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

“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.’ ”