Where Tigers Are at Home (83 page)

“Just think, Caspar,” he would cry, “our most eminent priests, men who are the glory of religion & the most difficult sciences, these men bear without shrinking the many torments inflicted on them by the fiendish ignorance of the pagans, they go with a smile on their faces to the most horrible martyrdom, resolved to die for the faith & the future of the world, & what is their reward?! The oblivion they suffer would itself be profoundly
unjust, but to add vilification to that, & calumny! How can we not be outraged when we hear Jansenists, Dominicans & even some Franciscans, who know nothing of the rites & customs of the Chinese, accuse the members of our Society of propagating idolatry & take it upon themselves, from the depths of their comfortable ignorance, to berate the true apostles of the faith?! If religion has been given to men in order to save them, then it must be made hospitable … Have these Arnaulds, these Pascals & other cheap imitation Catos ever saved one single soul from the claws of Lucifer? They have not, for they are like importunate flies that settle on any rich food, attempting to tarnish the luster of the most perfect & the most genuine things & constantly blackening that which is very pure & very beautiful with their insolent chatter & the blackest of malicious gossip! How long must we continue to suffer the despicable arrogance of these nonentities?!”

Then he would calm down, suddenly overcome with the memory of his friend again, & would reread, a frown on his face, the tragic account of Father Verbiest.

Informed of what had happened in the Peking mission, Father Paul Oliva, the eleventh Superior General of our Society, immediately appointed Father Verbiest to replace the late lamented Adam Schall. As we shall later see, he never had cause to regret that important decision.

A few days, dark days to tell the truth, passed without my master appearing to get over these misfortunes. He seemed to have lost interest in our work in progress and immersed himself in prayer & meditation. I was beginning to fear seriously for his health, when he appeared one morning with a smile on his lips, as if he had been fully restored.

“The Lord be praised!” I exclaimed, clasping my hands, full of joy to find him thus disposed.
“Indeed, for without Him we are nothing & we must certainly see His will in the sudden light that has illuminated my mind.”

But as he was about to confide the nature of this revelation to me, the surprise visit of the young King Charles of Spain was announced. He was scarcely five years old & accompanied by his mother, Maria Anna of Austria, the widow of Philip IV who was governing the Empire until her illustrious son came of age. Although we knew that they were in Rome to present the royal child to the Supreme Pontiff, we were far from imagining he would visit us. But my master was not especially surprised, as the reputation of his museum was such that it attracted even crowned heads.

They appeared accompanied by several richly appareled duennas, the Jesuit Father Nithard, recently appointed (thanks to the favor of the Queen Mother) Inquisitor General & Prime Minister, & his nephew, Don Luis Camacho. The latter was only thirteen, but had a precociously lively mind and was justly the pride of his uncle.

Kircher was quite right about the reason for their visit & with him as guide the whole party spent a long time going around the galleries of the museum. The young king amused himself in a very devil-may-care manner with the skeletons, mummies and stuffed animals, grabbing everything within reach with a fidgety clumsiness without anyone in his entourage thinking to remonstrate with him & almost ruined several invaluable exhibits. My master was seething inside & he was very grateful to Don Luis Camacho for gently pulling the little brat away every time he was about to do irreparable damage.

A little later, when we were gathered in the great gallery for an improvised collation, the Inquisitor General asked Kircher for details of the recents misfortunes suffered by our missions
in China. My master gave him Father Verbiest’s letter to read & the conversation quickly came round to idolatry, then to the points of doctrine criticized by the Chinese.

“Very good,” said Father Nithard, “but may I ask you another favor? My nephew here hardly ever has the opportunity to assess his knowledge by comparison with an intelligence such as yours & I would be happy to see him face up to you on this question. Whatever the result, it will be a lesson in humility & very profitable for him & I do not doubt that he will learn much from it.”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Father. I have observed him just now & have formed a high opinion of his abilities. Having said that,” he went on, turning to young Don Luis, “allow me to treat you as Socrates did Phaedo & deliver you of a truth you possessed without being aware of it. This, I assure you, is not a simple whim on my part, but an example of something that has gladdened my heart ever since God saw fit to give me the gift.”

The boy, who had listened attentively to the discussion between the grown-ups, willingly agreed & in the ensuing dialogue made every effort to meet my master’s expectations.

When Moéma woke in the stifling gloom of the shack, the strangeness of the surroundings prolonged the stupefied state she was trying to shake off. Beyond the blurred foliage of her eyelashes she could see large red letters on the boxes making the roof—THIS END UP!—and the broken glass that indicated, without having to resort to language, the extreme fragility of contents deprived of protection. A body, her own body, was wearing a soccer uniform,
a jersey and shorts in the colors of the Brazilian team. Leaning over her, a kind of angel was wiping her forehead with a sponge, a young man with a somber face, with big, sad eyes, a sparse, downy beard, one of those Neapolitan
ragazzi
you can see in the encaustic paintings of the Faiyum Roman mummy portraits. She closed her eyes. Stay like that, don’t say anything, continue to play dead to avoid being hit … The angel was speaking incessantly, in a low voice, a whole rosary of phrases tracing the erratic swirl of the dust. The word “princess” kept recurring in an obsessive way, full of consoling warmth. Moéma remembered having followed this same melody, drawn like a lost ship by the distant promise of calm water. Before that there had been the acid, at Andreas’s place, then that dance where she’d felt so miserable, the rat, the twisting alleys of the favela … A lacework of memories in which she retained the feeling of an intense and thus far unknown ordeal. Of all these incidents, separated by obscure rents, a single one came back to mind with unbearable contours: the one where a white heron had broken the rampart of light that protected her from the world. She saw the features of each one of the bastards who had raped her, heard each one of their insults, suffered one by one each brutal act they had inflicted on her while laughing at her pleas. The effects of the LSD hadn’t worn off yet and its almost undetectable persistence only increased the sensation whenever her mind nosedived into the horrors of the previous night. Her tears returned. Head in her hands, she tried to make herself as small as possible, to gather together at whatever cost the scattered pieces of the thing inside her that had been crushed by the pack of wolves.

She slept again.

Later in the day she found herself alone and took advantage of that to pee in one corner of the hut. Lying on her side, she spent a long time watching an oval of light projected onto the sand
through a hole in the roof. Clouds slowly passed across it. She felt terrorized by the “world outside,” out there, immediately beyond the shelter of planks and cardboard boxes. Then she studied the black-and-white magazine photos covering the clay and straw walls by her head: pictures of Lampião for the most part, plus some of a person whose eyes had been scratched out with the point of a knife. Underneath the portrait of a smiling American girl sitting on a four-poster bed with a drill on her lap—the child was surrounded by a heap of scrap iron at the top of which was a celluloid baby doll, riddled with holes like a sieve—it said:

The outside seemed to bounce off her pupils. Her sense of humiliation even extended to her relation to things, she felt impure, dirty, a fly on the surface of the milk. She wished she could be anesthetized for the coming days, which she felt it would be impossible to live through, could wake up a year, two years later—was it something you recovered from anyway?—relieved of this hatred of men that was paralyzing her thighs, of this loathing in which Aynoré, Roetgen and all the rest fused into the object of the same abhorrence.

The angel returned and this time she saw the deformity that forced him to drag himself along the ground when he moved.
“His giant’s wings prevent him from walking,” she thought without emotion as if such a metaphor—which Thaïs insisted was taken from
Jonathan Livingston Seagull—
were patently obvious. The cherub’s lips were still fixed in a touching smile, exaggerating the sense of blissful wonder to such an extent that he looked like a character from a silent film. She allowed him to smear Mercurochrome on her visible cuts. It made the scratches sting a little, but following his movements she could see that she had no serious wounds. After that she bit into the sandwich he offered her, drank out of a bottle of mineral water he unscrewed clumsily and studied his callused hands as he made the motions of rubbing his shoulders and chest with a tube of ointment.

Lying on her back, she listened to him. His voice drew an endless tracery behind her eyes, musical calligraphy that she just had to follow to think of nothing.

THEN THE ANGEL
wasn’t there anymore. An angel’s privilege, she was beginning to get used to it. He’d left some new clothes beside her, a T-shirt with an ad for a Swiss brand of crème fraîche across the front, a beige pair of shorts, still folded inside their transparent packing. There was also a beautiful bar of red and gold soap on a new towel.

Have a shower, scour her body from head to toe, disinfect it like a lavatory bowl … Without hesitation she slipped into the little cubicle, open to the sky, behind a sheet of semitransparent plastic against the wall at the far end of the shack. Three pallets stuck in the sand, a rusty barrel, a tin can. Used to the discomforts of Canoa, she took off her clothes and squatted down in the barrel.

Her manic cleaning of her body only ended when the cramp became too painful.

Back in the room, she put on the clothes left by her guardian angel, though not before having rubbed arnica over herself as he had suggested. There was a little mirror with a pale-green plastic frame on a box and she automatically picked it up. Despite her puffy eyelids and a little bruise under her lower lip, her face had not suffered, her hair was sticking up all over the place … Holding the mirror at arm’s length, she tried to assess her general appearance.

She gasped. Reflected back-to-front in the mirror, the T-shirt had a message that was clearly aimed at her: Athanasius … What was the name of that guy her father used to keep telling her about at one time: Karcher? Kitchener? A rather nice priest whom she used to imagine looking like Fernandel playing Don Camillo. The cat organ, the magic lantern, all the marvelous toys he’d invented for her, night after night, shone once more in the glittery colors of childhood. In her imagination he had been as alive, as exceptionally alive as Baron Munchhausen, Robinson Crusoe or Captain Nemo. Despite the only approximate spelling of the reflection, Moéma found the coincidence disturbing out of all proportion. Magnified by this fortuity, even the brand name,
Gloria
, took on the appearance of a hieroglyph awaiting translation.

She remembered, doubtless by analogy, the anecdote her father would relate whenever the conversation turned, as it often does
after a drink, to omens. One day, as he was about to board the steamship
Général Lamauricière
, a writer whose name she had forgotten had sensed a supernatural warning: instead of
Lamauricière
he had read, in a brief moment of extreme anguish and clairvoyance:
La mort ici erre
. Shaken to read that “death is wandering here” he had resolved to wait for the next ship. One week later the news came that the
Général Lamauricière
had indeed sunk during the crossing. After having given his audience time to enjoy the punch line, her father would generally add that Samuel Beckett had found himself faced with a similar scenario: “Captain Godot is delighted to welcome you on board,” the loudspeakers had said as the plane was already turning onto the runway to take off. Seized with panic, Beckett had fallen into a real fit of hysterics and had kicked up such a fuss he had forced the crew to turn back and let him get off what could only become his coffin. This time, by contrast, there was no tragedy. Which only proved, according to Beckett—we sometimes have such a strong impression that we have seen through the secret workings of fate, such an urgent need to authenticate our foreboding—not that his fear was groundless but that in getting off the plane he had thwarted a fatal plan and saved the lives of the other passengers at the last minute.

If the inscription in the mirror was a similar phenomenon, of what was it warning her, of what imminent shipwreck? Moéma was lying down again. With a sense of unease, she felt herself being dragged down into obscure depths where the enigma concealed in her T-shirt flickered. Nebulas exploded inside her brain and at the conclusion of a slow dissolve, Eléazard’s face revealed the message she was desperately trying to decipher: it was a cry, an appeal that grabbed her by the throat, making breathing difficult. After her parents’ break-up, she had first of all sided with Elaine, without for one moment concerning herself with what her father might feel. She hadn’t tried to help him, nor even to understand
him.
You have your own life to live, Moéma
, her mother had said when she refused to take her to Brazilia with her,
cut the cord. It’s not healthy to stay tied to my apron strings. We’ll become real friends, you’ll see, grown-up friends. But you have to do the same as me, liberate yourself, make a life of your own …
The problem was—and it was the first time Moéma had formulated it—that she didn’t feel grown-up at all, that she wanted a father and a mother, not “friends”! Suddenly the fact that Elaine could tell her something so absurd seemed monstrously selfish. Everything became suspect, including her insistence on being called by her Christian name, as if she were ashamed of being her mother … Looked at from this point of view she wasn’t free of blame herself, since she had betrayed her father’s love—a love that neither her whims nor her ingratitude had done anything to lessen!—with at least equal lack of consideration. But perhaps it was time to put things right, to tell him now what he should have been told six months ago. She would go and stay with him in Alcântara, he would be able to put her back on the rails, untangle the mess her life had become. Pity about this year at university, but it was down the drain anyway. She must write to him as soon as possible, tell him about the turnaround that had just taken place. In her distraught state, she thought she had found the solution and held on to it like a life preserver.
Dear Papa, if you agree, I’ll come back and live with you. It’s hard to write to your father without having something to ask from him, but I’ll explain everything soon … This time I’m just begging you to forgive me. With love and kisses
,