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

“ Aha … It’s not exactly straightforward then, is it?” Eléazard mocked, amused by the earnestness with which she explained these distinctions.

“It’s even more complicated than you think. I’ll spare you the details. According to the numbers you have thrown, your hexagram has three ‘young’ lines, so I will transform them into their opposite, which gives us …” She opened the booklet, looking for the first of the two diagrams. “Ah, here we are: Gou , the Meeting. Below: the wind; above: the sky. In the meeting the woman is strong. Do not marry the woman.”

“Well now!” said Eléazard, genuinely surprised.

“I’m not making anything up. You can read it yourself, if you like. Put in everyday terms it says you will meet again something you had expelled from your mind. Which means a big surprise …” Loredana continued to read, wrapped in thought, then said, “That’s incredible! Listen: The meeting is an assault, it is the flexible one who takes the firm one by assault. ‘Do not marry the woman’ means that a long-term association would be pointless …”

“Not very encouraging by the sound of it,” said Eléazard scornfully.

“Wait, that’s the overall sense of the hexagram. Now we have to interpret the lines that are susceptible to change and compare their meaning to that of the second hexagram. It’s only after that that we can get a resolution. And the first one says … Just a moment. Yes: In the presence of a fish in the net, the duty implied by this presence does not extend to visitors at all .”

“And the fish is me?”

“Wait, I tell you. For the second we have: A melon wrapped in branches of a weeping willow. It contains a brilliance that indicates the descent of celestial influences to the terrestrial plane …”

“Aha! That’s you! An angel come down from heaven …”

“And the third,” Loredana added, as if replying to Eléazard’s mischievous comment, “specifies that: To meet a horn, that is something humiliating. But you incur no blame in this .”

“If you mean I’ve hit a snag, thank you for nothing, I’d already noticed that.”

Loredana shook her head regretfully. “We can stop if you’ve had enough. I really have the feeling I’m wasting my time.”

“Please go on. I won’t do it again, promise.”

She leafed through her booklet for a while to identify the second hexagram. “That one’s the Xiao Guo , the Little Excess … Below: the mountain, above: thunder. A bird takes flight, leaving its call behind it. It ought not to rise higher. It ought to come down. In that case, and in that case alone, there will be happiness .”

“It leaves its call behind it …” Eléazard repeated, taken with the sudden poetry of the image.

“Which means you are too excessive, even in things of little importance. If the bird rises higher and higher, its cry will be lost in the clouds and become inaudible. If it came down, the others would hear it. Hearing the bird’s call symbolizes listening to one’s own excesses, becoming aware of them and carrying out a prompt adjustment .”

Loredana continued to read silently. People of high society, the book said, are excessively polite in their conduct and excessively sad in their mourning … It was one of the oddest of the I Chings , one of the most explicit she’d ever read for someone, doubtless because she had been involved in the questioning. She knew very well why her meeting with Eléazard could not go beyond certain limits fixed inside her by her fear, even if that were exaggerated. This result must fit him one way or another … She decided to drive him into a corner.

“For whom or for what are you in mourning?” she asked him point-blank, aware that this unexpected question shook him.

Eléazard felt his scalp tingle. He had reached the point of seeing the previous metaphor as representing his attitude to Elaine and of trying it out at random on the thousand and one aspects of his anguish, and with one word this stranger had hit the bull’s eye.

“You’re amazing!” he said with genuine admiration.

He thought: I’m in mourning for my love, for my youth, for an unsatisfactory world. I’m in mourning for mourning itself, for its twilight and for the soothing warmth of its lamentation …

But what he said was: “I’m in mourning for everything that has not succeeded in being born, for everything we do our best to destroy, for obscure reasons, every time it puts out a shoot. How can I put it … I can’t understand why we always see beauty as a threat, happiness as degradation …”

The rain stopped, replaced by a silence spattered with drops and sudden trickles of water.

“We haven’t gotten anywhere yet,” said Loredana, screwing up her eyes.

ELÉAZARD GOT UP around eight, a little later than usual. He found his coffee being kept warm in the kitchen and his piece of toast on the table beside the bowl and some maracujá juice. Soledade never appeared before ten, the television programs having kept her awake for a good part of the night, so she made a point of preparing his breakfast before going back to bed. With a muzzy head from the excesses of the previous evening, Eléazard took two soluble aspirin. “What a strange woman,” he thought as he watched the tablets swirling round in the glass of water, “but she certainly knew how to twist me round her little finger …” To the very last moment he had hoped to finish the night with her and, thinking about it, he had come very close: at the end of the I Ching session there had been a moment, he was sure, when she’d been thinking seriously about the possibility, but that idiot Alfredo had appeared to announce his victory over the pump. Loredana had seized the opportunity and used her desire for a shower as an excuse to get away. She fled, Eléazard told himself, without understanding the motives for her escape or being able to do anything about the frustration it caused him. A little later, with the help of the aspirin, he was blaming himself for having succumbed to the lustful promptings of alcohol; mortified to think he must have cut a ridiculous figure, he decided to repress the memory of the evening. What a bad idea it had been to go out for dinner!

Before sitting down at his desk, he poured some sunflower seeds into the parrot’s feeding dish. Heidegger seemed to be in a good mood, rocking back and forward and making his back ripple like a plumed serpent. Eléazard picked up a seed and went up to the bird, speaking softly to it, “Heidegger, Heidi! How are you today? Still not decided to speak normally, eh? Come on, come and get the seed, my beauty.” The parrot came toward him by shuffling sideways along its perch, then let itself topple over and came to a stop head down in a bat-like pose. “Well then, what do you think of the world? You really think there’s some hope?” Eléazard was moving his hand toward the enormous beak when the bird, like a spring suddenly released, bit his index finger and drew blood. “Oh, go fuck yourself, you stupid bastard,” Eléazard yelled in pain. “You’re mad, sir, stark staring mad! One day I’ll pop you in the saucepan, d’you hear, you moron?”

Squeezing his cut finger, he was heading for the bathroom when Soledade appeared in front of him.

“ Que passa? ”

“What has happened is that that stupid parrot’s bitten me again! Just look at that, he almost cut my finger off. I’ll release him in the forest, then he’ll learn what suffering is …”

“If you do that, then I’ll leave as well,” Soledade said solemnly. “It’s your own fault, you don’t know how to go about it. He doesn’t bite me at all.”