Where Tigers Are at Home (19 page)

“
La merda tira la merda!
”

I saw Kircher flush at the insult, but he continued to busy himself with his machine as if nothing had happened. I started to pray that it might all be over quickly, this way or that, & I could already see definite signs of irritation on the Grand Duke’s face, when a bellow from my master made all the spectators jump.

“
Eureka!
” he shouted again. “Look! Look, O ye of little faith!”

Motionless & in a theatrical pose, he was pointing at the target with a vengeful finger: a thread of black smoke was coming from it, rising straight up into the blue sky.

A hum of admiration rose from the whole audience. Simultaneously, or almost, the wolf burst into flames, crackling, & set off, as if by a trail of gunpowder, fires at several points on the boat. As I gave Kircher a look of astonishment at this development, he gave me a quick wink & I realized that he had taken care to make sure the vessel was prepared. Aware of my master’s expertise in this area I got ready for more surprises & they weren’t long in coming. As the felucca went up in flames, numerous rockets started shooting out of the hatches, exploding in the sky with great noise. Then Bengal lights turned into fountains of fire spouting up around the hull like the petals of many-colored flowers & catapults sent the blazing bodies of tailors’ dummies flying across this marvelous show. The Greek fire had not gone out when, with a piercing whistle, further rockets flew up very high to form as they exploded the three-legged symbol of Sicily, the “S” of Syracuse & the four letters of the Hebrew word for Jehovah. To finish, an uninterrupted volley of shots could be heard as the boat went straight to the bottom in a thick cloud of smoke.

Warm applause greeted Athanasius’s success, accompanied by hurrahs & shouts of joy from the people of Syracuse. I rushed to embrace my master, who had the kindness to make a gesture including me in his success. The Duke of Hesse came to congratulate him, granting him on the spot a very large sum of ducats to fund the later publication of his labors. Then all the guests filed past us to congratulate Kircher & admire the fiery machine. The Sicilian gentleman who had had the presumption to make such an insulting remark only a few minutes previously
also had to pass through these Caudine Forks. When the puffy-faced tub of lard came to pay his respects, with much ridiculous posturing, Kircher spoke to him in his most flowery Italian:

“Verily Your Lordship was speaking words of wisdom this afternoon, excrement does indeed attract excrement & for that reason you, more than any other, should take care …”

Now it was the Sicilian’s turn to flush red as a lobster. He muttered a few words & put his hand on his sword; if the Duke of Hesse had not been there, his presence forbidding any outburst of violence, the affair would doubtless have taken an unfortunate turn for my master, even though he was a man who would defend himself & possessed of strength rare among men of the cloth. Emboldened by Kircher’s attitude, I pretended to fan myself, as if to get rid of a bad smell, which made this charming provincial braggadocio furious, so that he turned his back on us, though not without having made a sign at me with his hand & teeth, the precise meaning of which escaped me. For the first time I enjoyed a rare feeling of pleasure that follows any unexpected victory, “the joy of delayed triumph,” as Athanasius dubbed this category when we discussed the matter that same night. Nevertheless I felt guilty for having shown a lack of magnanimity toward the poor Sicilian, but my master reassured me by asserting that to have behaved in any other way would have been to demonstrate hypocrisy, which sin was worse than the—after all rather venial—one of a deserved & innocuous retort.

The engine at half speed, the
Messenger of the Faith
made its way up the river with the noise and the blind obstinacy of a stubborn
tractor digging up the earth. The whole team had got up at dawn to load the crates of equipment that had been sent from Brazilia, while Petersen and his deckhand saw to the food and the engine. After a last meal at the Beira Rio, washed down with plenty of wine to celebrate their departure, they had embarked without ceremony and cast off. Leaving the tiller to Yurupig, the Indian who lived on board, having accumulated the functions of mechanic, guard and cook, Petersen had flopped onto one of the benches in the saloon, where he had been snoring like a pig for hours. Milton was doing the same in his cabin; as for Dietlev and Mauro, they were leaning on the rail, discussing a point of palaeontology that seemed to preclude any other preoccupation.

Lying face down on the warm roof of the gunboat, carried along by the river and hypnotized by its immense labyrinth of arms and channels, Elaine abandoned herself to a delightful drowsiness. Soothed by the absolute calm of the Pantanal—though the previous evening Petersen had assured her that the wind and floods could set off huge waves on this glossy plain—she played a game of focusing, as if with a camera, on various images in the exuberance of the virgin forest. The blood-red splash of a pair of parrots in flight, the delayed take-off of a white heron, very high up on the top of a tree, the gap-toothed smile of a naked child, squatting behind his father in the pirogue gliding along the riverbank, an unmoving swirl of yellow mud right in the middle of the river … And each time she made a little click with her tongue, taking delight in the fact that she hadn’t thought of bringing her camera: for one second later the parrots set off a flight of budgerigars in a cacophony of vivid greens and screeches; the white heron suddenly opened its wings like flapping sails and gave a long cry, its neck stretched out toward the sun; the kid’s smile vanished; when he saw her, his father, with a feverish look, paused in his paddle stroke; the wake of the boat released the clawed skeleton of a tree stump that
had been held up in its journey to the south. Even a camera would have misrepresented these free images of the River Paraguay by isolating them from their coexistence with all the other observed moments. Eléazard would approve, she thought, he who made it a matter of principle never to capture anything on film.

Elaine closed her eyes, lulled by the regular throb of the engine. Suddenly she felt once more the extreme weariness that, one day, had alienated her from Eléazard. There was nothing specific that had motivated her departure, unless it was her final survival reflex that had compelled her to flee a man being slowly but surely killed by his cynicism. Eléazard was being eaten away by his excessive clarity about people and things. She was angry with him because he didn’t believe in anything anymore, not even in his own abilities. His dissertation on Kircher had long since been abandoned, his desire to write anything other than dull agency dispatches had long since withered, and if he still seemed to be interested in what was going on in the world, it was simply in order to make a list of its defects. How often had he mocked her for claiming to understand it, to define the laws by which it operated? She thought she could still hear him: ‘Science is just one ideology among others, neither more nor less effective than any of its fellow ideologies. It just works on different areas but misses the truth by as wide a margin as religion or politics. Sending a missionary to convert the Chinese or a cosmonaut to the moon is exactly the same thing: it derives from the same desire to govern the world, to confine it within the limits of doctrinaire knowledge that each time presents itself as definitive. However improbable it might have appeared, Francis Xavier went to Asia and really did convert thousands of Chinese; the American, Armstrong—a soldier, by the way, if you see what I’m getting at—trampled the old lunar myth underfoot, but what do these two actions give us, apart from themselves? They don’t teach us anything, since all they do
is confirm something we already knew, namely that the Chinese are convertible and the moon tramplable … Both of them are nothing more than the same sign of men’s self-satisfaction at any given moment in history.”

One day she couldn’t bear these cracks in the blind wall of certainties any longer. Alcântara had come to seem like the exact reflection of Eléazard: a heap of contagious ruins she had to get away from at all cost. She felt herself threatened by her husband’s morbid interest in that sad failure, Athanasius Kircher. That was what she had fled from, that insidious sense of abandonment. Divorce had doubtless been going too far, but it had been a necessary step on the way to breaking once and for all the spells that kept her captive, to be alone, in tune with life, with the very ordinary happiness at being alive.

The noise of the engine stopped abruptly. As the boat continued to drift along in silence, Elaine could hear the clamor from the aviary of the jungle. From her post she watched Yurupig go to the prow and release the anchor chain. For a moment the clatter of the links halted the chatter of the invisible monkeys on the bank. Herman Petersen appeared on deck, carrying a bucket and a basket.

“What’s up?” Dietlev asked, a look of concern on his face. “Some problem with the engine?”

“Nothing to get worried about,
amigo
. It’s just that night falls quickly and round here it’s not a good idea to keep going in the dark. We could have gone for maybe an hour, but we wouldn’t have been sure of being able to anchor. And anyway, there isn’t a better place for
dourados
on the whole river.”

“What are they,
dourados
?” Mauro asked.

“
Salmidus brevidens
,” Dietlev replied immediately, as if it was obvious. “A kind of golden salmon that can weigh up to forty-five pounds. I had some last year, it’s delicious.”

“To work, then,” said Herman, taking several lines out of his basket. “If you want some for supper, now’s the time to show what you can do.”

“Can I try?” Elaine said from up on her perch.

“But of course,
senhora
. I was wondering where you’d got to.”

“I have to tell you,” she said as she came down on deck, “I’ve never fished before.”

“It’s easy, I’ll show you,” said Herman. “That’s the bait,” he added, pointing at the bucket. “
Piramboias
, there’s nothing better.”

Elaine came to look. She shrank back slightly when she saw the short, compact creatures it was teeming with. “Snakes?” she said with a look of disgust.

“Almost. But you’d better not stick your hands in,” he said, wrapping a cloth round his hand to grasp one of the eels.

With one slash of his knife he cut it in two and stuck one of the wriggling pieces on a hook. After having thrown it in the river, just a few yards from the boat, he handed the line to Elaine. “There you are. All you need now is patience. If there’s a tug, you pull it in; there’s nothing more to it than that.”

“Do these things stay alive for long,” she asked, pointing with her chin at the pool of blood where the
piramboia
tail was still writhing.

“For hours. They’re indestructible, that’s what makes them so attractive—no fish can resist a bit of meat like that. Especially the females …”

He said it in suggestive tones, his dull, watery eyes fixed on Elaine’s breasts. She pretended not to hear and turned to look at the river.

“What about you, Mauro? D’you feel like a go?”

“Why not? I’ll try anything once.”

“Come and get your line, then.”

Dietlev having declined the same offer, Petersen went to fish with the others.

They only had a few minutes to wait. Elaine suddenly had a violent bite but when she pulled in her line, it was empty—it had been cut off just above the hook. The same thing happened almost immediately to Herman and Mauro.

“Shit!” Herman exclaimed in disgust. “Piranhas. The fishing’s over, guys. When they’re about it’s no good for catching anything else. Too greedy, the little bastards … But just a minute, my dears. Since that’s the way things are we’ll get a few for the soup. I’ll put some steel hook lengths on the lines, that’ll give them something to think about.”

The first to have one of these, Elaine was soon struggling with a catch; the line was stretched almost to breaking point, zigzagging unpredictably through the yellow water.

“Go on, pull,” Herman shouted, also busy trying to land a fish. “It won’t break, pull, dammit! But be careful when it’s on the deck. Let Yurupig deal with it, they can cut off your fingers, no problem.”

Flashes of gold appeared in the disturbingly opaque river. With a great heave into which she put all her strength, Elaine brought a gleaming piranha flying onto the deck. The Indian rushed forward: two powerful blows with his club and that was the end of its convulsive twitchings she was trying awkwardly to avoid.

“Look,
belleza
,” Herman said. He had just landed a piranha and had managed to get it on his left hand, still alive, so that Elaine couldn’t tell whether he was taking a liberty in the way he addressed her or talking about the fish. She watched as Petersen inserted the point of his knife into its prognathous jaw; the two rows of triangular teeth—truly monstrous fangs—quickly closed on the blade, several times in succession, like a little stapler. With a cracking of bone that sent shivers down her spine, and with
the help of Herman levering with his knife, the piranha broke its teeth one by one on the metal.

“After that he won’t have to go to the dentist again,” Herman guffawed, proud of his demonstration. “Just imagine what they can do under water … A shoal of them can eat up an ox in no time at all. D’you know what
piranha
means in Tupi-Guarani? It means ‘scissors fish.’ Not bad, eh?”

Despite the fish’s repulsiveness, Elaine was appalled at the pointless torture Petersen was inflicting on it. She corrected herself immediately: it was oafish, obnoxious or anything you like from the catalog of human stupidity, but certainly not “pointless,” given that the word suggested there were tortures that were sometimes justified. She was about to tell Herman to stop his cruel sport when Yurupig went up to him.

“Let go of it,” he said calmly, but in a threatening tone. “At once!”

The two men stared at each other for a moment. Herman decided to smile as if it were nothing. “I’ll do even more than that,” he said, turning to Elaine, “I’ll let it go free. Just to please the fair lady …” And with an affected gesture, he threw the bleeding piranha back into the river.