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

He watched her as she came back, once more enjoying her casual gait, her very African way of sliding over the ground with the irritating slap of her bare feet. She placed the glass on his desk, made a face at him again and left.

Taking a sip of his drink — Soledade got the perfect balance between cachaça and lime — Eléazard gazed out of the window in front of him. It gave directly onto the jungle or, to be more precise, the mata , that luxuriance of tall trees, twisted lianas and foliage that had retaken possession of the town without anyone objecting. From his first floor Eléazard had the feeling he was plunging straight into the heart of organic life, a little like a surgeon bent over a stomach open to his curiosity alone. When he had decided to leave São Luís to buy a house in Alcântara he had been spoiled for choice. The old baroque town, the jewel of eighteenth-century architecture in Brazil, was falling into ruin. Ignored by history since the downfall of the Marquis de Pombal, engulfed by the forest, insects and damp, it was inhabited by a tiny population of fishermen too poor to live anywhere but in shacks made from corrugated iron, clay and cans or in tumbledown hovels. From time to time a grower would appear, wild-eyed at having stepped out of the great forest so abruptly, to sell his harvest of mangoes or papayas to the dealers who went to and fro between São Luís and Alcântara. It was there that Eléazard had bought this immense, dilapidated house, one of the sobrados that in former times had contributed to the beauty of the town. He had acquired it for what seemed to him next to nothing but which represented a substantial sum for most Brazilians. Its façade looked straight out onto Pelourinho Square, with the abandoned Church of São Matias on the left, and on the right, also open to every wind that blew, the Casa de Câmara e Cadeia , which is the town hall and prison. In the middle of the square, between the two ruins, of which only the walls and roof were left, the pelourinho still stood, the ornate stone column where refractory slaves used to be whipped. A tragic symbol of civil and religious oppression, of the blindness that had led some to massacre thousands of their fellow men with a clear conscience, the whipping post was the only one of all the monuments of the town that had remained intact. Even though they allowed their pigs to wander freely inside the church and the town hall, none of the caboclos who lived there would have allowed the least indignity to be inflicted on this testimony to thousands of years of suffering, injustice and stupidity. For nothing had changed, for nothing would ever shake those three interlinked pillars of human nature, and in that column, which had defied the ravages of time, the locals saw the symbol of their poverty and degradation.

Elaine, his wife, had never been able to bear this place where everything bore, like a stigma, the mold of deterioration, and this epidermal discharge had doubtless played a part in their separation. One more item in the multitude of faults that had been hurled at him out of the blue one evening the previous September. All the time she was talking, his mind had been filled with the standard image of a house eaten away by termites that suddenly collapses without the least sign of the impending disaster having been visible. The idea of trying to vindicate himself never entered his head, as it doubtless never enters the head of all those who are surprised one day by a slap in the face from fate: can you imagine justifying yourself when faced with an earthquake or an exploding mortar bomb? When his wife, suddenly an unknown woman, had demanded a divorce, Eléazard had submitted, signing everything he was asked to sign, agreeing to all the lawyer’s requests, just as people allow themselves to be transported from one refugee camp to another. Their daughter, Moéma, was no problem, since she was of age and led her own life, that is, if one can call her way of shirking all obligations day in, day out, “leading a life.”

Eléazard had chosen to remain in Alcântara and it was only recently, six months after Elaine had left to go to Brazilia, that he had started to go through the debris of his love, less to see what could be salvaged than to find the cause of such a mess.

Thinking about it, Werner’s proposal had come at just the right time. The work on Caspar Schott’s manuscript would be a kind of safety rail, forcing him to concentrate and persevere in a way that would be therapeutic. And even though there was no question of forgetting, nor ever would be, at least it would allow him to make the intervals between upsurges of memory longer.

Once more Eléazard leafed through the first chapter of the Life of Athanasius Kircher , rereading his footnotes and certain passages as he did so. God, wasn’t the opening terrible! Nothing more irritating than that stilted tone, the tone of all hagiographies, to be sure, but which here scaled the heights of platitude. The pages stank of candles and cassocks. And that tedious way of reading into childhood the signs of future “destiny”! In retrospect it always worked out, of course. A real pain in the ass! as Moéma said of anything, however minor, that got in the way of what she called her freedom but which was basically nothing but irrational and pathological egoism. The only one he felt attracted to was Friedrich von Spee, despite the inanity of his poems.

“Man’s swelling his pointed dick! Squaawk, squaaaawk!” the parrot screeched again, as if it had waited for the moment when its utterance would have the greatest effect.

As resplendent as it’s stupid, Eléazard thought, regarding the animal with disdain. A common enough paradox, alas, and not only in the great macaw of the Amazon.

He’d finished his caipirinha . A second — a third? — would have been welcome, but the idea of bothering Soledade again made him hesitate. After all, in Portuguese soledade meant “solitude.” “I live alone with Solitude …” he said to himself. There are pleonasms that have a kind of excess of truth in them. It could have been a quotation from the Romance of the Rose : “When Reason heard me, she turned away and left me pensive and mournful.”

In which we hear of the birth & early years of Athanasius Kircher, the hero of this history

ON THIS DAY, dedicated to Saint Genevieve, the third of the year 1690, I, Caspar Schott, sitting like some student at a desk in this library of which I have charge, undertake to relate the life, exemplary in every detail, of the Reverend Father Athanasius Kircher. Out of modesty this man, whose edifying works have put the stamp of his intelligence on our history, hid behind his books; people will, I am sure, be grateful to me if, as is my heartfelt desire, I gently lift this veil, in all propriety, to throw light on a destiny which glory has rendered immortal now & for evermore.

Setting out on such an arduous task, I put my trust in Mary, our mother, whom Athanasius never invoked in vain, as I take up my pen to bring back to life the man who was my master for fifty years & who bestowed on me, I make bold to assert, his true friendship.

Athanasius Kircher was born at three o’clock in the morning of the second day of May, the feast of Saint Athanasius, in the year 1602. His parents, Johannes Kircher & Anna Gansekin, were fervent & generous Catholics. At the time of his birth they lived in Geisa, a small town three hours from Fulda.

Athanasius Kircher was born, at the beginning of a period of relative concord, into a pious & close-knit family & into an atmosphere of study & contemplation which, I am sure, was not without influence on his future vocation, especially since Johannes Kircher possessed an extensive library so that as a child Athanasius was constantly surrounded by books. It was always with emotion & gratitude that, later on, he would mention to me certain titles he had held in his hands in Geisa, in particular the De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis of Rabanus Maurus, through which he had practically learned to read.