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

“Oh, really? And could you tell me what you have to do to please him? Get down on your knees? Crawl over to give him a seed? I’m really fed up with the creature.”

“A parrot isn’t like other animals. Xangó shines like the sun, there’s fire inside him; if you don’t show him respect, he’ll burn you. It’s as simple as that.”

“You’re as crazy as he is,” Eléazard said, disarmed by this reasoning. “And why do you insist on calling him Xangó?”

“It’s his real name,” she said with a stubborn look, “he told me himself. He doesn’t like the one he’s been given at all. Come, I’ll bandage that for you. That kind of thing can be dangerous, you know.”

Eléazard gave in, overcome by the girl’s touching naïveté, Brazil really was a different world.

“You got back late yesterday,” she said, pressing some cotton wool soaked in alcohol on the wound.

“That hurts! Be gentle now.”

“Gentle doesn’t get you anywhere,” she said, giving him a strange look, a mixture of sweet revenge and irony. “The disinfectant has to get to the bottom of the wound. What’s her name?”

“… Loredana,” he said, after a brief pause of surprise at her perspicacity. “She’s Italian. But how do you know?”

“My little finger told me. Is she beautiful?”

“Not bad. That is, yes, curves in all the right places. She’s got a superb ass,” he added to provoke her a little.

“You’re all the same,” said Soledade as she finished wrapping the Band-Aid round his finger. “But when you go fishing at night, all you catch is eels.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I know what I mean. Right, there, that’s done. I’ll go out and do the shopping.”

“Get a bit more in than usual, we might have a guest.”

Soledade nodded like the parrot and gave him a black look.

“ Si senhor ,” she said, mimicking absolute servility. “But I warn you, don’t expect me to serve at table, O meu computado não fala, computa! ”

God knows where she heard that, Eléazard thought as he went back to his study. Spoken in a tone of contempt, it was a sentence that could be understood differently depending on the stress on the last word, either “My computer doesn’t speak, it computes,” or: “My computer doesn’t speak with puta ” (i.e., whores). He certainly felt that Soledade was a bit too free and easy, but he liked the pun and tried unsuccessfully to translate it into French in a way that retained its marvelous concision.

Then he immersed himself in Caspar Schott’s manuscript. Rereading his notes on the computer, he decided they were too succinct and slightly prejudiced. The problem was to know whom they were aimed at: an academic familiar with the seventeenth century would doubtless consider them adequate but an ordinary reader wouldn’t find enough in them to satisfy his curiosity fully. But how far should he go? He felt he had so much to say about Kircher’s century, to his mind one of the most notable since Antiquity, that he could easily double or even triple Schott’s text with his notes. As for his prejudice against the man himself, that was something new, resulting entirely from his conversation with Loredana. There was a happy medium to be observed between unquestioning praise and systematic hostility, a balance in which his rancor toward Kircher was muzzled in the right way.

Still stormy, the weather was piling all the sadness of the world on Alcântara. Eléazard wondered whether Loredana would come and see him that morning, as she had promised. The woman was pretty unique of her kind. Now he remembered the night in the Caravela as something intense and poetic, one of those he would like to revive in his life. If she should come that day, he would offer her a genuine apology and tell her how much he wanted her friendship. He found himself imagining her in the alley she would have to go down to come to his house. Impatient, almost anxious, he watched out for her like a teenager on his first date.

I’m like an old child, he told himself with a smile. It’s Moéma who’s right. Down to work, then. In his archives — he’d have to get round to cataloging them one of these days — he’d finally managed to find the article by François Secret that had been missing since he’d edited the notes to chapter three. Secret, what a name for someone who’d devoted his life to hermeneutics! It was enough to make you think surnames could sometimes determine the destiny of those who bore them. Having said that, the study in question, A forgotten episode in the life of Peiresc: the magic sabre of Gustavus Adolphus , did not do much for Kircher since, in the light of the writings of George Wallin, it proved that the sabre he had examined was false. To make matters worse, Wallin quoted De orbibus tribus aureis by the Strasbourg scholar Johannes Scheffer, a book in which Kircher was accused of total ignorance in matters of interpretation for having talked of magic characters when, out of malice, someone had shown him what were merely samples of the Danish language. Of course, as thoroughgoing antipapists, Wallin and Scheffer were trying to rehabilitate Gustavus Adolphus and, through him, Protestantism as a whole; their accusation, along with many other similar ones, cast doubt on the Jesuit’s competence. And this all the more so since his attempts at deciphering the hieroglyphs ended, unquestionably to our eyes, in abject failure.

Eléazard wondered how a person could be so blind. Without being able to say why, he was convinced that Athanasius Kircher had never knowingly cheated. If he could be accused, for his part, of supporting the cause of the Counter-Reformation with a white lie, that motive did not come into question for the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It followed, therefore, that the man must either have been deceiving himself — by autosuggestion? out of madness? — about his abilities or have taken Machiavellianism and a love of fame to a point where it became truly monstrous.

Eléazard edited the note relating to the “magic” sword then continued with the task of putting the text on the computer. He could not, however, stop himself from going to look out of the window from time to time, on the pretext of smoking a cigarette.

Toward ten Soledade came back from shopping with the mail and the newspapers she had gone to collect from the first boat. There was nothing of interest in the dailies. Always the same reports on murders or muggings more or less everywhere in the big cities, all largely drowned in the slush of articles on football, pop singers, provincial social events and ministerial bombast. A VASP plane crashing in the mountains near Fortaleza was the front-page news. Nada restou! — ”Nothing left!”—was the expressive summary in one headline. “A hundred and thirty-five dead and two babies” proclaimed another with involuntary cynicism, as if the fact of having avoided the adult sufferings of human beings meant the babies did not have the right to be counted among the dead. There followed, in order, the usual photos to tickle their readers’ taste for blood and gore, a description of the pillage of the wreck before the rescue party arrived, and posthumous praise for the crew.

Eléazard’s attention was drawn by the plundering of the airplane: one more symptom in the long list he kept faithfully up to date. Two months previously several hundred destitute youths had left the favelas of Rio and poured onto the well-known Copacabana beach. They had cleaned out the place to such an extent, leaving the practically naked tourists to get on with their tan, that they had been dubbed grilos , “the locusts.” More or less all over the country gangs were getting together to rob banks, supermarkets, hotels and even restaurants. In the filthy and overfull jails the prisoners were rebelling in such large numbers that the police had started shooting on sight. Every time they were called in it ended with dozens of dead. Corruption had spread to the highest levels of the state and while the mass of people was getting poorer by the day, suffering an alarming resurgence of diseases such as leprosy, cholera and bubonic plague, a tiny number of the nouveaux riches could watch their assets grow in the Miami banks. Brazil, as they say of white dwarfs, was collapsing in on itself and no one could say what “black hole” would be the result of the implosion.