Where Tigers Are at Home (100 page)
Read Where Tigers Are at Home Online
Authors: Jean-Marie Blas de Robles
However outrageously improbable it sounded, this explanation was the only one to give a logical shape to the horror she had been through. A misunderstanding, an appalling millenarian misunderstanding that had cost the lives of a whole tribe. Elaine found it tormenting not to have anyone to share this sudden insight with. The Bible had doubtless been lost, but the book open on her knees—the shaman’s
aracanóa!
—had symbolized the sacred for generations of men to the point where it led their descendants to the abyss. Eléazard and Moéma would have been over the moon! Poor Dietlev as well, moreover, though he would have doubtless have been less interested in the living fossils than in those brought back by the old man from his stay in the mountain.
Elaine once more awoke to the world around her to realize she had climbed to the summit of the inselberg. The book was no longer there; it must have been left somewhere behind her. Despite
her surprise and her alarm at the black holes into which her mind was retreating more and more often, she was happy to come out into the open air. The rocky crest around her was one great jumble of petrified impressions.
Tribrachidium
?
Archaeoscyathids
?
Parvancorina
? Her memory was uncertain about giving names to the stones cascading from this spring turned to stone: a unique crucible of algae and invertebrates, a puddle of time, of the initial time when the whole of the Earth was nothing but a tragic and unpopulated ocean. On this shoal, six hundred million years ago, the sea had hatched the miracle of life. An uninterrupted link connected her with these blind, impoverished creatures, let her share in their destiny of primordial glyphs. In the eye of the cyclone, at the very heart of the whirling that was raising the black waters of the forest beneath her, Elaine knew that she was finally going to be able to come to rest. Eléazard, Moéma … she found them both again, here and now, having taken such a long way around to them. A solar mirror reflecting the dizzying universe, she saw for a moment the absolute coherence of everything that exists. This nonplace, this still center with the frail shell of life coiled around it, now she felt it, now she occupied the smallest gap in its space. Freed from hope, smiling, she felt like a deserted ark.
THE WEIGHT OF THE SOUL. From Euclides, ice-cold as usual: “Wind, just wind … Believe it or not, the air in our lungs has weight as well. Your Kircher weighed his last sigh; it’s taking introspection a bit far, don’t you think?”
NOVALIS made a
Catalogue raisonné of the operations man has permanently at his disposal:
he names saliva, urine, emissions of
semen, putting your finger in your mouth to make yourself be sick, holding your breath, changing position, closing your eyes, etc. In passing, he wonders whether there might not be some possible use for excrement. Marcel Duchamp was to add to these: excess pressure on an electric push-button, the growth of hair and fingernails, starting with fear or amazement, laughing, yawning, sneezing, twitching, giving hard looks, fainting, and he too was to suggest a “
transformer to make use of
[all]
these little bursts of wasted energy
.”
SIX GRAMS of soul …
I DON’T KNOW WHAT gives rise to the impression that henceforward Athanasius Kircher is part of my family. He could be sitting here, right beside me, his hat askew, shaking the skirt of his cassock to cool his legs. A familiar figure, with sparks of genius here and there, but very banal most of the time. A dreamer who enjoys life, a brother, a friend …
FRIDAY, TEN O’CLOCK in the morning: letter from Malbois.
Dear Eléazard,
I apologize for the great delay in answering your questions. It wasn’t that easy and demanded quite a bit of work, though I’m afraid you’re not going to like the result.
First of all I researched the passages that you thought dubious in the works of Mersenne, La Mothe Le Vayer and the few others, the titles of which you will remember. Your suspicions were well founded: there are plenty of disturbing similarities, sometimes even more, without it being possible to say who was plagiarising whom; as you know, it was common practice at the time, there were seldom any repercussions. I won’t go into details, they wouldn’t be of any use
to you—you’ll soon understand why: when I went on to the second question on your list, the one concerning the dates of Caspar Schott, the whole edifice started to crumble. 1608–1666! (Confirmed from several different sources.) Since the virtuous Caspar departed this life fourteen years before his master, it was obvious that the part of the biography devoted to Kircher’s life after the latter date was apocryphal. There remained the possibility that someone else who had been with Kircher during those last years had continued Schott’s work with sufficient skill to imitate his “style.”
At once I went back to look more closely at certain elements that had tickled my fancy when I first read it: the Villa Palagonia only existed the way Schott describes it in the eighteenth century—between 1750 and 1760. As for the Désert de Retz, even if it is well known that it was inspired by Kircher’s miniature landscapes, it definitely dates from 1785!
By this point in my researches it had become clear that not a single line in the manuscript could be by Schott, that the whole must have been written after 1780 at the earliest, that is, a hundred years after Kircher’s death.
As you can well imagine, this conclusion cast doubt on all the rest, so I went about methodically picking out aspects that seemed suspect. There were quite a lot of little things (I even identified a maxim by Chamfort!), almost all of them impossible to verify, and I was about to tell you the stage my conclusions had reached when I reread that horrible poem by Von Spee. Even taking into account the fact that it was a translation from Latin—and that seventeenth-century poetry is really not my cup of tea—the lines seemed singularly anachronistic and devoid of meaning. By chance, or perhaps infected by the language games Kircher engaged in, I started looking at ‘The Idolator’ as an encrypted text. I have to say that I found the solution pretty quickly (a kind of rather convoluted acrostic). I
won’t spoil it for you, I’ll let you work it out for yourself, but it’s clear someone’s been having you on, and with a vengeance! I hope you hadn’t gotten too far with it …
Take it with a pinch of humor, have a good laugh at it—if you can. And keep me informed: supposing you ever manage to find out who did it, I’d very much like to meet the guy before you strangle him.
See you someday,
C. Malbois
ONE O’CLOCK. I take it fairly coolly, but it doesn’t make me laugh. Impossible to get hold of Werner in Berlin.
SEVEN O’CLOCK: Spent the whole afternoon walking straight ahead. Hurt pride, of course. Once my initial irritation at having worked on these notes to no purpose had passed, I was above all mortified at not having discovered the hoax myself.
THE PROBLEM is not knowing whether a person really said what you made him say, but judging whether you managed to make him say it in a way that is true to him. Is not truth anything we find sufficiently suitable to accept it as such? The
borderline case of satisfaction
, as W. V. Quine put it. The person—Werner or someone else—who produced this sham comes closer to it than anything I could claim …
TO GO DOWN THE RIVER as far as Montevideo, to return to Lautréamont (to Voltaire?) just as turtles return to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs.
“IN A WORD,” Kircher says in his conclusion to his work on anamorphoses, “
there is no monster in whose shape you cannot see yourself with a mirror of this kind combining flat and curved surfaces
.”
WHO WOULD ruin their lives making a distorting mirror like that? Was it in the hope of fooling me or of achieving precisely what came out of it? I can’t bring myself to believe that this document was produced with me in mind, but I’m also sure it wasn’t entrusted to me purely by chance. Werner has been manipulated, I’ve no doubt he passed the manuscript on to me in good faith. Having said that, the authorship of the text is hardly important, the only question is: who likes me enough to give me such a violent wake-up call? Malbois?
It was a one-in-a-million chance he’d spot that acrostic …
“BIOLUMINESCENCE occurs when a substance known by the name of luciferin (from the Latin
lucifer
, ‘the bearer of light’) combines with oxygen when an enzyme called luciferase is present. There is a chemical reaction that releases energy in the form of light.” (D. L. Allen) Literature, the name of light!
THE SOLUTION, PERHAPS … Neither darkness, nor light, nor twilight: studding with stars. Fireflies, living, random phosphenes in the depths of the night itself.
A MAXIM on a gnomon seen by Léon Bloy: “It’s later than you think.”
Are you sure you want to eat mussels?
When all’s said and done, Eléazard thought, was it not reasonable to assume that the whole biography of Athanasius Kircher might be a fabrication, in the subject’s own image. The proportion of fiction in the supposed writings of Caspar Schott represented more
faithfully than any scientific study our poignant, unhealthy and obsessive determination to romanticize our existence. The message, if there was one, came down to this: the reflection always wins out over the reflected object, anamorphosis always has a greater power of truth than the object it at first sight distorts and transforms. Was not its ultimate goal to unite reality and fiction in a new reality, in a stereoscopic relief?
Eléazard quit his word processor and clicked on the file-manager icon. In the “Archives” folder he chose the file containing his notes, then asked to delete them.
“Are you sure you want to delete Kircher.doc? Yes. No.”
His finger poised over the left-hand button of his mouse, Eléazard hesitated for a moment at the abrupt irrevocability behind this exhortation to prudence. There was no copy of his work, everything would be irremediably lost.
Forget Kircher
, Loredana had said to him … And now he understood what she was saying: Look after your daughter, beware of going back, avoid going back like the plague. Get on with life! His heart had started to beat more quickly. Are you sure you want to eat mussels? You wish for the delights of amnesia so badly? Shrugging his shoulders, with the foreboding that afterward he would be spared nothing, he answered “Yes” to the question. The cursor immediately turned into a countdown to death, an empty clock face with a single hand sweeping round at top speed. Deleting track after track of information that was of no interest whatever to it, the hard disk recorded his choice with a series of mild hiccups. At the end of the process a new window replaced the preceding one:
“Do you want to delete another file? Yes. No.”
Hypnotized by the screen, Eléazard had started to play with his ping-pong balls again. Gravely they turned, those little blind planets. Milky, bulging.
Bri-git-te Bardot, Bardooo!
Nelson had put his election T-shirt on over his center-forward’s jersey; he was sweating as much from the heat as from anxiety. He’d been waiting at the side of the platform for two hours now, a hundred good reasons had made him give up his action, a hundred others had encouraged him to go ahead. Deafened by the closeness of the speakers, he was drifting along in a distressing and impatient daydream. His position off to the side limited his field of vision to the slanting lines of planks on the rostrum and the vertical infinity of the shore. Far away, sitting over the horizon, a line of clouds delineated the contours of an unknown coast, a world to discover.
As he did every time a piece of music came to the end, the campaign organizer came to test the mike and keep up the suspense. Walkie-talkie on his belt, he immediately plunged into a verbose harangue in which the names of Barbosa, Jr., and Moreira appeared again and again; they were on their way, they were about to arrive! While he was speaking, his assistants took turns throwing T-shirts by the dozen to the crowd. In the scramble that ensued, the area surrounding the platform became a sea of white.
All at once several sirens drowned out the hullaballoo on the beach. Right at the top of the hillock three black limousines flanked by police cars stopped above the platform. A swarm of policemen poured out of the vehicles to take up position along the slope and protect the officials as they got out. Masked by their bodyguards, the two governors began to walk down the dune, filmed all the way by a small TV team. At the bottom, the national anthem came over the loudspeakers, making all those who could hear it automatically stiffen and fall silent.
Nelson’s mind had shut down. His lips quietly repeated the words of the anthem. To stop his right hand from trembling, he gripped the butt of the pistol underneath his soccer jersey, forcing himself to visualize Lampião. He was close to fainting.
Jaunty in their lightweight cream suits, Barbosa, Jr., and Moreira put on the act of men whom the security guards were stopping from joining the crowd. The closer they came to the platform, the more they pretended to push their way through the ranks of police to shake a held-out hand or kiss the grubby cheek of a child. From the moment Nelson identified Moreira, his eyes never left him. The governor seemed to have aged compared with his face in the photos, but it was definitely the man he had hated for years: the man who had murdered his father, the bastard who had stolen Uncle Zé’s Willis.
Nelson released the safety catch of the revolver. A profound silence had fallen all round him; he heard neither the music starting up again, nor the campaign organizer at the mike, warming up the crowd. “Closer,” he repeated to himself obsessively, “wait until he’s really close.”
When they reached the bottom of the steps, Nelson lost sight of the two men again. They had stopped one last time to face the cameras and put on a show of love of the people that would encourage a certain segment of the electorate to vote for them. None of these beggars would ever put a ballot paper in the box but they knew from experience that the charade would appeal to soft-hearted people watching the television news.