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

“There’s something new,” he said to Alfredo when he ran into him in the vestibule. “We have to talk, all three of us. Where’s Loredana?”

“In her room. She almost fainted. Socorró told me she ate nothing for lunch.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t really know but she certainly doesn’t seem too well.”

Eléazard couldn’t say what was the real reason, but he felt it was essential to let her in on the secret. He sensed that the feeling of rebellion was stronger in her than in him but, paradoxically, more controlled. So he took the risk of disturbing her, going up to her room with Alfredo.

Loredana was just finishing putting on her makeup. Happy to hear Eléazard’s voice, she invited them in at once.

“You don’t look great, you seem—”

“I overdid the cachaça a bit, yesterday evening,” she said, “but I feel a lot better now.”

“Well hold on tight,” Eléazard said, putting Countess Carlotta’s photocopies on the bed. “Council of war! We’ve got the means to bring Moreira down.”

Two days ago the idea would have filled Loredana with enthusiasm but her world had been so completely turned upside down that she listened dispassionately to what Eléazard had to say.

“What a shit!” Alfredo said when Eléazard had finished going through the dossier. “We’ll get him for that. But we mustn’t mess up.”

“That’s precisely why I wanted to ask you two your opinion. It’s not that simple finding the best way to proceed.”

“We just have to go to the police with all those papers,” Alfredo said, immediately realizing he’d said something stupid. “Well perhaps not the police, you never know with them … How about the newspapers? We could tell them it’s his own wife the information comes from and …”

“And what?” Loredana asked quietly. “If the business is made public, they’ll have plenty of time to cover their tracks and kick up a fuss about a smear campaign. You don’t seem to know what they’re like …”

“If we can’t get our hands on the guys who committed the murders,” Eléazard said, “anything we can do won’t add up to much.”

“That’s better,” Loredana said. “Aim at the mulberry tree to get the locust tree …”

“Sorry?”

“Stratagem number twenty-six for battles of union and annexation. It’s a Chinese ploy, but what it comes down to is that we have to get at the governor through his lawyer. We have to start with his henchmen and since we have a good idea where they are …”

“I’ll make sure they talk, if that’s what you want,” Alfredo said in macho tones.

‘Please stop talking nonsense. You don’t happen to know a state prosecutor or a judge we can trust, I mean someone who isn’t in his pocket? That would make things easier.”

“There is Waldemar de Oliviera,” Eléazard said. “A young prosecutor in Santa Inês. I’ve interviewed him two or three times about cases, he’s an upright guy, he has a reputation of being incorruptible. But it doesn’t really fall within his remit …”

“He’ll do, at least to start the ball rolling. Now this is what I suggest …”

ONCE ALFREDO HAD left the hotel to inform his Maoist pals in the Communist Party, Eléazard and Loredana went back to Eléazard’s house. There they spent a few hours compiling several reports designed to reveal what had been going on; in them they exposed, with much supporting detail, Moreira’s speculation, divulged the series of events that had led to the murder of the Carneiro family and accused Wagner Cascudo by name of sheltering the perpetrators in his country cottage. The journalists were going to have a field day.

“What’s wrong with you?” Eléazard asked when they’d finished correcting the final version of the letter to the lawyer on the computer.

“Nothing, I’m just tired,” Loredana replied, pouring herself a glass of cachaça . “Black thoughts, it happens sometimes … You don’t get fed up of living in this country, do you?”

“Not really, no. I like the people here. With them, everything’s possible. They’re not carrying a lot of baggage, as they do in Europe. What have they got behind them, four, five hundred years of history? You’re going to find this very naive, but seeing them, I’m always reminded of Stefan Zweig’s little book: Brazil: Land of the Future … You’ve read it?”

“Yes, it’s not bad. Though having said that, I find it odd that a guy could write that of a country where he’d decided to commit suicide.”

“Actually, he died because of Europe, not because of Brazil. A bit like Walter Benjamin. They’re both men whose horror of fascism drove them to the breaking point. The people of their own countries sent them into depths of despair we can hardly imagine.”

“Where have you gotten with Kircher?”

“I’ve almost finished. The first draft, of course. But it’s getting difficult — things that can’t be verified, others for which I haven’t got sufficient material. The worst is that I’m starting to wonder what the point of all this work is …”

Reflectively he chewed away at the inside of his cheek.

“Stop that,” Loredana said, imitating him. “I’m sorry, but it’s irritating. What work, yours or Schott’s biography?”

“Both,” Eléazard replied, disturbed by her comment and by the effort he had to make to prevent himself from starting to chew his cheek again. “It’s a lot more complicated than I thought. How can you annotate a biography — above all, one that is so lacking in objectivity as Schott’s — without establishing another biography? If I want to piece together the real nature of the relationship between Peiresc and Kircher, for example, I can’t restrict myself to one or two comments taken from the correspondence of the former with Gassendi or Cassiano dal Pozzo. There’s no a priori reason to trust him rather than Schott or Kircher himself. To take it any farther I need to know the most minor features of their relationship, which means studying Peiresc’s biography as scrupulously as Kircher’s, then Gassendi’s, then Cassanio’s, et cetera, et cetera. There’s no end to it!”

“In the Chuang-tzu there’s a little story that puts what you’re saying in a nutshell: an emperor asks to have a very precise map of China drawn. All his cartographers take up their brushes apart from one, who sits quietly in his studio. Two months later, when he’s asked for the fruits of his labor, he just points to the view out of his window: his map is so precise because it’s on the scale of one to one, it’s China itself.”

“Borges mentions that too,” Eléazard said with a smile. “It’s a nice paradox, but what does it say? That there’s no point in doing anything? That you can’t write a biography of Kircher without being Kircher and all the others as well?”

“For me it’s clear,” Loredana said. “If it’s the truth that’s at stake, then that’s the price of precision. But a map, a biography or notes on a biography, perché no , the real question is: what is its purpose? If it’s a map — to go where? To invade which province? If it’s your notes — to prove what? That Kircher was an incompetent, a genius, or simply that you know a lot more about the subject than most of us? As you well know, it’s not the erudition that counts, it’s what it aims to show. A simple note a few lines long can hit the mark better than eight hundred pages devoted to the same individual.”

“Effectiveness as always, eh? You really are astonishing. I must admit I was very impressed just now: ‘we’ll do this, we’ll do that.’ Did you see the expression on Alfredo’s face? It could have been Eva Perón he was listening to!”