Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

“Perhaps you’re right,” Carlotta said, massaging her temples. “I hope upon hope that you’re right. But I can’t set my mind at rest, it’s stronger than me.”

There had been a call from the University of Brazilia the previous afternoon. Not having had any news of the expedition, the Geology Department secretary wanted to know whether Mauro had contacted his parents at all. With the new semester starting in three days’ time, the vice chancellor was getting increasingly concerned about the prolonged absence of his principal lecturers. When Moreira had come home, he had done his best to reassure his wife, his confidence only increased by his belief in the proverbial absentmindedness of scientists. Carlotta had seemed grateful for the effort he made and as a result the switch of the title deeds had gone ahead smoothly. She had even thanked him for the promptness with which he had righted the situation.

“I apologize for the scene I made the other evening,” she had added. “I don’t care about the money myself, but it’s for Mauro, for him alone … You understand?”

OF COURSE HE understood. The Colonel gave his reflection a self-satisfied smile and patted his cheeks with Yardley lavender water. The “Countess of Alzegul” had apologized to him and the Willis was being delivered that day. It was certainly getting off to the best possible start.

Back in her room Carlotta started when she heard the telephone ring — Mauro! Something had happened to Mauro! But her husband had already answered the phone, so she didn’t say anything, anxious for news of her son.

“The Carneiro business is sorted, Colonel. He’s signed, I have the bill of sale here …”

“Good, very good,” Moreira replied. “I knew I could trust you, Wagner.”

Disappointed, Carlotta was thinking of putting the receiver down when the voice at the other end of the line faltered. “Colonel … How shall I put it … Things went wrong … There was an accident …”

“What do you mean, went wrong? Out with it, Wagner, I’ve got a meeting in half an hour and I’m not dressed yet.”

“The baby … well, from what they told me … the baby choked to death, just like that. When the father saw it, he threw himself on one of my men and managed to pull his hood off … They panicked … It’ll be in the papers tomorrow, Colonel …

“You mean they’ve been …”

“Yes.”

There was a long silence during which Moreira stared blankly at his bedside table, incapable of gathering his thoughts.

“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!

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.