The Italian journey: of Morgan le Fay, of Atlantis & of the fumes of Mount Etna
WE WERE ONE day’s journey away from the Straits of Messina, riding slowly in the oppressive heat of Calabria, when Athanasius opened a missive with green wax seals that were unknown to me. Drawing my attention with a smile and a little gesture, he read out the letter to me, now and then absentmindedly wiping away the sweat dripping down his forehead with a handkerchief:
On the morning of the Assumption of the most Blessed Virgin, standing alone at my window, I saw such numerous and such new things that I cannot—nor will not—stop thinking about them because the most Blessed Virgin caused a vestige of the paradise that she entered on this very day centuries ago to appear in the lighthouse where I was. And if the eye up above possesses, like the intellect, a mirror in which, of its own volition, it can make anything it wishes appear, then I can call the one that I saw the mirror of that mirror! In an instant the sea that bathes Sicily swelled up and became, over a distance of about ten miles, like the spine of a black mountain. Then there appeared a very clear & transparent crystal; it resembled a mirror, the top of which was resting against the mountain and the foot on the Calabrian shore. This mirror suddenly showed a succession of more than ten thousand pilasters of equal height; & the bases between pilaster & pilaster were of the same bright clarity, of the same shadow. One moment later the said pilasters lost height and curved to form arches, such as the aqueducts in Rome or the foundations of Solomon have; & the rest of the water remained a simple mirror, even to the mountain pools of Sicily. But after a short while a large cornice formed above the arches & on it there appeared a number of veritable castles, all set out in this immense glass & all of the same form & the same workmanship. Then the towers turned into a colonnaded theatre; then the theatre split along a double vanishing point; then the alignment of the columns became a very long façade with ten rows of windows; the façade changed into a forest of pines & cypresses of equal height, then into other species of trees … At that everything disappeared & the sea, hardly rougher than before, became its former self. That is this famous Fata Morgana, which for twenty-six years I had believed improbable & which I have now seen, more beautiful & and more real than what had been described to me. Since that hour I believe it is real, I believe in this way various fleeting colors have of appearing, more beautiful and more vivid than those of art or of nature. I desire Your Reverence, who live surrounded by the glories of Rome and contemplate from close to the divine verities, to tell me who the architect or the craftsman is & with what art & what material he gathered together these varied and numerous glories in one place. While waiting, I pray God may ever look favorably on me and I commend myself to His most holy sacrifices.
Reverend Father Ignazio Angelucci of Reggio. S. J.
This letter, dated August 22, 1633, had been given to Athanasius by Father Riccioli who had admitted he couldn’t understand a word of it. Concerned about Father Angelucci’s mental health & because Reggio was one of the places where we had to stop, he had asked my master to clarify this enigma.
“Well, Caspar,” Kircher said, handing me the letter, “what do you think of it? Madness? Mystical visions? Authenticated miracle? Is our Ignazio a gentle simpleton or a holy man the Lord has touched with his finger?”
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” I replied without hesitation. “The chosen ones of God have often been seen as fools or madmen in the eyes of their fellow men. However, the things that Father Angelucci describes with such sincerity seem to me to be so far beyond understanding that I believe he has been fortunate enough to witness a true miracle.”
“A correct reply,” said Athanasius, “but wrong. Correct in logic, but wrong in truth. The author of this letter is neither mad nor one of the elect; he is, like you my dear Caspar, simply a victim of his own ignorance. What Father Angelucci witnessed, the famous Morgan le Fay, over which so much ink has been spilt, is not a miracle but a mirage. The columns this fellow from Reggio saw were doubtless those of the Greek temples of Agrigento or Selinunte, infinitely multiplied and pleasingly distorted by progressive transformation through the vapors rising from the sea. Having said that,” he added with a smile, “I would give anything to be able to witness such a fantasmagoria & above all … to be able to verify what I have just put forward.”
He wiped his forehead & immersed himself once more in his notes, without making anything of my defeat, for which I was grateful: once again a few words had been enough for him to resolve a mystery that had ever thwarted the most learned scholars & to make me aware, by comparison, of my own immeasurable ignorance.
As soon as we reached Reggio, we went with Father Angelucci to the lighthouse from which he had seen the Fata Morgana. He confirmed the details of his letter point by point & and we found him to be of perfectly sound mind, if a little rustic. Kircher explained the agencies of the spectacle he had witnessed, but even though the reverend father pretended to accept them, we could see that he didn’t believe a word of it & by far preferred miraculous explanations to those of physics.
During the week we spent in that town we went to the lighthouse every day without being granted a sight of the mirage. And, to be honest, it would have been rather unfair if a privilege that had cost our host twenty-six years of his life should have been granted us after so little effort. As the marine landscape we saw from that window was charming, it at least gave rise to pleasant conversations.
From Reggio we put out to sea &, skirting the coast of Sicily, reached the port of Valletta. Together with Frederick of Hesse we were given rooms in the palace of the Knights of the Order of Malta. The government of the island was seriously concerned about the presence of Turcoman pirates in the Tyrrhenian Sea & there was much disquiet. But Kircher, unaffected by all that, immediately set about organizing a tour of the island in order to carry out his program of observations. He started to study the plants & animals, also collecting a quantity of geological specimens.
From information supplied by one of the knights of the Order, we went to the east coast to view a cliff that had been sculpted by nature into a gigantic human figure. It was a woman’s face, which fascinated both of us by its beauty. I knew that nature, by definition, was capable of such marvels, but it is quite a different matter to contemplate the product of this magnificent art de visu. Kircher ran this way and that to vary his viewpoint, lifting up his cassock to climb the rocks more easily. He pointed out to me a very precise spot where the face could be seen but disappeared at the slightest change in the angle of observation, merging once more into the surrounding rock. He was talking to himself, laughing out loud, in one of those transports of delight that were customary with him every time he discovered something new.
“Jesus Maria! Only a few cable-lengths away from Africa, from Egypt! It’s proof. All the pharaohs and their wives in this emblematic figure! Natura pictrix, Caspar, natura pictrix! I’m on the right road, no doubt about that. Natural anamorphosis is only one of the forms of the universal analogy! I’ve never been so close to the goal …”
I had too often seen Athanasius in these states close to ecstasy to be particularly worried, but it was always amazing to see a man normally so level-headed in such a fever of excitement. When he had finished prancing around, my master sat down in the shade of the rock in question & started to write. I passed the time patiently cutting his quills, knowing that sooner or later he would tell me the result of his meditations.
Never having been so close to Egypt, Kircher confessed to me that he regretted that the Grand Duke had not asked to visit that land that in his eyes was so important for the understanding of the universe. In Valletta Athanasius was often absent for hours on end, sitting by the sea, his eyes fixed on the southeast, in the direction of the Nile, travelling in thought through those cities that are almost as old as the world. He would spend whole mornings wandering round the harbor, talking to sailors returning from Africa, avidly gathering all the information or curios these people might possess. But the time came when we had to leave Malta & start the return journey, which promised so many marvels.
After a calm passage, we disembarked at Palermo where we lodged in the Jesuit college. Frederick of Hesse having numerous official obligations to fulfill, we were free for several weeks, but before starting out on our planned tour of Sicily, Kircher had to demonstrate his talents to the teachers at the college and to the local notables, who already knew him by reputation. For several days, in this library where I am at the moment, he answered his colleagues’ questions with consummate ease, developing all the topics as they were submitted to him. He had a prodigious memory & could quote most of his sources in extenso or do extremely complex calculations without referring to a single note. His lectures were so successful that they were the talk of the town & soon he had to receive a number of aristocrats attracted by a man whose erudition was such a contrast with his youth & attractive features. The Prince of Palagonia, who prided himself on his knowledge of the sciences & astrology, attended several of these lessons & eventually invited us to go and stay at his palace on the outskirts of the town. Kircher accepted this gracious invitation, but he was so keen to begin his studies on the land of Sicily that he put it off until near the end of our stay. And that was what was agreed.
Finally the moment came when the two of us set off for Mount Etna, an expedition Athanasius had made a priority in memory of Peiresc, though it was also his own. Despite my fear of the Sicilian bandits who infested the roads, we reached Caeta Abbey unmolested. In the library Kircher and I set about making a complete inventory of the manuscripts. We were fortunate enough to find several extremely rare items such as the Hieroglyphica of Horapollon, the Pimander, the Asclepius or Book of Perfect Speech, the Arabic text of Picatrix dealing with talismans and sympathetic magic & a number of papyri that Kircher had me copy. It was an unexpected harvest & it was with light hearts that, a few days later, we undertook the ascent of Etna.
As night was falling after a long day’s walk, we came to a dilapidated cottage that was a stopping place for travelers. We had a bed for the night there & a meal as well as a guide for the last part of our venture. After supper, a frugal meal but accompanied by a good red wine from Selinunte, from the very same hills where the ancient Greeks used to grow vines, we sat down by the hearth & Kircher, a little mellow from the wine, happily agreed to explain his ideas on geology to me. Like Monsieur Descartes, he accepted the presence of a fire at the center of the terrestrial globe, miners at the coal face testifying that the heat increased with depth.
We went on talking until late into the night. Stimulated by my questions, Kircher dealt one after the other with the biggest problems set by the formation of the Earth, confiding in me that what I was hearing were the premises of a book he was preparing in secret—having been officially instructed to devote himself to Egyptology—& which he would doubtless call The Subterranean World. When we thought about getting some sleep, it was already four o’clock in the morning & since we had to rise at dawn to continue on our way to the summit, we decided to stay up. Our conversation turned to volcanoes again. Athanasius never tired of describing the fantastic upheavals the central fire could cause when it escaped by those chimneys.
“According to my calculations, Atlantis was somewhere between the New World & North Africa. When its highest peaks started spewing out fire, when the ground started trembling & caving in, spreading terror & death, the Atlantic submerged the whole land. But when it reached the volcanoes it succeeded in cooling their heat & consequently in arresting the progressive collapse of the land. The few peaks that were thus spared are the islands that today we call the Canaries & the Azores. And such was the power of these volcanoes, which must assuredly have been some of the major chimneys of the central fire, that even today they still display a certain amount of activity: all those islands smell of sulphur, & from what I have been told one can see numerous little craters & geysers where the water that escapes is boiling. It is therefore not impossible that one day the same phenomenon that made a whole world disappear could suddenly make it reappear, with all its ruined cities & and its millions of skeletons …”
Even though imaginary, this vision made my blood freeze. Kircher fell silent, the fire was dying out in the hearth & I shut my eyes in order to see with my mind’s eye the emergence of the terrible graveyard from those far-off times. I saw the alabaster palaces slowly rise from the depths, the towers truncated, the huge statues broken, lying on their sides, decapitated, & I seemed to hear the sinister creaking noises accompanying this nightmare apparition. But suddenly the sound took on a quite different quality, it became so real that I made an effort to throw off my drowsy imaginings; I woke at the very moment when a terrible explosion made the walls of our lodging tremble & cast a red light over the room where we were.
“Up you get, Caspar, up you get! Quick!” Kircher yelled, a transformed man. “The volcano has woken! The central fire! Quick!”
As I stood up, terrified, I saw Athanasius rushing toward our luggage as one explosion followed the other. “The instruments! The instruments!” he shouted to me.
Taking that to mean he was urging me to help him save our precious equipment before fleeing, I did my best, despite my shaking legs, to help him gather up our things. The innkeeper, who was to be our guide, & his wife did not take such precautions; they cleared off, not without having advised us to join them at the foot of the mountain as quickly as possible.
We soon came out; even though it was night, the sky was ablaze & we could see as if it were daylight. My spirits revived somewhat when I saw that the track by which we had arrived had not been affected by the eruption. But my terror returned when I saw my master setting off in the opposite direction, the one that led toward the crater the color of incandescent embers.
“This way! This way!” I screamed to Kircher, thinking his agitation had made him go the wrong way.
“Stupid ass!” was his reply. “It’s an unexpected chance, a present from heaven. Come on, hurry up! We’re going to learn a lot more today than we could by reading all the books ever written on the question.”
“But our guide!” I exclaimed, “we haven’t got a guide! We’re going to certain death!”
“We’ve got the best guide possible,” said Kircher, pointing to the skies, “we’re in His hands. If you’re too frightened, go down & get yourself another master. Or follow me & if we must die that’s just too bad, but at least we’ll have seen.”
“By the grace of God,” I said, crossing myself, & ran to catch up to Kircher, who had already turned away & set off for the summit.
“What do you think of Kircher from the point of view of Sinology?” Eléazard asked. “Do you think he can be considered a precursor, in one way or another?”
“I don’t know,” Loredana replied, “it’s odd. And then it all depends on what you mean by a ‘precursor.’ If you mean someone who put forward, before anyone else, some basic principles for understanding Chinese culture that were sufficiently penetrating to open the way to the understanding we have today, then the answer is definitely no. On that level his book is nothing more than an intelligent—and often dishonest—compilation of the work of Ricci and other missionaries. And every time he takes it upon himself to interpret these facts, he gets it badly wrong, just as with the Egyptian hieroglyphs. His theories on the way Asia was peopled or on the influence of Egypt on the development of Chinese religions are completely crack-brained. And it’s the same with his approach to the formation of ideograms … On the other hand, his book has been a fantastic tool, the first of its kind, for the understanding of the Chinese world in the West: he’s never prejudiced, except in religion of course, and all things considered presents a pretty objective vision of a world that until then simply didn’t exist for Europeans. And that, despite everything, is not bad at all.”
“That is what I think too,” said Eléazard, “but in my opinion it goes even farther. In his way he does more or less the same as Antoine Galland did for Arab culture when he produced the first translation of A Thousand and One Nights: he creates a myth, a mysterious China, supernatural, inhabited by wealthy aesthetes and scholars, a baroque exoticism that Baudelaire, or even Segalen, will recall in their fantasies of the Orient.
“It’s difficult to prove,” Loredana said reflectively, “but it’s an interesting idea. Kircher as the unwitting initiator of Romanticism. It’s close to heresy, isn’t it?”
“To bring in Romanticism is going a bit too far, but I really think that by providing, for the first time, an overall image of China and not a simple traveler’s tale, he determined the string of prejudices and errors under which that country continues to suffer.”
“Poor Kircher, it sounds as if you really do have it in for him,” Loredana said with a smile.
Eléazard was surprised by this remark. He had never seen his relationship with Kircher from that angle and even as he was collecting his thoughts to deny it, he realized that this way of formulating the problem opened up disturbing prospects. Looking at it more closely, there was certainly a touch of resentment in his constant denigration of the Jesuit. Something like the hatred with which a discarded lover reacts or a disciple unable to fill his master’s shoes.
“I don’t know,” he said earnestly, “I find your question disturbing … I’ll have to think about it.”
The rain was still pouring down on the patio. Lost in thought, Eléazard peered at the candle flame as if the light would provide him with an answer to his questions. Amused by his attitude, the unusual importance he seemed to accord the meanings of words, Loredana felt her prejudice against him crumble away a little more. It was perhaps because of the wine, but she found her defensive reaction just now—when she had reprimanded herself for lowering her guard, even just a little—exaggerated. One ought to be able to confide in him without being afraid of his pity or a lesson in morality. It was good to know that.
“I think I have it in for him for having been a Christian,” Eléazard suddenly said, without noticing how the few minutes of silence made his statement sound absurd. “For having betrayed … I can’t say what exactly at the moment, it’s the dominant impression despite my sympathy for him. His whole life’s work’s such a mess!”
“But who would have dared to be an atheist at the time he lived? Do you really think that was possible, or merely thinkable, even for a layman? Not out of fear of the Inquisition but because of the lack of the appropriate mind-set, because of an intellectual inability to imagine a world without God. Don’t forget it was three more centuries before Nietzsche managed to express that denial.”
“I agree with all that,” Eléazard said, shrugging his shoulders, “but no one is going to persuade me that Descartes, Leibniz or even Spinoza had not already got rid of God, that in their writings the word is nothing but a term for a mathematical void. Beside them Kircher looks like a diplodocus.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Loredana said with a doubtful look. “Anyway, I’d quite like to read this biography if you could lend me a copy.”
“Can you read French?”
“Well enough, I think.”
“No problem, then. I have a duplicate of my working copy, though you won’t be able to see my notes, I’ve only got a rough draft of those. You could come round to my place, tomorrow morning, for example. It’s not far: 3, Pelourinho Square.”
“OK. My God, just look at that rain … I’ve never seen it like that. I feel all clammy, it’s very unpleasant. I hope Alfredo’s managed to get the water working, I’m dying to have a shower.”
“I’ve no idea what he’s doing, but he must have some problem. With the pump or with his wife.”
“Oh, I hope not,” said Loredana with a smile. “I wouldn’t like to be responsible for a domestic squabble.”
Something about the corners of her smile, or perhaps it was just the ironic glint in her eyes, convinced Eléazard that, on the contrary, she was flattered to have aroused Eunice’s jealousy despite herself. This coquettishness suddenly made her seem desirable. Fixing his eyes on hers, he found he was imagining her in his arms, then devising various strategies to produce that result: suggesting she came to collect the Kircher biography that evening; taking her hand without a word; just telling her straight out that he wanted her. Each of these ploys generated a fragmentary scenario, hazy and with infinite ramifications that led nowhere except back to the acknowledgment of his desire, the image of their two bodies coming together, the urgent, suddenly vital need to touch her skin, to smell her hair …
“The answer’s no,” Loredana whispered with a hint of sadness in her voice. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you talking about?” Eléazard said, realizing she had read him like an open book.
“You know perfectly well,” she told him with a mild reprimand.
She had turned her head away to look at the rain. Without appearing nervous, she was rolling little balls of warm wax in her fingers and then putting them on the table, a faraway look in her eyes and the sulky expression of a little girl disheartened by an unwarranted reproof on her face.
“And may one ask why?” Eléazard went on, in the conciliatory tone of one who accepts defeat.
“Please … Don’t ask anymore. It’s not possible, that’s all.”
“Forgive me,” he said, moved by the sincere note. “I … It’s not something that happens to me every day, you know … That is, I mean … I meant it seriously.”
When she saw him getting himself into such an awkward situation, she was a whisker away from telling him the truth. It did her good to see his desire for her in his eyes; two years ago she would already have dragged him off to her room and they would have made love while listening to the rain. But why should she, she told herself, since her openness—and it wasn’t something she wanted to try again—disconcerted people more than it brought them closer.
“It’s too soon,” she said to give herself one last chance. “You need to give me time.”
“I can wait, I’m good at that,” Eléazard said with a smile. “It’s one of my rare qualities, apart from …” (with a look of surprise he took the ping-pong ball that had just appeared in his mouth and put it in his pocket) “a certain acquaintance with Athanasius Kircher, Esq …” (a second ball, like an egg that insisted on being regurgitated) “… a modicum of intelligence and, of course …” (as a last ball was expelled more slowly, his eyes wide, like someone preparing to spew out the whole contents of his gut) “my natural modesty …”
Loredana had burst out laughing as soon as the first ball appeared: “Meraviglioso!” she said, applauding. “How do you do that?!”
“Secret,” Eléazard whispered, putting his finger to his lips.
“How stupid of me—it’s the same one each time, isn’t it?”
“What d’you mean, the same one each time? You can count them if you want,” he said, taking out of his pocket the three balls he always carried with him to practice with.
Loredana was still astonished. “Well I’m flabbergasted! With a trick like that you’d be made king of the Papuans.”
Now it was Eléazard’s turn to burst out laughing. She had never seemed so attractive as in her artless amazement.
“If you tell me how you do it, I’ll read your future,” she offered in mysterious tones.
“From the lines of my hand?”
“Not at all, caro … That’s a load of bullshit. I read the I Ching, now that’s something else, isn’t it?”
“That’s debatable, but OK,” said Eléazard, delighted at having managed to revive her spirits.
“So?”
“So what?”
“The trick. That’s our deal: you tell me how you do it …”
When she knew how to conjure the balls away—the trick was all the more deceptive for being simple, once you knew—Loredana took a booklet out of her bag and three little orange pottery discs. “The sticks are too much of a bother to carry round, so I use these things …”
“What is it?” Eléazard asked, picking up one of the discs.
“It’s called a St. Lucia’s eye, a little plate that covers the entrance to some seashell, but I don’t know its real name. Have you seen the spiral? It’s almost the sign of the Tao. Right. Now you have to ask me a question.”
“A precise question?”
“That’s up to you. A precise question gets a precise answer, a vague one, a vague answer. That’s the rule. But take it seriously or it’s not worth the effort.”
Eléazard took a sip of wine. Elaine had immediately appeared in his mind’s eye. Elaine as a question. Not surprising, given the circumstances, but the contradictory questions that almost immediately clamored to be asked made him think: Was there a chance she might come back and everything would be as it was before? If she came back, would I be able to love her again? Will I know love with another woman? Does something else start once something has finished, or is that just an illusion to ensure the survival of the species? All this, he realized sadly, could be summed up in the one question: When will I be free of her?
“Come on. Is it so difficult?” she said, growing impatient.
“The two of us …” said Eléazard, looking up at her.
“What do you mean, the two of us?”
“The two of us. What will be the consequences of our meeting?”
“Clever,” said Loredana with a smile. “But that could well make the answer complicated. Shall we start? OK. You’ve to throw the shells six times while concentrating on your question. That’s the ‘heads or tails’ that allows me to determine the nature of the lines, but I imagine you know that.”
Having tried to concentrate but having produced nothing but Elaine’s distorted face, Eléazard threw the discs. After each throw, Loredana noted down the result, said some numbers and marked the lines of the hexagram with whole matches or ones that had been broken in half, as necessary.
“This first Gua,” she said when the figure had finally been completed, “represents the current possibilities of your question. From that I will derive a second one, which will give you some elements of a reply for the future. You will know that there are some ‘old’ and some ‘new’ lines; an ‘old’ line always remains itself, while a ‘young’ line can become the opposing ‘old’ line. Thus a young yin changes into an old yang and a young yang into an old yin …”
“Aha … It’s not exactly straightforward then, is it?” Eléazard mocked, amused by the earnestness with which she explained these distinctions.
“It’s even more complicated than you think. I’ll spare you the details. According to the numbers you have thrown, your hexagram has three ‘young’ lines, so I will transform them into their opposite, which gives us …” She opened the booklet, looking for the first of the two diagrams. “Ah, here we are: Gou, the Meeting. Below: the wind; above: the sky. In the meeting the woman is strong. Do not marry the woman.”
“Well now!” said Eléazard, genuinely surprised.
“I’m not making anything up. You can read it yourself, if you like. Put in everyday terms it says you will meet again something you had expelled from your mind. Which means a big surprise …” Loredana continued to read, wrapped in thought, then said, “That’s incredible! Listen: The meeting is an assault, it is the flexible one who takes the firm one by assault. ‘Do not marry the woman’ means that a long-term association would be pointless …”
“Not very encouraging by the sound of it,” said Eléazard scornfully.
“Wait, that’s the overall sense of the hexagram. Now we have to interpret the lines that are susceptible to change and compare their meaning to that of the second hexagram. It’s only after that that we can get a resolution. And the first one says … Just a moment. Yes: In the presence of a fish in the net, the duty implied by this presence does not extend to visitors at all.”
“And the fish is me?”
“Wait, I tell you. For the second we have: A melon wrapped in branches of a weeping willow. It contains a brilliance that indicates the descent of celestial influences to the terrestrial plane …”
“Aha! That’s you! An angel come down from heaven …”
“And the third,” Loredana added, as if replying to Eléazard’s mischievous comment, “specifies that: To meet a horn, that is something humiliating. But you incur no blame in this.”
“If you mean I’ve hit a snag, thank you for nothing, I’d already noticed that.”
Loredana shook her head regretfully. “We can stop if you’ve had enough. I really have the feeling I’m wasting my time.”
“Please go on. I won’t do it again, promise.”
She leafed through her booklet for a while to identify the second hexagram. “That one’s the Xiao Guo, the Little Excess … Below: the mountain, above: thunder. A bird takes flight, leaving its call behind it. It ought not to rise higher. It ought to come down. In that case, and in that case alone, there will be happiness.”
“It leaves its call behind it …” Eléazard repeated, taken with the sudden poetry of the image.
“Which means you are too excessive, even in things of little importance. If the bird rises higher and higher, its cry will be lost in the clouds and become inaudible. If it came down, the others would hear it. Hearing the bird’s call symbolizes listening to one’s own excesses, becoming aware of them and carrying out a prompt adjustment.”
Loredana continued to read silently. People of high society, the book said, are excessively polite in their conduct and excessively sad in their mourning … It was one of the oddest of the I Chings, one of the most explicit she’d ever read for someone, doubtless because she had been involved in the questioning. She knew very well why her meeting with Eléazard could not go beyond certain limits fixed inside her by her fear, even if that were exaggerated. This result must fit him one way or another … She decided to drive him into a corner.
“For whom or for what are you in mourning?” she asked him point-blank, aware that this unexpected question shook him.
Eléazard felt his scalp tingle. He had reached the point of seeing the previous metaphor as representing his attitude to Elaine and of trying it out at random on the thousand and one aspects of his anguish, and with one word this stranger had hit the bull’s eye.
“You’re amazing!” he said with genuine admiration.
He thought: I’m in mourning for my love, for my youth, for an unsatisfactory world. I’m in mourning for mourning itself, for its twilight and for the soothing warmth of its lamentation …
But what he said was: “I’m in mourning for everything that has not succeeded in being born, for everything we do our best to destroy, for obscure reasons, every time it puts out a shoot. How can I put it … I can’t understand why we always see beauty as a threat, happiness as degradation …”
The rain stopped, replaced by a silence spattered with drops and sudden trickles of water.
“We haven’t gotten anywhere yet,” said Loredana, screwing up her eyes.
ELÉAZARD GOT UP around eight, a little later than usual. He found his coffee being kept warm in the kitchen and his piece of toast on the table beside the bowl and some maracujá juice. Soledade never appeared before ten, the television programs having kept her awake for a good part of the night, so she made a point of preparing his breakfast before going back to bed. With a muzzy head from the excesses of the previous evening, Eléazard took two soluble aspirin. “What a strange woman,” he thought as he watched the tablets swirling round in the glass of water, “but she certainly knew how to twist me round her little finger …” To the very last moment he had hoped to finish the night with her and, thinking about it, he had come very close: at the end of the I Ching session there had been a moment, he was sure, when she’d been thinking seriously about the possibility, but that idiot Alfredo had appeared to announce his victory over the pump. Loredana had seized the opportunity and used her desire for a shower as an excuse to get away. She fled, Eléazard told himself, without understanding the motives for her escape or being able to do anything about the frustration it caused him. A little later, with the help of the aspirin, he was blaming himself for having succumbed to the lustful promptings of alcohol; mortified to think he must have cut a ridiculous figure, he decided to repress the memory of the evening. What a bad idea it had been to go out for dinner!
Before sitting down at his desk, he poured some sunflower seeds into the parrot’s feeding dish. Heidegger seemed to be in a good mood, rocking back and forward and making his back ripple like a plumed serpent. Eléazard picked up a seed and went up to the bird, speaking softly to it, “Heidegger, Heidi! How are you today? Still not decided to speak normally, eh? Come on, come and get the seed, my beauty.” The parrot came toward him by shuffling sideways along its perch, then let itself topple over and came to a stop head down in a bat-like pose. “Well then, what do you think of the world? You really think there’s some hope?” Eléazard was moving his hand toward the enormous beak when the bird, like a spring suddenly released, bit his index finger and drew blood. “Oh, go fuck yourself, you stupid bastard,” Eléazard yelled in pain. “You’re mad, sir, stark staring mad! One day I’ll pop you in the saucepan, d’you hear, you moron?”
Squeezing his cut finger, he was heading for the bathroom when Soledade appeared in front of him.
“Que passa?”
“What has happened is that that stupid parrot’s bitten me again! Just look at that, he almost cut my finger off. I’ll release him in the forest, then he’ll learn what suffering is …”
“If you do that, then I’ll leave as well,” Soledade said solemnly. “It’s your own fault, you don’t know how to go about it. He doesn’t bite me at all.”
“Oh, really? And could you tell me what you have to do to please him? Get down on your knees? Crawl over to give him a seed? I’m really fed up with the creature.”
“A parrot isn’t like other animals. Xangó shines like the sun, there’s fire inside him; if you don’t show him respect, he’ll burn you. It’s as simple as that.”
“You’re as crazy as he is,” Eléazard said, disarmed by this reasoning. “And why do you insist on calling him Xangó?”
“It’s his real name,” she said with a stubborn look, “he told me himself. He doesn’t like the one he’s been given at all. Come, I’ll bandage that for you. That kind of thing can be dangerous, you know.”
Eléazard gave in, overcome by the girl’s touching naïveté, Brazil really was a different world.
“You got back late yesterday,” she said, pressing some cotton wool soaked in alcohol on the wound.
“That hurts! Be gentle now.”
“Gentle doesn’t get you anywhere,” she said, giving him a strange look, a mixture of sweet revenge and irony. “The disinfectant has to get to the bottom of the wound. What’s her name?”
“… Loredana,” he said, after a brief pause of surprise at her perspicacity. “She’s Italian. But how do you know?”
“My little finger told me. Is she beautiful?”
“Not bad. That is, yes, curves in all the right places. She’s got a superb ass,” he added to provoke her a little.
“You’re all the same,” said Soledade as she finished wrapping the Band-Aid round his finger. “But when you go fishing at night, all you catch is eels.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know what I mean. Right, there, that’s done. I’ll go out and do the shopping.”
“Get a bit more in than usual, we might have a guest.”
Soledade nodded like the parrot and gave him a black look.
“Si senhor,” she said, mimicking absolute servility. “But I warn you, don’t expect me to serve at table, O meu computado não fala, computa!”
God knows where she heard that, Eléazard thought as he went back to his study. Spoken in a tone of contempt, it was a sentence that could be understood differently depending on the stress on the last word, either “My computer doesn’t speak, it computes,” or: “My computer doesn’t speak with puta” (i.e., whores). He certainly felt that Soledade was a bit too free and easy, but he liked the pun and tried unsuccessfully to translate it into French in a way that retained its marvelous concision.
Then he immersed himself in Caspar Schott’s manuscript. Rereading his notes on the computer, he decided they were too succinct and slightly prejudiced. The problem was to know whom they were aimed at: an academic familiar with the seventeenth century would doubtless consider them adequate but an ordinary reader wouldn’t find enough in them to satisfy his curiosity fully. But how far should he go? He felt he had so much to say about Kircher’s century, to his mind one of the most notable since Antiquity, that he could easily double or even triple Schott’s text with his notes. As for his prejudice against the man himself, that was something new, resulting entirely from his conversation with Loredana. There was a happy medium to be observed between unquestioning praise and systematic hostility, a balance in which his rancor toward Kircher was muzzled in the right way.
Still stormy, the weather was piling all the sadness of the world on Alcântara. Eléazard wondered whether Loredana would come and see him that morning, as she had promised. The woman was pretty unique of her kind. Now he remembered the night in the Caravela as something intense and poetic, one of those he would like to revive in his life. If she should come that day, he would offer her a genuine apology and tell her how much he wanted her friendship. He found himself imagining her in the alley she would have to go down to come to his house. Impatient, almost anxious, he watched out for her like a teenager on his first date.
I’m like an old child, he told himself with a smile. It’s Moéma who’s right. Down to work, then. In his archives—he’d have to get round to cataloging them one of these days—he’d finally managed to find the article by François Secret that had been missing since he’d edited the notes to chapter three. Secret, what a name for someone who’d devoted his life to hermeneutics! It was enough to make you think surnames could sometimes determine the destiny of those who bore them. Having said that, the study in question, A forgotten episode in the life of Peiresc: the magic sabre of Gustavus Adolphus, did not do much for Kircher since, in the light of the writings of George Wallin, it proved that the sabre he had examined was false. To make matters worse, Wallin quoted De orbibus tribus aureis by the Strasbourg scholar Johannes Scheffer, a book in which Kircher was accused of total ignorance in matters of interpretation for having talked of magic characters when, out of malice, someone had shown him what were merely samples of the Danish language. Of course, as thoroughgoing antipapists, Wallin and Scheffer were trying to rehabilitate Gustavus Adolphus and, through him, Protestantism as a whole; their accusation, along with many other similar ones, cast doubt on the Jesuit’s competence. And this all the more so since his attempts at deciphering the hieroglyphs ended, unquestionably to our eyes, in abject failure.
Eléazard wondered how a person could be so blind. Without being able to say why, he was convinced that Athanasius Kircher had never knowingly cheated. If he could be accused, for his part, of supporting the cause of the Counter-Reformation with a white lie, that motive did not come into question for the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It followed, therefore, that the man must either have been deceiving himself—by autosuggestion? out of madness?—about his abilities or have taken Machiavellianism and a love of fame to a point where it became truly monstrous.
Eléazard edited the note relating to the “magic” sword then continued with the task of putting the text on the computer. He could not, however, stop himself from going to look out of the window from time to time, on the pretext of smoking a cigarette.
Toward ten Soledade came back from shopping with the mail and the newspapers she had gone to collect from the first boat. There was nothing of interest in the dailies. Always the same reports on murders or muggings more or less everywhere in the big cities, all largely drowned in the slush of articles on football, pop singers, provincial social events and ministerial bombast. A VASP plane crashing in the mountains near Fortaleza was the front-page news. Nada restou!—”Nothing left!”—was the expressive summary in one headline. “A hundred and thirty-five dead and two babies” proclaimed another with involuntary cynicism, as if the fact of having avoided the adult sufferings of human beings meant the babies did not have the right to be counted among the dead. There followed, in order, the usual photos to tickle their readers’ taste for blood and gore, a description of the pillage of the wreck before the rescue party arrived, and posthumous praise for the crew.
Eléazard’s attention was drawn by the plundering of the airplane: one more symptom in the long list he kept faithfully up to date. Two months previously several hundred destitute youths had left the favelas of Rio and poured onto the well-known Copacabana beach. They had cleaned out the place to such an extent, leaving the practically naked tourists to get on with their tan, that they had been dubbed grilos, “the locusts.” More or less all over the country gangs were getting together to rob banks, supermarkets, hotels and even restaurants. In the filthy and overfull jails the prisoners were rebelling in such large numbers that the police had started shooting on sight. Every time they were called in it ended with dozens of dead. Corruption had spread to the highest levels of the state and while the mass of people was getting poorer by the day, suffering an alarming resurgence of diseases such as leprosy, cholera and bubonic plague, a tiny number of the nouveaux riches could watch their assets grow in the Miami banks. Brazil, as they say of white dwarfs, was collapsing in on itself and no one could say what “black hole” would be the result of the implosion.
Day after day Eléazard kept sending this prognosis of disaster to his news agency but the old world was too preoccupied with the symptoms of its own breakdown to feel sympathy for the misfortunes of a nation that neither the media nor international travel had managed to bring close to it. Without being pessimistic by nature, Eléazard was starting to have his doubts about the future. Following successive breakups, Europe was becoming volatile to the extent that it was beginning to resemble the continent that had been torn apart by the Thirty Years’ War. Even worse, actually, since in those days the religious dissension was limited to Catholics against Protestants. And even if the current upheavals should be interpreted as announcing a radical metamorphosis of the West, what could be seen of it at the moment was hardly something to get enthusiastic about.
Eléazard was feeling depressed. He lit a cigarette and was about to read his mail when a voice made him start.
“Eléazard?”
It was Loredana.
“My apologies,” she said, blushing, “the front door was open wide and since no one answered, I took the liberty of coming up.”
“And quite right too,” he said, disturbed by her sudden appearance. “I … I’ve gone native. What the locals do is to clap their hands to announce their presence. It’s more effective than knocking on the door, especially when they’re always open. But please sit down.”
“Isn’t he beautiful!” she said, noticing the parrot. “What’s his name?”
“Heidegger …”
“Heidegger?!” she said with a laugh. “You don’t do things by halves, do you! Hi, Heidegger. Wie geht’s dir, schräger Vogel?”
Reacting to its name, the parrot shook its feathers, puffing out its crop, and uttered the only words it knew.
“What’s he saying?”
“Nonsense. The man who gave him to me, a German friend, had tried to teach him a line by Hölderlin: ‘Man’s dwelling is poetic’ or something like that, but it didn’t work. The stupid bird insists on repeating that ‘Man’s swelling his pointed dick,’ and there’s no way of making him correct it.”
“But why would you want to correct him?” she asked with a glint of irony in her eyes. “He’s only telling the truth. Aren’t you, Heidegger?”
As she spoke, she went over to the animal and now she was scratching its neck in a gentle friendly fashion, something Eléazard had never managed to do in the five years they’d been living together. More than anything else, he found this quiet feat alluring.
When the Colonel’s limousine appeared at the entrance to the fazenda, the guard acknowledged it with a nod of the head as it went through and hurried to close the heavy wrought-iron gate behind it. Then he telephoned the butler to tell him the master was about to arrive home.
The Buick drove silently along the newly asphalted three-mile drive leading to the Governor’s private residence. Through the smoked-glass windows Moreira watched the green expanse of the fields of sugar cane pass, darkly gleaming in the twilight. The long stalks had benefited from the rain and grown even more—twice the height of a man, he thought proudly—and it promised to be a fine harvest, even if it only brought in a supplementary income. He kept this crop out of sentimentality, in memory of a time that had made the reputation and fortune of his family, and enjoyed watching the canes grow to maturity every year. They could reach a height of as much as sixteen feet and he never looked at them without seeing them as the jungle of giant beans they had represented when he was a child. But the days of fairy tales and of agriculture were long gone. He had preferred to invest his money in mines and prawn fishing, while pursuing the political career his ambition demanded. Of the huge stretches of arable land bequeathed him by his father he had agreed to lease a few plots to some ignorant matutos, still in thrall to their out-of-date customs, less for the rent they paid—those peasants were more cunning than foxes and stole from him without batting an eyelid!—than for the sight of them, when he was out on his horse, bent over in his father’s fields. The rest of his property was left lying fallow or used for raising cattle. Like the country squires who were his ancestors, he prided himself on not eating anything that did not come from his own estate.
The Governor closed his eyes. The vision of his land worked like an analgesic, dispelling the tiredness of the day as he came closer to the fazenda. His sense of well-being would have been complete were it not for the prospect of seeing his wife’s sullen face and having to deal with her regular hysterical fits brought on by alcohol. She hadn’t been the same since Mauro had gone off to university in Brazilia. Or perhaps since Manchete had published that photo of a tipsy “Governor Moreira,” shirt undone, nibbling the breast of a second-rate dancer? Carnival fever, the cocktails at the education offices and the stupid challenge of Sílvio Romero, the minister of public works … Yet he had explained the circumstances that had led to his behavior to his wife. At the time she had pretended to understand, to pardon his infidelity and the humiliating scandal that had ensued, but that same evening she swallowed a whole tube of Gardenal with her whiskey. They’d just managed to save her. Menopause problems, it happens more often than you think. Be patient with her, Governor, it’ll only last a few months … Too optimistic, as always, Dr. Euclides, the business had been going on for three years now and the annoying thing was that it was getting worse. Recently Euclides da Cunha had had the idea of advising them to undergo psychoanalytic couples therapy! Not a bad idea for her, certainly, but what was it to do with him?! The doctor was getting old, he’d have to think about consulting someone else. Discreetly, of course.
The Buick had stopped by the flight of steps leading up to the fazenda. The liveried chauffeur came around the car to open the door but the Colonel stayed on the seat for a few moments, contemplating the white façade of the family home, a dreamy look on his face. In the classical style—Moriera maintained, without a shred of evidence, that it had been built to a plan by the French architect, Louis Léger Vauthier—the house was like a little palace. Flanked by two symmetrical wings linked by a covered gallery, the main building had a balustraded upper floor and a triangular pediment. Coming out toward the steps, an imposing portico with three arches emphasized the seigniorial aspect of the building. Lengthened by the setting sun, the shadows of the royal palms were slanting across the pale pink roughcast of the walls, creating a harmonious geometrical network with the semicircular arches of the windows.
On the wide grass borders with their elegant groves of hibiscus, acanthus and laurels, the sprinklers suddenly started their staccato operation, sending out their fine, swirling spray over them. The Colonel checked his watch: seven thirty precisely. Order and progress! The Fazenda do Boi looked good, an image of the opportunities offered by Brazil, the symbol of a success that was open, as in North America, to the lowliest of its citizens, provided they believed in their country more than in their gods and worked to combat Nature’s irrepressible tendency to disorder. What his father had done and his father before him, and what he was doing, in his own way, even more than his forefathers.
“Tell the gardener to mow the grass,” he suddenly said to the chauffeur, who had remained standing stiff, his cap in his hand, beside the portal. “I want a proper lawn, not a meadow.”
Without waiting for a reply, he got out of the car and went up the white stone steps leading to the main entrance.
Ediwaldo, the butler, was there to greet him as he entered the vestibule. “Good evening, sir. Have you had a good day?”
“Exhausting, Ediwaldo, exhausting. If you knew the number of problems I’m supposed to sort out in this state and the number of imbeciles who get together to complicate matters every time they’re in danger of getting a bit too simple …”
“I can imagine, sir.”
“Where is Senhora Moreira?”
“In the chapel, sir. She wanted to collect her thoughts before dinner.”
The Governor’s lips pursed in annoyance. That fucking chapel! Another way of avoiding me … She who never used to set foot in it … Fucking God, dammit! Fucking shit of a woman!
“Has she been drinking?”
“A little too much, sir, if you’ll forgive me saying so.”
Ediwaldo saw the Governor’s jaw set. He hurried to strike a match under the cigarillo that had suddenly appeared between his lips.
“Thank you. Go and tell her that I want to see her at once in the drawing room. And have a whiskey sent up while you’re at it.”
“Cutty Sark, as usual?”
“As usual, Ediwaldo, as usual.”
The Colonel slowly climbed the marble staircase leading to the second floor. On the landing he avoided looking at his own reflection in the large baroque mirror with the deep vista of golds and crimson velvet of the reception rooms; purring, with a noise like a crackling fire, a jaguar came crawling toward him.
“Jurupari, my beauty! Juruparinha …” he said lovingly, abandoning his hand to the animal, which licked it eagerly. “Come, querida, come, my lovely.”
Moreira sank back into an ornate sofa—jacaranda wood, arms carved with passion fruit and star fruit, all bought at an exorbitant price from an antiques dealer in Recife. The jaguar had put its front paws on his knees to let him stroke its neck, eyes closed, quivering with pleasure. “Yes, carinha, yes … you’re the loveliest … the most powerful …” Nothing moved him like the taut muscles under its tawny coat, hypnotic, speckled with eyes fixed on him alone. In its universe there are no names, there’s no past, no future, nothing but the indubitable present moment. To think that it needed an Argentine to write that, to tell the truth about wild animals … His fingers could feel the warm gold of the collar in the animal’s fur and, thinking of Anita’s receptive thighs, her secret bush, he put one hand to his nostrils to try and bring back a memory.
Its spine suddenly twisting in a spasm, its ears flattened, the jaguar raised its head, turning its yellow eyes toward one of the drawing-room doors.
“Now, now, Jurupari. Calm down, calm down,” Moreira said, keeping a firm grip on its collar. “It’s only my aperitif.”
“Yes, sir, of course, sir, will that be all, sir?” came his wife’s slurred voice.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Moreira, turning toward her. “But what …”
Wearing a faded dressing gown—the one she preferred, as if out of revenge because he couldn’t stand it—a cheap, pastel pink, padded nylon dressing gown that parted at every step to reveal her fat thighs, his wife came toward him, a glass of whiskey in each hand. “I ran into Imelda on the stairs and I thought I might as well serve the drinks myself.”
“And took the opportunity to get one for yourself … You drink too much, Carlotta, it’s bad for you, the doctor told you. You ought to make an effort, at least for your health.”
Putting her husband’s glass on a little low table, Carlotta flopped down on the other end of the sofa, spilling some of her drink on her chest. Without seeming at all concerned, she took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped herself nonchalantly, revealing a flaccid breast, pitifully neglected.
“I’ve already told you not to walk around dressed like that,” Moreira said irritably. “It’s … it’s indecent, for God’s sake! If you won’t do it for me, at least do it for the servants. What are they going to think of you? Not to mention the chapel. Since it seems you’ve become pious … I don’t think it’s really appropriate to pray half naked.”
“You can go to hell,” she said calmly. “Countess Carlotta de Souza’s telling you to go to hell, Governor.”
A look of dismay on his face, her husband shrugged his shoulders. “Just look at yourself, darling, the state you’re in. You don’t know what you’re saying anymore.”
“You wanted to speak to me,” she said in an aggressive tone, “so get on with it, I’m listening. Come on, out with it.”
“I don’t think it’s the right moment, you’re in no state to listen to anything.”
“Get on with it, I said … or I’ll start screaming.”
Startled by the raised voice, the jaguar started to growl, trying to escape from its master’s grip.
“Quiet! Calm down, my beauty!” Then, in a lower voice, to Carlotta: “You’re mad! I don’t believe it! Do you want to get eaten up or what?”
“I warned you,” she said, apparently unconcerned at the jaguar’s growing agitation.
“I’m having a reception here, in a fortnight,” the governor said. “Fifty people. It all has to be perfect, it’s important for business. I’m counting on you to organize it. I’ll give Ediwaldo the guest list … and we’ll talk about it tomorrow, when you’re sober. And now, with your permission, I’m going to take a shower. I advise you to do the same and to make yourself presentable for dinner, you look like … like an old whore, querida, an old whore!” He came so close to her he was breathing over her face. “You understand? You understand that I’m starting to get fed up with your whims? I’ve had it up to here, caralho!”
Carlotta watched him leave the room, followed by his lousy jaguar. She was going to finish her drink but irrepressible sobs, all the more convulsive for being silent, made her double up with grief on the sofa.