Where Tigers Are at Home (43 page)

“The headless mule?” Nelson asked, turning to the old woman.

“What?! You’ve never heard of it? Well, when a girl does it before she’s married, or a married woman sleeps with her father, she turns into a headless mule. She appears on Friday nights and starts wandering around the
mata
. Whenever she meets a living person, she swallows their eyes, nails and all their teeth; sick or dead people she tears apart and scatters the bits along the way. But the result’s the same, no one can escape her.”

“But how can she do that when she hasn’t got a head?” Nelson asked, visibly alarmed.

“No one knows, and that’s the most frightening thing. But never go past a cross at midnight, you’ll make her come right away. And if you should meet her one day—God protect you from that misfortune—roll up in a ball, close your eyes and mouth, hide your nails between your thighs and she’ll leave you in peace.”

“Don’t listen to that nonsense, son,” Uncle Zé said wearily. “She’s old, she doesn’t know what she’s saying anymore.”

“Oh really,” Firmina objected vehemently. “Because Conceição doesn’t sleep with her father, perhaps? Everyone here knows that. It’s difficult not to since he tells everyone who’s willing to listen whenever he’s had one too many.”

“That may be true, but it doesn’t prove anything.”

“And that doesn’t prove anything, all those poor people crushed to a pulp? You’ll see, some of them’ll be found without eyes, without nails and without teeth; and we’ll know they were alive when the headless mule came to take them.”

In the face of his sister’s senile obduracy, Zé gave up, emptied his glass of
cachaça
and spat on the ground. That way of talking just didn’t make sense, but how could you make her see reason?
The old woman always had an answer to everything, he couldn’t see any way of convincing her she was wrong.

“It’s like the
sacaolhos
,” Nelson said, reflectively. “They come to the favelas, even in broad daylight, and tear out children’s eyes.”

“God forbid!” said
Dona
Firmina, crossing herself. “The things there are!”

“What’s all this now?” Uncle Zé muttered.

“It’s true. One day in Pirambú I saw a little girl with empty eyes and her mother, a Peruvian, told me that’s who it was. They’s
gringos
, always three of them together, two men and a blonde woman, with white coats, like doctors. They drive slowly into the middle of the favelas, in a Nissan Patrol with tinted windows, and when they see children alone, they offer to buy them a lemonade or a
guaraná
, then they take them to a quiet place and remove their eyes or the fat from their bodies, sometimes both …”

“The fat?” Uncle Zé asked in disgust, his skepticism suddenly shaken. “But whatever for?”

“Beauty products for the Americans and their friends. The oil from
caboclos
is very good for white people’s skin, it makes it look younger, smoother, you see. But it’s also used to grease precision instruments and to protect the space shuttle from cosmic rays. NASA need tons of it, it costs more than gold. So our government lets them get on with it, to pay off their foreign debt. It’s like that all over Latin America. Before they didn’t used to take the skinny ones, but now they’re less choosy.”

“And the eyes?”

“The eyes are for transplants. My neighbor’s little girl was lucky, they didn’t take her fat. Otherwise she’d be dead. When they found her, her eyes were bandaged and the orbits stuffed with cotton wool; and she had a fifty dollar note stuck down her underpants.”

“God in heaven!” Firmina said, close to tears. “Fifty dollars for a person’s eyes!”

“I was also told they took hearts or kidneys, and that there were even expensive restaurants in São Paulo where they serve human flesh to policemen and soldiers.”

“It’s the end of the world,” said Uncle Zé gloomily. “I can’t believe it. If that’s the way things are, then there’s no hope: none at all …”

“Don’t worry, Zé. I watch out for them, for Nissan Patrols, and the day I see one I’ll fucking well send it up in flames, the car and the bastards inside it!”

His lips were twisted in a horrible grimace that persisted for a while after he stopped speaking.
Dona
Firmina crossed herself again to help make it disappear.

BERNINI WAS A
bright, perspicacious & extremely courteous man, despite an inclination to let himself get carried away that his immense talent did not justify but almost always made forgivable. Short & stocky, simply dressed on all occasions, he scarcely spoke at all & was regarded as a hypochondriac by those who did not have the rare honor of being one of his friends. When he did manage to overcome his natural shyness, he spoke freely & with such charming volubility that he enchanted his circle of friends with his imaginative & lively mind. He was attracted by Kircher’s erudition, as Kircher was by the skill he demonstrated in his art. The two men very quickly became friends, which was of great advantage in the development of the plans for the fountain.

After several weeks’ work Kircher showed Bernini & the Pope an initial design, developed from a sketch by Francesco Borromini. Its aim was to represent the four regions of the world through the biggest known rivers, thus subtly recalling the four original rivers of the Garden of Eden. The Ganges, the Danube, the Nile & the Plate were to be personified by four marble colossi, each accompanied by emblematic animals. As for the obelisk at the center of the monument, it would in itself encapsulate all theology & sacred knowledge. Kircher was also proposing to channel the water from Rome’s best spring, the
Acqua Vergine
, to it, thus giving the fountain a natural meaning of purification.

These preparatory sketches aroused fierce discussion & my master had to defend every one of his ideas, point by point. But the design was accepted without amendment & Bernini immediately set about conceiving a composition worthy of the marble & chisel. That left, however, several physical problems: the restoration of the obelisk, its transport to the Circus Agonalis, its erection & the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. The obelisk found in the Circus Maximus was in a very poor state. Abandoned for centuries to the vagaries of the weather, it had suffered serious mutilation. For days we scoured the area around the stone needle looking for missing pieces, but we did not, alas, recover enough to complete the inscription we were working on. Moreover, certain passages that were still in place had been erased by the weather, leaving us with the question of whether to reconstitute the inscription by intelligent guesswork or to accept these ugly blemishes. The former seemed, if not impossible, then at least rather bold to Athanasius.

We therefore sent out an appeal to all the antiquaries of the city to buy back, out of the funds provided by Innocent X, any
inscribed fragments of the obelisk, if they could be found. Kircher recovered a certain number but he encountered several wily collectors who refused to sell them, or even to provide my master with a copy. From an indiscreet remark by Signore Manfredo Settala, I learned that this rebuff did not come from a desire to push up the price, but from the machinations of those who, doubting my master’s abilities, were challenging him in his efforts to restore the lost hieroglyphs. They hoped to be able to unmask him as an imposter by comparing his figures with those they had kept in their possession.

I informed Kircher & Bernini of this cabal. The sculptor fell into a rage, inveighing against those who had the effrontery to disobey the Pope & weave such malicious plots. Kircher remained thoughtful. “Perhaps,” he said at last, after we had gone on at him about this, “perhaps it would be better to leave the few lacunae in the inscription blank … Not that I am afraid to take up the challenge thrown down by these doctors of doltishness, but there is a great difference between translating a text and restoring it. As in any language, several signs can express the same thing, save for a slight shade of meaning. Just imagine I made a mistake, however minor, & a scandal ensued, tarnishing my name, that of the Church & even the favor our Order enjoys with the Pope.”

In an impassioned outburst Bernini insisted my master should confound his detractors & he did this in such friendly & confident terms that he managed to persuade him. Kircher took a copy of all the legible characters on the obelisk & on the retrieved fragments, then shut himself away in his study. As for Bernini, he fitted the obelisk into a device allowing it to be turned horizontally around its axis and started repairing the breaks. In order to avoid disfiguring it at all, he refused to use any cement or even iron pins &, in stone similar to that of the Egyptian
monument, sculpted replacements so ingeniously that they fitted their respective places precisely.

Invited to assess the result of these efforts, Kircher went into raptures over Bernini’s skill. Never at any time had such perfect work been seen! All that was left was to have the missing hieroglyphs carved, those copied from the fragments in our possession, which it would have been impossible to reinsert into the obelisk without damaging the beauty of the whole, & those, fewer as it happened, that Athanasius had to rewrite. This task was given to the sculptor Marco Antonino Canino & finished in 1645; Kircher’s detractors were routed, for the symbols he had drawn corresponded exactly to the originals they had refused to divulge to him. They were therefore compelled to make a virtue of necessity & agree that my master, guided by the Holy Ghost, had truly uncovered the key to that enigmatic language.

The year 1646 saw the publication of
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae
. This heavy folio tome of 936 pages was dedicated to Athanasius’s patron, Johann Friedrich, Count Wallenstein and Bishop of Prague.

Kircher began by describing the sun as the principal source of light, without avoiding the question of the spots, which could sometimes be observed on it surface, & their unhealthy influence. As proof of that he took the invasion by the Swedish armies in 1625, but also the death of the Ming emperor, that of Louis XIII & various catastrophes, the occurrence of which coincided with an inexplicable multiplication of the maculae.

After that, my master looked at the moon, that second source of light in the world, but which only works as a reflector of the sun. He continued with numerous pages on the heavenly bodies, gave for the first time a picture of the planet Jupiter & the rings of Saturn, & continued with a study of the colors: when pure light passed through a prism of a veil of raindrops, he wrote, it
was contaminated by the contact, thus producing yellow, red and violet, which are degradations of white, which is the color of light, just as black is that of its absence.

In this connection my master wrote at length on the chameleon & its talent for coloring itself to resemble things it is close to. He added a few remarks on octopuses & other marine creatures with a similar ability, then considered a very curious Mexican species of wood sent to him by Father Alejandro Fabiàn. After having had a bowl carved from this
tlapazatli
wood, as Father Fabiàn had suggested, Kircher, in my presence, poured some pure water into it. Soon, & with no obvious reason for this change, the fibers of the wood being clean and clear like cherrywood, the water started gradually to turn blue until it took on a magnificent purple hue. Reduced to a powder, the wood continued to produce the same effect, although losing the capacity little by little in the course of time. Kircher gave the bowl to Emperor Ferdinand III, who regarded it as one of his most precious treasures.

From
tlapazatli
wood, the book went on to the internal structure of the eye & to human vision, emphasizing how everything worked in a similar way to the camera obscura he had tried out in Sicily, to my misfortune. All one needed to do to convince oneself of this, Kircher said, was to take a bull’s eye—or a human eye, should the opportunity present itself—remove the vitreous humor & put it on the box in place of the artificial lens. Everything outside would then appear inside the black box with the precision of a most excellent painting.

Dealing with anamorphosis, he showed how to distort a drawing mathematically so as to make it appear monstrous to the eye, but unexceptional when seen reflected in a cylindrical mirror. Similarly he went through the various means of arranging trees, plants, vines, arbors & gardens so that from one
particular viewpoint they would present the image of a man or a dragon, of which there would be no trace from any other point.

After a chapter in which Athanasius gave exhaustive lists of all the lunar months in the form of a “dragon with lunar knots,” by which one could predict all the eclipses, he presented the picture of a man within a dial, showing the zodiacal relationships connecting each part of the body & each illness to each simple or sympathetic remedy that will cure it.

In conclusion, my master embellished his work with a splendid chapter on the metaphysical symbolism of light, crowning his efforts with a new philosophy & recalling the imperishable truths of our religion.