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

That he should make a lot of money out of the projects was only fair. The influx of American technical and military staff would not have been sufficient on its own to give the region the shock treatment it needed. It would owe its revival to its governor’s presence of mind alone, to his managerial and entrepreneurial skills. In our lives we encounter certain combinations of circumstances to fail to exploit which would be an insult to destiny. When he heard — from the lips of Alvarez Neto and under the seal of secrecy — of the existence of these negotiations, the whole process, which had just been completed, had immediately appeared to him with blinding clarity. On the very evening of his interview with the minister he had started to buy up the land provisionally selected by the Americans for the installation of their experimental missiles, as well as all the parcels surrounding them, so that he could sell them on at a high price when the time came; the aim of this speculation was not merely to make a fantastic profit, but to underwrite his real-estate project. Contacting the architect, meeting him in Palo Alto, setting up the financial arrangements had not been easy, far from it! The small landowners needed a lot of persuading to sell their patches of land, the architect took ages to send him his plans, then the banking pool had done its bit, criticizing his valuations, demanding more guarantees to the point where he had had to agree to mortgage the fazenda and his collection of cars, the only assets of which he was sole owner. Everything else belonged to Carlotta: the steelworks in Minas Gerais, the seafront apartments in Bahia, the 35 percent of Brazilian Petroleum … a fortune he managed for her and which their son would one day inherit. The Alzegul inheritance! What a load of nonsense. He never thought of Mauro without falling into a kind of impotent, bitter rage, rather as if he had fathered a legless cripple or a child with an atrophied brain. An intellectual crammed full of books, an Alzegul through and through, incapable of distinguishing between a balance sheet and a working account. Yes, disabled, with no knowledge of reality apart from his petrified memory, ancient, sterile, outside human time, outside his own life … A paleontologist! And since it summed up all his disappointment and misfortune as a father, the word twisted his lips, as if it were an insult. All that money lying idle. For what, for whom? If only they would allow him to pump the money into business enterprises! That and that alone would have a profound effect on the world. His son, his wife, all those who were always making speeches but never got their hands dirty — nothing but a load of jerk-offs who never produced anything, who only made ripples by spitting in the water! But the Earth went on turning without them and would consign them to oblivion in its slow metamorphosis.

It had taken no great effort for Moreira to overcome his scruples and use part of these savings to acquire the land he wanted. After all, the title deeds were in his wife’s name and were a much more profitable investment than ordinary stocks and shares. The fact that this subterfuge meant that his own name appeared nowhere in the long chain leading to the Alcântara International Resort was a pretty neat trick as well.

Entirely taken up with his blissful thoughts until that moment, he was completely unprepared as the shadow of Loredana returned to haunt him. His excursion with her passed before his inner eye in a succession of disjointed shots, like a film botched during editing.

Her shameless invitation had made him drunk with pride, a feeling of euphoria due less to the prospect of a probable affair with the woman than to the pleasure of whisking her away before the very eyes of her hack admirer. So he’d driven off, foot down, on the long straight road through the fields of sugar cane. Because of their protective grilles — an innovation at the time — the Panhard’s headlights only lit up the strict minimum so that the car seemed absorbed into the night as it sped forward. One of the advantages of the Dynamic—“A real car for the ladies’ man,” he often said, “just imagine yourself driving with a girl on either side. Mãe de Deus! ”—was that the central steering wheel reduced the distance between the driver and the door, favoring all sorts of maneuvers; there was no need to imagine a bend to feel Loredana’s shoulder against his own. Determined not to take the initiative, savoring every moment of the sensual pressure, Moreira was quivering, every nerve straining toward a body he was sure he was going to possess very soon.

He turned off onto a country lane, bumped along in neutral for a hundred yards and stopped by an isolated chapel. The headlights lit up a beautiful portal with baroque ornamentation over it, a mixture of angels and skulls. “I wanted to show you this little jewel,” he said in a warm voice. “The end of the seventeenth century …” This ploy always worked with women. Loredana seemed very taken with it, she admired the bas-reliefs, asked questions: were they still on his land? So this chapel belonged to him? To him, yes, like the hamlet they’d just passed through, like the wells or the hill you could make out over there, like the whole of the Alcântara peninsula. At first in order to impress her, then simply because he got carried away, he found himself telling her about his projects for Maranhão, the tourist complex, the sums he’d invested … And then, quite naturally, as if to get her to share in his vision, to associate her with it more closely, he’d put his hand on her thigh … His cheek was still stinging.

She could go to hell, her and her stupid frog! And Euclides as well, for having brought along a couple of leftie fanatics like that! Any woman but her would not have got away with it, but afterward she had looked at him with such disdainful calm — as if, without giving it a further thought, she had squashed an irritating fly — that he had simply started the car again, turned and driven back.

Relighting his cigar, he suddenly found it odd that even the memory of that fiasco had not managed to mar his joy.

Which follows the preceding chapter & in which Kircher contrives an astonishing pedagogical surprise for Caspar …

“JUST IMAGINE, CASPAR, how easily the idolators will recognize their errors if we show them that we speak the same language! For us as for them the Sun is the universal source of light, it is the work of the ‘Most High,’ the dwelling place of God. As for the world, it is never more than the shadow of the divinity, its distorted image. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ Archimedes said to Hieron of Syracuse, ‘& I will move the Earth,’ & I say, ‘Give me the right mirror & I will show you the face of Christ, restored in His perfection & wholeness.’ This mirror, which eliminates outward perversions and transforms the monstrosity of forms into pure beauty, I have in my hands, Caspar: it is analogy. Make the effort to reflect the totality of worlds in it & like me you will see, clear and resplendent at the very heart of darkness, the sole image of God.”

Athanasius fell silent & was lost in thought for a moment. I could have listened to him for hours on end, especially since the Burgundy was beginning to have its effect; I felt that I understood better than ever the importance of his mission.

“There’s nothing like an experiment,” he said in decisive tones. “Come on, off we go, discipulus , I am going to show you something few people have had the opportunity to see. Provided, that is, that you agree to allow yourself, when the time comes, to be led without being able to see a thing.”