CHAPTER 1
In which we hear of the birth & early years of Athanasius Kircher, the hero of this history
Setting out on such an arduous task, I put my trust in Mary, our mother, whom Athanasius never invoked in vain, as I take up my pen to bring back to life the man who was my master for fifty years & who bestowed on me, I make bold to assert, his true friendship.
Athanasius Kircher was born at three o’clock in the morning of the second day of May, the feast of Saint Athanasius, in the year 1602. His parents, Johannes Kircher & Anna Gansekin, were fervent & generous Catholics. At the time of his birth they lived in Geisa, a small town three hours from Fulda.
Athanasius Kircher was born, at the beginning of a period of relative concord, into a pious & close-knit family & into an atmosphere of study & contemplation which, I am sure, was not without influence on his future vocation, especially since Johannes Kircher possessed an extensive library so that as a child Athanasius was constantly surrounded by books. It was always with emotion & gratitude that, later on, he would mention to me certain titles he had held in his hands in Geisa, in particular the De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis of Rabanus Maurus, through which he had practically learned to read.
Favored by nature, learning even the most difficult of subjects was literally child’s play for him, but despite that he showed such application that he outshone his classmates in everything. There was never a day when he did not come back from school with some new decoration pinned to his coat, rewards with which his father was justifiably well pleased. Appointed class prefect, he assisted the master by explaining Canisius’s catechism to the first-years & heard the juniors’ lessons. At eleven he could already read the Gospels & Plutarch in the original. At twelve he won all the disputations in Latin hands down, could declaim better than anyone & wrote prose & verse with astonishing facility.
Athanasius was particularly fond of tragedy & at the age of thirteen his father gave him, as a reward for a particularly brilliant translation from Hebrew, permission to go to Aschaffenburg with his classmates to see a play: a company of wandering players were putting on Flavius Mauricius, Emperor of the East there. Johannes Kircher sent the little band in the care of a local farmer who was going to the town—two days’ walk away from Geisa—by cart & was to bring them home once the performance was over.
Athanasius was carried away by the talent of the actors & their truly magic ability to bring to life a figure he had always admired. On the boards, before his very eyes, the valiant successor to Tiberius once more defeated the Persians amid sound & fury; he harangued his troops, drove the Slavs & the Avars back over the Danube, eventually reestablishing the greatness of the Empire. And in the last act, when the traitor Phocas killed this model Christian most horribly without sparing either his wife or his sons, the crowd very nearly tore the poor actor playing the role of the vile centurion to pieces.
Athanasius took up Mauricius’s cause with all the hotheadedness of youth & when it was time to return to Geisa our madcap refused to go in the cart with his companions. The farmer who was in charge of the children tried in vain to hold him back: aspiring to an heroic death & ablaze with desire to emulate the virtue of his model, Athanasius Kircher had decided to go alone, like a hero of Antiquity, to face the Spessart forest, which was notorious not only for its highwaymen but also for the wild beasts that were to be found there.
Once in the forest, it took less than two hours for him to get lost. He spent all day wandering to & fro, trying to find the road they had taken on the way there, but the virgin forest grew thicker & thicker & he was seized with dread as night approached. Terrified by the phantasms his imagination saw in the darkness & cursing the stupid pride that had sent him on this adventure, Athanasius climbed to the top of a tree so that he would at least be safe from the wild beasts. He spent the night clutching onto a branch, praying to God with all his heart, trembling with fear & remorse. In the morning, more dead than alive from weariness & trepidation, he plunged deeper into the forest. He had continued like that for nine hours, dragging himself from tree to tree, when the forest started to thin out, revealing a large meadow. Joyfully Kircher went to find out where he was from the laborers who were gathering in the harvest—the place he was looking for was still two days’ walk away! Furnishing him with some provisions, they set him on the right path & it was five days after leaving Aschaffenburg that he returned to Geisa, to the great relief of his parents, who thought they had lost him for good.
Having exhausted his father’s patience, Athanasius was sent to continue his education as a boarder at the Jesuit college in Fulda.
True, discipline there was stricter than in the little school at Geisa, but the masters were more competent & were able to satisfy the young Kircher’s insatiable curiosity. There was also the town itself, so rich in history & architecture, the church of St. Michael, with its two asymmetrical towers, & above all the library, the one founded with his own books by Rabanus Maurus so long ago & where Athanasius spent most of his free time. Apart from Maurus’s own works, in particular the original copies of De Universo & of De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis, it contained all sorts of rare manuscripts, for example the Song of Hildebrand, the Codex Ragyndrudis, the Panarion of Epiphanius of Constantia, the Summa Logicae of William of Ockham & even a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, which Athanasius could never open without a shudder.
He often talked to me about that last book, every time he recalled his childhood friend, Friedrich von Spee Langenfeld. He was a young teacher at the Fulda seminary &, recognizing in Kircher the qualities that distinguished him from his fellow students, it was not long before he became attached to him. It was through him that Athanasius discovered the darker side of the library: Martial, Terence, Petronius … Von Spee introduced him to all these authors, whom propriety insists should not be read by innocent souls; & if the pupil emerged from this dubious trial strengthened in his aspiration to virtue, that still does not exonerate his master, for “vice is like pitch, as soon as you touch it, it sticks to your fingers.” We are, however, all the more willing to forgive him this slight bending of the rules of morality because his influence on Kircher was solely beneficial: did he not go out with him every Sunday to the Frauenberg, the Hill of Our Lady, to relax in the abandoned monastery & talk about the world as they contemplated the mountains and the town below?
As for the Malleus Maleficarum, Athanasius well remembered his young mentor’s anger at the cruelty and arbitrariness of the treatment inflicted on those supposedly possessed by the devil who were caught in the net of the Inquisition.
“How can you not confess to having killed your mother & father or fornicated with the devil,” he said, “when your feet are being crushed in steel shoes or they’re sticking long needles into you all over your body to find the witches’ mark, which does not feel pain and which proves, according to the fools, that you have had dealings with the devil?”
And it was the student who felt the need to calm his master down, urging him to be more prudent in what he said. Then Von Spee would start to whisper, out there on the hillside, quoting Ponzibinio, Weier or Cornelius Loos in support of his outburst. He was not the first, he insisted, to criticize the inhuman methods of the inquisitors; in 1584 Johann Ervich had denounced the ordeal by water, Jordaneus the witches’ mark, & as he said this Von Spee got carried away again, raising his voice and striking terror to the heart of the young Athanasius, who admired him all the more for his reckless courage.
“You see, my friend,” Von Spee cried, his eyes shining, “for one genuine witch—& I am prepared to doubt whether there ever was one—there are three thousand feeble-minded simpletons & three thousand raving madmen whose problems fall into the competence of doctors rather than inquisitors. It is the pretext that these things concern God & religion that allows these cruel supposed experts to have their way. But all they reveal is their own ignorance & if they attribute all these events to supernatural causes, it is because they are ignorant of the natural reasons governing things!”
Throughout his life Kircher repeatedly told me of his fascination for this man & the influence he had had on his intellectual development. Occasionally the young teacher would read him some of the magnificent poems he was writing at the time, those that were collected after his death under the titles of Counter-nightingale & Golden Book of Virtue. Athanasius knew several of them by heart & on certain evenings of anguish in Rome, he would declaim some in a low voice, as you would say a prayer. He had a marked preference for The Idolater, a poem the Egyptian coloring of which he found particularly delightful. I feel as if I can still hear his resonant voice reciting it in a solemn, restrained style:
O mighty pennate Ishtar, adorèd, benefic,
Wellspring, lunar brilliance, cat-queen edenic!
With the salamander, live adornment of thee,
Fluorescent sea!
Androgynous, its lip tingled: Tutankhamun,
Hermes, puppets, sibyls lie carolling welcome
loyalties, elders deploying stichomythia.
He would finish with his eyes closed & remain silent, absorbed by the beauty of the lines or some memory connected with the text. I would take advantage of that to slip away, sure as I was that I would find him on the morrow back in his usual high spirits.
In 1616 Von Spee was transferred to the Jesuit college in Paderborn, where he was to complete his noviciate, & Athanasius, suddenly tired of Fulda, decided to go to Mainz to study philosophy. The winter of 1617 was particularly hard. Mainz was buried beneath the snow, all the rivers around were frozen over. Athanasius had flung himself wholeheartedly into the study of philosophy, above all that of Aristotle, which he loved & assimilated with astonishing rapidity. But having learned from his experiences at Fulda, where his fellow students had sometimes reacted brutally to his subtlety of mind, Athanasius worked in secret & refused to reveal how much he had learned. Feigning humility & even stupidity, he was looked upon as an industrious pupil limited by his lack of understanding.
A few months after his arrival in Mainz, Kircher expressed the desire to enter the Society of Jesus. Since he was not, to all appearances, intellectually gifted, it took an approach by his father to Johann Copper, the Jesuits’ superior in the Rhineland, before the latter accepted his candidacy. His departure for the noviciate in Paderborn was put off until the autumn of 1618, after he had taken his final exams in philosophy. Athanasius was delighted by the news, doubtless in part at the prospect of seeing his friend Von Spee again.
That winter ice-skating was all the rage; Athanasius developed such skill in this activity that he derived sinful satisfaction from showing off in front of his companions. Filled with vanity, he liked to use his agility & the length of his slides to leave them behind. One day, when he was trying to skate faster than one of his fellow students, he realized he could not stop on the ice: his legs went in different directions & he took a severe fall on the hard-frozen ground. This fall, which was a just punishment for his conceit, left Kircher with a nasty hernia & various abrasions to his legs, which the same pride made him keep hidden.
By February these wounds had become infected. Not having been treated, they started to suppurate badly & in a few days poor Athanasius’ legs had swollen so much that he could only walk with extreme difficulty. As the winter intensified, Athanasius continued to study in the worst conditions of cold & discomfort imaginable. Afraid of being rejected by the Jesuit college, where he had only been accepted with great difficulty, he remained silent about his state, with the result that his legs got progressively worse, right up to the day he was to leave for Paderborn.
His journey on foot across the Hesse countryside was veritable torture. In the course of the days & nights of the walk Athanasius recalled his conversations with Friedrich von Spee about the tortures inflicted by the inquisitors on those accused of witchcraft: that was what he was having to endure & it was only his faith in Jesus & the prospect of soon being reunited with his friend that helped him to withstand as best he could the sufferings of the flesh. Limping terribly, he reached the Jesuit college in Paderborn on October 2, 1618. Immediately after they had expressed their delight at seeing each other again, Von Spee, who was there to receive him, squeezed his secret out of him. A surgeon, who was called urgently, was horrified at the state of his legs; he found them already gangrenous and declared Kircher beyond hope. Thinking an incurable sickness was enough in itself, Kircher said nothing about his hernia. The superior of the college, Johann Copper, came to tell him gently that he would have to return home if his health had not improved within the month. However, he called all the novices together in prayer to ask God to relieve the poor neophyte.
After several days during which Athanasius’s agonies only increased, Von Spee advised his protégé to appeal to the Virgin, who had always watched over him. In the church in Paderborn there was a very old statue of the Virgin Mary, which was said to have miraculous powers. Its fame was widespread among the ordinary folk of the region. Kircher had himself taken to the church & for a whole night he begged the Madonna to look down mercifully on the affliction of her sick child. Toward the twelfth hour he tried out his limbs to see if his supplication had been granted & was filled with a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. No longer doubting that he would be healed, he continued to pray until morning.
Waking a few hours later from a dreamless sleep, he found that both legs had healed & that his hernia had gone!
Look as he might through his spectacles, the surgeon was forced to admit the miracle had happened: to his great astonishment he only found scars & no trace of the infection that ought to have utterly destroyed his patient. Thus we can well understand the special devotion Athanasius retained throughout his life for Our Lady, who had succored him in his ordeal, indicating how Kircher was predestined to serve God within the Society.
ON THE WAY TO CORUMBÁ: “The Death Train”
Uncomfortable on the hard seat in her compartment, Elaine looked out of the window and watched the landscape passing by. She was a beautiful woman of thirty-five, with long, brown, curly hair that she wore in a loose, artistically tousled chignon. She was wearing a lightweight, beige safari jacket and matching skirt; she had crossed her legs in such a way that, without her noticing or perhaps without thinking it important, revealed rather more than she should of the suntanned skin of her left thigh. She was smoking a long menthol cigarette with the touch of affectation that revealed her lack of experience of that kind of thing. On the other seat, almost opposite her, Mauro had made himself comfortable: legs stretched out under the seat across the compartment, hands behind his neck, headset over his ears, he was listening to the cassette of Caetano Veloso, swaying his head in time to the music. Taking advantage of the fact that Elaine was turned to the window, he looked at her thighs with pleasure. It was not every day that one had the opportunity to admire the more intimate anatomy of Profesora Von Wogau, and many students at the University of Brazilia would have liked to be in his place. But he was the one she’d chosen to accompany her to the Pantanal because of his brilliant performance in his defense of his doctoral thesis in geology—passed with distinction, if you please!—because he had the handsome looks of an unrepentant Don Juan, and also perhaps, though to his mind it really didn’t come into consideration, because his father was governor of the state of Maranhão. “Cavaleiro de Jorge, seu chapéu azul, cruzeiro do sul no peito …” Mauro increased the volume, as he did every time his favorite tune came on. Carried away by the beat of the song, he started humming the words, drawing out the final “oo” sound as Caetano used to. Elaine’s thighs quivered a little every time the train jolted; inwardly he rejoiced.
Disturbed in her daydream by her companion’s irritating chirping, Elaine suddenly looked over and caught him examining her thighs.
“You’d do better to show an interest in the landscape we’re passing through,” she said, uncrossing her legs and pulling her skirt down.
Mauro switched off his Walkman at once and took out his earphones. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear. What did you say?”
“It’s not important,” she said with a smile, touched by Mauro’s worried expression. He was sweet with his dishevelled hair and the embarrassed look of a child caught in the act. “Look,” she went on, pointing out of the window, “there are geologists who come from all over the world to see that.”
Mauro glanced at the lunar landscape moving almost imperceptibly across the window frame; bizarre lumps of red sandstone looking as if they’d been dropped there, haphazardly, by some gigantic creature. “Precambrian ruiniform reliefs, highly eroded,” he said with a slight frown, as if reciting a lesson.
“Not bad … But you could have added, ‘A magnificent prospect with a savage beauty that gives humans a sense of their fragility here on Earth.’ Unfortunately that’s never in the geology manuals, not even in another form.”
“You’re just making fun of me, as usual,” Mauro sighed. “You know very well that I’m sensitive to that aspect of landscape; otherwise I’d have chosen history or math. To tell the truth, I’m starting to get tired.”
“Me too, I have to admit. This journey’s interminable, but remember that we’re going back to Brazilia by plane. The Department hasn’t a lot of money, so we had to come to a compromise. Having said that, I’m not at all unhappy that we’re taking this train, it’s something I’ve been dreaming about for ages. A bit in the same way as I dream of going on the Trans-Siberian Railway some day.”
“The Death Train!” said Mauro in funereal tones. “The only train in the world where you never know if it’s going to arrive …”
“Oh, don’t start that, Mauro,” Elaine said with a laugh. “You’ll bring us bad luck.”
The Death Train, so called because there were always accidents happening or an armed attack, linked Campo Grande with Santa Cruz in Bolivia. Just before the border it stopped at Corumbá, the small town where the two travellers were to meet up with the rest of the team, two professors from the University of Brazilia: Dietlev H. G. Walde, a specialist in palaeozoology, and Milton Tavares, Jr., head of the Department of Geology. To economize on cost, Elaine and Mauro had gone by van to Campo Grande, the last town accessible by road before the Mato Grosso. They had left the van in a garage—Dietlev and Milton, who had done the first stage by plane, were to pick it up on the way back—and waited at the station until dawn. The train was a veritable antique on wheels, with a steam engine worthy of the Far West, slatted-wood carriages in faded colors and arched windows. The compartments resembled ships’ cabins with their mahogany veneer and a tiny cubicle with a little washbasin in pink marble. In one corner there was even a nickel-plated steel fan mounted on a universal joint, which at the time it was built must have been the height of luxury. Now the tap, eaten away by rust, merely managed a hint of moisture, the handle for opening the window went round and round without engaging, the wires of the fan seemed to have been torn off years ago and there was so much grime everywhere, and the felt of the seats was so badly torn it was impossible to imagine at what distant time in the past all this could have been the very latest in up-to-date comfort.
The heat was starting to get uncomfortable; Elaine wiped her forehead and unscrewed her water bottle. Under Mauro’s amiable gaze she was trying to avoid spilling water over herself every time the train jolted when they heard angry shouts from the corridor. Drowning out the racket from the axles, a woman’s voice seemed to be trying to rouse the whole world. They saw several people rush toward the rear of the train, followed by an obese conductor, uniform unbuttoned, cap askew, who stopped for a moment, panting, by the open door of their compartment. The shouts continued even louder, until they were cut off abruptly by two dull thuds that shook the partition and made the window and the fan vibrate.
“I’ll go and have a look,” Mauro said, getting up.
He pushed his way through the luggage blocking the corridor and came to a small group of people around the conductor. Armed with a little ax—“only to be used in case of fire”—he was trying to wreck the carriage, starting with the lavatory door.
“What’s going on?” Mauro asked one of the peasants watching the scene impassively.
“Nothing. Just a desgraçado who’s robbed a woman. He’s shut himself in there and refuses to come out.”
For a good ten minutes the conductor continued to attack the locked door. He took a step back, struck the door a powerful blow with the ax, sending an aftershock through the fat of his double chin, paused a moment to catch his breath, then continued. Mauro was dumbfounded by the profound serenity of the violence and, even more, by the appreciative nods of the audience.
When the door had finally been broken down, they saw a poor drunk asleep on the lavatory, a wallet on his knees. After having checked then pocketed the stolen item, the conductor set about extracting the sleeper from his hideout. With the help of one of the passengers, he carried him out onto the open platform at the end of the carriage, waited a few seconds, then pushed him off. Mauro gasped as he saw the body fall onto the embankment like a sandbag. The man turned on his side, as if making himself more comfortable, put his hand over his face and continued to sleep.
“If I could only get my hands on the bastard who stole my passkey!” the conductor muttered as he replaced the ax. Then, turning to Mauro, he said, “It was a good door, solid, they don’t make them like that anymore.”
FORTALEZA: Avenida Tiburcío Cavalcante
Querido, Papa!
Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious. On the contrary. But I need a little extra this month, just two thousand dollars. (Write me a check, you know I can exchange it at unofficial rates thanks to my Greek in Rio …) The thing is, my friend Thaïs and I have had the idea of opening a nice little bar not far from the beach. A young place with music ao vivo every night (Thaïs knows all the musicians in the town!) and with an ambience that will enable us to attract both students and artists. If it goes as planned we’re even thinking of having poetry evenings and exhibitions of paintings. Brilliant, don’t you think?
To set ourselves up in the place I’ve found we need precisely the sum I’m asking, half for the first month’s rent, the rest for tables, chairs, drinks, etc. Given the enthusiastic response of everyone we’ve told about it, after that the bar will pay its way, no problem. What’s more, I read the tarot pack three times and three times in a row the Chariot turned up. So there you are!
I can already hear you grumbling that it’ll affect my studies … Don’t worry, I’ve got into the second year of ethnology and since we’ll take turns at the bar, Thaïs and I, I’ll have all the time I need for classes when the new semester starts.
I had a letter from Mama saying she was off to the Pantanal to search for some fossil or other. I’m really envious of her!
I hope you’re better and that you’re managing all right—you know what I mean. I’ll try to come over and see you some time, promise!
How’s Heidegger?
Love and kisses, beijo, beijo, beijo!
Moéma
All the visible space outside the French window in the living room was filled by the royal-blue night, which had a strong smell of ozone and jasmine. Sitting, naked, on the large straw mat that covered the floor, Moéma’s teeth chattered as she reread her letter. Sudden shivers ran down her spine; she was sweating copiously. She’d have to do something about that pretty quick. She put the letter in an envelope, stuck on a stamp then wrote her father’s address, forcing herself not to tremble. Going back into the bedroom, she stopped on the threshold a moment to look at Thaïs stretched out, naked as well, on the sheets. Her eyes were closed and her full figure was prey to the same icy waves that were making Moéma’s own skin contract from time to time. Through the Persian blinds, the moon cast soothing stripes over her body.
Moéma sat down on the edge of the bed; she ran her fingers through the girl’s thick hair.
“Have you done it?” Thaïs asked, opening her eyes.
“Yes, that’s it. I’m sure he’ll send me the dosh. After all, he never refuses me anything.”
“I’m speeding a bit, you know.”
“Me too, but I’ll sort it out.”
Moéma turned to the bedside table and took out the little ebony box containing the coke. With a strip of cardboard she took out a pinch of powder and poured it into a soup spoon; the spoon with the twisted handle that kept it perfectly horizontal. Deciding the quantity was too great, she put some of it back in the box before mixing the rest with a little water from a dropper.
“You’ll be careful, yes?” Thaïs whispered, watching her.
“Don’t worry, I’ve no desire to die, even less to kill you,” Moéma replied, heating the contents of the spoon over a lighter. “I’m not as crazy as I seem.”
After having drawn up the mixture, Moéma gave several taps to the fine syringe they had used four hours ago, gently pressed the plunger, checking that there were no air bubbles left, then picked up the delicate dressing-gown belt lying on the floor.
“Off we go, sweetheart.”
Thaïs sat up and held out her chubby arm. Moéma wrapped the belt twice around her biceps, then pulled it tight until a vein swelled up in the crook of her arm.
“Clench your fist,” she said, leaving Thaïs herself to keep the tourniquet tight. She soaked a piece of cotton wool in perfume then rubbed it over her arm. Holding her breath in an attempt to curb her trembling, she cautiously brought the needle up to the chosen vein.
“How lucky you are to have such large veins; with me it’s always a big production …”
Thaïs closed her eyes. She couldn’t stand the sight of the last part of these preparations, the moment when Moéma drew out the plunger a little: a tiny jet of black blood spurted into the syringe, as if life itself, escaping from her body, were spreading out in there in thin, deadly curls. The first time, two months ago, she had almost fainted.
“Now, unclench your fist slowly,” said Moéma, starting the injection. When she’d half emptied the syringe, she pulled the needle out and bent Thaïs’ arm over on a wad of cotton wool.
“Oh my God! Oh, the shit, my God, the white shit!” the girl repeated, slumping down on her back.
“Are you OK, Thaïs? Say something! Thaïs?!”
“It’s OK … Don’t worry … Come and join me, quick,” she said, articulating with difficulty.
Reassured, Moéma put the belt around her left arm, holding it in place with her teeth. Now her hand was trembling uncontrollably. Clenching her fist as tight as she could, she pricked herself several times without managing to find a vein in the bluish network scarcely visible under her skin. In desperation, she ended up sticking the needle in a blood-filled bulge in her wrist.
Even before injecting the rest of the syringe, she had a strong taste of ether and perfume in her mouth; and as the aperture on the world gradually closed, she felt herself cut off from the living, cast back into the darkness of her own being. A metallic rumbling swelled up abruptly inside her head, a kind of continuing echo, muffled, such as you hear during a dive when your cylinder hits the rusty metal of an old ship. And along with this shipwreck’s wail came fear. A terrible fear of dying, of not being able to turn back. But right at the bottom of this panic was a couldn’t-care-less attitude to death, a sort of defiance that was almost clear-headed, despairing.
Sensing that she was coming close to the very mystery of existence, she followed the progressive disappearance of everything that was not of the body, of her body and her own will to merge with another body eager for sensual pleasure, with all the bodies present in the world.
Moéma felt Thaïs’ hand on her chest, pulling her down. She stretched out, immediately concentrating on the exquisitely voluptuous enjoyment the contact gave her. Thaïs bit her on the lip, at the same time stroking her clitoris and rubbing her own genitals against her thigh. Life exploded in all its restored beauty; it had a lovely smell of Givenchy.
FAVELA DE PIRAMBÚ: L’aleijadinho
A nasty play on words between aleijado (handicapped) and alijado (reduced) meant that he was called “Reduced Nelson” or, more often, simply “Reduced.” He was a boy of about fifteen, perhaps older, who seemed to have the gift of ubiquity. Wherever you went in the streets of Fortaleza you always ended up seeing him between cars, in the middle of the road, begging for a few cruzeiros. Down as far as the groin he was a complete and, if anything, attractive boy with his shoulder-length hair, his big brown eyes and the beginnings of a mustache; he was only “reduced” in his lower limbs: with the bones of his two legs fused and his feet just stumps, he moved around like an animal, using his arms. Always dressed the same in a shapeless loincloth, like someone being crucified, rather than shorts, and a striped football shirt that he rolled up above his breasts, in the fashion of the Nordeste, he popped up everywhere, dragging himself along quite nimbly through the dust of the streets. Forced by his disability to perform ungainly acrobatics, from a distance he looked like a velvet crab or, to be more precise, a robber crab.
Since the heat in the town forced people to drive with their windows open, he would take up position at the main crossroads and wait for the lights to turn red before launching his attack on the vehicles. Suddenly two callused hands would grasp the bottom of the window, then a head with a fearsome look would appear while repulsively crooked limbs thumped the windscreen or threatened to invade the interior of the car. “Have pity, for the love of God, have pity!” the aleijadinho would cry, in menacing tones that sent shivers down your spine. Springing up from the depths of the earth, this apparition almost always produced the desired effect: the drivers would fumble with their wallets or rummage around nervously in the jumble of the side pockets to get rid of the nightmare as quickly as possible. And since his hands were occupied, Nelson would order them to place the grimy banknote they’d managed to unearth in his mouth. Then he would slip down onto the road and transfer the money to his trunks after having given it a quick glance.
“God bless you,” he would say between his teeth as the car was about to set off again; and such was the scorn he put into the words that it sounded like “Go to the devil.”
He filled women drivers with terror. But when you got to know him a bit and handed him his alms even before he had to beg, saving him having to climb up onto your car, he would thank you with a smile that was worth any number of blessings.
On bad days he would go thieving rather than fight with the vultures at the municipal rubbish dump for a piece of rotten fruit or a bone to gnaw. Usually he only stole things he could eat and that was a real torment for him because of his great fear of the savage violence of the police. The last time he’d been caught, for the theft of three bananas, the pigs had humiliated him until he couldn’t take any more, calling him a half-pint; they’d forced him to take off all his clothes, supposedly to search him, in reality to mock his atrophied organs even more cruelly and to tell him again and again that Brazil ought to be purged of such unnatural monsters. Then they locked him up for the night in a cell with a cascavel, one of the most poisonous snakes of the region, in order to cause “a regrettable accident.” By some miracle the serpent had left him in peace but Nelson had spent terrified hours sobbing and vomiting until he fainted. Even now the cascavel still haunted his nights. Fortunately Zé, “the truck driver,” had come in the morning to bail him out, so he had escaped the worst.
Nelson’s admiration and gratitude for this odd fellow knew no bounds. Zé, always in a jovial mood, had befriended him and came to the favela to see him from time to time. He always had some new story to tell and even took the aleijadinho in his truck for trips to the seaside. Not only was Zé—Uncle Zé as he called him—tall and strong and drove around the world in his huge, brightly colored truck, he possessed what in Nelson’s eyes was a genuine treasure: Lampião’s nephew’s car! It was a white Willis that Zé had shown him one day. It didn’t go anymore, but he looked after it carefully; Nelson had never been so happy as the day he had been allowed to sit inside it. Famous spoils of war! Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, alias Lampião, who had become an outlaw after his father was killed by the police and spent almost twenty years leading them by the nose, had taken it from Antônio Gurgel, a rich landowner who had ventured into the Sertão. Lampião had attacked it on horseback with his band as if it were an ordinary stagecoach and Gurgel had only come out of it alive by paying a large ransom. Nelson knew all the history of the cangaço and of the men who were called cangaceiros because they carried their rifles across their spine, the way harnessed oxen bore the cangalho, the yoke. They had thrown off the yoke of oppression to live the life of free men in the Sertão, and if their Winchesters weighed heavy on their shoulders, at least it was in a good cause, the cause of justice. Fascinated, like all the boys in the Nordeste, by the figure of Lampião, Nelson had done everything he could to collect material about this Robin Hood of the great estates. The sheet-metal and plywood walls of his lair in the favela of Pirambú were papered with numerous photos cut out from Manchete or Veja. They showed Lampião at all ages and in all aspects of his career, also his companion in his adventures, Maria Bonita, and his principal lieutenants: Chico Pereira, Antônio Porcino, José Saturnino, Jararaca … all of whose exploits Nelson knew by heart, holy martyrs whom he often called upon for protection.
Zé having promised he would come by that evening, Nelson had gone back to the favela a little earlier than usual. He’d bought a litre of cachaça from Terra e Mar and filled the two little paraffin lamps he’d made out of old tin cans. Performing contortions, he had even managed to level out the sand in his room, after having cleared away all his cigarette butts. Now, as he waited for Uncle Zé, he looked at his father gleaming in the half-light. Oh, no one could say that he neglected him: the steel bar had been cleaned as if it were a silver candlestick; oiled and rubbed day after day, it reflected the flame of the night-light on it that he kept lit all the time.
Like many men from the Nordeste, his father used to work in a steelworks of the Minas Geraís. Every evening he would tell him about the hell of the blast furnaces, of the dangers the workers were exposed to because of the rapacity of the owner, Colonel José Moreira de Rocha. One day he didn’t come home. At nightfall a fat oaf in a suit and two foremen had come to see him in the shack, unfit for human habitation, that the boss generously granted each of his employees. They talked of an accident, describing in detail how his father, his own father, had fallen into a vat of molten metal. There was nothing left of him apart from this symbolic piece of rail, which they had insisted on bringing with them. There were sure to be a few atoms of his father spread through it, they said; it weighed 143 pounds, exactly the same as his father, so it could be given a church funeral. And for good measure they added that, since he no longer had any claim on the house, he was being asked to quit the property.
Nelson was ten years old. His mother had died when he was born and having no other family, he found himself on the street at a moment’s notice. Through all his trials and tribulations he had held on to the piece of rail and lavished care on it as his most precious possession.
The Colonel was a bastard, a son of a whore eaten away by the pox.
“Don’t you worry, Daddy,” Nelson murmured, turning to the steel bar, “I’ll get him, you can be sure of that; sooner or later that swine will feel the vengeance of the cangaço.
ON THIS DAY, dedicated to Saint Genevieve, the third of the year 1690, I, Caspar Schott, sitting like some student at a desk in this library of which I have charge, undertake to relate the life, exemplary in every detail, of the Reverend Father Athanasius Kircher. Out of modesty this man, whose edifying works have put the stamp of his intelligence on our history, hid behind his books; people will, I am sure, be grateful to me if, as is my heartfelt desire, I gently lift this veil, in all propriety, to throw light on a destiny which glory has rendered immortal now & for evermore.