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

The Earth goes round and round in space,

The sun’s rays’ heat is like a stove,

Some men’s blood is spilled for cash,

While others meet their end from love,

But whether poor or reprobate,

No man can escape from his fate.

The story I’ll recount today,

I wouldn’t call it sentimental,

But it tells, in its own way,

A tale to thrill, both fierce and gentle:

The words and deeds of Lampião,

The legend of the wild Sertão.

It had more than a hundred and fifty verses … No one can change his destiny was the conclusion of the author of this classical tragedy, no man can live happy in the Sertão when he’s the son of Lampião .

Half asleep, Nelson was remembering. As every evening, a few minutes before going to sleep he saw the farm at Angicos where the army had finally succeeded in surrounding Lampião and his band. They had been gunned down, one after the other, and when the massacre was over the soldiers had posed for photographs in front of the mutilated corpses. One day he had seen in one of these old sepia photographs — they were regularly exhibited at fairs, along with other equally morbid attractions — the naked and dismembered body of Maria Bonita. Between her splayed legs the huge stake the soldiers had driven up her vagina was sticking out. Beside her, placed on a stone to be in the front row for the performance, Lampião’s head could be seen: his face covered in blood, his mouth opened exaggeratedly wide and full of clots of blood from his shattered jaw, he seemed to be screaming out his hatred for all eternity.

The conclusion of Kircher’s confession followed by a description of the Villa Palagonia, its enigmas and its strange owners

“I HAVE TO admit, Kircher went on, that the sight of those men & the bleeding tuna made me lose my head; I had the feeling I was watching a pagan festival & was considering the unreal side of such a spectacle, when I was almost caught up in something I condemn. Remember, Caspar, there was the fish, the symbol of Our Lord, the blood of sacrifice, love & death mingled in a furious joy & with all the solemn incantation of a sacred ceremony. Suddenly I could understand the trance of the Maenads the classical texts talk of & how they identify with the darkest forces of our being. The intoxication of the senses to the point of madness, Caspar, the obliteration of everything that is not the body & solely the body! For a moment everything else seemed empty to me. In the man who was singing I saw the only priest worthy of that name & in the fury of the sailors the only religious way of belonging to this world. Our Church had lost its way in losing this immediate, sensual contact with things, we could only approach the divine in the real violence of life, not in a puerile simulacrum of it. The one we are struggling against, the frenzied god, the “twice born,” he alone was worthy of our respect, despite our efforts to make him look ridiculous. Dionysus, yes, it was Dionysus whom we ought to worship, just as our ancestors before us did, & I should pick up a pike, lose myself in the mass of bodies, forget myself in the spurting blood until the complete consummation of the sacrifice …

Athanasius’s admission left me with my head in a whirl. My master had always been very assured in matters of religion; the doubts he had just revealed to me showed, even though they were the product of an oversensitive imagination, that he was as vulnerable as ordinary mortals. His acceptance of human weakness only made me love him all the more.

Three days after our return to Palermo, a carriage came to the Jesuit College to take us to visit the Prince of Palagonia.

In keeping with his reputation as an eccentric, the Prince lived outside the town, close to a village called Bagheria, where there was nothing but peasant hovels. When, after several hours, we saw his residence, we could not but admire its style. What the people of Palermo called a villa was a little Palladian palace, such as could be seen in the area around Rome; in truth, however, it was not that that drew our attention: the first thing to strike us was the height of the surrounding wall & the monstrous figures overhanging it for the whole of its circumference. It was as if the house were being attacked by all the demons of hell. The closer we came, the better we could make out these misshapen beings carved out of the porous rock that looked as if they’d come from the imagination of a man possessed by the devil. I crossed myself, calling on the Blessed Virgin while Athanasius seemed greatly perplexed. Our astonishment reached its height when we saw the two gnomes flanking the entrance gate. The one on the right above all impressed by its obvious barbarian nature; as far as one could tell from the unspeakable bulge jutting out from its lower abdomen, it was a seated Priapus, but crooked & distorted. Like the headless Libyans mentioned by Horace, its chest took the place of its head; a huge head, out of proportion & prolonged by an absurd Pharaoh’s goatee! And if the face’s two almond-shaped eyes looked like two slits opening onto the dark the tiara on top made up for it by being decorated with four pupils, arranged in a triangle, whose evil look made my blood curdle. The Egyptian inspiration for this horrible idol was manifest, but this one made me feel uneasy in a way that none of the sarcophagus figures had, nor the Egyptian grotesques I had seen at Aix-en-Provence in the collection of the late Sieur Peiresc. This disagreeable sensation was only increased by the way the servants hastened to lock the wide wrought-iron gates as soon as we had passed through. All this boded ill for our stay & I found myself deploring my master’s rashness in accepting this invitation.

“Come, Caspar,” my master said, “summon up all your courage. If my intuition is correct, you’re going to need it to face up to what’s in store for us.” He said this with a little amused smile that frightened me more than all the rest.

Having driven around the villa, the carriage stopped beside a fine double staircase & we got out. A lackey invited us into the house while another unloaded our baggage. We were taken to an antechamber that was rather dark but richly decorated.

“I will inform the prince of your arrival,” the servant said, “please make yourselves comfortable.”

He went out, closing the door behind him; it imitated the marble of the walls so perfectly I would have found it difficult to find my way out of the room if I had been invited to do so.

“Whatever happens, don’t say a word,” Kircher whispered surreptitiously. I acknowledged this with a nod of the head, repressing my desire to tell him of my concern.

Athanasius started to stroll around the room. All around us were cartouches, painted in fresco & charmingly rendered, depicting numerous very strange emblems, mottoes or riddles; there were so many it would have taken several days just to read them all.

“Look, Caspar, what do you think of this one: Morir per no morir ? Nothing? Really? You must have forgotten the phoenix, which has to be consumed by fire in order to be reborn from its ashes. That is really quite childish, I would have expected more wit from the Prince. But let us continue: Si me mira, me miran … That’s hardly less elementary, because of the double meaning, a gnomon could say it of the sun or, equally well, a courtier of his sovereign. Ah, here’s a more difficult one, but more amusing as well: Entier nous le mangeons, mais ô prodige étrange, reduit a sa moitié ce coquin nous mange . Come on, my friend, rack your brains a bit, what can we eat when it’s whole but half of which eats us.”