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.