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

O mighty pennate Ishtar, adorèd, benefic ,

Wellspring, lunar brilliance, cat-queen edenic!

With the salamander, live adornment of thee,

Fluorescent sea!

Androgynous, its lip tingled: Tutankhamun ,

Hermes, puppets, sibyls lie carolling welcome

loyalties, elders deploying stichomythia .

He would finish with his eyes closed & remain silent, absorbed by the beauty of the lines or some memory connected with the text. I would take advantage of that to slip away, sure as I was that I would find him on the morrow back in his usual high spirits.

In 1616 Von Spee was transferred to the Jesuit college in Paderborn, where he was to complete his noviciate, & Athanasius, suddenly tired of Fulda, decided to go to Mainz to study philosophy. The winter of 1617 was particularly hard. Mainz was buried beneath the snow, all the rivers around were frozen over. Athanasius had flung himself wholeheartedly into the study of philosophy, above all that of Aristotle, which he loved & assimilated with astonishing rapidity. But having learned from his experiences at Fulda, where his fellow students had sometimes reacted brutally to his subtlety of mind, Athanasius worked in secret & refused to reveal how much he had learned. Feigning humility & even stupidity, he was looked upon as an industrious pupil limited by his lack of understanding.

A few months after his arrival in Mainz, Kircher expressed the desire to enter the Society of Jesus. Since he was not, to all appearances, intellectually gifted, it took an approach by his father to Johann Copper, the Jesuits’ superior in the Rhineland, before the latter accepted his candidacy. His departure for the noviciate in Paderborn was put off until the autumn of 1618, after he had taken his final exams in philosophy. Athanasius was delighted by the news, doubtless in part at the prospect of seeing his friend Von Spee again.

That winter ice-skating was all the rage; Athanasius developed such skill in this activity that he derived sinful satisfaction from showing off in front of his companions. Filled with vanity, he liked to use his agility & the length of his slides to leave them behind. One day, when he was trying to skate faster than one of his fellow students, he realized he could not stop on the ice: his legs went in different directions & he took a severe fall on the hard-frozen ground. This fall, which was a just punishment for his conceit, left Kircher with a nasty hernia & various abrasions to his legs, which the same pride made him keep hidden.

By February these wounds had become infected. Not having been treated, they started to suppurate badly & in a few days poor Athanasius’ legs had swollen so much that he could only walk with extreme difficulty. As the winter intensified, Athanasius continued to study in the worst conditions of cold & discomfort imaginable. Afraid of being rejected by the Jesuit college, where he had only been accepted with great difficulty, he remained silent about his state, with the result that his legs got progressively worse, right up to the day he was to leave for Paderborn.

His journey on foot across the Hesse countryside was veritable torture. In the course of the days & nights of the walk Athanasius recalled his conversations with Friedrich von Spee about the tortures inflicted by the inquisitors on those accused of witchcraft: that was what he was having to endure & it was only his faith in Jesus & the prospect of soon being reunited with his friend that helped him to withstand as best he could the sufferings of the flesh. Limping terribly, he reached the Jesuit college in Paderborn on October 2, 1618. Immediately after they had expressed their delight at seeing each other again, Von Spee, who was there to receive him, squeezed his secret out of him. A surgeon, who was called urgently, was horrified at the state of his legs; he found them already gangrenous and declared Kircher beyond hope. Thinking an incurable sickness was enough in itself, Kircher said nothing about his hernia. The superior of the college, Johann Copper, came to tell him gently that he would have to return home if his health had not improved within the month. However, he called all the novices together in prayer to ask God to relieve the poor neophyte.

After several days during which Athanasius’s agonies only increased, Von Spee advised his protégé to appeal to the Virgin, who had always watched over him. In the church in Paderborn there was a very old statue of the Virgin Mary, which was said to have miraculous powers. Its fame was widespread among the ordinary folk of the region. Kircher had himself taken to the church & for a whole night he begged the Madonna to look down mercifully on the affliction of her sick child. Toward the twelfth hour he tried out his limbs to see if his supplication had been granted & was filled with a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. No longer doubting that he would be healed, he continued to pray until morning.

Waking a few hours later from a dreamless sleep, he found that both legs had healed & that his hernia had gone!

Look as he might through his spectacles, the surgeon was forced to admit the miracle had happened: to his great astonishment he only found scars & no trace of the infection that ought to have utterly destroyed his patient. Thus we can well understand the special devotion Athanasius retained throughout his life for Our Lady, who had succored him in his ordeal, indicating how Kircher was predestined to serve God within the Society.

Uncomfortable on the hard seat in her compartment, Elaine looked out of the window and watched the landscape passing by. She was a beautiful woman of thirty-five, with long, brown, curly hair that she wore in a loose, artistically tousled chignon. She was wearing a lightweight, beige safari jacket and matching skirt; she had crossed her legs in such a way that, without her noticing or perhaps without thinking it important, revealed rather more than she should of the suntanned skin of her left thigh. She was smoking a long menthol cigarette with the touch of affectation that revealed her lack of experience of that kind of thing. On the other seat, almost opposite her, Mauro had made himself comfortable: legs stretched out under the seat across the compartment, hands behind his neck, headset over his ears, he was listening to the cassette of Caetano Veloso, swaying his head in time to the music. Taking advantage of the fact that Elaine was turned to the window, he looked at her thighs with pleasure. It was not every day that one had the opportunity to admire the more intimate anatomy of Profesora Von Wogau, and many students at the University of Brazilia would have liked to be in his place. But he was the one she’d chosen to accompany her to the Pantanal because of his brilliant performance in his defense of his doctoral thesis in geology — passed with distinction, if you please! — because he had the handsome looks of an unrepentant Don Juan, and also perhaps, though to his mind it really didn’t come into consideration, because his father was governor of the state of Maranhão. “ Cavaleiro de Jorge, seu chapéu azul, cruzeiro do sul no peito …” Mauro increased the volume, as he did every time his favorite tune came on. Carried away by the beat of the song, he started humming the words, drawing out the final “oo” sound as Caetano used to. Elaine’s thighs quivered a little every time the train jolted; inwardly he rejoiced.

Disturbed in her daydream by her companion’s irritating chirping, Elaine suddenly looked over and caught him examining her thighs.

“You’d do better to show an interest in the landscape we’re passing through,” she said, uncrossing her legs and pulling her skirt down.