Where Tigers Are at Home (34 page)

For a brief moment he had been taken with the prospect of finding a well-filled wallet, but Nelson refused to join those robbing the corpses. Looking around for Uncle Zé, he made his way through the debris, The ground was nauseating, saturated with secretions and dubious matter. Crawling around a thicket, he came across what was left of a policeman, a decapitated cop who, absurdly, was still wearing his belt and holster with its pistol.

“You don’t look too clever like that,” Nelson muttered. “Fuck you, son of a bitch.”

Like a divine response to this blasphemy, he felt two hands grasp his shoulders and rolled over, screaming.

“What the hell are you doing here, for God’s sake? What the hell are you doing here?” Uncle Zé bellowed at the shock. “My God, have you seen yourself? You … you … I thought you were a survivor.”

“I followed you …” Nelson stammered, he too trembling.

“I can see you followed me. I told you to stay in the house.”

“Are there any injured?”

Uncle Zé shook his head sadly. “They’re all dead. It’s not possible after a crash like that. I’ll keep looking until the rescue party arrives. And you’re going straight back to the house, understood? I’ll come as soon as I can.”

Nelson stayed by the corpse for a few more minutes, surprised at the perfection of the plan that had formed in his mind. That was the way it would be, that and no other way. There was no other way it could be …

Back at the house, while Firmina, horrified at the state he was in, was heating some water to wash him, Nelson took the loaded gun out of his T-shirt and quickly stowed it in the bottom of his bag.

A little later, in the washtub where
Dona
Firmina was scrubbing his back while mumbling prayers for the victims, he had an amazing erection, the first hard-on he’d had since his father died.

“
DO THAT & YOU
will be lost,” this new Potiphar’s wife said calmly. “I will say you tried to violate me & I can assure you that you will feel the whole weight of my husband’s fury.”

I was stunned, realizing the truth of what she said. For a moment I almost rang despite everything, preferring scandal, disgrace & even death to this shameful temptation; recalling
in extremis
my promise to Kircher, I knelt down, face to the wall, & begged God to grant me His aid.

I felt the Princess come over and wrap her arms around me tenderly. “Now don’t be silly. You haven’t taken your final vows yet & there’s no sin in yielding under duress …”

Having said that, she pulled me down onto the carpet. My sight became blurred & my heart was pounding, obliterating any
attempt at resistance, & I pressed my body against hers while repeating the name of Jesus like a man possessed.

Even today I blush at the memory of our unbridled lasciviousness; but I will drain this bitter cup to the last drop & confess the full extent of a sin that I am not sure I have expiated by my subsequent conduct. For, not content with abandoning myself to debauchery with the Princess, I did not refuse the perverted embellishments she taught me that night … 
Lingua mea in nobilissimae os adacta, spiculum usque ad cor illi penetravit. Membra nostra humoribus rorabant, atque concinebant quasi sugentia. Modo intus macerabam, modo cito retrahebam lubricum caulem. Scrotum meum ultro citroque iactabatur. Nobilis mulier cum crura trementia attolleret, suavissime olebat. Novenis ictibus alte penetrantibus singulos breves inserui
.
¹
The Princess’s chignon had become undone, long locks half concealed her imploring looks … 
Pectoribus anhelantibus ambo gemebamus
.
²
I was doing everything I could with my hands and my legs
& semen meum ad imam vaginam penetravit
.
³
But the Princess was insatiable, I soon had to start again.
Tum pedes eius sublevandi ac sustinendi fuerunt humeris meis. Pene ad posticum admoto, in reconditas ac fervidas latebras intimas impetum feci. Deinde cuniculum illius diu linxi, dum irrumo. Mingere autem volui: “O Caspar mi, voluptas mea, inquit
,
quantumcumque meies, tantum ore accipiam!”
⁴
Which it did, as
liquore meo faciem eius perfundi
 …
⁵

She taught me other depraved acts that were equally abominable; by now I was indulging in them with pleasure without thinking for a moment that we were wallowing in mortal sin. However, the Princess, even while enjoying licentiousness such as had never appeared even in my worst nightmares, kept insisting I should take care not to brush against her navel or her stomach for fear of breaking the glass harpsichord she imagined was in there. It was a request I had some difficulty complying with, given my frenzied state.

When we were satiated, which was only after two hours of unbridled lust, she showed me an unobtrusive passage by which I could return to my room without being seen. Once there, I immediately fell asleep, drunk on wine & sensual pleasure. It was the early morning of December 25, 1637.

When I woke, feeling sick and bloated from my night of debauchery, it was to suffer the most excruciating torments of guilty conscience. There was no hope of redemption for my sin & already I was burning in the fires of a hell as terrible as the real one. Such were my sufferings and my self-hatred, such the sting of shame, that all I wanted was to confess my sins to my master & then bury myself in some hideous desert.

I had reached that stage of my torment when a lackey came to ask me to join Kircher in the library. I followed him like a man being taken to suffer the pain of martyrdom.

Athanasius was alone among the books & an expression of profound compassion appeared on his face when he saw me. I immediately threw myself down at his feet, incapable of uttering a word, mumbling my desire for confession between sobs.

“That is not necessary, Caspar,” he said, helping me up. “Whatever you have done, you are already pardoned. Look …”

He took a weighty folio tome down from the shelves & opened it in the middle at two blank pages. He placed the book, open, on a tall lectern facing the place from which it had been taken down, then asked me to put out the two candelabra lighting this windowless room.

“Pluck up your courage, Caspar, & look.”

I went over to him to see, to my amazement, that the book now showed a luminous picture in color, as clear as the reflection in a mirror. But my astonishment at this piece of magic was as nothing compared with my stupefaction when I recognized the alcove where I had condemned myself to eternal torment the previous night. Crying out, I fainted.

I regained consciousness soon after, Kircher having applied some smelling salts he always carried with him. In the meantime he had relit the candelabra & I could see that the pages of the book were blank again.

“Sit down & listen, without asking any questions. I have a lot more to confess than you. First of all you must know that there is no sorcery in what you have just seen. It is just one of my inventions, a camera obscura, which I would have preferred to reveal to you under better circumstances. But God, for it can only be Him, has decided otherwise. I was here, with the Prince, when you went into that alcove with his wife yesterday evening; I spied on you until I was sure you would obey my orders without fail. I don’t know what you did with the Princess, that Devil’s spawn, & I don’t want to know; it is the price that had to
be paid for an enterprise in which we are both nothing but blind instruments. Your submission to my orders, far from sending you to eternal damnation, allows you to enter Paradise; by your sin, Caspar, you have quite simply saved the Church!

“I knew about this volume,” he went on, grasping a thick roll of parchment, “even before I came to this house, but the horror of reading it surpassed everything I had been told.”

Constituting as it did an inestimable piece of good fortune for the enemies of the Christian religion, the very existence of that work was a catastrophe in the troubled times in which we lived …

“This morning the Prince, in accordance with the pact I made with him, gave me this book, which could be such a dangerous weapon in the hands of our adversaries. I will have no regrets about burning it, Caspar. May your sins & mine be consumed in the same fire.”

With these words Kircher cast the volume into the hearth & gave me absolution as the parchment buckled and twisted in the flames. He poked the fire until the manuscript of Flavius Josephus had been completely rendered to ashes, then looked me straight in the eye. I had never seen him so earnest & so moved. “Come,” he said gently, “let us go and leave this lair of the Fiend as quickly as possible. Everything has been accomplished, we have done our duty.”

We left the Prince’s residence without taking our leave of him & I had the consolation of not having to see again the woman who had taken me so far into the labyrinth of lust.

In the hired carriage that was taking us back to Palermo, Athanasius went into more detail on the adventure of which I had been the willing victim. Our hosts were unmitigated libertines, so confirmed in their vice that they were only aroused by lascivious refinements. The Prince was almost impotent from all the Spanish fly he had taken & the Princess half-crazy since
a miscarriage the previous year had deprived her of the child she had so longed for, which explained her
idée fixe
about the glass harpsichord she believed she had in her womb. She was a willing participant in her husband’s lecherous schemes & knew very well when we were together in the alcove that her husband was spying on us. Although intelligent & cultured, these people were a prime example of the moral chaos resulting from skepticism; deprived of the support of faith, they sank a little deeper into depravity every day without concerning themselves with a future judgment of their actions. God’s pity being infinite, sincere repentance could save them from Gehenna, but that, alas, was very unlikely. The manuscript of Flavius Josephus had been the sole reason for our presence in the Villa Palagonia. A knight of the Order of Malta had had it in his hands during an audience there & had taken it upon himself to tell Kircher about it & had supplied all kinds of useful details about the habits of the Prince & Princess.

My master continued to try & persuade me that I merited the plenary indulgence attached to the holy cause, which my unwitting efforts had supported. He kept repeating that I was, if not a martyr, then at least a hero of the Church; nevertheless, the delight I had felt while I disported myself with the Princess, the unreserved pleasure I had taken in the sin, precluded me from accepting that justification. What is more, my pride was hurt & I suffered less from having left the path of virtue than from having been a mere pawn in the vile schemes of those two libertines. But for Athanasius all this seemed to belong to the past already …

Once back in Palermo, in the studious calm of the Jesuit college, I helped my master file his notes & materials, after which we started to construct, for the Duke of Hesse, a new machine on the principles of the camera obscura, the first model of which I had unwittingly tested out. It was a wooden cube with arms, as on a sedan chair, & enough room for two people
inside. We made an aperture in each of the sides in which a lens was later fitted. In this perfectly dark box we placed a second, smaller cube made of translucent paper fitted to a frame. It was so arranged that this screen was sufficiently far from the lenses to show a clear image of the world outside. An opening at the bottom of the machine allowed one to slip inside the framework & thus observe, by means of the transparent paper, the images of things or people that were outside.

Once the machine had been constructed, we had ourselves carried through the city & its surroundings by four servants. We saw city streets & country landscapes, people, objects, hunting scenes & the most fantastic sights, all reproduced with such
maestria
that no pictorial art could have matched their perfection. Everything appeared on the sides of our little compartment, flights of birds, gestures, looks, teeth moving, even words themselves, & in a way that was so vivid & natural that I cannot remember having seen anything so wonderful in all my life.

Duke Frederick of Hesse, who became acquainted with this portable chamber a few days later, was full of enthusiasm. Paying out of his own pocket, he asked us to construct a much larger one so that he could take his friends in it. Kircher set to work &, with the help of several craftsmen, had the new model ready for February 1, 1638. It was in the form of a galleon on carriage wheels & looked as imposing as a real ship. Magnificently decorated with stucco nereids covered in gold leaf, it contained inside all the comforts of a luxurious drawing room. Numerous lenses placed in the portholes created a magical spectacle on the white silk walls. Pulled by twelve piebald geldings, this magnificent vessel, the fruit of my master’s art & ingeniousness, traveled up & down the avenues of Palermo for days on end without the Duke and those who intrigued to have the honor of accompanying him tiring of this marvel.
Believing it to be a new style of procession, the citizens followed these outings with cries of delight. The favor Kircher enjoyed knew no bounds.