my impotence in the face of that look, which was by turns anguished, furious or imploring; I felt I could see Kircher concentrating every ounce of his willpower on escaping from the terrible shackles of silence & immobility, but whatever he did & however prolonged his effort, all he managed was to utter the words, “Whoring trollop!” And hearing himself say, despite himself, such a vulgar expression, so unusual on his lips, the tears ran down his cheeks.

  Since I had observed that he appeared still to be able to move his eyelids at will, I had the idea of using this as a means of conversing with my master: one blink for “yes,” two for “no” & as many as necessary to indicate the position of a letter in the alphabet. Despite the difficulty of this device and the time it took, it allowed me to establish that my master was still in control of his mind, which made his disability even more tragic. The first word he transmitted to me by this means was “jiggler.” That told me that he wished to use that machine & I had him placed in his mechanical chair. Thus it was that he forced his inert body to move, to the fury of the surgeons, who predicted the worst consequences from this exercise. Father Ramón, with the approval of the doctor Alban Gibbs, having assured me that, although such a remedy had little chance of success, it did not present any danger, I persevered with my decision to obey Athanasius’s orders come what may. And I did well to do so for only three weeks after the start of these morning exercises, my master gave me one of the greatest joys I have ever known: one afternoon, while I was reading to him without listening to the “Whoring trollop!” that flew round the room from time to time, Kircher distinctly spoke my name! He immediately repeated it several times, in every tone & louder & louder, like a sailor sighting land after a long and perilous voyage. And as if that was a magic word that broke the spell binding his lips, he held out his hand toward me:

  “I’ve … thought,” he said in a trembling voice and hesitating over certain words, “I’ve thought of a … a new way of taking fown … fortified towns. You just have to soun … surround them with a wall as whoring … as high as its highest building, then to threaten the besieged that you will … will … fill them with war … water …”

  At once I urged him to stop talking in order to conserve his strength, all the while silently admiring the power of a genius that had not ceased to function at the heart of the most terrible of illnesses.

  It was the first of September of the year 1679; from that moment on he never ceased to make progress in regaining his health. In October he got out of his bed & took his first steps & was soon able to get around once more as he had done previously. His faculty of speech, alas, did not recover entirely & right to the end he suffered from a trembling of the tongue that made him hesitate slightly over words or, less often, invert them. As for writing or devoting himself to some task, he was so weakened there was no question of that. But he was alive, thinking, speaking! How could I not thank God every day for having granted me that consolation?

  I must say, however, that there had been tiny changes in him that I did not notice at first but that subsequently became evident. Kircher was as cheerful, if not more so, than before his apoplectic fit & his physical appearance only showed the effects of his long confinement in bed. He was gaunt, his teeth were loose, coming out one after the other; his hair, white for a
long time already from his studious life, was growing thinner, but that was something he shared with other men of his age or even, alas, less ancient. No, what changed imperceptibly as he gradually recovered was his behavior. A fortnight before Christmas, as he was finishing explaining to me a hookah he had invented designed to refresh the opium & give it the taste he liked, he started talking about himself in the third person: “What he wants,” he said without joking, “is for you to have this machine, which his organism needs so much to get over his weakness, constructed as quickly as possible.”

  For a moment I was taken aback & almost asked who had enjoined him to adapt this instrument that was already known to the Berbers. He pretended not to notice my amazement but continued, giving me almost incidentally the key to this change: “For the one who remains is no longer the same. I died last August, Caspar, & he will need to use all the tricks if he is to have any hope of resembling him one day.”

  This caprice & what it implied about his lucidity as far as his own condition was concerned, made my blood run cold. Fortunately my master returned to his normal manner of speech, only using this third person on rare occasions, whenever he wanted to emphasize his reduced state compared to the man he no longer was.

  In the same way I noticed in my master a new tendency to talk about his approaching death. Not that he was mistaken about that, since his age & his illness made it very likely, but what was shocking was the way in which he spoke of it: all smiles, as was his habit, he described in minute detail & with many macabre touches what would happen to his body once the worms started attacking it, almost as if he enjoyed emphasizing the way corruption would leave it crawling with monstrous parasites.

  It was on this occasion that my master completed what he had been telling me when his apoplectic fit had interrupted him at such an inopportune moment. His idea was to weigh the body of a dying man constantly so as to be able to check whether breathing one’s last and rendering up one’s soul reduces its weight &, if that were so, by how much. It being a bizarre, not to say unseemly, experiment, he suggested it should be carried out on his own body, assured as he was of my friendship and assistance.

  “It will be my final contribution to science,” he added gravely, “& I want you to collect the results in order to publish them after my death.”

  Following Athanasius’s instructions, Father Frederick Ampringer & I started to construct a balance suitable for that purpose. Kircher’s genius could still work wonders & we managed to install a system of pulleys in his room strong enough to lift his bed & gauge its weight by means of a certain number of weights with a hinged arm calibrated for that purpose. In case it should happen during the night, Kircher told me to come and counterpoise the balance each evening after he had gone to bed; if I then found him dead in his bed I simply had to rebalance it to find the precise weight of his soul. For he did not doubt for one moment that the machine would register some difference.

  Before the end of January his headaches recurred, worse than before. My master hardly stopped smoking his opium pipe at all, the sole remedy for his torment; his mind wandered wherever the dreams produced by the smoke took him & if sometimes I was saddened by his absent look & the indifference he showed toward me and my readiness to serve him, at least I knew he was not suffering.

  On February 18 one of our youngest novices came back from a walk in Rome with a pleasing little toy bought for just one lira from an Augsburg merchant who made it his business to profit from people’s taste for curios. It was a flea, attached by a steel chain round its neck. When it was shown to him, Kircher was so delighted with it and expressed such a strong desire to have one like it that the novice willingly gave it to him. From that moment my master was inseparable from his minuscule companion. He spent many hours observing it through a microscope, fascinated by the perfection of the insect itself as well as by the wonderful skill of the man who had managed to put a chain on it. The rest of the time he kept it under his shirt, on his chest, after having fixed the tiny chain to a buttonhole. To feed it, he took it to “graze,” as he put it, on the richest meadows of his body, that is on the open wounds the hair shirt causes on all those who wear it rigorously.

  “Come, my friend,” he would say very tenderly, “come and eat your fill, gorge yourself on the best nectar that ever there was. You have enough here to satisfy millions of your fellows, make the most of it without compunction in the knowledge that every one of your bites takes me a little closer to paradise.”

  One day when he was chatting thus in the presence of Father Ampringer, the latter could not sufficiently repress a reaction revealing his doubt as to the soundness of such a practice in the eyes of the Church. My master noticed this, unfortunately for the poor priest, who was a decent man & later reproached himself for having impeded Kircher in his admirable efforts to achieve saintliness.

  “Let me tell you the story of the monk, Lan Tzu,” my master said quite calmly, “as a trustworthy Dutch traveler told it to me. According to the ancient Chinese tradition, eight hundred years ago this Lan Tzu was regarded as a perfect model of all the virtues; very early on he left the noise of the cities and withdrew to the darkest cells of the Nan Hua gorges. Meat had no savor for him, drink no taste & sleep no rest. He had such a horror of immodesty, he so loved doing penance, mortifying the flesh, wearing coarse, rough clothes, that he had an iron chain made that he bore on his shoulders until he died. He looked on his body as the prison of an immortal spirit & believed that by gratifying it he would stifle what was best in him, which consisted of understanding. And when he saw worms falling out of his flesh, that had been eaten away by the work of the chain, he gathered them up gently & addressed them thus: ‘Dear little worms, why do you abandon me in this way while you still have something to feed on? Take your place again, I beg you, & if faithfulness is the foundation of all true friendships, be faithful to me unto death & dissect at your leisure this body which from birth was intended for you & all your kind.’ ”

  Kircher, who had become very heated during this, had such an afflux of blood that the surgeon had to be called hastily. After having bled him in several places, he advised us not to argue with my master if we wanted him to remain alive as long as possible. I took this very much to heart & made sure subsequently that no one should risk making his condition worse, either by ignorance or mistake.

  Kircher’s improvement lasted for three weeks & there was nothing to lead us to expect the second fit, which, alas, had a more severe & lasting effect on him than the first: on the morning of March 12, when I went to his room to light the fire, I found him sitting on his bed busy—my God, you must forgive me, but I have sworn to tell everything—making little balls of his own excrement!

  “Not throw away, Caspar,” he said with an artless smile. “Once dried, put in hearth instead of wood. Considerable savings to charitable ends …”

  I immediately tried to speak to him but whatever means I tried, I very quickly realized that my master had gone completely deaf.

  I was aghast. Father Ramón, whom I immediately called, could not conceal his sadness at such a distressing sight. On that & the following days he tried all the tricks of his art to try & improve my master’s state, unfortunately without success.

  Following the logic of his crazy ideas, Kircher soon refused all ablutions, & the efforts I made to get him to wash himself or even make himself presentable led to such fits of rage that I gave up all attempts. Every morning, after a session on the jiggler, he would urinate in a large earthenware pot which he absolutely refused to have emptied. Nauseous foam formed on the top: “Sovereign soap for long hair, such as Incas make at Cuzco,” he was good enough to tell me in confidential tones one day when I started to cry seeing him dip his hands in this cloaca to check its consistency.

  After a few weeks his body was infested with vermin. But Kircher exploited this disaster to invent a new occupation for himself; he had the idea that these animalcules were nothing other than the sinful atoms escaping from his body,
like rats leaving a sinking ship. Following the example of the Uros Indians, he meticulously counted the lice & other insects he collected from his body & put them into bamboo tubes that I then had to seal with wax, in order to prevent these “harmful monads” from spreading to other men.

  One day when we were attending mass in Saint John Lateran, Heaven, presumably moved by his pain, allowed him to elude my surveillance to empty his bladder into the commode that used to be used to check the sex of the popes!

  The list of his irrational acts would be long & I would not want to sully in a few lines the image of a man whose fame had, throughout his life, rested on both his knowledge & moderation. There is, however, one more fantasy I cannot resist recounting because of the suspicions it raised in my mind. One afternoon, when I had stayed longer than usual in the refectory, I found my master in a position that almost made me fall over backward: naked as the day he was born, he had stuck to his skin all the feathers from a stuffed swan, which was lying beside him in a pitiful state, dismembered. Kneeling on the floor, he was observing a helicoidal figure he had made by winding a cord into a coil; for fear of losing you in abstract explanations, dear reader, I have reproduced a drawing of this labyrinth here; in it the circles represent the half oranges my master had placed at certain points:

  On the path created by the cord, the captive flea was cautiously dragging its chain along.

  Although it only took me a moment to see all that, I have to admit that I hardly paid attention to it, so fascinated I was by Kircher’s ridiculous costume. As I approached I heard him talking in a low voice to the insect: “For it is thus that the whole of the universe starts out from a single point of light, to which it will one day return after having followed the twists and turns of this marvelous spiral.”