Where Tigers Are at Home (15 page)

We went on talking until late into the night. Stimulated by my questions, Kircher dealt one after the other with the biggest problems set by the formation of the Earth, confiding in me that what I was hearing were the premises of a book he was preparing in secret—having been officially instructed to devote himself to Egyptology—& which he would doubtless call
The Subterranean World
. When we thought about getting some sleep, it was already four o’clock in the morning & since we had to rise at dawn to continue on our way to the summit, we decided to stay up. Our conversation turned to volcanoes again. Athanasius never tired of describing the fantastic upheavals the central fire could cause when it escaped by those chimneys.

“According to my calculations, Atlantis was somewhere between the New World & North Africa. When its highest peaks started spewing out fire, when the ground started trembling & caving in, spreading terror & death, the Atlantic submerged the whole land. But when it reached the volcanoes
it succeeded in cooling their heat & consequently in arresting the progressive collapse of the land. The few peaks that were thus spared are the islands that today we call the Canaries & the Azores. And such was the power of these volcanoes, which must assuredly have been some of the major chimneys of the central fire, that even today they still display a certain amount of activity: all those islands smell of sulphur, & from what I have been told one can see numerous little craters & geysers where the water that escapes is boiling. It is therefore not impossible that one day the same phenomenon that made a whole world disappear could suddenly make it reappear, with all its ruined cities & and its millions of skeletons …”

Even though imaginary, this vision made my blood freeze. Kircher fell silent, the fire was dying out in the hearth & I shut my eyes in order to see with my mind’s eye the emergence of the terrible graveyard from those far-off times. I saw the alabaster palaces slowly rise from the depths, the towers truncated, the huge statues broken, lying on their sides, decapitated, & I seemed to hear the sinister creaking noises accompanying this nightmare apparition. But suddenly the sound took on a quite different quality, it became so real that I made an effort to throw off my drowsy imaginings; I woke at the very moment when a terrible explosion made the walls of our lodging tremble & cast a red light over the room where we were.

“Up you get, Caspar, up you get! Quick!” Kircher yelled, a transformed man. “The volcano has woken! The central fire! Quick!”

As I stood up, terrified, I saw Athanasius rushing toward our luggage as one explosion followed the other. “The instruments! The instruments!” he shouted to me.

Taking that to mean he was urging me to help him save our precious equipment before fleeing, I did my best, despite my
shaking legs, to help him gather up our things. The innkeeper, who was to be our guide, & his wife did not take such precautions; they cleared off, not without having advised us to join them at the foot of the mountain as quickly as possible.

We soon came out; even though it was night, the sky was ablaze & we could see as if it were daylight. My spirits revived somewhat when I saw that the track by which we had arrived had not been affected by the eruption. But my terror returned when I saw my master setting off in the opposite direction, the one that led toward the crater the color of incandescent embers.

“This way! This way!” I screamed to Kircher, thinking his agitation had made him go the wrong way.

“Stupid ass!” was his reply. “It’s an unexpected chance, a present from heaven. Come on, hurry up! We’re going to learn a lot more today than we could by reading all the books ever written on the question.”

“But our guide!” I exclaimed, “we haven’t got a guide! We’re going to certain death!”

“We’ve got the best guide possible,” said Kircher, pointing to the skies, “we’re in His hands. If you’re too frightened, go down & get yourself another master. Or follow me & if we must die that’s just too bad, but at least we’ll have seen.”

“By the grace of God,” I said, crossing myself, & ran to catch up to Kircher, who had already turned away & set off for the summit.

“What do you think of Kircher from the point of view of Sinology?” Eléazard asked. “Do you think he can be considered a precursor, in one way or another?”

“I don’t know,” Loredana replied, “it’s odd. And then it all depends on what you mean by a ‘precursor.’ If you mean someone who put forward, before anyone else, some basic principles for understanding Chinese culture that were sufficiently penetrating to open the way to the understanding we have today, then the answer is definitely no. On that level his book is nothing more than an intelligent—and often dishonest—compilation of the work of Ricci and other missionaries. And every time he takes it upon himself to interpret these facts, he gets it badly wrong, just as with the Egyptian hieroglyphs. His theories on the way Asia was peopled or on the influence of Egypt on the development of Chinese religions are completely crack-brained. And it’s the same with his approach to the formation of ideograms … On the other hand, his book has been a fantastic tool, the first of its kind, for the understanding of the Chinese world in the West: he’s never prejudiced, except in religion of course, and all things considered presents a pretty objective vision of a world that until then simply didn’t exist for Europeans. And that, despite everything, is not bad at all.”

“That is what I think too,” said Eléazard, “but in my opinion it goes even farther. In his way he does more or less the same as Antoine Galland did for Arab culture when he produced the first translation of
A Thousand and One Nights
: he creates a myth, a mysterious China, supernatural, inhabited by wealthy aesthetes and scholars, a baroque exoticism that Baudelaire, or even Segalen, will recall in their fantasies of the Orient.

“It’s difficult to prove,” Loredana said reflectively, “but it’s an interesting idea. Kircher as the unwitting initiator of Romanticism. It’s close to heresy, isn’t it?”

“To bring in Romanticism is going a bit too far, but I really think that by providing, for the first time, an overall image of China and not a simple traveler’s tale, he determined the string of prejudices and errors under which that country continues to suffer.”

“Poor Kircher, it sounds as if you really do have it in for him,” Loredana said with a smile.

Eléazard was surprised by this remark. He had never seen his relationship with Kircher from that angle and even as he was collecting his thoughts to deny it, he realized that this way of formulating the problem opened up disturbing prospects. Looking at it more closely, there was certainly a touch of resentment in his constant denigration of the Jesuit. Something like the hatred with which a discarded lover reacts or a disciple unable to fill his master’s shoes.

“I don’t know,” he said earnestly, “I find your question disturbing … I’ll have to think about it.”

The rain was still pouring down on the patio. Lost in thought, Eléazard peered at the candle flame as if the light would provide him with an answer to his questions. Amused by his attitude, the unusual importance he seemed to accord the meanings of words, Loredana felt her prejudice against him crumble away a little more. It was perhaps because of the wine, but she found her defensive reaction just now—when she had reprimanded herself for lowering her guard, even just a little—exaggerated. One ought to be able to confide in him without being afraid of his pity or a lesson in morality. It was good to know that.

“I think I have it in for him for having been a Christian,” Eléazard suddenly said, without noticing how the few minutes of silence made his statement sound absurd. “For having betrayed … I can’t say what exactly at the moment, it’s the dominant impression despite my sympathy for him. His whole life’s work’s such a mess!”

“But who would have dared to be an atheist at the time he lived? Do you really think that was possible, or merely thinkable, even for a layman? Not out of fear of the Inquisition but because of the lack of the appropriate mind-set, because of an intellectual
inability to imagine a world without God. Don’t forget it was three more centuries before Nietzsche managed to express that denial.”

“I agree with all that,” Eléazard said, shrugging his shoulders, “but no one is going to persuade me that Descartes, Leibniz or even Spinoza had not already got rid of God, that in their writings the word is nothing but a term for a mathematical void. Beside them Kircher looks like a diplodocus.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Loredana said with a doubtful look. “Anyway, I’d quite like to read this biography if you could lend me a copy.”

“Can you read French?”

“Well enough, I think.”

“No problem, then. I have a duplicate of my working copy, though you won’t be able to see my notes, I’ve only got a rough draft of those. You could come round to my place, tomorrow morning, for example. It’s not far: 3, Pelourinho Square.”

“OK. My God, just look at that rain … I’ve never seen it like that. I feel all clammy, it’s very unpleasant. I hope Alfredo’s managed to get the water working, I’m dying to have a shower.”

“I’ve no idea what he’s doing, but he must have some problem. With the pump or with his wife.”

“Oh, I hope not,” said Loredana with a smile. “I wouldn’t like to be responsible for a domestic squabble.”

Something about the corners of her smile, or perhaps it was just the ironic glint in her eyes, convinced Eléazard that, on the contrary, she was flattered to have aroused Eunice’s jealousy despite herself. This coquettishness suddenly made her seem desirable. Fixing his eyes on hers, he found he was imagining her in his arms, then devising various strategies to produce that result: suggesting she came to collect the Kircher biography that evening; taking her hand without a word; just telling her straight out that he wanted her. Each of these ploys generated a fragmentary
scenario, hazy and with infinite ramifications that led nowhere except back to the acknowledgment of his desire, the image of their two bodies coming together, the urgent, suddenly vital need to touch her skin, to smell her hair …

“The answer’s no,” Loredana whispered with a hint of sadness in her voice. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?” Eléazard said, realizing she had read him like an open book.

“You know perfectly well,” she told him with a mild reprimand.

She had turned her head away to look at the rain. Without appearing nervous, she was rolling little balls of warm wax in her fingers and then putting them on the table, a faraway look in her eyes and the sulky expression of a little girl disheartened by an unwarranted reproof on her face.

“And may one ask why?” Eléazard went on, in the conciliatory tone of one who accepts defeat.

“Please … Don’t ask anymore. It’s not possible, that’s all.”

“Forgive me,” he said, moved by the sincere note. “I … It’s not something that happens to me every day, you know … That is, I mean … I meant it seriously.”

When she saw him getting himself into such an awkward situation, she was a whisker away from telling him the truth. It did her good to see his desire for her in his eyes; two years ago she would already have dragged him off to her room and they would have made love while listening to the rain. But why should she, she told herself, since her openness—and it wasn’t something she wanted to try again—disconcerted people more than it brought them closer.

“It’s too soon,” she said to give herself one last chance. “You need to give me time.”

“I can wait, I’m good at that,” Eléazard said with a smile. “It’s one of my rare qualities, apart from …” (with a look of surprise
he took the ping-pong ball that had just appeared in his mouth and put it in his pocket) “a certain acquaintance with Athanasius Kircher, Esq …” (a second ball, like an egg that insisted on being regurgitated) “… a modicum of intelligence and, of course …” (as a last ball was expelled more slowly, his eyes wide, like someone preparing to spew out the whole contents of his gut) “my natural modesty …”

Loredana had burst out laughing as soon as the first ball appeared: “
Meraviglioso!
” she said, applauding. “How do you do that?!”

“Secret,” Eléazard whispered, putting his finger to his lips.

“How stupid of me—it’s the same one each time, isn’t it?”

“What d’you mean, the same one each time? You can count them if you want,” he said, taking out of his pocket the three balls he always carried with him to practice with.

Loredana was still astonished. “Well I’m flabbergasted! With a trick like that you’d be made king of the Papuans.”

Now it was Eléazard’s turn to burst out laughing. She had never seemed so attractive as in her artless amazement.

“If you tell me how you do it, I’ll read your future,” she offered in mysterious tones.

“From the lines of my hand?”

“Not at all,
caro …
That’s a load of bullshit. I read the
I Ching
, now that’s something else, isn’t it?”

“That’s debatable, but OK,” said Eléazard, delighted at having managed to revive her spirits.

“So?”

“So what?”

“The trick. That’s our deal: you tell me how you do it …”

When she knew how to conjure the balls away—the trick was all the more deceptive for being simple, once you knew—Loredana took a booklet out of her bag and three little orange pottery discs.
“The sticks are too much of a bother to carry round, so I use these things …”

“What is it?” Eléazard asked, picking up one of the discs.

“It’s called a St. Lucia’s eye, a little plate that covers the entrance to some seashell, but I don’t know its real name. Have you seen the spiral? It’s almost the sign of the Tao. Right. Now you have to ask me a question.”

“A precise question?”

“That’s up to you. A precise question gets a precise answer, a vague one, a vague answer. That’s the rule. But take it seriously or it’s not worth the effort.”

Eléazard took a sip of wine. Elaine had immediately appeared in his mind’s eye. Elaine as a question. Not surprising, given the circumstances, but the contradictory questions that almost immediately clamored to be asked made him think: Was there a chance she might come back and everything would be as it was before? If she came back, would I be able to love her again? Will I know love with another woman? Does something else start once something has finished, or is that just an illusion to ensure the survival of the species? All this, he realized sadly, could be summed up in the one question: When will I be free of her?