Where Tigers Are at Home (24 page)

Half asleep, Nelson was remembering. As every evening, a few minutes before going to sleep he saw the farm at Angicos where the army had finally succeeded in surrounding Lampião and his band. They had been gunned down, one after the other, and when the massacre was over the soldiers had posed for photographs in front of the mutilated corpses. One day he had seen in one of these old sepia photographs—they were regularly exhibited at fairs, along with other equally morbid attractions—the naked and dismembered body of Maria Bonita. Between her splayed legs the huge stake the soldiers had driven up her vagina was sticking out. Beside her, placed on a stone to be in the front row for the performance, Lampião’s head could be seen: his face covered in blood, his mouth opened exaggeratedly wide and full of clots of blood from his shattered jaw, he seemed to be screaming out his hatred for all eternity.

“
I HAVE TO
admit, Kircher went on, that the sight of those men & the bleeding tuna made me lose my head; I had the feeling I was watching a pagan festival & was considering the unreal side of such a spectacle, when I was almost caught up in something I condemn. Remember, Caspar, there was the fish, the symbol of Our Lord, the blood of sacrifice, love & death mingled in a furious joy & with all the solemn incantation of a sacred ceremony. Suddenly I could understand the trance of the Maenads the classical texts talk of & how they identify with the darkest forces of our being. The intoxication of the senses to the point of madness, Caspar, the obliteration of everything that is not the body & solely the body! For a moment everything else seemed empty to me. In the man who was singing I saw the only priest worthy of that name & in the fury of the sailors the only religious way of belonging to
this world. Our Church had lost its way in losing this immediate, sensual contact with things, we could only approach the divine in the real violence of life, not in a puerile simulacrum of it. The one we are struggling against, the frenzied god, the “twice born,” he alone was worthy of our respect, despite our efforts to make him look ridiculous. Dionysus, yes, it was Dionysus whom we ought to worship, just as our ancestors before us did, & I should pick up a pike, lose myself in the mass of bodies, forget myself in the spurting blood until the complete consummation of the sacrifice …

Athanasius’s admission left me with my head in a whirl. My master had always been very assured in matters of religion; the doubts he had just revealed to me showed, even though they were the product of an oversensitive imagination, that he was as vulnerable as ordinary mortals. His acceptance of human weakness only made me love him all the more.

Three days after our return to Palermo, a carriage came to the Jesuit College to take us to visit the Prince of Palagonia.

In keeping with his reputation as an eccentric, the Prince lived outside the town, close to a village called Bagheria, where there was nothing but peasant hovels. When, after several hours, we saw his residence, we could not but admire its style. What the people of Palermo called a villa was a little Palladian palace, such as could be seen in the area around Rome; in truth, however, it was not that that drew our attention: the first thing to strike us was the height of the surrounding wall & the monstrous figures overhanging it for the whole of its circumference. It was as if the house were being attacked by all the demons of hell. The closer we came, the better we could make out these misshapen beings carved out of the porous rock that looked as if they’d come from the imagination of a man possessed by the devil. I crossed myself, calling on the Blessed Virgin while Athanasius seemed greatly perplexed.
Our astonishment reached its height when we saw the two gnomes flanking the entrance gate. The one on the right above all impressed by its obvious barbarian nature; as far as one could tell from the unspeakable bulge jutting out from its lower abdomen, it was a seated Priapus, but crooked & distorted. Like the headless Libyans mentioned by Horace, its chest took the place of its head; a huge head, out of proportion & prolonged by an absurd Pharaoh’s goatee! And if the face’s two almond-shaped eyes looked like two slits opening onto the dark the tiara on top made up for it by being decorated with four pupils, arranged in a triangle, whose evil look made my blood curdle. The Egyptian inspiration for this horrible idol was manifest, but this one made me feel uneasy in a way that none of the sarcophagus figures had, nor the Egyptian grotesques I had seen at Aix-en-Provence in the collection of the late Sieur Peiresc. This disagreeable sensation was only increased by the way the servants hastened to lock the wide wrought-iron gates as soon as we had passed through. All this boded ill for our stay & I found myself deploring my master’s rashness in accepting this invitation.

“Come, Caspar,” my master said, “summon up all your courage. If my intuition is correct, you’re going to need it to face up to what’s in store for us.” He said this with a little amused smile that frightened me more than all the rest.

Having driven around the villa, the carriage stopped beside a fine double staircase & we got out. A lackey invited us into the house while another unloaded our baggage. We were taken to an antechamber that was rather dark but richly decorated.

“I will inform the prince of your arrival,” the servant said, “please make yourselves comfortable.”

He went out, closing the door behind him; it imitated the marble of the walls so perfectly I would have found it difficult to find my way out of the room if I had been invited to do so.

“Whatever happens, don’t say a word,” Kircher whispered surreptitiously. I acknowledged this with a nod of the head, repressing my desire to tell him of my concern.

Athanasius started to stroll around the room. All around us were cartouches, painted in fresco & charmingly rendered, depicting numerous very strange emblems, mottoes or riddles; there were so many it would have taken several days just to read them all.

“Look, Caspar, what do you think of this one:
Morir per no morir
? Nothing? Really? You must have forgotten the phoenix, which has to be consumed by fire in order to be reborn from its ashes. That is really quite childish, I would have expected more wit from the Prince. But let us continue:
Si me mira, me miran …
That’s hardly less elementary, because of the double meaning, a gnomon could say it of the sun or, equally well, a courtier of his sovereign. Ah, here’s a more difficult one, but more amusing as well:
Entier nous le mangeons, mais ô prodige étrange, reduit a sa moitié ce coquin nous mange
. Come on, my friend, rack your brains a bit, what can we eat when it’s whole but half of which eats us.”

That was precisely what I had been doing for a while with no other result that a growing headache & once more I had to admit defeat.

“A chicken, Caspar, a
poulet
, a
pou-let
! Don’t you get it? That’s why the riddle’s in French,” my master said with a smile. When I looked baffled, he pretended to be looking for a flea in his hair. “Well try this one, since it’s written in our own language,” he went on, hardly giving me time to catch my breath: “
Ein Neger mit Gazelle zagt im Regen nie …
Well?”

I puzzled over this for five minutes but I could not work out why a negro with a gazelle never despaired in the rain or what it might signify.

“This time you’re quite right, the sentence has no hidden meaning; on the other hand, it is a perfect palindrome & can be
read equally well from right to left. This kind of frivolity was much in fashion in Rome during the days of her decline & I only wish Egyptian writing was as easy to decipher as these lame riddles.

“When it spotted me it was the one who was spotted …” he went on. “What do you think, Caspar? Is it not a witty way of painting with words the leopard’s coat?”

My master was about to tackle a further puzzle when the valet returned to say that his Highness would soon be there but in the meanwhile he asked us to be patient & to take a seat. As he said that, the servant gestured toward several chairs arranged around a picture showing the Prince in hunting dress.

Hardly had I sat down than I felt a sharp pain in my posterior: the cushion on my armchair was bristling with tiny pins causing unbearable discomfort. I immediately stood up again, in as natural a manner as possible &, following my master’s order, without saying anything. He, I think, immediately realized what the difficulty was.

“Oh, do forgive me, Caspar,” he said, also standing up, “I’d forgotten your hernia and that you shouldn’t sit in chairs that are too comfortable. Take mine, you’ll be better there.”

He immediately sat in the chair I had left without appearing to feel any pain at all. I admired the strength of character through which he could suffer a torment I had not been able to bear for five seconds. The armchair I was sitting in was not lacking an uncomfortable feature: the front legs were shorter than the back ones so that I kept sliding forward & had to tense my leg muscles to stop myself falling. The back sloped forward, aggravating the awkwardness of my posture, but compared with the other chair, it was a bed of roses & I was grateful to Kircher for having suggested this unfair exchange.

“But let’s get back to our puzzles,” my master said. “
Legendo metulas imitabere cancros
. Oho! Latin now & some of the very best. It’s your turn, Caspar—”

At that moment the lackey reappeared behind us as if by magic; he announced the Prince of Palagonia. I was not in the least unhappy to leave my torture chair. The Prince was already approaching us with his limping gait. He was a small, very dry man, at most fifty but his uncombed wig and several bad teeth made him look as if he had one foot in the grave. His dress, of green silk, was rather austere in style & even somewhat dusty, betokening a man who cared little for his appearance.

“Good, good, good, that is good. My unworthy house is proud of your presence,” he said to Kircher in the bad German he insisted on speaking to the end of our stay.

My master bowed without returning his compliment.

“Good, even better like that. I like men who do not put on false modesty, especially when they possess the means to it. But come, come, I must myself excuse & to see is better than to speak …”

As he said that, he led us out of the room by a concealed door. After going along several corridors, we came to a library, well stocked, as it seemed to me, where he locked the door behind us. Going over to the shelves, he made as if to take out
The Golden Ass
by Apuleus—I remember the book because I could not see why he should suddenly want to talk to us about that author—but in fact by so doing he released a mechanism which opened a little window in the books, revealing the back of a painting. The Prince invited Kircher to put his eye to a tiny hole. My master did so & let me take his place after a few seconds.

“Amusing but rudimentary,” he commented without a muscle in his face expressing anything other than profound indifference.

I looked in my turn. The aperture gave a view of the room where we had been before.

“You understand,” the Prince went on, “that I show out of sincerity that & to prove to you how much I your worldly
wisdom greatly value. I offer you all my excuses for this modest examination. It allows me to judge human honesty & you are first to succeed. Believe me that I great opinion of your abilities have & trust you not to reveal little secret of mine.”

Kircher assured him that we would never reveal the device to anyone, adding that the Prince’s suspicion was fully justified: there was, he said, no limit to human hypocrisy & if one were going to waste one’s time with people, it was best to take precautions in choosing those one was going to deal with.”

“Good, good, good,” said the Prince, nodding. “You permit me congratulate you for decipherment of decorative enigmas. It prove great knowing never before seen. But we speak later. I beg you first visit your habitation and rest you a little your travails. We see each other at lunch if that agree with you.”

Athanasius nodded his agreement & a servant came to take us to our apartments, where we found our luggage. They were extensive and comfortable, with flowers in beautiful arrangements, a bottle of malmsey ready to drink and crystal glasses. In an open box we found a set of surgical instruments with everything we needed to treat the wounds caused during our wait. I encouraged my master to make first use of it, since he had suffered the torture of the armchair longest, but he waved my offer away. I was dumbfounded by such stoicism, but Kircher lifted the back of his cassock &, after having untied a few tapes, revealed a sheet of thick leather so well placed that it remained invisible from outside.

“Yes, my friend,” Kircher said, giving my shoulder a friendly squeeze, “concerned by the rumors about the Prince, I took further advice & … several precautions. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about these preparations but our good faith had to be absolutely convincing. I suspected we would be observed & you, with your innocence & your usual courage, were the one who served that objective. I only intended to inflict the sloping chair on you, but
you immediately sat down on the worst one of all. Let me tell you very sincerely how much I admire the way you reacted.”