Where Tigers Are at Home (90 page)

Despite his experience as a shaman and his stock of magic darts, he felt as terrified as he had as a youth, He felt he had no courage, no courage at all …

IT WAS IN
a soft but strained voice that Mauro told them the news: they had buried Dietlev … For a brief moment Elaine looked as if she were truly going mad, her eyes went wild, trying to cling on to objects.

“What … what have they done?” she managed to say, her throat tight with emotion.

Mauro took her in his arms. He was close to tears himself, the memory of the burial still weighing heavy on him. The fetal position of the body, crouching in the pit like an animal in its cage, the branch put through his armpits so as to bring up his hands on either side of his face, the mats, the black earth on top of them and the circle of spears, so small, so slim they looked like a trap for some terrible prey … The Indians had done it very quickly, touching the body as little as possible because of the stench and the decomposition. “It’s over, Elaine, it’s all over,” he said, rocking to and fro himself as he cradled her.

That night she came to his hammock and they made love, to comfort each other, panic-stricken at the proximity of death. Petersen was having a bad dream, they heard him groaning beside them several times.

ON THE EVENING
of the third day, the shaman reappeared on the side of the mountain. He came down the slope, his arms full of stones, as the whole tribe looked on, stupefied. As soon as he reached the camp he headed straight for the little group of Palefaces and put his unusual burden down in front of them. With an imperious gesture, he invited them to examine the strange nodules from the womb of the mother of all mountains. Among the various fossil birds and fish, Elaine immediately recognized the samples Dietlev had taken. She picked up a flatter fragment and immediately fell on her knees with an exclamation of surprise;
before her was an assortment of the things they had come to look for in the Mato Grosso: complete and perfectly preserved specimens of a fossil earlier than
Corumbella
!

“This is it, all right,” she said, her face radiant with happiness, “even with the peduncle, but a lot more secondary polyps. The chitin is different, coarser … And look at the structure of the sclerenchymas. We must learn their language and get out of here, Mauro! You realize what we’ve found?”

Already she was thinking about naming the object she held in her hand, running her fingers over the imprint. This fossil would be a stele to the memory of Dietlev. Tomorrow they’d go and have a look at the top of the mountain, there was a good chance they’d find other new species. Paleontology was going to take a leap of several thousand years back toward the beginnings of life!

“So this’s the thing that’s worth so much?” Petersen muttered, his attention suddenly gripped by this turn of events. There must be some way, he thought, of hoodwinking the Indians into carrying as many of these bits of stone as possible through the forest …

Satisfied with their reaction, Raypoty sketched something resembling a smile. He had interpreted the signs correctly, the god’s companion was satisfied. Qüyririche had appeared to him while he was handling the sacred stones on the mountain, identical to the ones one could see of the
aracanóa
bequeathed by his ancestors. The ball of fire had appeared as well, as it had in his childhood, and the Messenger had spoken distinctly inside his head:
Maëperese-kar?
What are you looking for?
Marapereico?
What are you asking?
Ageroure omano toupan?
I am asking: How is it that god can be dead? When will we too fly as high as the urubu? What must be said to the jaguar to stop him pissing on the forest? And Qüyririche had answered each of his questions clearly. The invisible armadillo would never come back. All was in order among the things, each object, each being in its respective place. That night
they would fly off to the Land-with-no-evil, would finally reach that dark junction where the universe fitted together, closed on itself like the shell of an armadillo. Qüyririche had gone on ahead to prepare their mat under the great canopy of the sky. He was waiting for them. His life as a shaman would not have been in vain; his people were finally going to leave the circle of suffering and solitude in which history had enclosed them. He had invoked the god correctly, forced him to speak to him. That evening the people of the Apapoçuva would go back to the very beginning, to that moment when all things were equal because all were equally possible, and it would be, oh god!, as if we had never chosen to be what we were …

“
Etegosi xalta
,” he said, turning to Elaine, “
fuera terrominia tramad mipisom!
”

Mauro raised his eyebrows as he recognized the shaman’s ecclesiastical intonation. After a moment’s reflection to separate the syllables and put them together again in their correct order, he translated, “
And I, when I am raised up from the earth, will take unto myself the whole of the world—
but I’ve no idea where he got that from!”

“It’s crazy,” Elaine said as she watched the shaman walking away. “I can’t get over it. Here we are in the back of beyond with guys naked as nature intended, who’ve never seen any whites, and they speak Latin and give us the fossils we’ve come to find. It’s enough to give you a fit of the giggles!”

“It’s not really the moment for it,” said Mauro, trying to control his own mirth. Even Petersen, full of his dreams of wealth, was smiling.

The shaman came back to see them, accompanied by a few Indians this time. His frightening appearance, the black snot spattering his chest, both suggested he had just taken another dose of
epena
. Without hesitation he placed the ends of the pipes through
which the ritual powder was insufflated in Mauro’s and Petersen’s hands. Herman tried to refuse, but the shaman seemed so unhappy at this that he immediately complied. Mauro had not even considered it; still full of the desire to laugh, he had decided to take the absurdity to its limit and go along with everything. They were given one dose in each nostril. The violence of the effect left them both stunned. Heads in their hands, they groaned, their sinuses white-hot, their brains dazzled with explosions of light.

Elaine was delighted at having been spared the honor done to her companions. The flutes had started up their shrill laments again, torches of copal resin were lit as night began to fall.

“That really clears out your head!” Mauro said, wiping away the thick mucus that was running down onto his lips. “It’s unbelievable!”

The drug had disturbed his vision. The things around him were slightly fuzzy, blurred, accentuating the effects of the chemicals in the depths of his brain cells. It was as if a pair of 3D glasses had been put inside his head, he told Elaine in an attempt to explain what was happening to him, the kind used to look at anaglyphs. He was seeing everything in red and green, with distortions, overlap-pings that he kept on describing amid gales of laughter. Petersen was similarly euphoric, though less outgoing than Mauro; he was happy to laugh to himself, in long, silent spasms.

“And it gives you a hard-on as well!” Mauro exclaimed, placing Elaine’s hand between his legs as naturally as one would get someone to feel a bruise. “You should try it, I swear you should.”

She drew her hand away sharply. Mauro had lost all restraint, becoming more and more grotesque. His facial muscles twitching uncontrollably, he became bolder and bolder, desperately trying to touch her breasts.

She was glad when the shaman interrupted them. “Join the birds,” he said, shaking toucan and kingfisher skins, “lighten your body to lighten your spirit.”

When Mauro realized the Indians wanted to make him like them, he undressed without embarrassment and let them paint his body with annatto and genipa juice. Long tufts of feathers were tied to his shoulders, his hair was coated with some sticky matter and had white down scattered over it. Finally a bark lace around the foreskin tied his penis to his lower abdomen. Petersen could feel his limbs growing numb; incapable of thinking or reacting, he allowed himself to be disguised without making a fuss. Putty in their hands, he watched unmoved as one of his packets of cocaine was squashed beneath the foot of the Indian who was dolling him up.

“It’s great!” Mauro exclaimed when Petersen’s transformation was complete. “You look like an old parrot, Herman! An old, plucked macaw!” And he slapped his thighs, so pleased he was with his metaphor.

The shaman placed a kind of large bundle wrapped in plant fibers at Elaine’s feet. He spoke to her earnestly for several minutes, interspersing his speech with singing, clucks and gusts of fetid breath.

He was handing the
aracanóa
, that smoke-cured dream, the proof, the guarantee of the Other World, back to her. Its contents were mysterious, its antiquity acknowledged. By a miracle known to Tupan alone, the whole of the world was shown in it. Not a blade of grass had been omitted, not an insect. Everything in it was indecipherable, apart from the stone eggs waiting for the rainy season to hatch out in the rivers. It was up to her, the great sister of Qüyririche, to take it. She must see how his fathers and he himself had taken care of it. Men, men and more men had died so that this magnificent thing should live. She must know, she must realize herself.

With that he turned away and left, taking Mauro and Petersen with him. Alone, Elaine watched them take more
epena
and start
to move round a blazing fire with tall, crackling flames, some way away from where she was. Soon the whole tribe was dancing in a fiery glow speckled with insects and glowing embers. They went forward and back, raising their arms. She recognized Mauro and Petersen in the crowd from their awkward movements. The beer was flowing freely. The women and, what was even more dumbfounding, the children had started to take the drug.

A change in the rhythm focused her gaze on the red glow of the fire. Elaine saw the shaman emerge from the group of dancers and come toward her accompanied by three torchbearers. Stricken with sudden terror at the idea that she might be compelled to join in the barbarous celebration, she took advantage of the darkness and hid behind a bush growing on the edge of the precipice. The shaman showed no surprise: the Messenger had gone back to Qüyririche. He had expected her to leave and raised his arms to thank her. Her sons would guide him, him and his people. The moment had come.

Elaine saw them return to the center of the clearing. The music stopped abruptly, the bodies froze in the light of the torches. The shaman briefly harangued his tribe and knelt down to kiss the earth. Then he picked up a torch, had one each given to Mauro and Petersen, and stood between them, while two other Indians positioned themselves on either side. There was a brief moment of hesitation when they started to run, but the Indians grasped the strangers by the arm and forced them to set off. Getting into the spirit of the game, Mauro shook himself free and tried to overtake everyone. Elaine thought they were going to go past her; amused, she was admiring the long ribbons of flame when she saw Mauro’s torch wobble then disappear in a wailing curve. Far from slowing down, the other runners plunged over the precipice deliberately, dragging Petersen with them. In that same futile second the shaman beat his arms as if he were trying to fly. Immediately
the whole crowd of the Indians rushed toward the precipice. A blaze of fire threw itself at the night, the torches swirled and crackled, plunging into the invisible jungle, where they continued to glow, like phosphorous rockets under the sea. The plumed torsos floated for a moment, swathed in residual light, sparks of down … Angels falling.

THE AIM OF A CHRISTIAN TEACHER: to lead the disciple back in time so he can see the real origins of his erroneous belief. Close to Platonic anamnesis.

GLOSSOLALIA … Everything begins with the myth of Pentecost: the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles and gave them the gift of tongues, the better to convert the unbelievers. In terms of output, of rhetorical efficiency, the ability to speak all languages or to reduce them all to one amounts to the same thing.

Ite et inflammate! Go and set on fire!
Ignatius Loyola orders the members of the Society. Prattle on and make a bonfire of all dialect—nothing gets a blaze going so well as hot air.

China Monumentis
remains one of the the most beautiful books it has been my privilege to hold in my hands. As in his
Œdipus Ægyptiacus
, Kircher creates marvels of typography in it that inspire respect.

ONCE THE CLOCK HAD BEEN INVENTED, no one went back to the hourglass except to boil eggs. There’s no alternative: we must finally take account of the sacred character of human
solitude and its struggle. A moral code has no meaning except inside this combat area, that of a lucidity that is not despairing but free of false hopes of transcendence.

TURNING ONE’S BACK on the waters of the spring like the tigers of Bengal …

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE: Although unaware of it, Kircher is writing an encyclopedia of everything that is going to disappear or be called into question after him. In that sense he is the curator of knowledge already fossilized during his lifetime rather than the first museum worthy of that name. The Copernican then Galilean revolution in astronomy, the sudden extension of the chronology of the earth overturned received ideas with the violence of a tidal wave. Kircher chose not to embrace this new conception of the world but to uphold the old one at all cost. He is the Noah of his age. His life’s work is the ark of a submerged world.

THE TRAPDOOR SPIDER HAS COVERED ITSELF in a fine spider’s web. Strange. Redundant: a fly-trap set over the fly-trap.

“WHERE DOES A THING COME FROM if it has not been ready for a long time?” Father Kircher, Goethe says, always appears at the moment when he’s least expected. He’s a mediator, he gets us, like children, to put our finger on what is causing a problem.

“MACHINES FOR THINKING”: those of Lull, Kircher or Jonathan Swift in the chapter devoted to the academicians of Laputa. The same desire to combine words or concepts in an automatic way, to draw on their vast reservoir of potentialities. Equipped with a computer, Kircher would probably have used it to play
chess, produce sonnets and cantatas or to shuffle the letters of the Torah
ad infinitum
. He would have made the numbers feel sick, hoping to get them to spew up as quickly as possible something that was worth the effort among the things that are possible.