Where Tigers Are at Home (16 page)

“Come on. Is it so difficult?” she said, growing impatient.

“The two of us …” said Eléazard, looking up at her.

“What do you mean, the two of us?”

“The two of us. What will be the consequences of our meeting?”

“Clever,” said Loredana with a smile. “But that could well make the answer complicated. Shall we start? OK. You’ve to throw the shells six times while concentrating on your question. That’s the ‘heads or tails’ that allows me to determine the nature of the lines, but I imagine you know that.”

Having tried to concentrate but having produced nothing but Elaine’s distorted face, Eléazard threw the discs. After each
throw, Loredana noted down the result, said some numbers and marked the lines of the hexagram with whole matches or ones that had been broken in half, as necessary.

“This first
Gua
,” she said when the figure had finally been completed, “represents the current possibilities of your question. From that I will derive a second one, which will give you some elements of a reply for the future. You will know that there are some ‘old’ and some ‘new’ lines; an ‘old’ line always remains itself, while a ‘young’ line can become the opposing ‘old’ line. Thus a young
yin
changes into an old
yang
and a young
yang
into an old
yin …”

“
Aha … It’s not exactly straightforward then, is it?” Eléazard mocked, amused by the earnestness with which she explained these distinctions.

“It’s even more complicated than you think. I’ll spare you the details. According to the numbers you have thrown, your hexagram has three ‘young’ lines, so I will transform them into their opposite, which gives us …” She opened the booklet, looking for the first of the two diagrams. “Ah, here we are:
Gou
, the Meeting.
Below: the wind; above: the sky. In the meeting the woman is strong. Do not marry the woman.”

“Well now!” said Eléazard, genuinely surprised.

“I’m not making anything up. You can read it yourself, if you like. Put in everyday terms it says you will meet again something you had expelled from your mind. Which means a big surprise …” Loredana continued to read, wrapped in thought, then said, “That’s incredible! Listen:
The meeting is an assault, it is the flexible one who takes the firm one by assault. ‘Do not marry the woman’ means that a long-term association would be pointless …”

“Not very encouraging by the sound of it,” said Eléazard scornfully.

“Wait, that’s the overall sense of the hexagram. Now we have to interpret the lines that are susceptible to change and compare
their meaning to that of the second hexagram. It’s only after that that we can get a resolution. And the first one says … Just a moment. Yes:
In the presence of a fish in the net, the duty implied by this presence does not extend to visitors at all
.”

“And the fish is me?”

“Wait, I tell you. For the second we have:
A melon wrapped in branches of a weeping willow. It contains a brilliance that indicates the descent of celestial influences to the terrestrial plane …”

“Aha! That’s you! An angel come down from heaven …”

“And the third,” Loredana added, as if replying to Eléazard’s mischievous comment, “specifies that:
To meet a horn, that is something humiliating. But you incur no blame in this
.”

“If you mean I’ve hit a snag, thank you for nothing, I’d already noticed that.”

Loredana shook her head regretfully. “We can stop if you’ve had enough. I really have the feeling I’m wasting my time.”

“Please go on. I won’t do it again, promise.”

She leafed through her booklet for a while to identify the second hexagram. “That one’s the
Xiao Guo
, the Little Excess … 
Below: the mountain, above: thunder. A bird takes flight, leaving its call behind it. It ought not to rise higher. It ought to come down. In that case, and in that case alone, there will be happiness
.”

“It leaves its call behind it …” Eléazard repeated, taken with the sudden poetry of the image.

“Which means you are too excessive, even in things of little importance.
If the bird rises higher and higher, its cry will be lost in the clouds and become inaudible. If it came down, the others would hear it. Hearing the bird’s call symbolizes listening to one’s own excesses, becoming aware of them and carrying out a prompt adjustment
.”

Loredana continued to read silently. People of high society, the book said, are excessively polite in their conduct and excessively sad in their mourning … It was one of the oddest of the
I Chings
,
one of the most explicit she’d ever read for someone, doubtless because she had been involved in the questioning. She knew very well why her meeting with Eléazard could not go beyond certain limits fixed inside her by her fear, even if that were exaggerated. This result must fit him one way or another … She decided to drive him into a corner.

“For whom or for what are you in mourning?” she asked him point-blank, aware that this unexpected question shook him.

Eléazard felt his scalp tingle. He had reached the point of seeing the previous metaphor as representing his attitude to Elaine and of trying it out at random on the thousand and one aspects of his anguish, and with one word this stranger had hit the bull’s eye.

“You’re amazing!” he said with genuine admiration.

He thought: I’m in mourning for my love, for my youth, for an unsatisfactory world. I’m in mourning for mourning itself, for its twilight and for the soothing warmth of its lamentation …

But what he said was: “I’m in mourning for everything that has not succeeded in being born, for everything we do our best to destroy, for obscure reasons, every time it puts out a shoot. How can I put it … I can’t understand why we always see beauty as a threat, happiness as degradation …”

The rain stopped, replaced by a silence spattered with drops and sudden trickles of water.

“We haven’t gotten anywhere yet,” said Loredana, screwing up her eyes.

ELÉAZARD GOT UP
around eight, a little later than usual. He found his coffee being kept warm in the kitchen and his piece of toast on the table beside the bowl and some
maracujá
juice. Soledade never appeared before ten, the television programs having kept
her awake for a good part of the night, so she made a point of preparing his breakfast before going back to bed. With a muzzy head from the excesses of the previous evening, Eléazard took two soluble aspirin. “What a strange woman,” he thought as he watched the tablets swirling round in the glass of water, “but she certainly knew how to twist me round her little finger …” To the very last moment he had hoped to finish the night with her and, thinking about it, he had come very close: at the end of the
I Ching
session there had been a moment, he was sure, when she’d been thinking seriously about the possibility, but that idiot Alfredo had appeared to announce his victory over the pump. Loredana had seized the opportunity and used her desire for a shower as an excuse to get away. She fled, Eléazard told himself, without understanding the motives for her escape or being able to do anything about the frustration it caused him. A little later, with the help of the aspirin, he was blaming himself for having succumbed to the lustful promptings of alcohol; mortified to think he must have cut a ridiculous figure, he decided to repress the memory of the evening. What a bad idea it had been to go out for dinner!

Before sitting down at his desk, he poured some sunflower seeds into the parrot’s feeding dish. Heidegger seemed to be in a good mood, rocking back and forward and making his back ripple like a plumed serpent. Eléazard picked up a seed and went up to the bird, speaking softly to it, “Heidegger, Heidi! How are you today? Still not decided to speak normally, eh? Come on, come and get the seed, my beauty.” The parrot came toward him by shuffling sideways along its perch, then let itself topple over and came to a stop head down in a bat-like pose. “Well then, what do you think of the world? You really think there’s some hope?” Eléazard was moving his hand toward the enormous beak when the bird, like a spring suddenly released, bit his index finger and drew
blood. “Oh, go fuck yourself, you stupid bastard,” Eléazard yelled in pain. “You’re mad, sir, stark staring mad! One day I’ll pop you in the saucepan, d’you hear, you moron?”

Squeezing his cut finger, he was heading for the bathroom when Soledade appeared in front of him.

“
Que passa?
”

“What has happened is that that stupid parrot’s bitten me again! Just look at that, he almost cut my finger off. I’ll release him in the forest, then he’ll learn what suffering is …”

“If you do that, then I’ll leave as well,” Soledade said solemnly. “It’s your own fault, you don’t know how to go about it. He doesn’t bite me at all.”

“Oh, really? And could you tell me what you have to do to please him? Get down on your knees? Crawl over to give him a seed? I’m really fed up with the creature.”

“A parrot isn’t like other animals. Xangó shines like the sun, there’s fire inside him; if you don’t show him respect, he’ll burn you. It’s as simple as that.”

“You’re as crazy as he is,” Eléazard said, disarmed by this reasoning. “And why do you insist on calling him Xangó?”

“It’s his real name,” she said with a stubborn look, “he told me himself. He doesn’t like the one he’s been given at all. Come, I’ll bandage that for you. That kind of thing can be dangerous, you know.”

Eléazard gave in, overcome by the girl’s touching naïveté, Brazil really was a different world.

“You got back late yesterday,” she said, pressing some cotton wool soaked in alcohol on the wound.

“That hurts! Be gentle now.”

“Gentle doesn’t get you anywhere,” she said, giving him a strange look, a mixture of sweet revenge and irony. “The disinfectant has to get to the bottom of the wound. What’s her name?”

“… Loredana,” he said, after a brief pause of surprise at her perspicacity. “She’s Italian. But how do you know?”

“My little finger told me. Is she beautiful?”

“Not bad. That is, yes, curves in all the right places. She’s got a superb ass,” he added to provoke her a little.

“You’re all the same,” said Soledade as she finished wrapping the Band-Aid round his finger. “But when you go fishing at night, all you catch is eels.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I know what I mean. Right, there, that’s done. I’ll go out and do the shopping.”

“Get a bit more in than usual, we might have a guest.”

Soledade nodded like the parrot and gave him a black look.

“
Si senhor
,” she said, mimicking absolute servility. “But I warn you, don’t expect me to serve at table,
O meu computado não fala, computa!
”

God knows where she heard that, Eléazard thought as he went back to his study. Spoken in a tone of contempt, it was a sentence that could be understood differently depending on the stress on the last word, either “My computer doesn’t speak, it computes,” or: “My computer doesn’t speak with
puta
” (i.e., whores). He certainly felt that Soledade was a bit too free and easy, but he liked the pun and tried unsuccessfully to translate it into French in a way that retained its marvelous concision.

Then he immersed himself in Caspar Schott’s manuscript. Rereading his notes on the computer, he decided they were too succinct and slightly prejudiced. The problem was to know whom they were aimed at: an academic familiar with the seventeenth century would doubtless consider them adequate but an ordinary reader wouldn’t find enough in them to satisfy his curiosity fully. But how far should he go? He felt he had so much to say about Kircher’s century, to his mind one of the most notable since
Antiquity, that he could easily double or even triple Schott’s text with his notes. As for his prejudice against the man himself, that was something new, resulting entirely from his conversation with Loredana. There was a happy medium to be observed between unquestioning praise and systematic hostility, a balance in which his rancor toward Kircher was muzzled in the right way.

Still stormy, the weather was piling all the sadness of the world on Alcântara. Eléazard wondered whether Loredana would come and see him that morning, as she had promised. The woman was pretty unique of her kind. Now he remembered the night in the Caravela as something intense and poetic, one of those he would like to revive in his life. If she should come that day, he would offer her a genuine apology and tell her how much he wanted her friendship. He found himself imagining her in the alley she would have to go down to come to his house. Impatient, almost anxious, he watched out for her like a teenager on his first date.

I’m like an old child, he told himself with a smile. It’s Moéma who’s right. Down to work, then. In his archives—he’d have to get round to cataloging them one of these days—he’d finally managed to find the article by François Secret that had been missing since he’d edited the notes to chapter three. Secret, what a name for someone who’d devoted his life to hermeneutics! It was enough to make you think surnames could sometimes determine the destiny of those who bore them. Having said that, the study in question,
A forgotten episode in the life of Peiresc: the magic sabre of Gustavus Adolphus
, did not do much for Kircher since, in the light of the writings of George Wallin, it proved that the sabre he had examined was false. To make matters worse, Wallin quoted
De orbibus tribus aureis
by the Strasbourg scholar Johannes Scheffer, a book in which Kircher was accused of total ignorance in matters of interpretation for having talked of magic characters when, out of malice, someone had shown him what were merely
samples of the Danish language. Of course, as thoroughgoing antipapists, Wallin and Scheffer were trying to rehabilitate Gustavus Adolphus and, through him, Protestantism as a whole; their accusation, along with many other similar ones, cast doubt on the Jesuit’s competence. And this all the more so since his attempts at deciphering the hieroglyphs ended, unquestionably to our eyes, in abject failure.