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

Nelson’s admiration and gratitude for this odd fellow knew no bounds. Zé, always in a jovial mood, had befriended him and came to the favela to see him from time to time. He always had some new story to tell and even took the aleijadinho in his truck for trips to the seaside. Not only was Zé—Uncle Zé as he called him — tall and strong and drove around the world in his huge, brightly colored truck, he possessed what in Nelson’s eyes was a genuine treasure: Lampião’s nephew’s car! It was a white Willis that Zé had shown him one day. It didn’t go anymore, but he looked after it carefully; Nelson had never been so happy as the day he had been allowed to sit inside it. Famous spoils of war! Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, alias Lampião, who had become an outlaw after his father was killed by the police and spent almost twenty years leading them by the nose, had taken it from Antônio Gurgel, a rich landowner who had ventured into the Sertão. Lampião had attacked it on horseback with his band as if it were an ordinary stagecoach and Gurgel had only come out of it alive by paying a large ransom. Nelson knew all the history of the cangaço and of the men who were called cangaceiros because they carried their rifles across their spine, the way harnessed oxen bore the cangalho , the yoke. They had thrown off the yoke of oppression to live the life of free men in the Sertão, and if their Winchesters weighed heavy on their shoulders, at least it was in a good cause, the cause of justice. Fascinated, like all the boys in the Nordeste , by the figure of Lampião, Nelson had done everything he could to collect material about this Robin Hood of the great estates. The sheet-metal and plywood walls of his lair in the favela of Pirambú were papered with numerous photos cut out from Manchete or Veja . They showed Lampião at all ages and in all aspects of his career, also his companion in his adventures, Maria Bonita, and his principal lieutenants: Chico Pereira, Antônio Porcino, José Saturnino, Jararaca … all of whose exploits Nelson knew by heart, holy martyrs whom he often called upon for protection.

Zé having promised he would come by that evening, Nelson had gone back to the favela a little earlier than usual. He’d bought a litre of cachaça from Terra e Mar and filled the two little paraffin lamps he’d made out of old tin cans. Performing contortions, he had even managed to level out the sand in his room, after having cleared away all his cigarette butts. Now, as he waited for Uncle Zé, he looked at his father gleaming in the half-light. Oh, no one could say that he neglected him: the steel bar had been cleaned as if it were a silver candlestick; oiled and rubbed day after day, it reflected the flame of the night-light on it that he kept lit all the time.

Like many men from the Nordeste , his father used to work in a steelworks of the Minas Geraís. Every evening he would tell him about the hell of the blast furnaces, of the dangers the workers were exposed to because of the rapacity of the owner, Colonel José Moreira de Rocha. One day he didn’t come home. At nightfall a fat oaf in a suit and two foremen had come to see him in the shack, unfit for human habitation, that the boss generously granted each of his employees. They talked of an accident, describing in detail how his father, his own father, had fallen into a vat of molten metal. There was nothing left of him apart from this symbolic piece of rail, which they had insisted on bringing with them. There were sure to be a few atoms of his father spread through it, they said; it weighed 143 pounds, exactly the same as his father, so it could be given a church funeral. And for good measure they added that, since he no longer had any claim on the house, he was being asked to quit the property.

Nelson was ten years old. His mother had died when he was born and having no other family, he found himself on the street at a moment’s notice. Through all his trials and tribulations he had held on to the piece of rail and lavished care on it as his most precious possession.

The Colonel was a bastard, a son of a whore eaten away by the pox.

“Don’t you worry, Daddy,” Nelson murmured, turning to the steel bar, “I’ll get him, you can be sure of that; sooner or later that swine will feel the vengeance of the cangaço .

Which takes us to the terrible war that lasted for thirty years and turned the kingdoms of Europe upside down; and in which Athanasius displays rare courage on the occasion of a misadventure that could have ended very badly

ATHANASIUS HAD JUST started his study of physics when war came to Paderborn. When, on January 6, 1622, Johann Copper gave his flock the order to flee, it was almost too late: the rabble had already surrounded the buildings. Relying solely on his courage & his faith in Our Lord, the principal of the college went out to meet the mercenaries & urge them to show mercy. They flung a flaming torch in his face. He managed to avoid it but the Lutheran fiends threw themselves on the holy man; he was given a thorough thrashing, insulted & humiliated before being tied up like an animal & dragged off to prison. He was fortunate not to be taken straight to the scaffold, on which many other Catholics no more culpable than he ended their days.

While this was going on & to obey the orders of their superior, the eighty Jesuit pupils — not including five priests who decided to stay — left the college in small groups disguised as ordinary men. Fifteen of them were captured & taken to join the principal in prison. Accompanied by another student, Athanasius & Friedrich managed to leave the town with no problem.

On February 7, 1622 they reached the banks of the Rhine, in the vicinity of Düsseldorf. The river had frozen over only recently but the locals indicated a section where the ice was thicker & it was possible to cross — which was a brazen lie dictated solely by the desire to save money! The custom was to pay some poor devil every year to cross the river & thus test the ice. The three strangers were a godsend for the country folk & it was solely to save a few coppers that these miserly peasants showed no mercy & lied to then. In those times of misery & hardship men’s lives, & a fortiori the lives of strangers who seemed to be vile deserters, were not worth a cabbage stalk. The skinflints showed them a path by which, they claimed, everyone went across without mishap.

With the hotheadedness of youth & his experience of skating, Kircher took the lead & went on, twenty paces ahead of the other two, to make sure they at least would be safe. The weather was worsening rapidly. Masses of fog drifting down from the north were threatening to hide the shore. Athanasius hurried on. When he reached the middle of the river, he saw to his horror that the ice was melting there. He immediately turned around in order to rejoin his companions & warn them of the danger, but with an ominous cracking noise the ice split between him & his friends with the result that the part he was standing on started to drift on open water. Carried along by the current, shouting himself hoarse on his ice floe, Athanasius disappeared in the mist.

Fearing for his life, the young man threw himself wholeheartedly into prayer. After sweeping perilously downstream, by a happy chance the ice-raft came close to the frozen part of the river & Kircher nimbly jumped onto it &, without wasting a moment, set off for dry land & the completion of the crossing. However, at about twenty cubits from the bank, while he was still thanking Our Lord for letting him escape from such a dangerous situation, & fairly comfortably too, the ice split in front of him again. Blue with cold, covered in bruises from his repeated falls, Athanasius did not hesitate for one second but threw himself into the icy water & after a few strokes, which called on all his experience as a swimmer, managed to pull himself up onto the bank, more dead than alive.