Where Tigers Are at Home (57 page)

“That’s it, done,” Herman said when he’d finished washing the flesh with boiling water. “The stump has to be left exposed to the air, so it’ll heal over; no Mercurochrome, nothing, just water and some gauze to protect it. I cut quite high up, I hope it’ll do.”

They were standing round Dietlev’s tortured body, pale, their faces pinched from weariness and the extreme strain the primitive surgery had put them under.

“Thank you,” Elaine said, taking Petersen’s hand. “I don’t know how, but I’ll repay you some day.”

Petersen muttered something, visibly embarrassed by this show of emotion. He straightened up, took a few steps, stuck his foot under the amputated leg and sent it flying into the thicket. “Put him back on his stretcher,” he said as he turned round, “we’ve been hanging around here for long enough already.”

IT IS NOT ONLY the musical theory of the
Musurgia
but the whole of Kircher’s work that is “infectious” or, rather, colonialist.

THE HERMENEUTIC MANIA … 
“A symbol,”
Kircher writes, “is
a mark signifying some more hidden mystery, that is to say, its nature is to lead our minds, thanks to some similarity, to understand something very different from those objects brought to us by our external senses whose property it is to be hidden or concealed
beneath the veil of an obscure expression.”
(
Obeliscus Pamphilius
) The dance of the seven veils, again and again … But why should things be a sign of something other than their own radiant nudity? What perverse eroticism does it take to compel us to skin them like rabbits?

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD: How good you are, Father, at weaving mosquito nets!

Athanasius Kircher: All the better to lift them off, my child …

KIRCHER MISSED THE DAWN of the scientific spirit. His work remains a sterile accumulation of information. It is even astonishing, given the huge number of his books, that he had so few interesting insights. He was unworthy of his age.

MORE THAN THE IDEA OF GOD, it is the dogma that is unhealthy, like systematics in philosophy or any rule based on precepts lubricated with the Vaseline of the Absolute.

“IDEOLOGY,” Roland Barthes wrote, “is like a fryer: whatever idea you drop into it, it’s always a french fry that comes out.” Kircher smells of the rancid oil of the Counter-Reformation. He ought to be burned, not in effigy, but really, as an example, “for the survivors and those who haven’t committed a crime.” Why are we at liberty to condemn the dead? Pierre Ayrault asked: “Because otherwise we would not be able to absolve or praise them.” To be able to decorate a soldier killed while acting under orders, we have to be able to hang the corpse of one who showed cowardice under fire.

PUNISHING A PERSON’S MEMORY: After having razed his house to the ground, filled in his moat and his ponds, degraded his
offspring and scratched out his name from the register of births, the guilty man’s forests were cut down to the height of a man.

DICTIONARIES and catalogs: the natural home of compulsives. The index as a literary genre?

KIRCHER ONLY THINKS through the intermedium of images, which comes down to saying he doesn’t think at all. He’s a meditative type, in the sense in which Walter Benjamin understood the expression: he’s at home among allegories.

THINGS THAT PLEASE the deity: odd numbers, vowels, silence, laughs.

THE PORTUGUESE of Brazil is a language full of soft vocalizations. A language of black magic, of invocation. In his
Manual of Harmonics
Nicomachus of Gerasa declares that the consonants constitute the material of sound, the vowels its divine nature. The latter are like the notes of the music of the spheres.

HAVING BECOME MASTERS of Egypt, the Arabs called the hieroglyphs the “language of the birds” because of the large number of stylized fowls to be seen among them.

FLAUBERT’S NOTEBOOKS, October 1859: “Father Kircher, the author of the Magic Lantern, of the
Œdipus Ægyptiacus
, of a system for making an automaton that would speak like a man, of the palingenesis of plants, of two other systems, one for counting, one for expatiating on all subjects, studied China, the Coptic language (the first man in Europe to do so); author of a work that begins
with the words:
Turris Babel sive Archontologia
, born in 1602.” The fact that this summary is there together with the little note on Pierre Jurieu—“Pierre Jurieu, tormented by colics, attributed them to the battles seven knights ceaselessly fought out in his bowels”—which he was to use in the preliminary manuscript of
Bouvard et Pécuchet
, leaves little doubt as to the high regard in which Flaubert held Athanasius Kircher’s works.

LOREDANA: She gives her advice with all the tenderness and gentleness of a heavy machine gun. Having said that, there’s no doubt she’s right: if you stand still, the beast will eat you, if you run, it’ll catch up with you.

THAT SAME YEAR
the most incredible news reached the Vatican by devious routes: the daughter of that Gustavus Adolphus who had vowed to exterminate all the papists & Jesuits in creation, the enlightened but libertine sovereign of a kingdom that was a stronghold of the Reformation, Queen Christina of Sweden secretly wanted to convert!

There were important matters at stake: it was a unique opportunity for the Church of Rome to demonstrate its power & its ability to bring one of the most striking figures of the Reformation back to the fold. It was a matter, therefore, of carefully selecting those who would be charged with accelerating proceedings. Kircher’s services were once more called upon and he gave his superiors the benefit of his wise advice; two Jesuits from his immediate entourage were dispatched to Sweden at once, disguised as simple gentlemen.

The indoctrination of Christina of Sweden began right away, though not without difficulty as the Queen, intelligent & more conversant with theological matters than one would have thought, opposed argument after argument from her two instructors. Having said that, the stumbling block to her conversion was purely temporal: if she became Catholic, Christina could not remain head of a Protestant kingdom.

For the next two years my master hardly left his study at all, entirely taken up with the compilation of his
Mundus Subterraneus
, which grew a little larger with every day, & with the revisions and adjustments essential for the publication of his
Egyptian Oedipus
. To his delight, on May 2, 1652, the day of his fiftieth birthday, he finally held the first volume of this major work in his hands, the one to which he had devoted every moment of his life, from the time when the hieroglyphs had, as it were, appeared to him. Twenty years of uninterrupted research, more than three hundred authors of antiquity quoted in support of his thesis, two thousand pages divided into four volumes to be published over three years! A very large number of engravings, executed to his orders by such talented painters as Bloemaert & Rosello, provided marvelous illustrations to a text for which my master had many new characters cast. It was a huge enterprise & enjoyed corresponding success.

The
Œdipus Ægyptiacus
thus created a great stir throughout Europe & from 1652 to 1654 Kircher had to put up with the inconveniences caused by his contemporaries’ enthusiasm. Scholars, sent by the greatest scientific academies in the world, flocked to Rome to meet him. People came from all sides to see the man who had managed to decipher the language of the pharaohs, the hieroglyphs that had remained such a mystery to ordinary mortals for twenty-four hundred years … It was such a success that the books were sold out even before they came
off the printer’s presses. The name of Kircher was on everyone’s lips & during those three years we had to reply to more than a thousand laudatory letters.

Meanwhile in Stockholm the Pope’s envoys suddenly saw their efforts rewarded: on February 11, 1654 Queen Christina of Sweden announced to the senate her decision to abdicate in favor of her cousin, Charles. All the protestations of the senators were futile &, in a coincidence to which destiny alone holds the key, it was on May 2, 1654, Kircher’s birthday, that she renounced the throne before all the representatives of the estates. After that, the ceremony of abdication was a mere formality & on June 16, having returned the crown jewels and taken off her crown herself, Christina of Sweden held sway over no one but herself here below.

Scarcely twenty-eight years old, though having reigned for longer than many a king who had gone white in the exercise of power, she immediately set off, anxious to leave as quickly as possible a kingdom from which she had banished herself in an act of great self-denial. Accompanied by a few servants & faithful courtiers, she had her hair cut, dressed like a man so as not to be recognized & left with no regret the country that had shown her such little love.

She headed for Innsbruck, where she was to abjure her heresy officially. One can well imagine how anxiously the ecclesiastical authorities followed her progress step by step. Her abdication, important though it was, meant nothing in itself; at any moment Christina could have renounced the sacrifice of her faith, which was so important for the Church. And my master was not the only person to follow the Queen on her journey by means of the letters the Vatican’s spies sent to the Quirinal.

On December 23, she arrived in Willebroek, where Archduke Leopold, governor of the Netherlands, had gone to meet her.
After a sumptuous dinner, they embarked on a frigate that took them along the canal as far as the bridge at Laeken, on the outskirts of Brussels. During the short voyage the Archduke & Christina played chess, while the sky above was constantly lit up by fireworks. The next evening, Christmas Eve, they gathered with some nobles in Leopold’s palace, in the very place where, a hundred years earlier, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth had abdicated to devote the rest of his life to the contemplation of the works of Our Lord.

That was the night when, under the direction of the Dominican, Father Guemes, she abjured Protestantism before God.

Kircher admitted to me that there had been great relief in certain quarters on hearing that news. However, the repeated reports following this memorable event were still disturbing: far from showing the humility appropriate to a new convert, Christina of Sweden was said to be leading a very hectic life in Brussels. One feast, one reception followed upon the other & Christina’s activities were on everyone’s lips. She played billiards, at which she exceled, exclusively with men, took part in wild sleigh races across the countryside or even through the city streets & went so far as to play unsuitable roles in the sung plays the Church condemned. But the most difficult part was over & there was certainly much exaggeration in the reports of her wild behavior. No one had been informed of Christina’s conversion, so all she did was give the world material to criticize the usual excesses of the reformed religion.

In June 1655 Christina of Sweden finally reached Innsbruck. It was in the cathedral of that city, on November 3, that the Queen recanted, now in full view of the whole world, at the same time taking communion & receiving absolution for her
sins. On this occasion she displayed perfect reverence & a humility, which boded well for the future.

Christina of Sweden a Catholic! The event, ceaselessly trumpeted abroad by the Church, was devastating for all the Protestant states. Sweden, above all, was thrown off balance by the coup. More than the Peace of Westphalia, this victory brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end, crowning the triumph of the Apostolic Church of Rome. Alexander VII was jubilant; never had our religion been in such a healthy state as under his rule. And when, only a few days after the ceremony in Innsbruck, Christina of Sweden expressed the desire to come to Rome & settle there, the Pope lost no time in granting her permission. After having convoked the Congregation of Rites, in the presence of all the cardinals, the General of the Jesuits & Kircher, he decided on the ceremonial to be observed in celebration of the entry of the eminent convert into the Eternal City. Any animosity toward my master had long since been forgotten & he was personally charged with organizing the preparations for her welcome to give them due pomp & solemnity.