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

One can easily imagine our amazement at such knowledge & above all at the ease with which he dispensed it. From that day on my admiration & respect for Father Kircher knew no bounds & nothing has happened since then to lessen them. I ceaselessly sought out his company & he favored me, if not with his friendship, then at least with his generous patronage. His favor brought me the jealousy of my comrades & various annoyances, which are not relevant here but which I am happy to forgive in view of the immense honor that was granted me.

Two happy years passed in this way. Kircher enjoyed Würzburg & tirelessly continued with his own work alongside his duties as a teacher. Through his correspondence with the greatest names of the time & the missionaries of the Society scattered over the globe, he was kept informed of all the new developments in the sciences. And protected as we were in a profoundly Catholic kingdom, the war raging between Reformers & the partisans of the Counter-Reformation seemed a long way away, although we regularly heard the most terrible reports.

It looked as if everything was going to continue in studious tranquillity when Athanasius Kircher had a strange experience: one stormy night, suddenly wakening with a start at an unusual noise, he saw a crimson light at his window. Jumping out of bed, he opened the skylight to see what was happening. To his great surprise he saw that the college courtyard was full of armed men drawn up in ranks! Horrified, he ran to his neighbor’s cell, but found him so fast asleep he could not wake him & it was the same with all the other Jesuits he tried to warn. Worried that he was suffering from hallucinations, he came to get me and took me to a place overlooking the courtyard. The armed men had disappeared.

During the following two weeks Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, joined the war on the side of the Reformers. Reverses for the Catholic side came thick & fast, & after the battle of Breitenfeld & his victory over Tilly, the Swedish army entered Franconia: we received news that the fiends were marching on Würzburg! Kircher’s worst fears were being realized … We only had time to gather a few belongings together & fly. Würzburg having no garrison, no reserves, no help of any kind, the college dispersed within twenty-four hours. The enemy was approaching & it was said that the Swedes showed no mercy toward Jesuits. We were caught up in unspeakable chaos; we had to flee to Mainz & on October 14, 1631 we set off with little more than what we stood up in. My master had to leave behind the manuscript of his Institutiones Mathematicæ , the fruit of several years’ work & a loss it took him several months to get over.

Whenever Eléazard felt dazed from having spent too long sitting at his computer, he would put his machine into sleep mode, watch the constellations moving across the star-studded night on the screen for a moment, then go and sit down in front of the large mirror in the living room. There he would practice manipulating the ping-pong balls with which his pockets were now filled. There was nothing that could empty his mind so well as repeating the precise movements governing the appearance and disappearance of the objects. He would watch the balls emerge between his fingers, or multiply, correcting the positioning of his hands, trying his utmost to make their dexterity more automatic. This fad had started only a few months ago, the day when he had admired the astonishing dexterity of a juggler in an alleyway in São Luís: a grubby, skinny little matuto with a mouth devoid of teeth, but who was sticking an unlikely number of very long nails up his nose. More than the act itself, Eléazard had admired the man’s perfect control over his body and the almost mathematical elegance he gave his movements. Spurred on by a feeling of urgency, he had scoured all the bookshops in the town to buy an introductory manual on these skills. He had been disappointed at how poor the books on that subject were. Most of those devoted to conjuring went no further than to reveal the secrets of a few ploys that might fool children. What he wanted to learn was how to be able to produce pigeons out of hats or pull miles of scarves out of someone’s ear, tricks that bordered on the miraculous. Having exhausted all the possibilities, he wrote off to France for a book that would meet his demands.

In reply to his letter, Malbois had sent him a fine copy of the only book ever written by Robert-Houdin plus a Fundamental Techniques for Conjurers , which had so many illustrations of hands and palming maneuvers that it looked like a manual for the language of the deaf and dumb. The two authors emphasized that the only way to achieve true mastery was by a long period of exercises to make the fingers supple and their movements automatic. Eléazard, therefore, was training himself according to these principles, repeating conscientiously every little exercise of a system that, for him, was quite close to martial arts.

He was annoyed by Moéma’s letter. Not that the money she was asking for was a problem — he spent hardly anything on himself — but he objected to his daughter’s casual attitude. To write just when she wanted something from him was OK, even if it hurt him; after all, it was a father’s function to help a child he’d been selfish enough to bring into the world. But for a bar! She who wasn’t even able to manage a simple student’s budget! He would have preferred it if Moéma wheedled money out of him to go off on a trip or to buy new clothes. Why not? That was the way of things, especially at her age, but every time she had to invent some new project even more unreasonable than the previous one. The worst thing was that she seemed to believe in her idea of a bar as firmly as she had been enthusiastic, two months ago, about the career of a model that was “beckoning her” and of which he had heard nothing since. Three thousand dollars for a portfolio and incidental expenses … Just a kid, really! he thought with a smile, suddenly touched by her ingenuousness. Or perhaps it’s me crossing the threshold: once you start noticing the follies of youth, whether to be offended by them or simply to forgive them, it means you’re already old. So bear with her. He’d sent the check that morning and he would continue to give in to his daughter’s whims until she found her vocation. It was the only way of ensuring she never had the feeling she’d missed out on something because of others or lack of money, of allowing her at some point to develop her own sense of responsibility in the course of her life. Was that not the way one became ?

At this point in his disenchanted reflections he was overcome with hunger. He felt like seeing, talking to people, so he decided to go out for dinner. Soledade was annoyed when he told her. She’d already prepared his evening meal and immediately made a face. Eléazard tried to cheer her up, but to no effect; her only response was a scornful pout before flouncing out of the kitchen. Glancing at the stove, he saw an omelette swimming in oil; she had gone to the trouble of making a dish that Raffanel had taught her. Not a great teacher, he thought, as he surveyed the contents of the frying pan, unless it’s just that she’s not up to it. He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

Evening was falling over Alcântara, a sort of disturbing grayness, thicker and blacker than the overcast sky that had darkened the afternoon. There was a threat of rain for the night. Eléazard hurried on, taking care to avoid the zebu droppings that booby-trapped the poorly paved alleyways in places. He turned left, behind Sâo Matías church, and was soon in the Rua da Amargura , the street of sorrow, so called because Viscount Antônio de Albuquerque, the former owner of the palace he was walking past, had been in the habit of making his slaves lie down in the mud so that his wife and daughters could cross with dry feet when going to mass on Sundays. Moth-eaten fabric hung in the wide windows, which destructive weeds were doing their best to take apart stone by stone; there were only scattered and cracked fragments left of the elegant blue-and-white azulejos that used to decorate one of the most beautiful residences in the town. Let the leprosy of time finish its work, Eléazard thought, let it peel off the façade of this obscene testimony to the barbarity of man to the very last tile.