That was when I saw the Pendulum

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 than Crowley: you will see, in my pages on the congressus cum daemone, the requirements for the furnishing of the temple and the carnal union with the Scarlet Woman and the Beast she rides. Crowley stopped at so-called carnal congress against nature, while I carry the ritual beyond Evil as we conceive it. I touch the inconceivable, the absolute purity of goety, the extreme threshold of the Bas-Aumgn and the Sa-Ba-Ft...”

The only thing left for Belbo to do was to sound out Ca-mestres’s financial capability. He did this with long, roundabout sentences, and finally it emerged that, like Bramanti before him, the professor had no thought of self-financing. Then the dismissal phase began, with a mild request of could we keep the manuscript for a week, we would have a look at it, and then we would see. But at this point Camestres clasped the manuscript to his bosom, said he had never been treated with such distrust, and went out, hinting that he had means, out of the ordinary, to make us regret the insult we had given him.

But before long we had dozens of manuscripts from eligible SFAs. A modicum of selectivity was necessary, since these books were also meant to be sold. Because it was impossible for us to read them all, we glanced at the contents, the indexes, some of the text, then traded discoveries.

And from this springs the extraordinary question: Did the Egyptians know about electricity?

—Peter Kolosimo, Terra senza tempo, Milan, Sugar, 1964, p. Ill

“I have a text on vanished civilizations and mysterious lands,” Belbo said. “It seems that originally there existed, somewhere around Australia, a continent of Mu, and from there the great currents of migration spread out. One went to Avalon, one to the Caucasus and the source of the Indus; then there were the Celts, and the founders of Egyptian civilization, and finally the founders of Atlantis...”

“Old hat. If you’re looking for books about Mu, I’ll swamp your desk with them,” I said.

“But this writer may pay. Besides, he has a beautiful chapter on Greek migrations into Yucatan, and tells about the bas-relief of a warrior at Chiche’n Itza who is the spit and image of a Roman legionary. Two peas in a pod...”

“All the helmets in the world have either plumes or horse tails,” Diotallevi said. “That’s not evidence.”

“Not for you, but for him. He finds serpent worship in all civilizations and concludes that there is a common origin...”

“Who hasn’t worshiped the serpent?” Diotallevi said. “Except, of course, the Chosen People.”

“They worshiped calves.”

“Only in a moment of weakness. I’d reject this one, even if he pays. Celtism and Aryanism, Kaly-yuga, and decline of the West, and SS spirituality. I may be paranoid, but he sounds like a Nazi to me.”

“For Garamond, that isn’t necessarily a drawback.”

“No, but there’s a limit to everything. Here’s a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs.”

“Not the Seven Dwarfs, the Nibelungs.”

“The dwarfs it mentions are the Little People of Ireland. The bad guys are the fairies, but the Little People are good, just mischievous.”

“Put it aside. What about you, Casaubon? What have you found?”

“A text on Christopher Columbus: it analyzes his signature and finds in it a reference to the pyramids. Columbus’s real aim was to reconstruct the Temple of Jerusalem, since he was grand master of the Templars-in-exile. Being a Portuguese Jew and therefore an expert cabalist, he used talismanic spells to calm storms and overcome scurvy. I didn’t look at any texts on the cabala, because I assumed Diotallevi was checking them.”

“The Hebrew letters are all wrong, photocopied from dream books.”

“Remember, we’re choosing texts forlsis Unveiled. Let’s steer clear of philology. If the Diabolicals like to take their Hebrew letters from dream books, let them do it. The problem I have is all the submissions on the Masons. Signor Garamond told me to be very careful there; he doesn’t want to get mixed up in polemics among the various rites. But I wouldn’t neglect this manuscript about Masonic symbolism in the grotto of Lourdes. Or this one about a mysterious gentleman, probably the Comte de Saint-Germain, an intimate friend of Franklin and Lafayette, who appeared at the moment of the creation of the flag of the United States. It explains the meaning of the stars very well, but becomes confused on the subject of the stripes.”

“The Comte de Saint-Germain!” I said. “Well, well!”

“You know him?”‘

“If I said yes, you wouldn’t believe me. Forget it. Now here, gentlemen, is a four-hundred-page monstrosity decrying the errors of modern science. The atom, a Jewish lie. The error of Einstein and the mystical secret of energy. The illusion of Galileo and the immaterial nature of the moon and the sun.”

“In that line,” Diotallevi said, “what I liked most is this review of Fortian sciences.”

“What are they?”

“Named after Charles Hoy Fort, who gathered an immense collection of inexplicable bits of news. A rain of frogs in Birmingham, footprints of a fabulous animal in Devon, mysterious steps and sucker marks on the ridges of some mountains, irregularities in the precession of the equinoxes, inscriptions on meteorites, black snow, rains of blood, winged creatures at an altitude of eight thousand meters above Palermo, luminous wheels in the sea, fossils of giants, a shower of dead leaves in France, precipitations of living matter in Sumatra, and, naturally, all the signs marked on Machu Picchu and other peaks in South America that bear witness to the landing of powerful spacecraft in prehistoric times. We are not alone in the universe.”

“Not bad,” Belbo said. “But what particularly intrigues me are these five hundred pages on the pyramids. Did you know that the pyramid of Cheops sits right on the thirtieth parallel, which is the one that crosses the greatest stretch of land above sea level? That the geometric ratios found in the pyramid of Cheops are the same ones found at Pedra Pintada in Amazonia? That Egypt possessed two plumed serpents, one on the throne of Tutankhamen and the other on the pyramid of Saqqara, and the latter serpent points to Quetzalcoatl?”

“What does Quetzalcoatl have to do with Amazonia, if he’s part of the Mexican pantheon?” I asked.

“Well, maybe I missed a connection. But for that matter, how do you explain the fact that the statues of Easter Island are megaliths exactly like the Celtic ones? Or that a Polynesian god called Ya is clearly the Yod of the Jews, as is the ancient Hungarian Io-v’, the great and good god? Or that an ancient Mexican manuscript shows the earth as a square surrounded by sea, and in its center is a pyramid that has on its base the inscription Aztlan, which is close to Atlas and Atlantis? Why are pyramids found on both sides of the Atlantic?’’

“Because it’s easier to build pyramids than spheres. Because the wind produces dunes in the shape of pyramids and not in the shape of the Parthenon.”

“I hate the spirit of the Enlightenment,” Diotallevi said.

“Let me continue. The cult of Ra doesn’t appear in Egyptian religion before the New Empire, and therefore it comes from the Celts. Remember Saint Nicholas and his sleigh? In prehistoric Egypt the ship of the Sun was a sleigh. Since there was no snow in Egypt, the sleigh’s origin must have been Nordic...”

I couldn’t let that pass: “Before the invention of the wheel, sleighs were used also on sand.”

“Don’t interrupt. The book says that first you identify the analogies and then you find the reasons. And it says that, in the end, the reasons are scientific. The Egyptians knew electricity. Without electricity they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did. A German engineer placed in charge of the sewers of Baghdad discovered electric batteries still operating that dated back to the Sassanids. In the excavations of Babylon, accumulators were found that had been made four thousand years ago. And, finally, the Ark of the Covenant (which contained the Tables of the Law, Aaron’s rod, and a pot of manna from the desert) was a kind of electric strongbox capable of producing discharges on the order of five hundred volts.”

“I saw that in a movie.”

“So what? Where do you think scriptwriters get their ideas? The ark was made of acacia wood sheathed in gold inside and out—the same principle as electric condensers, two conductors separated by an insulator. It was encircled by a garland, also of gold, and set in a dry region where the magnetic field reached five hundred to six hundred volts per vertical meter. It’s said that Porsena used electricity to free his realm from the presence of a frightful animal called Volt.”

“Which is why Alessandro Volta chose that exotic pseudonym. Before, his name was simply Szmrszlyn Khraznapahwsh-kij.”

“Be serious. Also, besides the manuscripts, I have letters that offer revelations on the connections between Joan of Arc and the Sibylline Books, between Lilith the Talmudic demon and the hermaphroditic Great Mother, between the genetic code and the Martian alphabet, between the secret intelligence of plants, cosmology, psychoanalysis, and Marx and Nietzsche in the perspective of a new angelology, between the Golden Number and the Grand Canyon, Kant and occultism, the Eleusian mysteries and jazz, Cagliostro and atomic energy, homosexuality and gno-sis, the golem and the class struggle. In conclusion, a letter promising a work in eight volumes on the Grail and the Sacred Heart.”

“What’s its thesis? That the Grail is an allegory of the Sacred Heart or that the Sacred Heart is an allegory of the Grail?’’

“He wants it both ways, I think. In short, gentlemen, I don’t know what course to follow. We should sound out Signor Gar-amond.”

So we sounded him out. He said that, as a matter of principle, nothing should be thrown out, and we should give everyone a hearing.

“But most of this stuff,” I argued, “repeats things you can find on any station newsstand. Even published authors copy from one another, and cite one another as authorities, and all base their proofs on a sentence of lamblicus, so to speak.”

“Well,” Garamond said, “would you try to sell readers something they knew nothing about? The Isis Unveiled books must deal with the exact same subjects as all the others. They confirm one another; therefore they’re true. Never trust originality.”

“Very well,” Belbo said, “but we can’t tell what’s obvious and what isn’t. We need a consultant.”

“What sort of consultant?”

“I don’t know. He must be less credulous than a Diabolical, but he must know their world. And then tell us what direction we should take in Hermetics. A serious student of Renaissance Hermeticism...”

“And the first time you hand him the Grail and the Sacred Heart,” Diotallevi said, “he storms out, slamming the door.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I know someone who would be just right,” I said. “He’s certainly erudite; he takes these things fairly seriously, but with elegance, even irony, I’d say. I met him in Brazil, but he should be in Milan now. I must have his phone number somewhere.”

“Contact him,” Garamond said. “Tentatively. It depends on the cost. And try also to make use of him for the wonderful adventure of metals.”

Aglie seemed happy to hear from me again. He inquired after the charming Amparo, and when I hinted that was over, he apologized and made some tactful remarks about how a young person could always begin, with ease, a new chapter in his life. I mentioned an editorial project. He showed interest, said he would be glad to meet us, and set a time, at his house.

From the birth of Project Hermes until that day, I had enjoyed myself heedlessly at the expense of many people. Now, They were preparing to present the bill. I was as much of a bee as the ones we wanted to attract; and, like them, I was being quickly lured to a flower, though I didn’t yet know what that flower was.

During the day you will approach the frog several times and will utter words of worship. And you will ask it to work the miracles you wish...Meanwhile you will cut a cross on which to sacrifice it.

—From a ritual of Aleister Crowley

Aglifc lived in the Piazzale Susa area: a little secluded street, a turn-of-the-century building, soberly art nouveau. An elderly butler in a striped jacket opened the door and led us into a small sitting room, where he asked us to wait for the count.

“So he’s a count,” Belbo whispered.

“Didn’t I tell you? He’s Saint-Germain redivivus.”

“He can’t be redivivus if he’s never died,” Diotallevi said. “Sure he’s not Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew?”

“According to some, the Comte de Saint-Germain had also been Ahasuerus.”

“You see?”

Aglte came in, impeccable as always. He shook our hands and apologized: a tiresome meeting, quite unforeseen, forced him to remain in his study for another ten minutes or so. He told the butler to bring coffee and begged us to make ourselves at home. Then he went out, drawing aside a heavy curtain of old leather. It wasn’t a door, and as we were having our coffee, we heard agitated voices coming from the next room. At first we spoke loudly among ourselves, in order not to listen; then Belbo remarked that perhaps we were disturbing the others. In a moment of silence, we heard a voice, and a sentence that aroused our curiosity.

Diotallevi got up and went over, as if he wanted to admire a seventeenth-century print on the wall by the curtain. It showed a mountain cave, to which some pilgrims were climbing by way of seven steps. Soon all three of us were pretending to study the print.

The man we had heard was surely Bramanti, and the sentence was: “See here, I don’t send devils to people’s houses!”

That day we realized Bramanti had not only a tapir’s face but also a tapir’s voice.

The other voice belonged to a stranger: a thick French accent and a shrill, almost hysterical tone. From time to time Aglie’s voice, soft and conciliatory, intervened.

“Come, gentlemen,” he was saying now, “you have appealed to my verdict, and I am honored, but you must therefore listen to me. Allow me, first of all, to say that you, dear Pierre, were imprudent, at the very least, in writing that letter...”

“It’s an extremely simple matter, Monsieur le Comte,” the French voice replied. “This Signer Bramanti, he writes an article, in a publication we all respect, in which he indulges himself in some fairly strong irony about certain Luciferans, who, he says, make hosts fly though they don’t even believe in the Real Presence, and they transmute silver, and so forth and so on. Bon, everyone knows that the only recognized Eglise Luciferienne is the one where I am the humble tauroboliaste and psychopompe, and it is also well known that my church does not indulge itself in vulgar Satanism and does not make ratatouille with hosts—things worthy of chan-oine Docre at Saint-Sulpice. In my letter I said that we are not vieux jeu Satanists, worshipers of the Grand Tenancierdu Mal, and that we do not have to ape the Church of Rome, with all those pyxes and those—comment dit-on?—chasubles...We are, au con-traire, Palladians, as all the world knows, and, for us, Luciferre is the principe of good. If anything, it is Adonai who is the principe of evil, because He created this world, whereas Luciferre tried to oppose...”

“All right,” Bramanti said angrily. “I admit I may have been careless, but this doesn’t entitle him to threaten me with sorcery!”

“Mais voyons! It was a metaphor! You are the one who, in return, caused me to have the envoutement!”

“Oh, of course, my brothers and I have time to waste, sending little devils around! We practice Dogma and the Ritual of High Magic: we are not witch doctors!”

“Monsieur le Comte, I appeal to you. Signer Bramanti is notoriously in touch with the abbe Boutroux, and you well know that this priest is said to have the crucifix tattooed on the sole of his foot so that he may tread on Our Lord, or, rather, on his...Bon, I meet seven days ago this supposed abbe at the Du San-greal Bookshop, you know; he smiles at me, very slimy, as is his custom, and he says to me, ‘Well, we’ll be hearing from each other one of these evenings.’ What does it mean, one of these evenings? It means that, two evenings after, the visits begin. I am going to bed and I feel chocs strike my face, fluid chocs, you know; those emanations are easily recognized.”

“You probably rubbed the soles of your slippers on the carpet. ‘‘

“Yes, yes, then why were the bibelots flying? Why did one of my alembiques strike my head, and my plaster Baphomet, it falls to the floor, and that a memento of my late father, and on the wall three writings appear in red, ordures I cannot repeat, hein? You know well that no more than a year ago the late Monsieur Gros accused that abbe1 there of making the cataplasms with fecal matter, forgive the expression, and the abbe condemned him to death, and two weeks later the poor Monsieur Gros, he dies mysteriously. This Boutroux handles poisons, the jury d’honneur summoned by the Martinists of Lyon said so...”

“Slander,” Bramanti growled.

“Ah, that then! A trial in matters of this sort is always circumstantial...”

“Yes, but nobody at the trial mentioned the fact that Monsieur Gros was an alcoholic in the last stages of cirrhosis.”

“Do not be enfantine! Sorcelery proceeds by natural ways; if one has a cirrhosis, they strike one in the cirrhosis. That is the ABC of black magic...”

“Then all those who die of cirrhosis have the good Boutroux to blame. Don’t make me laugh!”

“Then tell me, please, what passed in Lyon in those two weeks...Deconsecrated chapel, host with Tetragramma-ton, your Boutroux with a great red robe with the cross upside down, and Madame Olcott, his personal voyante, among other things, with the trident that appears on her brow and the empty chalices that fill with blood by themselves, and the abbe who crached in the mouth of the faithful...Is that true or is it not?”

“You’ve been reading too much Huysmans, my friend!” Bramanti laughed. “It was a cultural event, a pageant, like the celebrations of the school of Wicca and the Druid colleges!”

“Ouais, the carnival of Venise...”

We heard a scuffle, as if Bramanti was attempting to strike his adversary and Aglie was restraining him. “You see? You see?” the Frenchman said in a falsetto. “But guard yourself, Bramanti, and ask your friend Boutroux what happened to himl You don’t know yet, but he’s in the hospital. Ask him who broke his figure! Even if I do not practice that goety of yours, I know a little of it myself, and when I realized that my house was inhabited, I drew on the parquet the circle of defense, and since I do not believe, but your diablotines do, I removed the Carmelite scapular and made the contresign, the envoutement retourne, ah oui. Your abb6 passed a mauvais moment!”

“You see? You see?” Bramanti was panting. “He’s the one casting spells!”

“Gentlemen, that’s enough,” Aglie said politely but firmly. “Now listen to me. You know how highly I value, on a cognitive level, these reexaminations of obsolete rituals, and for me the Luciferine Church and the Order of Satan are equally to be respected above and beyond their demonological differences. You know my skepticism in this matter. But, in the end, we all belong to the same spiritual knighthood, and I urge you to show a minimum of solidarity. After all, gentlemen, to involve the Prince of Darkness in a personal spat! How very childish! Come, come, these are occultists’ tales. You are behaving like vulgar Freemasons. To be frank, yes, Boutroux is a dissident, and perhaps, my dear Bramanti, you might suggest to him that he sell to some junk dealer all that paraphernalia of his, like the props for a production of Boito’s Mefistofele...”

“Ha, c’est bien dit, ca,” the Frenchman snickered. “C’est de la brocanterie...”

“Let’s try to see this in perspective. There has been a debate on what we will call liturgical formalisms, tempers have flared, but we mustn’t make mountains out of molehills. Mind you, my dear Pierre, I am not for one moment denying the presence in your house of alien entities; it’s the most natural thing in the world, but with a little common sense it could all be explained as a poltergeist.”

“Yes, I wouldn’t exclude that possibility,” Bramanti said. “The astral conjuncture at this time...”

“Well then! Come, shake hands, and a fraternal embrace.”

We heard murmurs of reciprocal apologies. “You know yourself,” Bramanti was saying, “sometimes to identify one who is truly awaiting initiation, it is necessary to indulge in a bit of folklore. Even those merchants of the Great Orient, who believe in nothing, have a ceremony.”

“Bien entendu, le rituel, ah ca...”

“But these are no longer the days of Crowley. Is that clear?” Aglie said. “I must leave you now. I have other guests.”

We quickly went back to the sofa and waited for Aglie with composure and nonchalance.

Our exalted task then is to find order in these seven measures, a pattern that is distinct and will keep always the sense alert and the memory clear...This exalted and incomparable configuration not only performs the function of preserving entrusted things, words, and arts...but in addition it gives us true knowledge...

—Giulio Camillo Delminio, L’idea del Theatre, Florence, Torrentino, 1550, Introduction

A few minutes later, Agile came in. “Do forgive me, dear friends, I had to deal with a dispute that was regrettable, to say the least. As my friend Casaubon knows, I consider myself a student of the history of religions, and for this reason people not infrequently come to me for illumination, relying perhaps more on my common sense than on my learning. It’s odd how, among the adepts of sapiential studies, eccentric personalities are sometimes found...I don’t mean the usual seekers after transcendental consolation, I don’t mean the melancholy spirits, but men of profound knowledge and great intellectual refinement who nevertheless indulge in nocturnal fantasies and lose the ability to distinguish between traditional truth and the archipelago of the prodigious. The people with whom I spoke just now were arguing about childish conjectures. Alas, it happens in the best families, as they say. But do come into my little study, please, where we can converse in more comfortable surroundings.”

He raised the leather curtain and showed us into the next room. “Little study” is not how I would have described it; it was spacious, with walls of exquisite antique shelving crammed with handsomely bound books all of venerable age. What impressed me more than the books were some small glass cases filled with objects hard to identify—they looked like stones. And there were little animals, whether stuffed, mummified, or delicately reproduced I couldn’t say. Everything was bathed in a diffuse crepuscular light that came from a large double-mullioned window at the end, with leaded diamond panes of transparent amber. The light from the window blended with that of a great lamp on a dark mahogany table covered with papers. It was one of those lamps sometimes found on reading tables in old libraries, with a dome of green glass that could cast a white oval on the page while leaving the surroundings in an opalescent penumbra. This play of two sources of light, both unnatural, somehow enlivened the polychrome of the ceiling. The ceiling was vaulted, supported on all four sides by a decorative fiction: little brick-red columns with tiny gilded capitals. The many trompe 1’oeil images, divided into seven areas, enhanced the effect of depth, and the whole room had the feeling of a mortuary chapel, impalpably sinful, melancholy, sensual.

“My little theater,” Aglie said, “in the style of those Renaissance fantasies where visual encyclopedias were laid out, syl-loges of the universe. Not so much a dwelling as a memory machine. There is no image that, when combined with the others, does not embody a mystery of the world. You will notice that line of figures there, painted in imitation of those in the palace of Mantua: they are the thirty-six decans, the Masters of the Heavens. And respecting the tradition, after I found this splendid reconstruction—the work of an unknown artist—I went about acquiring the little objects in the glass cases, which correspond to the images on the ceiling. They represent the fundamental elements of the universe: air, water, earth, and fire. Hence the presence of this charming salamander, the master-work of a taxidermist friend, and this delicate reproduction in miniature, a rather late piece, of the aeolipile of Hero, in which the air contained in the sphere, were I to activate this little alcohol stove, warming it, would escape from these lateral spouts and thereby cause rotation. A magic instrument. Egyptian priests used it in their shrines, as so many texts inform us. They exploited it to claim a miracle, which the masses venerated, while the true miracle is the golden law that governs this secret and simple mechanism of the elements earth and fire. Here is learning that our ancients possessed, as did the men of alchemy, but that the builders of cyclotrons have lost. And so I cast my gaze on my theater of memory, this child of so many vaster theaters that beguiled the great minds of the past, and I know. I know better than the so-called learned. As it is below, so it is above. And there is nothing more to know.’’

He offered us Cuban cigars, curiously shaped—not straight, but contorted, curled—though they were thick. We uttered cries of admiration. Diotallevi went over to the shelves.

“Oh,” Aglie said, “a minimal library, as you see, barely two hundred volumes; I have more in my family home. But, if I may say so, all these have some merit, some value. And they are not arranged at random. The order of the subjects follows that of the images and the objects.”

Diotallevi timidly reached out as if to touch a volume. “Help yourself,” Aglie said. “That is the Oedypus Aegyptiacus of Ath-anasius Kircher. As you know, he was the first after Horapollon to try to interpret hieroglyphics. A fascinating man. I wish this study of mine were like his museum of wonders, now presumed lost, scattered, because one who knows not how to seek will never find...A charming conversationalist. How proud he was the day he discovered that this hieroglyph meant ‘The benefices of the divine Osiris are provided by sacred ceremonies and by the chain of spirits...’ Then that mountebank Cham-pollion came along, a hateful man, believe me, childishly vain, and he insisted that the sign corresponded only to the name of a pharaoh. How ingenious the moderns are in debasing sacred symbols. The work is actually not all that rare: it costs less than a Mercedes. But look at this, a first edition, 1595, of the Am-phitheatrum sapientiae aeternae of Khunrath. It is said there are only two copies in the world. This is the third. And this volume is a first edition of the Tetturis Theoria Sacra of Burnetius. I cannot look at the illustrations in the evening without feeling a wave of mystical claustrophobia. The profundities of our globe...Unsuspected, are they not? I see that Dr. Diotallevi is fascinated by the Hebrew characters of Vigenere’s Traicte des Chiffres. Then look at this: a first edition of the Kabbala denudata of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. The book was translated into English—in part and badly—at the beginning of this century by that wretch McGregor Mathers...You must know something of that scandalous conventicle that so fascinated the British esthetes, the Golden Dawn. Only from that band of counterfeiters of occult documents could such an endless series of debasements spring, from the Stella Matutina to the satanic churches of Aleister Crowley, who called up demons to win the favors of certain gentlemen devoted to the vice anglais. If you only knew, dear friends, the sort of people one has to rub elbows with in devoting oneself to such studies. You will see for yourselves if you undertake to publish in this field.”

Belbo seized this opportunity to broach the subject. He explained that Garamond wished to bring out, each year, a few books of an esoteric nature.

“Ah, esoteric.” Aglie smiled, and Belbo blushed.

“Should we say...hermetic?”

“Ah, hermetic.” Aglie smiled.

“Well,” Belbo said, “perhaps I am using the wrong word, but surely you know the genre.”

Aglie smiled again. “It is not a genre. It is knowledge. What you wish to do is publish a survey of knowledge that has not been debased. For you it may be simply an editorial choice, but for me, if I am to concern myself with it, it will be a search for truth, a queste du Graal.”

Belbo warned that just as the fisherman who casts his net could pull in empty shells and plastic bags, so Garamond Press might receive many manuscripts of dubious value, and that we were looking for a stern reader who would separate the wheat from the chaff, while also taking note of any curious by-products, because there was a friendly publishing firm that would be happy if we redirected less worthy authors to it...Naturally, a suitable form of compensation would be worked out.

“Thank heavens I am what is called a man of means. Even a shrewd man of means. If, in the course of my explorations, I come upon another copy of Khunrath, or another handsome stuffed salamander, or a narwhal’s horn (which I would be ashamed to display in my collection, though the Treasure of Vienna exhibits one as a unicorn’s horn), with a brief and agreeable transaction I can earn more than you would pay me in ten years of consultancy. I will look at your manuscripts in the spirit of humility. I am convinced that even in the most commonplace text I will find a spark, if not of truth, at least of bizarre falsehood, and often the extremes meet. I will be bored only by the ordinary, and for that boredom you will compensate me. Depending on the boredom I have undergone, I will confine myself to sending you, at the end of the year, a little note, and I will keep my request within the confines of the symbolical. If you consider it excessive, you will just send me a case of fine wine.”

Belbo was nonplussed. He was accustomed to dealing with consultants who were querulous and starving. He opened the briefcase he had brought with him and drew out a thick manuscript.

“I wouldn’t want you to be overoptimistic. Look at this, for example. It seems to me typical.”

Aglie took the manuscript: “The Secret Language of the Pyramids...Let’s see the index...Pyramidion...Death of Lord Carnarvon...Testimony of Herodotus...”He looked up. “You gentlemen have read it?”

“I skimmed through it,” Belbo said.

Aglie returned the manuscript to him. “Now tell me if my summary is correct.” He sat down behind the desk, reached into the pocket of his vest, drew out the pillbox I had seen in Brazil, and turned it in his thin, tapering fingers, which earlier had caressed his favorite books. He raised his eyes toward the figures on the ceiling and recited, as if from a text he had long known by heart:

“The author of this book no doubt reminds us that Piazzi Smyth discovered the sacred and esoteric measurements of the pyramids in 1864. Allow me to round off to whole numbers; at my age the memory begins to fail a bit...Their base is a square; each side measures two hundred and thirty-two meters. Originally the height was one hundred and forty-eight meters. If we convert into sacred Egyptian cubits, we obtain a base of three hundred and sixty-six; in other words, the number of days in a leap year. For Piazzi Smyth, the height multiplied by ten to the ninth gives the distance between the earth and the sun: one hundred and forty-eight million kilometers. A good estimate at the time, since today the calculated distance is one hundred and forty-nine and a half million kilometers, and the moderns are not necessarily right. The base divided by the width of one of the stones is three hundred and sixty-five. The perimeter of the base is nine hundred and thirty-one meters. Divide by twice the height, and you get 3.14, the number ir. Splendid, no?”

Belbo smiled and looked embarrassed. “Incredible! Tell me how you—”

“Let Dr. Aglie go on, Jacopo,” Diotallevi said.

Agile thanked him with a nod. His gaze wandered the ceiling as he spoke, but it seemed to me that the path his eyes followed was neither idle nor random, that they were reading, in those images, what he only pretended to be digging from his memory.

Now, from apex to base, the volume of the Great Pyramid in cubic inches is approximately 161,000,000,000. How many human souls, then, have lived on the earth from Adam to the present day? Somewhere between 153,000,000,000 and 171,900,000,000.

—Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, London, Isbister, 1880, p. 583

“I imagine your author holds that the height of the pyramid of Cheops is equal to the square root of the sum of the areas of all its sides. The measurements must be made in feet, the foot being closer to the Egyptian and Hebrew cubit, and not in meters, for the meter is an abstract length invented in modern times. The Egyptian cubit comes to 1.728 feet. If we do not know the precise height, we can use the pyramidion, which was the small pyramid set atop the Great Pyramid, to form its tip. It was of gold or some other metal that shone in the sun. Take the height of the pyramidion, multiply it by the height of the whole pyramid, multiply the total by ten to the fifth, and we obtain the circumference of the earth. What’s more, if you multiply the perimeter of the base by twenty-four to the third divided by two, you get the earth’s radius. Further, the area of the base of the pyramid multiplied by ninety-six times ten to the eighth gives us one hundred and ninety-six million eight hundred and ten thousand square miles, which is the surface area of the earth. Am I right?”

Belbo liked to convey amazement with an expression he had learned in the cinematheque, from the original-language version of Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney: “I’m flabbergasted!” This is what he said now. Aglie also knew colloquial English, apparently, because he couldn’t hide his satisfaction at this tribute ttrhis vanity. “My friends,” he said, “when a gentleman, whose name is unknown to me, pens a compilation on the mystery of the pyramids, he can say only what by now even children know. I would have been surprised if he had said anything new.”

“So the writer is simply repeating established truths?” “Truths?” Aglie laughed, and again opened for us the box of his deformed and delicious cigars. “Quid est veritas, as a friend of mine said many years ago. Most of it is nonsense. To begin with, if you divide the base of the pyramid by exactly twice the height, and do not round off, you don’t get IT, you get 3.1417254. A small difference, but essential. Further, a disciple of Piazzi Smyth, Flinders Petrie, who also measured Stonehenge, reports that one day he caught the master chipping at a granite wall of the royal antechamber, to make his sums work out...Gossip, perhaps, but Piazzi Smyth was not a man to inspire trust; you had only to see the way he tied his cravat. Still, amid all the nonsense there are some unimpeachable truths. Gentlemen, would you follow me to the window?”

He threw open the shutters dramatically and pointed. At the corner of the narrow street and the broad avenue, stood a little wooden kiosk, where, presumably, lottery tickets were sold.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I invite you to go and measure that kiosk. You will see that the length of the counter is one hundred and forty-nine centimeters—in other words, one hundred-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun. The height at the rear, one hundred and seventy-six centimeters, divided by the width of the window, fifty-six centimeters, is 3.14. The height at the front is nineteen decimeters, equal, in other words, to the number of years of the Greek lunar cycle. The sum of the heights of the two front corners and the two rear corners is one hundred and ninety times two plus one hundred and seventy-six times two, which equals seven hundred and thirty-two, the date of the victory at Poitiers. The thickness of the counter is 3.10 centimeters, and the width of the cornice of the window is 8.8 centimeters. Replacing the numbers before the decimals by the corresponding letters of the alphabet, we obtain C for ten and H for eight, or C10H8, which is the formula for naphthalene.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “You did all these measurements?” “No,” Aglie said. “They were done on another kiosk, by a certain Jean-Pierre Adam. But I would assume that all lottery kiosks have more or less the same dimensions. With numbers you can do anything you like. Suppose I have the sacred number 9 and I want to get the number 1314, date of the execution of Jacques de Molay—a date dear to anyone who, like me, professes devotion to the Templar tradition of knighthood. What do I do? I multiply nine by one hundred and forty-six, the fateful day of the destruction of Carthage. How did I arrive at this? I divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by two, by three, et cetera, until I found a satisfying date. I could also have divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by 6.28, the double of 3.14, and I would have got two hundred and nine. That is the year in which Attalus I, king of Pergamon, joined the anti-Macedonian League. You see?”

“Then you don’t believe in numerologies of any kind,” Dio-tallevi said, disappointed.

“On the contrary, I believe firmly. I believe the universe is a great symphony of numerical correspondences, I believe that numbers and their symbolisms provide a path to special knowledge. But if the world, below and above, is a system of correspondences where tout se tient, it’s natural for the kiosk and the pyramid, both works of man, to reproduce in their structure, unconsciously, the harmonies of the cosmos. The so-called pyr-amidologists discover with their incredibly tortuous methods a straightforward truth, a truth far more ancient, and one already known. It is the logic of research and discovery that is tortuous, because it is the logic of science. Whereas the logic of knowledge needs no discovery, because it knows already. Why must it demonstrate that which could not be otherwise? If there is a secret, it is much more profound. These authors of yours remain simply on the surface. I imagine this one also repeats all the tales of how the Egyptians knew about electricity...”

“I won’t ask how you managed to guess.”

“You see? They are content with electricity, like any old Marconi. The hypothesis of radioactivity would be less puerile. There is an interesting idea. Unlike the electricity hypothesis, it would explain the much vaunted curse of Tutankhamen. And how were the Egyptians able to lift the blocks of the pyramids? Can you lift boulders with electric shocks, can you make them fly with nuclear fission? No, the Egyptians found a way to eliminate the force of gravity; they possessed the secret of levitation. Another form of energy...It is known that the Chaldean priests operated sacred machines by sounds alone, and the priests of Karnak and Thebes could open the doors of a temple with only their voice—and what else could be the origin, if you think about it, of the legend of Open Sesame?”

“So?” Belbo asked.

“Now here’s the point, my friend. Electricity, radioactivity, atomic energy—the true initiate knows that these are metaphors, masks, conventional lies, or, at most, pathetic surrogates, for an ancestral, forgotten force, a force the initiate seeks and one day will know. We should speak perhaps”—he hesitated a moment— “of telluric currents.”

“What?” one of us asked, I forget who.