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

“Why not continue upstream on a raft?” Mauro asked.

Petersen gave a contemptuous shrug. “The current’s too strong. Even if we did manage to build a raft that would more or less float, we’d never be able to go upstream on it.”

“But they will eventually get worried,” Mauro went on. “They can always send someone in from the north, from Cáceres, for example, or even from Cuiabá, can’t they?”

“Who are ‘they’? Here it’s every man for himself. And my wife won’t get worried, sometimes I’m away for several weeks on business. By the time she does, we’ll all be long since dead.”

“But we’ve enough provisions for quite a length of time,” Elaine broke in, “and afterward we can always get by with fishing, or even hunting …”

“Oh, that’s no problem, missie. It’s not the grub I’m worried about, it’s the water. When the jerricans are empty — and quite a few have bullet holes — all that’ll be left will be river water, which leaves us the choice: die of thirst or of dysentery. That’s for certain.”

Elaine had read enough about tropical diseases to see that he was right. “And what are our chances of getting through the forest?”

“For you, none at all. It would be too hard, you’re not used to it; him either,” he said with a glance at Mauro. “Not to mention our friend; disabled as he is, it’s unthinkable. No, what I suggest is that I go with Yurupig to find help. The fork in the river isn’t that far, three or four days on foot, perhaps less, and once we’re there I’m sure there’ll be no problem finding someone to come and fetch you. At the very worst we’ll have to go up as far as Pôrto Aterradinho.”

Elaine hadn’t even started to consider the disaster from this angle, but the arguments Petersen put forward seemed irrefutable. Relieved at not having to face the jungle, she was about to accept this solution, when her eye met Yurupig’s. Slightly behind Petersen and without moving a muscle of his face, he was shaking his head rapidly to tell her to refuse.

“You keep out of this, I warn you,” Herman immediately said, turning to the Indian. “Well,” he said to Elaine, “what do you think?”

“It’s not a decision I can make alone. I’ll have to discuss it with Dietlev first, once he’s woken up. And Mauro will have his say too, of course.”

“As you wish,” Petersen said with a suspicious look. “But there’s nothing to discuss, believe me. I’m off tomorrow morning, anyway.”

“You’ll do what you’re told to do and that’s that,” Elaine said in a steady voice. “That’s what you’ve been paid for, and pretty generously paid too, from what I understand.”

A flash of anger appeared in Petersen’s eyes, but he merely gave a silent laugh, as if he’d glimpsed a comic sequel to the discussion. “I’m going to have a bite to eat and then get some sleep,” he said, controlling his temper. “And you’d be well advised to do the same, senhora … Oh, by the way, I’ve put Milton’s things in your trunk.”

“What things?”

“What he had on him. I chucked them both in the water, him and the other bastard. A matter of hygiene, you understand.”

Necrosis, the stench of corpses, caymans and piranhas falling on a naked body … She felt a quiver of disgust run across the back of her neck. “How could you!” she burst out indignantly. “Who authorized you to do a thing like that?”

“No one, senhora ,” Petersen said in honeyed tones and as if he were talking to a madwoman, “no one at all, I assure you …”

KIRCHER’s a common manipulator. He tampers with facts until they make sense. His clear conscience is no excuse. The propagation of the faith, propaganda, distortion of history, etc. — the sequence is only too well known. The certainty of being in the right is always a sign of a secret vocation for fascism.

I ASKED SOLEDADE IF, out of the goodness of her heart, she could give the library shelves a quick dusting: a categorical refusal. Even though it’s dead she’s terrified of the bird-eating spider I brought back from Quixadá.

A STORY FROM LOREDANA: A young Italian, on holiday in London, being taken home by car after a boozy night. It’s summer and he opens his window and sticks his arm out to drum his fingers on the roof of the vehicle. The car goes into a spin, overturns. After the accident, there’s nothing wrong with him apart from a bit of blood on his sleeves; he feels no pain, his pals are unharmed. Relieved, he shakes his hand in the gesture of a person who’s got off lightly and his fingers fly off onto the tarmac.

KIRCHER’S COLLECTION as an anamorphosis of Kircher himself. Less of a museum than a curiosity shop, like that of Dr. Azoux with his papier-mâché models.

LETTER TO MALBOIS: add confirmation of details on La Mothe Le Vayer.

A HISTORIAN, historians say, is at least capable of grasping the style of an age, something that could only arise at a certain time and in a certain place. But that is an illusion; a historian can only grasp the difference from the reflection of his own times. He holds up a bronze mirror to the past, eagerly looking for distortions.

“COPULATION with animals,” Albert Camus notes, “eliminates our awareness of the other. It is ‘freedom.’ That’s why it is attractive to lots of minds, even including Balzac.”

THE VERY END OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: “In consideration of the criminal proceedings, charges and information, the interrogations, replies and confessions of the accused, confrontations with witnesses, conclusions of the aforesaid prosecutor; of the replies and confessions of the accused made in the presence of his lawyer and everything that has been placed before us, we declare the aforesaid Legaigneux guilty in fact and in law of copulation with a female donkey belonging to the same. As public atonement for this crime we condemn him to be hanged and strangled by the executioner, from a gallows that will be erected in such and such a place; and before this death sentence is carried out, the aforesaid female donkey will be stunned and killed by the aforesaid executioner at the aforesaid place, in the presence of the accused.”

If the animal is punished it is because it shares responsibility for the act with the man: the man guilty of sodomy has stooped to the level of brute beasts, but the donkey committed the unpardonable crime of raising itself to the level of thinking beings. They are both “against nature.” By betraying the laws of their species, they equally endanger the order of the world.

THE VERY END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: “Accused of attempted sodomy with a dolphin called Freddie, Alan Cooper, 38, justified the act by saying that he was only masturbating the animal to gain its friendship. His lawyers based his defense on the fact that dolphins are notoriously licentious and are some of the rare animals who indulge in the sex act purely for pleasure. Alan Cooper risks ten years in prison if the charge of clear intention of rectal or vaginal penetration is accepted and life if sodomy is proved beyond reasonable doubt .” (Newcastle upon Tyne, England.)

WHY DOES SCHOTT use Latin for the lewd passages when the language was understood by the majority of readers of his time? This false sense of decency is indecent.

IN GENERAL THE PROBLEM of the labyrinth is posed in terms of escaping: once one is in it, one has to find the way out. The labyrinth designed by Kircher seems to invert the question in that it doesn’t lead anywhere. The heart is inaccessible. The pointlessness of Ariadne’s thread: a true labyrinth should be devised from the center, it is a space that is totally cut off from the outside; an allegory of the brain, of its convolutions, of its impenetrable solitude. It takes a Daedalus to fly away from the labyrinth, but it also takes a Daedalus to kill the Minotaur in it.