Where Tigers Are at Home (98 page)

I must say, however, that there had been tiny changes in him that I did not notice at first but that subsequently became evident. Kircher was as cheerful, if not more so, than before his apoplectic fit & his physical appearance only showed the effects of his long confinement in bed. He was gaunt, his teeth were loose, coming out one after the other; his hair, white for a long time already from his studious life, was growing thinner, but that was something he shared with other men of his age or even, alas, less ancient. No, what changed imperceptibly as he gradually recovered was his behavior. A fortnight before Christmas, as he was finishing explaining to me a hookah he had invented designed to refresh the opium & give it the taste he liked, he started talking about himself in the third person: “What he wants,” he said without joking, “is for you to have this machine, which his organism needs so much to get over his weakness, constructed as quickly as possible.”

For a moment I was taken aback & almost asked who had enjoined him to adapt this instrument that was already known to the Berbers. He pretended not to notice my amazement but
continued, giving me almost incidentally the key to this change: “For the one who remains is no longer the same.
I
died last August, Caspar, &
he
will need to use all the tricks if he is to have any hope of resembling him one day.”

This caprice & what it implied about his lucidity as far as his own condition was concerned, made my blood run cold. Fortunately my master returned to his normal manner of speech, only using this third person on rare occasions, whenever he wanted to emphasize his reduced state compared to the man he no longer was.

In the same way I noticed in my master a new tendency to talk about his approaching death. Not that he was mistaken about that, since his age & his illness made it very likely, but what was shocking was the way in which he spoke of it: all smiles, as was his habit, he described in minute detail & with many macabre touches what would happen to his body once the worms started attacking it, almost as if he enjoyed emphasizing the way corruption would leave it crawling with monstrous parasites.

It was on this occasion that my master completed what he had been telling me when his apoplectic fit had interrupted him at such an inopportune moment. His idea was to weigh the body of a dying man constantly so as to be able to check whether breathing one’s last and rendering up one’s soul reduces its weight &, if that were so, by how much. It being a bizarre, not to say unseemly, experiment, he suggested it should be carried out on his own body, assured as he was of my friendship and assistance.

“It will be my final contribution to science,” he added gravely, “& I want you to collect the results in order to publish them after my death.”

Following Athanasius’s instructions, Father Frederick
Ampringer & I started to construct a balance suitable for that purpose. Kircher’s genius could still work wonders & we managed to install a system of pulleys in his room strong enough to lift his bed & gauge its weight by means of a certain number of weights with a hinged arm calibrated for that purpose. In case it should happen during the night, Kircher told me to come and counterpoise the balance each evening after he had gone to bed; if I then found him dead in his bed I simply had to rebalance it to find the precise weight of his soul. For he did not doubt for one moment that the machine would register some difference.

Before the end of January his headaches recurred, worse than before. My master hardly stopped smoking his opium pipe at all, the sole remedy for his torment; his mind wandered wherever the dreams produced by the smoke took him & if sometimes I was saddened by his absent look & the indifference he showed toward me and my readiness to serve him, at least I knew he was not suffering.

On February 18 one of our youngest novices came back from a walk in Rome with a pleasing little toy bought for just one lira from an Augsburg merchant who made it his business to profit from people’s taste for curios. It was a flea, attached by a steel chain round its neck. When it was shown to him, Kircher was so delighted with it and expressed such a strong desire to have one like it that the novice willingly gave it to him. From that moment my master was inseparable from his minuscule companion. He spent many hours observing it through a microscope, fascinated by the perfection of the insect itself as well as by the wonderful skill of the man who had managed to put a chain on it. The rest of the time he kept it under his shirt, on his chest, after having fixed the tiny chain to a buttonhole. To feed it, he took it to “graze,” as he put it, on the richest
meadows of his body, that is on the open wounds the hair shirt causes on all those who wear it rigorously.

“Come, my friend,” he would say very tenderly, “come and eat your fill, gorge yourself on the best nectar that ever there was. You have enough here to satisfy millions of your fellows, make the most of it without compunction in the knowledge that every one of your bites takes me a little closer to paradise.”

One day when he was chatting thus in the presence of Father Ampringer, the latter could not sufficiently repress a reaction revealing his doubt as to the soundness of such a practice in the eyes of the Church. My master noticed this, unfortunately for the poor priest, who was a decent man & later reproached himself for having impeded Kircher in his admirable efforts to achieve saintliness.

“Let me tell you the story of the monk, Lan Tzu,” my master said quite calmly, “as a trustworthy Dutch traveler told it to me. According to the ancient Chinese tradition, eight hundred years ago this Lan Tzu was regarded as a perfect model of all the virtues; very early on he left the noise of the cities and withdrew to the darkest cells of the Nan Hua gorges. Meat had no savor for him, drink no taste & sleep no rest. He had such a horror of immodesty, he so loved doing penance, mortifying the flesh, wearing coarse, rough clothes, that he had an iron chain made that he bore on his shoulders until he died. He looked on his body as the prison of an immortal spirit & believed that by gratifying it he would stifle what was best in him, which consisted of understanding. And when he saw worms falling out of his flesh, that had been eaten away by the work of the chain, he gathered them up gently & addressed them thus: ‘Dear little worms, why do you abandon me in this way while you still have something to feed on? Take your place again, I beg you, & if faithfulness is the foundation of all true friendships, be faithful
to me unto death & dissect at your leisure this body which from birth was intended for you & all your kind.’ ”

Kircher, who had become very heated during this, had such an afflux of blood that the surgeon had to be called hastily. After having bled him in several places, he advised us not to argue with my master if we wanted him to remain alive as long as possible. I took this very much to heart & made sure subsequently that no one should risk making his condition worse, either by ignorance or mistake.

Kircher’s improvement lasted for three weeks & there was nothing to lead us to expect the second fit, which, alas, had a more severe & lasting effect on him than the first: on the morning of March 12, when I went to his room to light the fire, I found him sitting on his bed busy—my God, you must forgive me, but I have sworn to tell everything—making little balls of his own excrement!

“Not throw away, Caspar,” he said with an artless smile. “Once dried, put in hearth instead of wood. Considerable savings to charitable ends …”

I immediately tried to speak to him but whatever means I tried, I very quickly realized that my master had gone completely deaf.

I was aghast. Father Ramón, whom I immediately called, could not conceal his sadness at such a distressing sight. On that & the following days he tried all the tricks of his art to try & improve my master’s state, unfortunately without success.

Following the logic of his crazy ideas, Kircher soon refused all ablutions, & the efforts I made to get him to wash himself or even make himself presentable led to such fits of rage that I gave up all attempts. Every morning, after a session on the jiggler, he would urinate in a large earthenware pot which he absolutely refused to have emptied. Nauseous foam formed on the top:
“Sovereign soap for long hair, such as Incas make at Cuzco,” he was good enough to tell me in confidential tones one day when I started to cry seeing him dip his hands in this cloaca to check its consistency.

After a few weeks his body was infested with vermin. But Kircher exploited this disaster to invent a new occupation for himself; he had the idea that these animalcules were nothing other than the sinful atoms escaping from his body, like rats leaving a sinking ship. Following the example of the Uros Indians, he meticulously counted the lice & other insects he collected from his body & put them into bamboo tubes that I then had to seal with wax, in order to prevent these “harmful monads” from spreading to other men.

One day when we were attending mass in Saint John Lateran, Heaven, presumably moved by his pain, allowed him to elude my surveillance to empty his bladder into the commode that used to be used to check the sex of the popes!

The list of his irrational acts would be long & I would not want to sully in a few lines the image of a man whose fame had, throughout his life, rested on both his knowledge & moderation. There is, however, one more fantasy I cannot resist recounting because of the suspicions it raised in my mind. One afternoon, when I had stayed longer than usual in the refectory, I found my master in a position that almost made me fall over backward: naked as the day he was born, he had stuck to his skin all the feathers from a stuffed swan, which was lying beside him in a pitiful state, dismembered. Kneeling on the floor, he was observing a helicoidal figure he had made by winding a cord into a coil; for fear of losing you in abstract explanations, dear reader, I have reproduced a drawing of this labyrinth here; in it the circles represent the half oranges my master had placed at certain points:

On the path created by the cord, the captive flea was cautiously dragging its chain along.

Although it only took me a moment to see all that, I have to admit that I hardly paid attention to it, so fascinated I was by Kircher’s ridiculous costume. As I approached I heard him talking in a low voice to the insect: “For it is thus that the whole of the universe starts out from a single point of light, to which it will one day return after having followed the twists and turns of this marvelous spiral.”

My master was speaking correctly! I almost threw myself on him to embrace him.

“The soul of the world is made like that, my friend,” Kircher went on, talking to himself. “I’ve put on my angel’s Sunday best in order to prepare for this return in the appropriate manner.
For down there the earth is closer to the origins … And I will guide you, my soul, along these tortuous paths, toward the only refuge there ever was, toward that cradle the angels of the house watch over. Spread out through the veins of the world is an intelligence that makes its entire mass move & mingles it with the great all: I can already make out its ineffable radiance. Courage, my soul, our goal is near. Joy, joy, joy!”

At this point Father Ampringer burst into the room & since I was slightly behind the door, it was impossible to warn him. Seeing my master, he rushed toward him, calling on God and all the saints. The spell was broken. I distinctly saw Kircher frown and then he started to groan while Father Ampringer helped him to his feet while calling for me to help. I pretended I had just arrived at that moment.

“How terrible, my God, how terrible!” Father Ampringer kept repeating. “Come, Father Schott, help me to give him a wash. All these feathers, God forgive me, but what can have been going through his mind?! Old age can be so cruel. Our good Father Kircher has gone back to childhood; we’ll have to keep a better eye on him than we have done so far.”

Father Ampringer had ventured to say out loud what people in the College had been muttering for several weeks, but I refused to accept this apparently obvious fact, especially after the scene I had just witnessed. Kircher could still speak! His intelligence was still intact, even if he made every effort, for obscure reasons, to delude people into thinking the opposite.

It took us several hours to make my master presentable but nothing in the world would have forced him to allow his hair or his nails to be cut &, although clean after our efforts, he remained unrecognizable. As soon as we were alone once more, I wrote these words on a sheet of paper: “I am with you, Very Reverend Father & I will keep your secret. But, for the love of
God, speak! Speak to me as you were speaking to this insect just now.” After having read it, Kircher crumpled up the paper with his trembling hands and looked at me very sadly. “Can’t say … Caspar … Can’t say.”

He looked truly sorry, like someone who has tried his hardest to fulfil your request, but in vain. And since, indifferent to my presence, he had started to play with his flea again, I plunged into despair & it was a long time before prayer managed to relieve it.

On the evening of that disastrous September 18 I confessed what I had seen my master doing to Father Ramón & confided to him my doubts as to the real nature of his state.