Where Tigers Are at Home (37 page)

“I must be more drunk than I thought to say things like that,” she admitted with an embarrassed laugh.

“Don’t worry, you’re still less drunk than I am,” the Countess said, taking her hand. “that’s one of the advantages of champagne, it loosens your tongue, or rather, it frees it from the bars imposed on it by convention. I like you, both of you, you’d make a lovely couple.”

Almost completely cloaked in the bougainvillea, the governor’s wife seemed like a pagan idol, a calm and thoughtful prophetess whose words had the force of an oracle. She must have been very beautiful, Loredana thought, scrutinizing the lines of her face.

“If you knew how weary I am, sick and tired of everything,” the Countess suddenly said in a tone of profound helplessness. “I’ve only met you this evening, but these are things one can only admit in the combined intoxication and miracle of a meeting of minds. My husband doesn’t love me anymore, or not enough to stop me from hating him, my son’s far away and I’m getting old”—she gave a smile of self-deprecation—“like a pot in a corner of the dresser.”

Guessed, other people’s distress is almost always moving, even if the emotion only results in purely formal compassion; brazenly expressed, it inevitably provokes irritation. How feeble, Loredana thought, how self-indulgent! What was the bitterness of a grand lady compared with the threat that had been hanging over her for months? Did we have to be irrevocably deprived of our freedom before we could finally see its workings, before we could discover the value of the simple fact of being alive, of still existing?

Disconcerted, she abruptly lit a cigarette in an attempt to prolong the silence rather than continue a conversation she was no longer interested in. However, Carlotta eventually managed to get her to look at her. “Please don’t get me wrong,” she said in friendly tones, “I’m not looking for your pity. If you’d said the least word
along those lines, I’d have left you right away. I’m well aware that we all have to sort out our own problems.”

“What is it you want, then?” Loredana asked, somewhat brusquely.

With a smile on her lips, the Countess gave a long sigh expressing maternal patience and indulgence. “Let’s say some Italian conversation. Would that suit you?” But her look begged, “Frank, open, irreverent conversation. Young conversation, my child.”

KIRCHER RESUMED HIS
studies, only breaking off from them to receive people who brought him curious animal, vegetable or mineral objects, knowing he was making a collection of them. It was thus that he extended his harvest of anamorphic rocks considerably; he was given stones or sections of minerals in which nature herself had depicted many easily recognizable shapes: dogs, cats, horses, rams, owls, storks & snakes; men & women could also be clearly seen in them, sometimes whole towns with all their parts, their particular domes & belfries. Similarly there were certain sections of branches or tree trunks that had emblems, portraits, even scenes illustrating precisely all the fables of Aesop beautifully engraved on them without recourse to art. The most precious find in Kircher’s eyes was without doubt that series of twenty-one flints where one could very distinctly see each of the
letters of the Hebrew alphabet formed by the internal structure of the stone!

“The unique language,” Kircher said, “the memory of the universal language given by God to Adam, with its magnificent descriptive power & the thousand & one arcana of its numerological structure. See what we can find in the most ordinary pebbles of the road, Caspar. In His divine goodness, the Creator had given us the means of finding Him in objects themselves; for nature has certainly drawn for us this symbolic Ariadne’s thread to help us find our way in the labyrinth of the world.”

Thanks to Kircher I came to see how the cosmos had been made on the analogy & in the image of the supreme archetype. From the summit down to the tiniest being everything was in absolute proportion and reciprocal conformity & yet, as Saint Paul testified, things invisible could be perceived by our intellect through material things …

From that day onward I put my heart even more fully into my work & into our search for the emblematic letters that would help us to go back in time to the origin of things.

“Research,” said Kircher, “is collecting. It is to gather together as many of these undeciphered wonders in order to reconstitute the perfection of the initial encyclopedia; it is to reconstruct the Ark with the same concern for completeness & urgency as Noah showed. And I will accomplish this holy task, Caspar. With your aid & God’s.”

My master confided in me more & more, exhibiting a trust in me of which I ever strove to prove myself worthy. I can testify that at that time, at the age of just thirty-six, he had a view of the world that had reached a state of clarity & complexity that he then simply proceeded to develop. Henceforth
omnia in omnibus
, “everything is in everything,” was his motto, meaning
that there was no thing in the world that did not correspond to all the others according to a certain proportion & analogy.

We returned to Rome at the end of the summer of 1638 with no adventures worth mentioning apart from our discovery, as we left Calabria, of the fatal effects of the venom of the tarantula & the detailed study of its alexipharmakon. During the few months of our peregrinations, Kircher had acquired incomparable experience and knowledge. He brought back a phenomenal quantity of unique materials to the Roman College & his sole desire was to get down to studying them. During our journey back he had talked to me of the two books that were going through his mind & described his plans in great detail: a
Mundus subterraneus
, dealing with geology and hydrology, & an
Ars magna lucis et umbrae
, which would eclipse, in the field of optics, Kepler’s
Paralipomena
& even the
Dioptrique
of the previous year, in which Monsieur Descartes made bold to assert so many arrogant & foolish ideas.

But Pope Urban VIII insisted he give priority to applying his genius to Egypt and deciphering the hieroglyphs. Thus Athanasius had to wait several years before being able to write the works in which he uses the results of our explorations.

During our stay in the south, the collections of the late Sieur Peiresc had finally reached Rome. We spent several months organizing them & arranging them on the floor of the Roman College the Father General of the College had put at Kircher’s disposal. Together with everything my master had amassed during our recent voyage, it made a considerable accumulation of all kinds of rarities, especially since the Jesuits in the missions regularly sent him some from the East and West Indies.

Kircher wanted his museum to be the finest & most complete in the world. Not just a more extensive collection of curiosities than those of Paracelsus, Agrippa, Peiresc & others,
but a veritable concrete encyclopedia, a display that would give each visitor the possibility of surveying the whole of human knowledge since the origins. The gallery where it was housed was resplendent with costly marble; Athanasius added some Greek & Roman columns, transforming the place into a portico where one could philosophize while walking up & down in the manner of the Stoics. Several classrooms opening off the sides were used to teach various arts & sciences.

My master had five oval panels painted in fresco on the vaults of the vestibule. The first, which greeted the visitor when he entered the museum, showed a salamander surrounded by flames.

“The salamander is me,” Kircher told me when I asked him about the meaning of the allegory. “It says that I urge visitors to brave the fire of difficult studies …”

I found that entirely appropriate, especially since I had seen my master so at ease in the blazing infernos of Etna and Vesuvius.

The whole of 1639 was spent opening crates & setting the contents out in the embellished gallery. A ship had arrived from China, its hold packed with treasures sent to Kircher by Father Giovanni Filippo de Mariani, a missionary to Japan & China. Rhinoceros horns, ceremonial regalia embroidered in gold, belts adorned with rubies, samples of paper, statues of idols, saints, mandarins, inhabitants of those countries; flowers, birds and trees painted on silk, various drugs unknown to our doctors, especially the one called “Lac Tigridis,” various books, manuscripts, grammars, etc.; all these riches poured into the Roman College, increasing the wealth of the museum. As well as that, there were numerous letters sent to Athanasius by his distant & faithful correspondents.

In particular Manuel Diaz, Deputy Provincial of the Order in China, mentioned the recent discovery of a stele, which was
going to prove of major importance. On this stone, dug up by chance in 1623 in the course of excavations outside the city of Sian Fu, there was a text written in two languages, Syrian and Chinese. According to Diaz, it was an inscription carved in the year 781 after the death of Our Lord that proved that Nestorians had established themselves in China by that date. Kircher was extremely excited by the discovery that Christians, if only Syrians, had been present at such an early date at the heart of the Chinese Empire. He did not think it necessary to explain why this fact seemed so crucial to him but I did not for one second doubt that this simple letter had helped him take another step in the establishment of a doctrine that he was elaborating day by day.

Beside this letter from Manuel Diaz, our correspondence also included missives from Johann Adam Schall von Bell, the official in charge of introducing a calendar at the court of Emperor Ch’ung-chen, from the painter Johann Grueber, from Michal Piotr Boym & other equally famous missionaries, all of which were packed with marvelous information about that country. They were full of things such as magic or metamorphic mountains that could change or even move to another place, of sea dragons & extremely rare animals, of idols possessed by an evil spirit, of monuments & impassable walls. The missionaries also emphasized the power & antiquity of the Chinese Empire. They seemed fascinated by a people so different from ours & yet so advanced in numerous fields while still immersed in the most odious idolatry. The Jesuit who had accompanied the cargo on the boat had managed to keep an ‘
ananas
’ plant alive by giving it his own ration of water; Kircher pronounced the fruit absolutely delicious. The flesh beneath the skin is a little fibrous, but it dissolves entirely into juice in the mouth. Also its taste is so pronounced & so distinctive that those who tried to describe it precisely, finding it impossible to do so without having recourse
to comparison, cited everything that was most exquisite about the aubergine, the apricot, the strawberry, the raspberry, the muscat grape & the orange pippin, & having said that, they were forced to admit that in addition it has a certain taste that could not be expressed & that is restricted to it alone.

All that, combined with the perpetual persecution to which the Jesuit missionaries were subjected in their work of propagating the faith, convinced my master that he should go & join them. At the beginning of 1640 he asked the Father General to authorize him to leave for the East to devote himself to the conversion of the Chinese. I was as excited as Athanasius at the idea of devoting my life to God & to the Church, but Providence decided otherwise: Kircher’s request was refused on the express order of the Pope, who did not want to lose such an estimable man at any price. Despite what he admitted to me was a great disappointment, Athanasius submitted to the orders of his superiors with good grace while showing even greater interest than ever in everything he could learn about these distant countries.

At the age of thirty-eight my master seemed at the pinnacle of his powers. He was working on several books at once, mixing all subjects, throwing light on all the disciplines of human knowledge without, for all that, giving up his teaching of mathematics & oriental languages, or forgetting the practical application of his discoveries. Professor, astronomer, physician, geologist & geographer, specialist in languages, archaeologist, Egyptologist, theologian, etc., he was the man all the great minds of his age wanted to talk to & none came to Rome without asking for an audience with him.