Where Tigers Are at Home (78 page)

“I’ll make sure they talk, if that’s what you want,” Alfredo said in macho tones.

‘Please stop talking nonsense. You don’t happen to know a state prosecutor or a judge we can trust, I mean someone who isn’t in his pocket? That would make things easier.”

“There is Waldemar de Oliviera,” Eléazard said. “A young prosecutor in Santa Inês. I’ve interviewed him two or three times about cases, he’s an upright guy, he has a reputation of being incorruptible. But it doesn’t really fall within his remit …”

“He’ll do, at least to start the ball rolling. Now this is what I suggest …”

ONCE ALFREDO HAD
left the hotel to inform his Maoist pals in the Communist Party, Eléazard and Loredana went back to Eléazard’s house. There they spent a few hours compiling several reports designed to reveal what had been going on; in them they exposed, with much supporting detail, Moreira’s speculation, divulged the series of events that had led to the murder of the Carneiro family and accused Wagner Cascudo by name of sheltering the perpetrators in his country cottage. The journalists were going to have a field day.

“What’s wrong with you?” Eléazard asked when they’d finished correcting the final version of the letter to the lawyer on the computer.

“Nothing, I’m just tired,” Loredana replied, pouring herself a glass of
cachaça
. “Black thoughts, it happens sometimes … You don’t get fed up of living in this country, do you?”

“Not really, no. I like the people here. With them, everything’s possible. They’re not carrying a lot of baggage, as they do in Europe. What have they got behind them, four, five hundred years of history? You’re going to find this very naive, but seeing them, I’m always reminded of Stefan Zweig’s little book:
Brazil: Land of the Future …
You’ve read it?”

“Yes, it’s not bad. Though having said that, I find it odd that a guy could write that of a country where he’d decided to commit suicide.”

“Actually, he died because of Europe, not because of Brazil. A bit like Walter Benjamin. They’re both men whose horror of fascism drove them to the breaking point. The people of their own countries sent them into depths of despair we can hardly imagine.”

“Where have you gotten with Kircher?”

“I’ve almost finished. The first draft, of course. But it’s getting difficult—things that can’t be verified, others for which I haven’t
got sufficient material. The worst is that I’m starting to wonder what the point of all this work is …”

Reflectively he chewed away at the inside of his cheek.

“Stop that,” Loredana said, imitating him. “I’m sorry, but it’s irritating. What work, yours or Schott’s biography?”

“Both,” Eléazard replied, disturbed by her comment and by the effort he had to make to prevent himself from starting to chew his cheek again. “It’s a lot more complicated than I thought. How can you annotate a biography—above all, one that is so lacking in objectivity as Schott’s—without establishing another biography? If I want to piece together the real nature of the relationship between Peiresc and Kircher, for example, I can’t restrict myself to one or two comments taken from the correspondence of the former with Gassendi or Cassiano dal Pozzo. There’s no a priori reason to trust him rather than Schott or Kircher himself. To take it any farther I need to know the most minor features of their relationship, which means studying Peiresc’s biography as scrupulously as Kircher’s, then Gassendi’s, then Cassanio’s, et cetera, et cetera. There’s no end to it!”

“In the
Chuang-tzu
there’s a little story that puts what you’re saying in a nutshell: an emperor asks to have a very precise map of China drawn. All his cartographers take up their brushes apart from one, who sits quietly in his studio. Two months later, when he’s asked for the fruits of his labor, he just points to the view out of his window: his map is so precise because it’s on the scale of one to one, it’s China itself.”

“Borges mentions that too,” Eléazard said with a smile. “It’s a nice paradox, but what does it say? That there’s no point in doing anything? That you can’t write a biography of Kircher without being Kircher and all the others as well?”

“For me it’s clear,” Loredana said. “If it’s the truth that’s at stake, then that’s the price of precision. But a map, a biography
or notes on a biography,
perché no
, the real question is: what is its purpose? If it’s a map—to go where? To invade which province? If it’s your notes—to prove what? That Kircher was an incompetent, a genius, or simply that you know a lot more about the subject than most of us? As you well know, it’s not the erudition that counts, it’s what it aims to show. A simple note a few lines long can hit the mark better than eight hundred pages devoted to the same individual.”

“Effectiveness as always, eh? You really are astonishing. I must admit I was very impressed just now: ‘we’ll do this, we’ll do that.’ Did you see the expression on Alfredo’s face? It could have been Eva Perón he was listening to!”

“People aren’t as stupid as you like to believe. Alfredo’s bright enough to be taken in, but he’s a more complicated person than he seems. The day you realize that, you’ll perhaps have fewer problems with Kircher … All right, I have to go back. I’m exhausted. You too, it would be a good idea if you went to bed early if you want to be in form tomorrow morning. You’ve got to go to Santa Inês, don’t forget …”

“You’re sure you don’t want to stay?”

Gently but firmly Loredana took Eléazard’s hand off her shoulder. “Absolutely sure,
caro
. As I said, I’m not feeling well.”

“Another of your Chinese stratagems, I suppose?” Eléazard said with a sad smile. “What number is that one?”

“Stop that, will you? You’re wrong—about me, about Kircher, about almost everything. A strategy is what’s left when morality’s no longer possible. And morality’s no longer possible when absolute values are missing. If you believe in a god or something like that, it makes everything so much easier.”

“You don’t think it’s enough to believe in man?”

“As an absolute value?! Every man has his own definition of Humanity, and with a capital H, if you please. In life, if you insist,
in the totality of living things, but not in man, not in the one being capable of killing just for fun.”

“Also the one with awareness? At least as far as we know … What do you think of reason?”

“Awareness of what? Of himself, of his complete freedom, of the relative nature of good and evil? There’s not a single concept that can stand up to the fact that we have to die, and if there’s nothing after that, as we’ve come to believe, then everything’s allowed. Reason doesn’t produce any kind of hope, it’s hardly even able to give a name to our despair.”

“You’re taking a pessimistic view of things. I’m certain that—”

“I can’t go on,” Loredana broke in. “Another time, OK?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll see you back.”

On the way to the hotel Loredana stopped for a moment to watch the mist of fireflies lighting up the rectangles of a façade open to the night.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s as if someone’s lit candles for a celebration.”

ONCE IN HER
room, Loredana stretched out on the double bed, which hadn’t been made yet. Her hope of getting some sleep vanished almost immediately. She thought back to the ruins of Apollonia and to the magnificent moment when she had wanted to die, even though she had felt better than she did now. She had travelled to Cyrenaica with the avowed intent of going back to her earliest childhood for one last time. The Libyans who used to work with her father had aged, true, but less than her, to all appearances, for she had recognized them immediately while they had some difficulty putting the name of a boisterous little girl to this woman with the awkwardness of an adult. On the heights, Casa Parisi had now disappeared behind the eucalyptus trees, the
same ones with which she used to amuse herself by pulling their trunks down so she could see them shake themselves in the sun when she let go. The modern town of Shahhat had deteriorated, as if it were in a hurry to match the ruins, to follow the dark voices of Cyrene and of the ancient necropolis on which it was founded. This tendency toward the vestigial was particularly noticeable in Marsa Susa, of which the Italian quarter, already dilapidated in her memory, seemed to have suffered a veritable bombardment. The customs building, the harbormaster’s office, the Hotel Italia, the cafés and restaurants with their shady terraces … all of that had vanished, or almost: inside the shells of the buildings—occasionally identified by a flaking syllable on the façade—herds of goats were capering, rummaging through the rubbish. There were wrecked cars or trucks everywhere, already half-buried in sand, apparently determined to become part of a dubious posterity. On the shore, all around the port, scraps of plastic bags were stuck to the ribcages of boats, standing, faded, on the shore like humpback whales in a museum. High up in its last dry dock a tug, perforated by rust, dominated the wharf. Young Arabs were enjoying themselves diving from the superstructure of a landing craft and three huge barges shipwrecked in the docks. Compared with this junkyard, the archaeological site of Apollonia seemed a model of town planning, of cleanliness: visible beyond the cemetery gate that closed off the port, just below the beacon, the shafts of Byzantine columns proclaimed a sort of Garden of Eden where she hastily took refuge. Although he had spent most of his time in Cyrene, at the works on the agora, it was in this haven of peace that she had her most pleasurable and moving memories of her father. The family came here every Friday, by the old road that snaked down between the sarcophaguses and tombs, now just loose stones in the thickets, to wind for a short while across the panther skin of Jebel Akhdar before suddenly plunging
down, right at the bottom, toward the promise of the sea. In her mind’s eye she could see herself running over the beach with the smell of fresh bread in her nostrils, the joy of being alive that emanated from the sand and the sun, and which the call of the muezzin sometimes made swell to the very limit of what was bearable. In her clinging, white-satin bathing suit, suntanned like a movie star, her mother was reading under a hat shaped like a lampshade, and she just had to lift her head to see her father, sitting on the half-buried capital of a column or squatting down to clear out one of those mysterious foundations that would appear, as if by magic, under his trowel. Professor Goodchild would come over to say hello. He’d show his Italian colleague the progress made in his own excavation and always ended up inviting him to have a glass of bourbon in the old redoubt where the American archaeological team was based.

Nothing had really changed, except that her father wasn’t there anymore, nor Goodchild, nor the others, and that profoundly modified her view of things. Only the ruins had remained faithful to the child she had been, with that unfailing faithfulness shown by dogs and tombs.

She had waited for Friday before revisiting the site, waited with the same impatience, the same painful desire that had taken hold of her in her childhood when they’d been loading her mask and her flippers in the back of the jeep. The track of the narrow-gauge railway could still be seen, here and there, between the red earth of the molehills. Seen from a distance with their regular lines of columns, the three basilicas had made those “poky little holes” appear over the horizon, those poky little holes that had made Professor Goodchild frown:

“Poky little holes! My basilica’s poky little holes! Well, really.
You good-for-nothing child, I’ll tell Miss Reynolds when she comes, you know, and what will you do then?
”

The one memory alone had made all the rigors of the journey worthwhile.

When she came to the old theater at the far end of the site, she sat down for a moment on the top tier, at the very same place her father preferred. Down below, just beyond the stage, the sea was so calm, so transparent that one could clearly make out the geometrical shapes of the submerged ruins. To the right of the stalls, a bushy palm tree had found room to grow between the blocks of stone. Quite close to her, on the dazzling limestone, a tiny chameleon was regarding her with magnificent disdain. Looking at it, she had told herself there would never be a more fitting occasion: now, on the point of noon, it was time to bow out, to cut her wrists and wait quietly until she resembled that little animal that seemed to concentrate the whole of the sun’s heat in itself.

She would die far from her home town, far from Rome, so pleasant in the spring when sudden warmth finally releases your drowsy body. When you stop hearing the din of the vehicles going around the Coliseum and the ill-tempered whistles of the carabinieri. With every step a bud is revealed, then another, and another. Young street vendors get drunk on their broken voices. The alleys resound with the amazement of sparrows. On Piazza Navona the water beneath the Nile is singing …

Yes, she had thought, as she made one of the most beautiful sentences ever written her own, that was what she wanted,
to die slowly and attentively, in the same way as a baby sucks at its mother’s breast
.

Then a flight of pink flamingos had crossed the sky above some islands, a truly pink cluster of those large, gangling birds. The splendor had been like an electric shock to her. Something had been scrawled on the horizon ordering her to wait longer, to watch these performances life had in store for her to the very end.

Instead of cutting her wrists, she had gone down to the center of the stage and, facing the terracing, had declaimed the only poem she knew by heart:

Loredana opened her eyes and looked at her watch: more than five hours till daybreak. She felt guilty about Eléazard. The thought of having to explain herself had made her withdraw at the last moment, but she’d been close to telling him she was going to take the first flight to Rome. She wondered what memories he would have of her brief intrusion in his life. Four years ago she would have tried to make a go of it with him. He was reassuring, solid, even in his way of questioning things …