Where Tigers Are at Home (25 page)

“But what about the riddles, the pictures?”

“Yes, Caspar, yes, I had done my homework on those as well, so as not to appear unworthy so close to our goal. But don’t ask me any more questions, it’s still too early to explain all that to you. All I ask is a little patience & you’ll see yourself how justified this mystery-mongering was.”

I assured Athanasius I would obey him implicitly & started to put my things away. You can imagine how dumbfounded I was at my master’s cleverness & the way he took all possible steps to achieve his ends! His undertaking must be of some importance, I thought, as I swore to myself to do my best to support him in his projects. My unease regarding the Prince & his house had disappeared & I was full of impatience to take part in this unexpected adventure. My master was resting on his bed, his beard sticking up, his eyes closed, august & majestic, like a statue recumbent on a tomb. I almost knelt down before him, such was the effect of his strength of mind & superhuman intelligence on me.

Toward midday a servant came to take us to the room where luncheon was served. The Prince and his wife were waiting for us, sitting at a table whose setting showed perfect taste. He introduced us to Princess Alexandra, whose splendid beauty & youth were very much at odds with her husband’s decrepit appearance. With her blond hair arranged in a complicated chignon, her blue eyes & her small, red mouth & dressed ravishingly in silk & organdie, she looked like a goddess come straight from Olympus. Unlike her husband, she spoke perfect German, a legacy, we later learned, of her Bavarian roots. Refined even in her movements, she walked & did everything extremely slowly, as if the least abruptness on her part would have brought the villa tumbling down about her ears. But this
idiosyncrasy only made her all the more graceful & I blushed, tongue-tied, whenever she cast a glance in my direction.

“Good, good, good …,” said the Prince as the servants busied themselves about us, loading the table with the most exquisite dishes. “Do honor to this meager repast, I beg you.”

Deaf to this invitation, Kircher stood up to say grace &, not content with this piece of impertinence, took a long time consecrating the bread. I could see that our host was not accustomed to such ceremony & that he raised an eyebrow at the liberty my master had taken.

“Since the bread we have before us,” he said with a glint of malice, “could you me tell, Reverend Father, if its weight be lighter, after it taken out of the oven, when warm it is or cold?”

“Nothing easier to prove,” Athanasius replied, starting to eat, “when one has done the experiment oneself. Bread is heavier when it is warm & has just come out of the oven than when it has cooled down. A half pound of risen dough is two and a half ounces lighter cooked than raw & and even lighter when cooled. Which demonstrates that those who maintain that it is lighter raw than cooked are mistaken. One should never write, nor base oneself on anything other than genuine experiments, especially when they are as easy to prove as this one. Even Aristotle is sometimes wrong: in the fifth problem of the twenty-first section of his physics he claims that a salted loaf is lighter cold than warm & an unsalted loaf heavier. A simple experiment showed me however that the two loaves remain the same weight, whether cold or warm, whether they are salted or not.”

“Excellent, my sir, excellent,” the Prince said, sucking a chicken leg. “I did not expect less from you.”

Princess Alexandra turned to me &, matching action to words, said, “These gentlemen are too learned for me. And
I have to admit, lighter or heavier, it is a matter of complete indifference: I prefer my bread with butter anyway.”

“Quite right too,” my master agreed, also helping himself.

As for me, I kept my eyes fixed on my plate.

The meal continued on the same bantering tone. Wines & dishes followed each other without interruption & Athanasius did justice to them, much to the satisfaction of our hosts. When large slices of grilled swordfish were served, my master begged me to recount our adventures at Messina. Despite feeling intimidated, I still managed to describe our fishing excursion in detail, though naturally omitting the episode that had led to Kircher’s confession. When I came to the death of the fish, I became so impassioned at the revolting memory that the Prince laughed at my sensitivity. But his wife had turned quite pale … Without a word, she put her hand on mine & I could tell that she shared my feelings. The Prince noticed the gesture, brief though it was, & abruptly stiffened.

After the meal we were served a very bitter liqueur based, so the Prince told us, on herbs from the mountains. He seemed to have become very heated & kept pestering my master with his questions. Then the Prince appeared to hesitate for a moment & after he had whispered a few words in Athanasius’s ear, the two of them went to the other end of the room, where they continued to converse in low voices.

Left alone with the Princess, I did not know how to behave, so moved I was by her beauty. I asked her a few questions about God & the nature of the soul, to which her replies showed intelligence & good sense. Since the subject did not seem to interest her particularly, I brought the conversation to the twisted statues we could see through the windows, asking her to tell me what they meant. She went very pale & appeared to waver before answering.

“I feel you are a young man I can trust & I am happy to tell you a story of which I have no need to be ashamed but which was the cause of both those monsters & my misfortune. As you perhaps noticed during the meal, my husband is of a very jealous nature; a few years ago, not many months after our wedding, despite myself I gave him occasion to feel his suspicions were justified. A cousin of mine, Ödön von Horvath, came to visit me here. He excelled in the art of composing airs for the lute or the spinet & this inestimable gift was only equaled by his beauty. As we were the same age & my interests were closer to his than to those of my husband, I was very happy to see him here & we passed whole days playing music together or discussing all kinds of topics. I enjoyed listening to him talk about the country of my birth & the loved ones I had left there. Alas, under the influence of youth and loneliness, he fell so passionately in love with me & declared his love so sincerely & so sensitively that I was moved by it. All I felt for him was affection & a sister’s love for her brother but I have to admit that I was secretly flattered by his attentions & his insistence might perhaps have eventually borne fruit. Chance, or Providence, if you prefer, saved me from the unfaithfulness without sparing me the shame. One evening after supper, when the Prince pretended to go to bed on the pretext that he had drunk too much during the meal, my cousin, even more aroused than usual because of the wine, abandoned himself to transports he normally managed to repress. He begged me to grant him a kiss & since I refused, threatened to go & kill himself on the spot; he was a man to carry out such a piece of madness, especially given the state he was in, with the result that the idea frightened me. I resisted less … he put his arm around my waist & took advantage of the moment to steal the kiss he seemed to have set his heart on. That was the moment when my husband surprised us. He didn’t say a word,
but the coldness & cruelty I saw in his eyes made my blood run cold much more than if he had lost his temper. Ringing for the servants, he had my cousin dragged out of the room & locked me in my bedroom without giving me a chance to explain.

“Since that ill-fated evening, I have been shut away in this house, which my husband has transformed into a prison. As for my cousin, I have not had any news of him, but I know that he has not returned to Bavaria & I cannot stop myself constructing the worst hypotheses about his fate. Three months later workers started raising the walls around our park & installing on them the devilish statues that are intended to remind me ceaselessly of my supposed sin. But that would be nothing without the excessive cruelty with which my husband carried out his undertaking: if you look at these statues closely, you will see that many of them represent musicians; everything about them is grotesque, distorted, monstrous, everything apart from their faces, they are always the same, calm & angelic, as if surprised to find themselves in such company. The face,” the Princess quickly wiped away a large tear from her cheek, “is that of my cousin.”

I sympathized profoundly with this unhappy woman & felt so sorry for her misfortune that I poured out my sighs. I was speechless at her husband’s malevolence. I was trembling as I took her hand & squeezed it firmly as it seemed the only suitable way of consoling her a little.

“Excuse me,” she said, thanking me with a wan smile & withdrawing her hand slowly, “but I must go and rest.”

She gave me her arm & I accompanied her to the door. As she took more precautions than before, I thought she was about to faint and asked whether she felt strong enough to walk by herself.

“You needn’t worry,” she said with an artless smile, “it’s just that the glass harpsichord in my stomach is vibrating a little
more than usual. To hurry would risk breaking it & not all the skill of Father Kircher would be able to save me from a horrible death.”

At that she went, leaving me in a state close to stupor.

A few days passed, days entirely devoted to work on Caspar Schott’s text and Loredana’s occasional but regular visits. Despite her initial hostile reaction, Soledade had immediately adopted the Italian, or rather, Eléazard thought, had been won over by her open nature and by the exemplary way she was interested in everything, people as well as things, without distinction. She had refused to come and stay with him
—there’s plenty of unoccupied rooms
, he’d told her without any ulterior motive,
at least it would mean you wouldn’t have to pay for the hotel, it’s up to you—
but she had taken him at his word when he’d said she could come to Pelhourinho Square whenever she liked, to use his library or take advantage of a shower that worked more or less properly. He would run into her as she came and went in the house, reading on one of the chaise longues on the veranda or, more often, sitting at the kitchen table with Soledade. He was entirely satisfied with her unobtrusive, unpredictable presence; it was as if Loredana had always been living there and a spontaneous, transparent intimacy had quietly arisen in the course of both their lives.

She seemed to enjoy his guided tour around the town, putting a name, an anecdote to each dilapidated façade, reconstructing against the gray sky every ruined edifice with grand gestures and builder’s jargon. In his enthusiasm he had even taken her to see the moving little church—one of the first the missionaries built in
Brazil—hidden on a tiny uninhabited island in São Marcos Bay. An unbelievable number of snakes had taken up residence there and, in a kind of fiendish revenge, subjected every nook and cranny of the battered walls to their interference. He decided, however, not to take her to the
island of the short-sighted
or to that
of the albinos
, such was Loredana’s nauseated response to these examples, fairly banal, after all, of the dangers of inbreeding.

She still refused to go into detail about her own life and her reasons for being in Alcântara—and he had no desire to know more than she wanted to tell him—but proved to be inexhaustible on everything concerning China, a subject on which she had profound and first-hand knowledge. She had conscientiously set about reading Schott’s manuscript, in small doses and, as he understood it, more to satisfy her curiosity about him than about Athanasius Kircher. She told him her thoughts about it and emphasized the difficulties she came across, which allowed Eléazard to refine his notes or even to add a comment on certain passages he had not considered worth dwelling on. Without her he would never have thought it necessary to explain to a potential reader the scourge the Thirty Years’ War had been nor how exotic the simple discovery of Italy had been in the seventeenth century. It came to the point where he was writing his notes purely for her, not giving the matter final approval until it had been tempered by her comments.

For all that their rapport was something of a miracle, it still remained a provisional pact. Eléazard refused to see the problem from that point of view; he made sparing use of it, with the happiness it brought, as if it would last forever. Afterward he was to reproach himself for not having taken full advantage of what he knew from the start was to be a short-lived encounter.

He had told her so much about Euclides, his only friend in the area, that she had agreed in principle to meet him. That morning,
however, when he wanted to take Loredana to lunch at the doctor’s, neither Alfredo nor Soledade knew where she was. Eléazard had taken the ferry to São Luís with a feeling of irritation that even he eventually saw as both absurd and excessive.

“
I ASSURE YOU
the man’s perfectly well mannered. A touch rustic, perhaps. Lacking good taste for certain, but that’s more widespread than anything throughout the world and I would say you couldn’t pride yourself on being the opposite without demonstrating a smugness that is even worse.”

Eléazard looked doubtful.

“Yes, I know, I know,” Dr. Euclides went on with a smile. “He’s not really a left-winger, that’s what’s putting you off, isn’t it?”

“That’s going beyond euphemism, doctor, it’s sarcasm,” Eléazard said, smiling too. “And you’re probably right, I can’t see what I could do if I visited a man like that except insult him right in the middle of the party.”

“Oh, come now … You’re far too well brought up to indulge in anything so foolish. Just remember I’m asking you as a favor. You can believe me when I say from experience that you won’t regret it; it’s a very instructive milieu, especially for a journalist. And if my company alone isn’t enough, bring your fair Italian, at least it’ll give me the opportunity of meeting her …”

Eléazard watched the doctor as he took off his pince-nez and cleaned them meticulously on an immaculate handkerchief. Without the magnifying lenses, which made them look unnaturally large, grotesque, like some joke spectacles, his almond-green eyes suddenly revealed their great humanity once more. They had a cheerful look without showing any sign of the amaurosis—
Ah, morose is he! Amoroso … a nice name, don’t you think, for the atrophy of the optic nerve—
that would soon dim their light entirely.
Euclides never combed his hair except with his hand; his thick, unruly gray hair, in a fairly short crew cut, stuck out in all directions, giving the impression of being constantly blown about by invisible gusts of wind. His perfectly straight nose contrasted with a tousled mustache and goatee, yellowed by the tar from his Egyptian cigarettes; the whiskers concealed his mouth and moved mechanically when he spoke, as on a puppet’s face. Chubby without being fat, he always wore dark suits, made to measure, a starched white shirt and a sort of four-leaved bow tie; Eléazard wondered where he managed to get such an old-fashioned item of neckwear. The only extravagance he allowed himself in his dress was in his choice of vests, luxurious accessories with facings embroidered in silk or gold thread, with buttons of mother-of-pearl, marcasite or even delicate enameled miniatures; he had an impressive collection of them. For the rest he possessed an affability
à la Flaubert—
at least such as his devotees ascribe to him—combined with an unfailing calmness and courtesy. His encyclopedic and perceptive erudition was fascinating.