Umberto Eco

Foucalt's Pendulum

Only for you, children of doctrine and learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom

--Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, 3, 65

Superstition brings bad luck.

--Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C., 1.3.8


KETER


1

That was when I saw the Pendulum.

The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.

I knew—but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing—that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by IT, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane’s dimensions, the triadic beginning of ir, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.

I also knew that a magnetic device centered in the floor beneath issued its command to a cylinder hidden in the heart of the sphere, thus assuring continual motion. This device, far from interfering with the law of the Pendulum, in fact permitted its manifestation, for in a vacuum any object hanging from a weightless and unstretchable wire free of air resistance and friction will oscillate for eternity.

The copper sphere gave off pale, shifting glints as it was struck by the last rays of the sun that came through the great stained-glass windows. Were its tip to graze, as it had in the past, a layer of damp sand spread on the floor of the choir, each swing would make a light furrow, and the furrows, changing direction imperceptibly, would widen to form a breach, a groove with radial symmetry—like the outline of a mandala or pentaculum, a star, a mystic rose. No, more a tale recorded on an expanse of desert, in tracks left by countless caravans of nomads, a story of slow, millennial migrations, like those of the people of Atlantis when they left the continent of Mu and roamed, stubbornly, compactly, from Tasmania to Greenland, from Capricorn to Cancer, from Prince Edward Island to the Svalbards. The tip retraced, narrated anew in compressed time what they had done between one ice age and another, and perhaps were doing still, those couriers of die Masters. Perhaps the tip grazed Agarttha, the center of the world, as it journeyed from Samoa to Novaya Zemlya. And I sensed that a single pattern united Avalon, beyond the north wind, to the southern desert where lies the enigma of Ayers Rock.

At that moment of four in the afternoon of June 23, the Pendulum was slowing at one end of its swing, then falling back lazily toward the center, regaining speed along the way, slashing confidently through the hidden parallelogram of forces that were its destiny.

Had I remained there despite the passage of the hours, to stare at that bird’s head, that spear’s tip, that obverse helmet, as it traced its diagonals in the void, grazing the opposing points of its astigmatic circumference, I would have fallen victim to an illusion: that the Pendulum’s plane of oscillation had gone full circle, had returned to its starting point in thirty-two hours, describing an ellipse that rotated around its center at a speed proportional to the sine of its latitude. What would its rotation have been had it hung instead from the dome of Solomon’s Temple? Perhaps the Knights had tried it there, too. Perhaps the solution, the final meaning, would have been no different. Perhaps the abbey church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs was the true Temple. In any case, the experiment would work perfectly only at the Pole, the one place where the Pendulum, on the earth’s extended axis, would complete its cycle in twenty-four hours.

But this deviation from the Law, which the Law took into account, this violation of the rule’ did not make the marvel any less marvelous. I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving.

So it was hot so much the earth to which I addressed my gaze but the heavens, where the mystery of absolute immobility was celebrated. The Pendulum told me that, as everything moved— earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion—one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move. And I was now taking part in that supreme experience. I, too, moved with the all, but I could see the One, the Rock, the Guarantee, the luminous mist that is not body, that has no shape, weight, quantity, or quality, that does not see or hear, that cannot be sensed, that is in no place, in no time, and is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, number, order, or measure. Neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth.

I was roused by a listless exchange between a boy who wore glasses and a girl who unfortunately did not.

“It’s Foucault’s Pendulum,” he was saying. “First tried out in a cellar in 1851, then shown at the Observatoire, and later under the dome of the Pantheon with a wire sixty-seven meters long and a sphere weighing twenty-eight kilos. Since 1855 it’s been here, in a smaller version, hanging from that hole in the middle of the rib.”

“What does it do? Just hang there?”

“It proves the rotation of the earth. Since the point of suspension doesn’t move...”

“Why doesn’t it move?”

“Well, because a point...the central point, I mean, the one right in the middle of all the points you see...it’s a geometric point; you can’t see it because it has no dimension, and if something has no dimension, it can’t move, not right or left, not up or down. So it doesn’t rotate with the earth. You understand? It can’t even rotate around itself. There is no ‘itself.’ “

“But the earth turns.”

“The earth turns, but the point doesn’t. That’s how it is. Just take my word for it.”

“I guess it’s the Pendulum’s business.”

Idiot. Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum’s business, not hers. A moment later the couple went off—he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter—their first and last encounter—with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?

I watched with reverence and fear. In that instant I was convinced that Jacopo Belbo was right. What he told me about the Pendulum I had attributed to esthetic raving, to the shapeless cancer taking gradual shape in his soul, transforming the game into reality without his realizing it. But if he was right about the Pendulum, perhaps all the rest was true as well: the Plan, the Universal Plot. And in that case I had been right to come here, on the eve of the summer solstice. Jacopo Belbo was not crazy; he had simply, through his game, hit upon the truth.

But the fact is that it doesn’t take long for the experience of the Numinous to unhinge the mind.

I tried then to shift my gaze. I followed the curve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns and ran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring the mystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests on an absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting the great ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding the columns down, the vault being both all and nothing, at once cause and effect. But I realized that to neglect the Pendulum that hung from the vault while admiring the vault itself was like becoming drunk at the stream instead of drinking at the source.

The choir of Saint-Martin-des-Champs existed only so that, by virtue of the Law, the Pendulum could exist; and the Pendulum existed so that the choir could exist. You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

Still unable to take my eyes from the key of the vault, I retreated, step by step, for I had learned the path by heart in the few minutes I had been there. Great metal tortoises filed past me on either side, imposing enough to signal their presence at the corner of my eyes. I fell back along the nave toward the front entrance, and again those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks; the planes of Brdguet, Bleriot, Esnault, and the helicopter of Du-faux.

* * *

To enter the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, you first cross an eighteenth-century courtyard and step into an old abbey church, now part of a later complex, but originally part of a priory. You enter and are stunned by a conspiracy in which the sublime universe of heavenly ogives and the chthonian world of gas guzzlers are juxtaposed.

On the floor stretches a line of vehicles: bicycles, horseless carriages, automobiles; from the ceiling hang planes. Some of the objects are intact, though peeling and corroded by time, and in the ambiguous mix of natural and electric light they seem covered by a patina, an old violin’s varnish. Others are only skeletons or chassis, rods and cranks that threaten indescribable tortures. You picture yourself chained to a rack, something digging into your flesh until you confess.

Beyond this sequence of antique machines—once mobile, now immobile, their souls rusted, mere specimens of the technological pride that is so keen to display them to the reverence of visitors—stands the choir, guarded on the left by a scale model of the Statue of Liberty Bartholdi designed for another world, and on the right by a statue of Pascal. Here the swaying Pendulum is flanked by the nightmare of a deranged entomologist— chelae, mandibles, antennae, proglottides, and wings—a cemetery of mechanical corpses that look as if they might all start working again at any moment—magnetos, monophase transformers, turbines, converters, steam engines, dynamos. In the rear, in the ambulatory beyond the Pendulum, rest Assyrian idols, and Chaldean, Carthaginian, great Baals whose bellies, long ago, glowed red-hot, and Nuremberg Maidens whose hearts still bristle with naked nails: these were once airplane engines. Now they form a horrible garland of simulacra that lie in adoration of the Pendulum; it is as if the progeny of Reason and the Enlightenment had been condemned to stand guard forever over the ultimate symbol of Tradition and Wisdom.

The bored tourists who pay their nine francs at the desk or are admitted free on Sundays may believe that elderly nineteenth-century gentlemen—beards yellowed by nicotine, collars rumpled and greasy, black cravats and frock coats smelling of snuff, fingers stained with acid, their minds acid with professional jealousy, farcical ghosts who called one another cher maitre—placed these exhibits here out of a virtuous desire to educate and amuse the bourgeois and the radical taxpayers, and to celebrate the magnificent march of progress. But no: Saint-Martin-des-Champs had been conceived first as a priory and only later as a revolutionary museum and compendium of arcane knowledge. The planes, those self-propelled machines, those electromagnetic skeletons, were carrying on a dialog whose script still escaped me.

The catalog hypocritically informed me that this worthy undertaking had been conceived by the gentlemen of the Convention, who wanted to offer the masses an accessible shrine of all the arts and trades. But how could I believe that when the words used to describe the project were the very same Francis Bacon had used to describe the House of Solomon in his New Atlantis!

Was it possible that only I—along with Jacopo Belbo and Dio-tallevi—had guessed the truth? Perhaps I would have my answer that night. I had to find a way to remain in the museum past closing, and wait here for midnight.

How would They get in? I had no idea. Some passageway in the network of the Paris sewers might connect the museum to another point in the city, perhaps near Porte St.-Denis. But I was certain that if I left, I would not be able to find that route back in. I had to hide somewhere in the building.

I tried to shake off the spell of the place and look at the nave with cold eyes. It was not an epiphany now I was seeking, but information. I imagined that in the other halls it would be difficult to escape the notice of the guards, who made the rounds at closing time, checking to see that no thief was lurking somewhere. The nave, however, crammed with vehicles, was the ideal place to settle in for the night as a passenger: a live man hiding inside a lifeless vehicle. We had played too many games for me not to try this one, too.

Take heart, I said to myself: don’t think of Wisdom now; ask the help of Science.


2

Wee haue divers curious Clocks; And other like Motions of Return...Wee haue also Houses of Deceits of the Senses, where we represent all manner of Feats of Juggling, False Apparitions, Impostures, and Illusions...These are (my sonne) the Riches of Salomon’s House.

—Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, ed. Rawley, London, 1627, pp. 41-42

I gained control of my nerves, my imagination. I had to play this ironically, as I had been playing it until a few days before, not letting myself become involved. I was in a museum and had to be dramatically clever and clearheaded.

I looked at the now-familiar planes above me: I could climb into the fuselage of a biplane, to await the night as if I were flying over the Channel, anticipating the Legion of Honor. The names of the automobiles on the ground had an affectionately nostalgic ring. The 1932 Hispano-Suiza was handsome, welcoming, but too close to the front desk. I might have slipped past the attendant if I had turned up in plus fours and Norfolk jacket, stepping aside for a lady in a cream-colored suit, with a long scarf wound around her slender neck, a cloche pulled over her bobbed hair. The 1931 Citroen C6G was shown only in cross section, an excellent educational display but a ridiculous hiding place. Cugnot’s enormous steam automobile, all boiler, or cauldron, was out of the question. I looked to the right, where velocipedes with huge art-nouveau wheels and draisiennes with their flat, scooterlike bars evoked gentlemen in stovepipe hats, knights of progress pedaling through the Bois de Boulogne.

Across from the velocipedes were cars with bodies intact, ample receptacles. Perhaps not the 1945 Panhard Dynavia, too open and narrow in its aerodynamic sleekness; but the tall 1909 Peugeot—an attic, a boudoir—was definitely worth considering. Once I was inside, deep in its leather divan, no one would suspect a thing. But the car would not be easy to get into; one of the guards was sitting on a bench directly opposite, his back to the bicycles. I pictured myself stepping onto the running board, clumsy in my fur-collared coat, while he, calves sheathed in leather leggings, doffed his visored cap and obsequiously opened the door...

I concentrated for a moment on the twelve-passenger Obeis-sante, 1872, the first French vehicle with gears. If the Peugeot was an apartment, this was a building. But there was no hope of boarding it without attracting everyone’s attention. Difficult to hide when the hiding places are pictures at an exhibition.

I crossed the hall again, and there was the Statue of Liberty, “eclairant le monde” from a pedestal at least two meters high in the shape of a prow with a sharp beak. Inside the pedestal was a kind of sentry box, from which you could look through a porthole at a diorama of New York harbor. A good observation point at midnight, because through the darkness it would be possible to see into the choir to the left and the nave to the right, your back protected by a great stone statue of Gramme, which faced other corridors from the transept where it stood. In daylight, however, you could look into the sentry box from outside, and once the visitors were gone, a guard would probably make a routine check and peer in, just to be on the safe side.

I didn’t have much time: they closed at five-thirty. I took another quick look at the ambulatory. None of the engines would serve the purpose. Nor would the great ship machinery on the right, relics of some Lusitania engulfed by the waves, nor Le-noir’s immense gas engine with its variety of cogwheels. In fact, now that the light was fading, watery through the gray window-panes, I felt fear again at the prospect of hiding among these animals, for I dreaded seeing them come to life in the darkness, reborn in the shadows in the glow of my flashlight. I dreaded their panting, their heavy, telluric breath, skinless bones, viscera creaking and fetid with black-grease drool. How could I endure in the midst of that foul concatenation of diesel genitals and turbine-driven vaginas, the inorganic throats that once had flamed, steamed, and hissed, and might again that very night? Or maybe they would buzz like stag beetles or chirr like cicadas amid those skeletal incarnations of pure, abstract functionality, automata able to crush, saw, shift, break, slice, accelerate, ram, and gulp fuel, their cylinders sobbing. Or they would jerk like sinister marionettes, making drums turn, converting frequencies, transforming energies, spinning flywheels. How could I fight them if they came after me, instigated by the Masters of the World, who used them as proof—useless devices, idols only of the bosses of the lower universe—of the error of creation?

I had to leave, get away; this was madness. I was falling into the same trap, the same game that had driven Jacopo Belbo out of his mind, I, the doubter...

I don’t know if I did the right thing two nights ago, hiding in that museum. If I hadn’t, I would know the beginning of the story but not the end. Nor would I be here now, alone on this hill, while dogs bark in the distance, in the valley below, as I wonder: Was that really the end, or is the end yet to come?

I decided to move on. I abandoned the chapel, turned left at the statue of Gramme, and entered a gallery. It was the railroad section, and the multicolored model locomotives and cars looked like reassuring playthings out of a Toyland, Madurodam, or Disney World. By now I had grown accustomed to alternating surges of anxiety and self-confidence, terror and skepticism (is that, perhaps, how illness starts?), and I told myself that the things seen in the church upset me because I was there under the spell of Jacopo Belbo’s writings, writings I had used so many tricks to decipher, even though I knew they were all inventions.

This was a museum of technology, after all. You’re in a museum of technology, I told myself, an honest place, a little dull perhaps, but the dead here are harmless. You know what museums are, no one’s ever been devoured by the Mona Lisa—an androgynous Medusa only for esthetes—and you are even less likely to be devoured by Watt’s engine, a bugbear only for Os-sianic and Neo-Gothic gentlemen, a pathetic compromise, really, between function and Corinthian elegance, handle and capital, boiler and column, wheel and tympanum. Jacopo Belbo, though he was far away, was trying to draw me into the hallucinations that had undone him. You must behave like a scientist, I told myself. A vulcanologist does not burn like Empedocles. Frazer did not flee, hounded, into the wood of Nemi. Come, you’re supposed to be Sam Spade. Exploring the mean streets— that’s your job. The woman who catches you has to die in the end, and if possible by your own hand. So long, Emily, it was great while it lasted, but you were a robot, you had no heart.

The transportation section happened to be right next to the Lavoisier atrium, facing a grand stairway that led to the upper floor.

The arrangement of glass cases along the sides, the alchemical altar in the center, the liturgy of a civilized eighteenth-century macumba—this was not accidental but symbolic, a stratagem.

First, all those mirrors. Whenever you see a mirror—it’s only human—you want to look at yourself. But here you can’t. You look at the position in space where the mirror will say “You are here, and you are you,” you look, craning, twisting, but nothing works, because Lavoisier’s mirrors, whether concave or convex, disappoint you, mock you. You step back, find yourself for a moment, but move a little and you are lost. This catoptric theater was contrived to take away your identity and make you feel unsure not only of yourself but also of the very objects standing between you and the mirrors. As if to say: You are not the Pendulum or even near it. And you feel uncertain, not only about yourself, but also about the objects set there between you and another mirror. Granted, physics can explain how and why a concave mirror collects the light from an object—in this case, an alembic in a copper holder—then returns the rays in such a way that you see the object not within the mirror but outside it, ghostlike, upside down in midair, and if you shift even slightly, the image, evanescent, disappears.

Then suddenly I saw myself upside down in a mirror.

Intolerable.

What was Lavoisier trying to say, and what were the designers of the Conservatoire hinting at? We’ve known about the magic of mirrors since the Middle Ages, since Alhazen. Was it worth the trouble of going through the Encyclopedic, the Enlightenment, and the Revolution to be able to state that merely curving a mirror’s surface can plunge a man into an imagined world? For that matter, a normal mirror, too, is an illusion. Consider the individual looking back at you, condemned to perpetual left-handedness, every morning when you shave. Was it worth the trouble of setting up this hall just to tell us this? Or is the message really that we should look at everything in a different way, including the glass cases and the instruments that supposedly celebrated the birth of physics and enlightened chemistry?

A copper mask for protection in calcination experiments. Hard to believe that the gentleman with the candles under the glass bell actually wore that thing that looks like a sewer rat’s head or a space invader’s helmet, just to avoid irritating his eyes. Quelle delicatesse, M. Lavoisier! If you really wanted to study the kinetic theory of gases, why did you reconstruct so painstakingly the eolopile—a little spouted sphere that, when heated, spins, spewing steam—a device first built by Heron in the days of the Gnostics to assist the speaking statues and other wonders of the Egyptian priests?

And what about this contraption for the study of necrotic fermentation, 1789? A fine allusion, really, to the putrid, reeking bastards of the Demiurge. A series of glass tubes that connect two ampules and lead through a bubble uterus, through spheres and conduits perched on forked pins, to transmit an essence to coils that spill into the void...Balneum Mariae, sublimation of hydrargyrum, mysterium conjunctionis, the Elixir!

Or this apparatus for the study of the fermentation of wine. A maze of crystal arches leading from athanor to athanor, from alembic to alembic. Those little spectacles, the tiny hourglass, the electroscope, the lens. Or the laboratory knife that looks like a cuneiform character, the spatula with the release lever, the glass blade, and the tiny, three-centimeter clay crucible for making a gnome-size homunculus—infinitesimal womb for the most minuscule clonings. Or the acajou boxes filled with little white packets like a village apothecary’s cachets, wrapped in parchment covered with untranslatable ciphers, with mineral specimens that in reality are fragments of the Holy Shroud of Basilides, reliquaries containing the foreskin of Hermes Tris-megistus. Or the long, thin upholsterer’s hammer, a gavel for opening a brief judgment day, an auction of quintessences to be held among the Elfs of Avalon. Or the delightful little apparatus for analyzing the combustion of oil, and the glass globules arrayed like quatrefoil petals, with other quatrefoils connected by golden tubes, and quatrefoils attached to other, crystal, tubes leading first to a copper cylinder, then to the gold-and-glass cylinder below it, then to other tubes, lower still, pendulous appendages, testicles, glands, goiters, crests...This is modern chemistry? For this the author had to be guillotined, though truly nothing is created or destroyed? Or was he killed to silence what his fraud revealed?

The Salle Lavoisier in the Conservatoire is actually a confession, a confession in code, and an emblem of the whole museum, for it mocks the arrogance of the Age of Reason and murmurs of other mysteries. Jacopo Belbo was reasonably right; Reason was wrong.

I had to hurry; time was pressing now. I walked past the meter, the kilogram, the other measures, all false guarantees. I had learned from Aglie that the secret of the pyramids is revealed if you don’t calculate in meters but in ancient cubits. Then, the counting machines that proclaimed the triumph of the quantitative but in truth pointed to the occult qualities of numbers, a return to the roots of the notarikon the rabbis carried with them as they fled through the plains of Europe. Astronomy and clocks and robots. Dangerous to linger among these new revelations. I was penetrating to the heart of a secret message in the form of a rationalist theatrum. But I had to hurry. Later, between closing time and midnight, I could explore them, objects that in the slanted light of sunset assumed their true aspect—symbols, not instruments.

I went upstairs, walked through the halls of the crafts, of energy, electricity. No place to hide here, not in these cases. I began to guess their meaning, but suddenly I was gripped by the fear that there would not be time to find a place from which I could witness the nocturnal revelation of their secret purpose. Now I moved like a man pursued—pursued by the clock, by the ghastly advance of numbers. The earth turned, inexorably, the hour was approaching. In a little while I would be kicked out.

Crossing the exhibit of electrical devices, I came to the hall of glass. By what logic had they decided that the most advanced and expensive gadgetry of the modern mind should be followed by a section devoted to an art known to the Phoenicians thousands of years ago? A jumble of a room, Chinese porcelain alongside androgynous vases of Lalique, poteries, majolica, faience, and Murano, and in an enormous case in the rear, life-size and three-dimensional, a lion attacked by a serpent. The apparent reason for this piece was its medium, that it was made entirely of glass; but there had to be a deeper reason. Where had I seen this figure before? Then I remembered that the Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, the first Archon, odious creation of Sophia, who was responsible for the world and its fatal flaw, had the form of a serpent and of a lion, and that his eyes cast fire. Perhaps the whole Conservatoire was an image of the vile process by which, through the eons, the fullness of the first principle, the Pendulum, and the splendor of the Plerome give way, by which the Ogdoades crumbles and Evil rules in the cosmic realm. If so, then the serpent and lion were telling me that my initiatory journey—a rebours, alas—was already over, and that soon I would see the world anew, not as it should be, but as it is.

Near a window in the right-hand corner, I noticed the sentry box of the periscope. I entered it and found myself facing a glass plate, as on the bridge of a ship, and through it I saw shifting images of a film, blurred; a scene of a city. What I saw was projected from a screen above my head, where everything was upside down, and this second screen was the eyepiece, as it were, of a primitive periscope made of two packing cases arranged in an obtuse angle. The longer case stuck out like a pipe from the cubicle above and behind me, reaching a higher window, from which a set of wide-angle lenses gathered the light from outside. Calculating the route I had followed, coming up here, I realized that the periscope gave me a view of the outside as if I were looking through a window in the upper part of the apse of Saint-Martin—as if I were swaying there with the Pendulum, like a hanged man, taking his last look. After my eyes adjusted to the pale scene, I could make out rue Vaucanson, which the choir overlooked, and rue Conte, on a line with the nave. Rue Conte split into rue Montgolfier to the left and rue de 1\irbigo to the right. There were a couple of bars at the corners, Le Weekend and La Rotonde, and opposite them a fa?ade with a sign that I could just barely discern: LES CREATIONS JACSAM.

The periscope. There was no real reason it should be in the hall of glass rather than in the hall of optical instruments, but obviously it was important for this particular view of the outside to be in this particular place. But important how? Why should this cubicle, so positivist-scientific, a thing out of Verne, stand beside the emblematic lion and serpent?

In any case, if I had the strength and the courage to stay here for another half hour or so, the night watchman might not see me.

And so I remained underwater for what seemed a very long time. I heard the footsteps of the last of the visitors, then the footsteps of the last guards. I was tempted to crouch under the bridge to elude a possible random glance inside, but decided against it. If they discovered me standing, I could pretend I was an enthusiast who had lingered to enjoy the marvel.

Later, the lights went out, and the hall was shrouded in semi-darkness. But the cubicle seemed less dark now, illuminated as it was by the screen. I stared steadily at it, my last contact with the world.

The best course was to stay on my feet—if my feet ached too much, then in a crouch, for at least two hours. Closing time for visitors was not the same as quitting time for the employees. I was seized by sudden fear: Suppose the cleaning staff started going through all the rooms, inch by inch. But then I remembered: the museum opened late in the morning, so the cleaners probably worked by daylight and not in the evening. And that must have been the case, at least in the upper rooms, because I heard no one else pass by, only distant voices and an occasional louder sound, perhaps of doors closing. I stood still. There would be plenty of time for me to get back to the church between ten and eleven, or even later. The Masters would not come until close to midnight.

A group of young people emerged from La Rotonde. A girl walked along rue Conte and turned into rue Montgolfier. Not a very busy neighborhood. Would I be able to hold out, watching the humdrum world behind my back for hours on end? Shouldn’t I try to guess the secret of the periscope’s location here? I felt the need to urinate. Ignore it: a nervous reaction.

So many things run through your mind when you’re hiding alone inside a periscope. This must be how a stowaway feels, concealed in a ship’s hold, emigrating to some far-off land. To the Statue of Liberty, in fact, with the diorama of New York. I might grow drowsy, doze; maybe that would be good. No, then I might wake up too late...

The worst would be an anxiety attack. You are certain then that in a moment you will start screaming. Periscope. Submarine. Trapped on the ocean floor. Maybe the great black fish of the abyss are already circling you, unseen, and all you know is that you’re running out of air...

I took several deep breaths. Concentrate. The only thing you can rely on at a time like this is the laundry list. Stick to facts, causes, effects. I am here for this reason, and also for this reason and this...

Memories, distinct, precise, orderly. Of the past three frantic days, of the past two years, and the forty-year-old memories I found when I broke into Jacopo Belbo’s electronic brain.

I am remembering now (as I remembered then) in order to make sense out of the chaos of that misguided creation of ours.

Now (as then, while I waited in the periscope) I shrink into one remote corner of my mind, to draw from it a story. Such as the Pendulum. Diotallevi told me that the first Sefirah is Keter, the Crown, the beginning, the primal void. In the beginning He created a point, which became Thought, where all the figures were drawn. He was and was not, He was encompassed in the name yet not encompassed in the name, having as yet no name other than the desire to be called by a name...He traced signs in the air; a dark light leapt from His most secret depth, like a colorless mist that gives form to formlessness, and as the mist spread, a burst of flames took shape in its center, and the flames streamed down to illuminate the lower Sefirot, and down, down to the Kingdom.

But perhaps in that simsun, that diminishment, that lonely separation—Diotallevi said—there was already the promise of the return.


HOKHMAH


3

In hanc utilitatem clementes angeli saepe figuras, characteres, formas et voces invenerunt proposueruntque nobis mortalibus et ignotas et stupendas nullius rei iuxta consuetum linguae usum significativas, sed per rationis nostrae summam admirationem in assiduam intelligibilium pervestigationem, deinde in illorum ipsorum venerationem et amorem inductivas.

—Johannes Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica, Hagenhau, 1517, III

It had been two days earlier, a Thursday. I was lazing in bed, undecided about getting up. I had arrived the previous afternoon and had telephoned my office. Diotallevi was still in the hospital, and Gudrun sounded pessimistic: condition unchanged; in other words, getting worse. I couldn’t bring myself to go and visit him.

Belbo was away. Gudrun told me he telephoned to say he had to go somewhere for family reasons. What family? The odd thing was, he took away the word processor—Abulafia, he called it— and the printer, too. Gudrun also told me he had set it up at home in order to finish some work. Why had he gone to all that trouble? Couldn’t he do it in the office?

I felt like a displaced person. Lia and the baby wouldn’t be back until next week. The previous evening I’d dropped by Pi-lade’s, but found no one there.

The phone woke me. It was Belbo; his voice different, remote.

“Where the hell are you? Lost in the jungle?”

“Don’t joke, Casaubon. This is serious. I’m in Paris.”

“Paris? But I was the one who was supposed to go to the Conservatoire.”

“Stop joking, damn it. I’m in a booth—in a bar. I may not be able to talk much longer...”

“If you’re running out of change, call collect. I’ll wait here.”

“Change isn’t the problem. I’m in trouble.” He was talking fast, not giving me time to interrupt. “The Plan. The Plan is real. I know, don’t say it. They’re after me.”

“Who?” I still couldn’t understand.

“The Templars, Casaubon, for God’s sake. You won’t want to believe this, I know, but it’s all true. They think I have the map, they tricked me, made me come to Paris. At midnight Saturday they want me at the Conservatoire. Saturday—you understand—Saint John’s Eve...” He was talking disjointedly; and I couldn’t follow him. “I don’t want to go. I’m on the run Casaubon. They’ll kill me. Tell De Angelis—no, De Angelis is useless—keep the police out of it...”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know. Read the floppy disks, use Abulafia. I put everything there these last few days, including all that happened this month. You weren’t around, I didn’t know who to tell it to, I wrote for three days and three nights...Listen, go to the office; in my desk drawer there’s an envelope with two keys in it. The large one you don’t need: it’s the key to my house in the country. But the small one’s for the Milan apartment. Go there and read everything, then decide for yourself, or maybe we’ll talk. My God, I don’t know what to do...”

“All right. But where can I find you?”

“I don’t know. I change hotels here every night. Do it today and wait at my place tomorrow morning. I’ll call if I can. My God, the password—”

I heard noises. Belbo’s voice came closer, moved away, as if someone was wresting the receiver from him.

“Belbo! What’s going on?”

“They found me. The word—”

A sharp report, like a shot. It must have been the receiver falling, slamming against the wall or onto that little shelf they have under telephones. A scuffle. Then the click of the receiver being hung up. Certainly not by Belbo.

I took a quick shower to clear my head. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The Plan real? Absurd. We had invented it ourselves. But who had captured Belbo? The Rosicrucians? The Comte de Saint-Germain? The Okhrana? The Knights of the Temple? The Assassins? Anything was possible, if the impossible was true. But Belbo might have gone off the deep end. He had been very tense lately, whether because of Lorenza Pelle-grini or because he was becoming more and more fascinated by his creature...The Plan, actually, was our creature, his, mine, Diotallevi’s, but Belbo was the one who seemed obsessed by it now, beyond the confines of the game. It was useless to speculate further.

I went to the office. Gudrun welcomed me with the acid remark that she had to keep the business going all on her own. I found the envelope, the keys, and rushed to Belbo’s apartment.

The stale, rancid smell of cigarette butts, the ashtrays all brimming. The kitchen sink piled nigh with dirty dishes, the garbage bin full of disemboweled cans. On a shelf in the study, three empty bottles of whiskey, and a little left—two fingers—in a fourth bottle. This was the apartment of a man who had worked nonstop for days without budging, eating only when he had to, working furiously, like an addict.

There were two rooms in all, books piled in every corner, shelves sagging under their weight. The table with the computer, printer, and boxes of disks. A few pictures in the space not occupied by shelves. Directly opposite the table, a seventeenth-century print carefully framed, an allegory I hadn’t noticed last month, when I came up to have a beer before going off on my vacation.

On the table, a photograph of Lorenza Pellegrini, with an inscription in a tiny, almost childish hand. You saw only her face, but her eyes were unsettling, the look in her eyes. In a gesture of instinctive delicacy (or jealousy?) I turned the photograph facedown, not reading the inscription.

There were folders. I looked through them. Nothing of interest, only accounts, publishing cost estimates. But in the midst of these papers I found the printout of a file that, to judge by its date, must have been one of Belbo’s first experiments with the word processor. It was titled “Abu.” I remembered, when Abulafia made its appearance in the office, Belbo’s infantile enthusiasm, Gudrun’s muttering, Diotallevi’s sarcasm.

Abu had been Belbo’s private reply to his critics, a kind of sophomoric joke, but it said a lot about the combinatory passion with which he had used the machine. Here was a man who had said, with his wan smile, that once he realized that he would never be a protagonist, he decided to become, instead, an intelligent spectator, for there was no point in writing without serious motivation. Better to rewrite the books of others, which is what a good editor does. But Belbo found in the machine a kind of LSD and ran his fingers over the keyboard as if inventing variations on “The Happy Farmer” on the old piano at home, without fear of being judged. Not that he thought he was being creative: terrified as he was by writing, he knew that this was not writing but only the testing of an electronic skill. A gymnastic exercise. But, forgetting die usual ghosts that haunted him, he discovered that playing with the word processor was a way of giving vent to a fifty-year-old’s second adolescence. His natural pessimism, his reluctant acceptance of his own past were somehow dissolved in this dialog with a memory that was inorganic, objective, obedient, nonmoral, transistorized, and so humanly inhuman that it enabled him to forget his chronic nervousness about life.

FILENAME: Abu

O what a beautiful morning at the end of November, in the beginning was the word, sing to me, goddess, the son of Peleus, Achilles, now is the winter of our discontent. Period, new paragraph. Testing testing parakalo, parakalo, with the right program you can even make anagrams, if you’ve written a novel with a Confederate hero named Rhett Butler and a fickle girl named Scarlett and then change your mind, all you have to do is punch a key and Abu will global replace the Rhett Butlers to Prince Andreis, the Scarletts to Natashas, Atlanta to Moscow, and lo! you’ve written war and peace.

Abu, do another thing now: Belbo orders Abu to change all words, make each “a” become “akka” and each “o” become “ulla,” for a paragraph to look almost Finnish.

Akkabu, dulla akkanullather thing nullaw: Belbulla ullarders Ak-kabu tulla chakkange akkall wullards, makkake eakkach “akka” be-cullame “akkakkakka” akkand eakkach “ulla” becullame “ullakka,” fullar akka pakkarakkagrakkaph tulla lullaullak akkalmullast Finnish.

O joy, O new vertigo of difference, O my platonic reader-writer racked by a most platonic insomnia, O wake of finnegan, O animal charming and benign. He doesn’t help you think but he helps you because you have to think for him. A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goose quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type, the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him (it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you are borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light of critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter.

An loo what I doo now, I tak this pac of speling monnstrosties an I orderr the macchin to coppy them an file them in temrary memry an then brring them bak from tha limbo onto the scren, folowing itsel.

There, I was typing blindly, but now I have taken that pack of spelling monstrosities and ordered the machine to copy the mess, and on the copy I made all the corrections, so it comes out perfect on the page. From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola. Repenting, I could have deleted the first draft. I left it to show how the “is” and the “ought,” accident and necessity, can co-exist on this screen. If I wanted, I could remove the offending passage from the screen but not from the memory, thereby creating an archive of my repressions while denying omnivorous Freudians and virtuosi of variant texts the pleasure of conjecture, the exercise of their occupation, their academic glory.

This is better than real memory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns to remember but not to forget. Diotallevi goes Sephardically mad over those palaces with grand staircases, that statue of a warrior doing something unspeakable to a defenseless woman, the corridors with hundreds of rooms, each with the depiction of a portent, and the sudden apparitions, disturbing incidents, walking mummies. To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea, processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of gymnosophists— and so on, to infinity. O Raimundo, O Camillo, you had only to cast your mind back to your visions and immediately you could reconstruct the great chain of being, in love and joy, because all that was disjointed in the universe was joined in a single volume in your mind, and Proust would have made you smile. But when Diotallevi and I tried to construct an ars oblivionalis that day, we couldn’t come up with rules for forgetting. It’s impossible. It’s one thing to go in search of a lost time, chasing labile clues, like Hop-o’-My-Thumb in the woods, and quite another deliberately to misplace time refound. Hop-o’-My-Thumb always comes home, like an obsession. There is no discipline of forgetting; we are at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke and amnesia, and such self-interventions as drugs, alcohol, or suicide.

Abu, however, can perform on himself precise local suicides, temporary amnesias, painless aphasias.

Where were you last night, L

There, indiscreet reader: you will never know it, but that half-line hanging in space was actually the beginning of a long sentence that I wrote but then wished I hadn’t, wished I hadn’t even thought let alone written it, wished that it had never happened. So I pressed a key, and a milky film spread over the fatal and inopportune lines, and I pressed DELETE and, whoosh, all gone.

But that’s not all. The problem with suicide is that sometimes you jump out the window and then change your mind between the eighth floor and the seventh. “Oh, if only I could go back!” Sorry, you can’t, too bad. Splat. Abu, on the other hand, is merciful, he grants you the right to change your mind: you can recover your deleted text by pressing RETRIEVE. What a relief! Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget.

Never again will I go from one bar to another, disintegrating alien spacecraft with tracer bullets, until the invader monster disintegrates me. This is far more beautiful: here you disintegrate thoughts instead of aliens. The screen is a galaxy of thousands and thousands of asteroids, all in a row, white or green, and you have created them yourself. Fiat Lux, Big Bang, seven days, seven minutes, seven seconds, and a universe is born before your eyes, a universe in constant flux, where sharp lines in space and time do not exist. No numerus Clausius here, no constraining law of thermodynamics. The letters bubble indolently to the surface, they emerge from nothingness and obediently return to nothingness, dissolving like ectoplasm. It’s an underwater symphony of soft linkings and unlinkings, a gelatinous dance of self-devouring moons, like the big fish in the Yellow Submarine. At a touch of your fingertip the irreparable slides backward toward a hungry word and disappears into its maw with a slump, then darkness. If you don’t stop, the word swallows itself as well, fattening on its own absence like a Cheshire-cat black hole.

And if you happen to write what modesty forbids, it all goes onto a floppy disk, and you can give the disk a password, and no one will be able to read you. Excellent for secret agents. You write the message, save it, then put the disk in your pocket and walk off. Not even Tor-quemada could find out what you’ve written: It’s between you and it (It?). And if they torture you, you pretend to confess; you start entering the password, then press a secret key, and the message disappears forever. Oh, I’m so sorry, you say, my hand slipped, an accident, and now it’s gone. What was it? I don’t remember. It wasn’t important. I have no Message to reveal. But later on—who knows?—I might.


4

He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the key resembles a man who would walk without feet.

—Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Oppenheim, De Bry, 1618, emblem XXVII

That was the only file that had been printed out. I would have to go through the disks on the computer. They were arranged by number, and I thought I might as well start with the first. But Belbo had mentioned a password. He had always been possessive with Abulafia’s secrets.

When I loaded the machine, a message promptly appeared: “Do you have the password?” Not in the imperative. Belbo was a polite man.

The machine doesn’t volunteer its help. It must be given the word; without the word, it won’t talk. As though it were saying: “Yes, what you want to know is right here hi my guts. Go ahead and dig, dig, old mole; you’ll never find it.” We’ll see about that, I said to myself; you got such a kick out of playing with Diotallevi’s permutations and combinations, and you were the Sam Spade of publishing. As Jacopo Belbo would have said: Find the falcon.

* * *

The password to get into Abulafia had to be seven letters or fewer. Letters or numbers. How many groups of seven could be made from all the letters of the alphabet, including the possibility of repetition, since there was no reason the word couldn’t be “cadabra”? I knew the formula. The number was six billion and something. A giant calculator capable of running through all six billion at the rate of a million per second would still have to feed them to Abulafia one at a time. And it took Abulafia about ten seconds to ask for the password and verify it. That made sixty billion seconds. There were over thirty-one million seconds in a year. Say thirty, to have a round figure. It would take, therefore, two thousand years to go through all the possibilities. Nice work.

I would have to proceed, instead, by inductive guesswork. What word would Belbo have chosen? Was it a word he had decided on at the start, when he began using the machine, or was it one he had come up with only recently, when he realized that these disks were dangerous and that, for him at least, the game was no longer a game? This would make a big difference.

Better assume the latter, I thought. Belbo feels he is being hunted by the Plan, which he now takes seriously (as he told me on the phone). For a password, then, he would use some term connected with our story.

But maybe not: a term associated with the Tradition might also occur to Them. Then I thought: What if They had already broken into the apartment and made copies of the disks, and were now, at this very moment, trying all the combinations of letters in some remote place? Using the supreme computer, in a castle in the Carpathians.

Nonsense, I told myself. They weren’t computer people. They would use the notarikon, the gematria, the temurah, treating the disks like the Torah, and therefore would require as much time as had passed since the writing of the Sefer Yesirah. No, if They existed, They would proceed cabalistically, and if Belbo believed that They existed, he would follow the same path.

Just to be on the safe side, I tried the ten Sefirot: Keter, Hokh-mah, Binah, Hesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Nezah, Hod, Yesod, Malkhut. They didn’t work, of course: it was the first thing that would have occurred to anyone.

Still, the word had to be something obvious, something that would come to mind at once, because when you work on a text as obsessively as Belbo must have during the past few days, you can’t think of anything else, of any other subject. It would not be human for him to drive himself crazy over the Plan and at the same time pick Lincoln or Mombasa for the password. The password had to be connected with the Plan. But what?

I tried to put myself inside Belbo’s head. He had been chainsmoking as he wrote, and drinking. I went to the kitchen for a clean glass, found only one, poured myself the last of the whiskey, sat down at the keyboard again, leaned back in the chair, and propped my feet on the table. I sipped my drink (wasn’t that how Sam Spade did it? Or was it Philip Marlowe?) and looked around. The books were too far away; I couldn’t read the titles on their spines.

I finished the whiskey, shut my eyes, opened them again. Facing me was the seventeenth-century engraving, a typical Rosi-crucian allegory of the period, rich in coded messages addressed to the members of the Fraternity. Obviously it depicted the Temple of the Rosy-Cross, a tower surmounted by a dome in accordance with the Renaissance iconographic model, both Christian and Jewish, of the Temple of Jerusalem, reconstructed on the pattern of the Mosque of Omar.

The landscape around the tower was incongruous, and inhabited incongruously, like one of those rebuses where you see a palace, a frog in the foreground, a mule with its pack, and a king receiving a gift from a page. In the lower left was a gentleman emerging from a well, clinging to a pulley that was attached, through ridiculous winches, to some point inside the tower, the rope passing through a circular window. In the center were a horseman and a wayfarer. On the right, a kneeling pilgrim held a heavy anchor as though it were his staff. Along the right margin, almost opposite the tower, was a precipice from which a character with a sword was falling, and on the other side, foreshortened, stood Mount Ararat, the Ark aground on its summit. In each of the upper corners was a cloud illuminated by a star that cast oblique rays along which two figures floated, a nude man in the coils of a serpent, and a swan. At the top center, a nimbus was surmounted by the word “Oriens” and bore Hebrew letters from which the hand of God emerged to hold the tower by a string.

The tower moved on wheels. Its main part was square, with windows, a door, and a drawbridge on the right. Higher up, there was a kind of gallery with four observation turrets, each turret occupied by an armed man who waved a palm branch and carried a shield decorated with Hebrew letters. Only three of these men were visible; the fourth had to be imagined, since he was behind the octagonal dome, from which rose a lantern, also octagonal, with a pair of great wings affixed. Above the winged lantern was another, smaller, cupola, with a quadrangular turret whose open arches, supported by slender columns, revealed a bell inside. To the final small four-vaulted dome at the top was tied the thread held by the hand of God. The word “Fa/ma” appeared here, and above that, a scroll that read “Collegium Fraternitatis.”

There were other oddities. An enormous arm, out of all proportion to the figures, jutted from a round window in the tower on the left. It held a sword, and belonged perhaps to the winged creature shut up in the tower. From a similar window on the right jutted a great trumpet. Once again, the trumpet.

The number of openings in the tower drew my attention. There were too many of them, and the ones in the dome were too regular, whereas the ones in the base seemed random. Since only half the tower was shown in this orthogonal perspective, you could assume that symmetry was preserved and the doors, windows, and portholes on this side were repeated in the same order on the other side. That would mean, altogether, four arches in the dome of the bell tower, eight windows in the lower dome, four turrets, six openings in the east and west facades, and fourteen in the north and south facades. I added it up.

Thirty-six. For more than ten years that number had haunted me. The Rosicrucians. One hundred and twenty divided by thirty-six came to 3.333333, going to seven digits. Almost too perfect, but it was worth a try. I tried. And failed.

It occurred to me then that the same number, multiplied by two, yielded the number of the Beast: 666. That guess also proved too farfetched.

Suddenly I was struck by the nimbus in the middle, the divine throne. The Hebrew letters were large; I could see them even from my chair. But Belbo couldn’t write Hebrew on Abulafia. I took a closer look: I knew them, of course, from right to left, yod, he, vav, he. The Tetragrammaton, Yahweh, the name of God.


5

And begin by combining this name, YHWH, at the beginning alone, and examine all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the fear of confusion of your imagination and the rolling about of your thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask it, until there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not abandon it.

—Abulafia, Hayye ha-Nefes, MS Munchen 408, fols. 65a-65b

The name of God...Of course! I remembered the first conversation between Belbo and Diotallevi, the day Abulafia was set up in the office.

Diotallevi was at the door of his room, pointedly tolerant. Diotallevi’s tolerance was always exasperating, but Belbo didn’t seem to mind it. He tolerated it.

“It won’t be of any use to you, you know. You’re not planning, surely, to rewrite the manuscripts you don’t read anyway.”

“It’s for riling, making schedules, updating lists. If I write a book with it, it’ll be my own, not someone else’s.”

“You swore that you’d never write anything of your own.”

“That I wouldn’t inflict a manuscript on the world, true. When I concluded I wasn’t cut out to be a protagonist—”

“You decided you’d be an intelligent spectator. I know all that. And so?”

“If an intelligent spectator hums the second movement on his way home from the concert, that doesn’t mean he wants to conduct it in Carnegie Hall.”

“So you’ll try humming literature to make sure you don’t write any.’’

“It would be an honest choice.”

“You think so?”

Diotallevi and Belbo, both from Piedmont, often claimed that any good Piedmontese had the ability to listen politely, look you in the eye, and say “You think so?” in a tone of such apparent sincerity that you immediately felt his profound disapproval. I was a barbarian, they used to say: such subtleties would always be lost on me.

“Barbarian?” I would protest. “I may have been born in Milan, but my family came from Val d’Aosta.”

“Nonsense,” they said. “You can always tell a genuine Piedmontese immediately by his skepticism.”

“I’m a skeptic.”

“No, you’re only incredulous, a doubter, and that’s different.”

I knew why Diotallevi distrusted Abulafia. He had heard that word processors could change the order of letters. A test, thus, might generate its opposite and result in obscure prophecies. “It’s a game of permutation,” Belbo said, trying to explain. “Temurah? Isn’t that the name for it? Isn’t that what the devout rabbi does to ascend to the Gates of Splendor?’’

“My dear friend,” Diotallevi said, “you’ll never understand anything. It’s true that the Torah—the visible Jbrah, that is—is only one of the possible permutations of the letters of the eternal Torah, as God created it and delivered it to the angels. By rearranging the letters of the book over the centuries, we may someday arrive again at the original Torah. But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest. And in an office! No, the Book must be murmured day after day in a little ghetto hovel where you learn to lean forward and keep your arms tight against your hips so there will be as little space as possible between the hand that holds the Book and the hand that turns the pages. And if you moisten your fingers, you must raise them vertically to your lips, as if nibbling unleavened bread, and drop no crumb. The word must be eaten very slowly. It must melt on the tongue before you can dissolve it and reorder it. And take care not to slobber it onto your caftan. If even a single letter is lost, the thread that is about to link you with the higher sefirot is broken. To this Abraham Abulafia dedicated his life, while your Saint Thomas was toiling to find God with his five paths.

“Abraham Abulafia’s Hokhmath ha-Zerufvtas at once the science of the combination of letter and the science of the purification of the heart. Mystic logic, letters whirling in infinite change, is the world of bliss, it is the music of thought, but see that you proceed slowly, and with caution, because your machine may bring you delirium instead of ecstasy. Many of Abulafia’s disciples were unable to walk the fine line between contemplation of the names of God and the practice of magic. They manipulated the names in an effort to turn them into a talisman, an instrument of dominion over nature, unaware—as you are unaware, with your machine—that every letter is bound to a part of the body, and shifting a consonant without the knowledge of its power may affect a limb, its position or nature, and then you find yourself deformed, a monster. Physically, for life; spiritually, for eternity.”

“Listen,” Belbo said to him then. “You haven’t discouraged me, you know. On the contrary. I have Abulafia—that’s what I’m calling him—at my command, the way our friends used to have the golem. Only, my Abulafia will be more cautious and respectful. More modest. The problem is to find all the permutations of the name of God, isn’t it? Well, this manual has a neat little program in Basic for listing all possible sequences of four letters. It seems tailor-made for YHVH. Should I give it a whirl?” And he showed Diotallevi the program; Diotallevi had to agree it looked cabalistic:

10  REM anagrams

20  INPUT L$(1), L$(2), L$(3), L$(4)

30  PRINT

40  FOR I1 = 1 TO 4

50  FOR I2 = 1 TO 4

60  IF I2 = I1 THEN 130

70  FOR I3 = 1 TO 4

80  IF I3 = I1 THEN 120

90  IF I3 = I1 THEN 120

100 LET I4 = 10-(I1+I2+I3)

110 LPRINT L$(I1);L$(I2);L$(I3);L$(I4)

120 NEXT I3

130 NEXT I2

140 NEXT I1

150 END

“Try it yourself. When it asks for input, type in Y, H, V, H, and press the ENTER key. But you may be disappointed. There are only twenty-four possible permutations.”

“Holy Seraphim! What can you do with twenty-four names of God? You think our wise men hadn’t made that calculation? Read the Sefer Yesirah, Chapter Four, Section Sixteen. And they didn’t have computers. ‘Two Stones make two Houses. Three Stones make six Houses. Four Stones make twenty-four Houses. Five Stones make one hundred and twenty Houses. Six Stones make seven hundred and twenty Houses. Seven Stones make five thousand and forty Houses. Beyond this point, think of what the mouth cannot say and the ear cannot hear. ‘ You know what this is called today? Factor analysis. And you know why the Tradition warns that beyond this point a man should quit? Because if there were eight letters in the name of God, there would be forty thousand three hundred and twenty permutations, and if ten, there would be three million six hundred twenty-eight thousand eight hundred, and the permutations of your own wretched little name, first name and last, would come to almost forty million. Thank God you don’t have a middle initial, like so many Americans, because then there would be more than four hundred million. And if the names of God contained twenty-seven letters — in the Hebrew alphabet there are no vowels, but twenty -two consonants plus five variants— then the number of His possible names would have twenty-nine digits. Except that you have to allow for repetitions, because the name of God could be aleph repeated twenty-seven times, in which case factor analysis is of no use: with repetitions you’d have to take twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh power, which is, I believe, something like four hundred forty-four billion billion billion billion. Four times ten with thirty-nine zeros after it.”

“You’re cheating, trying to scare me. I’ve read your Sefer Yesirah, too. There are twenty-two fundamental letters, and with them—with them alone—God formed all creation.”

“Let’s not split hairs. Five, at this order of magnitude, won’t help. If you say twenty-two to the twenty-second power instead of twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh, you still come up with something like three hundred and forty billion billion billion. On the human scale, it doesn’t make much difference. If I counted one, two, three, and so on, one number every second, it would take me almost thirty-two years to get to one lousy little billion. And it’s more complicated than that, because cabala can’t be reduced to the Sefer Yesirah alone. Besides which, there’s a good reason why any real permutation of the Torah must include all twenty-seven letters. It’s true that if the last five letters fall in the middle of a word, they are transformed into their normal variant. But not always. In Isaiah 9:2, for instance, there’s the word “LMRBH,” lemarbah—which, note the coincidence, means to multiply—but the mem in the middle is written as a final mem.”

“Why is that?”

“Every letter corresponds to a number. The normal mem is forty, but the final mem is six hundred. This has nothing to do with temurah, which teaches permutation; it involves, rather, gematria, which seeks sublime affinities between words and their numeric values. With the final mem the word “LMRBH” totals not two hundred and seventy-seven but eight hundred and thirty-seven, and thus is equivalent to ThThZL, or thath zal, which means ‘he who gives profusely.’ So you can see why all twenty-seven letters have to be considered: it isn’t just the sound that matters, but the number too. Which brings us to my calculation. There are more than four hundred billion billion billion billion possibilities. Have you any idea how long it would take to try them all out, using a machine? And I’m not talking about your miserable little computer. At the rate of one permutation per second, you would need seven billion billion billion billion minutes, or one hundred and twenty-three million billion billion billion hours, which is a little more than five million billion billion billion days, or fourteen thousand billion billion billion years, which comes to a hundred and forty billion billion billion centuries, or fourteen billion billion billion millennia. But suppose you had a machine capable of generating a million permutations per second. Just think of the time you’d save with your electronic wheel: you’d need only fourteen thousand billion billion millennia!

“The real and true name of God, the secret name, is as long as the entire Torah, and there is no machine in the world capable of exhausting all its permutations, because the Torah itself is a permutation with repetitions, and the art of temurah tells us to change not the twenty-seven letters of the alphabet but each and every character in the Torah, for each character is a letter unto itself, no matter how often it appears on other pages. The two hes in the name YHVH therefore count as two different letters. And if you want to Calculate all the permutations of all the characters in the entire Torah, then all the zeros in the world will not be enough for you. But go ahead, do what you can with your pathetic little accountant’s machine. A machine does exist, to be sure, but it wasn’t manufactured in your Silicon Valley: it is the holy cabala, or Tradition, and for centuries the rabbis have been doing what no computer can do and, let us hope, will never be able to do. Because on the day all the combinations are exhausted, the result should remain secret, and in any case the universe will have completed its cycle—and we will all be consumed in the dazzling glory of the great Metacyclosynchro-tron.”

“Amen,” Jacopo Belbo said.

Diotallevi was already driving him toward these excesses, and I should have kept that in mind. How often had I seen Belbo, after office hours, running programs to check Diotallevi’s calculations, trying to show him that at least Abu could give results in a few seconds, not having to work by hand on yellowing parchment or use antediluvian number systems that did not even include zero? But Abu gave his answers in exponential notation, so Belbo was unable to daunt Diotallevi with a screen full of endless zeros: a pale visual imitation of the multiplication of combinatorial universes, of the exploding swarm of all possible worlds.

After everything that had happened, it seemed impossible to me, I thought as I stared at the Rosicrucian engraving, that Belbo would not have returned to those exercises on the name of God in selecting a password. And if, as I guessed, he was also preoccupied with numbers like thirty-six and one hundred and twenty, they would enter into it, too. He would not have simply combined the four Hebrew letters, knowing that four Stones made only twenty-four Houses.

But he might have played with the Italian transcription, which contained two vowels. With six letters—lahveh—he had seven hundred and twenty permutations at his disposal. The repetitions didn’t count, because Diotallevi had said that the two hes must be taken as two different letters. Belbo could have chosen, say, the thirty-sixth or the hundred and twentieth.

I had arrived at Belbo’s at about eleven; it was now one. I would have to write a program for anagrams of six letters, and the best way to do that was to modify the program I already had written for four.

I needed some fresh air. I went out, bought myself some food, another bottle of whiskey.

I came back, left the sandwiches in a corner, and started on the whiskey as I inserted the Basic disk and went to work. I made the usual mistakes, and the debugging took me a good half hour, but by two-thirty the program was functional and the seven hundred and twenty names of God were running down the screen.

iahueh

iahuhe

iahtuh

iahehu

iahhve

iahhev

iauheh

iauhhe

iauehh

iauehh

iauhhe

iauhih

iaehuh

iaehhv

iaeuhh

iaeuhh

iaehhu

iaehuh

iahhu*

iahhev

lahuhe

iahueh

iahehv

iaheuh

ihaueh

ihauhe

ihaeuh

ihaehu

ihahue

ihahcu

i hwaeh

ihuahe

ihueah

ihueha

ihuhae

ihuhea

iheauh

iheahv

iheuah

iheuha

Ihehau

ihehva

ihhaue

ihhaev

ihhuae

ihhuea

ihheau

ihheua

iuaheh

iuahhe

iuaehh

iuaehh

iuahhe

i uahth

iuhaeh

i uhahe

iuehah

iuehha

iuhahe

iuhaeh

i uhhae

iuhhea

iuheah

iuheha

itahuh

i eahhu

ieavhh

ieauhh

ieahhv

ieahuh

iehauh

iehahu

iehuah

iehuha

iehhau

iehhua

itvahh

ieuahh

ievhah

ieuhha

iiuhah

ieuhha

iehahu

iehauh

iehhau

iehhva

iehwah

iehMha

lhahue

ihaheu

ihauhe

ihaueh

ihaehv

ihaeuh

ihhaue

i hhaeu

ihhuae

ihhuea

ihheau

ihheua

ihuahe

ihuaeh

ihuhae

ihuhea

ihueah

ihueha

iheahu

iheauh

ihehau

ihehua

iheuah

iheuha

aihueh

ai huhe

ai heuh

aihihu

ai hhue

aihheu

ai uheh

ai uhhe

aiuehh

aiuehh

aiuhhe

aiuh«h

aiehuh

aiehhv

aieuhh

aieuhh

ai ehhu

ai ehuh

aihhue

aihheu

aih-uhe

aihueh

ai hehu

aiheuh

ahiueh

ahiuhe

ahieuh

ahiehu

ahihue

ah i hew

ahuieh

ahu i he

ahueih

ahuehi

ahuh ie

ahvhei

ahe i uh

aheihu

ahe u i h

aheuhi

aheh i u

ahehui

ahhii/B

ahhieu

ahhuie

ahhye i

ahhei v

ahheu i

auiheh

aui hhe

auiehh

auiehh

au ihhe

auiheh

auh i eh

auhihe

auheih

auhehi

auhhie

auhhei

aueihh

auei hh

aueh ih

auehh i

auehih

auehhi

auhihe

avhieh

auhhie

aMhhei

auhe ih

auhehi

aeihuh

aeihhu

aeiuhh

aeiuhh

aeihhu

aeihuh

aehiuh

aeh i hu

aehuih

aehuhi

aehhiu

avhhu i

aeu i hh

aeuihh

aeuh i h

aeuhhi

aeuhih

a>uhhi

aehihu

aehi uh

aehhiu

aehhui

aehuih

aehuh i

ahihue

ahiheu

ahiuhe

ahiueh

ahiehu

ah iewh

ahhiue

ahhieu

ahhuie

ahhuei

ahheiu

ahheu i

ahu i he

ahy ieh

ahuhie

ahuhe i

ahue i h

ahuehi

ahe i hu

aheiuh

aheh i u

ahehui

ahevih

aheuhi

I took the pages from the printer without separating them, as if I were consulting the scroll of the Torah. I tried name number thirty-six. And drew a blank. A last sip of whiskey, then with hesitant fingers I tried name number one hundred and twenty. Nothing.

I wanted to die. Yet I felt that by now I was Jacopo Belbo, that he had surely thought as I was thinking. So I must have made some mistake, a stupid, trivial mistake. I was getting closer. Had Belbo, for some reason that escaped me, perhaps counted from the end of the list?

Casaubon, you fool, I said to myself. Of course he started from the end. That is, he counted from right to left. Belbo had fed the computer the name of God transliterated into Latin letters, including the vowels, but the word was Hebrew, so he had written it from right to left. The input hadn’t been IAHVEH, but HEVHAI. The order of the permutations had to be inverted.

I counted from the end and tried both names again.

Nothing.

This was all wrong. I was clinging stubbornly to an elegant but false hypothesis. It happens to the best scientists.

No, not the best scientists. To everyone. Only a month ago we had remarked that in three recent novels, at least three, there was a protagonist trying to find the name of God in a computer.

Belbo would have been more original. Besides which, when you choose a password, you pick something easy to remember, something that comes to mind automatically. Ihvhea, indeed! In that case he would have had to apply the notarikon to the temurah, to invent an acrostic to remember the word. Something like Imelda Has Vindicated Hiram’s Evil Assassination.

But why should Belbo have thought in DiotallevFs cabalistic terms? Belbo was obsessed by the Plan, and into the Plan we had put all sorts of other ingredients: Rosicrucians, Synarchy, Homunculi, the Pendulum, the Tower, the Druids, the Ennoia...

Ennoia. I thought of Lorenza Pellegrini. I reached out, picked up her censored photograph, looked at it, and an inopportune thought surfaced, the memory of that evening in Piedmont...I read the inscription on the picture: “For I am the first and the last, the honored and the hated, the saint and the prostitute. Sophia.”

She must have written that after Riccardo’s party. Sophia. Six letters. And why would they need to be scrambled? I was the one with the devious mind. Belbo loves Lorenza, loves her precisely because she is the way she is, and she is Sophia. And at that very moment she might be...No, no good. Belbo was devious, too. I recalled Diotallevi’s words: “In the second se-firah the dark aleph changes into the luminous aleph. From the Dark Point spring the letters of the Torah. The consonants are the body, the vowels the breath, and together they accompany the worshiper as he chants. When the chant moves, the consonants and vowels move with it, and from them rises Hokhmah— wisdom, knowledge, the primordial thought that contains, as in a box, everything, all that will unfold in creation. Hokhmah holds the essence of all that will emanate from it.”

And what was Abulafia, with its secret files? The box that held everything Belbo knew, or thought he knew. His Sophia. With her secret name he would enter Abulafia, the thing—the only thing—he made love to. But, making love to Abulafia, he thinks of Lorenza. So he needs a word that will give him possession of Abulafia but also serve as a talisman to give him possession of Lorenza, to penetrate Lorenza’s heart as he penetrates Abulafia’s. But Abulafia should be impenetrable to others, as Lorenza is impenetrable to him. It is Belbo’s hope that he can enter, know, and conquer Lorenza’s secret in the same way that he possesses Abulafia.

But I was making this up. My explanation was just like the Plan: substituting wishes for reality.

Drunk, I sat down at the keyboard again and tapped out SOPHIA. Again, nothing, and again the machine asked me politely: “Do you have the password?” You stupid machine, you feel no emotion at the thought of Lorenza.


6

Juda Leon se dio a permutaciones

De letras y a complejas variaciones

Y alfin pronuncio el Nombre que es la Clave,

La Puerta, el Eco, el Hue’sped y el Palacio...

—Jorge Luis Borges, El Golem

And then, in a fit of hate, as I worked again at Abulafia’s obtuse question “Do you have the password?” I typed: NO.

The screen began to fill with words, lines, codes, a flood of communication.

I had broken into Abulafia.

Thrilled by my triumph, I didn’t ask myself why Belbo had chosen that, of all words. Now I know, and I know, too, that in a moment of lucidity he understood what I have come to understand only now. But last Thursday, my only thought was that I had won.

I danced, clapped my hands, sang an old army song. Then I went to the bathroom and washed my face. When I came back, I began printing out the files, last files first, what Belbo had written just before his flight to Paris. As the printer chattered implacably, I devoured some food and drank some more whiskey.

When the printer stopped and I read what Belbo had written, I was aghast, unable to decide whether this was an extraordinary revelation or the wild raving of a madman.

What did I really know about Jacopo Belbo? What had I learned about him in the two years I worked at his side, almost every day? How much faith could I put in the word of a man who, by his own admission, was writing under exceptional circumstances, in a fog of alcohol, tobacco, and terror, completely cut off from the world for three days?

It was already night, Thursday, June 21. My eyes were watering. I had been staring at the screen and then at the printer’s pointillist anthill since morning. What I had read might be true or it might be false, but Belbo said he would call in the morning. I would have to wait here. My head swam.

I staggered into the bedroom and fell, still dressed, onto the unmade bed.

* * *

At around eight I awoke from a deep, sticky sleep, not realizing at first where I was. Luckily I found a can of coffee and was able to make myself a few cups. The phone didn’t ring. I didn’t dare go out to buy anything, because Belbo might call while I was gone.

I went back to the machine and began printing out the other disks in chronological order. I found games, exercises, and accounts of events I knew about, but told from Belbo’s private point of view, so that they were reshaped and appeared to me now in a different light. I found diary fragments, confessions, outlines for works of fiction made with the bitter obstinacy of a man who knows that his efforts are doomed to failure. I found descriptions of people I remembered, but now I saw them with different faces—sinister faces, unless this was because I was seeing them as part of a horrible final mosaic.

And I found a file devoted entirely to quotations taken from Belbo’s most recent reading. I recognized them immediately. Together we had pored over so many texts during those months...The quotations were numbered: one hundred and twenty in all. The number was probably a deliberate choice; if not, the coincidence was disturbing. But why those passages and not others?

Today I reinterpret Belbo’s files, the whole story they tell, in the light of that quotation file. I tell the passages like the beads of a heretical rosary. For Belbo some of them may have been an alarm, a hope of rescue. Or am I, too, no longer able to distinguish common sense from unmoored meaning? I try to convince myself that my reinterpretation is correct, but as recently as this morning, someone told me—me, not Belbo—that I was mad.

On the horizon, beyond the Bricco, the moon is slowly rising. This big house is filled with strange rustling sounds, termites perhaps, mice, or the ghost of Adelino Canepa...I dare not walk along the hall. I stay in Uncle Carlo’s study and look out the window. From time to time I step onto the terrace, to see if anyone is coming up the hill. I feel that I’m in a movie. How pathetic! “Here come the bad guys...”

Yet the hill is so calm tonight, a summer night now.

Adventurous, dubious, and demented were the events I reconstructed to pass the time, and to keep up my spirits, as I stood waiting in the periscope two nights ago, between five and ten o’clock, moving my legs as if to some Afro-Brazilian beat to help the blood circulate.

I thought back over the last few years, abandoning myself to the magic rolling of the atabaques, accepting the revelation that our fantasies, begun as a mechanical ballet, were about to be transformed, in this temple of things mechanical, into rite, possession, apparition, and the dominion of Exu.

In the periscope I had no proof that what I had learned from the printout was true. I could still take refuge in doubt. At midnight, perhaps, I would discover that I had come to Paris and hidden myself like a thief in a harmless museum of technology only because I had foolishly fallen into a macumba staged for credulous tourists, letting myself be hypnotized by the perfu-madores and the rhythm of the pontos.

As I recomposed the mosaic, my mood changed from disenchantment to pity to suspicion—and I wish that now I could rid myself of this present lucidity and recover that same vacillation between mystic illusion and the presentiment of a trap; recover what I thought then as I mulled over the documents I had read so frantically the day before and reread that morning at the airport and during the flight to Paris.

How irresponsibly Belbo, Diotallevi, and I had rewritten the world, or—as Diotallevi would have put it—had rediscovered what in the Book had been engraved at white heat between the black lines formed by the letters, like black insects, that supposedly made the Torah clear!

And now, two days later, having achieved, I hope, serenity and amor fati, I can tell the story I reconstructed so anxiously (hoping it was false) inside the periscope, the story I had read two days ago in Belbo’s apartment, the story I had lived for twelve years between Pilade’s whiskey and the dust of Garamond Press.


BINAH


7

Do not expect too much of the end of the world.

—Stanislaw J. Lee, Aforyzmy. Fraszki, Krakow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977, “Mysli nieuczesane”

To enter a university a year or two after 1968 was like being admitted to the Academic de Saint-Cyr in 1793: you felt your birth date was wrong. Jacopo Belbo, who was almost fifteen years older than I, later convinced me that every generation feels this way. You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature. My father, not because he was stingy, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. “The purpose of this magazine,” I pontificated, quoting the ad, “is to educate the reader in an entertaining way.” “The purpose of your magazine,” my father replied without looking up from his paper, “is the purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it can.”

That day, I began to be incredulous.

Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.

Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.

Incredulity doesn’t kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don’t believe in them, the collision of two ideas— both false—can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.

“You live on the surface,” Lia told me years later. “You sometimes seem profound, but it’s only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you tried to stand it up.”

“Are you saying I’m superficial?”

“No,” she answered. “What others call profundity is only a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. You walk in one side and come out another, and you’re in their universe, which can’t coexist with yours.”

(Lia, now that They have walked into the cube and invaded our world, I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. And it was all my fault: I made Them believe there was a depth, a depth that They, in their weakness, desired.)

What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can’t hurt, and you might get better.

So there I was, in the midst of the Revolution, or at least in the most stupendous imitation of it, seeking an honorable faith. It was honorable, for example, to take part in rallies and marches. I chanted “Fascist scum, your time has come!” with everybody else. I never threw paving stones or ball bearings, out of fear that others might do unto me as I did unto them, but I experienced a kind of moral excitement escaping along narrow downtown streets when the police charged. I would come home with the sense of having performed a duty. In the meetings I remained untouched by the disagreements that divided the various groups: I always had the feeling that if you substituted the right phrase for another phrase, you could move from group to group. I amused myself by finding the right phrases. I modulated.

At the demonstrations, I would fall in behind one banner or another, drawn by a girl who had aroused my interest, so I came to the conclusion that for many of my companions political activism was a sexual thing. But sex was a passion. I wanted only curiosity. True, in the course of my reading about the Templars and the various atrocities attributed to them, I had come across Carpocrates’s assertion that to escape the tyranny of the angels, the masters of the cosmos, every possible ignominy should be perpetrated, that you should discharge all debts to the world and to your own body, for only by committing every act can the soul be freed of its passions and return to its original purity. When we were inventing the Plan, I found that many addicts of the occult pursued that path in their search for enlightenment. According to his biographers, Aleister Crowley, who has been called the most perverted man of all time and who did everything that could be done with his worshipers, both men and women, chose only the ugliest partners of either sex. I have the nagging suspicion, however, that his lovemaking was incomplete.

There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you’d end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism. I was almost clubbed. A tall guy with a Tartar mustache said I was a fascist. I’ll never forget him. He later shaved his head and now belongs to a commune where they weave baskets.

I evoke the mood of those days only to reconstruct my state of mind when I began to visit Garamond Press and made friends with Jacopo Belbo. I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote “I am that I am,” for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

That’s why I wisely chose philology. The University of Milan was the place to be in those years. Everywhere else in the country students were taking over classrooms and telling the professors they should teach only proletarian sciences, but at our university, except for a few incidents, a constitutional pact—or, rather, a territorial compromise—held. The Revolution occupied the grounds, the auditorium, and the main halls, while traditional Culture, protected, withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, where it went on talking as if nothing had happened.

The result was that I could spend the morning debating proletarian matters downstairs and the afternoon pursuing aristocratic knowledge upstairs. In these two parallel universes I lived comfortably and felt no contradiction. I firmly believed that an egalitarian society was dawning, but I also thought that the trains, for example, in this better society ought to run better, and the militants around me were not learning how to shovel coal into the furnace, work the switches, or draw up timetables. Somebody had to be ready to operate the trains.

I felt like a kind of Stalin laughing to himself, somewhat remorsefully, and thinking: “Go ahead, you poor Bolsheviks. I’m going to study in this seminary in Tiflis, and we’ll see which one of us gets to draft the Five-Year Plan.”

Perhaps because I was always surrounded by enthusiasm in the morning, in the afternoon I came to equate learning with distrust. I wanted to study something that confined itself to what could be documented, as opposed to what was merely a matter of opinion.

For no particular reason I signed up for a seminar on medieval history and chose, for my thesis subject, the trial of the Templars. It was a story that fascinated me from the moment I first glanced at the documents. At that time, when we were struggling against those in power, I was wholeheartedly outraged by the trial in which the Templars, through evidence it would be generous to call circumstantial, were sentenced to the stake. Then I quickly learned that, for centuries after their execution, countless lovers of the occult persisted in looking for them, seeking everywhere, without ever producing proof of their existence. This visionary excess offended my incredulity, and I resolved to waste no more time on these hunters of secrets. I would stick to primary sources. The Templars were monastic knights; their order was recognized by the Church. If the Church dissolved that order, as in fact it had seven centuries ago, then the Templars could no longer exist. Therefore, if they existed, they weren’t Templars. I drew up a bibliography of more than a hundred books, but in the end read only about thirty of them.

It was through the Templars that I first got to know Jacopo Belbo—at Pilade’s toward the end of ‘72, when I was at work on my thesis.


8

Having come from the light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from them.

—Fragment of TUrfa’n M7

In those days Pilade’s Bar was a free port, a galactic tavern where alien invaders from Ophiulco could rub elbows peaceably with the soldiers of the Empire patrolling the Van Alien belt. It was an old bar near one of the navigli, the Milan canals, ^with a zinc counter and a billiard table. Local tram drivers and artisans would drop in first thing in the morning for a glass of white wine. In ‘68 and in the years that followed, Pilade’s became a kind of Rick’s Cafe, where Movement activists could play cards with a reporter from the bosses’ newspaper who had come in for a whiskey after putting the paper to bed, while the first trucks were already out distributing the Establishment’s lies to the newsstands. But at Pilade’s the reporter also felt like an exploited proletarian, a producer of surplus value chained to an ideological assembly line, and the students forgave him.

Between eleven at night and two in the morning you might see a young publisher, an architect, a crime reporter trying to work his way up to the arts page, some Brera Academy painters, a few semisuccessful writers, and students like me.

A minimum of alcoholic stimulation was the rule, and old Pilade, while he still stocked his big bottles of white for the tram drivers and the most aristocratic customers, replaced root beer and cream soda with petillant wines with the right labels for the intellectuals and Johnnie Walker for the revolutionaries. I could write the political history of those years based on how Red Label gradually gave way to twelve-year-old Ballantine and then to single malt.

At the old billiard table the painters and motormen still challenged each other to games, but with the arrival of the new clientele, Pilade also put in a pinball machine.

I was never able to make the little balls last. At first I attributed that to absent-mindedness or a lack of manual dexterity. I learned the truth years later after watching Lorenza Pellegrini play. At the beginning I hadn’t noticed her, but then she came into focus one evening when I followed the direction of Belbo’s gaze.

Belbo had a way of standing at the bar as if he were just passing through (he had been a regular there for at least ten years). He often took part in conversations, at the counter or at a table, but almost always he did no more than drop some short remark that would instantly freeze all enthusiasm, no matter what subject was being discussed. He had another freezing technique: asking a question. Someone would be talking about an event, the whole group would be completely absorbed, then Belbo, turning his pale, slightly absent eyes on the speaker, with his glass at hip level, as though he had long forgotten he was drinking, would ask, “Is that a fact?” Or, “Really?” At which point everyone, including the narrator, would suddenly begin to doubt the story. Maybe it was the way Belbo’s Piedmont drawl made his statements interrogative and his interrogatives taunting. And he had yet another Piedmont trick: looking into his interlocutor’s eyes, but as if he were avoiding them. His gaze didn’t exactly shirk dialogue, but he would suddenly seem to concentrate on some distant convergence of parallel lines no one had paid attention to. He made you feel that you had been staring all this time at the one place that was unimportant.

It wasn’t just his gaze. Belbo could dismiss you with the smallest gesture, a brief interjection. Suppose you were trying hard to show that it was Kant who really completed the Coper-nican revolution in modern philosophy, suppose you were staking your whole future on that thesis. Belbo, sitting opposite you, with his eyes half-closed, would suddenly look down at his hands or at his knee with an Etruscan smile. Or he would sit back with his mouth open, eyes on the ceiling, and mumble, “Yes, Kant...” Or he would commit himself more explicitly, in an assault on the whole system of transcendental idealism: “You really think Kant meant all that stuff?” Then he would look at you with solicitude, as if you, and not he, had disturbed the spell, and he would then encourage you: “Go ahead, go ahead. I mean, there must be something to it. The man had a mind, after all.”

But sometimes Belbo, when he became really angry, lost his composure. Since loss of composure was the one thing he could not tolerate in others, his own was wholly internal—and regional. He would purse his lips, raise his eyes, then look down, tilt his head to the left, and say in a soft voice: “Ma gavte la nata.” For anyone who didn’t know that Piedmontese expression, he would occasionally explain: “Ma gavte la nata. Take out the cork.” You say it to one who is full of himself, the idea being that what causes him to swell and strut is the pressure of a cork stuck in his behind. Remove it, and phsssssh, he returns to the human condition.

Belbo’s remarks had a way of making you see the vanity of things, and they delighted me. But I drew the wrong conclusion from them, considering them an expression of supreme contempt for the banality of other people’s truth.

Now, having breached the secret of Abulafia and, with it, Belbo’s soul, I see that what I thought disenchantment and a philosophy of life was a form of melancholy. His intellectual disrespect concealed a desperate thirst for the Absolute. This was not immediately obvious, because Belbo had many moods-irresponsibility, hesitation, indifference—and there were also moments when he relaxed and enjoyed conversation, asserting absolutely contradictory ideas with lighthearted disbelief. Then he and Diotallevi would create handbooks for impossibilities, or invent upside-down worlds or bibliographical monstrosities. When you saw him so enthusiastically talkative, constructing his Rabelaisian Sorbonne, there was no way of knowing how much he suffered at his exile rrom the faculty of theology, the real one.

I had deliberately thrown that address away; he had mislaid it and could never resign himself to the loss.

In Abulafia’s files I found many pages of a pseudo diary that Belbo had entrusted to the password, confident that he was not betraying his often-repeated vow to remain a mere spectator of the world. Some entries carried old dates; obviously he had put these on the computer out of nostalgia, or because he planned to recycle them eventually. Others were more recent, after the advent of Abu. His writing was a mechanical game, a solitary pondering on his own errors, but it was not—he thought—”creation,” for creation had to be inspired by love of someone who is not ourselves.

But Belbo, without realizing it, had crossed that Rubicon; he was creating. Unfortunately. His enthusiasm for the Plan came from his ambition to write a book. No matter if the book were made entirely of errors, intentional, deadly errors. As long as you remain in your private vacuum, you can pretend you are in harmony with the One. But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil.

FILENAME: A bevy of fair women

It’s like this: toutes les femmes que j’ai rencontrdes se dressent aux horizons—avec les gestes piteux et les regards tristes des semaphores sous la pluie...

Aim high, Belbo. First love, the Most Blessed Virgin. Mama singing as she holds me on her lap as if rocking me though I’m past the age for lullabies, but I asked her to sing because I love her voice and the lavender scent of her bosom. “O Queen of Heaven fair and pure, hail, O daughter, queen demure, hail, mother of our Savior!”

Naturally, the first woman in my life was not mine. By definition she was not anyone’s. I fell immediately in love with the only person capable of doing everything without me.

Then, Marilena (Marylena? Mary Lena?). Describe the lyric twilight, her golden hair, big blue bow, me standing in front of the bench with my nose upward, she tightrope-walking on the top rail of the back, swaying, arms outstretched for balance (delicious extrasystoles!), skirt flapping around her pink thighs. High above me, unattainable.

Sketch: that same evening as Mama sprinkles talcum powder on my sister’s pink skin. I ask when her wee-wee will finally grow out. Mania’s answer is that little girls don’t grow wee-wees, they stay like that. Suddenly I see Mary Lena again, the white of her underpants visible beneath the fluttering blue skirt, and I realize that she is blond and haughty and inaccessible because she is different. No possible relationship; she belongs to another race.

My third woman, swiftly lost in the abyss, where she has plunged. She has died in her sleep, virginal Ophelia amid flowers on her bier. The priest is reciting the prayer for the dead, when suddenly she sits up on the catafalque, pale, frowning, vindictive, pointing her finger, and her voice cavernous: “Don’t pray for me, Father. Before I fell asleep last night, I had an impure thought, the only one in my life, and now I am damned.” Find the book of my first communion. Does it have this illustration, or did I make the whole thing up? She must have died while thinking of me; I was the impure thought, desiring the untouchable Mary Lena, she of a different species and fate. I am guilty of her damnation, I am guilty of the damnation of all women who are damned. It is right that I should not have had these three women: my punishment for wanting them.

I lose the first because she’s in paradise, the second because she’s in purgatory envying the penis that will never be hers, and the third because she’s in hell. Theologically symmetrical. But this has already been written.

On the other hand, there’s the story of Cecilia, and Cecilia is here on earth. I used to think about her before falling asleep: I would be climbing the hill on my way to the farm for milk, and when the partisans started shooting at the roadblock from the hill opposite, I pictured myself rushing to her rescue, saving her from the horde of Fascist brigands who chased her, brandishing their weapons. Blonder than Mary Lena, more disturbing than the maiden in the sarcophagus, more pure and demure than the Virgin—Cecilia, alive and accessible. I could have talked to her so easily, for I was sure she could love one of my species. And, in fact, she did. His name was Papi; he had wispy blond hair and a tiny skull, was a year older than I, and had a saxophone. I didn’t even have a trumpet. I never saw the two of them together, but all the kids at Sunday School laughed, poked one another in the ribs, and whispered, giggling, that the pair made love. They were probably lying, little peasants, horny as goats, but they were probably right that she (Marylena Cecilia bride and queen) was accessible, so accessible that someone had already gained access to her. In any case—the fourth case—I was out in the cold.

Could a story like this be made into a novel? Perhaps I should write, instead, about the women I avoid because I can have them. Or could have had them. Same story.

If you can’t even decide what the story is, better stick to editing books on philosophy.


9

In his right hand he held a golden trumpet.

—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, I

In this file, I find the mention of a trumpet. The day before yesterday, in the periscope, I wasn’t aware of its importance. The file had only one reference to it, and that marginal.

During the long afternoon at the Garamond office, Belbo, tormented by a manuscript, would occasionally look up and try to distract me, too, as I sat at the desk across from his sorting through old engravings of the World Fair. Then he would drift into reminiscence, prompt to ring down the curtain if he suspected I was taking him too seriously. He would recall scenes from his past, but only to illustrate a point, to castigate some vanity.

“I wonder where all this is heading?” he remarked one day.

“Do you mean the twilight of Western civilization?”

“Twilight? Let the sun handle twilight. No. I was talking about our writers. This is my third manuscript this week: one on Byzantine law, one on the Finis Austriae, and one on the poems of the Earl of Rochester. Three very different subjects, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would.”

“Yet in all these manuscripts, at one point or another, Desire appears, and the Object of Desire. It must be a trend. With the Earl of Rochester I can understand it, but Byzantine law?”

“Just reject them.”

“I can’t. All three books have been funded by the National Research Council. Actually, they’re not that bad. Maybe I’ll just call the three authors and ask them to delete those parts. The Desire stuff doesn’t make them look good either.”

“What can the Object of Desire possibly be in Byzantine law?”

“Oh, you can slip it in. If there ever was an Object of Desire in Byzantine law, of course, it wasn’t what this guy says it was. It never is.”

“Never is what?”

“What you think it is. Once—I was five or six—I dreamed I had a trumpet. A gold trumpet. It was one of those dreams where you can feel honey flowing in your veins; you know what I mean? A kind of prepubescent wet dream. I don’t think IVe ever been as happy as I was in that dream. When I woke up, I realized there was no trumpet, and I started crying. I cried all day. This was before the war—it must have been ‘38-a time of poverty. If I had a son today and saw him in such despair, I’d say, ‘All right, I’ll buy you a trumpet.’ It was only a toy, after all, it wouldn’t have cost a fortune. But my parents never even considered such a thing. Spending money was a serious business in those days. And they were serious, too, about teaching a child he couldn’t have everything he wanted. ‘I can’t stand cabbage soup,’ I’d tell them—and it was true, for God’s sake; cabbage made me sick. But they never said: ‘Skip the soup today, then, and just eat your meat.’ We may have been poor, but we still had a first course, a main course, and fruit. No. It was always: ‘Eat what’s on the table.’ Sometimes, as a compromise, my grandmother would pick the cabbage out of my bowl, stringy piece by stringy piece. Then I’d have to eat the expurgated soup, which was more disgusting than before. And even this was a concession my father disapproved of.”

“But what about the trumpet?”

He looked at me, hesitant. “Why are you so interested in the trumpet?”

“I’m not. You were the one who brought it up, to show how the Object of Desire is never what others think.”

“The trumpet...My uncle and aunt from *** arrived that evening. They had no children, and I was their favorite nephew. Well, when they saw me bawling over my dream trumpet, they said they would fix everything: tomorrow we would go to the department store where there was a whole counter of toys-wonder of wonders—and I’d have the trumpet I wanted. I didn’t sleep all night, and I couldn’t sit still all the next morning. In the afternoon we went to the store, and they had at least three kinds of trumpets there. Little tin things, probably, but to me they were magnificent brass worthy of die Philharmonic. There was an army bugle, a slide trombone, and a trumpet of gold with a real trumpet mouthpiece but the keys of a saxophone. I couldn’t decide, and maybe I took too long. Wanting them all, I must have given the impression that I didn’t want any of them. Meanwhile, I believe my uncle and aunt looked at the price tags. My uncle and aunt weren’t stingy; on the other hand, a Bakelite clarinet with silver keys was much cheaper. ‘Wouldn’t you like this better?’ they asked. I tried it, produced a reasonable honk, and told myself that it was beautiful, but actually I was rationalizing. I knew they wanted me to take the clarinet because the trumpet cost a fortune. I couldn’t demand such a sacrifice from my relatives, having been taught that if a person offers you something you like, you must say, ‘No, thank you,’ and not just once, not ‘No, thank you,’ with your hand out, but ‘No, thank you’ until the giver insists, until he says, ‘Please, take it.’ A well-bred child doesn’t accept until that point. So I said maybe I didn’t care about the trumpet, maybe the clarinet was all right, if that’s what they wanted. And I looked up at them, hoping they would insist. They didn’t, God bless them, they were delighted to buy me the clarinet, since—they said—that was what I wanted. It was too late to backtrack. I got the clarinet.”

Belbo looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. “You want to know if I dreamed about the trumpet again?’’

“I want to know,” I said, “what the Object of Desire was.”

“Ah,” he said, turning back to his manuscript. “You see? You’re obsessed by the Object of Desire, too. But it’s not all that simple...Suppose I had taken the trumpet. Would I have been truly happy then? What do you think, Casaubon?”

“I think you would have dreamed about the clarinet.”

“I got the clarinet,” he concluded sharply, “but I never played it.”

“Never played it? Or never dreamed it?”

“Played it,” he said, underlining his words, and for some reason I felt like a fool.


10

And finally nothing is cabalistically inferred from vinum save VIS NUMerorum, upon which numbers this Magia depends.

—Cesare della Riviera, Il Mondo Magico degli Eroi, Mantua, Osanna, 1603, pp. 65-66

But I was talking about my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had exchanged a few words at Pilade’s, but I didn’t know much about him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the university.

“And what do you do?” he asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at Pilade’s. “Tu—buy me a drink,” a student wearing a parka would say to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi, one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he respected but hadn’t known long. He addressed me formally the whole time we worked together, and I valued that.

“And what do you do?” he asked, with what I now know was friendliness.

“In real life or in this theater?” I said, nodding at our surroundings.

“In real life.”

“I study.”

“You mean you go to the university, or you study?”

“You may not believe this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I’m finishing a thesis on the Templars.”

“What an awful subject,” he said. “I thought that was for lunatics.”

“No. I’m studying the real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the Templars, anyway?”

“I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he’s almost always a lunatic.”

“Don’t I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How do you identify the others?”

“I’ll explain. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Casaubon.”

“Casaubon. Wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?”

“I don’t know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we’re not related.”

“The next round’s on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”

“And that covers everybody?”

“Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

“Idealtypen.”

“Very good. You know German?”

“Enough for bibliographies.”

“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.”

“My German’s poor, so I’ll graduate. But let’s get back to your typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?”

“A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others.” He took a sip of his drink. “Hi there, beautiful,” he said. “Made that suicide attempt yet?”

“No,” the girl answered as she walked by. “I’m in a collective now.”

“Good for you,” Belbo said. He turned back to me. “Of course, there’s no reason one can’t have collective suicides, too.”

“Getting back to the lunatics.”

“Look, don’t take me too literally. I’m not trying to put the universe in order. I ‘m just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition.”

“All right. My round.”

“All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers’ offices. So let’s forget about them.”

“Let’s.”

“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He’s the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him.”

“Yes, I know a few of those.”

“Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don’t interest us, either. They’re never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so they don’t submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent. It’s a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read such things?”

“I do.”

“Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. ‘Vous etes negre?’ Murat asks. ‘Oui, mon general!’ the man answers. And Murat says: ‘Bravo, bravo, continuez!’ And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I’m celebrating a historic decision in my life. I’ve stopped drinking. Another round? Don’t answer, you’ll make me feel guilty. Pilade!”

“What about the morons?”

“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”

“Which they are.”

“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”

“You mean it’s okay to say something that’s wrong as long as the reason is right.”

“Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?”

“All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape.”

“Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something’s wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it’s bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons’ books are published, because they’re convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn’t do it, why should he?”

“Philosophers don’t either. Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I ^can conceive Him as a being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality.”

“True, but Gaunilon’s refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn’t exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary.”

“A duel between morons.”

“Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic mo-ronism.”

“We’re surrounded by morons.”

“Everyone’s a moron—save me and thee. Or, rather—I wouldn’t want to offend—save thee.”

“Somehow I feel that Godel’s theorem has something to do with all this.”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m a cretin. Pilade!”

“My round.”

“We’ll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true, because he’s a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen well.”

“That’s moronic thinking.”

“Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren’t, but Cretans don’t trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar.”

“Isn’t that moronic thinking?”

“You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel prize.”

“Hold on. Of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How’s that?”

“My God—to use the mot juste—I wouldn’t know. A moron-ism or not?”

“It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars.”

“And what if you were a moron?”

“I’d be in excellent, venerable company.”

“You’re right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”

“Thought as the coherent expression of moronism.”

“But what is moronism to one is incoherence to another.”

“Profound. It’s two o’clock, Pilade’s about to close, and we still haven’t got to the lunatics.”

“I’m getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all id6e fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

“Invariably?”

“There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden...”He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked for the check. “Speaking of the Templars, the other day some character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see it?”

“I’d be glad to. Maybe there’s something I can use.”

“I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number 1, Via Sincere Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit.”

“What makes you trust me?”

“Who says I trust you? But if you come, I’ll trust you. I trust curiosity.”

A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. “Comrades! There are fascists along the canal with chains!”

“Let’s get them,” said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over Krupskaya. “Come on, comrades!” And they all left.

“What do you want to do?” I asked, feeling guilty. “Should we go along?”

“No,” Belbo said. “Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkey effect. Everything I’ve said to you so far is false. Good night, Casaubon.”


11

His sterility was infinite. It was part of the ecstasy.

—E. M. Cioran, Le mauvais demiurge, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, “Pensees ftranglees”

The conversation at Pilade’s had shown me the public Belbo. But a keen observer would have been able to sense the melancholy behind the sarcasm. Not that Belbo’s sarcasm was the mask. The mask, perhaps, was the private confessing he did. Or perhaps his melancholy itself was the mask, a contrivance to hide a deeper melancholy.

There is a document in which he tried to fictionalize what he told me about his job when I went to Garamond the next day. It contains all his precision and passion, the disappointment of an editor who could write only through others while yearning for creativity of his own. It also has the moral severity that led him to punish himself for desiring something to which he did not feel entitled. Though he painted his desire in pathetic and garish hues, I never knew a man who could pity himself with such contempt.

FILENAME: Seven Seas Jim

Tomorrow, see young Cinti.

1. Good monograph, scholarly, perhaps a bit too scholarly.

2. In the conclusion, the comparison between Catullus, the poetae novi, and today’s avant-garde is the best part.

3. Why not make this the introduction?

4. Convince him. He’ll say that such flights of fancy don’t belong in a philological series. He’s afraid of alienating his professor, who is supposed to write the authoritative preface. A brilliant idea in the last two pages might go unnoticed, but at the beginning it would be too conspicuous, it would irritate the academic powers that be.

5. If, however, it is put into italics, in a conversational form, separate from the actual scholarship, then the hypothesis remains only a hypothesis and doesn’t undermine the seriousness of the work. And readers will be captivated at once; they’ll approach the book in a totally different way.

Am I urging him to an act of freedom—or am I using him to write my own book?

Transforming books with a word here, a word there. Demiurge for the work of others. Tapping at the hardened clay, at the statue someone else has already carved. Instead of taking soft clay and molding my own. Give Moses the right tap with the hammer, and he’ll talk.

See William S.

“I’ve looked at your work. Not bad. It has tension, imagination. Is this the first piece you’ve written?”

“No. I wrote another tragedy. It’s the story of two lovers in Verona who—”

“Let’s talk about this piece first, Mr. S. I was wondering why you set it in France. May I suggest—Denmark? It wouldn’t require much work. If you just change two or three names, and turn the chateau of Chalons-sur-Marne into, say, the castle of Elsinore...In a Nordic, Protestant atmosphere, in the shadow of Kierkegaard, so to speak, all these existential overtones...”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“I think I am. The work might need a little touching up stylistically. Nothing drastic; the barber’s snips before he holds up the mirror for you, so to speak. The father’s ghost, for example. Why at the end? I’d put him at the beginning. That way the father’s warning helps motivate the young prince’s behavior, and it establishes the conflict with the mother.’’

“Hmm, good idea. I’d only have to move one scene.”

“Exactly. Now, style. This passage here, where the prince turns to the audience and begins his monologue on action and inaction. It’s a nice speech, but he doesn’t sound, well, troubled enough. ‘To act or not to act? This is my problem.’ I would say not ‘my problem* but ‘the question.”That is the question.’ You see what I mean? It’s not so much his individual problem as it is the whole question of existence. The question whether to be or not to be...”

* * *

If you fill the world with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no, better to go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): “Here I am, the One, and they don’t know it.” If a pedestrian bumps into you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize and move on, even though you’re God and with a snap of your fingers can turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you can afford to be long-suffering.

A novel about God incognito. No. If I thought of it, somebody else must have already done it.

* * *

You’re an author, not yet aware of your powers. The woman you loved has betrayed you, life for you no longer has meaning, so one day, to forget, you take a trip on the Titanic and are shipwrecked in the South Seas. You are picked up, the sole survivor, by a pirogue full of natives, and spend long years, forgotten by the outside world, on this island inhabited only by Papuans. Girls serenade you with languorous songs, their swaying breasts barely covered by necklaces of pua blossoms. They call you Jim (they call all white men Jim), and one night an amber-skinned girl slips into your hut and says: “I yours, I with you.” How nice, to lie there in the evening on the veranda and look up at the Southern Cross while she fans your brow.

You live by the cycle of dawn and sunset, and know nothing else. One day a motorboat arrives with some Dutchmen aboard, you learn that ten years have passed; you could go away with these Dutchmen, but you refuse. You start a business trading coconuts, you supervise the hemp harvest, the natives work for you, you sail from island to island, and everyone calls you Seven Seas Jim. A Portuguese adventurer ruined by drink comes to work with you and redeems himself. By now you’re the talk of the Sunda, you advise the maharajah of Brunei in his campaign against the Dayaks of the river, you find an old cannon from the days of Tippo Sahib and get it back in working order. You train a squad of devoted Malayans whose teeth are blackened with betel. In a skirmish near the coral reef, old Sampan, his teeth blackened with betel, shields you with his own body; I gladly die for you, Seven Seas Jim. Good old Sampan, farewell, my friend.

Now you’re famous in the whole archipelago, from Sumatra to Port-au-Prince. You trade with the English, too; at the harbor master’s office in Darwin you’re registered as Kurtz, and now you’re Kurtz to everyone—only the natives still call you Seven Seas Jim. One evening, as the girl caresses you on the veranda and the Southern Cross shines brighter than ever overhead—ah! so different from the Great Bear—you realize you want to go back. Just for a little while, to see what, if anything, is left of you there.

You take a boat to Manila, from there a prop plane to Ball, then Samoa, the Admiralty Islands, Singapore, Tenerife, Timbuktu, Aleppo, Samarkand, Basra, Malta, and you’re home.

Eighteen years have passed, life has left its mark on you: your face is tanned by the trade winds, you’re older, perhaps also handsomer. Arriving, you discover that all the bookshops are displaying your books, in new critical editions, and your name has been carved into the pediment of your old school, where you learned to read and write. You are the Great Vanished Poet, the conscience of a generation. Romantic maidens kill themselves at your empty grave.

And then I encounter you, my love, with those wrinkles around your eyes, your face still beautiful though worn by memory and tender remorse. I almost pass you on the sidewalk, I’m only a few feet away, and you look at me as you look at all people, as though seeking another beyond their shadow. I could speak, erase the years. But to what end? Am I not, even now, fulfilled? I am like God, as solitary as He, as vain, and as despairing, unable to be one of my creatures. They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.

* * *

Go in peace, then, William S.! Famous, you pass and do not recognize me. I murmur to myself: To be or not to be. And I say to myself: Good for you, Belbo, good work. Go, old William S., and reap your meed of glory. You alone created; I merely made a few changes.

We mid wives, who assist at the births of what others conceive, should be refused burial in consecrated ground. Like actors. Except that actors play with the world as it is, while we play with a plurality of make-believes, with the endless possibilities of existence in an infinite universe...

How can life be so bountiful, providing such sublime rewards for mediocrity?


12

Sub umbra alarum tuarum, Jehova.

—Fama Fraternitatis, in Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1514, conclusion

The next day, I went to Garamond Press. Number 1, Via Sincere Renato, opened into a dusty passage, from which you could glimpse a courtyard and a rope-maker’s shop. To the right was an elevator that looked like something out of an industrial archeology exhibit. When I tried to take it, it shuddered, jerked, as if unable to make up its mind to ascend, so prudently I got out and climbed two flights of dusty, almost circular wooden stairs. I later learned that Mr. Garamond loved this building because it reminded him of a publishing house in Paris. A metal plate on the landing said GARAMOND PRESS, and an open door led to a lobby with no switchboard or receptionist of any kind. But you couldn’t go in without being seen from a little outer office, and I was immediately confronted by a person, probably female, of indeterminate age and a height that could euphemistically be called below average.

She accosted me in a foreign language that was somehow familiar; then I realized it was Italian, an Italian almost completely lacking in vowels. When I asked for Belbo, she led me down a corridor to an office in the back.

Belbo welcomed me cordially: “So, you are a serious person. Come in.” He had me sit opposite his desk, which was old, like everything else, and piled high with manuscripts, as were the shelves on the walls.

“I hope Gudrun didn’t frighten you,” he said.

“Gudrun? That...signora?”

“Signorina. Her name isn’t really Gudrun. We call her that because of her Nibelung look and because her speech is vaguely Teutonic. She wants to say everything quickly, so she saves time by leaving out the vowels. But she has a sense of justitia aequa-trix: When she types, she skips consonants.”

“What does she do here?”

“Everything, unfortunately. In every publishing house there is one person who is indispensable, the only one who can find things in the mess that he or she creates. At least when a manuscript is lost, you know whose fault it is.”

“She loses manuscripts, too?”

“Publishers are always losing manuscripts. I think sometimes that’s their main activity. But a scapegoat is always necessary, don’t you agree? My only complaint is that she doesn’t lose the ones I’d like to see lost. Contretemps, these, in what the good Bacon called The Advancement of Learning.’’

“How do they get lost?”

He spread his arms. “Forgive me, but that is a stupid question. If we knew how they got lost, they wouldn’t get lost.”

“Logical,” I said. “But look, the Garamond books I see here and there seem very carefully made, and you have an impressive catalog. Is it all done here? How many of you are there?”

“There’s a room for the production staff across the hall; next door is my colleague Diotallevi. But he does the reference books, the big projects, works that take forever to produce and have a long sales life. I do the university editions. It’s not really that much work. Naturally I get involved with some of the books, but as a rule we have nothing to worry about editorially, academically, or financially. Publications of an institute, or conference proceedings under the aegis of a university. If the author’s a beginner, his professor writes the preface. The author corrects the proofs, checks the quotations and footnotes, and receives no royalties. The book is adopted as a textbook, a few thousand copies are sold in a few years, and our expenses are covered. No surprises, no red ink.”

“What do you do, then?”

“A lot of things. For example, we publish some books at our own expense, usually translations of prestige authors, to add tone to the catalog. And then there are the manuscripts that just turn up, left at the door. Rarely publishable, but they all have to be read. You never can tell.”

“Do you like it?”

“Like it? It’s the only thing I know how to do well.”

We were interrupted by a man in his forties wearing a jacket a few sizes too big, with wispy light hair that fell over thick blond eyebrows. He spoke softly, as if he were instructing a child.

“I’m sick of this Taxpayer’s Vade Mecum. The whole thing needs to be rewritten, and I don’t feel like it. Am I intruding?”

“This is Diotallevi,” Belbo said, introducing us.

“Oh, you’re here to look at that Templar thing. Poor man. Listen, Jacopo, I thought of a good one: Urban Planning for Gypsies.”

“Great,” Belbo said admiringly. “I have one, too: Aztec Equitation.”

“Excellent. But would that go with Potio-section or the Adyn-ata?”

“We’ll have to see,” Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. “Potio-section...” He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. “Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no,” he said to Diotallevi. “It’s not a department, it’s a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all fall under the heading of Tetrapyloctomy.”

“What’s tetra...?” I asked.

“The art of splitting a hair four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We’re not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it’s the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn’t seem completely useless.”

“All right, gentlemen,” I said, “I give up. What are you two talking about?”

“Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given. The school’s aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.”

“And how many departments are there?”

“Four so far, but that may be enough for the whole syllabus. The Tetrapyloctomy department has a preparatory function; its purpose is to inculcate a sense of irrelevance. Another important department is Adynata, or Impossibilia. Like Urban Planning for Gypsies. The essence of the discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reasons for a thing’s absurdity. We have courses in Morse syntax, the history of antarctic agriculture, the history of Easter Island painting, contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading, Assyrio-Babylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent film.”

“How about crowd psychology in the Sahara?”

“Wonderful,” Belbo said.

Diotallevi nodded. “You should join us. The kid’s got talent, eh, Jacopo?”

“Yes, I saw that right away. Last night he constructed some moronic arguments with great skill. But let’s continue. What did we put in the Oxymoronics department? I can’t find my notes.”

Diotallevi took a slip of paper from his pocket and regarded me with friendly condescension. “In Oxymoronics, as the name implies, what matters is self-contradiction. That’s why I think it’s the place for Urban Planning for Gypsies.”

“No,” Belbo said. “Only if it were Nomadic Urban Planning. The Adynata concern empirical impossibilities; Oxymoronics deal with contradictions in terms.”

“Maybe. But what courses did we put under Oxymoronics? Oh, yes, here we are: Tradition in Revolution, Democratic Oligarchy, Parmenidean Dynamics, Heraclitean Statics, Spartan Sybaritics, Tautological Dialectics, Boolean Eristic.”

I couldn’t resist throwing in “How about a Grammar of Solecisms?”

“Excellent!” they both said, making a note.

“One problem,” I said.

“What?”

“If the public gets wind of this, people will show up with manuscripts.”

“The boy’s sharp, Jacopo,” Diotallevi said. “Unwittingly, we’ve drawn up a real prospectus for scholarship. We’ve shown the necessity of the impossible. Therefore, mum’s the word. But I have to go now.”

“Where?” Belbo asked.

“It’s Friday afternoon.”

“Jesus Christ!” Belbo said, then turned to me. “Across the street are a few houses where Orthodox Jews live; you know, black hats, beards, earlocks. There aren’t many of them in Milan. This is Friday, and the Sabbath begins at sundown, so in the afternoon they start preparing in the apartment across the way: polishing the candlesticks, cooking the food, setting everything up so they won’t have to light any fires tomorrow. They even leave the TV on all night, picking a channel in advance. Anyway, Diotallevi here has a pair of binoculars; he spies on them with delight, pretending he’s on the other side of the street.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Our Diotallevi thinks he’s Jewish.”

“What do you mean, ‘thinks’?” Diotallevi said, annoyed. “I am Jewish. Do you have anything against that, Casaubon?”

“Of course not.”

“Diotallevi is not Jewish,” Belbo said firmly.

“No? And what about my name? Just like Graziadio or Dios-iaconte. A traditional Jewish name. A ghetto name, like Sholom Aleichem.”

“Diotallevi is a good-luck name given to foundlings by city officials. Your grandfather was a foundling.”

“A Jewish foundling.”

“Diotallevi, you have pink skin, you’re practically an albino.”

“There are albino rabbits; why not albino Jews?”

“Diotallevi, a person can’t just decide to be a Jew the way he might decide to be a stamp collector or a Jehovah’s Witness. Jews are born. Admit it! You’re a gentile like the rest of us.”

“I’m circumcised.”

“Come on! Lots of people are circumcised, for reasons of hygiene. All you need is a doctor with a knife. How old were you when you were circumcised?”

“Let’s not nitpick.”

“No, let’s. Jews nitpick.”

“Nobody can prove my grandfather wasn’t Jewish.”

“Of course not; he was a foundling. He could have been anything, the heir to the throne of Byzantium or a Hapsburg bastard.”

“He was found near the Portico d’Ottavia, in the ghetto in Rome.”

“But your grandmother wasn’t Jewish, and Jewish descent is supposed to be matrilineal...”

“And skipping registry reasons—and municipal ledgers can also be read beyond the letter—there are reasons of blood. The blood in me says that my thoughts are exquisitely Talmudic, and it would be racist for you to claim that a gentile can be as exquisitely Talmudic as I am.”

He left. “Don’t pay any attention,” Belbo said. “We have this argument almost every day. The fact is, Diotallevi is a devotee of the cabala. But there were also Christian cabalists. Anyway, if Diotallevi wants to be Jewish, why should I object?”

“Why indeed. We’re all liberals here.”

“So we are.”

He lit a cigarette. I remembered why I had come. “You mentioned a manuscript about the Templars,” I said.

“That’s right...Let’s see. It was in a fake-leather folder...”He tried to pick a manuscript out of the middle of a pile without disturbing the others. A hazardous operation. Part of the pile fell to the floor. Now Belbo was holding the fake-leather folder.

I looked at the table of contents and the introduction. “It deals with the arrest of the Templars,” I said. “In 1307, Philip the Fair decided to arrest all the Templars in France. There’s a legend that two days before Philip issued the arrest warrant, the ox-drawn hay wain left the enclave of the Temple in Paris for an

unknown destination. They say that hidden in the wain was a group of knights led by one Aumont. These knights supposedly escaped, took refuge in Scotland, and joined a Masonic lodge in Kilwinning. According to the legend, they became part of the society of Freemasons, who served as guardians of the secrets of the Temple of Solomon. Ah, here we are; I thought so. This writer, too, claims that the origins of Masonry lie in the Templars’ escape to Scotland. A story that’s been rehashed for a couple of centuries, with no foundation to it. I can give you at least fifty pamphlets that tell the same tale, each cribbed from the other. Here, listen to this—just a page picked at random: ‘The proof of the Scottish expedition lies in the fact that even today, six hundred and fifty years later, there still exist in the world secret orders that hark back to the Temple Militia. How else is one to explain the continuity of this heritage?’ You see what I mean? How can the Marquis de Carabas not exist when Puss in Boots says he’s in the marquis’s service?”

“All right,” Belbo said, “I’ll throw it out. But this Templar business interests me. For once I have an expert handy, and I don’t want to let him get away. Why is there all this talk about the Templars and nothing about the Knights of Malta? No, don’t tell me now. It’s late. Diotallevi and I have to go to dinner with Signor Garamond in a little while. We should be through by about ten-thirty. I’ll try to persuade Diotallevi to drop by Pi-lade’s—he goes to bed early and usually doesn’t drink. Will you be there?”

“Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.’’


13

Li frere, li mestre du Temple

Qu’estoient rempli et ample

D’or et d’argent et de richesse

Et qui menoient tel noblesse,

Ou sont ils? que sont devenu?

—Chronique a la suite du roman de Favel

Et in Arcadia ego. That evening Pilade’s was the image of the golden age. One of those evenings when you feel that not only will there definitely be a revolution, but that the Association of Manufacturers will foot the bill for it. Where but at Pilade’s could you watch the bearded owner of a cotton mill, wearing a parka, play hearts with a future fugitive from justice dressed in a double-breasted jacket and tie? This was the dawn of great changes in style. Until the beginning of the sixties, beards were fascist, and you had to trim them, and shave your cheeks, in the style of Italo Balbo; but by ‘68 beards meant protest, and now they were becoming neutral, universal, a matter of personal preference. Beards have always been masks (you wear a fake beard to keep from being recognized), but in those years, the early seventies, a real beard was also a disguise. You could lie while telling the truth—or, rather, by making the truth elusive and enigmatic. A man’s politics could no longer be guessed from his beard. That evening, beards seemed to hover on clean-shaven faces whose very lack of hair suggested defiance.

I digress. Belbo and Diotallevi arrived tense, exchanging harsh whispers about the dinner they had just come from. Only later did I learn what Signer Garamond’s dinners were.

Belbo went straight to his favorite distillations; Diotallevi, after pondering at length, decided on tonic water. We found a little table in the back. Two tram drivers who had to get up early the next morning were leaving.

“Now then,” Diotallevi said, “these Templars...”

“But, really, you can read about the Templars anywhere...”

“We prefer the oral tradition,” Belbo said.

“It’s more mystical,” Diotallevi said. “God created the world by speaking, He didn’t send a telegram.”

“Fiat lux, stop,” Belbo said.

“Epistle follows,” I said.

“The Templars, then?” Belbo asked.

“Very well,” I said. “To begin with...”

“You should never begin with ‘To begin with,’ “ Diotallevi objected.

“To begin with, there’s the First Crusade. Godefroy worships at the Holy Sepulcher and fulfills his vow. Baudouin becomes the first king of Jerusalem. A Christian kingdom in the Holy Land. But holding Jerusalem is one thing; quite another, to conquer the rest of Palestine. The Saracens are down but not out. Life’s not easy for the new occupiers, and not easy for the pilgrims either. And then in 1118, during the reign of Baudouin II, nine young men led by a fellow named Hugues de Payns arrive and set up the nucleus of an order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ: a monastic order, but with sword and shield. The three classic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, plus a fourth: defense of pilgrims. The king, the bishop, everyone in Jerusalem contributes money, offers the knights lodging, and finally sets them up in the cloister of the old Temple of Solomon. From then on they are known as the Knights of the Temple.”

“But what were they really?”

“Hugues and the original eight others were probably idealists caught up in the mystique of the Crusade. But later recruits were most likely younger sons seeking adventure. Remember, the new kingdom of Jerusalem was sort of the California of the day, the place you went to make your fortune. Prospects at home were not great, and some of the knights may have been on the run for one reason or another. I think of it as a kind of Foreign Legion. What do you do if you’re in trouble? You join the Templars, see the world, have some fun, do a little fighting. They feed you and clothe you, and in the end, as a bonus, you save your soul. Of course, you had to be pretty desperate, because it meant going out into the desert, sleeping in a tent, spending days and days without seeing a living soul except other Templars, and maybe a Turk now and then. In the meantime, you ride under the sun, dying of thirst, and cut the guts out of other poor bastards.”

I stopped for a moment. “Maybe I’m making it sound too much like a Western. There was probably a third phase. Once the order became powerful, people may have wanted to join even if they were well off at home. By that time, though, you could be a Templar without having to go to the Holy Land; you could be a Templar at home, too. It gets complicated. Sometimes they sound like tough soldiers, and sometimes they show sensitivity. For example, you can’t call them racists. Yes, they fought the Moslems—that was the whole point—but they fought in a spirit of chivalry and with mutual respect. Once, when the ambassador of the emir of Damascus was visiting Jerusalem, the Templars let him say his prayers in a little mosque that had been turned into a Christian church. One day a Frank came in, was outraged to see a Moslem in a holy place, and started to rough him up. But the Templars threw the intolerant Frank out and apologized to the Moslem. Later on, this fraternization with the enemy helped lead to their ruin: one of the charges against them at their trial was that they had dealings with esoteric Moslem sects. Which may have been true. They were a little like the nineteenth-century adventurers who went native and caught the mal d’Af-rique. The Templars, lacking the usual monastic education, were slow to grasp the fine points of theology. Think of them as Lawrences of Arabia, who after a while start dressing like sheiks...But it’s difficult to get an objective picture of their behavior because contemporary Christian historiographers, William of Tyre, for example, take every opportunity to vilify them.”

“Why?”

“The Templars became too powerful too fast. It all goes back to Saint Bernard. You’re familiar with Saint Bernard, of course. A great organizer. He reformed the Benedictine order and eliminated decorations from churches. If a colleague got on his nerves, as Abelard did, he attacked him McCarthy-style and tried to get him burned at the stake. If he couldn’t manage that, he’d burn the offender’s books instead. And of course he preached the Crusade: Let us take up arms and you go forth...”

“You don’t care for him,” Belbo remarked.

“If I had my way, Saint Bernard would end up in one of the nastier circles of the inferno. Saint, hell! But he was good at self-promotion. Look how Dante treats him: making him the Madonna’s right-hand man. He got to be a saint because he buttered up all the right people. But to get back to the Templars. Bernard realized right away that this idea had possibilities. He supported the nine original adventurers, transformed them into a Militia of Christ. You could even say that the heroic view of the Templars was his invention. In 1128 he held a council in Troyes for the express purpose of defining the role of those new soldier-monks, and a few years later he wrote an elogium on them and drew up their rule, seventy-two articles. The articles are fun to read; there’s a little of everything in them. Daily Mass, no contact with excommunicated knights, though if one of them applies for admission to the Temple, he must be received in a Christian spirit. You see what I mean about the Foreign Legion. They’re supposed to wear simple white cloaks, no furs, at most a lambskin or a ram’s pelt. They’re forbidden to wear the curved shoes so fashionable at the time, and must sleep in their underwear, with one pallet, one sheet, and one blanket...”

“With the heat there, I can imagine the stink,” Belbo said.

“We’ll come to the stink in a minute. There were other tough measures in the rule: one bowl for each two men; eat in silence; meat three times a week; penance on Fridays; up at dawn every day. If the work has been especially heavy, they can sleep an extra hour, but in return they must recite thirteen Paters in bed. There is a master and a whole series of lower ranks, down to sergeants, squires, attendants, and servants. Every knight will have three horses and one squire, no decorations are allowed on bridles, saddles, or spurs. Simple but well-made weapons. Hunting forbidden, except for lions. In short, a life of penance and battle. And don’t forget chastity. The rule is particularly insistent about that. Remember, these are men who are not living in a monastery. They’re fighting a war, living in the world, if you can use that word for the rat’s nest the Holy Land must have been in those days. The rule says in no uncertain terms that a woman’s company is perilous and that the men are allowed to kiss only their mothers, sisters, and aunts.”

“Aunts, eh?” Belbo grumbled. “I’d have been more careful there...But if memory serves, weren’t the Templars accused of sodomy? There’s that book by Klossowski, The Baphomet. Baphomet was one of their satanic divinities, wasn’t he?”

“I’ll get to that, too. But think about it for a moment. You live for months and months in the desert, out in the middle of nowhere, and at night you share a tent with the guy who’s been eating out of the same bowl as you. You’re tired and cold and thirsty and afraid. You want your mama. So what do you do?”

“Manly love, the Theban legion,” Belbo suggested.

“The other soldiers haven’t taken the Templar vow. When a city is sacked, they get to rape the dusky Moorish maids with amber bellies and velvet eyes. And what is the Templar supposed to do amid the scent of the cedars of Lebanon? You can see why there was the popular saying: ‘To drink and blaspheme like a Templar.’ It’s like a chaplain in the trenches who drinks brandy and curses with his illiterate soldiers. The Templar seal depicts the knights always in pairs, one riding behind the other on the same horse. Now why should that be? The rule allows them three horses each. It must have been one of Bernard’s ideas, an attempt to symbolize poverty or perhaps their double role as monks and knights. But you can imagine what people must have said about it, two men galloping, one with his ass pressed against the other’s belly. But they may have been slandered...”

“They certainly were asking for it,” Belbo interrupted. “That Saint Bernard wasn’t stupid, was he?”

“Stupid, no. But he was a monk himself, and in those days monks had their own strange ideas about the body...I said before that maybe I was making this sound too much like a Western, but now that I think about it...Listen to what Bernard has to say about his beloved knights. I brought this quotation with me, because it’s worth hearing: ‘They shun and abhor mimes, magicians, and jugglers, lewd songs and buffoonery; they cut their hair short, for the apostle says it is shameful for a man to groom his hair. Never are they seen coiffed, and rarely washed. Their beards are unkempt, caked with dust and sweat from their armor and the heat.’ “

“I would hate to sleep in their quarters,” Belbo said.

“It’s always been characteristic of the hermit,” Diotallevi declared, “to cultivate a healthy filth, to humiliate his body. Wasn’t it Saint Macarius who lived on a column and picked up the worms that dropped from him and put them back on his body so that they, who were also God’s creatures, might enjoy their banquet?’’

“The stylite was Saint Simeon,” Belbo said, “and I think he stayed on that column so he could spit on the people who walked below.’’

“How I detest the cynicism of the Enlightenment,” Diotallevi said. “In any case, whether Macarius or Simeon, I’m sure there was a stylite with worms, but of course I’m no authority on the subject, since the follies of the gentiles don’t interest me.”

“Whereas your Gerona rabbis were spick and span,” Belbo said.

“They lived in squalor because you gentiles kept them in the ghetto. The Templars, on the other hand, chose to be squalid.”

“Let’s not go overboard,” I said. “Have you ever seen a platoon of recruits after a day’s march? The reason I’m telling you all this is to help you understand the dilemma of the Templar. He had to be mystic, ascetic, no eating, drinking, or screwing, but at the same time he roamed the desert cutting off the heads of Christ’s enemies; the more heads he cut off, the more points he earned for paradise. He stank, got hairier every day, and then Bernard insisted that after conquering a city he couldn’t jump on top of some young girl—or old hag, for that matter. And on moonless nights, when the simoom blew over the desert, he couldn’t seek any favors from his favorite fellow-soldier. How can you be a monk and a swordsman at the same time, disemboweling people one minute and reciting Ave Marias the next? They tell you not to look even your female cousin in the eye, but when you enter a city, after days of siege, the other Crusaders hump the caliph’s wife before your very eyes, and marvelous Shulammite women undo their bodices and say, Take me, Take me, but spare my life...No, the Templar had to stay hard, reciting compline, hairy and stinking, as Saint Bernard wanted him to. For that matter, if you just read the retraits...”

“The what?”

“The statutes of the order, drawn up rather late, after the order had put on its robe and slippers, so to speak. There’s nothing worse than an army when the war is over. At one point, for instance, brawling is forbidden, it’s forbidden to wound a Christian for revenge, forbidden to have commerce with women, forbidden to slander a brother. A Templar could not allow a slave to escape, lose his temper and threaten to defect to the Saracens, let a horse wander off, give away any animal except a dog or cat, be absent without leave, break the master’s seal, go out of the barracks at night, lend the order’s money without authorization, or throw his habit on the ground in anger.”

“From prohibitions you can tell what people normally do,” Belbo said. “It’s a way of drawing a picture of daily life.”

“Let’s see,” Diotallevi said. “A Templar, annoyed at something the brothers said or did that evening, rides out at night without leave, accompanied by a little Saracen boy and with three capons hanging from his saddle. He goes to a girl of loose morals and, bestowing the capons upon her, engages in illicit intercourse. During this debauchery, the Saracen boy rides off with the horse, and our Templar, even more sweat-covered and dirty than usual, crawls home with his tail between his legs. In an attempt to pass unnoticed, he slips some of the Temple’s money to the Jewish usurer, who is waiting like a vulture on its perch...”

“Thou hast said it, Caiaphas,” Belbo remarked.

“We’re talking in stereotypes here. With the money the Templar tries to recover, if not the Saracen boy, at least a semblance of a horse. But a fellow Templar hears about the misadventure, and one night—we know that envy is endemic in such communities—he drops some heavy hints at supper, when the meat is served. The captain grows suspicious, the suspect stammers, flushes, then draws his dagger and flings himself on his brother...”

“On the treacherous sycophant,” Belbo corrected him.

“On the treacherous sycophant, good. He flings himself on the wretch, slashing his face. The wretch draws his sword, an unseemly brawl ensues, the captain with the flat of his sword tries to restore order, the other brothers snigger...”

“Drinking and blaspheming like Templars,” Belbo said.

“God’s bodkin, in God’s name, ‘swounds, God’s blood,” I said.

“Our hero is enraged, and what does a Templar do when he’s enraged?”

“He turns purple,” Belbo suggested.

“Right. He turns purple, tears off his habit, and throws it on the ground.”

“How about: ‘You can shove this tunic, you can shove your goddamn temple!’ “ I suggested. “And then he breaks the seal with his sword and announces that he’s joining the Saracens.”

“Violating at least eight precepts at one blow.”

“Anyway,” I said, driving home my point, “imagine a man like that, who says he’s joining the Saracens. And one day the king’s bailiff arrests him, shows him the white-hot irons, and says: ‘Confess, knave! Admit you stuck it up your brother’s behind!”Who, me? Your irons make me laugh. I’ll show you what a Templar is! I’ll stick it up your behind, and the pope’s. And King Philip’s, too, if he comes within reach!’ “

“A confession! That must be how it happened,” Belbo said. “Then it’s off to the dungeon with him, and a coat of oil every day so he’ll burn better when the time comes.”

“They were just a bunch of children,” Diotallevi concluded.

We were interrupted by a girl with a strawberry birthmark on her nose; she had some papers in her hand and asked if we had signed the petition for the imprisoned Argentinean comrades.’ Belbo signed without reading it. “They’re even worse off than I am,” he said to Diotallevi, who was regarding him with a bemused expression. “He can’t sign,” Belbo said to the girl. “He belongs to a small Indian sect that forbids its members to write their own names. Many of them are in jail because of government persecution.” The girl looked sympathetically at Diotallevi and passed the petition to me.

“And who are they?” I asked.

“What do you mean, who are they? Argentinean comrades.”

“But what group do they belong to?”

“The Tacuaras, I think.”

“The Tacuaras are fascists,” I said. As if I knew one group from the other.

“Fascist pig,” the girl hissed at me. She left.

“What you are saying, then,” Diotallevi asked, “is that the Templars were just poor bastards?”

“No,” I said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to liven up the story. We were talking about the rank and file, but from the beginning the order received huge donations and little by little set up commanderies throughout Europe. Alfonso of Aragon, for example, gave them a whole region. In fact, in his will he wanted to leave the kingdom to them in the event that he died without issue. The Templars didn’t trust him, so they made a deal—took the money and ran, more or less. Except that instead of money it was half a dozen strongholds in Spain. The king of Portugal gave them a forest. Since the forest happened to be occupied by the Saracens, the Templars organized an attack, drove out the Moors, and in the process founded Coimbra. And these are just a few episodes. The point is this: Part of the order was fighting in Palestine, but the bulk of it stayed home. Then what happened? Let’s say someone has to go to Palestine. He needs money, and he’s afraid to travel with jewels and gold, so he leaves his fortune with the Templars in France, or in Spain, or in Italy. They give him a receipt, and he gets cash for it in the East.”

“A letter of credit,” Belbo said.

“That’s right. They invented the checking account long before the bankers of Florence. What with donations, armed conquests, and a percentage from their financial operations, the Templars became a multinational. Running an operation like that took men who knew what they were doing. Men who could convince Innocent II to grant them exceptional privileges. The order was allowed to keep its booty, and wherever they owned property, they were answerable not to the king, not to the bishops or to the patriarch of Jerusalem, but only to the pope. They were exempted from all tithes, but they had the right to impose their own tithes on the lands under their control...In short, the organization was always in the black, and nobody had the right to pry into it. You can see why the bishops and monarchs didn’t like them, though they couldn’t do without them. The Crusaders were terrible screwups. They marched off without any idea of where they were going or what they would find when they got there. But the Templars knew their way around. They knew how to deal with the enemy, they were familiar with the terrain and the art of fighting. The Order of the Temple had become a serious business, even though its reputation was based on the boasting of its assault troops.”

“And the boasting was empty?” Diotallevi asked.

“Often. Here again, what’s amazing is the gulf between their political and administrative skill on the one hand and their Green Beret style on the other: all guts and no brains. Let’s take the story of Ascalon—”

“Yes, let’s,” Belbo said, after a moment’s distraction as he greeted, with a great show of lust, a girl named Dolores.

She joined us, saying, “I must hear the story of Ascalon!”

“All right. One fine day the king of France, the Holy Roman emperor, King Baudouin HI of Jerusalem, and the grand masters of the Templars and the Hospitalers all decided to lay siege to Ascalon. They set out together: king, court, patriarch, priests carrying crosses and banners, and the archbishops of Tyre, Nazareth, Caesarea. It was like a big party, oriftammes and standards flying, tents pitched around the enemy city, drums beating. Ascalon was defended by one hundred and fifty towers, and the inhabitants had long been preparing for a siege: all the houses had slits made in the walls; they were like fortresses within the fortress. I mean, the Templars were smart fighters, they should have known these things. But no, everybody got excited, and they built battering rams and wooden towers: you know, those constructions on wheels that you push up to the enemy walls so you can hurl stones or firebrands or shoot arrows while the catapults sling rocks from a distance. The Ascalonites tried to set fire to the towers, but the wind was against them, and they burned their own walls instead, until in one place a wall collapsed. The attackers all charged the breach.

“And then a strange thing happened. The grand master of the Templars had a cordon set up so that only his men could enter the city. Cynics say he was trying to make sure that only the Templars would get the booty. A kinder explanation is that he feared a trap and wanted to send his own brave men in first. Either way, I wouldn’t make him head of a military academy. Forty Templars ran full steam straight through the city, came to a screeching halt in a great cloud of dust at the wall on the other side, looked at one another, and wondered what in hell they were doing there. Then they about-faced and ran back, racing past the Saracens, who pelted them with rocks and darts, slaughtering the lot of them, grand master included. Then they closed the breach, hung the corpses from the walls, and jeered at the Christians, with obscene gestures and horrid laughter.”

“The Moor is cruel,” Belbo said.

“Like children,” Diotallevi added.

“These Templars of yours were really crazy!” Dolores said with admiration.

“They remind me of Tom and Jerry,” Belbo said.

I felt a little guilty. After all, I had been living with the Templars for two years, and I loved them. Yet now, catering to the snobbery of my audience, I had made them sound like characters out of a cartoon. Maybe it was William of Tyre’s fault, treacherous historiographer that he was. I could almost see my Knights of the Temple, bearded and blazing, the bright red crosses on their snow-white cloaks, their mounts wheeling in the shadow of the Beauceant, their black-and-white banner. They had been so dazzlingly intent on their feast of death and daring. Perhaps the sweat Saint Bernard talked about was a bronze glow that lent a sarcastic nobility to their fearsome smiles as they celebrated their farewell to life...Lions in war, Jacques de Vitry called them, but sweet lambs in times of peace; harsh in battle, devout in prayer; ferocious to their enemies, but full of kindness toward their brothers. The white and the black of their banner were so apposite: to the friends of Christ they were pure; to His adversaries they were grim and terrible.

Pathetic champions of the faith, last glimmer of chivalry’s twilight. Why play any old Ariosto to them when I could be their Joinville? The author of the Histoire de Saint Louis had accompanied the sainted king to the Holy Land, acting as both scribe and soldier. I recalled now what he had written about the Templars. This was more than a hundred and eighty years after the order was founded, and it had been through enough crusades to undermine anyone’s ideals. The heroic figures of Queen Meli-sande and Baudouin the leper-king had vanished like ghosts; factional fighting in Lebanon—blood-soaked even then—had drawn to a close; Jerusalem had already fallen once; Barbarossa had drowned in Cilicia; Richard the Lion-Heart, defeated and humiliated, had gone home disguised as, of all things, a Templar; Christianity had lost the battle. The Moors’ view of the confederation of autonomous potentates united in the defense of their civilization was very different. They had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic? Then, in 1244, came the final, definitive fall of Jerusalem. The war, begun a hundred and fifty years earlier, was lost. The Christians had to lay down their arms in a land now devoted to peace and the scent of the cedars of Lebanon. Poor Templars. Your epic, all in vain.

Little wonder that in the tender melancholy of their faded, aging glory they lent an ear to the secret doctrines of Moslem mystics, hieratic guardians of hidden treasures. Perhaps that was how the legend of the Knights of the Temple was born, the legend with which some frustrated and yearning minds are still obsessed, the myth of a boundless power lying unused, unharnessed...

Even in Joinville’s day, the saint-king Louis, at whose table Aquinas dined, persisted in his belief in the crusade, despite two centuries of dreams ruined by the victors’ stupidity. Was it worth one more try? Yes, Louis said. And the Templars were ready and willing; they followed him into defeat, because that was their job. Without a crusade, how could they justify the Temple?

Louis attacks Damietta from the sea. The enemy shore glitters with pikes, halberds, oriflammes, shields, and scimitars. Fine-looking men, Joinville says chivalrously, who carry arms of gold struck by the sun. Louis could wait, but he decides to land at any cost. “My faithful followers, we will be invincible if we are inseparable in our charity. If we are defeated, we will be martyrs. If we triumph, the glory of God will be the greater.” The Templars don’t believe it, but they have been trained to be knights of the ideal, and this is the image of themselves they must confirm. They will follow the king in his mystical madness.

Incredibly, the landing is a success; equally incredibly, the Saracens abandon Damietta. But the king hesitates to enter the city, fearing treachery. But there is no treachery: the city is his for the taking, along with its treasures and its hundred mosques, which Louis immediately converts into churches of the Lord. Now he has a decision to make: Should he march on Alexandria or on Cairo? The wise choice would be Alexandria, thus depriving Egypt of a vital port. But the expedition has its evil genius, the king’s brother, Robert d’Artois, a megalomaniac hungry for glory. A typical younger son. He advises Louis to head for Cairo, the heart of Egypt. The Templars, cautious at first, are now champing at the bit. The king issues orders to avoid isolated skirmishes, but the marshal of the Temple takes it upon himself to violate that prohibition. Seeing a squadron of the sultan’s Mamelukes, he cries out: “Now have at them, in the name of God, for a shame like this I cannot bear!”

The Saracens dig in beyond the river near Mansura. The French try to build a dam and create a ford, protecting it with their mobile towers, but the Saracens have learned the art of Greek fire from the Byzantines. Greek fire is a barrel-like container with a kind of big spear as a tail. It is hurled like a lightning bolt, a flying dragon. It burns so brightly that in the Christian camp at night one can see as clearly as if it were day.

While the camp burns, a Bedouin traitor leads the king and his men to a ford in exchange for a payment of three hundred bezants. The king decides to attack. The crossing is not easy; many are drowned and swept away by the current, while three hundred mounted Saracens wait on the other side. When the main body of the attack force finally comes ashore, the Templars, as planned, are in the vanguard, followed by the Comte d’Artois. The Moslem horsemen flee, and the Templars wait for the rest of the Christian army. But Artois and his men dash off in pursuit of the enemy.

The Templars, anxious to avoid dishonor, then join in the assault, but catch up with Artois only after he has penetrated the enemy camp and begun a massacre. The Moslems fall back toward Mansura, which is just what Artois has been hoping for. He sets out after them. The Templars try to stop him; Brother Gilles, supreme commander of the Temple, tries flattery, telling Artois that he has performed a wondrous feat, perhaps the greatest ever achieved overseas. But Artois, eager for glory, accuses the Templars of treachery, claiming that the Templars and Hospitalers could have conquered this territory long ago if they had really wanted to. He has shown them what a man with blood in his veins can do. This is too much. The Templars must prove that they are second to none. They charge into the city and chase the enemy all the way to the wall on the opposite side. Then suddenly the Templars realize that they have repeated the mistake of Ascalon. While the Christians are busy sacking the sultan’s palace, the infidels reassemble and fall upon the now unorganized group of jackals.

Have the Templars allowed themselves to be blinded once again by greed? Some say that before accompanying Artois into the city, Brother Gilles spoke to him with stoic lucidity: “My Lord, my brothers and I are not afraid. We follow you. But great is our doubt that any of us will return.” And indeed, Artois was killed, and many good knights died with him, including two hundred and eighty Templars.

It was more than a defeat; it was a disgrace. Yet not even Joinville recorded it as such. It happened and that is the beauty of war.

Joinville’s pen turns many of these battles and skirmishes into charming ballets. Heads roll here and there, implorations to the good Lord abound, and the king sheds tears over a loyal follower’s death. But the whole thing is Technicolor, complete with crimson saddlecloths, gilded trappings, the flash of helmets and swords under the yellow desert sun, and an azure sea in the background. And who knows? Perhaps the Templars really lived their daily butchery that way.

Joinville’s perspective shifts vertically, depending on whether he has fallen from his horse or just remounted. Isolated scenes are sharply focused, but the larger picture eludes him. We see individual duels, whose outcome is often random. Joinville sets off to help the lord of Wanpn. A Turk strikes him with his lance, Joinville’s horse sinks to its knees, Joinville falls over the animal’s head, he stands up, sword in hand, and Chevalier Erard de Siveiey (“may God grant him grace”) points to a ruined house where they can take refuge. They are trampled by Turks on horseback. Chevalier Frederic de Loupey is struck from behind, “which made so large a wound that the blood poured from his body as if from the bunghole of a barrel.” Siverey receives a slashing blow in the face, so that “his nose was left dangling over his lips.” And so on, until help arrives. They leave the house and move to another part of the battlefield, where there are more deaths and last-minute rescues, and loud prayers to Saint James. In the meantime, the good Comte de Soissons, wielding his sword, cries, “Seneschal, let these dogs howl as they will. By God’s bonnet, we shall talk of this day yet, you and I, sitting at home with our ladies!” The king asks for news of his brother, the wretched Comte d’Artois, and Brother Henri de Ronnay, provost of the Hospitalers, answers that he “has good news, for certainly the count is now in Paradise.” “God be praised for everything He gives,” says the king, big tears falling from his eyes.

But it isn’t always a ballet, angelic and bloodstained. Grand Master Guillaume de Sonnac dies, burned alive by Greek fire. With the great stink of corpses and the shortage of provisions, the Christian army is stricken with scurvy. Saint Louis’s men are finally routed. The king is so badly racked by dysentery that he cuts out the seat of his pants to save time in battle. Damietta is lost, and the queen has to negotiate with the Saracens, paying five hundred thousand livres tournois to ransom the king.

The crusades were carried out in virtuous bad faith. On his return to Saint-Jean-d’Acre, Louis is hailed as a victor; the whole city comes out in procession to greet him, including the clergy, ladies, and children. The Templars, seeing which way the wind is blowing, try to open negotiations with Damascus. Louis finds out and, furious at being bypassed, repudiates the new grand master in the presence of the Moslem ambassadors. The grand master has to retract the promises he made to the enemy, has to kneel before the king and beg his pardon. No one can say the Knights haven’t fought well—and selflessly—but the king of France still humiliates them, to reassert his power. And, half a century later, Louis’s successor, Philip, to reassert his power, will send the Knights to the stake.

In 1291 Saint-Jean-d’Acre is conquered by the Moors, and all its inhabitants are put to the sword. The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem is gone for good. The Templars are richer, more numerous, more powerful than ever, but they were born to fight in the Holy Land, and in the Holy Land there are none left.

They live in splendor, isolated in their commanderies throughout Europe and in the Temple in Paris, but they dream still of the plateau of the Temple in Jerusalem in their days of glory, dream of the handsome church of Saint Mary Lateran spangled with votive chapels, dream of their bouquets of trophies, and all the rest: the forges, the saddlery, the granaries, the stables of two thousand horses, the cantering troops of squires, aides, and turcopoles, the red crosses on white cloaks, the dark surplices of the attendants, the sultan’s envoys with their great turbans and gilded helmets, the pilgrims, a crossroads filled with dapper patrols and outriders, and the delights of rich coffers, the port from which instructions and cargoes were dispatched for the castles on the mainland, or on the islands, or on the shores of Asia Minor...

All gone now, my poor Templars.

That evening, at Pilade’s, by then on my fifth whiskey, for which Belbo was paying, insisted on paying, I realized that I had been dreaming aloud and—the shame of it—with feeling. But I must have told a beautiful story, full of compassion, because Dolores’s eyes were glistening, and Diotallevi, having taken the mad plunge and ordered a second tonic water, was seraphically gazing toward heaven—or, rather, toward the bar’s decidedly noncabalistic ceiling. “Perhaps,” he murmured, “they were all those things: lost souls and saints, horsemen and grooms, bankers and heroes...”

“They were remarkable, no doubt about it” was Belbo’s summation. “But tell me, Casaubon, do you love them?”

“I’m doing my thesis on them. If you do your thesis on syphilis, you end up loving even the Spirochaeta pallida.”

“It was lovely,” Dolores said. “Like a movie. But I have to go now. I have to mimeograph the leaflets for tomorrow morning. There’s picketing at the Marelli factory.”

“Lucky you. You can afford it,” Belbo said. He raised a weary hand and stroked her hair. Then he ordered what he said was his last whiskey. “It’s almost midnight. I say that not for normal people, I say it for Diotallevi’s benefit. But let’s go on. I want to hear about the trial. Who, what, when, and why.”

“Cur, quomodo, quando,” Diotallevi agreed. “Yes, yes.”


14

He declares that he saw, the day before, five hundred and four brothers of the order led to the stake because they would not confess the above-mentioned errors, and he heard it said that they were burned. But he fears that he himself would not resist if he were to be burned, that he would confess in the presence of the lord magistrates and anyone else, if questioned, and say that all the errors with which the order has been charged are true; that he, if asked, would also confess to killing Our Lord.

—Testimony of Aimery de Villiers-le-Duc, May 13, 1310

A trial full of silences, contradictions, enigmas, and acts of stupidity. The acts of stupidity were the most obvious, and, because they were inexplicable, they generally coincided with the enigmas. In those halcyon days I believed that the source of enigma was stupidity. Then the other evening in the periscope I decided that the most terrible enigmas are those that mask themselves as madness. But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

With the collapse of the Christian kingdoms of the Holy Land, the Templars were left without a purpose. Or, rather, they soon turned their means into an end; they spent their time managing their immense wealth. Philip the Fair, a monarch intent on building a centralized state, naturally disliked them. They were a sovereign order, beyond any royal control. The grand master ranked as a prince of the blood; he commanded an army, administered vast landholdings, was elected like the emperor, and had absolute authority. The French treasury was located in the Temple in Paris, outside the king’s control. The Templars were the trustees, proxies, and administrators of an account that was the king’s only in name. They paid funds in and out and manipulated the interest; they acted like a great private bank but enjoyed all the privileges and exemptions of a state institution. The king’s treasurer was a Templar. How could a ruler rule under such conditions?

If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. Philip asked to be made an honorary Templar. Request denied. An insult no king could swallow. He suggested that the pope merge Templars and Hospitalers and place the new order under the control of one of his sons. Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Temple, arrived with great pomp from Cyprus, where he lived like a monarch in exile. He handed the pope a memorandum that supposedly assessed the advantages of the merger but actually emphasized its disadvantages. Molay brazenly argued that, among other things, the Templars were far wealthier than the Hospitalers, that the merger would enrich the latter at the expense of the former, thus putting the souls of his knights in jeopardy. Molay won this first round: the plan was shelved.

The only recourse left was slander, and here the king held good cards. Rumors about the Templars had been circulating for a long time. Imagine how these “colonials” must have looked to right-thinking Frenchmen, these people who collected tithes everywhere while giving nothing in return, not even—anymore— their own blood as guardians of the Holy Sepulcher. True, they were Frenchmen. But not completely. People saw them as pieds noirs; at the time, the term was poulains. The Templars flaunted their exotic ways; it was said that among themselves they even spoke the language of the Moors, with which they were familiar. Though they were monks, their savage nature was common knowledge: some years before, Pope Innocent III had issued a bull entiSed De insolentia Templariorum. They had taken a vow of poverty, but they lived with the pomp of aristocrats, with the greed of the new merchant classes, and with the effrontery of a corps of musketeers.

The whispering campaign was not long in coming: the Templars were homosexuals, heretics, idolaters worshiping a bearded head of unknown provenance. Perhaps they shared the secrets of the Isma’ilis, for they had had dealings with the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain. Philip and his advisers put these rumors to good use.

Philip was assisted by his two evil geniuses, Marigny and Nogaret. It was Marigny who ultimately got control of the Templar treasury, administering it on the king’s behalf until it was transferred to the Hospitalers. It is not clear who got the interest. Nogaret, the king’s lord chancellor, in 1303 had been the strategist behind the incident in Anagni, when Sciarra Colonna slapped Boniface VIII and the pope died of humiliation less than a month later.

Then a man by the name of Esquin de Floyran appeared on the scene. Apparently, while imprisoned for unspecified crimes and on the verge of being executed, Floyran encountered a renegade Templar in his cell and from him heard a terrible confession. In exchange for his life and a tidy sum, Floyran told everything. Which turned out to be exactly what everybody was already rumoring. Now the rumors became formal depositions before a magistrate. The king transmitted Floyran’s sensational revelations to the pope, Clement V, who later moved the papal seat to Avignon. Clement believed some of the charges, but knew it would not be easy to interfere in the Temple’s affairs. In 1307, however, he agreed to open an official inquiry. Molay, the grand master, was informed, but declared that his conscience was clear. At the king’s side, he continued to take part in official ceremonies, a prince among princes. Clement V seemed to be stalling, and the king began to suspect that the pope wanted to give the Templars time to disappear. But no, the Templars went on drinking and blaspheming in their commanderies, seemingly unaware of the danger. And this is the first enigma.

On September 14, 1307, the king sent sealed messages to all the bailiffs and seneschals of the realm, ordering the mass arrest of the Templars and the confiscation of their property. A month went by between the issuing of this order and the arrest on October 13. But the Templars suspected nothing. On that October morning they all fell into the trap and—another enigma—gave themselves up without a fight. In fact, in the days before the arrests, using the most feeble excuses, the king’s men, wanting to make sure that nothing would escape confiscation, had conducted a kind of inventory of the Temple’s possessions throughput the country. And still the Templars did nothing. Come right in, my dear bailiff, take a look around, make yourself at home.

When he learned what had happened, the pope hazarded a protest, but it was too late. The royal investigators had already brought out their irons and ropes, and many Knights had begun to confess under torture. When they confessed, they were handed over to inquisitors, who had methods of their own, even though they were not yet burning people at the stake. The Knights confirmed their confessions.

This is the third mystery. Granted, there was torture, and it must have been vigorous, since thirty-six Knights died in the course of it. But not a single one of these men of iron, seasoned by their battles with the cruel Tlirk, resisted arrest. In Paris only four Knights out of a hundred and thirty-eight refused to confess. All the others did, including Jacques de Molay.

“What did they confess?” Belbo asked.

“They confessed exactly what was charged in the arrest warrant. There was hardly any variation in the testimony, at least not in France and Italy. In England, where nobody really wanted to go through with the trial, the usual accusations appeared in the depositions, but they were attributed to witnesses outside the order, whose testimony was hearsay. In other words, the Templars confessed only when asked to, and then only to what was charged.”

“Same old inquisitional stuff. We’ve seen it often,” Belbo remarked.

“Yet the behavior of the accused was odd. The charges were that during their initiation rites the Templars denied Christ three times, spat on the crucifix, and were stripped and kissed in posteriori parte spine dorsi, in other words, on the behind, then on the navel and the mouth, in humane dignitatis opprobrium. That they then engaged in mutual fornication. That they were then shown the head of a bearded idol, which they had to worship. Now, how did the accused respond to these charges? Geoffroy de Charnay, who was later burned at the stake with Molay, said that, yes, it had happened to him; he had denied Christ, but with his mouth, not his heart; he didn’t recall whether he spat on the crucifix, because they had been in such a hurry that night. As for the kiss on the behind, that also had happened to him, and he had heard the preceptor of Auvergne say that, after all, it was better to couple with brothers than to be befouled by a woman, but he personally had not committed carnal sins with other Knights. In other words: Yes, it’s all true, but it was only a game, nobody really believed in it, and anyway it was the others who did it, I just went along to be polite. Jacques de Molay—the grand master himself—said that when they gave him the crucifix, he only pretended to spit on it and spat on the ground instead. He admitted that the initiation ceremonies were more or less as described, but—to tell the truth—he couldn’t say for sure, because he had initiated very few brothers in the course of his career. Another Knight said that he had kissed the master, but only on the mouth, not the behind; it was the master who kissed him on the behind. Some did confess to more than was necessary, saying that they had not only denied Christ but also called Him a criminal, and they had denied the virginity of Mary, and they had urinated on the crucifix, not only on the day of their initiation, but during Holy Week as well. They didn’t believe in the sacraments, they said, and they worshiped not only Ba-phomet but also the Devil in the form of a cat...”

Equally grotesque, though not as incredible, is the pas de deux that now begins between the king and the pope. The pope wants to take charge of the case; the king insists on seeing the trial through to its conclusion. The pope suggests a temporary suspension of the order: the guilty will be sentenced, then the Temple will be revived in its original purity. The king wants the scandal to spread, wants it to involve the entire order. This will lead to the order’s complete dissolution—politically, religiously, and, most of all, financially.

At one point a document is produced that’s a pure masterpiece. Some doctors of theology argue that in order to prevent them from retracting their confessions, the accused should be denied any defense. Since they have already confessed, there is no need for a trial. A trial is required only if some doubt about the case exists, and here there is no doubt. “Why allow them a defense, whose only purpose would be to shield them from the consequences of their admitted errors? The evidence renders their punishment inescapable.”

But there is still a risk that the pope might take control of the trial, so the king and Nogaret set up a sensational case involving the bishop of Troyes, who is accused of witchcraft by the secret testimony of a mysterious conspirator named Noffo Dei. It will be discovered later that Dei lied—and he will be hanged for his trouble—but in the meantime the poor bishop is publicly accused of sodomy, sacrilege, and usury; the same crimes as the Templars. Perhaps the king is trying to show the sons of France that the Church has no right to sit in judgment on the Templars, since it is itself not untouched by their sins; or perhaps he is simply giving the pope a warning to stay away. It’s all very murky, a crisscrossing of various police forces and secret services, mutual infiltrations and anonymous accusations. The pope is now cornered, and he agrees to interrogate seventy-two Templars, who repeat the confessions they made under torture. But the pope observes that they have repented, and uses their abjuration—a trump card—as an excuse to pardon them.

And here something else happens—it was a problem I had to resolve in my thesis, but I was torn between contradictory sources. Just when the pope has finally won jurisdiction over the knights, he suddenly hands them back to the king. Why does this happen? Molay retracts his confession; Clement allows him a defense, and three cardinals are summoned to interrogate him. On November 26, 1309, Molay proudly defends the order and its purity; he even goes so far as to threaten its accusers. But then he is visited by an envoy from the king, Guillaume de Plaisans, whom Molay considers a friend. He is given some obscure advice, and two days later, on November 28, he issues a meek and vague deposition, in which he claims to be a poor, uneducated knight, and he confines himself to listing the (now remote) merits of the Temple, its acts of charity, the blood the Templars shed in the Holy Land, and so on. To make matters worse, Nogaret suddenly arrives and reminds everyone that the Temple once had dubious contacts with Saladin. Now the implied crime is high treason. Molay’s excuses are pathetic. He has endured two years in prison, and in this deposition he seems a broken man, but he seemed a broken man immediately after his arrest, too. In March of the following year Molay adopts a new strategy in a third deposition. Now he refuses to speak at all, saying that he will address the pope himself but no one else,

A dramatic twist, and here the epic theater begins. In April of 1310, five hundred and fifty Templars ask to be allowed to speak in defense of the order. They denounce the torture to which they have been subjected and deny the charges against them. They demonstrate that all the accusations are implausible. But the king and Nogaret know what to do. Some Templars have retracted their confessions? Fine. Their retraction only makes them recidivists and perjurers—relapsi—a terrible charge in those days. He who confesses and repents may be pardoned, but he who not only does not repent but also retracts his confession, forswears himself, and stubbornly denies that he has anything to repent, he must die. Fifty such perjurers are condemned to death.

It is easy to predict the response of the other prisoners. If you confess, you stay alive, though locked up, and you can wait and see what happens. If you do not confess, or, worse, if you retract your confession, you go to the stake. The five hundred surviving retractors retract their retraction.

As it turns out, the ones who repented chose wisely. In 1312 those who have not confessed are sentenced to life imprisonment, whereas those who confessed are pardoned. Philip is not looking for a massacre; he just wants to dissolve the order. The freed knights, broken in mind and body by four or five years in prison, quietly drift into other orders. All they want is to be forgotten, and this silent disappearance will fuel the legend of the order’s underground survival.

Molay was still asking to be heard by the pope. Clement had convened a council in Vienne in 1311, but Molay had not been invited. The suppression of the order is ratified and its property turned over to the Hospitalers, though temporarily it is to be administered by the king.

Another three years go by, and finally an agreement is reached with the pope. On March 19, 1314, in front of Notre-Dame, Molay is sentenced to life imprisonment. He reacts with a surge of dignity. He had expected the pope to allow him to exculpate himself; he now feels betrayed. He knows that if he retracts yet again he will be condemned as a recidivist and perjurer. What does he feel in his heart as he stands there after almost seven years awaiting judgment? Does he regain the courage of his forebears? Or does he simply decide that, ruined as he now is, condemned to end his days in dishonor, buried alive, he might as well die a decent death? Because he protests in a loud voice that he and his brothers are innocent. The Templars, he says, committed one crime and one crime only: out of cowardice they betrayed the Temple. He will dp so no longer.

Nogaret is overjoyed. A public crime requires public condemnation, definitive, immediate. Geoffroy de Charnay, the Templar preceptor of Normandy, follows Molay’s example. The king makes his decision that very day: a pyre is erected at the tip of the lie de la Cite’. At sundown, Molay and Charnay are burned at the stake.

Tradition has it that before his death the grand master prophesied the ruin of his persecutors. And, indeed, the pope, the king, and Nogaret all die before the year is out. Once the king is gone, Marigny comes under suspicion of embezzlement. His enemies accuse him of witchcraft and have him hanged. Many begin to think of Molay as a martyr. Dante himself voices widespread indignation at the persecution of the Templars.

And that is where history ends and legend begins. One part of the legend insists that when Louis XVI was guillotined, an unknown man climbed onto the block and shouted: “Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!”

That was more or less the story I told that night at Pilade’s, with constant interruptions.

Belbo, for instance, would ask: “Are you sure you didn’t read this in Orwell or Koestler?” Or: “Wait a minute, this is just what happened to what’s-his-name, that guy in the Cultural Revolution.” And Diotallevi kept interjecting, sententiously: “His-toria magistra vitae.” To which Belbo responded: “Come on, cabalists don’t believe in history.” And Diotallevi invariably answered: “That’s just the point. Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t exist. It’s the permutations that matter.”

“We still haven’t answered the real question,” Belbo finally said. “Who were the Templars? At first you made them sound like sergeants in a John Ford movie, then like a bunch of bums, then like knights in an illuminated miniature, then like bankers of God carrying on their dirty deals, then like a routed army, then like devotees of a satanic sect, and finally like martyrs tt free thought. What were they in the end?”

“Probably they were all those things. ‘What was the Catholic Church?’ a Martian historian in the year 3000 might ask. ‘The people who got themselves thrown to the lions or the ones who killed heretics?’ All of the above.”

“But did they do those horrible things or didn’t they?”

“The funny thing is that their followers—the neo-Templars of various epochs—say they did. And they offer justifications. For instance, it was like fraternity hazing. You want to be a Templar? Okay, prove you have balls, spit on the crucifix, and let’s see if God strikes you dead. If you join this militia, you have to give yourself to your brothers heart and soul, so let them kiss your ass. An alternative thesis is that they were asked to deny Christ in order to see how they would behave if the Saracens got them. Which seems idiotic, because you don’t train someone to resist torture by making him do—even if only symbolically—what the torturer will ask of him. A third thesis: In the East the Templars had come into contact with Manichean heretics who despised the Cross, regarding it as the instrument of the Lord’s torture. The Manicheans also preached renunciation of the world and discouraged marriage and procreation. An old idea, common to many heresies in the early centuries of Christianity. It was later taken up by the Cathars—and in fact there’s a whole tradition claiming that the Templars were steeped in Catharism. And this would explain the sodomy—also only symbolic. Let’s assume the knights came into contact with Manichean heretics. Well, they weren’t exactlv intellectuals, so perhaps—partly out of naivete, partly out of snobbery and esprit de corps—they invented a personal ceremony to distinguish themselves from the other Crusaders. They performed various ritual acts of recognition, without bothering about their significance.”

“And that Baphomet business?”

“Many of the depositions do mention a figure Baffometi, but this may have been an error made by the first scribe, an error copied into all subsequent documents. Or the records may have been tampered with. In some cases there was talk of Mahomet (istud caput vester deus est, et vester Mahumet), which would suggest that the Templars had created a syncretic liturgy of their own. Some depositions say that they were also urged to call out ‘Yalla,’ which could be Allah. But the Moslems didn’t worship images of Mahomet, so where does the object come from? The depositions say that many people saw carved heads, but sometimes it was not just a head but a whole idol—wooden, with kinky hair, covered with gold, and always with a beard. It seems that investigators did find such heads and confronted the accused with them, but no trace of them remains. Everyone saw the heads, and no one saw them. Like the cat: some saw a gray cat, others a red cat, others still a black cat. Imagine being interrogated with a red-hot iron: Did you see a cat during the initiation? Well, why not a cat? A Templar farm, where stored grain had to be protected against mice, would be full of cats. The cat was not a common domestic animal in Europe back then. But in Egypt it was. Maybe the Templars kept cats in the house, though right-minded folk looked upon such animals with suspicion. Same thing with the heads of Baphomet. Maybe they were reliquaries in the shape of a head; not unknown at the time. Of course, some say Baphomet was an alchemic figure.”

“Alchemy always comes up,” Diotallevi said, nodding. “The Templars probably knew the secret of making gold.”

“Of course they did,” Belbo said. “It was simple enough. Attack a Saracen city, cut the throats of the women and children, and grab everything mat’s not nailed down. The truth is that this whole story is a great big mess.”

“Maybe the mess was in their heads. What did they care about doctrinal debates? History is full of little sects that make up then-own style, part swagger, part mysticism. The Templars themselves didn’t really understand what they were doing. On the other hand, there’s always the esoteric explanation: They knew exactly what they were doing, they were adepts of Oriental mysteries, and even the kiss on the ass had a ritual meaning.”

“Do explain to me, briefly, the ritual meaning of the kiss on the ass,” Diotallevi said.

“All right. Some modern esotericists maintain that the Templars were reviving certain Indian doctrines. The kiss on the ass serves to wake the serpent Kundalini, a cosmic force that dwells at the base of the spinal column, in the sexual glands. Once wakened, Kundalini rises to the pineal gland...”

“Descartes’s pineal gland?”

“I think it’s the same one. A third eye is then supposed to open up in the brow, the eye that lets you see directly into time and space. This is why people are still seeking the secret of the Templars.”

“Philip the Fair should have burned the modern esotericists instead of those poor bastards.”

“Yes, except that the modern esotericists don’t have two pennies to rub together.”

“Now you see the kind of stories we have to listen to!” Belbo concluded. “At least I understand why so many of my lunatics are obsessed with these Templars.”

“It’s a little like what you were saying the other day. The whole thing is a twisted syllogism. Act like a lunatic and you will be inscrutable forever. Abracadabra, Manel Tekel Phares, Pape Satan Pape Satan Aleppe, le vierge le vivace et le bel au-jourd’hui. Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message. The Templars’ mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That’s why so many people venerate them.”

“A positivist explanation,” Diotallevi said.

“Yes,” I agreed, “maybe I am a positivist. A little surgery on the pineal gland might have turned the Templars into Hospitalers; normal people, in other words. War somehow damages the cerebral circuitry. Maybe it’s the sound of the cannon, or the Greek fire. Look at our generals.”

It was one o’clock. Diotallevi, drunk on tonic water, was clearly unsteady. We all said good night. I had enjoyed myself. So had they. We didn’t yet know that we had begun to play with fire—Greek fire, the kind that burns and destroys.


15

Erard de Siverey said to me: “My lord, if you think that neither I nor my heirs will incur reproach for it, I will go and fetch you help from the Comte d’Anjou, whom I see in the fields over there.” I said to him: “My dear man, it seems to me you would win great honor for yourself if you went for help to save our lives. Your own, by the way, is also in great danger.”

—Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, 46, 226

After that evening of the Templars, I had only fleeting conversations with Belbo at Pilade’s, where I went less and less often because I was working on my thesis.

One day there was a big march against fascist conspiracies. It was to start at the university, and all the left-wing intellectuals had been invited to take part. Magnificent, police presence, but apparently the tacit understanding was to let things take their course. Typical of those days: the demonstration had no permit, but if nothing serious happened, the police would just watch, making sure the marchers didn’t transgress any of the unwritten boundaries drawn through downtown Milan (there were a lot of territorial compromises back then). The protesters operated in an area beyond Largo Augusto; the fascists were entrenched in Piazza San Babila and its neighboring streets. If anybody crossed the line, there were incidents; otherwise nothing happened. It was like a lion and a lion tamer. We usually believe that the tamer is attacked by the lion and that the tamer stops the attack by raising his whip or firing a blank. Wrong: the lion was fed and sedated before it entered the cage and doesn’t feel like attacking anybody. Like all animals, it has its own space; if you don’t invade that space, the lion remains calm. When the tamer steps forward, invading it, the lion roars; the tamer then raises his whip, but also takes a step backward (as if in expectation of a charge), whereupon the lion calms down. A simulated revolution must also have its rules.

I went to the demonstration but didn’t march with any of the groups. Instead, I stood at the edge of Piazza Santo Stefano, where reporters, editors, and artists who had come to show their solidarity were milling around. The whole clientele of Pilade’s.

I found myself standing next to Belbo and a woman I had often seen him with at the bar, who I thought was his companion. (She later disappeared—and now I know why, having read about it in the file on Dr. Wagner.)

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You know how it is,” he said, smiling, embarrassed. “We have to save our souls somehow. Crede firmiter et pecca fortiter. Doesn’t this scene remind you of something?”

I looked around. It was a sunny afternoon, one of those days when Milan is beautiful: yellow facades and a softly metallic sky. The police, across the square, were armored with helmets and plastic shields that gave off glints like steel. A plainclothes officer girded with a gaudy tricolor sash strutted up and down in front of his men. I turned and looked at the head of the march. People weren’t moving; they were marking time. They were lined up in ranks, but the rows were irregular, almost serpentine, and the crowd seemed to bristle with pikes, standards, banners, sticks. Impatient groups chanted rhythmic slogans. Along the flanks of the procession, activists darted back and forth, wearing red kerchiefs over their faces, motley shirts, studded belts, and jeans that had known much rain and sun. Even the rolled-up flags that concealed the incongruous weapons looked like dabs of color on a palette. I thought of Duty, his gaiety. Freely associating, I went from Dufy to Guillaume Dufay. I had the impression of being in a Flemish miniature. In the little crowds gathered on either side of the marchers, I glimpsed some androgynous women waiting for the great display of daring they had been promised. But all this went through my mind in a flash, as if I were reliving some other experience without recognizing it.

“It’s the taking of Ascalon, isn’t it?” Belbo said.

“By the lord Saint James, my good sir,” I replied, “this is truly a Crusaders’ combat! I do believe that this night some of these men will be in paradise!”

“No doubt,” Belbo said. “But can you tell me where the Saracens are?”

“Well, the police are definitely Teutonic,” I observed, “which would make us the hordes of Aleksandr Nevski. But I’m getting my texts mixed up. Look at that group over there. They must be the companions of the Comte d’Artois, eager to enter the fray, for they will brook no ofFense, and already they head for the enemy lines, shouting threats to provoke the infidel!”

That was when it happened. I don’t remember it that clearly. The marchers had started moving, and a group of activists with chains and ski masks began to force their way through the police lines toward Piazza San Babila, yelling. The lion was on the move. The front line of police parted and the fire hoses appeared. The first ball bearings, then the first stones, came hurtling from the forward positions of the demonstration. A cordon of police advanced, swinging clubs, and the procession recoiled. At that moment, in the distance, from the far end of Via La-ghetto, a shot was heard. Maybe it was only a tire exploding, or a firecracker; maybe it was a popgun shot from one of those groups that in a few years would regularly be using P-38s.

Panic. The police drew their weapons, trumpet blasts for a charge were heard, the march split into two groups: one, militants, who were ready to fight, and one, all the others, who considered their duty done. I found myself running along Via Larga, with the mad fear of being hit by some blunt object, such as a club. Suddenly Belbo and his companion were beside me, running fast but without panic.

At the corner of Via Rastrelli, Belbo grabbed me by the arm. “This way, kid,” he said. I wanted to ask why; Via Larga seemed much more spacious and peopled, and claustrophobia overcame me in the maze of alleys between Via Pecorari and the Archbishop’s Palace. It seemed to me that where Belbo was going there were fewer places to hide or blend in if the police intercepted us. But he signaled me to be quiet, turned two or three corners, and gradually slowed down. We found ourselves walking unhurriedly, right behind the cathedral, where traffic was normal and no echoes came from the battle taking place less than two hundred meters away. Still silent, we walked around the cathedral and finally came to the side facing the Galleria. Belbo bought a bag of corn and began feeding the pigeons with seraphic pleasure. We blended into the Saturday crowd completely; Belbo and I were in jackets and ties, and the girl had on the uniform of a Milanese lady: a gray turtleneck with a strand of pearls—cultured, or maybe not.

Belbo introduced us. “This is Sandra. You two know each other?”

“By sight. Hi.”

“You see, Casaubon,” Belbo said to me then, “you must never flee in a straight line. Napoleon HI, following the example of the Savoys in Turin, had Paris disemboweled, then turned it into the network of boulevards we all admire today. A masterpiece of intelligent city planning. Except that those broad, straight streets are also ideal for controlling angry crowds. Where possible, even the side streets were made broad and straight, like the Champs-Elysees. Where it wasn’t possible, in the little streets of the Latin Quarter, for example, that’s where May ‘68 was seen to its best advantage. When you flee, head for alleys. No police force can guard them all, and even the police are afraid to enter them in small numbers. If you run into a few on their own, they’re more frightened than you are, and both parties take off, in opposite directions. Anytime you’re going to a mass rally in an area you don’t know well, reconnoiter the neighborhood the day before, and stand at the corner where the little streets start.”

“Did you take a course in Bolivia, or what?”

“Survival techniques are learned only in childhood, unless as an adult you enlist in the Green Berets. I had some bad experiences during the war, when the partisans were active around ***,” he said, naming a town between Monferrato and the Langhe. “We had been evacuated from the city in ‘43, a great idea, exactly the time and place to savor everything: mass arrests, the SS, gunfire in the streets...One evening I was going up the hill to get some fresh milk from a farm, and I heard a sound up in the trees: frr, frr. I realized that some men on a distant hill were machine-gunning the railroad line in the valley behind me. My instinct was to run, or just dive to the ground. I made a mistake: I ran toward the valley, and suddenly I heard a chack-chack-chack in the field around me. Some of the shots were falling short of the railroad. That’s when I learned that if they’re shooting from a high hill down at a valley, then you should run uphill. The higher you go, the higher the bullets will be over your head. Once, my grandmother was caught in a shoot-out between Fascists and partisans deployed on opposite sides of a cornfield. Wherever she ran, she risked stopping a bullet. So she just flung herself down in the middle of the field, right in the line of fire, and lay there for ten minutes, her face in the dirt, hoping that neither side would advance very far. She was lucky. When you learn these things as a child, they are hardwired in your nervous system.”

“So you were in the Resistance.”

“As a spectator,” he said. I sensed a slight embarrassment in his voice. “In 1943 I was eleven, and at the end of the war, barely thirteen. Too young to take part, but old enough to follow everything with—how shall I put it?—photographic attention. What else could I do? I watched. And ran. Like today.”

“You should write about it, instead of editing other people’s books.”

“It’s all been told, Casaubon. If I had been twenty back then, in the fifties I’d have written a poetic memoir. Luckily I was born too late for that. By the time I was old enough to write, all I could do was read the books that were already written. On the other hand, I could also have ended up on that hill with a bullet in my head.”

“From which side?” I asked, then immediately regretted the question. “Sorry, I was just kidding.”

“No you weren’t. Sure, today I know, but what did I know then? You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing—you can always repent, atone—but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing. I was a potential traitor. What truth does that entitle me now to teach to others?”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but potentially you were also a Jack the Ripper. This is neurotic—unless your remorse is based on something specific.”

“What does that mean? But, speaking of neurosis, this evening there’s a dinner party for Dr. Wagner. Let’s take a taxi at Piazza della Scala. Coming, Sandra?”

“Dr. Wagner?” I asked, about to take my leave of them. “In person?”

“Yes. He’s in Milan for a few days, and maybe I’ll be able to persuade him to give us some of his unpublished essays for a little volume. It would be a real coup.”

So Belbo was in contact with Dr. Wagner even then. I wonder if that was the evening Wagner (pronounced Vagnere) psychoanalyzed Belbo free of charge, without either of them knowing it. But perhaps this happened later.

In any case, that was the first time I heard Belbo talk about his childhood in ***. Strange, he talked about running away, investing it with a kind of heroism, in the glorious light of memory, but the memory had come back to him only after—with me as accomplice but also as witness—he had unheroically, if wisely, run away again.


16

After which, brother Etienne de Provins, brought into the presence of the aforesaid officials and asked by them to defend the order, said he did not wish to. If the masters wished to defend it, they could, but before his arrest, he had been in the order only nine months.

—Deposition, November 27, 1309

In Abulafia I found other tales of Belbo’s running away. And I thought about them that evening as I stood in the darkness in the periscope listening to a sequence of rustling sounds, squeaks, creaks and telling myself not to panic, because that was how museums, libraries, and antique palaces talked to themselves at night. It is only old cupboards settling, window frames reacting to the evening’s humidity, plaster crumbling at a miserly millimeter-per-century rate, walls yawning. You can’t run away, I told myself. You’re here to learn what happened to a man who, in a mad (or desperate) act of courage, tried once and for all to stop running away—perhaps in order to hasten his encounter, so many times postponed, with the truth.

FILENAME: Canal

Was it from a police charge or, once again, from history that I ran away? Does it make any difference? Did I go to the march because of a moral choice or to subject myself to yet another test of Opportunity? Granted, I was either too early or too late for all the great Opportunities, but that was the fault of my birth date. I would have liked to be in that field of bullets, shooting, even at the price of hitting Granny. But I was absent because of age, not because of cowardice. All right. And what about the march? Again I ran away for a generational reason: it was not my conflict. But I could have taken the risk even so, without enthusiasm, to prove that if I had been in the field of bullets, I would have known how to choose. Does it make sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convince yourself that you would have chosen the right one—had you had the Opportunity? I wonder how many of those who opt for fighting today do it for that reason. But a contrived Opportunity is not the right Opportunity.

Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it. You have to seize Opportunity instinctively, without knowing at the time that it is the Opportunity. Is it possible that I really did seize it once, without knowing? How can you feel like a coward because you were born in the wrong decade? The answer: You feel like a coward because once you were a coward.

But suppose you passed up the Opportunity because you felt it was inadequate?

* * *

Describe the house in ***, isolated on the hill among the vineyards—don’t they call those breast-shaped hills?—and then the road that led to the edge of town, to the last row of houses (or the first, depending on the direction you come from). The little evacuee who abandons the protection of his family and ventures into the tentacular town, walking the broad avenue, skirting the Alley he so enviously fears.

The Alley was the gathering place of the Alley gang. Country boys, dirty, loud. I was too citified: better to stay away from them. But to reach the square, and the newspaper kiosk and the stationery store, unless I essayed a circumnavigation almost equatorial and quite undignified, the only course was to go along the Canal. And the boys of the Alley gang were little gentlemen compared to the Canal gang, named after a former stream, now a drainage ditch, that ran through the poorest part of town. The Canal kids were filthy subproletarians, and violent.

The Alley kids couldn’t cross the Canal area without being attacked and beaten up. At first I didn’t know that I was an Alley kid. I had just arrived, but already the Canal gang had identified me as an enemy. I walked through their area with a children’s magazine open before my face, reading as I went. They saw me. I ran. They chased me, throwing stones. One stone went right through a page of the magazine, which I was still holding in front of me as I ran, trying to retain a little dignity. I got away but lost the magazine. The next day I decided to join the Alley gang.

I presented myself at their Sanhedrin and was greeted with cackles. My hair was very thick at the time, and it tended to stand up on my head a bit like Struwwelpeter’s. The style in those days, as shown in movies and ads, or on Sunday strolls after Mass, featured young men with broad-shouldered, double-breasted jackets, greased mustaches, and gleaming hair combed straight back and stuck to their skulls. And that’s what I wanted, sleek hair like that. In the market square, on a Monday, I spent what for me was an enormous sum on some boxes of brilliantine thick as beanflower honey. Then I spent hours smearing it on until my hair was laminated, a leaden cap, a camauro. Then I put on a net, to keep the hair tightly compressed. The Alley gang had seen me go by wearing the net, and had shouted taunts in that harsh dialect of theirs, which I understood but couldn’t speak. That particular day, after staying two hours in the house with the net on, I took it off, checked the splendid result in the mirror, and set out to meet the gang to which I hoped to swear allegiance. I approached them just as the brilliantine was losing its glutinous power and my hair was again assuming, in slow motion, its vertical position. Delight among the Alley kids, in a circle around me, nudging one another. I asked to be admitted.

Unfortunately, I spoke in Italian. An outsider. Their leader, Marti-netti, who seemed a giant to me then, came forward, splendid, barefoot. He decided I should undergo one hundred kicks in the behind. Perhaps the kicks were meant to reawaken the serpent Kundalini. I agreed and stood against the wall. Two sergeants held my arms, and I received one hundred barefoot kicks. Martinetti applied himself to his task with vigor and skill, striking sideways so he wouldn’t hurt his toes. The gang served as chorus for the ritual, keeping count in their dialect. Then they shut me up in a rabbit hutch for half an hour, while they passed the time in guttural conversation. They let me out when I complained that my legs were numb. I was proud because I had been able to stand up to the liturgy of a savage tribe. I was a man called Horse.

In *** in those days were stationed latter-day Teutonic Knights, who were not particularly alert, because the partisans hadn’t yet made themselves felt—this was toward the end of ‘43, the beginning of ‘44. One of our first exploits was to slip into a shed, while some of us flattered the soldier on guard duty, a great Langobard eating an enormous sandwich of—we thought, and were horrified—salami and jam. The decoys distracted the German, praising his weapons, while the rest of us crept through some loose planks in the back of the shed and stole a few sticks of TNT. I don’t believe the explosive was ever used subsequently, but the idea was, according to Martinetti’s plan, to set it off in the countryside, for purely pyrotechnical purposes and by methods I now know were very crude and would not have worked. Later, the Germans were replaced by the Fascist marines of the Decima Mas, who set up a roadblock near the river, right at the crossroads where the girls from the school of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice came down the avenue at six in the evening. Martinetti convinced the Decima marines (who couldn’t have been over eighteen) to tie together a bunch of hand grenades left by the Germans, the ones with a long pin, and remove the safeties so they could explode at the water’s edge at the exact moment the girls arrived. Martinetti knew how to calculate the timing. He explained it to the Fascists, and the effect was prodigious: a sheet of water rose up along the bank in a thunderous din just as the girls were turning the corner. General flight, much squeaking, and we and the Fascists split our sides laughing. The survivors of Allied imprisonment would remember that day of glory, second only to the burning of Molay.

The chief amusement of the Alley kids was collecting shell cases and other war residue, which after September 8 and the German occupation of Italy were plentiful: old helmets, cartridge pouches, knapsacks, sometimes live bullets. This is what you did with a good bullet: holding the shell case in one hand, you stuck the projectile into a keyhole, twisted it, and pulled out the case, adding it to your collection. The gunpowder was emptied out (sometimes there were thin strips of ballistite) and deposited in serpentine trails that were set alight. The casings, especially prized if the caps were intact, went to enrich one’s army. A good collector would have a lot of them, arranged in rows by make, color, shape, and origin. There were squads of foot soldiers, which were submachine-gun and Sten casings, then squires and knights, which were 1891 rifle shells (we saw Garands only after the Americans came), and finally, a boy’s supreme ambition, towering grand masters, which were empty machine-gun shells.

One evening, as we were absorbed in these peaceful pursuits, Mar-tinetti informed us that the moment had come. A challenge had been sent to the Canal gang, and they had accepted. The battle was to take place on neutral ground, behind the station. That night, at nine.

It was late afternoon, on a summer day, enervating but charged with excitement. We decked ourselves out in the most terrifying paraphernalia, looking for pieces of wood that could be easily gripped, filling pouches and knapsacks with stones of various sizes. Some of us made whips out of rifle slings, awesome if wielded with decision. During those twilight hours we all felt like heroes, me most of all. It was the excitement before the attack: bitter, painful, splendid. So long, Mama, I’m off to Yokohama; send the word over there. We were sacrificing our youth to the Fatherland, just as they had taught us in school before September 8.

Martinetti’s plan was shrewd. We would cross the railroad embankment farther to the north and come at them from behind, take them by surprise, and thus would be victors from the start. Then no quarter would be granted.

At dusk we crossed the embankment, scrambling up ramps and across gullies, loaded down with stones and clubs. From the crest of the embankment we saw them lying in ambush behind the station latrines. But they saw us, too, because they were watching their backs, suspecting we would arrive from that direction. The only thing for us to do was to move in without giving them time for astonishment at the obviousness of our ploy.

Nobody had passed around any grappa before we went over the top, but we flung ourselves into battle anyway, yelling. Then came the turning point, when we were about a hundred meters from the station. There stood the first houses of the town, and though they were few, they created a web of narrow paths. There, the boldest group dashed forward, fearless, while I and (luckily for me) a few others slowed down and ducked behind the corners of the houses, to watch from a distance.

If Martinetti had organized us into vanguard and rear guard, we would have done our duty, but this was a spontaneous deployment: those with guts in front, and the cowards behind. So from our refuges—mine was farther back than the others—we observed the conflict. Which never took place.

The two groups came within a few meters of each other, and stood in confrontation, snarling. Then the leaders stepped forward to confer. Yalta. They decided to divide their territories into zones and agreed to allow an occasional safe-conduct pass, like Christians and Moslems in the Holy Land. Solidarity between groups of knights had prevailed over the ineluctability of battle. Each side had proved itself. The opposing camps withdrew in harmony, still opponents, in opposite directions.

Now I tell myself that I didn’t rush into the attack because I found it laughable. But that’s not what I told myself then. Then, I felt like a coward, and that was that.

Today, even more cowardly, I tell myself that as it turned out I would have risked nothing had I charged with the others, and my life afterward would have been better. I missed Opportunity at the age of twelve. If you fail to have an erection the first time, you’re impotent for the rest of your life.

A month later, some random trespass brought the Alley and Canal gangs face to face in a field, and clods of earth began to fly. I don’t know whether it was because the outcome of the earlier conflict had reassured me or because I desired martyrdom, but one way or another, this time I stood in the front line. A clod, which concealed a stone, struck my lip and split it. I ran home crying, and my mother had to use the tweezers from her toilet case to pick pieces of earth out of the wound on the inside of my lip. In fact I was left with a lump next to the lower right canine, and even now, when I run my tongue over it, I feel a vibration, a shudder.

But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heed-lessness, not through courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.

* * *

After the day of the march I didn’t see Belbo again for about a year. I fell in love with Amparo and stopped going to Pi-lade’s—or, at least, the few times I did drop in with Amparo, Belbo wasn’t there. Amparo didn’t like the place anyway. In her moral and political severity—equaled only by her grace, her magnificent pride—she considered Pilade’s a clubhouse for liberal dandies, and liberal dandysme, as far as she was concerned, was a subtle thread in the fabric of the capitalist plot. For me this was a year of great commitment, seriousness, and enchantment. I worked joyfully but serenely on my thesis.

Then one day I ran into Belbo along the navigli, not far from the Garamond office. “Well, look who’s here,” he said cheerfully. “My favorite Templar! Listen, I’ve just been presented with a bottle of ineffably ancient nectar. Why don’t you come up to the office? I have paper cups and a free afternoon.”

“A zeugma,” I said.

“No. Bourbon. And bottled, I believe, before the fall of the Alamo.”

I followed him. We had just taken the first sip when Gudrun came in and said there was a gentleman to see Belbo. He slapped his forehead. He had forgotten the appointment. But chance has a taste for conspiracy, he said to me. From what he had gathered, this individual wanted to show him a book that concerned the Templars. “I’ll get rid of him quickly,” he said, “but you must lend me a hand with some keen objections.”

It had surely been chance. And so I was caught in the net.


17

And thus did the knights of the Temple vanish with their secret, in whose shadow breathed a lofty yearning for the earthly city. But the Abstract to which their efforts aspired lived on, unattainable, in unknown regions...and its inspiration, more than once in the course of time, has filled those spirits capable of receiving it.

—Victor Emile Michelet, Le secret de la Chevalerie, 1930, p. 2

He had a 1940s face. Judging by the old magazines I had found in the basement at home, everybody had a face like that in the forties. It must have been wartime hunger that hollowed the cheeks and made the eyes vaguely feverish. This was a face I knew from photographs of firing squads—on both sides. In those days men with the same face shot one another.

Our visitor was wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, and a pearl-gray tie, and instinctively I asked myself why he was in civilian clothes. His hair, unnaturally black, was combed back from the temples in two bands, brilliantined, though with discretion, showing a bald, shiny crown traversed by fine strands, regular as telegraph wires, that formed a centered V on his forehead. His face was tanned, marked—marked not only by the explicitly colonial wrinkles. A pale scar ran across his left cheek from lip to ear, slicing imperceptibly through the left half of his black Adolphe Menjou mustache. The skin must have been opened less than a millimeter and stitched up. Mensur? Or a grazing bullet’s wound?

He introduced himself—Colonel Ardenti—offering Belbo his hand and merely nodding at me when Belbo presented me as an assistant. He sat down, crossed his legs, drew up his trousers from the knee, revealing a pair of maroon socks, ankle-length.

“Colonel...on active service?” Belbo asked.

Ardenti bared some high-quality dentures. “Retired, you could say. Or, if you prefer, in the reserves. I may not look old, but I am.”

“You don’t look at all old,” Belbo said.

“I’ve fought in four wars.”

“You must have begun with Garibaldi.”

“No. I was a volunteer lieutenant in Ethiopia. Then a captain, again a volunteer, in Spain. Then a major back in Africa, until we abandoned our colonies. Silver Medal. In ‘43—well, let’s just say I chose the losing side, and indeed I lost everything, save honor. I had the courage to start all over again, in the ranks. Foreign Legion. School of hard knocks. Sergeant in ‘46, colonel in ‘58, with Massu. Apparently I always choose the losing side. When De Gaulle’s leftists took over, I retired and went to live in France. I had made some good friends in Algiers, so I set up an import-export firm in Marseilles. This time I chose the winning side, apparently, since I now enjoy an independent income and can devote myself to my hobby. These past few years, I’ve written down the results of my research. Here...” From a leather briefcase he produced a voluminous file, which at the time seemed red to me.

“So,” Belbo said, “a book on the Templars?”

“The Templars,” the colonel acknowledged. “A passion of mine almost from my youth. They, too, were soldiers of fortune who crossed the Mediterranean in search of glory.”

“Signor Casaubon has also been studying the Templars,” Belbo said. “He knows the subject better than I do. But tell us about your book.”

“The Templars have always interested me. A handful of generous souls who bore the light of Europe among the savages of the two Tripolis...”

“The Templars’ adversaries weren’t exactly savages,” I remarked.

“Have you ever been captured by rebels in the Magreb?” he asked me with heavy sarcasm.

“Not that I recall,” I said.

He glared at me, and I was glad I had never served in one of his platoons. “Excuse me,” he said, speaking to Belbo. “I belong to another generation.” He looked back at me defiantly. “Is this some kind of trial, or—”

“We’re here to talk about your work, Colonel,” Belbo said. “Tell us about it, please.”

“I want to make one thing clear immediately,” the colonel said, putting his hands on the file. “I am prepared to assume the production costs. You won’t lose money on this. If you want scholarly references, I’ll provide them. Just two hours ago I met an expert in the field, a man -who came here from Paris expressly to see me. He could contribute an authoritative preface...” He anticipated Belbo’s question and made a gesture, as if to say that for the moment it was best to leave the name unsaid, that it was a delicate matter.

“Dr. Belbo,” he said, “these pages contain all the elements of a story. A true story, and a most unusual story. Better than any American thriller. I’ve discovered something—something very important—but it’s only the beginning. I want to tell the world what I know, hoping that there may be somebody out there who can fit the rest of the puzzle together—somebody who might read the book and come forward. In other words, this is a fishing’ expedition of sorts. And time is of the essence. The one man who knew what I know now has probably been killed, precisely to keep him from divulging it. But if I can reach perhaps two thousand readers with what I know, there will be no further point in doing away with me.” He paused. “The two of you know something about the arrest of the Templars?”

“Signer Casaubon told me about it recently, and I was struck by the fact that there was no resistance to the arrest, and the knights were caught by surprise.’’

The colonel smiled condescendingly. “True. But it’s absurd to think that men powerful enough to frighten the king of France would have been unable to find out that a few rogues were stirring up the king and that the king was stirring up the pope. Quite absurd! Which suggests that there had to be a plan. A sublime plan. Suppose the Templars had a plan to conquer the world, and they knew the secret of an immense source of power, a secret whose preservation was worth the sacrifice of the whole Temple quarter in Paris, and of the commanderies scattered throughout the kingdom, also in Spain, Portugal, England, and Italy, the castles in the Holy Land, the monetary wealth— everything. Philip the Fair suspected this. Why else would he have unleashed a persecution that discredited the fair flower of French chivalry? The Temple realized that the king suspected and that he would attempt its destruction. Direct resistance was futile; the plan required time: either the treasure (or whatever it was) had to be found, or it had to be exploited slowly. And the Temple’s secret directorate, whose existence everyone now recognizes...”

“Everyone?”

“Of course. It’s inconceivable that such a powerful order could have survived so long without having a secret directorate.”

“Your reasoning is flawless,” Belbo said, giving me a sidelong glance.

The colonel went on. “The grand master belonged to the secret directorate, but he must have served only as its cover, to deceive outsiders. In La Chevalerie et les aspects secrets de I’histoire, Gaulthier Walther says that the Templar plan for world conquest was to be finally realized only in the year 2000. The Temple decided to go underground, and that meant that it had to look as if the order were dead. They sacrificed themselves, that’s what they did! The grand master included. Some let themselves be killed; they were probably chosen by lot. Others submitted, blending into the civilian landscape. What became of the minor officials, the lay brothers, the carpenters, the glaziers? That was how the Freemasons were bom, later spreading throughout the world, as everyone knows. But hi England things happened differently. The king resisted the pope’s pressure and pensioned the Templars off. They lived out their days meekly, in the order’s great houses. Meekly—do you believe that? I don’t. In Spain the order changed its name to the order of Montesa. Gentlemen, these were men who could bring a king to heel; they held so many of his promissory notes that they could have bankrupted him in a week. The king of Portugal, for instance, came to terms. Let us handle it like this, dear friends, he said: don’t call yourselves Knights of the Temple anymore; change the name to Knights of Christ, and I’ll be happy. In Germany there were very few trials. The abolition of the order was purely formal, and in any case there was a brother order, the Teutonic Knights, who at the time were not merely a state within the state: they were the state, having acquired a territory as big as those countries now under the Russian heel, and they kept expanding until the end of the fifteenth century, when the Mongols arrived. But that’s another story, because the Mongols are at our gates even now. But I mustn’t digress.”

“Yes, let us not digress,” Belbo said.

“Well then. As everyone knows, two days before Philip issued the arrest warrant, and a month before it was carried out, a hay wain drawn by oxen left the precincts of the Temple for an unknown destination. Nostradamus himself alludes to it in one of his Centuries...” He looked through his manuscript for the quotation:

Souz la pasture d’animaux ruminant

par eux conduits au ventre herbipolique

soldats caches, les armes bruit menant....

“The hay wain is a legend,” I said. “And I would hardly

consider Nostradamus an authority in matters of historical fact.”

“People older than you, Signer Casaubon, have had faith in many of Nostradamus’s prophecies. Not that I am so ingenuous as to take the story of the hay wain literally. It’s a symbol—a symbol of the obvious, established fact that Jacques de Molay, anticipating his arrest, turned over command of the order, as well as its secret instructions, to a nephew, Comte de Beaujeu, who became the head of the now clandestine Temple.”

“Are there documents that bear this out?”

“Official history,” the colonel said with a bitter smile, “is written by the victors. According to official history, men like me don’t exist. No, behind the story of the hay wain lies something else. The Temple’s secret nucleus moved to a quiet spot, and from there they began to extend their underground network. This obvious fact was my starting point. For years—even before the war—I kept asking myself where these brothers in heroism might have gone. When I retired to private life, I finally decided to look for a trail. Since the flight of the hay wain had occurred in France, France was where I should find the original gathering of the secret nucleus. But where in France?”

He had a sense of theater. Belbo and I were all ears. We could find nothing better to say than “Well, where?”

“I’ll tell you. Where would the Templars have hidden? Where did Hugues de Payns come from? Champagne, nearTroyes. And at the time the Templars were founded, Champagne was ruled by Hugues de Champagne, who joined them in Jerusalem just a few years later. When he came back home, he apparently got in touch with the abbot of Citeaux and helped him initiate the study and translation of certain Hebrew texts in his monastery. Think about it: the White Benedictines—Saint Bernard’s Benedictines—also invited the rabbis of upper Burgundy to come to Citeaux, to study whatever texts Hugues had found in Palestine. Hugues even gave Saint Bernard’s monks a forest at Bar-sur-Aube, where Clairvaux was later built. And what did Saint Bernard do?”

“He became the champion of the Templars,” I said.

“But why? Did you know he made the Templars even more powerful than the Benedictines? That he prohibited the Benedictines from receiving gifts of lands and houses, and had them give lands and houses to the Templars instead? Have you ever seen the Foret d’Orient near Troyes? It’s immense, one com-mandery after the other. And in the meantime, you know, the knights in Palestine weren’t fighting. They were settled in the Temple, making friends with the Moslems instead of killing them. They communicated with Moslem mystics. In other words, Saint Bernard, with the economic support of the counts of Champagne, built an order in the Holy Land that was in contact with Arab and Jewish secret sects. An unknown directorate ran the Crusades in an effort to keep the order going, and not the other way around. And it set up a network of power that was outside royal jurisdiction. I am a man of action, not a man of science. Instead of spinning empty conjectures, I did what all the long-winded scholars have never done: I went to the place the Templars came from, the place that had been their base for two centuries, their home, where they could live like fish in water...”

“Chairman Mao says that revolutionaries must live among the people like fish in water,” I said.

“Good for your chairman. But the Templars were preparing a revolution far greater than the revolution of your pigtailed communists.”

“They don’t wear pigtails anymore.”

“No? Well, so much the worse for them. As I was saying, the Templars must have sought refuge in Champagne. Payns? Troyes? The Eastern Forest? No. Payns was—and still is—a tiny village. At the time, it had a castle at most. Troyes was a city: too many of the king’s men around. The forest, which the Templars owned, was the first place the royal guards would look. Which they did, by the way. No, I said to myself, the only place that made sense was Provins.”


18

If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns.

—Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam, Wolters, 1694, p. 38

“Why Provins?”

“Have you ever been to Provins? A magic place: you can feel it even today. Go there. A magic place, still redolent of secrets. In the eleventh century it was the seat of the Comte de Champagne, a free zone, where the central government couldn’t come snooping. The Templars were at home there; even today a street is named after them. There were churches, palaces, a castle overlooking the whole plain. And a lot of money, merchants doing business, fairs, confusion, where it was easy to pass unnoticed. But most important, something that has been there since prehistoric times: tunnels. A network of tunnels—real catacombs—extends beneath the hill. Some tunnels are open to the public today. They were places where people could meet in secret, and if their enemies got in, the conspirators could disperse in a matter of seconds, disappearing into nowhere. And if they were really familiar with the passages, they could exit in one direction and reappear in the opposite, on padded feet, like cats. They could sneak up behind the intruders and cut them down in the dark. As God is my witness, gentlemen, those tunnels are tailor-made for commandos. Quick and invisible, you slip in at night, knife between your teeth, a couple of grenades in hand, and your enemies die like rats!”

His eyes were shining. “Do you realize what a fabulous hiding place Provins must have been? A secret nucleus could meet underground, and the locals, even if they did see something, wouldn’t say a word. The king’s men, of course, did come to Provins. They arrested the Templars who were visible on the surface and took them to Paris. Reynaud de Provins was tortured, but didn’t talk. Clearly, the secret plan called for him to be arrested to make the king believe that Provins had been swept clean. But at the same time he was to give a signal, by refusing to talk: Provins will not yield—not Provins, where the new, underground Templars live on. Some tunnels lead from building to building. You can enter a granary or a warehouse and come out in a church. Some tunnels are constructed with columns and vaulted ceilings. Even today, every house in the upper city still has a cellar with ogival vaults—there must be more than a hundred of them. And every cellar has an entrance to a tunnel.”

“Conjecture,” I said.

“No, young man, fact. You haven’t seen the tunnels of Provins. Room after room, deep in the earth, covered with ancient graffiti. The graffiti are found mostly in what speleologists call lateral cells. Hieratic drawings of druidic origin, scratched into the wall before the Romans came. Caesar passed overhead, while down below men plotted resistance, ambushes, spells. There are Catharist symbols, too. Yes, gentlemen, the Cathars in Provence were wiped out, but there were Cathars in Champagne also, and they survived, meeting secretly in these catacombs of heresy. One hundred and eighty-three of them were burned above-ground, but the others hid below. The chronicles call them bougres et manicheens. Now, mind you, the bougres were simply Bogomils, Cathars of Bulgarian origin. Does the French word bougres tell you anything? Originally it meant sodomite, because the Bulgarian Cathars were said to have that little failing...”He gave a nervous laugh. “And who else was accused of that same failing? The Templars. Curious, isn’t it?”

“Up to a point,” I said. “In those days the easiest way to get rid of a heretic was to accuse him of sodomy...”

“True, and you mustn’t think that I believe the Templars actually...They were fighting men, and we fighting men like beautiful women. Vows or not, a man is a man. I mention this only because I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Cathar heretics found refuge where the Templars were. But in any case the Templars learned from them the use of caves and tunnels.”

“But all this, really, is guesswork,” Belbo said.

“It started with guesswork, yes. I’m just explaining why I set out to explore Provins. But now we come to the actual story. In the center of Provins is a big Gothic building, the Grange-aux-Dimes, or tithe granary. As you may know, one of the sources of the Templars’ strength was that they collected tithes directly and didn’t have to pay anything to the state. Under the building, as everywhere else, there’s a network of passages, today in very bad condition. Well, as I was going through archives in Provins I came across a local newspaper from 1894. In it was an article about two dragoons, Chevalier Camille Laforge of Tours and Chevalier Edouard Ingolf of Petersburg—yes, Petersburg!—who had visited the Grange a few days earlier. Accompanied by the caretaker, they went down into one of the subterranean rooms, on the second level belowground. When the caretaker, trying to show that there were other levels even farther down, stamped on the earth, they heard echoes and reverberations. The reporter praised the bold dragoons, who promptly fetched lanterns and ropes and went into the unknown tunnels like boys down a mine, pulling themselves forward on their elbows, crawling through mysterious passages. And the paper says they came to a great hall with a fine fireplace and a dry well in the center. They tied a stone to a rope, lowered it, and found that the well was eleven meters deep. They went back a week later with stronger ropes, and two companions lowered Ingolf into the well, where he discovered a big room with stone walls, ten meters square and five meters high. The others then followed him down. They realized that they were at the third level, thirty meters beneath the surface. We don’t know what the men saw and did in that room. The reporter admits that when he went to the scene to investigate, he lacked the courage to go down into the well. I was excited by the story and felt a desire to visit the place. But many of the tunnels had collapsed since the end of die last century, and even if such a well did exist at that time, there was no way of telling where it was now.

“It suddenly occurred to me that the dragoons might have found something down there. I had recently read a book about the secret of Rennes-le-Chateau, another story in which the Templars figure. A penniless and obscure parish priest was restoring an old church in a little village of some two hundred souls. A stone in the choir floor was lifted, revealing a box said to contain some very old manuscripts. Only manuscripts? We don’t know exactly what happened next, but in later years the priest became immensely rich, threw money around, led a life of dissipation, and was finally brought before an ecclesiastical court. What if something similar had happened to one of the dragoons? Or to both? Ingolf went down first; let’s say he found some precious object small enough to be hidden in his tunic. He came back up and said nothing to his companions. Well, I am a stubborn man; otherwise I wouldn’t have lived the life I have.”

The colonel ran his fingers over his scar, then raised his hands to his temples and brushed his hair toward his nape, making sure it was in place.

“I went to the central telephone office in Paris and checked the directories of the entire country, looking for a family named Ingolf. I found only one, in Auxerre, and wrote a letter introducing myself as an amateur archeologist. Two weeks later I received a reply from an elderly midwife, the daughter of the Ingolf I had read about. She was curious to know why I was interested in him. In fact, she asked: For God’s sake, could I tell her anything? I realized there was a mystery here, so I hurried to Auxerre. Mademoiselle Ingolf lives in a little ivy-covered cottage, its wooden gate held shut by a string looped around a nail. An old maid—tidy, kind, and uneducated. She asked me right away what I knew about her father, and I told her I knew only that one day he had gone down into a tunnel in Provins. I said I was writing a historical monograph on the region. She was dumbfounded; she had no idea her father had ever been to Provins. Yes, he had been a dragoon, but he resigned from the service in 1895, before she was born. He bought this cottage in Auxerre, and in 1898 he married a local girl with some money of her own. Mademoiselle Ingolf was five when her mother died, in 1915. Her father disappeared in 1935. Literally disappeared. He left for Paris, which he regularly visited at least twice a year, but was never heard from again. The local gendarmerie telephoned Paris: the man had vanished into thin air. Presumed dead. And so our mademoiselle, left alone with only a meager inheritance, had to go to work. Apparently she never found a husband, and judging by the way she sighed, thereby also hangs a tale—probably the only tale in her life, and it must have ended badly. ‘Monsieur Ardenti,’ she said, ‘I suffer constant anguish and remorse, having learned nothing of poor Papa’s fate, not even the site of his grave, if indeed there is one.’ She was eager to talk about him, describing him as very gentle and calm, a methodical, cultured man who spent his days reading and writing in a little attic study. He puttered in the garden now and then, and exchanged a few words with the pharmacist—also dead now. From time to time he traveled to Paris—on business, he said—and always came home with packages of books. The study was still full of them; she wahted to show them to me. We went upstairs.

“It was a clean and tidy little room, which Mademoiselle Ingolf dusted once a week: she could take flowers to her mother’s grave, but all she could do for poor Papa was this. She kept it just as he left it; she wished she had gone to school so she could read those books of his, but they were in languages like Old French, Latin, German, and even Russian. Papa had been born and spent his childhood in Russia; his father had been a French Embassy official. There were about a hundred volumes in the library, most of them—I was delighted to see—on the trial of the Templars. For example, he had Raynouard’s Monuments historiques relatifs a la condamnation des chevaliers du Temple, published in 1813, a great rarity. There were many volumes on secret writing systems, a whole collection on cryptography, and some works on paleography and diplomatic history. As I was leafing through an old account ledger, I found an annotation that made me start: it concerned the sale of a case, with no further description and no mention of the buyer’s name. Nor was any price given, but the date was 1895, and the entries immediately below were quite meticulous. This was the ledger of a judicious gentleman shrewdly managing his nest egg. There were some notes on the purchase of items from antiquarian booksellers in Paris. I was beginning to understand.

“In the crypt in Provins, Ingolf must have found a gold case studded with precious stones. Without a moment’s thought, he slipped it into his tunic and went back up, not saying a word to the others. At home, he found a parchment in the case. That much seems obvious. He went to Paris and contacted a collector of antiques—probably some bloodsucking pawnbroker—but the sale of the case, even so, left Ingolf comfortably off, if not rich. Then he went further, left the service, retired to the country, and started buying books and studying the parchment. Perhaps he was something of a treasure hunter to start with; otherwise he wouldn’t have been exploring tunnels in Provins. He was probably educated enough to believe that he would eventually be able to decipher the parchment on his own. So he worked calmly, unruffled, for more than thirty years, a true monomaniac. Did he ever tell anyone about his discoveries? Who knows? One way or another, by 1935 he must have felt either that he had made considerable progress or that he had come to a dead end, because he then apparently decided to turn to someone, either to tell that person what he knew or to find out what he needed to know. And what he knew must have been so secret and awesome that the person he turned to did away with him.

“But let us return to his attic. I wanted to see whether Ingolf had left any clues, so I told the good mademoiselle that if I examined her father’s books, I might perhaps find some trace of the discovery he had made in Provins. If so, I would give him fall credit in my essay. She was enthusiastic. Anything for poor Papa. She invited me to stay the whole afternoon and to come back the next morning if necessary. She brought me coifee, turned on the lights, and went back to her garden, leaving me in full charge. The room had smooth, white walls, no cupboards, nooks, or crannies where I could rummage, but I neglected nothing. I looked above, below, and inside the few pieces of furniture; I searched through an almost empty wardrobe containing a few suits filled with mothballs; I looked behind the three or four framed engravings of landscapes. I’ll spare you the details, but, take it from me, I did a thorough job. It’s not enough, for instance, to feel the stuffing ,of a sofa; you have to stick needles in to make sure you don’t miss any foreign object...”

The colonel’s experience, I realized, was not limited to battlefields.

“That left the books. I made a list of the titles and checked for underlinings and notes in the margins, for any hint at all. After a long while, I clumsily picked up an old volume with a heavy binding; I dropped it, and a handwritten sheet of paper fell out. It was notebook paper, and the texture and ink suggested that it wasn’t very old: it could have been written in the last years of Ingolf’s life. I barely glanced at it, but suddenly noticed something written in the margin: ‘Provins 1894.’ Well, you can imagine my excitement, the wave of emotion that swept over me...I realized that Ingolf had taken the original parchment to Paris, and that this was a copy. I felt no compunction. Mademoiselle Ingolf had dusted those books for years and had never come across that paper, otherwise she would have told me. Very well, let her continue to be unaware of it. The world is made up of winners and losers. I had had my share of defeat; it was time now to grasp victory. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. I bade Mademoiselle Ingolf good-bye, telling her that, though I had found nothing of interest, I would nevertheless mention her father if I wrote anything. Bless you, she said. A man of action, gentlemen, especially one burning with the passion that blazed within me, can’t have scruples when dealing with a dismal woman already sentenced by fate.”

“No need to apologize,” Belbo said. “You did it. Just tell us the rest.”

“Gentlemen, I will now show you this text. Forgive me for using a photocopy. It’s not distrust. I don’t want to subject the original to further wear.”

“But Ingolf’s copy wasn’t the original,” I said. “The parchment was the original.”

“Casaubon, when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original.”

“But Ingolf may have made errors in transcription.”

“You don’t know that he did. Whereas I know Ingolf’s transcription is true, because I see no way the truth could be otherwise. Therefore Ingolf’s copy is the original. Do we agree on this point, or do we sit and split hairs?”

“No,” Belbo said. “I hate that. Let’s see your original copy.”


19

After Beaujeu, the Order has never ceased to exist, not for a moment, and after Aumont we find an uninterrupted sequence of Grand Masters of the Order down to our own time, and if the name and seat of the true Grand Master and the true Seneschals who rule the Order and guide its sublime labors remain a mystery today, an impenetrable secret known only to the truly enlightened, it is because the hour of the Order has not struck and the time is not ripe...

—Manuscript of 1760, in G. A. Schiffmann, Die Entstehung der Rittergrade in der Freimauerei urn die Mitte des XVIII Jahrhun-derts, Leipzig, Zechel, 1882, pp. 178-190

This was our first, remote contact with the Plan. I could easily be somewhere else now if I hadn’t been in Belbo’s office that day. I could be—who knows?—selling sesame seeds in Samarkand, or editing a series of books in Braille, or heading the first National Bank of Franz Josef Land. Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false. But I was there that day, so now I am where I am.

The colonel handed us the page with a flourish. I still have it here among my papers, in a little plastic folder. Printed on that thermal paper photocopies used in those days, it is more yellowed and faded now. Actually there were two texts on the page: the first, densely written, took up half the space; the second was divided into fragments of verses...

The first text was a kind of demoniacal litany, a parody of a Semitic language:

Kuabris Defrabax Rexulon Ukkazaal Ukzaab Urpaefel Tacul-bain Habrak Hacoruin Maquafel Tebrain Hmcatuin Rokasor Himesor Argaabil Kaquaan Docrabax Reisaz Reisabrax De-caiquan Oiquaquil Zaitabor Qaxaop Dugraq Xaelobran Di-saeda Magisuan Raitak Huidal Uscolda Arabaom Zipreus Mecrim Cosmae Duquifas Rocarbis.

“Not exactly clear,” Belbo remarked.

“No, it isn’t,” the colonel agreed slyly. “And I might have spent my life trying to make sense of it, if one day, almost by chance, I hadn’t found a book about Trithemius on a bookstall and noticed one of his coded messages: ‘Pamersiel Oshurmy Delmuson Thafloyn...’ I had uncovered a clue, and I pursued it relentlessly. I knew nothing at all -about Trithemius, but in Paris I found an edition of his Steganographia, hoc est ars per occultam scripturam animi sui voluntatem absentibus aperiendi certa, published in Frankfurt in 1606. The art of using secret writing in order to bare your soul to distant persons. A fascinating man, this Trithemius. A Benedictine abbot of Spannheim, late fifteenth-early sixteenth centuries, a scholar who knew Hebrew and Chaldean, Oriental languages like Tartar. He corresponded with theologians, cabalists, alchemists, most certainly with the great Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim and perhaps with Paracelsus...Trithemius masked his revelations about secret writings behind magical smoke screens. For instance, he recommended sending coded messages like the one you’re looking at now. The recipient was then supposed to call upon angels like Pamersiel, Padiel, Dorothiel, and so on, to help him decipher the real message. But many of his examples are actually military dispatches, and his book—dedicated to Philip, Count Palatine and Duke of Bavaria—represents one of the first serious studies of cryptography.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but didn’t you say that Trithemius lived at least a hundred years after the manuscript we’re talking about was written?”

“Trithemius was associated with a Sodalitas Celtica that was concerned with philosophy, astrology, Pythagorean mathematics. You see the connection? The Templars were an order whose initiates were also inspired by the wisdom of the ancient Celts; that has been widely demonstrated. Somehow Trithemius also learned the cryptographic systems used by the Templars.”

“Amazing,” Belbo said. “And the transcription of the secret message? What does it say?”

“All in good time, gentlemen. Trithemius presents forty major and ten minor cryptosystems. Here I was lucky—either that or the Templars of Provins simply didn’t make any great effort, since they were sure nobody would ever crack their code. I tried the first of the forty major systems and assumed that only the first letter of each word counted.”

Belbo asked to see the page and glanced over it. “You still get nonsense: kdruuuth...”

“Naturally,” the colonel said condescendingly. “The Templars may not have made a great effort, but they weren’t altogether lazy either. This first sequence of letters is itself a coded message, and I wondered whether the second series of ten minor coding systems might not give an answer. For this second series, you see, Trithemius used some wheels. Here is the wheel for the first system.”

He took another photocopy from his file, drew his chair up to the desk, and, asking us to pay careful attention, touched the letters with his closed fountain pen.

[...]

“It’s the simplest possible system. Consider only the outer circle. To code something, you replace each letter of your original message with the letter that precedes it for A you write Z, for B you write A, and so on. Child’s play for a secret agent nowadays, but back then it was considered witchcraft. To decode, of course, you go in the opposite direction, replacing each letter of the coded message with the letter that follows it. I tried it, and I was lucky again; it worked the very first time. Here’s what it says.” He recited: “ ‘Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes.’ That is: the thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups.”

“Which means what?”

“Apparently nothing, at first glance. It’s a kind of headline announcing the establishment of a group. It was written in secret language for ritualistic reasons. Our Templars, satisfied that they were putting their message in an inviolable inner sanctum, were content to use their fourteenth-century French. But let’s look at the second text.”

a la...Saint Jean

36 p charrete de fein

6...entiers avec saiel

p...les blancs mantiax

r...s...chevaliers de Pruins pour /a...j.nc.

6 foil 6 en 6 places

chascune foil 20 a...720 a...

iceste est I’ordonation

al donjon It premiers

it li secunz joste iceus qui...pans

it al refuge

it a Nostre Dame de I ‘altre pan de I ‘iau

it a I ‘ostel des popelicans

it a la pierre

3 foiz 6 avant la feste...to Grant Pute.

“This is the decoded message?” Belbo asked, disappointed and amused.

“Obviously the dots in Ingolf’s transcription stand for words that were illegible. Perhaps the parchment was damaged in places. But I’ve made a final transcription and translation, based on surmises that are, if I do say so myself, unassailable. I’ve restored the text to its ancient splendor—as the saying goes.”

With a magician’s gesture, he flipped over the photocopy and showed us his notes, printed in capitals.

THE (NIGHT OF) SAINT JOHN

36 (YEARS) P(OST) HAY WAIN

6 (MESSAGES) INTACT WITH SEAL

F(OR THE KNIGHTS WITH) THE WHITE CLOAKS [TEMPLARS]

R(ELAP)S(I) OF PROVINS FOR (VAIN)JANCE [REVENGE]

6 TIMES 6 IN SIX PLACES

EACH TIME 20 Y(EARS MAKES) 120 Y(EARS)

THIS IS THE PLAN

THE FIRST GO TO THE CASTLE

IT(ERUM) [AGAIN AFTER 120 YEARS] THE SECOND JOIN THOSE

(OF THE) BREAD AGAIN TO THE REFUGE AGAIN TO OUR LADY BEYOND THE RIVER

AGAIN TO THE HOSTEL OF THE POPELICANS

AGAIN TO THE STONE

3 TIMES 6 [666] BEFORE THE FEAST (OF THE) GREAT WHORE.

“Clear as mud,” Belbo said.

“Of course, it still needs interpretation. But Ingolf surely must have done that, as I have. If you know the history of the order, it’s less obscure than it seems.”

A pause. He asked for a glass of water and went over the text with us again, word by word.

“Now then. The night of Saint John’s Eve, thirty-six years after the hay wain. The Templars charged with keeping the order alive escaped capture in September 1307 in a hay wain. At that time the year was calculated from Easter to Easter. So 1307 would end at what we would consider Easter of 1308. Count thirty-six years after Easter 1308 and you arrive at Easter 1344. The message was placed in the crypt inside a precious case, as a seal, a kind of deed attesting to some event that took place there on Saint John’s Eve after the establishment of the secret order. In other words, on June 23, 1344.”

“Why 1344?”

“I believe that between 1307 and 1344 the secret order was reorganized in preparation for the project proclaimed in the parchment. They had to wait till the dust had settled, till links could be forged again among Templars in five or six countries. Now if the Templars waited thirty-six years—not thirty-five or thirty-seven—clearly it was because the number 36 had mystical properties for them, as the coded message confirms. The sum of the digits of thirty-six is nine, and I don’t have to remind you of the profound significance of this number.”

“Am I disturbing you?” It was Diotallevi, who had slipped in behind us, on padded feet like a Templar of Provins.

“Right up your alley,” Belbo said. He introduced him to the colonel, who didn’t seem particularly disturbed. On the contrary, he was happy to have a larger, and keen, audience. He continued his exegesis, Diotallevi salivating at those numerolog-ical delicacies. Pure gematria.

“We come now to the seals: six things intact with seals. Ingolf had found a case closed with a seal. For whom was this case sealed? For the White Cloaks, for the Templars. Next comes an r, several missing letters, and an s. I read it as ‘relapsi.’ Why? Because, as we all know, relapsi were confessed defendants who later retracted, and relapsi played a crucial role in the trial of the Templars. The Templars of Provins bore their identity as relapsi proudly. They were the ones who disassociated themselves from that wicked farce of a trial. So the message refers to the knights of Provins, relapsi, who are preparing—what? The few letters we have suggest ‘vainjance,’ revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“Gentlemen! The whole Templar mystique, from the trial on, was focused on the plan to avenge Jacques de Molay. I don’t think much of the Masonic rite—a mere bourgeois caricature of Templar knighthood—but nevertheless it’s a reflection, however pale, of Templar practices. And one of the degrees of Scottish Masonry was kadosch knight, the knight of revenge.”

“All right, the Templars were preparing for revenge. What next?”

“How much time would it take to carry out the plan of revenge? In the coded message there is mention of six knights appearing six times in six places; thirty-six divided into six groups. Then it says ‘Each time twenty.’ What follows is unclear, but in Ingolf’s transcription it looks like an a, for ‘ans,’ or years. Every twenty years, I conclude; six times or one hundred and twenty years in all. Later on in the message we find a list of six places, or six tasks to be performed. There is mention of an ‘ordonation,’ a plan, project, or procedure to be followed. And it says the first group must go to a donjon or castle while the second goes somewhere else, and so on down to the sixth. Then the document tells us there should be another six documents, still sealed, scattered in different places. It is obvious to me that the seals are supposed to be opened in sequence, at intervals of a hundred and twenty years.”

“But what does twenty years each time mean?” Diotallevi asked.

“These knights of revenge are to carry out missions in particular places every hundred and twenty years. It’s a kind of relay race. Clearly, six Templars set out on that night in 1344, each one going to one of the six places included in the plan. But the keeper of the first seal surely can’t remain alive for a hundred and twenty years. Instead, each keeper of each seal is to hold his post for twenty years and then pass the command on to a successor. Twenty years seems a reasonable term. There would be six keepers per seal, each one serving twenty years. When the hundred and twenty years had gone by, the last keeper of the seal could read an instruction, for example, and then pass it on to the chief keeper of the second seal. That’s why the verbs in the message are in the plural: the first are to go here, the second there. Each location is, so to speak, under surveillance for a hundred and twenty years by six knights who serve terms of twenty years each. If you add it up, you’ll see that there are five spaces of one hundred and twenty years between the first location and the sixth. Five times one hundred and twenty is six hundred. Add six hundred to 1344 and you get 1944. Which, by the way, is confirmed in the last line. Perfectly clear.”

“Clear how?”

“The last line says, ‘Three times six before the feast (of the) Great Whore.’ This is another numerological game, because the digits of 1944 add up to eighteen. Eighteen is three times six. This further miraculous numerical coincidence suggested another, very subtle, enigma to the Templars. The year 1944 is the terminal date of the plan. But with a view to another target: the year 2000! The Templars believed that the second millennium would see the advent of their Jerusalem, an earthly Jerusalem, the Anti-Jerusalem. They were persecuted as heretics, and in their hatred of the Church they came to identify with the Antichrist. They knew that throughout the occult tradition 666 was the number of the Beast, and the six hundred and sixty-sixth year was the year of the Beast. Well, 666, the Year of the Beast, is the year 2000, when the Templars’ revenge will triumph. The Anti-Jerusalem is the New Babylon, and this is why 1944 is the year of the triumph of La Grande Pute, the great whore of Babylon mentioned in the Apocalypse. The reference to 666 was a provocation, a bit of bravado from those fighting men. A gesture of defiance from outsiders, as they would be called today. Great story, don’t you think?”

His eyes were moist as he looked at us, and so were his lips and mustache. He stroked his briefcase.

“All right,” Belbo said. “Let’s assume that the message outlines the timing of a plan. But what plan?”

“Now you’re asking too much. If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to cast this bait. But one thing I do know. Somewhere along the line something went wrong, and the plan was not carried out. Otherwise, if I may say so, we’d know it. And I can understand the reason: 1944 wasn’t an easy year. Back in 1344, the Templars had no way of predicting a disruptive world war.’’

“Excuse me for butting in,” Diotallevi said, “but if I understood correctly, when the first seal is opened, the succession of keepers of that seal doesn’t end; it lives on until the breaking of the last seal, when all the representatives of the order are to be present. In every century, then—or, strictly speaking, every hundred and twenty years—there would always be six keepers for each place, or thirty-six in all.”

“Right,” Ardenti said.

“Thirty-six knights for each of the six places makes two hundred and sixteen, the digits of which add up to nine. And since there are six centuries, we can multiply two hundred and sixteen by six, which gives us one thousand two hundred and ninety-six, whose digits add up to eighteen, or three times six, or 666.”

Diotallevi would perhaps have gone on to a numerological reconstruction of the history of the world if Belbo hadn’t stopped him with one of those looks mothers give children when they are acting up. But the colonel immediately recognized Diotallevi as an enlightened mind.

“Splendid, Professor. It’s a revelation! By the way, did you know that nine was the number of the knights who founded the Temple in Jerusalem?”

“And the Great Name of God, as expressed in the Tetragram-maton,” Diotallevi said, “has seventy-two letters—and seven plus two makes nine. But that’s not all, if you’ll allow me. The Pythagorean tradition, which cabala preserves—or perhaps inspired—notes that the sum of the odd numbers from one to seven is sixteen, and the sum of the even numbers from two to eight is twenty, and twenty plus sixteen makes thirty-six.”

“My God, Professor!” The colonel was beside himself. “I knew it, I knew it! You’ve given me the courage to go on. Now I know that I’m close to the truth.”

Had Diotallevi turned arithmetic into a religion, or religion into arithmetic? Perhaps both. Or maybe he was just an atheist flirting with the rapture of some superior heaven. He could have become a fanatic of roulette (and that would have been better); instead, he thought of himself as an unbelieving rabbi.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but Belbo intervened and broke the spell with his Piedmont-style good sense. More lines of the message remained for the colonel to interpret, and we were all eager to hear. It was now six o’clock. Six P.M., I thought: eighteen hours.

“All right,” Belbo said. “Thirty-six per century; step by step the knights prepare to converge on the Stone. But what is this Stone?”

“Really, gentlemen! The Stone is, of course, the Grail.”


20

The Middle Ages awaited the hero of the Graal and expected that the head of the Holy Roman Empire would become an image and a manifestation of that “King of the World.”...The invisible Emperor was to become also the visible one, and the Middle Ages would be “middle” in the sense of “central”...the invisible, inviolable center, the sovereign who must reawaken, the same hero, avenging and restoring. These are not fantasies of a dead, romantic past, but, rather, the simple truth for those who, today, alone can legitimately call themselves alive.

—Julius Evola, Il mistero del Graal, Rome, Edizioni Mediterranee, 1983, Chapter 23 and epilogue

“You mean the Grail also comes into this?” Belbo asked.

“Naturally. And I’m not the only one who says so. You are educated men; there is no need for me to go into the legend of the Grail. The Knights of the Round Table, the mystical quest for this miraculous object, which some believe was the chalice in which the blood of Jesus was collected. The Grail taken to France by Joseph of Arimathea. Others say it is a stone that possesses mysterious powers. The Grail is often depicted as a dazzling light. It’s a symbol representing power, a source of immense energy. It nourishes, heals wounds, blinds, strikes down...Some have thought of it as the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists, but even if that’s so, what was the philosopher’s stone if not a symbol of some cosmic energy? The literature on the subject is endless, but you can easily distinguish signs that are irrefutable. In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival the Grail is said to be kept in a Templar castle! Was Eschenbach an initiate? A foolhardy writer who revealed too much? But there is more. This Grail kept by the Templars is described as a stone fallen from the heavens: lapis exillis. It’s not clear whether the expression means ‘stone from heaven’ (ex coelis) or ‘stone from exile.’ But in either case, it is something that comes from far away, and some suggest that it could have been a meteorite. As far as we’re concerned, however, it is definitely a stone. Whatever the Grail may have been, for the Templars it was the symbol of the objective, or end of the plan.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but the document indicates that the knights’ sixth meeting would be held near or above a stone. It doesn’t tell them to find the stone.”

“Another subtle ambiguity, another luminous mystical analogy! Yes, indeed: the sixth meeting is to be held near a stone, and we shall soon see where; but at that stone, where the transmission of the plan is fulfilled and the six seals opened, the knights will learn where to find the Stone! It’s like the pun in the New Testament: Thou art Peter and upon this rock...On the stone you shall find the Stone.”

“It’s all quite obvious,” Belbo said. “Please go on. Casau-bon, stop interrupting. We’re all eager to hear the rest.”

“Well then,” the colonel said, “the reference to the Grail made me think for a long time that the treasure was a huge deposit of radioactive material, perhaps of extraterrestrial origin. Consider, for example, the mysterious wound in the legend of King Amfortas. The account makes him sound like a radiologist who has been dangerously exposed. He is not to be touched. Why not? Imagine how excited the Templars must have been when they reached the shores of the Dead Sea, whose waters, as you gentlemen surely know, are so dense that on them you float like a cork. It is a sea with curative powers. They could have discovered a deposit of radium or uranium in Palestine, a deposit they weren’t in a position to exploit then and there.

“The relationship between the Grail, the Templars, and the Cathars was investigated scientifically by a valiant German officer. I’m referring to Otto Rahn, an SS Obersturmbannruhrer who devoted his life to rigorous, scholarly study of the European and Aryan nature of the Grail. I won’t go into why and how he lost his life in 1939, but some insist that...Well, how can I forget what happened to Ingolf ? In any case, Rahn demonstrated a link between the Golden Fleece of the Argonauts and the Grail. It’s obvious that there’s a connection between the Grail, the philosopher’s stone, and the enormous power source that Hitler’s followers were seeking on the eve of the war and pursued to their last breath. In one version of the Argonauts’ story, remember, they see a cup—a cup, mind you—floating over the Mountain of the World with the Tree of Light. When the Argonauts find the Golden Fleece, their ship is magically borne into the Milky Way, in the austral sky, where the luminous nature of God eternal is made manifest by the Southern Cross, the Triangle, and the Altar. The triangle symbolizes the Holy Trinity, the cross the divine Sacrifice of love, and the altar is the Table of the Supper, on which stood the Cup of the Resurrection. The Celtic and Aryan origin of all these symbols is obvious.”

The colonel seemed caught in the same heroic ecstasy that had impelled his Obersturmunddrang, or whatever the hell that German was, to the supreme sacrifice. Someone had to bring him down to earth.

“Where is all this leading?” I asked.

“Signer Casaubon, can’t you see it for yourself? The Grail has been called the Luciferian Stone, which points to the figure of Baphomet. The Grail is a power source, the Templars were the guardians of an energy secret, and they drew up their plan accordingly. Where would the unknown commanderies be established? Where, gentleman?” And the colonel looked at us with a conspiratorial air, as if we were all in the plot together. “I had a trail to follow, erroneous but useful. In 1797, Charles Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, an author who must have overheard some secrets, wrote a book entitled Le tombeau de Jacques Malay ou le secret des conspirateurs a ceux qui veulent tout savoir. By an interesting coincidence, his work turned up in Ingolf’s little library. He claims that Molay, before his death, set up four secret lodges: in Paris, Scotland, Stockholm, and Naples. These four lodges were to exterminate all monarchs and destroy the power of die pope. Gassicourt was an eccentric, of course, but I used his idea as a starting point from which to determine where the Templars might have located their secret centers. I wouldn’t have been able to understand the enigmas of the message if I hadn’t had some guiding idea. But I did have such an idea. It was my conviction, based oh abundant evidence, that the Templar spirit was of Celtic, druidic origin; it was the spirit of Nordic Arian-ism, traditionally associated with the island of Avalon, seat of the legendary civilization of the far north. As you surely know, various authors have identified Avalon as the Garden of the Hes-perides or as Ultima Thule, or as the Colchis of the Golden Fleece. It’s hardly an accident that history’s greatest chivalric order was la Toison d’Or, the Order of the Golden Fleece. Which makes it clear what the word ‘castle’ in the message really means: it refers to the hyperboreal, the northernmost castle, where the Templars kept the Grail, probably the mythical Monsalvat.”

He paused, wanting us to hang on his every word. We hung.

“Now let’s go back to the second command in the message: The guardians of the seal are to go to a place associated with bread. This instruction is completely clear: the Grail is the chalice that contained Christ’s blood, the bread is Christ’s body, the place where the bread was eaten is the place of the Last Supper, Jerusalem. It seems impossible that the Templars wouldn’t have maintained a secret base there, even after the Saracen recon-quest. I must admit that at first I was troubled by this Jewish element in a plan so deeply imbued widi Aryan mythology. But then I realized: we are the ones who continue to regard Jesus as deriving from the Judaic religion, because that’s what the Church of Rome has always taught us. But the Templars knew that Jesus was actually a Celtic myth. The whole gospel story is a hermetic allegory: resurrection after dissolution in the bowels of the earth, and all that. Christ is simply the elixir of the alchemists. For that matter, everyone knows that the Trinity is an Aryan concept anyway, and that’s why the whole rule of the Templars, drawn up by the Druid Saint Bernard, is riddled with the numbers.”

The colonel took another sip of water. He was hoarse. “And now we come to the third stage: the refuge. It’s Tibet.”

“Why Tiber?”

“Because, in the first place, Eschenbach tells us the Templars left Europe and took the Grail to India. Cradle of the Aryan race. The refuge is Agarttha. You gentlemen must have heard talk of Agarttha, seat of the King of the World, the underground city from which the Masters of the World control and direct the developments of human history. The Templars established one of their secret centers there, at the very source of their spirituality. You must be aware of the connection between the realm of Agarttha and the Synarchy...”

“Frankly, no.”

“All the better. There are secrets that kill. But let’s not digress. In any case, you know that Agarttha was founded six thousand years ago, at the beginning of the Kali Yuga era, in which we are still living. The task of the knightly orders has always been to maintain contact with Agarttha, the active link between the wisdom of the East and the wisdom of the West. And now it’s clear where the fourth meeting is to take place, in another druidic sanctuary, in a city of the Virgin: the cathedral of Chartres. From Provins, Chartres lies across the chief river of the Ile-de-France, the Seine.”

We were completely lost. “Wait a minute,” I said. “What does Chartres have to do with your Celts and Druids?”

“Where do you think the idea of the Virgin came from? The first virgins mentioned in Europe were the black virgins of the Celts. Once, as a young man, Saint Bernard was in the church of Saint Voirles, kneeling before the black virgin there, and she squeezed from her breast three drops of milk, which fell on the lips of the future founder of the Templars. That was why the romances of the Grail arose: to create a cover for the Crusades, which were meant to find the Grail. The Benedictines are the heirs of the Druids. Everybody knows that.”

“And where are these black virgins now?”

“They were destroyed by forces who wanted to corrupt the Nordic and Celtic traditions and transform them into a Mediterranean religion by inventing the myth of Mary of Nazareth. Or else those virgins were disguised, distorted, like so many other black madonnas still displayed to the fanaticism of the masses.

But if you examine the images in the cathedrals as carefully as the great Fulcanelli did, you will find that this story is told quite clearly, and the ties between the Celtic virgins and the alchemist tradition, Templar in origin, are equally clear. The black virgin symbolizes the prime matter that seekers employ in their quest for the philosopher’s stone, which, as we have seen, is simply the Grail. Where do you mink Mahomet, another great Druid initiate, got the inspiration for the Black Stone of Mecca? Someone walled up the crypt in Chartres that leads to the underground site where the original pagan statue still stands, but if you look carefully, you can still make out a black virgin, Notre-Dame-du-Pilier, carved by an Odinian canon. In her right hand she holds the magic cylinder of the high priestesses of Odin, in her left the magic calendar that once depicted—I say, ‘once,’ because these sculptures unfortunately were vandalized by orthodox canons—the sacred animals of Odinism: the dog, the eagle, the lion, the white bear, and the werewolf. At the same time, none of the scholars of Gothic esoterica has overlooked in Chartres a statue of a woman holding the chalice, the Grail. Ah, gentlemen, if only it were possible not just to read Chartres cathedral according to the tourist guides—Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic—but to see it, really see it, with the eyes of Tradition! Then the true story told by that rock of Erik at Avalon would be known.”

“Which brings us to the Popelicans. Who were they?”

“The Cathars. ‘Popelican’—or ‘Popelicant’—was one of the names given to heretics. The Cathars of Provence had been destroyed, and I am not so naive as to imagine a meeting in the ruins of Montsegur, but the sect itself didn’t die. There’s a whole geography of hidden Catharism, which produced Dante as well as the dolce stil nuovo poets and the Fedeli d’Amore sect. The fifth meeting place is therefore somewhere in northern Italy or southern France.”

“And the last?”

“Ah, what is the most ancient, the most sacred, the most enduring of Celtic stones, the sanctuary of the sun-god, most favored observation point from which finally the reunited descendants of the Templars of Provins, having reached the end of their plan, can look upon the secrets hidden till then by the seven seals and at last discover how to exploit the immense power granted by their possession of the Holy Grail? Why, it’s in England! The magic circle of Stonehenge! Where else?”

“O basta la,” Belbo said. Only another child of Piedmont could have understood the spirit in which this expression of polite amazement was uttered. No equivalent in any other language or dialect (dis done, are you kidding?) can convey the apathy, the fatalism with which it expresses the firm conviction that the person to whom it is addressed is, irreparably, the product of a bumbling creator.

But the colonel wasn’t from Piedmont, and he seemed flattered by Belbo’s reaction.

“Yes indeed. Such is the plan, the ordonation, in its marvel-ous simplicity and coherence. And there’s something else. If you take a map of Europe and Asia and trace the development of the plan beginning with the castle in the north and moving from there to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to Agarttha, from Agarttha to Chartres, from Chartres to the shores of the Mediterranean, and from there to Stonehenge, you will find that you have drawn a rune that looks more or less like this.”

[...]

“And?” Belbo asked.

“And the same rune, ideally, would connect the main centers of Templar esotericism: Amiens, Troyes—Saint Bernard’s domain at the edge of the Foret d’Orient—Reims, Chartres, Rennes-le-Chateau, and Mont-Saint-Michel, a place of ancient druidic worship. The rune also recalls the constellation of the Virgin.”

“I dabble in astronomy,” Diotallevi said shyly. “The Virgin has a different shape, and I believe it contains eleven stars...”

The colonel smiled indulgently. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, you know as well as I do that everything depends on how you draw the lines. You can make a wain or a bear, whatever you like, and it’s hard to decide whether a given star is part of a given constellation or not. Take another look at the Virgin, make Spica the lowermost point corresponding to the Provengal coast, use only five stars, and you’ll see a striking resemblance between the two outlines.”

“You just have to decide which stars to omit,” Belbo said.

“Precisely,” the colonel agreed.

“Listen,” Belbo said, “how can you rule out the possibility that the meetings did take place as scheduled and that the knights are now hard at work?”

“Because I perceive no symptoms, and allow me to add, ‘unfortunately.’ No, the plan was definitely interrupted. And perhaps those who were to carry it to its conclusion no longer exist.

The groups of the thirty-six may have been broken up by some worldwide catastrophe. But some other group of men with spirit, men with the right information, could perhaps pick up the thread of the plot. Whatever it is, that something is still there. I’m looking for the right men. That’s why I want to publish the book: to encourage reactions. And at the same time, I’m trying to make contact with people who can help me look for the answer in the labyrinth of traditional learning. Just today I managed to meet the greatest expert on the subject. But he, alas, luminary that he is, couldn’t tell me anything, though he expressed great interest in my story and promised to write a preface...”

“Excuse me,” Belbo asked, “but wasn’t it unwise to confide your secret to this gentleman? You told us yourself about Ingolf’s misstep...”

“Please,” the colonel replied. “Ingolf was a bungler. The person I’m in contact with is a scholar above suspicion, a man who doesn’t venture hasty conclusions. Today, for instance, he asked me to wait a little longer before showing my work to a publisher, until I had resolved all the controversial points. I didn’t want to antagonize him, so I didn’t tell him I was coming here. But I’m sure you can understand how impatient I am, having come this far in my task. The gentleman...oh, to hell with discretion! I don’t want you to think I’m bragging idly. He is Rakosky.”

He paused for our reaction.

Belbo disappointed him. “Who?”

“Rakosky. The Rakosky! The authority on traditional studies, the former editor of Les Cahiers du Mysterel”

“Oh, that Rakosky,” Belbo said. “Yes, yes, of course...”

“Before writing the final version of my book, I’ll wait to hear this gentleman’s advice. But I wanted to move as quickly as possible, and if I could come to an agreement with your firm in the meantime...As I said, I am eager to stir up reactions, to collect new information...There are people who surely know but won’t speak...Around 1944, gentlemen, though he knew the war was lost, Hitler began talking about a secret weapon that would allow him to turn the situation around. He was crazy, people said. But what if he wasn’t crazy? You follow me?” His forehead was bathed in sweat, and his moustache bristled like a feline’s whiskers. “In any event,” he said, “I’m casting the bait. We’ll see if anyone bites.”

From what I knew and thought of Belbo then, I expected him to show the colonel out with some polite words. But he didn’t. “Listen, Colonel,” he said, “this is enormously interesting, regardless of whether you sign a contract with us or with someone else. Do you think you could spare another ten minutes or so?” He turned to me. “It’s late, Casaubon, and I’ve kept you too long already. Can we meet tomorrow?”

I was being dismissed. Diotallevi took my arm and said he was leaving, too. We said good-bye. The colonel shook Diotallevi’s hand warmly and gave me a nod accompanied by a chilly smile.

As we were going down the stairs, Diotallevi said to me: “You’re probably wondering why Belbo asked you to leave. Don’t think he was being rude. He’s going to make the colonel an offer. It’s a delicate matter. Delicate, by order of Signer Gar-amond. Our presence would be an embarrassment.”

As I learned later, Belbo meant to cast the colonel into the maw of Manutius.

I dragged Diotallevi to Pilade’s, where I had a Campari and he a root beer. Root beer, he said, had a monkish, archaic taste, almost Templar.

I asked him what he thought of the colonel.

“All the world’s follies,”he replied, “turn up in publishing houses sooner or later. But the world’s follies may also contain flashes of the wisdom of the Most High, so the wise man observes folly with humility.” Then he excused himself; he had to go. “This evening, a feast awaits me,” he said.

“A party?”

He seemed dismayed by my frivolity. “The Zohar,” he explained. “Lekh Lekha. Passages still completely misunderstood.”


21

The Graal...is a weight so heavy that creatures in the bondage of sin are unable to move it from its place.

—Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, IX, 477

I hadn’t taken to the colonel, yet he had piqued my interest. You can be fascinated even by a tree frog if you watch it long enough. I was savoring the first drops of the poison that would carry us all to perdition.

I went back to see Belbo the following afternoon, and we talked a little about our visitor. Belbo said the man had seemed a mythomaniac to him. “Did you notice how he quoted that Rakosky, or Rostropovich, as if the man were Kant?”

“But these are typical old tales,” I said. “Ingolf was a lunatic who believed them, and the colonel is a lunatic who believes Ingolf.”

“Maybe he believed him yesterday and today he believes something else. Before he left, I arranged an appointment for him with—well, with another publisher, a firm that’s not choosy and brings out books financed by the authors themselves. He seemed enthusiastic. But I just learned that he didn’t show up. And—imagine—he even left the photocopy of that message here. Look. He leaves the secret of the Templars around as if it were of no importance. That’s how these characters are.”

At this moment the phone rang. Belbo answered: “Good morning, Garamond Press, Belbo speaking. What can I do for you?...Yes, he was here yesterday afternoon, offering me a book...Sorry, that’s rather confidential. If you could tell me...”

He listened for a few seconds, then, suddenly pale, looked at me and said: “The colonel’s been murdered, or something of the sort.” He spoke into the phone again: “Excuse me. I was talking to Signer Casaubon, a consultant of mine who was also present at yesterday’s conversation...Well, Colonel Ardenti came to talk to us about a project of his, a story I consider largely fabrication, about a supposed treasure of the Templars. They were medieval knights...”

Instinctively, he put his hand around the mouthpiece as if to talk privately, then took his hand away when he saw I was watching. He spoke with some hesitation: “No, Inspector De Angelis, the colonel discussed a book he wanted to write, but only in vague terms...What, both of us? Now? All right, give me the address.”

He hung up and was silent for a while, drumming his fingers on the desk. “Sorry, Casaubon,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve dragged you into this. I didn’t have time to think. That was a police inspector named De Angelis. It seems the colonel was staying in an apartment hotel, and somebody claims to have found him there last night, dead...”

“Claims? The inspector doesn’t know if it’s true or not?”

“It sounds strange, but apparently he doesn’t. They found my name and yesterday’s appointment in a notebook. I believe we’re the only clue. What can I say? Let’s go.”

We called a taxi. During the ride Belbo gripped my arm. “Listen, Casaubon, this may be just a coincidence. Maybe my mind is warped. But where I come from there’s a saying: ‘Whatever you do, don’t name names.’ When I was a boy, I used to

go see this Nativity play performed in dialect. A pious farce, with shepherds who didn’t know whether they were in Bethlehem or on the banks of the Tanaro, farther up the Po valley. The Magi arrive and ask a shepherd’s boy what his master’s name is. The boy answers: Gelindo. When Gelindo finds out, he beats the daylights out of the boy. ‘Never give away a man’s name,’ he says. Anyway, if it’s all right with you, the colonel never mentioned Ingolf or the Provins message.”

“We don’t want to meet Ingolf’s mysterious end,” I said, trying to smile.

“As I said,- it’s all nonsense. But there are some things it’s better to keep out of.”

I promised I would go along with him on this, but I was nervous. After all, I was a student who participated in demonstrations. The police made me uneasy. We arrived at the hotel— not one of the best—in an outlying neighborhood. They sent us right up to what they called Colonel Ardenti’s apartment. Police on the stairs. They let us into number 27—two plus seven is nine, I thought. A bedroom, vestibule with a little table, closet-kitchen, bathroom with shower, no curtain. Through the half-open door I couldn’t see if there was a bidet, though in a place like this it was probably the only convenience the guests demanded. Drab furnishings, not many personal effects, but what there was, in great disorder. Someone had hastily gone through the closets and suitcases. Maybe the police; there were about a dozen of them, including plainclothesmen.

A fairly young man with fairly long hair came over to us. “I’m De Angelis. Dr. Belbo? Dr. Casaubon?”

“I’m not a doctor yet. Still working toward my degree.”

“Good for you. Keep at it. Without a degree you won’t be able to take the police exams, and you don’t know what you’re missing.” He seemed irritated. “Excuse me, but let’s get the preliminaries out of the way. This is the passport that belonged to the man who rented this room. He registered as Colonel Ar-denti. Recognize him?”

“That’s Ardenti,” Belbo said. “But can you tell us what’s going on here? From what you said on the phone, I didn’t quite understand if he’s dead or—”

“I’d be delighted if you could tell me that,” De Angelis said with a frown. “But all right, you gentlemen are probably entitled to know a bit more. Signor Ardenti—or Colonel Ardenti— checked in four days ago. As you may have noticed, this place isn’t the Grand. The one desk clerk goes to bed at eleven, because the guests have a key to the front door. There are a couple of maids who come in every morning to do the rooms, and an old alcoholic who acts as porter and takes liquor up to the rooms if the customers ring. Not only alcoholic, but arteriosclerotic, too. It was hell getting anything out of him. The desk clerk says the old man sees spooks and sometimes scares the guests. Last night the clerk saw Ardenti come in around ten and go up to his room with two men. In this place they don’t bat an eye if somebody takes a whole troop of transvestites upstairs. The men looked normal, though according to the clerk they had foreign accents. At ten-thirty Ardenti called the old alcoholic and asked him to bring up a bottle of whiskey, mineral water, and three glasses. At about one or one-thirty the old man heard someone ringing erratically from room 27. Judging by the way he looked this morning, though, he must have put away quite a few glasses by then, rotgut for sure. Anyway, the old man came up and knocked. No answer. He opened the door with his passkey. Found everything all messed up the way it is now. The colonel was lying on the bed with a length of wire wound tight around his neck, his eyes staring. The old man ran downstairs, woke the desk clerk, but neither of them felt like coming back up. They tried to use the phone, but the line seemed to be dead. It was working perfectly this morning, but we’ll take their word for it. The clerk ran out to call the police from the pay phone on the comer, while the old man hobbled across the square to a doctor’s house. To make a long story short, they were gone for twenty minutes. When they got back, they waited downstairs, still frightened. Meanwhile, the doctor got dressed and arrived almost at the same time as the squad car. They went up to twenty-seven, and there was no one on the bed.”

“What do you mean, no one?” Belbo asked.

“No corpse. The doctor went home, and the police found only what you see here. They questioned the old alcoholic and the clerk, and got the story I just told you. What of the two gentlemen who came in with Ardenti at ten o’clock? They could have left anytime between eleven and one, and nobody would have noticed. Were they still in the room when the old man came in? Who knows? He stayed only a second, didn’t look into the kitchen or the bathroom. Could they have left while the clerk and the alcoholic were out calling for help? Did they take the body with them? Not impossible. There’s an outside staircase to the courtyard, and from the courtyard they could just walk out the front door, which opens into a side street.

“More important, was there really a body? Or did the colonel go out with the two men—at midnight, say—and the old alcoholic dreamed the whole thing? The clerk says it wouldn’t be the first time the old man saw things that weren’t there. A few years ago he saw a naked female guest hanged in her room, but half an hour later the woman came in, fresh as a daisy, and on the old man’s cot they found one of those S-M magazines. Who knows? Maybe he was peeping through the keyhole and saw a curtain stirring in the shadows. All we know for sure is that this room has been searched and Ardenti is missing.

“But I’ve already talked too much. Now it’s your turn, Dr. Belbo. The only thing we found was a slip of paper on the floor by that little table, ‘2 P.M. Rakosky, Hotel Principe e Savoia; 4 P.M. Garamond, Dr. Belbo.’ You say he did come to see you. Tell me what happened.”


22

The knights of the Graal wanted to face no further questions.

—Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, XVI, 819

Belbo was brief. He repeated what he had already said on the phone: The colonel had told a hazy story about discovering evidence of a treasure in some documents he had found in France, but he hadn’t said much more about it. He seemed to think he was in possession of a dangerous secret, and he wanted to make it public so he wouldn’t be the only one who knew it. He mentioned the fact that others who had discovered the secret before him had disappeared mysteriously. He would show us the documents only if we guaranteed him a contract, but Belbo couldn’t guarantee a contract without seeing something first. They vaguely agreed to get together again. The colonel had spoken of a meeting with someone named Rakosky, describing him as the editor of Les Cahiers du Mystere. The colonel wanted this Rakosky to write a preface for him, and apparently Rakosky had advised him to delay publication. The colonel hadn’t told this man about the appointment at Garamond. That was all.

“I see,” De Angelis said. “What sort of impression did he make on you?”

“He seemed an eccentric to us, and he spoke about his past in, well, an unrepentant tone. It included a spell in the Foreign Legion.”

“He told you the truth, though not the whole truth. We were already keeping an eye on him, at least to some extent. We have so many such cases...First of all, Ardenti wasn’t his real name, but he had a legitimate French passport. He started reappearing in Italy from time to time a few years ago, and was tentatively identified as a Captain Arcoveggi, sentenced to death in absentia in 1945. Collaboration with the SS. He sent some people to Dachau. They were keeping an eye on him in France, too. He was tried for fraud there, and just managed to get off. We have an idea—but only an idea, mind you—that Ardenti at one point was calling himself Fassotti, that he’s the Fassotti that a small industrialist in Peschiera Borromeo filed a complaint against last year. This Fassotti—or Ardenti—had convinced the industrialist that the treasure of Dongo, the legendary Fascist gold reserve, was still lying at the bottom of Lake Como. Fassotti claimed to have identified the spot, and said all he needed was a few tens of millions of lire for a couple of divers and a power boat. Once he had the money, he vanished. Now you confirm that he had a kind of mania about treasures.”

“And this Rakosky?”

“We checked. A Vladimir Rakosky was registered at the Principe e Savoia. French passport. Distinguished-looking gentleman. It matches the description the clerk here gave us. Alitalia says his name appears on the passenger list for the first flight to Paris this morning. IVe alerted Interpol. Annunziata, anything come in from Paris?”

“Nothing so far, sir.”

“And that’s it. So Colonel Ardenti, or whatever his name is, arrived in Milan four days ago. We don’t know what he did the first three, but yesterday at two he presumably saw Rakosky at the hotel, didn’t tell him about going to see you—which is interesting—then last night he came here, probably with the same Rakosky and another man, and after that your guess is as good as mine. Even if they didn’t kill him, they certainly searched his room. What were they looking for? In his jacket...which reminds me, if he went out, it was in shirtsleeves, because the jacket with his passport in the pocket is still here. But that doesn’t make things any easier, because the old man says the colonel was stretched out on the bed in his jacket, unless k was a different jacket. God, I feel like I’m in a loony bin. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, in his jacket we found plenty of money, too much money. So it wasn’t money they were looking for. And you gentlemen have given me the only lead. You say the colonel had some documents. What did they look like?”

“He was carrying a brown briefcase,” Belbo said.

“It looked more red to me,” I said.

“Brown,” Belbo insisted. “But I could be wrong.”

“Red or brown,” De Angelis said, “it’s not here now. Last night’s visitors must have taken it. The briefcase is what we have to concentrate on. If you ask me, Ardenti wasn’t trying to publish a book at all. He had probably come up with something he could blackmail Rakosky with, and talking about a publishing contract was a way of applying pressure. That would have been more his style. From there, any number of hypotheses are possible. The two men may have threatened him and left, and Ardenti was so scared that he fled into the night, leaving everything behind except the briefcase, which he clutched under his arm. But first, for some reason, he tried to make the old man think he was dead. It all sounds too much like a novel, and it doesn’t account for the way the room was torn up. On the other hand, if the two men killed him and stole the briefcase, why would they also steal the corpse? Excuse me, but may I see your IDs?”

He looked at my student card, turning it over a few times. “Philosophy student, eh?”

“There are lots of us,” I said.

“Far too many. And you’re studying the Templars. Suppose I wanted to get some background on them—what should I read?”

I suggested two books, popular but fairly serious. I also told him he would find reliable information only up to the trial. After that it was all raving nonsense.

“I see,” he said. “Now it’s the Templars, too. One splinter group I haven’t run into yet.”

The policeman named Annunziata came in with a telegram: “The reply from Paris, sir.”

De Angelis read it. “Great,” he said. “No one in Paris has heard of Rakosky, and the passport number shows that it was stolen two years ago. Now we’re really stuck. Monsieur Rakosky doesn’t exist. You say he’s the editor of a magazine—what was it called?” He made a note. “Well, we’ll try, but I bet we find that the magazine doesn’t exist either, or else it folded ages ago. All right, gentlemen, thanks for your help. I may trouble you again at some point. Oh, yes, one last question: Did Argenti indicate that he had connections with any political organization?”

“No,” Belbo said. “He seemed to have given up politics for treasures.”

“And confidence games.” He turned to me. “You seem not to have liked him much.”

“Not my style,” I said. “But it wouldn’t have occurred to me to strangle him with a length of wire. Except in theory.”

“Naturally. Too much trouble. Relax, Signer Casaubon. I’m not one of those cops who think all students are criminals. Good luck, also, on your thesis.”

“Excuse me,” Belbo asked, “but just out of curiosity, are you homicide or political?’’

“Good question. My opposite number from homicide was here last night. After they found a bit more on Ardenti in the records, he turned the case over to me. Yes, I’m from political. But I’m really not sure I’m the right man. Life isn’t simple, the way it is in detective stories.”

“I guess not,” Belbo said, shaking his hand.

We left, but I was still troubled. Not because of De Angelis, who seemed nice enough, but because for the first time in my life I found myself involved in something shady. I had lied. And so had Belbo.

We parted at the door of the Garamond office, and we were both embarrassed.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Belbo said defensively. “It won’t make any difference if the police don’t learn about Ingolf and the Cathars. It was all raving anyway. Maybe Ardenti had to disappear for other reasons; there could be a thousand reasons. Maybe Rakosky was an Israeli secret-service agent settling old scores. Or maybe he was sent by some big shot the colonel had conned. Or maybe they were in the Foreign Legion together and there was some old grudge. Or maybe Rakosky was an Algerian assassin. And maybe this Templar-treasure story was only a minor episode in the life of our colonel. All right, the briefcase is missing, red or brown. By the way, it was good that you contradicted me: that made it clear we had only had a quick glimpse of it.”

I said nothing, and Belbo didn’t know how to conclude.

“You’ll say I’ve run away again. Like Via Larga.”

“Nonsense. We did the right thing. I’ll see you.”

I was sorry for him, because he felt like a coward. But I didn’t. I had learned in school that when you deal with the police, you lie. As a matter of principle. But a guilty conscience can poison a friendship.

I didn’t see Belbo for a long time after that. I was his remorse, and he was mine.

I worked for another year and produced two hundred and fifty typewritten pages on the trial of the Templars. It was then that I learned that a graduate student is less an object of suspicion than an undergraduate. Those were years when defending a thesis was considered evidence of respectful loyalty to the state, and you were treated with indulgence.

In the months that followed, some students started using guns. The days of mass demonstrations in the open air were drawing to a close.

I was short on ideals, but for that I had an alibi, because loving Amparo was like being in love with the Third World. Amparo was beautiful, Marxist, Brazilian, enthusiastic, disenchanted. She had a fellowship and splendidly mixed blood. All at the same time.

I met her at a party, and acted on impulse. “Excuse me,” I said, “but I would like to make love to you.”

“You’re a filthy male chauvinist pig.”

“Forget I said it.”

“Never. I’m a filthy feminist.”

She was going back to Brazil, and I didn’t want to lose her. She put me in touch with the University of Rio, where the Italian department was looking for a lecturer. They offered me a two-year contract with an option to renew. I didn’t feel at home in Italy anymore; I accepted.

Besides, I told myself, in the New World I wouldn’t run into any Templars.

Wrong, I thought Saturday evening as I huddled in the periscope. Climbing the steps to the Garamond oifice had been like entering the Palace. Binah, Diotallevi used to say, is the palace Hokhmah builds as He spreads out from the primordial point. If Hokhmah is the source, Binah is the river that flows from it, separating into its various branches until they all empty into the great sea of the last Sefirah. But in Binah all forms are already formed.


HESED


23

The analogy of opposites is the relation of light to shadow, peak to abyss, fullness to void. Allegory, mother of all dogmas, is the replacement of the seal by the hallmark, of reality by shadow; it is the falsehood of truth, and the truth of falsehood.

—Eliphas Levi, Dogme de la haute magie, Paris, Bailie re, 1856, XXII, 22

I went to Brazil out of love for Amparo, I stayed out of love for the country. I never did understand how it was that Amparo, a descendant of Dutch settlers in Recife who intermarried with Indians and Sudanese blacks—with her Jamaican face and Parisian culture—had wound up with a Spanish name. For that matter, I never managed to figure out Brazilian names. They defy all onomastic dictionaries, and exist only in Brazil.

Amparo told me that in their hemisphere, when water drains down a sink, the little eddy swirls counterclockwise, whereas at home, ours swirls clockwise. Or maybe it’s the other way around: I’ve never succeeded in checking the truth of it. Not only because nobody in our hemisphere has ever looked to see which way the water swirls, but also because, after various experiments in Brazil, I realized it’s very hard to tell. The suction is too quick to be studied, and its direction probably depends partly on the force and angle of the jet and the shape of the sink or the tub. Besides, if this is true, what happens at the equator? Maybe the water drains straight down, with no swirling, or maybe it doesn’t drain at all.

At that time I didn’t agonize over the problem, but Saturday night in the periscope I was thinking how everything depended on telluric currents, and the Pendulum contained the secret.

Amparo was steadfast in her faith. “The particular empirical event doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s an ideal principle, which can be verified only under ideal conditions. Which means never. But it’s still true.”

In Milan, Amparo’s disenchantment had been one of her most desirable traits. But in Brazil, reacting to the chemistry of her native land, she became elusive, a visionary capable of subterranean rationality. Stirred by ancient passions, she was careful to keep them in check; but the asceticism which made her reject their seduction was not convincing.

I measured her splendid contradictions when I watched her argue with her comrades. The meetings were held in shabby houses decorated with a few posters and a lot of folk art, portraits of Lenin and Amerindian fetishes, or terra-cotta figures glorifying the cangaceiros, outlaws of the Northeast. I hadn’t arrived during one of the country’s most lucid moments politically, and, after my experiences at home, I decided to steer clear of ideologies, especially in a place where I didn’t understand them. The way Amparo’s comrades talked made me even more uncertain, but they also roused a new curiosity in me. They were, naturally, all Marxists, and at first they seemed to talk more or less like European Marxists, but the subject somehow was always different. In the middle of an argument about the class struggle, they would suddenly mention “Brazilian cannibalism” or the revolutionary role of Afro-Brazilian religions.

Hearing them talk about these cults convinced me that at least ideological suction, down there, swirled in the opposite direction. They described a panorama of internal migrations back and forth, the disinherited of the north moving down toward the industrial south, where they became subproletarians in immense smog-choked metropolises, eventually returning in desperation to the north, only to repeat their flight southward in the next cycle. But many ran aground in the big cities during these oscillations, and they were absorbed by a plethora of indigenous churches; they worshiped spirits, evoked African divinities...And here Amparo’s comrades were divided: some considered this a return to their roots, a way of opposing the white world; others thought these cults were the opiate with which the ruling class held an immense revolutionary potential in check; and still others maintained that the cults were a melting pot in which whites, Indians, and blacks could be blended—for what purpose, they were not clear. Amparo had made up her mind: religion was always the opiate of the people, and pseudo-tribal cults were even worse. But when I held her by the waist in the escolas de samba, joining in the snaking lines to the unbearable rhythm of the drums, I realized that she clung to that world with the muscles of her belly, her heart, her head, her nostrils...Afterward, she was die first to offer a bitter, sarcastic analysis of the orgiastic character of people’s religious devotion—week after week and month after month—to the rite of carnival. Exactly the same sort of tribal witchcraft, she would say with revolutionary contempt, as the soccer rituals in which the disinherited expended their combative energy and sense of revolt, practicing spells and enchantments to win from the gods of every possible world the death of the opposing halfback, completely unaware of the Establishment, which wanted to keep them in a state of ecstatic enthusiasm, condemned to unreality.

In time I lost any sense of contradiction, just as I gradually abandoned any attempt to distinguish the different races in that land of age-old, unbridled hybridization. I gave up trying to establish where progress lay, and where revolution, or to see the plot—as Amparo’s comrades expressed it—of capitalism. How could I continue to think like a European once I learned that the hopes of the far left were kept alive by a Nordeste bishop suspected of having harbored Nazi sympathies in his youth but who now faithfully and fearlessly held high the torch of revolt, upsetting the wary Vatican and the barracudas of Wall Street, and joyfully inflaming the atheism of the proletarian mystics won over by the tender yet menacing banner of a Beautiful Lady who, pierced by seven sorrows, gazed down on the sufferings of her people?

One morning Amparo and I were driving along the coast after having attended a seminar on the class structure of the lumpen-proletariat. I saw some votive offerings on the beach, little candles, white garlands. Amparo told me they were offerings to Yemanja, goddess of the waters. We stopped, and she got out and walked demurely onto the sand, stood a few moments in silence. I asked her if she believed in this. She retorted angrily: How could I think such a thing? Then she added, “My grandmother used to bring me to the beach here, and she would pray to the goddess to make me grow up beautiful and good and happy. Who was that Italian philosopher who made that comment about black cats and coral horns? ‘It’s not true, but I believe in it’? Well, I don’t believe in it, but it’s true.” That was the day I decided to save some money to venture a trip to Bahia.

It was also the day I began to let myself be lulled by feelings of resemblance: the notion that everything might be mysteriously related to everything else.

Later, when I returned to Europe, I converted this metaphysics into mechanics—and thus fell into the trap in which I now lie. But back then I was living in a twilight that blurred all distinctions. Like a racist, I believed that a strong man could regard the faiths of others as an opportunity for harmless daydreaming and no more.

I learned some rhythms, ways of letting go with body and mind. Recalling them the other evening in the periscope, to fight off growing numbness I moved my limbs as if I were once again striking the agogd. You see? I said to myself. To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don’t believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn’t exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone.

What happened to me was like what might happen to a pedantic ethnologist who has spent years studying cannibalism. He challenges the smugness of the whites by assuring everybody that actually human flesh is delicious. Then one day a doubter decides to see for himself and performs the experiment—on him. As the ethnologist is devoured piece by piece, he hopes, for he will never know who was right, that at least he is delicious, which will justify the ritual and his death. The other evening I had to believe the Plan was true, because if it wasn’t, then I had spent the past two years as the omnipotent architect of an evil dream. Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame.


24

Sauvez la faible Aischa des vertiges de Nahash, sauvez la plaintive Heva des mirages de la sensibility, et que les Khe’rubs me gardent.

—Jose’phin P^ladan, Comment on devient Fee, Paris, Chamuel, 1893, p. XIII

As I was advancing into the forest of resemblances, I received Belbo’s letter.

Dear Casaubon,

I didn’t know until the other day that you were in Brazil. I lost touch completely, not even knowing that you had graduated (congratulations). Anyway, someone at Pilade’s gave me your coordinates, and I thought it would be a good idea to bring you up to date on some developments in that unfortunate Colonel Ardenti business. It’s been more than two years now, I know, and again I must apologize: I was the one who got you into trouble that morning, though I didn’t mean to.

I had almost forgotten the whole nasty story, but two weeks ago I was driving around in the Montefeltro area and happened upon the fortress of San Leo. In the eighteenth century, it seems, the region was under papal rule, and the pope imprisoned Cagliostro there, in a cell with no real door (you entered it, for the first and last time, through a trapdoor in the ceiling) and with one little window from which the prisoner could see only the two churches of the village. I saw a bunch of roses on the shelf where Cagliostro had slept and died, and I was told that many devotees still make the pilgrimage to the place of his martyrdom. Among the most assiduous pilgrims are the members of Picatrix, a group of Milanese students of the occult. It publishes a’ magazine entitled—with great imagination—Picatrix.

You know how curious I am about these oddities. So back in Milan I got hold of a copy of Picatrix, from which I learned that an evocation of the spirit of Cagliostro was to be held in a few days. I went.

The walls were draped with banners covered with cabalistic signs, an abundance of owls of all kinds, scarabs and ibises, and Oriental divinities of uncertain origin. Near the rear wall was a dais, a proscenium of burning torches held up by rough logs, and in the background an altar with a triangular altar-piece and statuettes of Isis and Osiris. The room was ringed by an amphitheater of figures of Anubis, and there was a portrait of Cagliostro (it could hardly have been of anyone else, could it?), a gilded mummy in Cheops format, two five-armed candelabra, a gong suspended from two rampant snakes, on a podium a lectern covered by calico printed with hieroglyphics, and two crowns, two tripods, a little portable sarcophagus, a throne, a fake seventeenth-century fauteuil, four unmatched chairs suitable for a banquet with the sheriff of Nottingham, and candles, tapers, votive lights, all flickering very spiritually.

Anyway, to go on with the story: seven altar boys entered in red cassocks and carrying torches, followed by the celebrant, apparently the head of Picatrix—he rejoiced in the commonplace name of Brambilla—in pink-and-olive vestments. He was, in turn, followed by the neophyte, or medium, and six acolytes in white, who all looked like Bing Crosby, but with infulas, the god’s, if you recall our poets.

Brambilla put on a triple crown with a half-moon, picked up a ritual sword, drew magic symbols on the dais, and summoned various angelic spirits with names ending hi “el.” At this point I was vaguely reminded of those pseudo-Semitic incantations in Ingolf’s message, but only for a moment, because I was immediately distracted by something unusual. The microphones on the dais were connected to a tuner that was supposed to picjc up random waves in space, but the operator must have made a mistake, because first we heard a burst of disco music and then Radio Moscow came on. Brambilla opened the sarcophagus, took out a book of magic spells, swung a thurible, and cried, “O Lord, Thy kingdom come.” This seemed to achieve something, because Radio Moscow fell silent, but then, at the most magical moment, it came on again, with a drunken Cossack song, the kind they dance to with their behinds scraping the ground. Brambilla invoked the Clavicula Salomonis, risked self-immolation by burning a parchment on a tripod, summoned several divinities of the temple of Karnak, testily asked to be placed on the cubic stone of Yesod, and insistently called out for “Familiar 39,” who must have been familiar enough to the audience, since a shiver ran through the hall. One woman sank into a trance, her eyes rolling back until only the whites were visible. People called for a doctor, but Brambilla involved the Power of the Penta-cles, and the neophyte, who had meanwhile sat down on the fake fauteuil, began to writhe and groan. Brambilla hovered over her, anxiously asking questions of her, or, rather, of Familiar 39, who, I suddenly realized, was Cagliostro himself. And now came the disturbing part, because the pathetic girl seemed to be in real pain: she trembled, sweated, bellowed, and began to speak in broken phrases of a temple and a door that must be opened. She said a vortex of power was being created, and we had to ascend to the Great Pyramid. Brambilla, up on the dais, became agitated; he banged the gong and called Isis in a loud voice. I was enjoying the performance until I heard the girl, still sighing and moaning, say something about six seals, a one-hundred-and-twenty-year wait, and thirty-six invisibles. Now, there could be no doubt: she was talking about the message of Provins. I waited to hear more, but the girl slumped back, exhausted. Brambilla stroked her brow, blessed the audience with his thurible, and proclaimed the rite over.

I was slightly awed, and also eager to understand. I tried to move closer to the girl, who in the meantime had come to her senses, slipped into a scruffy overcoat, and was on her way out through the rear exit. I was about to touch her on the shoulder, when I felt someone grasp my arm. I turned and it was Inspector De Angelis, who told me to let her go: he knew where to find her. He invited me out for coffee. I went, as if he had caught me doing something wrong, which in a sense he had. At the cafe he asked me what I was doing there and why I had tried to approach the girl. This irritated me. We aren’t living in a dictatorship, I said. I can approach anyone I choose. He apologized and explained that, although the Ar-denti investigation had no priority, they had tried to reconstruct the two days he had spent in Milan before his meeting at Garamond and with the mysterious Rakosky. A year after Ardenti’s disappearance, the police had found out, by sheer luck, that someone had seen him leaving the Picatrix offices in the company of the psychic girl, who, incidentally, was of interest to De Angelis because she lived with an individual not unknown to the narcotics squad.

I told him I was there by chance, and I had been struck by the fact that the girl had spoken a phrase about six seals, which I had heard from the colonel. He remarked how strange it was that I could remember so clearly what the colonel said two years ago, yet, at the time, I had spoken only of some vague talk about the treasure of the Templars. I replied that the colonel had indeed said that the treasure was protected by six seals of some kind, but I hadn’t considered this an important detail because all treasures are protected by seals, usually seven, and by gold bugs. He observed that if all treasures were protected by gold bugs, he couldn’t see why I should have been struck ty what the girl had said. I asked him to stop treating me like a suspect, and he laughed and changed his tone. He said he didn’t find it strange that the girl had said what she did, because Ardenti must have talked to her about his fantasies, perhaps trying to use her to establish some astral contact, as they say in those circles. A psychic, he went on, was like a sponge, a photographic plate with an unconscious that must look like an amusement park. The Picatrix bunch probably give her a brainwashing all year round, so it was not unlikely that once in a trance—because the girl was in earnest, wasn’t faking, and there was something wrong with her head-she would see images that had been impressed on her long ago.

But two days later De Angelis dropped in at the office to say that, curiously enough, when he went to see the girl the day after the ceremony, she was gone. The neighbors said nobody had seen her since the afternoon before the evening of the ceremony. His suspicions were aroused, so he entered the apartment and found it torn to pieces: sheets on the floor, pillows in one corner, trampled newspapers, emptied drawers. No sign of her. Or of her boyfriend, or roommate or whatever you wanted to call him.

He told me that if I knew anything more, I’d be wise to talk, because it was strange how the girl had disappeared into thin air, and he could think of only two reasons: either somebody realized that De Angelis had her under surveillance, or it was noticed that one Jacopo Belbo had tried to talk to her. The things she had said in the trance might therefore have concerned something serious, some unfinished business.

They—whoever they were—hadn’t realized she knew so much.

“Now suppose some colleague of mine gets it into his head that you killed her,” De Angelis added with a beautiful smile.

“You can see we have every interest in working together.” I almost lost my temper, and God knows I don’t do that often. I asked him why a person who’s not home is assumed to have been murdered, and he asked if I remembered what happened to the colonel. Then I told him that if she had been killed, or kidnapped, it must have happened that evening, when I was with him. He asked how I could be so sure of that, since we had said good-bye around midnight and he had no way of knowing what had happened after that. I asked him if he was serious, and he said what, hadn’t I ever read a detective story? Didn’t I know that the prime suspect was always the one who didn’t have an alibi as radiant as Hiroshima? He said he would donate his head to an organ bank if I had an alibi for the time between one A.M. and the next morning.

What can I say, Casaubon? Maybe I should have told him the truth, but where I come from, men are stubborn and never back down.

I’m writing you because if I found your address, then De Angelis can find it, too. If he gets in touch with you, at least you know the line I’ve taken. But since it doesn’t seem a very straight line to me, go ahead and tell him everything if you want to. I’m embarrassed, I apologize. I feel like some kind of accomplice. Try as I might, I can’t seem to find any noble justification for myself. Must be my peasant origins; in our part of the country, we’re a mean bunch. The whole thing is—as the Germans says—unheimlich.

Yours, Jacopo Belbo


25

...of these mysterious initiates—now become numerous, bold, conspiring—all was born: Jesuitism, magnetism, Martinism, philosopher’s stone, somnambulism, eclecticism.

—C.-L. Cadet-Gassicourt, Le tombeau de Jacques de Malay, Paris, Desenne, 1797, p. 91

The letter upset me. Not that I was afraid of being tracked down by De Angelis—we were in different hemispheres, after all—but for less definable reasons. At the time, I thought I was upset because a world I had left behind had bounced back at me. But today I realize that what bothered me was yet another strand of resemblance, the suspicion of an analogy. I was annoyed, too, at having to deal with Belbo again, Belbo and his eternal guilty conscience. I decided not to mention the letter to Amparo.

A reassuring second letter arrived from Belbo two days later.

The story of the psychic had had a reasonable ending. A police informer reported that the girl’s lover had been involved in a settling of scores over a drug shipment, which he had sold retail instead of delivering it to the honest wholesaler who had already paid. They frown on that sort of behavior in those circles, and he vanished to save his neck. Obviously he took the woman with him. Rummaging then among the newspapers left in their apartment, De Angelis found some magazines on the order of Picatrix, with a series of articles heavily underlined in red. One was about the treasure of the Templars, another about Rosicrucians who lived in a castle, cave, or some damn place where “post CXX annos patebo” was written and they called themselves the thirty-six invisibles. So for De Angelis it was all clear. The psychic, consuming the same sort of literature that the colonel had, regurgitated it whin she was in a trance. The matter was closed, passed on to the narcotics squad.

Belbo’s letter exuded relief. De Angelis’s explanation seemed the most economical.

The other evening in the periscope, I told myself that the facts might have been quite different. Granted, the psychic quoted something she had heard from Ardenti, but it was something her magazines never mentioned, something no one was supposed to know. Whoever had got rid of the colonel was in the Picatrix group, and this someone noticed that Belbo was about to question the psychic, so he eliminated her. To throw the investigators off the track, he also eliminated her lover, then instructed a police informer to say that the couple had fled.

Simple enough, if there was really a plan. But how could there have been? Since we invented “the Plan” ourselves, and only much later was it possible for reality not only to catch up with fiction, but actually to precede it, or, rather, to rush ahead of it and repair the damage that it would cause.

At the time, though, in Brazil, these were not my thoughts on receiving Belbo’s second letter. Instead, I felt once more that something was resembling something else. I had been thinking about my trip to Bahia and had spent an afternoon visiting bookstores and shops that sold cult objects, places I had ignored till then. I went to out-of-the-way little emporiums crammed with statues and idols. I purchased perfumadores of Yemanja, pun-gently scented mystical smoke sticks, incense, sweetish spray cans labeled “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” cheap amulets. I also found many books, some for devotees, others for people studying devotees, a mixture of exorcism manuals like Como adivin-harofuturo na bola de cristal and anthropology textbooks. And a monograph on the Rosicrucians.

Suddenly it all seemed to come together: Satanic and Moorish rites in the Temple of Jerusalem, African witchcraft for the sub-proletarians of the Brazilian Northeast, the message-of Provins with its hundred and twenty years, and the hundred and twenty years of the Rosicrucians.

I felt like a walking blender mixing strange concoctions of different liquors. Or maybe I had caused some kind of short circuit, tripping over a varicolored tangle of wires that had been entwining themselves for a long, long time. I bought the book on the Rosicrucians, thinking that if I spent a few hours in these bookstores, I would meet at least a dozen Colonel Ardentis and brainwashed psychics.

I went home and officially informed Amparo that the world was full of unnatural characters. She promised me solace, and we ended the day naturally.

That was late 1975. I decided to put resemblances aside and concentrate on my work. After all, I was supposed to be teaching Italian culture, not the Rosicrucians.

I devoted myself to Renaissance philosophers and I discovered that the men of secular modernity, once they had emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, had found nothing better to do than devote themselves to cabala and magic.

After two years spent with Neoplatonists who chanted formulas designed to convince nature to do things she had no intention of doing, I received news from Italy. It seems my old classmates—or some of them, at least—were now shooting people who didn’t agree with them, to convince the stubborn to do things they had no intention of doing.

I couldn’t understand it. Now part of the Third World, I made up my mind to visit Bahia. I set off with a history of Renaissance culture and the book on the Rosicrucians, which had remained on a shelf, its pages uncut.


26

All the traditions of the earth must be seen as deriving from a fundamental mother-tradition that, from the beginning, was entrusted to sinful man and to his first offspring.

—Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, De I’esprit des chases, Paris, Laran, 1800, II, “De l’esprit des traditions en general”

And I saw Salvador: Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, the “black Rome,” with three hundred and sixty-five churches, which stand out against the line of hills or nestle along the bay, churches where the gods of the African pantheon are honored.

Amparo knew a primitive artist who painted big wooden panels crammed with Biblical and apocalyptic visions, dazzling as a medieval miniature, with Coptic and Byzantine elements. Naturally he was a Marxist; he talked about the coming revolution, but he spent his days dreaming in the sacristies of the sanctuary of Nosso Senhor do Bomfim: a triumph of horror vacui, scaly with ex-votos that hung from the ceiling and encrusted the walls, a mystical assemblage of silver hearts, wooden arms and legs, images of wondrous rescues from glittering storms, waterspouts, maelstroms. He took us to the sacristy of another church, which was full of great furnishings redolent of jacaranda. “Who is that a painting of?” Amparo asked the sacristan. “Saint George?”

The sacristan gave us a knowing look. “They call him Saint George,” he said, “and if you don’t call him that, the pastor gets angry. But he’s Oxossi.”

For two days the painter led us through naves and cloisters hidden behind decorated fagades like silver plates now blackened and worn. Wrinkled, limping famuli accompanied us. The sacristies were sick with gold and pewter, heavy chests, precious frames. Along the walls, in crystal cases, life-size images of saints towered, dripping blood, their open wounds spattered with ruby droplets; Christs writhed in pain, their legs red. In a glow of late-Baroque gold, I saw angels with Etruscan faces, Romanesque griffins, and Oriental sirens peeping out from the capitals.

I moved along ancient streets, enchanted by names that sounded like songs: Rua da Agonia, Avenida dos Amores, Tra-vessa de Chico Diabo. Our visit to Salvador took place during a period when the local government, or someone acting in its name, was trying to renew the old city, and was closing down the thousands of brothels. But the project was only at midpoint. At the feet of those deserted and leprous churches embarrassed by their own evil-smelling alleys, fifteen-year-old black prostitutes still swarmed, ancient women selling African sweets crouched along the sidewalks with their steaming pots, and hordes of pimps danced amid trickles of sewage to the sound of transistor radios in nearby bars. The ancient palaces of the Portuguese settlers, surmounted by coats of arms now illegible, had become houses of ill-repute.

On the third day, our guide took us to the bar of a hotel in a renovated part of the upper city, on a street full of luxury antique shops. He was to meet an Italian gentleman, he told us, who wanted to buy—and for the asking price—a painting of his, three meters by two, in which teeming angelic hosts waged the final battle against the opposing legions.

And so we met Signor Aglie. Impeccably dressed in a double-breasted pin-striped suit despite the heat, he wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses and had a rosy complexion, silver hair. He kissed Amparo’s hand as if he knew of no other way to greet a lady, and he ordered champagne. When the painter had to leave, Aglifc handed him a pack of traveler’s checks and said to send the picture to his hotel. We stayed on to chat. Aglie spoke Portuguese correctly, but it sounded as if he had learned it in Lisbon. This accent made him seem even more like a gentleman of bygone days. He asked about us, commented on the possible Genevan origin of my name, and expressed curiosity about Amparo’s family history, though somehow he had already guessed that the main branch was from Recife. About his own origins he was vague. “I’m like many people here,” he said. “Countless races are represented in my genes...The name is Italian, from the ancient estate of an ancestor. Perhaps a nobleman, but who cares these days? It was curiosity that brought me to Brazil. All forms of tradition fascinate me.”

He told us he had a fine library of religious sciences in Milan, where he had been living for some years. “Come and see me when you get back. I have a number of interesting things, from Afro-Brazilian rites to the Isis cults of the late Roman Empire.” “I adore the Isis cults,” Amparo said, who often, out of pride, pretended to be silly. “You must know everything there is to know about them.”

Aglie replied modestly: “Only what little IVe seen of them.” Amparo tried again: “But wasn’t it two thousand years ago?” “I’m not as young as you are.” Aglie smiled.

“Like Cagliostro,” I joked. “Wasn’t he the one who was heard to murmur to his attendant as they passed a crucifix, ‘I told that Jew to be careful that evening, but he just wouldn’t listen’?”

Aglie stiffened. Afraid I had offended him, I started to apologize, but our host stopped me with an indulgent smile. “Cagliostro was a humbug. It’s common knowledge when and where he was born, and he didn’t even manage to live very long. A braggart.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Cagliostro was a humbug,” Aglie repeated, “but that does not mean that there have not been—and still are—privileged persons who have lived many lives. Modern science knows so little about the aging process. It’s quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education. Cagliostro was a humbug, but the Comte de Saint-Germain was not. He may not have been boasting when he claimed to have learned some of his chemical secrets from the ancient Egyptians. Nobody believed him, so out of politeness to his listeners he pretended to be joking.”

“And now you pretend to be joking in order to convince us you’re telling the truth,” Amparo said.

“You are not only beautiful, but extraordinarily perceptive too,” Aglie said. “But I beseech you, do not believe me. Were I to appear before you in the dusty splendor of my many centuries, your own beauty would wither, and I could never forgive myself.’’

Amparo was conquered, and I felt a twinge of jealousy. I changed the subject to churches, and to the Saint George-Oxossi we had seen. Aglie said we absolutely had to attend a candom-ble”. “Not one where they charge admission. They let you into the real ones without asking anything of you. You don’t even have to be a believer. You must observe respectfully, of course, showing the same tolerance of all faiths as they do in accepting your unbelief. At first sight a pai or mae-de-santo might seem to be straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but they have as much culture as a Vatican theologian.”

Amparo put her hand on his. “Take us!” she said. “I went to one many years ago, in a tenda de umbanda, but I can’t recall much about it. All I remember is great turmoil.”

The physical contact embarrassed Aglie, but he didn’t take his hand away. He did something I later saw him do in moments of reflection: reaching into his vest with his other hand, he took out a little gold-and-silver box with an agate on the lid. It looked like a snuffbox or a pillbox. There was a small wax light burning on the table, and Aglie, as if by chance, held the box near it. When exposed to heat, the agate’s color could no longer be discerned, and in its place appeared a miniature, very fine, in green, blue, and gold, depicting a shepherdess with a basket of flowers. He turned it in his fingers with absent-minded devotion, as if telling a rosary. When he noticed my interest, he smiled and put the object away.

“Turmoil? I hope, my sweet lady, that, although you are so perceptive, you are not excessively sensitive. An exquisite quality, of course, when it accompanies grace and intelligence, but dangerous if you go to certain places without knowing what to look for or what you will find. Moreover, the umbanda must not be confused with the candomble”. The latter is completely indigenous—Afro-Brazilian, as they say—whereas the former is a much later development born of a fusion of native rites and esoteric European culture, and with a mystique I would call Templar...”

The Templars had found me again. I told Aglie I had studied them. He regarded me with interest. “A most curious circumstance, my young friend, to find a young Templar here, under the Southern Cross.”

“I wouldn’t want you to consider me an adept—”

“Please, Signor Casaubon. If you knew how much nonsense there is in this field.”

“I do know.”

“Good. But we’ll see one another soon.” In fact, we arranged to meet the next day: all of us wanted to explore the little covered market along the port.

We met there the next morning, and it was a fish market, an Arab souk, a saint’s-day fair that had proliferated with cancerous virulence, like a Lourdes overrun by the forces of evil, wizard rainmakers side by side with ecstatic and stigmatized Capuchins. There were little propitiatory sacks with prayers sewn into the lining, little hands in semiprecious stones, the middle finger extended, coral horns, crucifixes, Stars of David, sexual symbols of pre-Judaic religions, hammocks, rugs, purses, sphinxes, sacred hearts, Bororo quivers, shell necklaces. The degenerate mystique of the European conquistadors was owed to the occult knowledge of the slaves, just as the skin of every passerby told a similar story of lost genealogies.

“This,” Aglie said, “is the very image of what the ethnology textbooks call Brazilian syncretism. An ugly word, in the official view. But in its loftiest sense syncretism is the acknowledgment that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religion, all learning, all philosophy. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come...These slaves, or descendants of slaves, are therefore wiser than the ethnologists of the Sorbonne. At least you understand me, do you not, lovely lady?”

“In my mind, no,” Amparo said. “But in my womb, yes. Sorry, I don’t imagine the Comte de Saint-Germain ,ever expressed himself in such terms. What I mean is: I was born in this country, and even things I don’t understand somehow speak to me from somewhere...Here, I believe.” And she touched her breast.

“What was it Cardinal Lambertini once said to a lady wearing a splendid diamond cross on her decolletage? ‘What joy it would be to die on that Calvary!’ Well, how I would love to listen to those voices! But now it is I who must beg your forgiveness, both of you. I am from an age when one would have accepted damnation to pay homage to beauty. You two must want to be alone. Let’s keep in touch.”

“He’s old enough to be your father,” I said to Amparo as I dragged her through the stalls.

“Even my great-great-grandfather. He implied that he’s at least a thousand years old. Are you jealous of a pharaoh’s mummy?”

“I’m jealous of anyone who makes a light bulb flash on in your head.”

“How wonderful. That’s love.”


27

One day, saying that he had known Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, he described minutely the governor’s house and listed the dishes served at supper. Cardinal de Rohan, believing these were fantasies, turned to the Comte de Saint-Germain’s valet, an old man with white hair and an honest expression. “My friend,” he said to the servant, “I find it hard to believe what your master is telling us. Granted that he may be a ventriloquist; and even that he can make gold. But that he is two thousand years old and saw Pontius Pilate? That is too much. Were you there?” “Oh, no, Monsignore,” the valet answered ingenuously, “I have been in M. le Comte’s service only four hundred years.”

—Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, Paris, Mellier, 1844, p. 434

In the days that followed, Salvador absorbed me completely. I spent little time in the hotel. But as I was leafing through the index of the book on the Rosicrucians, I came across a reference to the Comte de Saint-Germain. Well, well, I said to myself, tout se tient.

Voltaire wrote of him, “C’est un homme qui ne meurt jamais et qui sail tout,” but Frederick the Great wrote back, “C’est un comte pour rire.” Horace Walpole described him as an Italian or Spaniard or Pole who had made a fortune in Mexico and then fled to Constantinople with his wife’s jewels. The most reliable information about him comes from the memoirs of Madame du Hausset, la Pompadour’s femme de chambre (some authority, the intolerant Amparo said). He had gone by various names: Surmont in Brussels, Welldone in Leipzig, the Marquis of Ay-mar or Bedmar or Belmar, Count Soltikoff. In 1745 he was arrested in London, where he excelled as a musician, giving violin and harpsichord recitals in drawing rooms. Three years later he offered his services as an expert in dyeing to Louis XV in Paris, in exchange for a residence in the chateau of Chambord. The king sent him on diplomatic missions to Holland, where he got into some sort of trouble and fled to London again. In 1762 he turned up in Russia, then again in Belgium, where he encountered Casanova, who tells us how the count turned a coin into gold. In 1776 he appeared at the court of Frederick the Great, to whom he proposed various projects having to do with chemistry. Eight years later he died in Schleswig, at the court of the landgrave of Hesse, where he was putting the finishing touches on a manufactory for paints.

Nothing exceptional, the typical career of an eighteenth-century adventurer; not as many loves as Casanova and frauds less theatrical than Cagliostro’s. Apart from the odd incident here and there, he enjoyed some credibility with those in authority, to whom he promised the wonders of alchemy, though with an industrial slant. The only unusual feature was the rumor of his immortality, which he undoubtedly instigated himself. In drawing rooms he would casually mention remote events as if he had been an eyewitness, and he cultivated his legend gracefully, en sourdine.

The book also quoted a passage from Giovanni Papini’s Gog, describing a nighttime encounter with the Comte de Saint-Germain on the deck of an ocean liner. The count, oppressed by his millennial past and by the memories crowding his brain, spoke in despairing tones reminiscent of Funes, “el memo-rioso” of Borges, except that Papini’s story dates from 1930. “You must not imagine our lot is deserving of envy,” the count says to Gog. “After a couple of centuries an incurable ennui takes possession of the wretched immortals. The world is monotonous, men learn nothing, and, with every generation, they fall into the same errors and nightmares, events are not repeated but they resemble one another...novelties end, surprises, revelations. I can confess to you now that only the Red Sea is listening to us: my immortality bores me. Earth holds no more secrets for me and I have no hope anymore in my fellows.”

“Curious character,” I remarked. “Obviously our friend Aglife is playing at impersonating him. A gentleman getting on in years, a bit dotty, with money to spend, free time for travel, and an interest in the supernatural.”

“A consistent reactionary, with the courage to be decadent,” Amparo said. “Actually, I prefer him to bourgeois democrats.”

“Sisterhood is powerful, but let a man kiss your hand and you’re ecstatic.”

“That’s how you’ve trained us, for centuries. Let us free ourselves gradually. I didn’t say I wanted to marry him.”

“That’s good.”

The following week Aglie telephoned me. That evening, he said, we would be allowed to visit a terreiro de candomble. We wouldn’t be admitted to the actual rite, because the ialorixa was suspicious of tourists, but she would welcome us herself and would show us around before it started.

He picked us up by car and drove through the favelas beyond the hill. The building where we stopped had a humble look, like a big garage, but on the threshold an old black man met us and purified us with a fumigant. Up ahead was a bare little garden with an immense corbeil of palm fronds, on which some tribal delicacies, the comidas de santo, were laid out.

Inside, we found a large hall, the walls covered with paintings, especially ex-votos, and African masks. Aglie explained the arrangement of furniture: the benches in the rear were for the uninitiated, the little dais for the instruments, and the chairs for the Oga. “They are people of some standing, not necessarily believers, but respectful of the cult. Here in Bahia the great Jorge Amado is an Oga in one terreiro. He was selected by lansa, mistress of war and winds...”

“But where do these divinities come from?” I asked.

“It’s complicated. First of all, there’s a Sudanese branch, dominant here in the north from the early days of slavery. The candomble of the orixas—in other words, the African divinities—come from this branch. In the southern states you find the influence of the Bantu groups, and this is where all the intermingling starts. The northern cults remain faithful to the original African religions, but in the south the primitive macumba develops toward the umbanda, which is influenced by Catholicism, Kardecism, and European occultism...”

“So no Templars tonight?”

“That was meant to be a metaphor, but no, no Templars tonight. Syncretism, however, is a very subtle process. Did you notice, outside, near the comidas de santo, a little iron statue, a sort of devil with a pitchfork, and with votive offerings at his feet? That’s Exu, very powerful in the umbanda, but not in the candomble. Still, the candombte also honors him as a kind of degenerate Mercury. In the umbanda, they are possessed by Exu, but not here. However, he’s treated affectionately. But you never can tell. You see that wall over there?” He was pointing at the polychrome statues of a naked Indio and an old black slave, seated, dressed in white, and smoking a pipe. “They are a ca-boclo and a preto velho, spirits of the departed. Very important in umbanda rites. What are they doing here? Receiving homage. They are not used, because the candombl£ entertains relations only with the African orixas, but they are not cast out on that account.”

“What do all these churches have in common, then?”

“Well, during the rite in all Afro-Brazilian cults the initiates go into a trance and are possessed by higher beings. In the candomble these beings are the orixas; in the umbanda they are spirits of the departed.”

“I forgot my own country and my own race,” Amparp said. “My God, a bit of Europe and a bit of historical materialism, and I forgot everything, the stories I used to hear from my grandmother...”

“Historical materialism?” Aglife smiled. “Oh, yes, I believe I’ve heard of it. An apocalyptic cult that came out of the Trier region. Am I right?”

I squeezed Amparo’s arm. “No pasaran, darling.”

“God,” she murmured.

Aglie watched our brief whispered dialog in silence. “Infinite are the powers of syncretism, my dear. Shall I tell you a political version of this whole story? Legally, the slaves were freed in the nineteenth century, but all the archives of the slave trade were burned in an effort to wipe out the stigmata of slavery. Formally, slaves were free, but their past was gone. In the absence of any family identity, they tried to reconstruct a collective past. It was their way of opposing what you young people call the Establishment.”

“But you just said those European sects were also part of it.”

“My dear, purity is a luxury, and slaves take what they can get. But they have their revenge. By now they have captured more whites than you think. The original African cults possessed the weakness of all religions: they were local, ethnic, shortsighted. But when they met the myths of the conquerors, they reproduced an ancient miracle, breathing new life into the mystery cults that arose around the Mediterranean during the second and third centuries of our era, when Rome in decline was exposed to ferment that had originated in Persia, Egypt, and pre-Judaic Palestine...In the centuries of the late empire, Africa received the influences of all the religions of the Mediterranean and condensed them into a package. Europe was corrupted by Christianity as a state religion, but Africa preserved the treasures of knowledge, just as it had preserved and spread them in the days of the Egyptians, passing them on to the Greeks, who wreaked such great havoc with them.”


28

There is a body that enfolds the whole of the world; imagine it in the form of a circle, for this is the form of the Whole...Imagine now that under the circle of this body are the 36 decans, midway between the total circle and the circle of the zodiac, separating these two circles and, so to speak, delimiting the zodiac, transported along it with the planets...The changing of kings, the rising up of cities, famine, plague, the tides of the sea, earthquakes: none of these takes place without the influence of the decans…

—Corpus Hermeticus, Stobaeus, excerptum VI

“What treasures of knowledge?”

“Do you realize how great the second and third centuries after Christ were? Not because of the pomp of the empire in its sunset, but because of what was burgeoning in the Mediterranean basin then. In Rome, the Praetorians were slaughtering their emperors, but in the Mediterranean area, there flourished the epoch of Apuleius, the mysteries of Isis, and that great return to spirituality: Neoplatonism, gnosis. Blissful times, before the Christians seized power and began to put heretics to death. A splendid epoch, in which dwelled the nous, a time dazzled by ecstasies and peopled with presences, emanations, demons, and angelic hosts. The knowledge I am talking about is diffuse and disjointed; it is as ancient as the world itself, reaching back beyond Pythagoras, to the Brahmans of India, the Hebrews, the mages, the gymnosophists, and even the barbarians of the far north, the Druids of Gaul and the British Isles. The Greeks called the barbarians by that name because to overeducated Greek ears, their languages sounded like barking, and the Greeks therefore assumed that they were unable to express themselves. In fact, the barbarians knew much more than the Hellenes at the time, precisely because their language was impenetrable. Do you believe the people who will dance tonight know the meaning of all the chants and magic names they will utter? Fortunately, they do not, and each unknown name will be a kind of breathing exercise, a mystical vocalization.

“The age of the Antonines...The world was full of mar-velous correspondences, subtle resemblances; the only way to penetrate them—and to be penetrated by them—was through dreams, oracles, magic, which allow us to act on nature and her forces, moving like with like. Knowledge is elusive and volatile; it escapes measurement. That’s why the conquering god of that era was Hermes, inventor of all trickery, god of crossroads and thieves. He was also the creator of writing, which is the art of evasion and dissimulation and a navigation that carries us to the end of all boundaries, where everything dissolves into the horizon, where cranes lift stones from the ground and weapons transform life into death, and water pumps make heavy matter float, and philosophy deludes and deceives...And do you know where Hermes is today? Right here. You passed him when you came through the door. They call him Exu, messenger of the gods, go-between, trader, who is ignorant of the difference between good and evil.”

He looked at us with amused distrust. “You believe that I am as hasty in distributing gods as Hermes is in distributing merchandise. But look at this book, which I bought this morning in a little shop in Pelourinho. Magic and mystery of Saint Cyprian, recipes for spells to win love or cause your enemy’s death, invocations to the angels and to the Virgin. Popular literature for these mystics whose skin is black. But this is Saint Cyprian of Antioch, about whom there is an immense literature dating from the silver age. His parents wanted him to learn all there was to know about the earth—land, sea, and air—so they sent him to the most distant realms, that he might acquire all mysteries, including the generation and corruption of herbs and the virtues of plants and of animals: the secrets not of natural history but of occult science, those buried in the depths of distant and archaic traditions. At Delphi, Cyprian dedicated himself to Apollo and to the dramaturgy of the serpent; he studied the mysteries of Mithra; on Mount Olympus at fifteen, guided by fifteen hi-erophants, he attended the rites that summon the Prince of This World, in order to master his intrigues; in Argos he was initiated into the mysteries of Hera; in Phrygia he learned hepatoscopic fortunetelling. At last there was nothing left of land, sea, or air that he did not know, no ghost, no object, no artifice of any kind, not even the art of altering writing through sorcery. In the underground temples of Memphis he had learned how demons communicate with earthly things and places, what they loathe and love, how they dwell in darkness and how they mount resistance in certain domains, how they are able to possess souls and bodies, the feats of higher knowledge they can perform, of memory, terror, and illusion, and the art of causing turmoil in the earth, influencing underground currents...Then, alas, he was converted, but something of his knowledge remained and was passed on, and we find it here, in the mouths and minds of these ragged people you call idolaters. My lovely friend, a little while ago you looked at me as if I were a ci-devant. Who among us is living in the past? You, who would bestow the horrors of the toiling industrial age upon this country, or I, who wish that our poor Europe might recover the naturalness and faith of these children of slaves?”

“Jesus,” Amparo said in a nasty hiss. “You know as well as I do that it’s just another way of keeping them quiet...”

“Not quite. Capable of expectation. Without a sense of expectation, there can be no paradise; isn’t that what you Europeans have taught us?”

“I’m a European?”

“The important thing is not skin color but faith in Tradition. Granted, these children of slaves pay a price in returning a sense of expectation to a West paralyzed by well-being; perhaps they even suffer, but still they know the language of the spirits of nature, of the air, the waters, and the winds...”

“You people are exploiting us again.”

“Again?”

“Yes. You should have learned your lesson in ‘89, Count. We get fed up, and then...” Smiling like an angel, she drew her beautiful hand straight across her throat. For me, even Amparo’s teeth aroused desire.

“How dramatic!” Aglie said, taking his snuffbox from his pocket and stroking it with his fingers. “So you’ve recognized me. But it wasn’t the slaves who made heads roll in ‘89; it was the upstanding bourgeoisie, whom you should hate. Besides, the Comte de Saint-Germain has seen many a head roll in all his centuries, and many a head reattached. But wait, here comes the mae-de-santo, the ialorixa.”

Our meeting with the abbess of the terreiro was calm, cordial, civilized, and rich in folklore. She was a big black woman with a dazzling smile. At first you would have said she was a housewife, but when we began talking, I understood how women like this could rule the cultural life of Salvador.

“Are the orixas people or forces?” I asked her. The mae-de-santo answered that they were forces, obviously: water, wind, leaves, rainbows. But how did she prevent ordinary people from seeing them as warriors, women, saints of the Catholic Church? “Do you yourselves not also worship a cosmic force in the form of virgins?’’ she replied. The important thing is to venerate the force. The aspect of the force must fit each man’s ability to comprehend.

She invited us to visit the chapels in the garden before the rite began. In the garden were the houses of the orixas. A swarm of black girls in Bahian dress was cheerfully gathered there, making the final preparations.

The houses of the orixas were arranged around the garden like the chapels of a sacred mount. Outside each one was displayed the image of the corresponding saint. Inside, the garish colors of flowers clashed with those of the statues and the just-cooked foods offered to the gods. White for Oxala, blue and pink for Yemanja, red and white for Xang5, yellow and gold for Ogun...Initiates kneeled and kissed the threshold, touching themselves on the forehead and behind the ear.

“But is Yemanja Our Lady of the Conception or not?” I asked. “Is Xango Saint Jerome or not?”

“Don’t ask embarrassing questions,” Aglie advised. “It’s even more complicated in an umbanda. Saint Anthony and Saints Cosmas and Damian are part of the Oxala line. Sirens, water nymphs, caboclas of the sea and the rivers, sailors, and guiding stars are part of the Yemanja line. The line of the Orient includes Hindus, doctors, scientists, Arabs and Moroccans, Japanese, Chinese, Mongols, Egyptians, Aztecs, Incas, Caribs, and Romans. To the Oxossi line belong the sun, the moon, the caboclo of waterfalls, and the caboclo of the blacks. In the Ogun line we come upon Ogun Beira-Mar, Rompe-Mato, lara, Mege, Na-ruee...In other words, it all depends.”

“Jesus,” Amparo said again.

“Oxala, you mean,” I murmured to her, my lips brushing her ear. “Calm down. No pasaran.”

The ialorixa showed us a series of masks that some acolytes were bringing into the temple. These were big straw dominoes, or hoods, which the mediums would put on as they went into a trance, falling prey to the divinity. This was a form of modesty, she explained. In some terreiros the chosen danced with their faces bare, letting onlookers see their passion. But the initiates should be shielded, respected, removed from the curiosity of the profane or anyone who cannot understand the inner jubilation and grace. That was the custom in this terreiro, she said, and that was why outsiders were not readily admitted. Maybe someday, she remarked, who knows? We might well meet again.

But she didn’t want us to leave without sampling some of the comidas de santo—not from the corbeils, which had to remain intact until the end of the rite, but from her own kitchen. She took us to the back of the terreiro, where there was a multicolored banquet of manioc, pimento, coco, amendoim, gengibre, moqueca de siri-mole, vatapa, ef6, caruru, black beans with farofa, amid a languid odor of African spices, sweet and strong tropical flavors, which we tasted dutifully, knowing that we were sharing the food of the ancient Sudanese gods. And rightly so, the ialorixa told us, because each of us, whether he knew it or not, was the child of an orixa, and often it was possible to tell which one. I boldly asked whose son I was. The ialorixa demurred at first, saying she couldn’t be sure, but then she agreed to examine the palm of my hand. She looked into my eyes and said: “You are a son of Oxala.”

I was proud. Amparo, now relaxed, suggested we find out whose son Aglie was, but he said he preferred not to know.

When we were home again, Amparo said to me: “Did you see his hand? Instead of the life line, he has a series of broken lines. Like a stream that comes to a stone, parts, and flows together again a meter farther on. The line of a man who must have died many times.”

“World champion of the metempsychosis relay.”

“No pasaran,” Amparo said, laughing.


29

Simply because they change and hide their names, do not give their right age, and by their own admission go about without allowing themselves to be recognized, there is no logic that can deny that they necessarily must exist.

—Heinrich Neuhaus, Pia et ultimissima admonestatio de Fratri-bus Rosae-Crucis, nimirum: an sint? quotes sint? unde nomen Mud sibi asciverunt, Danzig, Schmidlin, 1618; French ed. 1623, p. 5

Diotallevi used to say that Hesed was the Sefirah of grace and love, white fire, south wind. The other evening in the periscope, I thought that those last days with Amparo in Bahia belonged under that sign. You remember so much while you wait for hours and hours in the darkness. I remembered especially one of the last evenings. We had walked through so many alleys and squares that our feet ached, and we went to bed early, but we didn’t feel like sleeping. Amparo, huddled against the pillow in the fetal position, was pretending to read one of my little pamphlets on the umbanda, propping it on her knees. From time to time she would roll lazily onto her back, legs spread, the book balanced on her belly, listening to me read from the book on the Rosicrucians. I was trying to involve her in my discoveries. It was a mild evening; as Belbo, exhausted with literature, might have put it in one of his files, there was nought but a lovely sighing of the wind. We had splurged on a good hotel; there was a view of the sea from the window, and the still-lighted closet kitchen offered the comforting sight of the basket of tropical fruit we had bought at four that morning.

“It says that in 1614 an anonymous work appeared in Germany entitled Allgemeine und general Reformation, or General and common Reform of the entire Universe, followed by Fama Fra-ternitatis of the Honorable Confraternity of the Rosy-Cross, addressed to all learned Men and Sovereigns of Europe, together with a brief Reply by Herr Haselmeyer, who for this Reason was cast into Prison by the Jesuits and then placed in Irons on a Galley. Now printed and made known to all the sincere of Heart. Published in Cassel by Wilhelm Wessel.’’

“A little long, isn’t it?”

“Apparently all titles were like that in the seventeenth century. Lina Wertmuller wrote them, too. Anyway, this was a satirical work, a fairy tale about a general reform of mankind, partly plagiarized from Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Par-naso. But it contained a manifesto of about a dozen pages—the Fama Fratemitatis—which was republished separately a year later, at the same time as another manifesto, this one in Latin: Confessio fraternitatis Roseae Crucis, ad eruditos Europae. Both present the Confraternity of the Rosy Cross and talk about its founder, a mysterious C.R. Only later—and from other sources— was it learned, or presumed, that C.R. was one Christian Ro-sencreutz.”

“Why didn’t they use the full name?”

“The whole thing’s full of initials; they didn’t use anybody’s full name. They’re all G.G.M.P.I.; one is called P.O., an affectionate nickname. Anyway, the pamphlet tells of the formative years of C.R., who first visited the Holy Sepulcher, then set off for Damascus, moved on to Egypt, and from there went to Fez, which must have been one of the sanctuaries of Moslem wisdom at the time. There, our Christian, who already knew Greek and Latin, learned Oriental languages, physics, mathematics, andthe sciences of nature, accumulating all the millennial wisdom of the Arabs and Africans, as well as cabala and magic. He also translated a mysterious Liber M into Latin, and thus came to know all the secrets of the macrocosm and microcosm. For two centuries, everything Oriental had been fashionable, especially if it was incomprehensible.”

“They always go for that. Hungry? Frustrated? Exploited? Mystery cocktail coming up. Here...” She passed me a joint. “This is good stuff.”

“See? You also seek to lose yourself.”

“Except that I know it’s only chemical. No mystery at all. It works even if you don’t know Hebrew. Come here.”

“Wait. Next Rosencreutz went to Spain, where he picked up more occult doctrines, claiming that he was drawing closer to the center of all knowledge. In the course of these travels—which for an intellectual of the time was a sort of total-wisdom trip-he realized that what was needed in Europe was an association that would guide rulers along the paths of wisdom and good.”

“Very original. Well worth it, all that studying. I want some cold mamaia.”

“In the fridge. Do me a favor. You go. I’m working.”

“If you’re working, that makes you the ant. So be a good ant and get some provisions.”

“Mamaia is pleasure, so the grasshopper should go. Otherwise I’ll go, and you read.”

“No. Jesus, I hate the white man’s culture. I’ll go.”

Amparo went to the little kitchen, and I enjoyed seeing her against the light. Meanwhile, C.R. was on his way back from Germany, but instead of devoting himself to the transmutation of metals, of which his now immense knowledge made him capable, he decided to dedicate himself to spiritual reformation. He therefore founded the confraternity, inventing a language and magic writing that would be the foundation of the wisdom of generations of brothers to come.

“No, I’ll spill it on the book. Put it in my mouth. Come on, no tricks, silly. That’s right...God, how good mamaia is, rosencreutzlische Mutti-ja-ja...Anyway, what the first Rosicrucians wrote in the first few years could have enlightened the world.”

“Why? What did they write?”

“There’s the rub. The manifesto doesn’t say; it leaves you with your mouth watering. But it was important; so important, it had to remain secret.”

“The bastards.”

“No! Hey, cut that out! Well, as the Rosicrucians gained more and more members, they decided to spread to the four corners of the earth, vowing to heal the sick without charging, to dress according to the customs of each country (never wearing clothes that would identify them), to meet once a year, and to remain secret for a hundred years.”

“Tell me: what kind of reformation were they after? I mean, hadn’t there just been one? What was Luther then? Shit?”

“No, you’re wrong. This was before the Protestant Reformation. There’s a note here; it says that a thorough reading of the Fama and the Confessio evinces—”

“Evinces?”

“Evinces. Shows, makes evident. Stop that, I’m trying to talk about the Rosy Cross. It’s serious.”

“It evinces.”

“Rosencreutz was born in 1378 and died in 1484, at the ripe old age of a hundred and six. And it’s not hard to guess that the secret confraternity made a considerable contribution to the Reformation that celebrated its centenary in 1615. In fact, Luther’s coat of arms includes a rose and a cross.”

“Some imagination.”

“You expect Luther to use a burning giraffe or a limp watch? We’re all children of our own time. I’ve found out whose child I am, so shut up and let me go on. Around 1604 the brethren of the Rosy Cross were rebuilding a part of their palace or secret castle, and they came across a plaque with a big nail driven into it. When they pulled out the nail, part of the wall collapsed, and they saw a door with something written on it in big letters: POST CXX ANNOS PATEBO...”

I had already learned this from Belbo’s letter, but still couldn’t help reacting. “My God...”

“What is it?”

“It’s like a Templar document that...A story I never told you, about a colonel who—”

“What of it? The Templars must have copied from the Rosi-crucians.”

“But the Templars came first.”

“Then the Rosicrucians copied from the Templars.”

“What would I do without you, darling?”

“That Aglie’s ruined you. You’re looking everywhere for revelation.”

“Me? I’m not looking for anything.”

“And a good thing, too. Watch out for the opiate of the masses.”

“El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido.”

“Go ahead, laugh. So what did those idiots say?”

“Those idiots learned everything they knew in Africa, weren’t you listening?”

“And while they were in Africa, they started packing us up and sending us here.”

“Thank God. Otherwise you might have been born in Pretoria.” I kissed her. “Beyond the door,” I went on, “they found a sepulcher with seven sides and seven corners, miraculously illuminated by an artificial sun. In the middle was a circular altar decorated with various mottoes or emblems, on the order of NEQUAQUAM VACUUM....”

“Quack quack what? Signed, Donald Duck?”

“It’s Latin. It means ‘the void does not exist.’ “

“That’s good to know. Otherwise, think of the horror—”

“Do me a favor and turn on the fan, animula vagula blan-dula.”

“But it’s winter.”

“Only for you people of the wrong hemisphere, darling. For me it’s July. Please, the fan. It’s not because you’re a woman; just that it’s on your side of the bed. Thanks. Anyway, under the altar they found Rosencreutz’s body, intact. In his hand was a copy of Book I, crammed with infinite knowledge. Too bad the world can’t read it—the manifesto says—otherwise, gulp, wow, brr, squisssh!”

“Ouch.”

“As I was saying, the manifesto ends by promising that a huge treasure remains to be discovered, along with stupendous revelations about the ties between the macrocosm and the microcosm. And don’t think that these were a bunch of tacky alchemists offering to show us how to make gold. No, that was small potatoes. They were aiming higher, in every sense of the word. The manifesto announced that the Fama was being distributed in five languages, and, soon to appear on this screen, the Confessio. The brothers awaited replies and reviews from learned and ignorant alike. Write, telephone, send in your names, and we’ll see if you’re worthy to share our secrets, of which we have given you only the faintest notion. Sub umbra alarum tuarum lehova.”

“Which means?”

“It’s a formula of conclusion. Over and out. It sounds as if the Rosicrucians were dying to tell what they had learned, and were anxiously waiting for the right listener. But not one word about what it was they knew.”

“Like that fellow whose\picture was in the ad we saw on the plane: Send me ten dollars, and I’ll tell you how to become a millionaire.”

“And it’s no lie. He has discovered the secret. And so have I.”

“Listen, you better read on. You’re acting as if we just met tonight.”

“With you, it’s always like the first time.”

“Ah, but I don’t get too familiar with the first one who comes along. Anyway, you have quite a collection now. First Templars, then Rosicrucians. You haven’t read Plekhanov by any chance?”

“No. I’m waiting to discover his sepulcher a hundred and twenty years from now. Unless Stalin buried him with tractors.”

“Idiot. I’m taking a bath.”


30

And the famous confraternity of the Rosy Cross declares even now that throughout the universe delirious prophecies circulate. In fact, the moment the ghost appeared (though Fama and Confessio prove that this was a mere invention of idle minds), it produced a hope of universal reform, and generated things partly ridiculous and absurd, partly incredible. Thus upright and honest men of various countries exposed themselves to contempt and derision in order to lend open support, or to reveal themselves to these brothers...through the Mirror of Solomon or in some other occult way.

—Christoph von Besold (?), Appendix to Tommaso Campanella, Van der Spanischen Monarchy, 1623

The best came later, and when Amparo returned, I was able to give her a foretaste of wondrous events. “It’s an incredible story. The manifestoes appeared in an age teeming with texts of that sort. Everyone was seeking renewal, a golden century, a Cockaigne of the spirit. Some pored over magic texts, others labored at forges, melting metals, others sought to rule the stars, and still others invented secret alphabets and universal languages. In Prague, Rudolph II turned his court into an alchemistic laboratory, invited Comenius and John Dee, the English court astrologer who had revealed all the secrets of the cosmos in the few pages of his Monas lerogliphica. Are you with me?”

“To the end of time.”

“Rudolph’s physician was a man named Michael Maier, who later wrote a book of visual and musical emblems, the Atalanta Fugiens, an orgy of philosopher’s eggs, dragons biting their tails, sphinxes. Nothing was more luminous than a secret cipher; everything was the hieroglyph of something else. Think about it. Galileo was dropping stones from the Tower of Pisa, Richelieu played Monopoly with half of Europe, and in the meantime they all had their eyes peeled to read the signs of the world. Pull of gravity, indeed; something else lies beneath (or, rather, above) all this, something quite different. Would you like to know what? Abracadabra. Torricelli invented the barometer, but the rest of them were messing around with ballets, water games, and fireworks in the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg. And the Thirty Years’ War was about to break out.”

“Mutter Courage must have been delighted.”

“But even for them it wasn’t all fun and games. In 1619 the Palantine elector accepted the crown of Bohemia, probably because he was dying to rule Prague, the magic city. But the next year, the Hapsburgs nailed him to the White Mountain. In Prague the Protestants were slaughtered, Comenius’s house and library were burned, and his wife and son were killed. He fled from court to court, harping on how great and full of hope the idea of the Rosy Cross was.”

“Poor man, but what did you expect him to do? Console himself with the barometer? Wait a minute. Give a poor girl time to think. Who wrote these manifestoes?”

“That’s the whole point: we don’t know. Let’s try to figure it out...How about scratching my rosy cross...no, between the shoulder blades, higher, to the left, there. Yes, there. Now then, there were some incredible characters in this German environment. Like Simon Studion, author of Naometria, an occult treatise on the measurements of the Temple of Solomon; Hein-rich Khunrath, who wrote Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, full of allegories, with Hebrew alphabets and cabalistic labyrinths that must have inspired the authors of Fama, who were probably friends of one of the countless little Utopian conventicles of Christian rebirth. One popular rumor is that the author was a man named Johann Valentin Andreae. A year later, he published The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, but he had written that in his youth, so he must have been kicking the idea of the Rosy Cross around for quite some time. There were other enthusiasts, in Tubingen, who dreamed of the republic of Christianopolis. Perhaps they all got together. But it sounds as if it was all in fun, a joke. They had no idea of the pandemonium they were unleashing. Andreae spent the rest of his life swearing he hadn’t written die manifestoes, which he claimed were a lusus, a ludibrium, a prank. It cost him his academic reputation. He grew angry, said that the Rosicrucians, if indeed they existed, were all impostors. But that didn’t help. Once the manifestoes appeared, it was as if people had been waiting for them. Learned men from all over Europe actually wrote to the Rosicrucians, and since there was no address, they sent open letters, pamphlets, printed volumes. In that same year Maier published Arcana arcanissima, in which the brethren of the Rosy Cross were not mentioned explicitly, but everyone was sure he was talking about them and that there was more to his book than met the eye. Some people boasted that they had read Fama in manuscript. It wasn’t so easy to prepare a book for publication in those days, especially if it had engravings, but in 1616, Robert Fludd—who wrote in England but printed in Leyden, so you have to figure in the time to ship the proofs—circulated Apologia compendiaria Fratemitatem de Rosea Cruce suspicionis et in-famiis maculis aspersam, veritatem quasi Fluctibus abluens et abstergens, to defend the brethren and free them from suspicion, from the ‘slander’ that had been their reward. In other words, a debate was raging in Bohemia, Germany, England, and Holland, alive with couriers on horseback and itinerant scholars.”

“And the Rosicrucians themselves?”

“Deathly silence. Post CXX annos patebo, my ass. They watched, from the vacuum of their palace. I believe it was their silence that agitated everyone so much. The fact that they didn’t answer was taken as proof of their existence. In 1617 Fludd wrote Tractatus apologeticus integritatem societatis de Rosea Cruce de-fendens, and somebody in a De Naturae Secretis, 1618, said that the time had come to reveal the secret of the Rosicrucians.”

“And did they?”

“Anything but. They only complicated things, explaining that if you subtracted from 1618 the one hundred and eighty-eight years promised by the Rosicrucians, you got 1430, the year when the Order of the Golden Fleece, la Toison d’Or, was established.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I don’t understand the one hundred and eighty-eight years. It seems to me it should have been one hundred and twenty, but mystical subtractions and additions always come out the way you want. As for la Toison d’Or, it’s a reference to the Argonauts, who, an unimpeachable source once told me, had some connection with the Holy Grail and therefore with the Templars. But that’s not all. Fludd, who seems to have been as prolific as Barbara Cartland, brought out four more books between 1617 and 1619, including Utriusque cosmi historia, brief remarks on the universe, illustrated with roses and crosses throughout. Maier then mustered all his courage and put out his Silentium post clamores, in which he claimed that the confraternity did indeed exist and was connected not only to la Toison d’Or but also to the Order of the Garter. Except that he was too lowly a person to be received into it. Imagine the reaction of the scholars of Europe! If the Rosicrucians didn’t accept even Maier, the order must have been really exclusive. So now all the pseuds bent over backward to get in. In other words, everyone said the Rosicrucians existed, though no one admitted to having actually seen them. Everyone wrote as if trying to set up a meeting or wheedle an audience, but no one had the courage to say I’m one, and some, maybe only because they had never been approached, said the order didn’t exist; others said the order existed precisely because they had been approached.”

“And not a peep out of the Rosicrucians.”

“Quiet as mice.”

“Open your mouth. You need some mamaia.”

“Yum. Meanwhile, the Thirty Years’ War began, and Johann Valentin Andreae wrote Turns Babel, promising that the Antichrist would be defeated within the year, while one Ireneus Agnostus wrote Tintinnabulum sophorum—”

“Tintinnabulum! I love it.”

“—not a word of which is comprehensible. But then Campa-nella, or someone acting on his behalf, declared in Spanischen Monarchy that the whole Rosy Cross business was a game of corrupt minds...And that’s it. Between 1621 and 1623 they all shut up.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. They got tired of it. Like the Beatles. But only in Germany. Otherwise, it’s the story of a toxic cloud. It shifted to France. One fine morning in 1623, Rosicrucian manifestoes appeared on the walls of Paris, informing the good citizens that the deputies of the confraternity’s chief college had moved to their city and were ready to accept applications. But according to another version, the manifestoes came right out and said there were thirty-six invisibles scattered through the world in groups of six, and that they had the power to make their adepts invisible. Hey! The thirty-six again!”

“What thirty-six?”

“The ones in my Templar document.”

“No imagination at all, these people. What next?”

“Collective madness broke out. Some defended the Rosicrucians, others wanted to meet them, still others accused them of devil worship, alchemy, and heresy, claiming that Ashtoreth had intervened to make them rich, powerful, capable of flying from place to place. The talk of the town, in other words.”

“Smart, those brethren. Nothing like a Paris launching to make you fashionable.”

“You’re right. Listen to what happened next. Descartes—that’s right, Descartes himself—had, several years before, gone looking for them in Germany, but he never found them, because, as his biographer says, they deliberately disguised themselves. By the time he got back to Paris, the manifestoes had appeared, and he learned mat everybody considered him a Rosicrucian. Not a good thing to be, given the atmosphere at the time. It also irritated his friend Mersenne, who was already fulminating against the Rosicrucians, calling them wretches, subversives, mages, and cabalists bent on sowing perverted doctrines. So what does Descartes do? Simply appears in public as often as possible. Since everybody can undeniably see him, he must not be a Rosicru-cian, because if he were, he’d be invisible.”

“That’s method for you!”

“Of course, denying it wouldn’t have worked. The way things were, if somebody came up to you and said, ‘Hi there, I’m a Rosicrucian,’ that meant he wasn’t. No self-respecting Rosicru-cian would acknowledge it. On the contrary, he would deny it to his last breath.”

“But you can’t say that anyone who denies being a Rosicrucian is a Rosicrucian, because I say I’m not, and that doesn’t make me one.”

“But the denial is itself suspicious.”

“No, it’s not. What would a Rosicrucian do once he realized people weren’t believing those who said they were, and that people suspected only those who said they weren’t? He’d say he was, to make them think he wasn’t.”

“Damnation. So those who say they’re Rosicrucians are lying, which means they really are! No, no, Amparo, we musn’t fall into their trap. Their spies are everywhere, even under this bed, so now they know that we know, and therefore they say they aren’t.”

“Darling, you’re scaring me.”

“Don’t worry, I’m here, and I’m stupid, so when they say they aren’t, I’ll believe they are and unmask them at once. The Rosicrucian unmasked is harmless; you can shoo him out the window with a rolled-up newspaper.”

“What about Aglie? He wants us to think he’s the Comte de Saint-Germain. Obviously so we’ll think he isn’t. Therefore, he’s a Rosicrucian. Or isn’t he?”

“Listen, Amparo, let’s get some sleep.”

“Oh, no, now I want to hear the rest.”

“The rest is a complete mess. Everybody’s a Rosicrucian. In 1627 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis was published, and readers thought he was talking about the land of the Rosicrucians, even though he never mentioned them. Poor Johann Valentin Andreae died, still swearing up and down that he wasn’t a Rosicrucian, or if he said he was, he had only been kidding, but by now it was too late. The Rosicrucians were everywhere, aided by the feet that they didn’t exist.’’

“Like God.”

“Now that you mention it, let’s see. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one’s free to take it and run with it. At the end, they’ll see who’s done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn’t bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what’s happening, it’s too late. Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty...Toi, apo-cryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere. It all goes to Peter’s head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens to tell the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of Patmos. Soon the poor man is seeing things: Help, there are locusts all over my bed, make those trumpets stop, where’s all this blood coming from? The others say he’s drunk, or maybe it’s arteriosclerosis...Who knows, maybe it really happened that way.”

“It did happen that way. You should read some Feuerbach, instead of those junk books of yours.”

“Amparo, the sun’s coming up.”

“We must be crazy.”

“Rosy-fingered dawn gently caresses the waves...”

“Yes, go on. It’s Yemanja. Listen! She’s coming.”

“Show me your ludibria...”

“Oh, the Tintinnabulum!”

“You are my Atalanta Fugiens...”

“Oh, my Turris Babel...”

“I want the Arcana Arcanissima, the Golden Fleece, pale et rose comme un coquillage marin...”

“Sssh...Silentium post clamores,” she said.


31

It is probable that the majority of the supposed Rosy Crosses, generally so designated, were in reality only Rosicrucians...Indeed, it is certain that they were in no way members, for the simple fact that they were members of such associations. This may seem paradoxical at first, and contradictory, but is nevertheless easily comprehensible...

—Ren6 Guenon, Aperfu sur I’initiation, Paris, Editions Traditi onelles, 1981, XXXVIII, p. 241

We returned to Rio, and I went back to work. One day I read in an illustrated magazine that there was an Order of the Ancient and Accepted Rosy Cross in the city. I suggested to Amparo that we go and take a look, and reluctantly she came along.

The office was in a side street; its plate-glass window contained plaster statuettes of Cheops, Nefertiti, the Sphinx.

There was a plenary session scheduled for that very afternoon: “The Rosy Cross and the Umbanda.” The speaker was one Professor Bramanti, Referendary of the Order in Europe, Secret Knight of the Grand Priory in Partibus of Rhodes, Malta, and Thessalonica.

We decided to go in. The room, fairly shabby, was decorated with Tantric miniatures depicting die serpent Kundalini, the one the Templars wanted to reawaken with the kiss on the behind. All things considered, I thought, it had hardly been worth crossing the Atlantic to discover a new world: I could have found the same things at the Picatrix office.

Professor Bramanti sat behind a table covered with a red cloth, facing a rather sparse and sleepy audience. He was a corpulent gentleman who might have been described as a tapir if it hadn’t been for his bulk. He was already talking when we came in. His style was pompous and oratorical. He couldn’t have started long before, however, because he was still discussing the Rosicru-cians during the eighteenth dynasty, under the reign of Ah-mose I.

Four Veiled Masters, he said, kept watch over the race that twenty-five thousand years before the foundation of Thebes had originated the civilization of the Sahara. The pharaoh Ahmose, influenced by them, established the Great White Fraternity, guardian of the antediluvian wisdom the Egyptians still retained. Bramanti claimed to have documents (naturally, inaccessible to the profane) that dated back to the sages of the Temple of Karnak and their secret archives. The symbol of the rose and the cross had been conceived by the pharaoh Akhenaton. Someone has the papyrus, Bramanti said, but don’t ask me who.

The Great White Fraternity was ultimately responsible for the education of: Hermes Trismegistus (who influenced die Italian Renaissance just as much as he later influenced Princeton gno-sis), Homer, the Druids of Gaul, Solomon, Solon, Pythagoras, Plotinus, the Essenes, the Therapeutae, Joseph of Arimathea (who took the Grail to Europe), Alcuin, King Dagobert, Saint Thomas, Bacon, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Jakob Bohme, Debussy, Einstein. (Amparo whispered that he seemed to be missing only Nero, Cambronne, Geronimo, Pancho Villa, and Buster Kea-ton.)

As for the influence of the original Rosy^ Cross on Christianity, Bramanti pointed out, for those who hadn’t got their bearings, that it was no accident that Jesus had died on a cross.

The sages of the Great White Fraternity were also the founders of the first Masonic lodge, back in the days of King Solomon. It was clear, from his works, that Dante had been a Rosicrucian and a Mason—as had Saint Thomas, incidentally. In cantos XXIV and XXV of the “Paradiso” one finds the triple kiss of Prince Rosicrux, the pelican, white tunics (me same as those worn by the old men of the Apocalypse), and the three theological virtues of Masonic chapters (Faith, Hope, and Charity). In fact, the symbolic flower of the Rosicrucians (the white rose of cantos XXX and XXXI) was adopted by the Church of Rome as symbol of the mother of the Savior. Hence the Rosa Mystica of the litanies.

It was equally clear that the Rosicrucians had lived on through the Middle Ages, a fact shown not only by their infiltration of the Templars, but also by far more explicit documents. Bramanti cited one Kiesewetter, who demonstrated in the late nineteenth century that the Rosicrucians had manufactured four quintals of gold for the Prince-Elector of Saxony in medieval times, clear proof being available on a certain page of the Theatrum Chem-icum, published in Strasbourg in 1613. But few have remarked the Templar references in the legend of William Tell. Tell cuts his arrow from a branch of mistletoe, a plant of Aryan mythology, and he hits an apple, symbol of the third eye activated by the serpent Kundalini. And we know, of course, that the Aryans came from India, where the Rosicrucians took refuge after leaving Germany.

Of the various groupings that claimed descent from the Great White Fraternity—often childishly—Bramanti recognized just one as legitimate: the Rosicrucian Fellowship of Max Heindel, and that only because Alain Kardek had been educated in its circles. Kardek was the father of spiritualism, and it was his theosophy, which contemplated contact with the souls of the departed, that spiritually formed umbanda spirituality, the glory of our most noble Brazil. In this theosophy, Aum Banda, it seems, is a Sanskrit expression denoting the divine principle and source of life. (“They tricked us again,” Amparo murmured. “Not even the word ‘umbanda’ is ours; the only African thing about it is the sound.”)

The root is Aum or Um, which is the Buddhist Om and also the name of God in the language of Adam. If the syllable urn is properly pronounced, it becomes a powerful mantra and produces fluid currents of harmony in the psyche through the siakra, or frontal plexus. (“What’s the frontal plexus?” Amparo asked. “An incurable disease?”)

Bramanti explained that there was a big difference between true brethren of the Rosy Cross—heirs of the Great White Fraternity, obviously secret, such as the Ancient and Accepted Order, whose unworthy representative he was, and the “Rosicrucians,” who claimed attachment to the Rosy Cross mystique for opportunistic reasons, lacking any justification. He urged his audience to give no credence to any Rosicrucian who called himself a brother of the Rosy Cross. (Amparo remarked that one man’s Rosy Cross was another man’s Rosicrucian.)

One ill-advised member of the audience stood up and asked how Professor Bramanti’s order could claim to be authentic, since it violated the law of silence observed by all true adepts of the Great White Fraternity.

Bramanti rose to reply. “I was unaware that we had been infiltrated by the paid provocateurs of atheistic materialism. Under these circumstances I have no more to say.” And at that he walked out with a certain majesty.

That evening, Aglie telephoned to see how we were and to tell us that we had finally been invited to a rite, the next day. In the meantime, he suggested we have a drink. Amparo had a political meeting with her friends; I went to join Aglie by myself.


32

Valentiniani...nihil magis curant quam occultare quod praedicant: si tamen praedicant, qui occultant...Si bona fides quaeres, concrete vultu, suspense supercilio—altum est—aiunt. Si subtiliter tentes, per ambiguitates bilingues communem fidern affirmant. Si scire te subos-tendas, negant quidquid agnoscunt...Habent artificium quo prius persuadeant, quam edoceant.

—Tertullian, Adversus Valentinianos

Aglie invited me to a place where some ageless men still made a batida in the traditional way. In just a few steps we left the civilization of Carmen Miranda, and I found myself in a dark room where some natives were smoking cigars thick as sausages. The tobacco, as broad, transparent leaves, was rolled into what looked like old hawser, worked with the fingertips, and wrapped in oily straw paper. It kept going out, but you could understand what it must have been like when Sir Walter Raleigh discovered it.

I told him about my afternoon adventure.

“So now it’s the Rosicrucians as well? Your thirst for knowledge is insatiable, my friend. But pay no attention to those lunatics. They constantly talk about irrefutable documents that no one ever produces. I know that Bramanti. He lives in Milan, but he travels all over the world spreading his gospel. ,A harmless man, though he still believes in Kiesewetter. Hordes of Rosicrucians insist on that page of the Theatrum Chemicum. But if you actually take a look at it—and I might modestly add that I have a copy in my little Milanese library—there is no such quotation.”

“Herr Kiesewetter’s a clown, then.”

“But much quoted. The trouble is that even the nineteenth-century occultists fell victim to the spirit of positivism: a thing is true only if it can be proved. Take the debate on the Corpus Hermeticum. When that document came to light in Europe in the fifteenth century, Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, and many other people of great wisdom immediately realized that it had to be a work of most ancient wisdom, antedating the Egyptians, antedating even Moses himself. It contained ideas that would later be expressed by Plato and by Jesus.”

“What do you mean, later? That’s the same argument Bramanti used to prove Dante was a Mason. If the Corpus repeats ideas of Plato and Jesus, it must have been written after them!”

“You see? You’re doing it, too. That was exactly the reasoning of modem philologists, who also added wordy linguistic analyses intended to show that the Corpus was written in the second or third century of our era. It’s like saying that Cassandra must have been born after Homer because she predicted the destruction of Troy. The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modem illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause...What does ‘coming before’ mean, or ‘coming after’? Does your beautiful Amparo come before or after her motley ancestors? She is too splendid—if you will allow a dispassionate opinion from a man old enough to be her father. She thus comes before. She is the mysterious origin of whatever went into her creation.”

“But at this point...”

“It is the whole idea of ‘point’ that is mistaken. Ever since Parmenides, points have been posited by science in an attempt to establish whence and whither something moves. But in fact nothing moves, and there is only one point, the one from which all others are generated at the same instant. The occultists of the nineteenth century, like those of our own time, naively tried to prove the truth of a thing by resorting to the methods of scientific falsehood. You must reason not according to the logic of time but according to the logic of Tradition. One time symbolizes all others, and the invisible Temple of the Rosicrucians therefore exists and has always existed, regardless of the current of history—your history. The time of the final revelation is not time by the clock. Its bonds are rooted in the time of ‘subtle history,’ where the befores and afters of science are of scant importance.”

“In other words, those who maintain that the Rosicrucians are eternal—”

“Are scientific fools, because they seek to prove that which must be known without proof. Do you think the worshipers we will see tomorrow night are capable of proving all the things that Kardek told them? Not at all. They simply know, because they are willing to know. If we had all retained this receptivity to secret knowledge, we would be dazzled by revelations. There is no need to wish; it’s enough to be willing.”

“But look—and forgive my banality—do the Rosicrucians exist or not?’’

“What do you mean by exist?”

“You tell me.”

“The Great White Fraternity—whether you call them Rosicrucians or the spiritual knighthood of which the Templars are a temporary incarnation—is a cohort of a few, a very few, elect wise men who journey through human history in order to preserve a core of eternal knowledge. History does not happen randomly. It is the work of the Masters of the World, whom nothing escapes. Naturally, the Masters of the World protect themselves through secrecy. And that is why anyone who says he is a master, a Rosicrucian, a Templar is lying. They must be sought elsewhere.”

“Then the story goes on endlessly.”

“Exactly. And it demonstrates the shrewdness of the Masters.”

“But what do they want people to know?”

“Only that there’s a secret. Otherwise, if everything is as it appears to be, why go on living?”

“And what is the secret?”

“What the revealed religions have been unable to reveal. The secret lies beyond.”


33

The visions are white, blue, white, pale red. In the end they mingle and are all pale, the color of the flame of a white candle; you will see sparks, you will feel gooseflesh all over your body. This announces the beginning of the attraction exerted on the one who fulfills the mission.

—Papus, Marlines de Pasqually, Paris, Chamuel, 1895, p. 92

The promised evening arrived. Aglie picked us up just as he had in Salvador. The tenda where the session, or gira, was to take place was in a fairly central district, if you can speak of a center in a city whose tongues of land stretch through hills and lick the sea. Seen from above, illuminated in the evening, the city looks like a head with patches of alopecia areata.

“Remember, mis is an umbanda tonight, not a candomble. The participants will be possessed not by orixas, but by the eguns, spirits of the departed. And by Exu, the African Hermes you saw in Bahia, and his companion, Pompa Gira. Exu is a Yoruba divinity, a demon inclined to mischief and joking, but there was a trickster god in Amerind mythology, too.”

“And who are the departed?”

“Pretos velhos and caboclos. The pretos velhos are old African wise men who guided their people at the time of deportation, like Rei Congo and Pai Agostinho...They are the memory of a milder phase of slavery, when the blacks, no longer animals, became family friends, uncles, grandfathers. The caboclos, on the other hand, are Indian spirits, virgin forces representing the purity of original nature. In the umbanda the African orixas stay in the background, completely syncretized with Catholic saints, and these beings alone intervene. They are the ones who produce the trance. At a certain point in the dance, the medium, the cavalo, is penetrated by a higher being and loses all awareness of self. He continues to dance until the divine being has left him, and he emerges feeling better. Clean, purified.”

“Lucky mediums,” Amparo said.

“Lucky indeed,” Aglie said. “They attain contact with mother earth. These worshipers have been uprooted, flung into the horrible melting pot of the city, and, as Spengler said, at a time of crisis the mercantile West turns once more to the world of the earth.”

We arrived. The tenda looked like an ordinary building from the outside. Here, too, you entered through a little garden, more modest than the one in Bahia, and at the door of the barracao, a kind of storehouse, was a little statue of Exu, already surrounded by propitiatory offerings.

Amparo drew me aside as we went in. “IVe figured it out,” she said. “That tapir at the lecture talked about the Aryan age, remember? And this one talks about the decline of the West. Blut und Boden, blood and earth. It’s pure Nazism.”

“It’s not that simple, darling. This is a different continent.”

“Thanks for the news. The Great White Fraternity! You eat your God for dinner.”

“It’s the Catholics who do that. It’s not the same thing.”

“It is too. Weren’t you listening? Pythagoras, Dante, the Virgin Mary, and the Masons. Always out to screw us. Make um-banda, not love.”

“You’re the one who’s syncretized. Come on, let’s have a look. This, teo, is culture.”

“There’s only one culture: strangle the last priest with the entrails of the last Rosicrucian.”

Aglie signaled us to go in. If the outside was seedy, the inside was a blaze of violent colors. It was a quadrangular hall, with one area set aside for the dancing of the cavalos. The altar was at the far end, protected by a railing, against which stood the platform for the drums, the atabaques. The ritual space was still empty, but on our side of the railing a heterogeneous crowd was already stirring: believers and the merely curious, blacks and whites, all mixed, some barefoot, others wearing tennis shoes. I was immediately struck by the figures around the altar: pretos velhos, caboclos in multicolored feathers, saints who would have seemed to be marzipan were it not for their Pantagruelian dimensions, Saint George in a shining breastplate and scarlet cloak, saints Cosmas and Damian, a Virgin pierced by swords, and a shamelessly hyperrealist Christ, his arms outstretched like the redeemer of Corcovado, but in color. There were no orixas, but you could sense their presence in the faces of the crowd and in the sweetish odor of cane and cooked foods, in the stench of sweat caused by the heat and by the excitement of the imminent gira.

The pai-de-santo went forward and took a seat near the altar, where he received the faithful, scenting them with dense exhalations of his cigar, blessing them, and offering them a cup of liquor as if in a rapid Eucharistic rite. I knelt and drank with my companions, noticing, as I watched a cambone pour the liquid from a bottle, that it was Dubonnet. No matter. I savored it as if it were an elixir from the Fountain of Youth. On the platform the atabaques were already beating, to brisk blows, as the initiates chanted a propitiatory song to Exu and to Pompa Gira: Seu Tranca Ruas e Mojuba! E Mojuba, e Mojuba! Sete Encruzilhadas 6 Mojuba! E Mojuba, 6 Mojuba! Seu Maraboe e Mojuba! Seu Tiriri € Mojuba! Exu Veludo, i Mojuba! A Pompa Gira € Mojuba!

The pai-de-santo began to swing his thurible, releasing a heavy odor of Indian incense, and to chant special orations to OxaM and Nossa Senhora.

The atabaques beat faster, and the cavalos invaded the space before the altar, beginning to fall under the spell of the pontos. Most were women, and Amparo made sarcastic asides about the sensitivity of her sex.

Among the women were some Europeans. Aglie pointed out a blonde, a German psychologist who had been participating in the rites for years. She had tried everything, but if you are not chosen, it’s hopeless: for her, the trance never came, was beyond achieving. Her eyes seemed lost in the void as she danced, and the atabaques gave neither her nerves nor ours any relief. Pungent fumes filled the hall and dazed both worshipers and observers, somehow hitting everybody—me included—in the stomach. But the same thing had happened to me at the escolas de samba in Rio. I knew the psychological power of music and noise, the way they produced Saturday night fevers in discos. The German woman’s eyes were wide, and every movement of her hysterical limbs begged for oblivion. The other daughters of the saint went into ecstasy, flung their heads back, wriggled fluidly, navigating a sea of forgetfulness. The German tensed, distraught and almost in tears, like someone desperately struggling to reach orgasm, wriggling and straining, but finding no release. However much she tried to lose control, she constantly regained it. Poor Teuton, sick from too many well-tempered clavichords.

The elect, meanwhile, were making their leap into the vacuum, their gaze dulled, their limbs stiffened. Their movements became more and more automatic, but not haphazard, because they revealed the nature of the beings taking possession of them: some of the elect seemed soft, their hands moving sideways, palms down, in a swimming motion; others went bent over and moved slowly, and the cambones used white linen cloths to shield them from the crowd’s view, for these had been touched by an excellent spirit.

Some of the cavalos shook violently, and those possessed by pretos velhos emitted hollow sounds—hum hum hum—as they moved with their bodies tilted forward, like old men leaning on canes, jaws jutting out in haggard, toothless faces. But those possessed by the caboclos let out shrill warrior cries—hiahou!— and the cambones rushed to assist the ones unable to bear the violence of the gift.

The drums beat, the pontos rose in the air thick with fumes. I was holding Amparo’s arm when all of a sudden her hands were sweating, her body trembled, and her lips parted. “I don’t feel well,” she said. “I want to go.”

Aglie noticed what had happened and helped me take her outside. The night air brought her around. “I’m all right,” she said. “It must have been something I ate. And the smells, the heat...”

“No,” said the pai-de-santo, who had followed us. “You have the qualities of a medium. You reacted well to the pontos. I was watching you.”

“Stop!” Amparo cried, adding a few words in a language I didn’t know. I saw the pai-de-santo turn pale—or gray, as they used to say in adventure stories, where men with black skin turned gray with fear. “That’s enough. I got a little sick. I ate something I shouldn’t have...Please, go back inside. Just let me get some air. I’d rather be by myself; I’m not an invalid.”

We did as she asked, but when I went back inside, after the break in the open air, the smells, the drums, the sweat that now covered every body acted like a shot of alcohol gulped down after a long abstinence. I ran a hand over my brow, and an old man offered me an agog6, a small gilded instrument like a triangle with bells, which you strike with a little bar. “Go up on the platform,” he said. “Play. It’ll do you good.”

There was homeopathic wisdom in that advice. I struck the agogo, trying to fall in with the beat of the drums, and gradually I became part of the event, and, becoming part of it, I controlled it. I found relief by moving my legs and feet, I freed myself from what surrounded me, I challenged it, I embraced it. Later, Aglie was to talk to me about the diiference between the man who knows and the man who undergoes.

As the mediums fell into trances, the cambones led them to the sides of the room, sat them down, offered them cigars and pipes. Those of the faithful who had been denied possession ran and knelt at their feet, whispered in their ears, listened to their advice, received their beneficent influence, poured out confessions, and drew comfort from them. Some hovered at the edges of trance, and the cambones gently encouraged them, leading them, now more relaxed, back among the crowd.

In the dancing area many aspirants to ecstasy were still moving. The German woman twitched unnaturally, waiting to be visited—in vain. Others had been taken over by Exu and were making wicked faces, sly, astute, as they moved in jerks.

It was then that I saw Amparo.

Now I know that Hesed is not only the Sefirah of grace and love. As Diotallevi said, it is also the moment of expansion of the divine substance, which spreads out to the edge of infinity. It is the care of the living for the dead, but someone also must have observed that it is the care of the dead for the living.

Striking the agogd, I no longer followed what was happening in the hall, focused as I was on my own control, letting myself be led by the music. Amparo must have come in at least ten minutes before, and surely she had felt the same effect I had experienced earlier. But no one had given her an agogo, and by now she probably wouldn’t have wanted one. Called by deep voices, she had stripped herself of all defenses, of all will.

I saw her fling herself into the midst of the dancing, stop, her abnormally tense face looking upward, her neck rigid. Then, oblivious, she launched into a lewd saraband, her hands miming the offer of her own body. “A Pomba Gira, a Pomba Gira!” some shouted, delighted by the miracle, since until then the she-devil had not made her presence known. O seu manto 6 de veludo, rebordado todo em ouro, o seu garfo 6 de prata, muito grande e seu tesouri...Pomba Gira das Almas, vein toma cho cho...

I didn’t dare intervene. I may have accelerated the strokes of my little bar, trying to join carnally with my woman, or with the indigenous spirit she now incarnated.

The cambones went to her, had her put on the ritual vestment, and held her up as she came out of her brief but intense trance. They led her to a chair. She was soaked with sweat and breathed with difficulty. She refused to welcome those who rushed over to beg for oracles. Instead, she started crying.

The gira was coming to an end. I left the platform and ran to Amparo. Aglie was already there, delicately massaging her temples.

“How embarrassing!” Amparo said. “I don’t believe in it, I didn’t want to. How could I have done this?”

“It happens,” Aglie said softly, “it happens.”

“But then there’s no hope,” Amparo cried. “I’m still a slave. Go away,” she said to me angrily. “I’m a poor dirty black girl. Give me a master; I deserve it!”

“It happens to blond Achaeans, too,” Aglie consoled her. “It’s human nature...”

Amparo asked the way to the toilet. The rite was ending. The German woman was still dancing, alone in the middle of the hall, ostentatious but now listless. She had followed Amparo’s experience with envious eyes.

Amparo came back about ten minutes later, as we were taking our leave of the pai-de-santo, who congratulated us on the splendid success of our first contact with the world of the dead.

Aglie drove in silence through the night. When he stopped outside our house, Amparo said she wanted to go upstairs alone. “Why don’t you take a little walk,” she said to me. “Come back when I’m asleep. I’ll take a pill. Excuse me, both of you. I really must have eaten something I shouldn’t have. All those women tonight must have. I hate my country. Good night.”

Aglie understood my uneasiness and suggested we go to an all-night bar in Cppacabana.

At the bar I didn’t speak. Aglie waited until I had started sipping my batida before he broke the silence.

“Race—or culture, if you prefer—is part of our unconscious mind. And in another part of that unconscious dwell archetypes, figures identical for all men and in all centuries. This evening, the atmosphere, the surroundings lulled our vigilance. It happened to all of us; you felt it yourself. Amparo discovered that the orixas, whom she has destroyed in her heart, still live in her womb. You must not think I consider this a positive thing. You have heard me speak respectfully of the supernatural energies that vibrate around us in this country. But I have no special fondness for the practices of possession. An initiate is not the same as a mystic. Being an initiate—having an intuitive comprehension of what reason cannot explain—is a very deep process; it is a slow transformation of the spirit and of the body, and it can lead to the exercise of superior abilities, even to immortality. But it is secret, intimate; it does not show itself externally; it is modest, lucid, detached. That is why the Masters of the World, initiates, do not indulge in mysticism. For them, a mystic is a slave, a site of the manifestation of the numinous, through which site the signs of a secret can be observed. The initiate encourages the mystic and uses him as you might use a telephone, to establish long-distance contact, or as a chemist might use litmus paper, to detect the action of a particular substance. The mystic is useful, because he is conspicuous. He broadcasts himself. Initiates, on the contrary, are recognizable only to one another. It is they who control the forces that mystics undergo. In this sense there is no difference between the possession experienced by the cavalos and the ecstasies of Saint Theresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross. Mysticism is a degenerate form of contact with the divine, whereas initiation is the fruit of long askesis of mind and heart. Mysticism is a democratic, if not demagogic, phenomenon; initiation is aristocratic.”

“It is mental as opposed to carnal?”

“In a sense. Your Amparo was guarding her mind tenaciously, but she was not on guard against her body. The lay person is weaker than we are.”

It was late. Aglie informed me that he was leaving Brazil. He gave me his Milan address.

I went home and found Amparo asleep. I lay down beside her in silence, in the dark, and spent a sleepless night. It was as if there were an unknown being next to me.

In the morning Amparo told me that she was going to Petrdp-olis to visit a girlfriend. We said good-bye awkwardly.

She left with a canvas bag, a volume of political economy under her arm.

For two months she sent me no word, and I made no attempt to seek her out. Then she wrote me a brief, evasive letter, telling me she needed time to think. I didn’t answer.

I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

I stayed in Brazil for another year, with the constant feeling that I was on the brink of departure. I didn’t see Aglie again, I didn’t see any of Amparo’s friends. I spent long, long hours on the beach, sunbathing.

I flew kites, which down there are very beautiful.


GEVURAH


34

Beydelus, Demeymes, Adulex, Matucgayn, Atine, Ffex, Uquizuz, Ga-dix, Sol, Veni cito cum tuis spiritibus.

—Picatrix, Sloane Ms. 1305, 152, verso

The Breaking of the Vessels. Diotallevi was to talk to us often about the late cabalism of Isaac Luria, in which the orderly articulation of the Sefirot was lost. Creation, Luria held, was a process of divine inhalation and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action of the bellows.

“God’s asthma,” Belbo glossed.

“You try creating from nothing. It’s something you do once in your life. God blows the world as you would blow a glass bubble, and to do that He takes a deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous hiss of the ten Sefirot.”

“A hiss of light?”

“God hissed, and there was light.”

“Multimedia.”

“But the lights of the Sefirot must be gathered in vessels that can contain their splendor without shattering. The vessels destined to receive Keter, Hokhmah, and Binah withstood their magnificence, but for the lower Sefirot, from Hesed to Yesod, light was exhaled too strongly in a single burst, and the vessels broke. Fragments of light were spilled into the universe, and gross matter was thus born.”

The breaking of the vessels was a catastrophe, Diotallevi said. What could be more unbearable than an aborted world? There must have been some defect in the cosmos from the beginning, and not even the most learned rabbis had been able to explain it completely. Perhaps at the moment God exhaled and was emptied, a few drops of oil lay in the first receptacle, a material residue, the reshimu, thus adulterating God’s essence. Or perhaps the seashells^the qelippot, the beginnings of ruin—were slyly waiting in ambush somewhere.

“Slippery folk, those qelippot,” Belbo said. “Agents of the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu. And then what happened?”

And then, Diotallevi patiently explained, in the light of Severe Judgment, or Gevurah—also known as Pachad, or Terror—the Sefirah in which, according to Isaac the Blind, Evil first shows itself, the seashells acquired a real existence.

“Then the seashells are in our midst,” Belbo said.

“Just look around you,” Diotallevi said.

“But is there no way out?”

“There’s a way back in, actually,” Diotallevi said. “All emanates from God, in the contraction of simsum. The problem is to bring about tikkun, the restoration of Adam Qadmon. Then we will rebuild everything in the balanced structure of the par-zufim, the faces—or, rather, forms—that will take the place of the Sefirot. The ascension of the soul is like a cord of silk that enables devout intention, groping in the darkness, to find the path to the light. And so the world constantly strives, by combining the letters of the Torah, to regain its natural form, to emerge from its horrible confusion.”

And this is what I am doing now, in the middle of the night, in the unnatural calm of these hills. The other evening in the periscope, however, I was still mired in the slime of the seashells I felt afl around me, of the slugs trapped in the crystal cases of the Conservatoire, among the barometers and rusted clockworks, in deaf hibernation. I thought then that if there had been a breaking of the vessels, the first crack probably appeared that evening in Rio, during the rite, but it was on my return to my native country that the shattering occurred. It happened slowly, soundlessly, so that we all found ourselves caught in the morass of gross matter, where noxious vermin emerge by spontaneous generation.

When I returned from Brazil, I hardly knew who I was anymore. I was approaching thirty. At that age, my father was a father; he knew who he was and where he lived.

I had been too far from my country while prodigious things were happening. I had lived in a world swollen with the incredible, where events in Italy wore a halo of legend. Shortly before leaving the other hemisphere—it was near the end of my stay and I was treating myself to an airplane ride over the forests of Amazonia—I picked up a local newspaper during a stopover in Fortaleza. On the front page was a prominent photograph of someone I recognized: I had seen him sipping white wine at Pilade’s for years. The caption read: “O homem que matou Moro.”

When I got back, I found out that, of course, he wasn’t the man who killed Moro. Handed a loaded pistol, he would have shot himself in the ear when checking to see if it worked. What had happened was simply that an antiterrorist squad had burst in on him and found three pistols and two packs of explosives hidden under the bed. He was lying on the bed, since it was the only piece of furniture in that one-room apartment, whose rent was shared by a group of survivors of ‘68 who used it as a place to satisfy the demands of the flesh. If its sole decoration hadn’t been a poster of Che, the place could have been taken for any bachelor’s pied-a-terre. But one of the tenants belonged to an armed group, and the others had no idea that they were financing the group’s safe house. They all ended up in jail for a year.

I understood very little of what had happened in Italy over the past few years. The country had been on the brink of great changes when I left—left guiltily, feeling almost that I was running away at the moment of the settling of scores. Before I left, I could tell a man’s ideology just by the tone of his voice. I was back and now could not figure out who was on whose side. No one was talking about revolution; the new thing was the unconscious. People who claimed to be leftists quoted Nietzsche and Celine, while right-wing magazines hailed revolution in the Third World.

I went back to Pilade’s, but I felt I was on foreign soil. The billiard table was still there, and more or less the same painters, but the young fauna had changed. I learned that some of the old customers had opened schools of transcendental meditation or macrobiotic restaurants. Apparently nobody had thought of a tenda de umbanda yet. Maybe I was ahead of the times.

To appease the historic hard core, Pilade still had one of those old-fashioned pinball machines, the kind that now seemed copied from a Lichtenstein painting and were bought up wholesale by antique dealers. Next to it, however, the younger customers crowded around other machines, machines with fluorescent screens on which stylized hawks or kamikazes from Planet X hovered, or frogs jumped around grunting in Japanese. Pilade’s was an arcade of sinister flashing lights, and couriers from the Red Brigades on recruiting missions may well have been taking their turn at the Space Invaders screen. But they couldn’t play the pinball; you can’t play pinball with a pistol stuck in your belt.

I realized this one night when I followed Belbo’s gaze and saw Lorenza Pellegrini at the machine. Or, rather, when I later read one of his files. Lorenza isn’t named, but it’s obviously about her. She was the only one who played pinball like that.

FILENAME: Pinball

You don’t play pinball with just your hands, you play it with the groin too. The pinball problem is not to stop the ball before it’s swallowed by the mouth at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a halfback. The problem is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are more numerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering, confused, delirious, but still a free agent. And you achieve this not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to the case, the frame, but gently, so the machine won’t catch on and say Tilt. You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the hips that makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this side of an orgasm. And if the hips move according to nature, it’s the buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so that when the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as in homeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more the drug dissolves in the water added gradually, until the drug has almost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective and potent it is. Thus from the groin an infinitesimal pulse is transmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball moves against nature, against inertia, against gravity, against the laws of dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, who wanted it disobedient. The ball is intoxicated with vis movendi, remaining in play for memorable and immemorial lengths of time. But a female groin is required, one that interposes no spongy body between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no erectile matter in between, only skin, nerves, padded bone sheathed in a pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a disinterested adaptability to the partner’s response, a taste for arousing desire without suffering the excess of one’s own: the Amazon must drive the pinball crazy and savor the thought that she will then abandon it.

* * *

That, I believe, was when Belbo fell in love with Lorenza Pellegrini: when he realized that she could promise him an unattainable happiness. But I also believe it was through her that he began to be aware of the erotic nature of automated universes, the machine as metaphor of the cosmic body, the mechanical game as talismanic evocation. He was already hooked on Abu-lafia and perhaps had entered, even then, into the spirit of Project Hermes. Certainly he had seen the Pendulum. Somehow, Lorenza Pellegrini held out the promise of the Pendulum.

I had trouble readjusting to Pilade’s. Little by little, but not every evening, in the forest of alien faces, I was rediscovering familiar ones, the faces of survivors, though they were blurred by my effort of recognition. This one was a copywriter in an advertising agency; this one, a tax consultant; and this one sold books on the installment plan—in the old days he peddled the works of Che, but now he was offering herbals, Buddhism, astrology. They had gained a little weight and some gray in their hair, but I felt that the Scotch-on-the-rocks in their hands was the same one they had held ten years ago. They were sipping slowly, one drop every six months.

“What are you up to? Why don’t you come by and see us?” one of them asked me.

“Who’s M* nowadays?”

He looked at me as if I’d been away for a century. “The Cultural Commission at City Hall, of course.”

I had skipped too many beats.

I decided to invent a job for myself. I knew a lot of things, unconnected things, but I wanted to be able to connect them after a few hours at a library. I once thought it was necessary to have a theory, and that my problem was that I didn’t. But nowadays all you needed was information; everybody was greedy for information, especially if it was out of date. I dropped in at the university, to see if I could fit in somewhere. The lecture halls were quiet; the students glided along the corridors like ghosts, lending one another badly made bibliographies. I knew how to make a good bibliography.

One day, a doctoral candidate, mistaking me for faculty (the teachers now were the same age as the students, or vice versa), asked me what this Lord Chandos they were talking about in an economics course on cyclical crises had written. I told him Chandos was a character in Hofmannsthal, not an economist.

That same evening I was at a party with old friends and recognized a man who worked for a publisher. He had joined the staff after the firm had switched from novels by French collaborationists to Albanian political texts. They were still publishing political books, but with government backing. And they didn’t reject an occasional good work in philosophy—provided it was in the classical line, he added.

“By the way,” he said to me then, “since you’re a philosopher—”

“Thanks, but unfortunately I’m not.”

“Come on, in your day you knew everything. I was just looking over the translation of a book on the crisis of Marxism, and I came across a quotation from Anselm of Canterbury. Who’s he? I couldn’t even find him in the Dictionary of Authors.’” I told him it was Anselmo d’Aosta, and that only the English, who had to be different from everybody else, called him Anselm of Canterbury.

A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning.

Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I’d sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup, the whiskey I’d brought up from the corner store in a paper bag. The phone rings and a man says: “Listen, I’m translating this book and came across something or someone called Motakallimun. What the hell is it?”

Give me two days, I tell him. Then I go to the library, flip through some card catalogs, give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a clue.

That evening I invite an instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple of beers and he drops his guard, gives me the lowdown for nothing. I call the client back. “All right, the Motakallimun were radical Moslem theologians at the time of Avicenna. They said the world was a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would fall to pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you? The job took me three days. Pay what you think is fair.”

I was lucky enough to find two rooms and a little kitchen in an old building in the suburbs. It must have been a factory once, with a wing for offices. All the apartments that had been made from it opened onto one long corridor. I was between a real estate agent and a taxidermist’s laboratory (A. Salon, the sign said). It was like being in an American skyscraper of the thirties; if I’d had a glass door, I’d have felt like Marlowe. I put a sofa bed in the back room and made the front one an office. In a pair of bookcases I arranged the atlases, encyclopedias, catalogs I acquired bit by bit. In the beginning, I had to turn a deaf ear to my conscience and write theses for desperate students. It wasn’t hard: I just went and copied some from the previous decade. But then my friends in publishing began sending me manuscripts and foreign books to read—naturally, the least appealing and for little money.

Still, I was accumulating experience and information, and I never threw anything away. I kept files on everything. I didn’t think to use a computer (they were coming on the market just then; Belbo was to be a pioneer). Instead, I had cross-referenced index cards. Nebulae, Laplace; Laplace, Kant; Kant, Konigs-berg, the seven bridges of Konigsberg, theorems of topology...It was a little like that game where you have to go from sausage to Plato in five steps, by association of ideas. Let’s see: sausage, pig bristle, paintbrush, Mannerism, Idea, Plato. Easy. Even the sloppiest manuscript would bring twenty new cards for my hoard. I had a strict rule, which I think secret services follow, too: No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.

After about two years in business, I was pleased with myself. I was having fun. Meanwhile I had met Lia.


35

Sappia qualunque il mio nome dimanda ch’i’ mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno le belle mani a farmi una ghirlanda.

—Dante, Purgatorio, XXVII, 100-102

Lia. Now, I despair of seeing her again, but I might never have met her, and that would have been worse. I wish she were here, to hold my hand while I reconstruct the stages of my undoing. Because she told me so. But no, she must remain outside this business, she and the child. I hope they put off their return, that they come back when everything is finished, however it may finish.

It was July 16, 1981. Milan was emptying; the reference room of the library was almost deserted.

“Hey, I need volume 109 myself.”

“Then why did you leave it here?”

“I just went back to my seat for a minute to check a note.”

“That’s no excuse.”

She took the volume stubbornly and went to her table. I sat down across from her, trying to get a better look at her face.

“How can you read it like that, unless it’s in Braille?” I asked.

She raised her head, and I really couldn’t tell whether I was looking at her face or the nape of her neck. “What?” she asked. “Oh. I can see through it all right.” But she lifted her hair as she spoke, and she had green eyes.

“You have green eyes.”

“Of course I do. Is that bad?”

“No. There should be more eyes like that.”

That’s how it began.

“Eat. You’re thin as a rail,” she said to me at supper. At midnight we were still in the Greek restaurant near Pilade’s, the candle guttering in the neck of the bottle as we told each other everything. We did almost the same work: she checked encyclopedia entries.

I felt I had to tell her. At twelve-thirty, when she pulled her hair aside to see me better, I aimed a forefinger at her, thumb raised^ and went: “Pow.”

“Me too,” she said.

That night we became flesh of one flesh, and from then on she called me Pow.

We couldn’t afford a new house. I slept at her place, and sometimes she stayed with me at the office, or went off investigating, because she was smarter than I when it came to following up clues. She was good, also, at suggesting connections.

“We seem to have a half-empty file on the Rosicrucians,” she said.

“I should go back to it one of these days. They’re notes I took in Brazil...”

“Well, put in a cross reference to Yeats.”

“What’s Yeats got to do with it?”

“Plenty. I see here that he belonged to a Rosicrucian society that was called Stella Matutina.”

“What would I do without you?”

I resumed going to Pilade’s, because it was like a marketplace where I could find customers.

One evening I saw Belbo again. He must have been coming rarely in the past few years, but he showed up regularly after meeting Lorenza Pellegrini. He looked the same, maybe a bit grayer, maybe slightly thinner.

It was a cordial meeting, given the limits of his expansiveness: a few remarks about the old days, sober reticence about our complicity in that last event and its epistolary sequel. Inspector De Angelis hadn’t been heard from again. Case closed? Who could say?

I told him about my work, and he seemed interested. “Just the kind of thing I’d like to do: the Sam Spade of culture. Twenty bucks a day and expenses.”

“Except that no fascinating, mysterious women have dropped in on me, and nobody ever comes to talk about the Maltese falcon,” I said.

“You never can tell. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Enjoying myself?” I asked. I quoted him: “It’s the only thing I seem to be able to do well.”

“Bon pour vous,” he said.

We saw each other again after that, and I told him about my Brazilian experience, but he seemed more absent than usual. When Lorenza Pellegrini wasn’t there, he kept his eyes glued to the door, and when she was, he glanced nervously along the bar, following her every move. One night near closing time, he said, without looking at me, “Listen, we might be able to use your services,- but not for a single consultation. Could you give us, say, a few afternoons each week?”

“We can discuss it. What does it involve?”

“A steel company has commissioned a book about metals. Something with a lot of illustrations. Serious, but for the mass market. You know the sort of thing: metals in history, from the Iron Age to spaceships. We need somebody who’ll dig around in libraries and archives and find beautiful illustrations, old miniatures, engravings from nineteenth-century volumes on smelting, for instance, or lightning rods.”

“All right. I’ll drop by tomorrow.”

Lorenza Pellegrini came over to him. “Would you take me home?”

“Why me?” Belbo asked.

“Because you’re the man of my dreams.”

He blushed, as only he could blush, and looked away. “There’s a witness,” he said. And to me: “I’m the man of her dreams. This is Lorenza.”

“Ciao.”

“Ciao.”

He got up, whispered something in her ear.

She shook her head. “I asked for a ride home, that’s all.”

“Ah,” he said. “Excuse me, Casaubon, I have to play chauffeur to the woman of someone else’s dreams.”

“Idiot,’’ she said to him tenderly, and kissed him on the cheek.


36

Yet one caution let me give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually melancholy—that he read not the symptomes or prog-nosticks of the following tract, lest, by applying that which he reads to himself, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his own person (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurt himself, and get, in conclusion, more harm than good. I advise them therefore warily to peruse that tract.

—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621, Introduction

It was obvious that there was something between Belbo and Lorenza Pellegrini. I didn’t know exactly what it was or how long it had been going on. Abulafia’s files did not help me to reconstruct the story.

There is no date, for example, on the file about the dinner with Dr. Wagner. Belbo knew Dr. Wagner before my departure, and may well have been in contact with him after I started working at Garamond, which was when, in fact, I got to know him myself. So the dinner could have been before or after the evening I have in mind. If it was before, then I understand Belbo’s embarrassment, his solemn desperation.

Dr. Wagner—an Austrian who for years had been practicing in Paris (hence the pronunciation “Vagnere” for those who wanted to boast of their familiarity with him)—had been coming to Milan regularly for about ten years, at the invitation of two revolutionary groups of the post-’68 period. They fought over him, and of course each group gave a radically different interpretation of his thought. How and why this famous man allowed himself to be sponsored by extremists, I never understood. Wagner’s theories had no political color, so to speak, and, had he wanted, he could easily have been invited by the universities, the clinics, the academies. I believe he accepted the invitations because he was basically an epicurean and required regal expense accounts. The private hosts could raise more money than the institutions, and for Dr. Wagner this meant first-class tickets, luxury hotels, plus fees in keeping with his therapist rates, for the lectures and seminars.

Why the two groups found ideological inspiration in Wagner’s theories was another story. But in those days Wagner’s brand of psychoanalysis seemed sufficiently deconstructive, diagonal, li-bidinal, and non-Cartesian to provide some theoretical justification for revolutionary activity.

It proved difficult to get the workers to swallow it, so at a certain point the two groups had to choose between the workers and Wagner. They chose Wagner. Which gave rise to the theory that the new revolutionary protagonist was not the proletarian but the deviate.

“Instead of deviating the proletariat, they would do better to proletarianize the deviates, which would be more economical, considering Dr. Wagner’s prices,” Belbo said to me one day.

The Wagnerian revolution was the most expensive in history.

Garamond, subsidized by a university psychology department, had published a translation of Wagner’s minor essays—very technical, nearly impossible to find, and therefore in great demand among the faithful. Wagner had come to Milan for a publicity launch, and that was when his acquaintance with Belbo began.

FILENAME: Doktor Wagner

The diabolical Doktor Wagner Twenty-sixth installment

Who, on that gray morning of

During the discussion I raised an objection. The satanic old man must have been irritated, but he didn’t let it show. On the contrary, he replied as if he wanted to seduce me.

Like Charlus with Jupien, bee and flower. A genius can’t bear not being loved; he must immediately seduce the dissenter, make the dissenter love him. He succeeded. I loved him.

But he must not have forgiven me, because that evening of the divorce he dealt me a mortal blow. Unconsciously, instinctively, not thinking, he seduced me, and unconsciously, he punished me. Though it cost him deontologically, he psychoanalyzed me free. The unconscious bites even its handlers.

Story of the Marquis de Lantenac in Quatre-vingt-treiie. The ship of the Vendeeiens is sailing through a storm off the Breton coast. Suddenly a cannon slips its moorings, and as the ship pitches and rolls it begins a mad race from rail to rail, an immense beast smashing larboard and starboard. A cannoneer (alas, the very one whose negligence had left the cannon improperly secured) seizes a chain and with unparalleled courage flings himself at the monster, which nearly crushes him, but he stops it, bolts it fast, leads it back to its stall, saving the ship, the crew, the mission. With sublime liturgy, the fearsome Lantenac musters all the men on deck, praises the cannoneer’s heroism, takes an impressive medal from around his own neck and puts it on the man, embraces him, and the crew makes the welkin ring with its hurrahs.

Then stern Lantenac, reminding the honored sailor that he was responsible for the danger in the first place, orders him to be shot.

Splendid, just Lantenac, man of virtue, above corruption. And this is what Dr. Wagner did for me: he honored me with his friendship, and executed me with the truth.

and executed me, revealing to me what I desired

revealing to me that the thing that I desired, I feared.

Begin the story in a bar. The need to fall in love.

Some things you can feel coming. You don’t fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.

Because at that time I felt the need. I had just given up drinking. Relationship between the liver and the heart. A new love is a good reason for going back to drink. Somebody to go to a bar with. Feel good with.

The bar is brief, furtive. It allows you a long, sweet expectation through the day, then you go and hide in the shadows among the leather chairs; at six in the evening there’s nobody there, the sordid clientele comes later, with the piano man. Choose a louche American bar empty in the late afternoon. The waiter comes only if you call him three times, and he has the next martini ready.

It has to be a martini. Not whiskey, a martini. The liquid is clear. You raise your glass and you see her over the olive. The difference between looking at your beloved through a dry martini straight up, where the glass is small, thin, and looking at her through a martini on the rocks, through thick- glass, and her face broken by the transparent cubism of the ice. The effect is doubled if you each press your glass to your forehead, feeling the chill, and lean close until the glasses touch. Forehead to forehead with two glasses in between. You can’t do that with martini glasses.

The brief hour of the bar. Afterward, trembling, you await another day. Free of the blackmail of certainty.

He who falls in love in bars doesn’t need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.

His role. He allowed her great freedom, he was always traveling. His suspect generosity: I could telephone even at midnight. He was there, you weren’t. He said you were out. Actually, while I have you on the line, do you have any idea where she is? The only moments of jealousy. But still, in that way I was taking Cecilia from the sax player. To love, or believe you love, as an eternal priest of an ancient vengeance.

With Sandra, things were complicated. That time she decided I was too involved. Our life as a couple had become strained. Should we break up? Let’s break up, then. No, wait, let’s talk it over. No, we can’t go on like this. The problem, in a nutshell, was Sandra.

When you hang out in bars, the drama of love isn’t the women you find but the women you leave.

Then comes the dinner with Dr. Wagner. At the lecture he had just given a heckler a definition of psychoanalysis. La psychanalyse? C’est qu’entre 1’homme et la femme...chers amis...ca ne colle pas.

There was discussion: the couple, divorce as a legal fiction. Taken up by my own problems, I participated intensely. We allowed ourselves to be drawn into dialectical exchanges, speaking while Wagner was silent, forgetting there was an oracle in our presence. And it was with a pensive

and it was with a sly expression

and it was with melancholy detachment

and it was as if he entered our conversation playfully, off the subject, he said (I remember his exact words; they are carved on my mind): In professional life not once have I had a patient made neurotic by his own divorce. The cause of the trouble was always the divorce of the Other.

Dr. Wagner always said Other with a capital O. I gave a start, as if bitten by an asp.

the viscount started, as if bitten by an asp a cold sweat beaded his brow

the baron peered at him through the” lazy whorls of smoke from his thin Russian cigarette

Are you saying, I asked, that a person has a breakdown not because he is divorced but on account of the divorce, which may or may not happen, of the third party, that is, of the one who created the crisis for the couple of which he is a member?

Wagner looked at me with the puzzlement of a layman who encounters a mentally disturbed person for the first time. He asked me what I meant. To tell the truth, whatever I meant, I had expressed it badly. I tried to be more concrete. I took a spoon from the table and put it next to a fork. Here, this is me, Spoon, married to her, Fork. And here is another couple: she’s Fruit Knife, married to Steak Knife, alias Mackie Messer. Now I, Spoon, believe I’m suffering because I have to leave Fork and I don’t want to; I love Fruit Knife, but it’s all right with me if she stays with Steak Knife. And now you’re telling me, Dr. Wagner, that the real reason I’m suffering is that Fruit Knife won’t leave Steak Knife. Is that it?

Wagner told someone else at the table that he had said nothing of the sort.

What do you mean, you didn’t say it? You said that not once had you come across anyone made neurotic by his own divorce, it was always the divorce of the Other.

That may be, I don’t remember, Wagner said then, bored.

If you did say it, did you mean what I understood you to mean?

Wagner was silent for a few moments.

While the others waited, not even swallowing, Wagner signaled for his wineglass to be filled. He looked carefully at the liquid against the light and finally spoke.

What you understood was what you wanted to understand.

Then he looked away, said it was hot, hummed an aria, moved a breadstick as if he were conducting an orchestra, yawned, concentrated on a cake with whipped cream, and finally, after another silence, asked to be taken back to his hotel.

The others looked at me as if I had ruined a symposium from which Words of Wisdom might have come.

The truth is that I had heard Truth speak.

I telephoned. You were at home, and with the Other. I spent a sleepless night. It was all clear: I couldn’t bear your being with him. Sandra had nothing to do with it.

Six dramatic months followed, in which I clung to you, breathed down your neck, trying to undermine your couplehood, telling you I wanted you for myself, convincing you that you hated the Other. You began quarreling with him, and he grew jealous, demanding; he never went out in the evening, and when he was traveling he called twice a day, in the middle of the night, and one night he slapped you. You asked me for money so you could run away. I collected the little I had in the bank. You abandoned the conjugal bed, went off to the mountains with friends, no forwarding address. The Other telephoned me in despair, asked if I knew where you were; I didn’t know, but it looked as if I were lying, because you told him you were leaving him for me.

When you returned, you announced, radiant, that you had written him a letter of farewell. I wondered then what would happen with me and Sandra, but you didn’t give me time to worry, you told me you had met this man with a scar on his cheek and a very gypsy apartment. You were going to live with him.

Don’t you love me anymore?

Of course I do, you’re the only man in my life, but after everything that’s happened I need to have this experience, don’t be childish, try to understand. After all, I left my husband for you. Let people follow their tempo.

Their tempo? You’re telling me you’re going off with another man.

You’re an intellectual and a leftist. Don’t act like a mafioso. I’ll see you soon.

I owe everything to Dr. Wagner.


37

Whoever reflects on four things, it were better he had never been born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, and that which is after.

—Talmud, Hagigah 2.1

I showed up at Garamond the morning they were installing Abu-lafia, as Belbo and Diotallevi were lost in a diatribe about the names of God, and Gudrun suspiciously watched the men who were introducing this new, disturbing presence among the increasingly dusty piles of manuscripts.

“Sit down, Casaubon. Here are the plans for our history of metals.” We were left alone, and Belbo showed me indexes, chapter outlines, suggested layouts. I was to read the texts and find illustrations. I mentioned several Milan libraries that seemed promising sources.

“That won’t be enough,” Belbo said. “You’ll have to visit other places, too. The science museum in Munich, for instance, has a splendid photographic archive. In Paris there’s the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. I’d go back there myself, if I had time.”

“Interesting?”

“Disturbing. The triumph of the machine, housed in a Gothic church...” He hesitated, realigned some papers on his desk. Then, as if afraid of giving too much importance to the statement, he said, “And there’s the Pendulum.”

“What pendulum?”

“The Pendulum. Foucault’s Pendulum.”

And he described it to me, just as I saw it two days ago, Saturday. Maybe I saw it the way I saw it because Belbo had prepared me for the sight. But at the time I must not have shown much enthusiasm, because Belbo looked at me as if I were a man who, seeing the Sistine Chapel, asks: Is this all?

“It may be the atmosphere—that it’s in a church—but, believe me, you feel a very strong sensation. The idea that everything else is in motion and up above is the only fixed point in the universe...For those who have no faith, it’s a way of finding God again, and without challenging their unbelief, because it is a null pole. It can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. ‘‘

“My generation ate even more disappointment.”

“Don’t brag. Anyway, you’re wrong. For you it was just a phase. You sang the ‘Carmagnole,’ and then you all met in the Vended. For us it was different. First there was Fascism, and even if we were kids and saw it as an adventure story, our nation’s immortal destiny was a fixed point. The next fixed point was the Resistance, especially for people like me, who observed it from the outside and turned it into a rite of passage, the return of spring—like an equinox or a solstice; I always get them mixed up...For some, the next thing was God; for some, the working class; and for many, both. Intellectuals felt good contemplating the handsome worker, healthy, strong, ready to remake the world. And now, as you’ve seen for yourself, workers exist, but not the working class. Perhaps it was killed in Hungary. Then came your generation. For you personally, what happened was natural; it probably seemed like a holiday. But not for those my age. For us, it was a settling of scores, a time of remorse, repentance, regeneration. We had failed, and you were arriving with your enthusiasm, courage, self-criticism. Bringing hope to us, who by then were thirty-five or forty, hope and humiliation, but still hope. We had to be like you, even at the price of starting over from the beginning. We stopped wearing ties, we threw away our trench coats and bought secondhand duffle coats. Some quit their jobs rather than serve the Establishment...”

He lit a cigarette and pretended that he had only been pretending bitterness. An apology for letting himself go.

“And then you gave it all up. We, with our penitential pilgrimages to Buchenwald, refused to write advertising copy for Coca-Cola because we were antifascists. We were content to work for peanuts at Garamond, because at least books were for the people. But you, to avenge yourselves on the bourgeoisie you hadn’t managed to overthrow, sold them videocassettes and fanzines, brainwashed them with Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. You’ve made us buy, at a discount, your copies of the thought of Chairman Mao, and used the money to purchase fireworks for the celebration of the new creativity. Shamelessly. While we spent our lives being ashamed. You tricked us, you didn’t represent purity; it was only adolescent acne. You made us feel like worms because we lacked the courage to face the Bolivian militia, and you started shooting a few poor bastards in the back while they were walking down the street. Ten years ago, we had to lie to get you out of jail; you lied to send your friends to jail. That’s why I like this machine: it’s stupid, it doesn’t believe, it doesn’t make me believe, it just does what I tell it. Stupid me, stupid machine. An honest relationship.”

“But I—”

“You’re innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got your degree, you didn’t shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too, were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything.”

“Everything?”

“Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it’s the only fixed point in the cosmos, but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same. And there are other pendulums: there’s one in New York, in the UN building, there’s one in the science museum in San Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you put it, Foucault’s Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it.”

“God is everywhere?”

“In a sense, yes. That’s why the Pendulum disturbs me. It promises the infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. So it isn’t enough to worship the Pendulum; you still have to make a decision, you have to find the best point for it. And yet...”

“And yet?”

“And yet...You’re not taking me seriously by any chance, are you, Casaubon? No, I can rest easy; we’re not the type to take things seriously...Well, as I was saying, the feeling you have is that you’ve spent a lifetime hanging the Pendulum in many places, and it’s never worked, but there, in the Conservatoire, it works...Do you think there are special places in the universe? On the ceiling of this room, for example? No, nobody would believe that. You need atmosphere. I don’t know, maybe we’re always looking for the right place, maybe it’s within reach, but we don’t recognize it. Maybe, to recognize it, we have to believe in it. Well, let’s go see Signor Garamond.”

“To hang the Pendulum?”

“Ah, human folly! Now we have to be serious. If you’re going to be paid, the boss must see you, touch you, sniff you, and say you’ll do. Come and let the boss touch you; the boss’s touch heals scrofula.”


38

Prince of Babylon, Knight of the Black Cross, Knight of Death, Sublime Master of the Luminous Ring, Priest of the Sun, Grand Architect, Knight of the Black and White Eagle, Holy Royal Arch, Knight of the Phoenix, Knight of Iris, Priest of Eleusis, Knight of the Golden Fleece.

—High grades of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite

We walked along the corridor, climbed three steps, went through a frosted-glass door, and abruptly entered another universe. The rooms I had seen so far were dark, dusty, with peeling paint, but this looked like a VIP lounge at an airport. Soft music, a plush waiting room with designer furniture, pale-blue walls decorated with photographs showing gentlemen who looked like Members of Parliament presenting Winged Victories to gentlemen who looked like senators. On a coffee table, as in a dentist’s office, were slick magazines, in casual disarray, with titles like Literature and Wit, The Poetic Athanor, The Rose and the Thorn, The Italic Parnassus, Free Verse. I had never seen any of them before, and I later found out why: they were distributed only to Manutius clients.

At first I thought these were the offices of the Garamond directors, but I soon learned otherwise. This was another publishing firm entirely. The Garamond lobby had a little glass case, dusty and clouded, displaying the latest publications, but the books were unassuming, with uncut pages and sober gray covers imitating French university publications. The paper was the kind that turned yellow in a few years, giving the impression that the author, no matter how young, had been publishing for a long time. But here the glass case, lighted inside, displayed Manutius books, some of them opened to reveal bright pages. They had gleaming white covers sheathed in elegant transparent plastic, with handsome rice paper and clean print.

Whereas the Garamond catalog contained such scholarly series as Humanist Studies and Philosophia, the Manutius series were delicately, poetically named: The Flower Unplucked (poetry), Terra Incognita (fiction), The Hour of the Oleander (including Diary of a Young Girl’s Illness), Easter Island (assorted nonfiction, I believe), New Atlantis (the most recent release being Kdnigsberg Revisited: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Presented as Both a Transcendental System and a Science of the Phenomenal Noumenon). On every cover there was the firm’s logo: a pelican under a palm tree, with the D’Annunzian motto “I have what I have given.”

Belbo had been laconic: Signor Garamond owned two publishing houses. In the days that followed, I realized that the passageway between Garamond and Manutius was private and secret. The official entrance to Manutius Press was on Via Marchese Gualdi, the street in which the purulent world of Via Sincero Renato ceded to spotless facades, spacious sidewalks, lobbies with aluminum elevators. No one could have suspected that an apartment in an old Via Sincero Renato building might be joined, by a mere three steps, to a building on Via Marchese Gualdi. To obtain permission for this, Signor Garamond must have Had to perform feats of persuasion. I believe he had help from one of his authors, an official in the City Planning Bureau.

We were received promptly by Signora Grazia, bland and matronly, her designer scarf and suit the exact color of the walls. With a guarded smile she showed us into an office that recalled Mussolini’s.

The room was not so immense, but it suggested that hall in the Palazzo Venezia. Here, too, there was a globe near the door, and at the far end the mahogany desk of Signor Garamond, who seemed to be looking at us through reversed binoculars. He motioned us to approach, and I felt intimidated. Later, when De Gubernatis came in, Garamond got up and went to greet him, an act of cordiality that enhanced even more the publisher’s importance. The visitor first watches him cross the room, then crosses it himself, arm in arm with his host, and as if by magic the space is doubled.

Garamond waved us to seats opposite his desk. He was brusque but friendly: “Dr. Belbo speaks highly of you, Dr. Ca-saubon. We need good men. You realize, of course, we’re not putting you on the staff. Can’t afford it. But you’ll be well paid for your efforts. For your devotion, if I may say so, because I consider our work a mission.”

He mentioned a flat fee based on estimated hours of work; it seemed reasonable for those times. I accepted.

“Excellent, Casaubon.” Now that I was an employee, the title disappeared. “This history of metals,” he went on, “must be splendid—more, a thing of beauty. Popular, but scholarly, too. It must catch the reader’s imagination. An example. Here in the first draft there is mention of these spheres—what were they called? Yes, the Magdeburg hemispheres. Two hemispheres which, when put together and the air is pumped out, create a pneumatic vacuum inside. Teams of draft horses are hitched to them and they pull in opposite directions. The horses can’t separate the hemispheres. This is scientific information. But it’s special, it’s picturesque. You must single it out from all the other information, then find the right image—a fresco, an oil, whatever—and we’ll give it a full page, in color.”

“There’s an engraving I know of,” I said.

“You see? Bravo! A whole page. Full color.”

“Since it’s an engraving, it’ll have to be in black and white,” I said.

“Really? Fine, black and white it is. Accuracy above all. But against a gold background. It has to strike the reader, make him feel he’s there on the day the experiment was carried out. See what I mean? Science, realism, passion. With science you can grab the reader by the throat. What could be more dramatic than Madame Curie coming home one evening and seeing that phosphorescent glow in the dark? Oh, my goodness, whatever can that be? Hydrocarbon, golconda, phlogiston, whatever the hell they called it, and voila, Marie Curie invents X rays. Dramatize! But with absolute respect for the truth.”

“What connection do X rays have with metals?” I asked.

“Isn’t radium a metal?”

“Yes.”

“Well then. The entire body of knowledge can be viewed from the standpoint of metals. What did we decide to call the book, Belbo?”

“We were thinking of something sober, like Metals.”

“Yes, it has to be sober. But with that extra hook, that little detail that tells the whole story. Let’s see...Metals: A World History. Are there Chinese in it, too?”

“Yes.”

“World, then. Not an advertising gimmick: it’s the truth. Wait, I know: The Wonderful Adventure of Metals.”

It was at that moment Signora Grazia announced the arrival of Commendatore De Gubernatis. Signer Garamond hesitated, gave me a dubious look. Belbo made a sign, as if to say that I could be trusted. Garamond ordered the guest to be shown in and went to greet him. De Gubernatis wore a double-breasted suit, a rosette in his lapel, a fountain pen in his breast pocket, a folded newspaper in his side pocket, a leatherette briefcase under his arm.

“Ah, my dear Commendatore,” Garamond said, “come right in. Our dear friend De Ambrosiis told me all about you. A life spent in the service of the state. And a secret poetic vein, yes? Show me, show me the treasure you hold in your hands...But first let me introduce two of my senior editors.”

He seated the visitor in front of the desk, cluttered with manuscripts, while his hands, trembling with anticipation, caressed the cover of the work held out to him. “Not a word. I know everything. You come from Vitipeno, that great and noble city. You were in the customs service. And, secretly, night after night, you filled these pages, fired by the demon of poetry. Poetry...it consumed Sappho’s young years, it nourished Goethe’s old age. Drug, the Greeks called it, both poison and medicine. Naturally, we’ll have to read this creation of yours. I always insist on at least three readers’ reports, one in-house and two from consultants (who must remain anonymous; you’ll forgive me, but they are quite prominent people). Manutius doesn’t publish a book unless we’re sure of its quality, and quality, as you know better than I, is an impalpable, it can be detected only with a sixth sense. A book may have imperfections, flaws—even Svevo sometimes wrote badly, as you know better than I—but, by God, you still feel the idea, rhythm, power. I know—don’t say it. The moment I glanced at the incipit of your first page, I felt something, but I don’t want to judge on my own, though time and again—ah, yes, often—when the readers’ reports were lukewarm, I overruled them, because you can’t judge an author without having grasped, so to speak, his rhythm, and here, for example, I open this work of yours at random and my eyes fall on a verse, ‘As in autumn, the wan eyelid’...Well, I don’t know how it continues, but I sense an inspiration, I see an image. There are times you start a work like this with a surge of ecstasy, carried away. Cela dit, my dear friend, ah, if only we could always do what we like! But publishing, too, is a business, perhaps the noblest of all, but still a business. Do you have any idea what printers charge these days? And the cost of paper? Just look at this morning’s news: the rise of the prime rate on Wall Street. Doesn’t affect us, you say? Ah, but it does. Do you know they tax even our inventory? And they tax returns, the books I don’t sell. Yes, I pay even for failure—such is the calvary of genius unrecognized by the philistines. This onionskin—most refined of you, if I may say so, to type your text on such thin paper. It smacks of the poet. The typical clod would have used parchment to dazzle the eye and confuse the spirit, but here is poetry written with the heart—this onionskin might as well be paper money.”

The phone rang. I later learned that Garamond had pressed a button under the desk, and Signora Grazia had sent through a fake call.

“My dear Maestro! What? Splendid! Great news! Ring out, wild bells! A new book from your pen is always an event. Why, of course! Manutius is proud, moved—more, thrilled—to number you among its authors. You saw what the papers wrote about your latest epic poem? Noble material. Unfortunately, you’re ahead of your time. We had trouble selling the three thousand copies...”

Commendatore De Gubernatis blanched: three thousand copies was an achievement beyond his dreams.

“Sales didn’t cover the production costs. Take a look through the glass doors and you’ll see how many people I have in the editorial department. For a book to break even nowadays I have to sell at least ten thousand copies, and luckily I sell more than that in many cases, but those are writers with—how shall I put it?—a different vocation. Balzac was great, and his books sold like hotcakes; Proust was equally great, but he published at his own expense. You’ll end up in school anthologies, but not on the stands in train stations. The same thing happened to Joyce, who, like Proust, published at his own expense. I can allow myself the privilege of bringing out a book like yours once every two or three years. Give me three years’ time...” A long pause followed. An expression of pained embarrassment came over Garamond’s face.

“What? At your own expense? No, no, it’s not the amount. We can hold the costs down...But as a rule Manutius doesn’t...Of course, you’re right, even Joyce and Proust...Of course, I understand...”

Another pained pause. “Very well, we’ll talk about it. I’ve been honest with you, and you’re impatient...Let’s try what the Americans call a joint venture. They’re always way ahead of us, the Yanks. Drop in tomorrow, and we’ll do some figuring...My respects and my admiration.”

Garamond seemed to wake up from a dream. He rubbed his eyes, then suddenly remembered the presence of his visitor. “Forgive me. That was a writer, a true writer, perhaps one of the Greats. And yet, for that very reason...Sometimes this job is humbling. If it weren’t for the vocation...But where were we? Ah, yes, I think we’ve said everything there is to be said now. I’ll write you, hmm, in about a month. Please leave your work here; it’s in good hands.”

Commendatore De Gubernatis went out, speechless. He had set foot in the forge of glory.


39

Doctor of the Planispheres, Hermetic Philosopher, Grand Elect of the Eons, Knight Prince of the Rose of Heredom, Grand Master of the Temple of Wisdom, Knight Noachite, .Wise Siviast, Knight Supreme Commander of the Stars, Sublime Sage of the Zodiac, Shepherd King of the Hutz, Interpreter of Hieroglyphs, Sage of the Pyramids, Sublime Titan of the Caucasus, Orphic Doctor, Sublime Skald, Prince Brahmin, Guardian of the Three Fires.

—Grades of the Antient and Primitive Memphis-Misraim Rite Manutius was a publishing house for SFAs.

An SEA, in Manutiuan jargon, was...But why do I use the past tense? SFAs still exist, after all. Back in Milan, all continues as if nothing has happened, and yet I cast everything into a tremendously remote past. What occurred two nights ago in the nave of Saint-Martin-des-Champs has made a rent in time, reversing the order of the centuries. Or perhaps it is simply that I have aged decades overnight, or that the fear that They will find me makes me speak as if I were now chronicling a collapsing empire as I lie in the balneum with my veins severed, waiting to drown in my own blood...

An SFA is a self-financing author, and Manutius is a vanity press. Earnings high, overhead minuscule. A staff of four: Garamond, Signora Grazia, the bookkeeper in the cubbyhole in the back, and Luciano, the disabled shipping clerk in the vast storeroom in the half-basement.

“I’ve never figured out how Luciano manages to pack books with one arm,” Belbo once said to me. “I believe he uses his teeth. However, he doesn’t have all that much packing to do. Normal publishers ship to booksellers, but Luciano ships only to authors. Manutius isn’t interested in readers...The main thing, Signer Garamond says, is to make sure the authors remain loyal to us. We can get along fine without readers.”

Belbo admired Signor Garamond. He felt the man possessed a strength that he himself lacked.

The Manutius system is very simple. A few ads are placed in local papers, professional magazines, provincial literary reviews, especially those that tend to survive for only a few issues. Medium-size announcements, with a photograph of the author and a few incisive lines: “A lofty voice in our nation’s poetry,” or “The latest narrative achievement by the author of Floriana and Her Sisters.”

“At this point the net is cast,” Belbo explained, “and the SFAs fall into it in clumps, if you can fall into a net in clumps.”

“And then?”

“Well, take De Gubernatis for example. A month from now, as our retired customs official writhes with anxiety, a call from Signer Garamond will invite him to dinner with a few writers. They’ll meet in the latest Arab restaurant: very exclusive, no sign outside, you ring the bell and give your name through a peephole. Deluxe interior, soft lights, exotic music. Garamond will shake the maitre d’s hand, call the waiters by name, and send back the first bottle of wine because the vintage isn’t right. Or else he’ll say, ‘Excuse me, old friend, but this isn’t couscous the way we eat it in Marrakesh.’ De Gubernatis will be introduced to Inspector X; all the airport services are under his command, but his real claim to fame is that he is the inventor and apostle of Cosmoranto, the language of universal peace now being considered by UNESCO. There’s also Professor Y, a remarkable storyteller, winner of the Petruzzellis della Gattina Prize in 1980, but also a leading figure in medical science. How many years did you teach, Professor? Ah, those were other times; education then was taken seriously. And finally, our charming poetess, the exquisite Odolinda Mezzofanti Sassabetti, author of Chaste Throbs, which you’ve surely read.”

Belbo told me that he had long wondered why all female SFAs used a double surname: Lauretta Solimeni Calcanti, Dora Ar-denzi Fiamma, Carolina Pastorelli Cefalu. Why was it that important women writers had just one surname (except for Ivy Compton-Burnett) and some (like Colette) had none at all, while an SFA felt the need to call herself Odolinda Mezzofanti Sassabetti? Perhaps because real writers wrote out of love of the work and didn’t care whether they were known—they could even use a pseudonym, like Nerval—whereas an SFA wanted to be recognized by the family next door, by the people in her neighborhood, and in the neighborhood where she used to live. For a man, one surname is enough, but not for a woman, because there are some who knew her before her marriage and some who only met her afterward. Hence the need for two.

“Anyway,” Belbo went on, “it is an evening rich in intellectual experiences. De Gubernatis will feel as if he’s drained an LSD cocktail. He’ll listen to the gossip of his fellow-guests, hear a tasty anecdote about a great poet who is notoriously impotent, and not worth that much as a poet either. He’ll look, eyes glistening with emotion, at the latest edition of the Encyclopedia of Illustrious Italians, which Garamond will just happen to have on hand, to show Inspector X the appropriate page (You see, my dear friend, you, too, have entered the pantheon; ah, it is mere justice).”

Belbo showed me the encyclopedia. “Just an hour ago I was preaching at you, but nobody is innocent. The encyclopedia is compiled exclusively by Diotallevi and me. But I swear we don’t do it just for the money. It’s one of the most amusing jobs there is. Every year we have to prepare a new, updated edition. It works more or less this way: you include an entry on a famous writer and an entry on an SFA, making sure they’re in alphabetical proximity. And you don’t waste space on the famous name. See, for example, under L.”

LAMPEDUSA, Giuseppe Tomasi di (1896-1957). Sicilian writer. Long ignored, achieved fame posthumously for his novel The Leopard.

LAMPUSTRI, Adeodato (1919- ). Writer, educator, veteran (Bronze Star, East Africa), thinker, novelist, and poet. Looms large on the contemporary Italian literary scene. Lampustri’s talent was revealed in 1959 with the publication of The Car-massi Brothers, volume one of a trailblazing trilogy. Narrated with unrelenting realism and noble poetic inspiration, the novel tells of a fisherman’s family in Lucania. The Carmassi Brothers won the Petruzzellis della Gattina Prize in 1960 and was followed a few years later by The Dismissed and Panther Without Eyelashes, both of which, perhaps even more than the author’s initial work, exhibit the epic sweep, the dazzling plastic invention, the lyrical flow that distinguish this incomparable artist. A diligent ministry official, Lampustri is esteemed by those who know him as a man of upright character, an exemplary father and husband, and a stunning public speaker.

“De Gubernatis,” Belbo explained, “will want to appear in the encyclopedia. He’s always said that the fame of the famous was a fraud, a conspiracy on the part of obliging critics. But, chiefly, he will want to join a family of writers who are also directors of state agencies, bank managers, aristocrats, magistrates. Appearing in the encyclopedia, he will expand his circle of acquaintances. If he needs to ask a favor, he’ll know where to turn. Signor Garamond has the power to lift De Gubernatis out of the provinces and hurl him to the summit. Toward the end of the dinner, Garamond will whisper to him to drop by the office the next morning.”

“And the next morning, he comes.”

“You can bet on it. He’ll spend a sleepless night, dreaming of the greatness of Adeodato Lampustri.”

“And then?”

“Garamond will say to him: ‘Yesterday, I didn’t dare speak— it would have humiliated the others—but your work, it’s sublime. Not only were the readers’ reports enthusiastic—no, more, favorable—but I personally spent an entire night poring over these pages of yours. A book worthy of a literary prize. Great, really great.’ Then Garamond will go back to his desk, slap the manuscript—now well worn by the loving attention of at least four readers (rumpling the manuscripts is Signora Grazia’s job)—and stare at the SFA with a puzzled expression. ‘What shall we do with it?’ And ‘What shall we do with it?’ De Gubernatis will ask. Garamond will say that the work’s value is beyond the slightest dispute. But clearly it is ahead of its time, and as for sales, it won’t do more than two thousand copies, twenty-five hundred tops. Well, two thousand more than covers all the people De Gubernatis knows, and an SFA doesn’t think in planetary terms—or, rather, his planet consists of familiar faces: schoolmates, bank managers, fellow teachers in the high school, retired colonels. The SFA wants to bring his poetry to all these people, even to those who couldn’t care less, like the butcher or the prefect of police. Faced by the risk that Garamond might back oif (and remember: everybody at home, in town and office, knows that De Gubernatis has submitted his manuscript to a big Milan publisher), he will make some quick calculations. He could empty his savings account, take out a loan against his pension, mortgage the house, cash in those few government bonds. Paris is well worth a mass. Shyly, he will oifer to underwrite some of the costs. Garamond will look upset. ‘That is not the usual practice of Manutius, but, well, all right, it’s a deal, you’ve talked me into it, even Proust and Joyce had to bow to harsh necessity. The costs are so high, for the present we’ll plan on two thousand copies, though the contract will provide for up to ten thousand. You’ll receive two hundred author’s copies, to send to anyone you like, another two hundred will be review copies, because we want to promote the book as if this were the new Stephen King. That leaves sixteen hundred for commercial distribution. On these, obviously, no royalties for you, but if the book catches on and we go into a second printing, you’ll get twelve percent.’ “

Later I saw the standard contract that De Gubernatis, now on his poetic trip, would sign without even reading, while Signor Garamond’s bookkeeper loudly protested that the costs had been grossly underestimated. Ten pages of clauses in eight-point type: foreign rights, subsidiary rights, dramatizations, radio and television serialization, film rights, Braille editions, abridgments for Reader’s Digest, guarantees against libel suits, all disputes to be settled by Milan courts. The SFA, lost in dreams of glory, would not notice the clause that specified a maximum print run of ten thousand but mentioned no minimum or the clause that said the amount to be paid by the author was independent of the print run (which was agreed upon only verbally), or the clause that said—most important of all—that the publisher had the right to pulp all unsold copies after one year unless the author wished to buy them at half the list price. Sign on the dotted line.

The launching would be lavish. Ten-page press releases, with biography and critical essays. No modesty; the newspaper editors would toss them out anyway. The actual printing: one thousand copies, of which only three hundred and fifty would be bound. Two hundred to the author, about fifty to minor or associated bookshops, fifty to provincial magazines, about thirty to the newspapers, just in case they needed to fill a couple of lines in the Books Received column. These copies would later be given as donations to hospitals or prisons—and you can see why the former don’t heal and the latter don’t redeem.

In summer the Petruzzellis della Gattina Prize, a Garamond creation, would be awarded. Total cost: two days’ meals and lodging for the jury, plus a Nike of Samothrace, in vermeil, for the winner. Congratulatory telegrams from other Manutius authors.

Finally, the moment of truth. A year and a half later, Garamond writes: Dear friend, as I feared, you are fifty years ahead of your time. Rave reviews in the dozens, awards, critical acclaim, ca va sans dire. But few copies sold. The public is not ready. We are forced to make space in the warehouse, as stipulated in the contract (copy enclosed). Unless you exercise your right to buy the unsold copies at half the list price, we must pulp them.

De Gubernatis goes mad with grief. His relatives console him: People just don’t understand you, of course if you belonged to the right clique, if you sent the requisite bribe, by now they’d have reviewed you in the Corriere della Sera, it’s all Mafia, you have to hold out. Only five author’s copies are left, and there are still so many important people to whom the work should go. You can’t allow your writing to be pulped, recycled into toilet paper. Let’s see how much we can scrape together, maybe we can buy back five hundred copies, and for the rest, sic transit gloria mundi.

Manutius still has six hundred and fifty copies in unbound sheets. Signor Garamond has five hundred of them bound and shipped, COD. The final balance: the author paid the production costs for two thousand copies, Manutius printed one thousand and bound eight hundred and fifty, of which five hundred were paid for a second time. About fifty authors a year, and Manutius always ends up well in the black. And without remorse: Manutius is dispensing happiness.


40

Cowards die many times before their deaths.

—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, II, 2

I was always aware of a conflict between Belbo’s devotion in working with his respectable Garamond authors, his efforts to get from them books he could be proud of, and the piratical zeal with which he contributed to the swindling of the hapless Manutius authors, even referring to Via Marchese Gualdi those he considered unsuitable for Garamond, as I had seen him attempt to do with Colonel Ardenti.

Working with Belbo, I often wondered why he accepted this arrangement. I don’t think it was the money. He knew his trade well enough to find a better-paying position.

For a long time I thought he did it because it enabled him to pursue his study of human folly from an ideal observation point. As he never tired of pointing out, he was fascinated by what he called stupidity—the impregnable paralogism, the insidious delirium hidden behind the impeccable argument. But that, too, was a mask. It was Diotallevi who did it for fun, or perhaps hoping that a Manutius book might someday offer an unprecedented combination of the Torah. And I, too, participated, for the amusement, the irony, out of curiosity, especially after Garamond launched Project Hermes.

For Belbo it was a different story. This became clear to me after I went into his files.

FILENAME: Vendetta

She simply arrives. Even if there are people in the office, she grabs me by my lapels, thrusts her face forward, and kisses me. How does that song go? “Anna stands on tiptoe to kiss me.” She kisses me as if she were playing pinball.

She knows it embarrasses me. Puts me on the spot.

She never lies.

I love you, she says.

See you Sunday?

No. I’m spending the weekend with a friend...

A girlfriend, naturally.

No, a man friend. You know him. He’s the one who was at the bar with me last week. I promised. You wouldn’t want me to break my promise?

Don’t break your promise, but don’t come here to make me...Please, I have an author coming in.

A genius to launch?

A poor bastard to destroy.

A poor bastard to destroy.

I went to pick you up at Pilade’s. You weren’t there. I waited a long time, then I went by myself; otherwise the gallery would have been closed. Somebody there told me you had all gone on to the restaurant. I pretended to look at the pictures, though they tell me art’s been dead since Holderlin. It took me twenty minutes to find the restaurant, because dealers always pick ones that are going to become famous next month.

You were there, among the usual faces, and beside you was the man with the scar. You weren’t the least embarrassed. You looked at me with complicity and—how do you manage both at the same time?— defiance, as if to say: So what? The intruder with the scar looked me up and down, as if I, not he, were the intruder. The others, in on the story, waited. I should have found an excuse to pick a fight. I’d have come out of it well, even if he hit me. Everybody knew you were there with him to provoke me. My role was assigned. One way or the other, I was to put on a show.

Since there had to be a show, I chose drawing-room comedy. I joined the conversation, amiable, hoping someone would admire my control.

The only one who admired me was me.

You’re a coward when you feel you’re a coward.

The masked avenger. As Clark Kent I take care of misunderstood young geniuses; as Superman I punish justly misunderstood old geniuses. I collaborate in the exploitation of those who, lacking my courage, have been unable to confine themselves to the role of spectator.

Is this possible? To spend a life punishing people who will never know they have been punished? So you wanted to be a Homer, eh? Take that, wretch, and that!

I hate anyone who tries to see me as an illusion of passion.


41

When it is recalled that Daath is situated at the point where the abyss bisects the Middle Pillar, and that up the Middle Pillar lies the Path of the Arrow, the way by which consciousness goes when the psychic rises on the planes, and that here also is Kundalini, we see that in Daath is the secret of both generation and regeneration, the key to the manifestation of all things through the differentiation into pairs of Opposites and their union in a Third.

—Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah, London, Fraternity ofthe Inner Light, 1957, 7.19

In any case I wasn’t supposed to concern myself with Manutius; my job was the wonderful adventure of metals. I began by exploring the Milan libraries. I started with textbooks, made a bibliography on file cards, and from there I went back to the original sources, old or new, looking for decent pictures. There’s nothing worse than illustrating a chapter on space travel with a photograph of the latest American satellite. Signer Garamond had taught me that it needs, at the very least, an angel by Dore.

I reaped a harvest of curjous reproductions, but they weren’t enough. To choose the right picture for an illustrated book, you have to reject at least ten others.

I got permission to go to Paris for four days. Not much time to visit all the archives. Lia came with me. We arrived Thursday and had return reservations for the Monday-evening train, and I scheduled the Conservatoire for Monday, a mistake, because I found out the Conservatoire was closed Mondays. Too late. I left Paris crestfallen.

Belbo was vexed, but I had collected plenty of interesting things, and we went to show them to Signer Garamond. He leafed through the reproductions, many of them in color, then looked at the bill and let out a whistle. “My dear friend,” he said, “our work is a mission, true, we toil in the fields of culture, ca va sans dire, but we’re not the Red Cross—more, we’re not UNICEF. Was it necessary to buy all this material? I mean, I see here a mustachioed gentleman in his underwear who looks like d’Artagnan, surrounded by abracadabras and capricorns. Who is he? Mandrake?”

“Primitive medicine. Influence of the zodiac on the different parts of the body, with the corresponding curative herbs. And minerals, including metals. The doctrine of the cosmic signatures. Those were times when the boundary between magic and science was rather ill-defined.”

“Interesting. But what does this title page mean? Philosophia Moysaica. What’s Moses got to do with it? Isn’t that being a little too primitive?”

“It’s the dispute over unguentum armarium, otherwise known as weapon salve. Illustrious physicians spent fifty years arguing whether this salve could heal wounds by being smeared on the weapon that had dealt the blow.’’

“Incredible. And that’s science?”

“Not in today’s sense of the word. But they considered this seriously, because they had just discovered the marvels of the magnet, the magic possibility of action at a distance...These men were wrong, but later, Volta and Marconi were not. What are electricity and radio if not action at a distance?”

“Well, well. Bravo, Casaubon. Science and magic going arm in arm, eh? Great idea. Let’s pursue this. Throw out some of those revolting generators and put in a few more Mandrakes. Perhaps a summoning of the Devil, say, on a gold background.”

“I wouldn’t want to go too far. This is the wonderful adventure of metals. Oddities work only when they’re to the point.”

“The wonderful adventure of metals must be, most of all, the story of science’s mistakes. Stick in the catchy oddity, and in the caption say it’s wrong. In the meantime, the reader’s hooked, because he sees that even the greats had crazy ideas, just like him.”

I told them about a strange thing I had seen in Paris, a bookshop near quai Saint-Michel. Its symmetrical windows advertised its own schizophrenia: on one side, books on computers and the electronics of the future; on the other, occult sciences. And it was the same inside: Apple and cabala.

“Unbelievable,” Belbo said.

“Obvious,” Diotallevi said. “Or, at least, you’re the last person who should be surprised, Jacopo. The world of machines seeking to rediscover the secret of creation: letters and numbers.”

Garamond said nothing. He had clasped his hands as if in prayer, and his eyes were turned heavenward. Then he smacked his hands together. “What you’ve said today confirms an idea of mine. For a while now IVe...But all in good time; it needs more thought. Meanwhile, carry on. You’ve done well, Casaubon. We must look at your contract again; you’re a valuable colleague. And, yes, put in plenty of cabala and computers. Computers are made with silicon, aren’t they?”

“But silicon isn’t a metal. It’s a nonmetallic element.”

“Metallic, nonmetallic, why split hairs? What is this, Rosa rosarum? Computers and cabala.”

“Cabala isn’t a metal either,” I said.

He accompanied us to the door. At the threshold he said: “Casaubon, publishing is an art, not a science. Let’s not think like revolutionaries, eh? Those days are past. Put in the cabala. Oh, yes, about your expenses: I’ve taken the liberty of disallowing the couchette. Not to be stingy, believe me. It’s just that research requires—how shall I put it?—a Spartan spirit. Otherwise you lose your faith.”

He summoned us again a few days later, telling Belbo there was a visitor in his office he wanted us to meet.

We went. Garamond was entertaining a fat gentleman with a face like a tapir’s, no chin, a little blond mustache beneath a large, animal nose. I thought I recognized him; then I knew who it was: Professor Bramanti, the man I had gone to hear in Rio, the referendary or whatever of that Rosicrucian order.

“Professor Bramanti,” Garamond said, “believes this is the right moment for a smart publisher, alert to the cultural climate of the time, to inaugurate a line of books on the occult sciences.”

“For...Manutius,” Belbo suggested.

“Why, naturally.” Signor Garamond smiled shrewdly. “Professor Bramanti—who, by the way, was recommended to me by my dear friend Dr. De Amicis, the author of that splendid volume Chronicles of the Zodiac, which we brought out this year-has been lamenting the fact that the few works published on his subject—almost invariably by frivolous and unreliable houses-fail to do justice to the wealth, the profundity of this field of studies...”

“Given the failure of the Utopias of the modern world,” Bramanti said, “the time is ripe for a reassessment of the culture of the forgotten past.”

“What you say is the sacred truth, Professor. But you must forgive our—I don’t like to say ignorance—our unfamiliarity with the subject. When you speak of occult sciences, what exactly do you have in mind? Spiritualism, astrology, black magic?”

Bramanti made a gesture of dismay. “Please! That’s just the sort of nonsense that’s foisted on the ingenuous. I’m talking about science, occult though it be. Of course, that may include astrology when appropriate, but not the kind that tells a typist that next Sunday she’ll meet the man of her dreams. No. What I mean, to give an example, would be a serious study of the de-cans.”

“Yes, I see. Scientific. It’s in our line, to be sure; but could you be a little more specific?”

Bramanti settled into his chair and looked around the room, as if to seek astral inspiration. “I’d be happy to give you some examples, of course. I would say that the ideal reader of a collection of this sort would be a Rosicrucian adept, and therefore an expert in magiam, in necromantiam, in astrologiam, in geo-mantiam, in pyromantiam, in hydromantiam, in chaomantiam, in medicinam adeptam, to quote the book of Azoth, which, as the Raptus philosophorum explains, was given to Staurophorus by a mysterious maiden. But the knowledge of the adept embraces other fields, such as physiognosis, which deals with occult physics, the static, the dynamic, and the kinematic, or astrology and esoteric biology, the study of the spirits of nature, hermetic zoology. I could add cosmognosis, which studies the heavens from the astronomical, cosmological, physiological, and ontological points of view, and anthropognosis, which studies human anatomy, and the sciences of divination, psychurgy, social astrology, hermetic history. Then there is qualitative mathematics, arithmology...But the fundamentals are the cosmography of the invisible, magnetism, auras, fluids, psy-chometry, and clairvoyance, and in general the study of the five hyperphysical senses—not to mention horoscopic astrology (which, of course, becomes a mere mockery of learning when not conducted with the proper precautions), as well as physiognomies, mind reading, and the predictive arts (tarots, dream books), ranging to the highest levels, such as prophecy and ecstasy. Sufficient information would be required on alchemy, spa-gyrics, telepathy, exorcism, ceremonial and evocatory magic, basic theurgy. As for genuine occultism, I would advise exploration of the fields of early cabala, Brahmanism, gymnosophy, Memphis hieroglyphics—”

“Templar phenomenology,” Belbo slipped in.

Bramanti glowed. “Absolutely. But I almost forgot: first, some idea of necromancy and sorcery among the other races, ono-mancy, prophetic furies, voluntary thaumaturgy, hypnotic suggestion, yoga, somnambulism, mercurial chemistry...For the mystical tendency, Wronski advises bearing in the mind the techniques of the possessed nuns of Loudon, the convulsives of Saint-Mldard, the mystical beverages, the wine of Egypt, the elixir of life, and arsenic water. For the principle of evil—but I realize mat here we come to the most delicate part of a possible series— I would say we need to acquaint the reader with the mysteries of Beelzebub as destruction proper, with Satan as dethroned prince, and with Eurynomius, Moloch, incubi and succubi. For the positive principle, the celestial mysteries of Saint Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and the agathodemons. Then of course the mysteries of Isis, Mithra, Morpheus, Samothrace, and Eleusis, and the natural mysteries of the male sex, phallus, Wood of Life, Key of Science, Baphomet, mallet, then the natural mysteries of the female sex, Ceres, Cteis, Patera, Cybele, Astarte.”

Signor Garamond leaned forward with an insinuating smile. “I wouldn’t overlook the Gnostics...”

“Certainly not, although on that particular subject a great deal of rubbish is in circulation. In any case, every sound form of occultism is a gnosis.”

“Just what I was going to say,” said Garamond.

“And all this would be enough?” Belbo asked innocently.

Bramanti puffed out his cheeks, abruptly transforming himself from tapir to hamster. “Enough? To begin with, yes, but not for beginners, if you’ll forgive the little joke. But with about fifty volumes you could enthrall an audience of thousands, readers who are only waiting for an authoritative word...With an investment of perhaps a few hundred million lire—I’ve come to you personally, Dr. Garamond, because I know of your willingness to undertake such generous ventures—and with a modest royalty for myself, as editor in chief of the series...”

Bramanti had now gone too far; Garamond was losing interest. The visitor was dismissed hastily, with expansive promises. The usual committee of advisers would carefully weigh the proposal.


42

But you must know that we are all in agreement, whatever we say.

—Turba Philosopkorum

After Bramanti had left, Belbo remarked that he should have pulled his cork. Signor Garamond was unfamiliar with this expression, so Belbo attempted a few polite paraphrases, but with little success.

“Let’s not quibble,” Garamond said. “Before that gentleman said five words, I knew he wasn’t for us. Not him. But the people he was talking about, authors and readers alike—that’s different. Professor Bramanti happened to confirm the very idea I Ve been pondering for some days now. Here, look at this,” he said, theatrically taking three books from his drawer.

“Here are three volumes that have come out in recent years, all of them successful. The first is in English; I haven’t read it, but the author is a famous critic. What has he written? The subtitle calls it a gnostic novel. Now look at this: a mystery, a best-seller. And what’s it about? A gnostic church near Turin. You gentlemen may know who these Gnostics are...” He paused, waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter. They’re something demoniacal; that’s all I need to know...Yes, maybe I’m being hasty, but I’m not trying to talk like you, I’m trying to talk like Bramanti—that is, I’m speaking as a publisher, not as a professor of comparative gnoseology or whatever it is. Now, what was it that I found clear, promising, inviting—no, more, intriguing— in Bramanti’s talk? His extraordinary capacity for tying everything together. He didn’t mention Gnostics, but he easily could have, what with geomancy, maalox, and mercurial Radames. And why do I insist on this point? Because here is another book, by a famous journalist, who tells about incredible things that go on in Turin—Turin, mind you, the city of the automobile. Sorceresses, black masses, consorting with the Devil—and for paying customers, not for poor crazed peasants in the south. Casaubon, Belbo tells me you were in Brazil and saw the savages down there performing satanic rites...Good, later you can tell me about it, but really, it’s all the same. Brazil is right here, gentlemen. The other day I went personally into that bookshop— what’s it called? Never mind; it doesn’t matter—you know, the place where six or seven years ago they sold anarchist books, books about revolutionaries, Tupamaros, terrorists—no, more, Marxists...Well, the place has been recycled. They stock those things Bramanti was talking about. It’s true today we live in an age of confusion. Go into a Catholic bookshop, where there used to be nothing but the catechism, and you find a reassessment of Luther, though at least they won’t sell a book that says religion is all a fraud. But in the shops I’m talking about they sell the authors who believe and the authors who say it’s all a fraud, provided the subject is—what do you call it?”

“Hermetic,” Diotallevi prompted.

“Yes, I believe that’s the right word. I saw at least a dozen books on Hermes. And that’s what I want to talk to you about: Project Hermes. A new branch...”

“The golden branch,” Belbo said.

“Exactly,” Garamond said, missing the reference. “It’s a gold mine, all right. I realized that these people will gobble up anything that’s hermetic, as you put it, anything that says the opposite of what they read in their books at school. I see this also as a cultural duty: I’m no philanthropist, but in these dark times to offer someone a faith, a glimpse into the beyond...Yet Garamond also has a scholarly mission...”

Belbo stiffened. “I thought you had Manutius in mind.”

“Both. Listen, I rooted around in that shop, then went to another place, a very respectable place, but even it had an occult sciences section. There are university-level studies on these subjects sitting on the shelves alongside books written by people like Bramanti. Think a minute: Bramanti has probably never met any of the university authors, but he’s read them, read them as if they were just like him. Whatever you say to such people, they think you’re talking about their problem, like the story of the cat, where the couple was arguing about a divorce but the cat thought they were disagreeing about the giblets for its lunch. You must have noticed it, Belbo; you dropped that remark about the Templars and he nodded immediately. Sure, the Templars, too, and cabala, and the lottery, and tea leaves. They’re omnivorous. Omnivorous. You saw Bramanti’s face: a rodent. A huge audience, divided into two categories—I can see them lining up now, and they’re legion. In primis: the ones who write about it, and Manutius will greet them with open arms. All we have to do to draw them is start a series that gets a little publicity. We could call it...let’s see...”

“The Tabula Smaragdina,” Diotallevi said.

“What? No. Too difficult. It doesn’t say anything to me. No. What we want is something that suggests something else...”

“Isis Unveiled,” I said.

“Isis Unveiled! That’s good. Bravo, Casaubon. It has Tutankhamen in it, the scarab of the pyramids. Isis Unveiled, with a slightly black-magical cover, but not overdone. Now let’s continue. The second group: those who buy it. I know what you’re thinking, my friends: Manutius isn’t interested in the buyer. But there’s no law to that effect. This time, we’ll sell Manutius books. Progress, gentlemen!

“But there are also the scholarly studies, and that’s where Garamond comes in. We’ll look through the historical studies and the other university series and find ourselves an expert, a consultant. Then we’ll publish three or four books a year. An academic series, with a title that’sxdirect but not too picturesque...”

“Hermetica,” Diotallevi said.

“Excellent. Classical, dignified. You ask me: Why spend money with Garamond when we can make money with Manutius? But the scholarly series will act as a lure, attracting intelligent people, who will make suggestions and point out new directions. And it will also attract the others, the Professor Bra-mantis, who will be rerouted to Manutius. It seems perfect to me: Project Hermes, a nice, clean, profitable operation that will strengthen the flow of ideas between the two firms...To work, gentlemen. There are libraries to visit, bibliographies to compile, catalogs to request. And find out what’s being done in other countries...Who knows how many people have already slipped through our fingers, people bearing treasures, and we dismissed them as worthless. Casaubon, don’t forget, in the history of metals, to put in a little alchemy. Gold’s a metal, I believe. Hold your comments for later: you know I’m open to criticism, suggestions, objections, as all cultured people are. This project is in effect as of now.

“Signora Grazia, that gentleman’s been waiting two hours. That’s no way to treat an author! Show him in!” he shouted, to make himself heard as far as the reception room.


43

People who meet on the street...secretly dedicate themselves to operations of Black Magic, they bind or seek to bind themselves to the Spirits of Darkness, to satisfy their ambitions, their hates, their loves, to do—in a word—Evil.

—J. K. Huysmans, Preface to J. Bois, Le satanisme et la magie, 1895, pp. VIII-IX

I had thought that Project Hermes was the rough sketch of an idea, not a plan of action. But I didn’t yet know Signer Garamond. In the days that followed, while I stayed late in libraries looking for illustrations about metals, at Manutius they were already at work.

Two months later in Belbo’s office, I found, hot off the press, an issue of The Italic Parnassus, with a long article, “The Rebirth of Occultism,” in which the well-known Hermeticist Dr. Moebius—Belbo’s new pseudonym, and source of his first bonus from Project Hermes—talked about the miraculous renaissance of the occult sciences in the modern world and announced that Manutius intended to move in this direction with its new series “Isis Unveiled.”

Meanwhile, Signer Garamond had written letters to various reviews of Hermeticism, astrology, tarot, UFOlogy, signing one name or another and requesting information about the new series announced by Manutius. Whereupon the editors of the reviews telephoned Manutius, requesting information, and Signor Garamond acted mysterious, saying he could not yet reveal the first ten titles, which were, however, in the works. In this way theworld of the occultists, stirred by constant drumming of the tomtoms, was now alerted to Project Hermes.

“We disguise ourselves as a flower,” Signer Garamond said, having summoned us to his office, “and the bees will come swarming.’’

That wasn’t all. Garamond wanted to show us the flier (the depliant, he called it): a simple affair, four pages, but on glossy paper. The first page reproduced what was to be the uniform cover of the books in the series: a kind of golden seal (the Pen-tacle of Solomon, Garamond explained) on a black ground; the page was framed by interwoven swastikas (but Asian swastikas, Garamond hastened to add, which went in the direction of the sun, not the Nazi kind, which went clockwise). At the top, where each volume’s title would go, were the words “There are more things in heaven and earth...” The flier extolled the glories of Manutius in the service of culture, then stated, with some catchy phrases, that the contemporary world sought truths deeper and more luminous than those science could provide: “From Egypt, from Chaldea, from Tibet, a forgotten knowledge—for the spiritual rebirth of the West.”

Belbo asked where the flier would go, and Garamond smiled like the evil genius of the rajah of Assam, as Belbo would have said. “From France I’ve ordered a directory of all the secret societies in the world today. It exists. Here it is. Editions Henry Veyrier, with addresses, postal codes, phone numbers. Take a look at it, Belbo, and eliminate those that don’t apply, because I see it also includes the Jesuits, Opus Dei, the Carbonari, and Rotary. Find all the ones with occult tendencies. I’ve already underlined some.”

He leafed through it. “Here you are: the Absolutists (who believe in metamorphosis), the Aetherius Society of California (telepathic relations with Mars), the Astara of Lausanne (oath of absolute secrecy), Atalanteans in Great Britain (search for lost happiness), Builders of the Adytum in California (alchemy, cabala, astrology), Cercle E. B. of Perpignan (dedicated to Hator, goddess of love and guardian of the Mountain of the Dead), Cercle Eliphas Levi of Maule (I don’t know who this Levi is; perhaps that French anthropologist or whatever he was), Knights of the Templar Alliance of Toulouse, Druidic College of Gaul, Couvent Spiritualiste de Jericho, the Cosmic Church of Truth in Florida, Traditionalist Seminar of Econe in Switzerland, the Mormons (I read about them in a detective story, too, but maybe they don’t exist anymore), the Church of Mithra in London and Brussels, the Church of Satan in Los Angeles, the United Lu-ciferan Church of France, the Apostolic Rosicrucian Church in Brussels, Children of Darkness and Green Order on the Ivory Coast (let’s forget that one; God knows what language they write in), Escuela Hermetista Occidental of Montevideo, the National Institute of Cabala in Manhattan, the Central Ohio Temple of Hermetic Science, Tetra-Gnosis of Chicago, Ancient Brethren of the Rosie-Cross of Saint Cyr-sur-Mer, Johannite Fraternity for the Templar Resurrection in Kassel, International Fraternity of Isis in Grenoble, Ancient Bavarian Illuminati of San Francisco, the Sanctuary of Gnosis of Sherman Oaks, the Grail Foundation of America, Sociedade do Graal do Brasil, Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, Lectorium Rosicrucianum in Holland, the Grail Movement of Strasbourg, Order of Anubis in New York, Temple of the Black Pentacle in Manchester, Odinist Fellowship in Florida, the Order of the Garter (even the Queen of England must be in that one), the Order of the Vril (neo-Nazi Masons, no address), Militia Templi in Montpellier, Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple in Monte Carlo, Rosy Cross of Harlem (you understand? Even the blacks now), Wicca (Luciferine association of Celtic obedience; they invoke the seventy-two geni of the cabala)...Need I go on?”

“Do all those really exist?” Belbo asked.

“Those and more. To work, gentlemen. Draw up a definitive list. Then we’ll do our mailing. Include all those foreigners; news travels fast among them. One thing remains for us to do: we have to go around to the right shops and talk not only with the booksellers but also with the customers. Mention that such-and-such a series exists.”

Diotallevi objected that we shouldn’t expose ourselves in this way; we should find people to do it for us. Garamond told him to find some, “provided they’re free.”

“That’s asking a lot,” Belbo said when we were back in his office.

But the gods of the underworld were protecting us. At that very moment Lorenza Pellegrini came in, more solar than ever, making Belbo brighten. She saw the fliers and was curious.

When she heard about the project of the firm next door, she said: “Terrific! I have this fantastic friend, an ex-Tupamaro from Uruguay, who works for a magazine called Picatrix. He’s always taking me to seances. There, I met a fantastic ectoplasm; he asks for me now every time he materializes!”

Belbo looked at Lorenza as if to ask her something, then changed his mind. Perhaps he was becoming accustomed to hearing about Lorenza’s alarming friends and had decided to worry only about the ones that threatened his relationship with her (did they have a relationship?). In that reference to Picatrix he saw the threat not of the colonel but of the fantastic ex-Tupamaro. But Lorenza was now talking about something else, telling us that she visited many of those little shops that sold the kind of books Isis Unveiled wanted to publish.

“That’s a real trip, you know,” she was saying. “They tell all about medicinal herbs or list instructions for making a ho-munculus, remember what Faust did with Helen of Troy. Oh, Jacopo, let’s! I’d love to have your homunculus, and then we could keep it like a dachshund. It’s easy, the book says: you just have to collect a little human seed in a test tube. That wouldn’t be hard for you—don’t blush, silly. Then you mix it with hip-pomene, which is some liquid that is excreted—no, not excreted—what’s the word?”

“Secreted,” Diotallevi suggested.

“Really? Anyway, pregnant mares make it. I realize that’s a bit harder to get. If I were a pregnant mare, I wouldn’t like

Ceople coming to collect my hippomene, especially strangers, ut I think you can buy it in packages, like joss sticks. Then you put it all in a pot and let it steep for forty days, and little by little you see a tiny form take shape, a fetus thing, which in another two months becomes a dear little homunculus, and he comes out and puts himself at your service. And they never die. Imagine: they’ll even put flowers on your grave after you’re dead!”

“What about the customers in those bookshops?” “Fantastic people, people who talk with angels, people who make gold, and professional sorcerers with faces exactly like professional sorcerers...”

“What’s the face of a professional sorcerer like?” “An aquiline nose, Russian eyebrows, piercing eyes. The hair is long, like painters in the old days, and there’s a beard, not thick, with bare patches between the chin and the cheeks, and the mustache droops forward and falls in clumps over their lips, but that’s only natural, because their lips are thin, poor things, and their teeth stick out. They shouldn’t smile, with those teeth, but they do, very sweetly, but the eyes—I said they were piercing, didn’t I?—look at you in an unsettling way.” “Facies hermetica,” Diotallevi remarked. “Really? Well, you understand, then. When somebody comes in and asks for a book, say, of prayers against evil spirits, they immediately suggest the right title to the bookseller, and, of course, it’s always a title he doesn’t have in stock. But then, if you make friends and ask if the book works, they smile again, indulgently, as if they were talking to children, and they say that with this sort of thing you have to be quite careful. They tell you about cases of devils that did horrible things to friends of theirs, but when you get frightened, they say that often it’s only hysteria. In other words, you never know whether they believe it or not. Sometimes the booksellers give me sticks of incense as presents; once one of them gave me a little ivory hand to ward off the evil eye.”

“Then, if the occasion arises,” Belbo said to her, “while you’re browsing in those places, ask if they know anything about the new Manutius series, and show them our flier.”

Lorenza went off with a dozen fliers. I guess she did a good job in the weeks that followed, but, even so, I wouldn’t have believed things could move so fast. Within a few months, Si-gnora Grazia simply couldn’t keep up with the Diabolicals, as we had come to call the SFAs with occult interests. And, by their very nature, they were legion.


44

Invoke the forces of the Tablet of Union by means of Supreme Ritual of Pentagram, with the Active and Passive Spirit, with Eheieh and Agla. Return to the Altar, and recite the following Enochian Spirit Invocation: Ol Sonuf Vaorsag Goho lad Bait, Lonsh Calz Vonpho, Sobra Z-ol Ror I Ta Nazps, od Graa Ta Malprg...Ds Hol-q Qaa Nothoa Zimz, Od Commah Ta Nopbloh Zien...

—Israel Regardie, the Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Ritual for Invisibility, St. Paul, Llewellyn Publications, 1986, p. 423

We were lucky; our first meeting was of the highest quality—at least as far as our initiation was concerned.

For the occasion the trio was complete—Belbo, Diotallevi, and I—and when our guest came in, we almost let out a cry of satisfaction. He had the facies hermetica described by Lorenza Pellegrini, and, what’s more, he was dressed in black.

He looked around circumspectly, then introduced himself: Professor Camestres. At the question “Professor of what?” he made a vague gesture as if urging us to exercise greater discretion. “Forgive me,” he said, “I don’t know whether you gentlemen are interested in the subject purely from a professional, commercial standpoint, or whether you are connected with any mystical group...”

We reassured him on that point.

“Perhaps I am being excessively cautious,” he said, “but I do not wish to have anything to do with a member of the OTO.” Seeing our puzzlement, he added: “Ordo Templi Orientis, the conventicle of the remaining self-styled followers of Aleister Crowley...I see that you are not connected...All the better: there will be no prejudices on your side.” He agreed to sit down. “Because, you understand, the work I would now like to show you takes a courageous stand against Crowley. All of us, myself included, are still faithful to the revelations of the Liber AL vel legis, which, as you probably know, was dictated to Crowley in Cairo in 1904 by a higher intelligence named Aiwaz. This text is followed by the faithful of the OTO even today. They draw on all four editions, the first of which preceded by nine months the outbreak of the war in the Balkans, the second by nine months the outbreak of the First World War, the third by nine months the Sino-Japanese War, and the fourth by nine months the massacres of the Spanish Civil War...”

I couldn’t help crossing my fingers. He noticed and said with a funereal smile, “I understand your apprehension. What I am bringing you is the fifth edition of that book. What, you ask, will happen in nine months’ time? Nothing, gentlemen, rest assured. Because what I am proposing is an enlarged Liber legis, inasmuch as I have had the good fortune to be visited not by a mere higher intelligence but by Al himself, the supreme principle—namely, Hoor-paar-Kraat, who is the double or the mystical twin of Ra-Hoor-Khuit. My sole concern, also to ward off evil influences, is that my work be published before the winter solstice.”

“I think that could be managed,” Belbo said.

“I’m most pleased. The book will cause a stir in the circles of initiates, because, as you will understand, my mystical source is more serious and authenticated than Crowley’s. I don’t know how Crowley could have activated the Rituals of the Beast without bearing in mind the Liturgy of the Sword. Only by unsheathing the sword can the nature of Mahapralaya be understood, the Third Eye of Kundalini, in other words. And also in his arith-mology, all based on the Number of the Beast, he failed to consider the New Numbers: 93, 118, 444, 868, and 1001.

“What do they mean?” asked Diotallevi, suddenly all ears.

“Ah,” said Professor Camestres, “as was already stated in the first Liber legis, every number is infinite and therefore there is no real difference!”

“I understand,” Belbo said. “But don’t you think all this will be a bit obscure for the common reader?”

Camestres almost bounced in his chair. “Why, it’s absolutely indispensable. Anyone who approached these secrets without the proper preparation would plunge headlong into the Abyss! Even by making them public in a veiled way, believe ine, I am running risks. I work within the environment of the worship of the Beast, but more radically th