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

On June 20, 1667 his Eminence Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi was elected by the conclave under the name of Clement IX, but his advanced 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.

Having worked on his notes until two in the morning, Eléazard got up later than usual, but with the feeling that he had turned a corner: both the person and the works of Athanasius Kircher had been reshaped in his mind with sufficient contrast to make him see the extent to which he had caricatured them up to that point. This adjustment owed much to Dr. Euclides, even more to Loredana’s willingness to say what came into her mind; she had asked good questions, ones that challenged his own attitude to Kircher rather than the German Jesuit’s supposed genius or hypocrisy. He was in a hurry to see her to discuss it, in a hurry to go further with her in this sort of loving intimacy their relationship had entered into.

He breakfasted in the kitchen. The Carneiro affair was still front-page news: one of the two alleged killers had finally admitted to having been in the house at the time of the murder. He was giving evidence against his accomplice in the hope of reducing his sentence, at the same time testifying that they had been sent by Wagner Cascudo to persuade their victim to hand over his property to him. That said, the lawyer had been released on bail and was protesting his innocence. He was standing by his own version of the matter, namely that he didn’t know the two men from Adam and the whole thing had been set up by the police. As for the governor, there were lengthy quotations from his outraged denial on television: this conspiracy against him had been mounted for purely electoral ends, its sole aim was to destabilize the party in power. If the press was going to start suspecting every honest man in the country, they were heading for a catastrophe. He had known Wagner Cascudo for years, he was not only an outstanding lawyer, but a friend, a man whom he knew to be incapable of the least wrongdoing.

And not a single word on his schemes.

Being in the business, Eléazard could sense that there was a kind of turnaround in opinion in process, the result of shrewd manipulation. He tried to reassure himself with the thought that the state prosecutor in Santa Inês wouldn’t give up that easily, especially after the confession implicating Wagner Cascudo. He was getting ready to leave, with the idea of going to see Loredana, when Alfredo clapped his hands to announce himself.

“What’s up? Why the grim look? What’s been going on?”

“She’s left—”

“Who d’you mean, she?” Eléazard broke in, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“Loredana. She took the first boat this morning. Only Socorró saw her. She paid her bill and left …”

Eléazard sat down. His heart was pounding in his chest. “Without even saying goodbye,” he said, stating the obvious.

“Socorró said that to her. Her reply was that it was better like that and, anyway, she just had time to catch her plane. She left you a letter. Here it is, if you want to read it …”

She’d known she was going to leave today, Eléazard told himself as he looked at the large envelope Alfredo was holding out to him, she knew and she didn’t say anything …

“But what’s got into her, for God’s sake?” he said angrily. “You just can’t do something like that!”

“I don’t know any more than you, Lazardinho. She left me a note saying sorry and that she had to go back to Italy. I’ve a funny feeling about it too.”

Eléazard pointed to the pile of articles he’d cut out in order to file them: “Pour yourself a glass and have a look at those while I’m reading this, OK?”

“I’ve nothing else to do,” Alfredo said, looking downcast. “Anyway, the hotel’s empty, so …”

The envelope contained a voluminous dossier and a letter, in Italian and in a large round hand that seemed determined to cover every last inch of the page …

Doubtless you’ll be surprised, Eléazard, and hurt, I know, to learn of my departure in this way, but I no longer have the courage or the strength to tell you these things face to face. All right then, here I go: it seems that I’m ill, a kind of cancer of the blood that doctors don’t know much about. And it’s a contagious disease that develops so quickly it’s starting to have a devastating effect on me. My life expectancy is only a few months, a year or two if my body resists it more strongly, as it appears can happen sometimes … Oddly enough, it’s not the fact that I have to die that poses most problems — that awareness is so insupportable that my brain switches off after a few seconds. It’s as if it were producing endorphins of hope just to fool us, to allow us to pretend we’re OK until the next low. No, the worst thing about it, and I’ve realized this here more than in Italy, is the delusion that you’re going to survive despite everything. I’ll spare you the details of the soul-searching all that leads to, the nostalgia, the terror, the desperate need to hang on, to continue to exist … Basta!

I’m leaving you my bedside book. That’s where I got everything I know about strategy. The translator’s a good friend of mine, I hope you’ll like his pseudonym .

That’s it. There’s nothing more I can say apart from begging you not to have any hard feelings. Forget Kircher for a bit, give Soledade a kiss from me and drag Moreira through the shit right to the end .

I’ll say goodbye with a kiss, as I did just now, when I left you .

Loredana

“Well?” Alfredo asked; he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off him all the time he was reading. “You knew?”

“What?”

“That she was seriously ill.”

“What are you getting at? I assure you I knew nothing.” Eléazard handed him the letter so he could read it for himself. “I’m sorry,” Alfredo said after a brief glance, “but Italian, you know …”

He smoothed down his hair with both hands. Without realizing, he’d started to chew the inside of his cheek again.

“She didn’t leave a book with the letter?”

“Sorry, I almost forgot,” Alfredo said, taking a black and red book out of his bag. “I don’t know where I am today!”

Eleazard quickly read the front cover:

THE 36 STRATAGEMS

A secret treatise on Chinese strategy translated and annotated by François Kircher

“I think I’ll have a drink too,” he said in a toneless voice.

AFTER ALFREDO HAD left, he continued to fill his glass as quickly as he emptied it. Close to a drunken stupor, he reread Loredana’s letter, scrutinizing each expression, as if one of them might eventually give him the key to her disappearance, but the more he probed the words, the more he felt their lack of substance.

Mechanically he leafed through the little book she’d left him. Some passages here and there were indicated by lines in the margin, but there was nothing to suggest, as he had for a moment hoped, that they had been underlined as a message to him. A difference in color indicated two readings at different times, each revealing separate preoccupations. Without having specifically looked for it, Eléazard came across the principle put forward by Loredana to take on the governor of Maranhão: The tall silhouette of the sophora shields the puny mulberry tree in the shadow of its foliage just as great men surround themselves with a court of clients and protégés. To attack one of the followers as a direct threat to his master is a common practice … The thirty-sixth stratagem was the only one with a box drawn round it; Eléazard was sure it came from the second reading, the one Loredana had done in her hotel room during the last few days. If all else fails, retreat , he read, feeling a pang of anguish. When your side is losing, there are only three choices remaining: surrender, compromise or escape. Surrender is complete defeat, compromise is half defeat, but escape is not defeat .