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

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.”

My master was speaking correctly! I almost threw myself on him to embrace him.

“The soul of the world is made like that, my friend,” Kircher went on, talking to himself. “I’ve put on my angel’s Sunday best in order to prepare for this return in the appropriate manner. For down there the earth is closer to the origins … And I will guide you, my soul, along these tortuous paths, toward the only refuge there ever was, toward that cradle the angels of the house watch over. Spread out through the veins of the world is an intelligence that makes its entire mass move & mingles it with the great all: I can already make out its ineffable radiance. Courage, my soul, our goal is near. Joy, joy, joy!”

At this point Father Ampringer burst into the room & since I was slightly behind the door, it was impossible to warn him. Seeing my master, he rushed toward him, calling on God and all the saints. The spell was broken. I distinctly saw Kircher frown and then he started to groan while Father Ampringer helped him to his feet while calling for me to help. I pretended I had just arrived at that moment.

“How terrible, my God, how terrible!” Father Ampringer kept repeating. “Come, Father Schott, help me to give him a wash. All these feathers, God forgive me, but what can have been going through his mind?! Old age can be so cruel. Our good Father Kircher has gone back to childhood; we’ll have to keep a better eye on him than we have done so far.”

Father Ampringer had ventured to say out loud what people in the College had been muttering for several weeks, but I refused to accept this apparently obvious fact, especially after the scene I had just witnessed. Kircher could still speak! His intelligence was still intact, even if he made every effort, for obscure reasons, to delude people into thinking the opposite.

It took us several hours to make my master presentable but nothing in the world would have forced him to allow his hair or his nails to be cut &, although clean after our efforts, he remained unrecognizable. As soon as we were alone once more, I wrote these words on a sheet of paper: “I am with you, Very Reverend Father & I will keep your secret. But, for the love of God, speak! Speak to me as you were speaking to this insect just now.” After having read it, Kircher crumpled up the paper with his trembling hands and looked at me very sadly. “Can’t say … Caspar … Can’t say.”

He looked truly sorry, like someone who has tried his hardest to fulfil your request, but in vain. And since, indifferent to my presence, he had started to play with his flea again, I plunged into despair & it was a long time before prayer managed to relieve it.

On the evening of that disastrous September 18 I confessed what I had seen my master doing to Father Ramón & confided to him my doubts as to the real nature of his state.

“I wish it were not true,” he said gently, “but unfortunately I must dash your hopes, for they have no foundation. As I have observed in other patients, this kind of remission is merely superficial; far from heralding an eventual recovery, it actually indicates a worsening of the illness & is nothing but the patient’s swan song, so to speak. The end is imminent, Father. Come to terms with that thought & your prayers for the soul of our friend will be all the better for it.”

The further course of events proved Father Ramón right. Kircher did not say another word, apart from the absurd babbling that tormented me right to the end. But even if the voice, as Aristotle maintains, is a luxury in the absence of which life is perfectly possible, my master’s voice during those last few months was still very upsetting. Henceforth he was an infirm and slovenly old man whose clothes were now too big for him; horribly emaciated, with long, greasy hair, he spent his days counting the companies of lice marching up and down his breeches. Although still amiable, he put people off by the repulsive layer of dirt he wore like a second skin. For all that, I loved him no less, knowing as I did that he was no longer responsible for his actions, but it cost me more than I can say to follow the deterioration of his body & mind day after day.