Where Tigers Are at Home (30 page)

Out of bravado more than unconcern, Mauro had switched on his Walkman; leaning against the rail, his eyes fixed on Milton, he was humming away assiduously.

Herman reappeared on deck and hurried across to Dietlev. “I assure you it’s not my fault,” he said right away. Their plane’s broken down, there’s no way they can repair it. They want us to take their mechanic to Cáceres to buy some replacement parts; there’s an airport there.”

“To Cáceres!” Dietlev exclaimed. He immediately saw in his mind’s eye the two branches of the river a few miles upstream. “But that’s not our route, it’s even the opposite way.”

“I know,” Herman said, putting on a dismayed look. “Don’t complicate things. I swear I’ve tried everything. I even proposed
to leave you where you want to go first and pick you up on my way back. But they won’t listen. They’re in a hurry, a great hurry, if you see what I mean.”

Dietlev realized they’d have to bring the mechanic back here, which dashed any hope he still had of completing their mission. At best, counting just three days in Cáceres to find the parts—and that was a minimum—they could only get back to this point at the end of their scheduled time in the Mato Grosso. “It’s piracy!” he muttered. “Do you realize what that means? A whole year of preparations down the drain because of these bastards.”

“I couldn’t foresee this,
amigo
, I swear it.”

“And there’s nothing we can do about it? I don’t know, what if we offer them money if they agree to leave us on the deposit with the fossils?”

“Money?” Petersen said genuinely amazed. “But these guys have a thousand times more than you, they’re literally wallowing in dollars. You don’t realize, Dietlev, you’re lucky still to be alive. They don’t care a fuck about the lot of you, about your mission or your bloody fossils.”

“We just have to do what they say, and that’s that,” said Milton, still terrified. “I’ve had enough of … of all this. I’m canceling the mission, d’you hear. We’ll take the plane from Cáceres. I’m cancelling everything.”

“What plane?” the Paraguayan asked in mocking tones, putting down a large cardboard box full of tins of food and bottles. “And the little lady, is she ready? You haven’t told her the news yet, eh, yellow belly? Come on, get on with it, I’ve got to take the Zod’ to collect the mechanic.”

“Please, Hernando,” said Petersen in a tearful voice. “There’s no point, I’ve given you my word. I’ll bring your guy back, whatever happens. I’ve got to come back by this route anyway.”

“Herman?!” Dietlev growled. His voice had deepened a tone, as if he had a premonition of what the old German’s reply would be.

“They want to keep
Professora
Von Wogau until we come back. As security.”

“No question!” Dietlev exclaimed without a moment’s pause for reflection. Turning to Hernando, he said, “We’ll take your mechanic to Cáceres, or even to Cuiabá if necessary, we’ll do everything you want, but she stays with us, understood?

“All right, that’s enough,” the man said, pointing his gun at Dietlev. “Herman, you put the supplies in the dinghy and you,
guapa
, you get on board double quick. We won’t do anything to harm you, believe me.”

There was a lecherous glint in his eye that said everything about what he had in mind for her.

Elaine was sitting on the deck, her legs tight together, shaking her head from side to side, unable in her panic to express her refusal to go with him in any other way.

Mauro faced up to the Paraguayan. “She’s not going,” he said in a tremulous voice. “
No venga, non viene!
What language do we have to say it in? I’ll stay here, if that’s what you want.”

“Well he’s got balls, the little cockerel,” Hernando said with a smile, “I like that …” And with a swift blow with the rifle butt he hit him in the face. Mauro collapsed like a rag doll.

Dietlev was already coming forward, fists clenched.

“But he says they won’t harm her,” Milton yelped, pulling him back. “There’s nothing for it but to leave her with them. Is there, Elaine? Tell him you’ll stay. As you can see, he’s not joking.”

“Pansy!” Dietlev said, spitting on his mouth.

Hernando stuck the barrel of the Kalashnikov in Dietlev’s throat. “You’re getting to be a pain in the ass, you idiot. Come on, little lady, in the dinghy or I blow his head off.”

Despite all her efforts, Elaine just could not stand up. She’d started crawling toward them, when the engine, suddenly put on full speed, made the gunboat leap forward.

Off-balance for a moment, Hernando realized what Yurupig was doing. “He’s going to kill the lot of us, the stupid cunt,” he screamed, rushing toward the wheelhouse.

At the same moment Dietlev saw the boat set off on a slanting course toward the bank. Without bothering about the others, he ran for the upper deck as well. He was just climbing the accommodation ladder when the gunboat changed course and boldly made its way back into the middle of the river. Then there was a sort of orange flash, on the extreme edge of his field of vision and, above the din of the engine, a kind of simultaneous discharge in which the white noise of war mingled with the screaming of the monkeys. Dietlev threw himself to the floor, covering his head with his hands. He felt his leg slap against the metal by itself, becoming one with it. Instinctively he tried to pull it back into a more natural position and, astonished at its lack of reaction, lost consciousness.

Staggered at Yurupig’s reaction, Petersen had dropped onto the deck as soon as he saw that the boat was continuing its course and, despite Hernando’s efforts, would pass the invisible limit set by the crocodile hunters. Dumbfounded, sucked into his deepest fears, he observed the ensuing events with a hypnotic sense of déjà vu: Milton, waving his arms and shouting demands for a cease-fire, the jig that the repeated impact of the bullets made him dance on the spot, the red gashes in his linen suit; Elaine on all fours relieving herself on the deck, eyes closed, with the expression of a saint undergoing a visitation.

Imperturbable under the hail of bullets, the
Messenger of the Faith
continued to glide up the river, forcing its way, with a kind of dogged voluptuousness, between the Nile-green palisades of the jungle.

METAPHYSICIANS OF TLÖN: Kircher is like them, he is not looking for the truth, nor even the probable, he’s looking for the amazing. It never occurred to him that metaphysics is a branch of literature of the fantastic, but his work belongs entirely to fiction and therefore also to Jorge Luis Borges.

THE ESSENTIAL CLOSENESS to death, a fleeting insight from this homemade hell where my struggles take place.

DRAGONS: If God is perfect, Kircher asks himself, why has He created these hybrid creatures that appear to cast doubt on the natural order of things? What is the meaning of these breaks, these departures from the norm? In that way God manifests His omnipotence: He can unmake what He has made, he can dismantle what He has set up. For however long it has been our experience that a stone thrown up to the sky falls back down, nothing can assure us that one day it will not disappear into the clouds, on a divine whim and to remind us that it is He who makes the laws.

This simple deduction forbids Kircher any pretension to knowledge: he chooses to believe the unbelievable, systematically, because it is absurd and that is what should make a true believer believe.

FAITH IN A WORLD created for the human theater and at times not merely theatrical. Kircher has an innate sense of the theatrical, a
quasi-Borrominian art of vertiginous asymmetries
(thanks, Umberto!). Reason’s elastic vision, a tendency toward the picturesque, toward reminiscence, flights of the imagination, a taste for the raw forms of life, for theatrical machinery, for illusion:
Kircher is baroque, quite simply baroque (
Barocchus tridentinus, sive romanus, sive jesuiticus …
).

SERTÃO is a deformation of
deserto
: the desert. They also say the Interior.
Sertanejo
: someone who lives in the desert, who is himself deserted …

ADD A NOTE on the “anemic machine” invented by Kircher. Ineffective but charitable. Ineffective to the point of charity? At least it makes him more human.

NOTE. If you’re going to get it wrong, do it with precision! Kircher and his contemporaries allowed our world a princely 4,000 years of existence; but at the same time the survivors of the Mayas were counting in millions of years and the Hindus calculating the cycles of successive creations of the universe in periods of 8.4 billion years …

WHEN WE RETURNED
to the great hall, we discovered that a very large table had been set in our absence. Kircher was given the place of honor, opposite the Prince, & I was happy to discover I was seated on the left hand of his wife. The banquet started immediately. To describe the profusion of dishes we were given is beyond the weak power of my memory, especially since I was paying particular attention to what my master & the Princess were saying. I do remember, however, that there was a large amount of seafood, shellfish & lobster, as well as poultry & joints of game, which the guests despatched indifferently. As I was hardly touching the pieces that arrived on my plate, being careful to avoid the sin of gluttony, my master lectured me on the matter, telling me it was a feast day & that there was no harm in rejoicing both in body &
in spirit at the birth of Our Lord. I must confess that I followed this advice enthusiastically & did full justice to our hosts’ meal. Our glasses were refilled as soon as they were emptied, the crystal sparkled & the whole table was abuzz with laughter & witty ripostes; the Princess was gracious & amusing & I was happier than I could have imagined when I arrived at this place.

The conversation turned on trivial topics & every time they looked to Kircher for, if not the last word on the question, at least the most authoritative opinion. This turned into a kind of game among the guests: to see who could put forward an argument that my master would then confirm, reveling in his approval. Since the profusion of dishes suggested it, we discussed the relative qualities of various foods & the strange habits of ancient or far-off peoples. La Mothe Le Vayer reminded us of the abstinence from all meat practised by Pythagoreans & the Brahmins of the Orient, the latter leaving even grass unless it had been dried, the reason being that the soul is in all green growth; the rhizophagi, spermatophagi, hylophagi & foliophagi of Africa, who live solely on seeds, leaves or the heads of plants & leap from branch to branch as nimbly as squirrels. We can read in Mendès Pinto, someone said, that the flesh of asses, dogs, tigers & lions is on sale in the butchers’ shops of China & Tartary. And in Pliny, another said, that the Macrobians owed their long life to the fact that they fed exclusively on vipers, as we know do certain European princes, who have them swallowed by poultry whose flesh they are going to eat subsequently. And what would you say, Kircher added, trumping the lot, of the cynomolgi, who live on the milk of bitches, which they suck? The struthophagi of Deodorus the Sicilian, who eat ostriches, the acridophagi who eat locusts or even the Asian phthirophagi mentioned by Strabo—who are perhaps Herodotus’s Budini—who swallow their lice with great pleasure?

The ladies cried out in disgust at such habits, but it was even worse when La Mothe Le Vayer started talking about the anthropophagi …

THESE PEOPLE, WHO
prided themselves on being philosophers, knew their classics well. References to Latin & Greek authors flew from all sides & the ladies were not slow to stand up for their sex with erudition. Only the Princess remained silent. I saw that she blushed whenever certain remarks reached the limits of propriety & I pressed my leg against hers to show that I shared her embarrassment & agreed wholeheartedly with her disapproval.

Arguing that love was a passion & that this passion could be satisfied either by ourselves or with the help of others, Sieur Jean-Jacques Bouchard analyzed that hoodwinking of the nerves they call “masturbation,” which is an abomination but which he justified with numerous famous examples. In support he called upon Diogenes, of course, Zeno and Sextus Empiricus, who all swore by this method alone because of the independence of others it gave them, & also the entire population of Lydia, which practised this manual operation in broad daylight.

Count Manuel Cuendias, a young Spaniard with a pockmarked face, condemned such conduct, but only to defend love between men. He deluged his audience with a flood of Greek & Latin figures who in the past had all extolled what today we look upon as an act of depravity. Olympus was full of the likes of Ganymede and Antinous, Hercules only had eyes for his Hylas or his Tarostes, Achilles for his Patroclus; the wisest & most highly respected philosophers swore by their catamites: Plato indulged every whim of his Alexis, his Phaedo or his Agathon, Xenophon those of his Clenias; Aristotle went weak at the knees at the
sight of Hermias, Empedocles at the sight of Pausanias; Epicurus courted Pytocles, Aristippus crawled for Eurychides …