Aglie seemed disappointed. “You see? I was beginning to hope that among your prospective authors one had appeared who could tell me something more interesting. But it grows late. Very well, my friends, our pact is made; the rest was just the rambling of an elderly scholar.’’

As he held out his hand to us, the butler entered and murmured something in his ear. “Ah, the sweet friend,” Aglie said, “I had forgotten. Ask her to wait a moment...No, not in the living room, in the Turkish salon.”

The sweet friend must have been familiar with the house, because she was already on the threshold of the study, and without even looking at us, in the gathering shadows of the day at its end, she proceeded confidently to Aglie, patted his cheek, and said: “Simon, you’re not going to make me wait outside, are you?” It was Lorenza Pellegrini.

Aglie moved aside slightly, kissed her hand, and said, gesturing at us: “My sweet Sophia, you know you are always welcome, as you illuminate every house you enter. I was merely saying good-bye to these guests.”

Lorenza turned, saw us, and made a cheerful wave of greeting—I don’t believe I ever saw her discomposed or embarrassed. “Oh, how nice,” she said; “you also know my friend! Hello, Jacopo.”

Belbo turned pale. We said good-bye. Aglie expressed pleasure that we knew each other. “I consider our mutual acquaintance to be one of the most genuine creatures I ever had the good fortune to know. In her freshness she incarnates—allow an old man of learning this fancy—the Sophia, exiled on this earth. But, my sweet Sophia, I haven’t had time to let you know: the promised evening has been postponed for a few weeks. I’m so sorry.’’

“It doesn’t matter,” Lorenza said. “I’ll wait. Are you going to the bar?” she asked us—or, rather, commanded us. “Good. I’ll stay here for a half hour or so. Simon’s giving me one of his elixirs. You should try them. But he says they’re only for the elect. Then I’ll join you.”

Aglie smiled with the air of an indulgent uncle; he had her take a seat, then accompanied us to the door.

Out in the street again, we headed for Pilade’s, in my car. Belbo was silent. We didn’t talk all the way there. But at the bar, the spell had to be broken.

“I hope I haven’t delivered you into the hands of a lunatic,” I said.

“No,” Belbo said. “The man is keen, subtle. It’s just that he lives in a world different from ours.” Then he added grimly: “Or almost.”

49

The Traditio Templi postulates, independently, the tradition of a templar knighthood, a spiritual knighthood of initiates...

—Henry Corbin, Temple et contemplation, Paris, Flammarion, 1980

“I believe I’ve got your Agile figured out, Casaubon,” Diotal-levi said, having ordered a sparkling white wine from Pilade, making all of us fear for his moral health. “He’s a scholar, curious about the secret sciences, suspicious of dilettantes, of those who learn by ear. Yet, as we ourselves learned today, by our eavesdropping, he may scorn them but he listens to them, he may criticize them but he doesn’t dissociate himself from them.”

“Signer or Count or Margrave Aglie, or whatever the hell he is, said something very revealing today,” Belbo added. “He used the expression ‘spiritual knighthood.’ He feels joined to them by a bond of spiritual knighthood. I think I understand him.”

“Joined, in what sense?” we asked.

Belbo was now on his third martini (whiskey in the evening, he claimed, because it was calming and induced reverie; martinis in the afternoon, because they stimulated and fortified). He began talking about his childhood in ***, as he had already done once with me.

“It was between 1943 and 1945, that is, the period of transition from Fascism to democracy and then to the dictatorship of the Salo republic, with the partisan war going on in the mountains. At the beginning of this story I was eleven, and staying in my uncle Carlo’s house. My family normally lived in the city, but in 1943 the air raids were increasing and my mother had decided to evacuate.

“Uncle Carlo and Aunt Caterina lived in ***. Uncle Carlo came from a farming family and had inherited the *** house, with some land, which was cultivated by a tenant farmer named Adeline Canepa. The tenant planted, harvested the grain, made the wine, and gave half of everything to the owner. A tense situation, obviously: the tenant considered himself exploited, and so did the owner, who received only half the produce of his land.

The landowners hated the tenants and the tenants hated the landowners. But in Uncle Carlo’s case they lived side by side.

“In 1914 Uncle Carlo had enlisted in the Alpine troops. A bluff Piedmontese, all duty and Fatherland, he became a lieutenant, then a captain. One day, in a battle on the Carso, he found himself beside an idiot soldier who let a grenade explode in his hands—why else call them hand grenades? Uncle Carlo was about to be thrown into a common grave when an orderly realized he was still alive. They took him to a field hospital, removed the eye that was hanging out of its socket, cut off one arm, and, according to Aunt Caterina, they also put a metal plate in his head, because he had lost some of his skull. In other words, a masterpiece of surgery on the one hand and a hero on the other. Silver medal, cavalier of the Crown of Italy, and after the war a good steady job in public administration. Uncle Carlo ended up head of the tax office in ***, where, after inheriting the family property, he went to live in the ancestral home with Adeline Canepa and family.

“As head of the tax office, Uncle Carlo was a local bigwig, and as a mutilated veteran and cavalier of the Crown of Italy, he was naturally on the side of the government, which happened to be the Fascist dictatorship. Was Uncle Carlo a Fascist?

“In those days, Fascism had given veterans status, had rewarded them with decorations and promotions; so let’s say Uncle Carlo was moderately Fascist. Fascist enough to earn the hatred of Adeline Canepa, who was ardently anti-Fascist, for obvious reasons. Canepa had to go to Uncle Carlo every year to make his income declaration. He would arrive in the office with a bold expression of complicity, having tried to corrupt Aunt Caterina with a few dozen eggs. And he would find himself up against Uncle Carlo, who, being a hero, was not only incorruptible, but also knew better than anyone how much Canepa had stolen from him in the course of the year, and who wouldn’t forgive him one cent. Adeline Canepa, considering himself a victim of the dictatorship, began spreading slanderous rumors about Uncle Carlo. One lived on the ground floor, the other on the floor above; they met every morning and night, but no longer exchanged greetings. Communication was maintained through Aunt Caterina and, after our arrival, through my mother—to whom Adeline Canepa expressed much sympathy and understanding, since she was the sister-in-law of a monster. My uncle, in his gray double-breasted suit and bowler, would come home every evening at six with his copy of La Stampa still to be read. He walked erect, like an Alpine soldier, his gray eye on the peak to be stormed. He passed by Adelino Canepa, who at that hour was enjoying the cool air on a bench in the garden, and it was as if my uncle did not see him. Then he would encounter Si-gnora Canepa at the downstairs door and ceremoniously doff his hat. And so it went, every evening, year after year.”

It was eight o’clock; Lorenza wasn’t coming, as she had promised. Belbo was on his fifth martini.

“Then came 1943. One morning Uncle Carlo came into our room, waked me with a kiss, and said, ‘My boy, you want to hear the biggest news of the year? They’ve kicked out Mussolini.’ I never figured out whether or not Uncle Carlo suffered over it. He was a citizen of total integrity and a servant of the state. If he did suffer, he said nothing about it, and he went on running the tax office for the Badoglio government. Then came September 8, and the area in which we lived fell under the control of the Fascists’ Social Republic, and Uncle Carlo again adjusted. He collected taxes for the Social Republic.

“Adeline Canepa, meanwhile, boasted of his contacts with the partisan groups forming in the mountains, and he promised vengeance, the making of examples. We kids didn’t yet know who the partisans were. There were great tales about them, but so far nobody had seen them. There was talk about a Badoglian leader known as Mongo—a nickname, naturally, as was the custom then; many said he had taken it from Flash Gordon. Mongo was a former Carabinieri sergeant major who had lost a leg in the first fighting against the Fascists and the SS and now commanded all the brigades in the hills around ***.

“And then came the disaster: one day the partisans showed up in town. They had descended from the hills, they were running wild in the streets, still without uniforms, just blue kerchiefs, and firing rounds into the air to make their presence known. The news spread; all the people locked themselves in their houses. It wasn’t yet clear what sort of men these partisans were. Aunt Caterina was only mildly concerned: after all, those partisans were friends of Adeline Canepa, or at least Adelino Canepa claimed to be a friend of theirs, so they wouldn’t do anything bad to Uncle, would they? They would. We were informed that around eleven o’clock a squad of partisans with automatic rifles aimed had entered the tax office, arrested Uncle Carlo, and carried him off, destination unknown. Aunt Caterina lay down on her bed, and whitish foam began to dribble from her lips. She declared that Uncle Carlo would be killed. A blow with a rifle butt would-be enough: with the metal plate in his head, he would die on the spot.

“Drawn by my aunt’s moans, Adelino Canepa arrived with his wife and children. My aunt cried that he was a Judas, that he had reported Uncle to the partisans because Uncle collected taxes for the Social Republic. Adelino Canepa swore by everything sacred that this was not true, but obviously he felt responsible, because he had talked too much in town. My aunt sent him away. Adelino Canepa wept, appealed to my mother, reminded her of all the times he had sold her a rabbit or a chicken at a ridiculously low price, but my mother maintained a dignified silence, Aunt Caterina continued to dribble whitish foam, I cried. Finally, after two hours of agony, we heard shouts, and Uncle Carlo appeared on a bicycle, steering it with his one arm and looking as if he were returning from a picnic. Seeing a disturbance in the garden, he asked what had happened. Uncle hated dramas, like everyone in our parts. He went upstairs, approached the bed of pain of Aunt Caterina, who was still kicking her scrawny legs, and inquired why she was so agitated.”

“What had happened?”

“What had happened was this. Mongo’s partisans, probably hearing some of Adelino Canepa’s mutterings, had identified Uncle Carlo as one of the local representatives of the regime, so they arrested him to teach the whole town a lesson. He was taken outside the town in a truck and found himself before Mongo. Mongo, his war medals shining, stood with a gun in his right hand and his left holding a crutch. Uncle Carlo—but I really don’t think he was being clever; I think it was instinct, or the ritual of chivalry—snapped to attention, introduced himself: Major Carlo Covasso, Alpine Division, disabled veteran, silver medal. And Mongo also snapped to attention and introduced himself: Sergeant Major Rebaudengo, Royal Carabineers, commander of the Badoglian brigade Bettino Ricasoli, bronze medal. ‘Where?’ Uncle Carlo asked. And Mongo, impressed, said: ‘Pordoi, Major, hill 327.”By God,’ said Uncle Carlo, ‘I was at hill 328, third regiment, Sasso di Stria!’ The battle of the solstice? Battle of the solstice it was. And the cannon on Five-Finger Mountain? Dammit to hell, do I remember! And the bayonet attack on Saint Crispin’s Eve? Yessir! That sort of thing. Then, the one without an arm, the other without a leg, on the same impulse they took a step forward and embraced. Mongo said then, ‘You see, Cavalier, it’s this way, Major: we were informed that you collect taxes for the Fascist government that toadies to the invaders.”You see, Commander,’ Uncle Carlo said, ‘it’s this way: I have a family and receive a salary from the government, and the government is what it is; I didn’t choose it, and what would you have done in my place?”My dear Major,’ Mongo replied, ‘in your place, I’d have done what you did, but try at least to collect the taxes slowly; take your time.’ Til see what I can do,’ Uncle Carlo said. ‘I have nothing against you men; you, too, are sons of Italy and valiant fighters.’ They understood each other, because they both thought of Fatherland with a capital F. Mongo ordered his men to give the major a’ bicycle, and Uncle Carlo went home. Adelino Canepa didn’t show his face for several months.

“There, I don’t know if this qualifies as spiritual knighthood, but I’m certain there are bonds that endure above factions and parties.”

50

For I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the hated. I am the saint and the prostitute.

—Fragment of Nag Hammadi 6, 2

Lorenza Pellegrini entered. Belbo looked up at the ceiling and ordered a final martini. There was tension in the air, and I got up to leave, but Lorenza stopped me. “No. All of you come with me. Tonight’s the opening of Riccardo’s show; he’s inaugurating a new style! He’s great! You know him, Jacopo.”

I knew who Riccardo was; he was always hanging around Pilade’s. But at that moment I didn’t understand why Belbo’s eyes were fixed so intensely on the ceiling. Having read the files, I realize now that Riccardo was the man with the scar, the man with whom Belbo had lacked the courage to start a fight.

The gallery wasn’t far from Pilade’s, Lorenza insisted. They had organized a real party—or, rather, an orgy. Diotallevi became nervous at this and immediately said he had to go home. I hesitated, but it was obvious Lorenza wanted me along, and this, too, made Belbo suffer, since he saw the possibility of a tete-a-tete slipping farther and farther away. But I couldn’t refuse; so we set out.

I didn’t care that much for Riccardo. In the early sixties he turned out very boring paintings, small canvases in blacks and grays, very geometric, slightly optical, the sort of stuff that made your eyes swim. They bore titles like Composition 15, Parallax 17, Euclid X. But in 1968 he started showing in squats, he changed his palette; now there were only violent blacks and whites, no grays, the strokes were bolder, and the titles were like Ce n’est qu’un debut, Molotov, A Hundred Flowers. When I got back to Milan, I saw a show of his in a club where Dr. Wagner was worshiped. Riccardo had eliminated black, was working in white only, the contrasts provided by the texture and relief of the paint on porous Fabriano paper, so that the pictures—as he explained—would reveal different figures in different lightings. Their titles were In Praise of Ambiguity, A/Travers, fa, Berggasse, and Denegation 15.

That evening, as soon as we entered the new gallery, I saw that Riccardo’s poetics had undergone a profound change. The show was entitled Megale Apophasis. Riccardo had turned figurative with a dazzling palette. He played with quotations, and, since I don’t believe he knew how to draw, I guess he worked by projecting onto the canvas the slide of a famous painting. His choices hovered between the turn-of-the-century pompiers and the early-twentieth-century Symbolists. Over the projected image he worked with a pointillist technique, using infinitesimal gradations of color, covering the whole spectrum dot by dot, so that he always began from a blindingly bright nucleus and ended at absolute black, or vice versa, depending on the mystical or cosmological concept he wanted to express. There were mountains that shot rays of light, which were broken up into a fine powder of pale spheres, and there were concentric skies with hints of angels with transparent wings, something like the Paradise of Dore”. The titles were Beatrix, Mystica Rosa, Dante Gabriels 33, Fedeli d’Amore, Atanor, Homunculus 666. This is the source of Lorenza’s passion for homunculi, I said to myself. The largest picture was entitled Sophia, and it showed a rain of black angels, which faded at the ground and created a white creature caressed by great livid hands, the creature a copy of the one you see held up against the sky in Guernica. The juxtaposition was dubious, and, seen close up, the execution proved crude, but at a distance of two or three meters the effect was quite lyrical.

“I’m a realist of the old school,” Belbo whispered to me. “I understand only Mondrian. What does a nongeometric picture say?”

“He was geometric before,” I said.

“That wasn’t geometry, that was bathroom tiles.”

Meanwhile, Lorenza rushed to embrace Riccardo. He and Belbo exchanged a nod of greeting. There was a crowd; the gallery was trying to look like a New York loft, all white, with heating or water pipes exposed on the ceiling. God knows what it had cost them to backdate the place like that. In one corner, a sound system was deafening those present with Asian music— sitar music, if I recall rightly, the kind where you can’t pick out a tune. Everybody walked absently past the pictures to crowd around the tables at the end and grab paper cups. We had arrived well into the evening: the air was thick with smoke, some girls from time to time hinted at dance movements in the center of the room, but everybody was still busy conversing, busy consuming the plentiful buffet. I sat on a sofa, and at my feet lay a great glass bowl half-filled with fruit salad. I was about to take a little, because I hadn’t had any supper, but then I saw in it a footprint, which had crushed the little cubes of fruit in the center, reducing them to a homogeneous pave. This was not that surprising, because the floor was now spattered in many places with white wine, and some of the guests were already staggering.

Belbo had captured a paper cup and was proceeding lazily, without any apparent goal, occasionally slapping someone on the shoulder. He was trying to find Lorenza.

But few people remained motionless; the crowd was intent on a kind of circular movement, like bees hunting for a hidden flower. Though I wasn’t looking for anything myself, I stood up and moved, shifted in response to the impulses transmitted to me by the group, and not far from me I saw Lorenza. She was wandering, miming the impassioned recognition of this man, of that: head high, eyes deliberately myopic-wide, back straight, breasts steady, and her steps haphazard, like a giraffe’s.

At a certain point the human flow trapped me in a corner behind a table, where Lorenza and Belbo had their backs to me, having finally met, perhaps by chance, and they were also trapped. I don’t know if they were aware of my presence, but the noise was so great that nobody could hear what others were saying at any distance. Lorenza and Belbo therefore considered themselves isolated, and I was forced to hear their conversation.

“Well,” Belbo said, “where did you meet your Aglie?”

“My Aglie? Yours, too, from what I saw. You can know Simon, but I can’t. Fine.’’

“Why do you call him Simon? Why does he call you Sophia?”

“Oh, it’s a game. I met him at a friend’s place—all right? And I find him fascinating. He kisses my hand as if I were a princess. He could be my father.”

“He could be the father of your son, if you aren’t careful.”

It sounded like me, in Bahia, talking to Amparo. Lorenza was right. Aglie knew how to kiss the hand of a young lady unfamiliar with that ritual.

“Why Simon and Sophia?” Belbo insisted. “Is his name Simon? ‘‘

“It’s a wonderful story. Did you know that our universe is the result of an error and that it’s partly my fault? Sophia was the female part of God, because God then was more female than male; it was you men who later put a beard on him and started calling him He. I was his good half. Simon says I tried to create the world without asking permission—I, the Sophia, who is also called—wait a minute—the Ennoia. But my male part didn’t want to create; maybe he lacked the courage or was impotent. So instead of uniting with him, I decided to make the world by myself. I couldn’t resist; it was through an excess of love. Which is true; I adore this whole mixed-up universe. And that’s why I’m the soul of this world, according to Simon.”

“How nice! Does he give that line to all the girls?”

“No, stupid, just to me, because he understands me better than you do. He doesn’t try to create me in his image. He understands I have to be allowed to live my life in my own way. And that’s what Sophia did; she flung herself into making the world. She came up against primordial matter, which was disgusting, probably because it didn’t use a deodorant. And then, I think, she accidentally created the Demi—how do you say it?”

“You mean the Demiurge?”

“That’s him, yes. Or maybe it wasn’t Sophia who made this Demiurge; maybe he was already around and she egged him on: Get moving, silly, make the world, and then we’ll have real fun. The Demiurge must have been a real screwup, because he didn’t know how to make the world properly. In fact, he shouldn’t even have tried it, because matter is bad, and he wasn’t authorized to touch the stuff. Anyway, he made this awful mess, and Sophia was caught inside. Prisoner of the world.”

Lorenza was drinking a lot. A number of people had started dancing sleepily in the center of the room, their eyes closed, and Riccardo came by every few minutes and filled her cup. Belbo tried to stop him, saying she had already had too much to drink, but Riccardo laughed and shook his head, and she said indignantly that she could hold her alcohol better than Jacopo because she was younger.

“All right,” Belbo said, “don’t listen to Granddad, listen to Simon. What else did he tell you?”

“What I said: I’m prisoner of the world, or, rather, of the bad angels...because in this story the angels are bad and they helped the Demiurge make all this mess...The bad angels, anyhow, are holding me; they don’t want me to get away, and they make me suffer. But every now and then in the world of men there is someone who recognizes me. Like Simon. He says it happened to him once before, a thousand years ago—I forgot to tell you Simon’s practically immortal; you can’t imagine all the things he’s seen...”

“Of course...but don’t drink anymore now.”

“Sssh...Simon found me once when I was a prostitute in a brothel in Tyre and my name was Helen...”

“He tells you that? And you’re overjoyed. Pray let me kiss your hand, wAore of my screwed-op universe...Satne gea-tleman.”

“If anything, that Helen was the whore. And besides, in those days, when they said prostitute, they meant a woman who was free, without ties, an intellectual who didn’t want to be a housewife. She might hold a salon. Today she’d be in public relations. Would you call a PR woman a whore or a hooker, who lights bonfires along the highway for truck drivers?’’

At that point Riccardo came and took her by the arm. “Come and dance,” he said.

In the middle of the room, they made faint, dreamy movements, as if beating a drum. But from time to time Riccardo drew her to him, put a hand possessively on the back of her neck, and she would follow him with closed eyes, her face flushed, head thrown back, hair hanging free, vertically. Belbo lit one cigarette after another.

Then Lorenza grabbed Riccardo by the waist and slowly pulled him until they were only a step from Belbo. Still dancing, she took the paper cup from Belbo’s hand. Holding Riccardo with her left hand, the cup with her right, she turned her moist eyes on Belbo. It was almost as if she had been crying, but she smiled and said: “It wasn’t the only time, either.” “The only time, what?” Belbo asked.

“That he met Sophia. Centuries after that, Simon was also Guillaume Postel.” “A letter carrier?”

“Idiot. He was a Renaissance scholar who read Jewish—” “Hebrew.”

“Same difference. He read it the way kids read Superman. Without a dictionary. Anyhow, in a hospital in Venice he meets an old illiterate maidservant, Joanna. He looks at her and says, ‘You are the new incarnation of Sophia, the Ennoia, the Great Mother descended into our midst to redeem the whole world, which has a female soul.’ And so Postel takes Joanna with him; everybody says he’s crazy, but he pays no attention; he adores her, wants to free her from the angels’ imprisonment, and when she dies, he sits and stares at the sun for an hour and goes for days without drinking or eating, inhabited by Joanna, who no longer exists but it’s as if she did, because she’s still there, she inhabits the world, and every now and then she resurfaces, that is, she’s reincarnated...Isn’t that a story to make you cry?”

“I’m dissolved in tears. Are you so pleased to be Sophia?”

“But I’m Sophia for you, too, darling. You know that before you met me you wore the most dreadful ghastly ties and had dandruff on your shoulders.”

Riccardo was holding her neck again. “May I join the conversation?” he said.

“You keep quiet and dance. You’re the instrument of my lust.” “Suits me.”

Belbo went on as if the other man didn’t exist. “So you’re his prostitute, his feminist who does public relations, and he’s your Simon.”

“My name’s not Simon,” Riccardo said, his tongue thick. “We’re not talking about you,” Belbo said. His behavior had been making me uneasy for some while now. He, as a rule so guarded about his feelings, was having a lovers’ quarrel in front of a witness, in front of a rival, even. But this last remark made me realize that with his baring of himself before the other man—the true rival being yet another—Belbo was reasserting, in the only way he could, his possession of Lorenza. Meanwhile, holding out her cup for more drink, Lorenza answered: “But it’s a game. I love you.”

“Thank God you don’t hate me. Listen, I’d like to go home, I have a stomachache. I’m still a prisoner of base matter. Simon hasn’t done me any good. Will you come with me?”

“Let’s stay a little longer. It’s so nice. Aren’t you having fun? Besides, I still haven’t looked at the pictures. Did you see? Riccardo made one on me.”

“There are other things I’d like to do on you,” Riccardo said.

“You’re vulgar. Stop it. I’m talking about Jacopo. My God, Jacopo, are you the only one who can make intellectual jokes with your friends? Who treats me like a prostitute from Tyre?

You do.”

“I might have known. Me. I’m the one pushing you into the arms of old gentlemen.”

“He’s never tried to take me in his arms. He isn’t a satyr. You’re cross because he doesn’t want to take me to bed but considers me an intellectual partner.” “Allumeuse.”

“You really shouldn’t have said that. Riccardo, get me something to drink.’’

“No, wait,” Belbo said. “Now, I want you to tell me if you take him seriously. Stop drinking, dammit! Tell me if you take him seriously!”

“But, darling, it’s our game, a game between him and me. And besides, the best part of the story is that when Sophia realizes who she is and frees herself from the tyranny of the angels, she frees herself from sin...” “You’ve given up sinning?”

“Think it over first,” Riccardo said, kissing her chastely on the forehead.

 “I don’t have to,” she replied—to Belbo, ignoring the painter. “Those things aren’t sins anymore; I can do anything I like. Once you’ve freed yourself from the flesh, you’re beyond good and evil.”

She pushed Riccardo away. “I’m Sophia, and to free myself from the angels I have to perpet...per-pet-rate all sins, even the most marvelous!”

Staggering a little, she went to a corner where a girl was seated, dressed in black, her eyes heavily mascaraed, her complexion pale. Lorenza led the girl into the center of the room and began to sway with her. They were belly to belly, arms limp at their sides. “I can love you, too,” Lorenza said, and kissed the girl on the mouth.

The others gathered around, mildly aroused. Belbo sat down and looked at the scene with an impenetrable face, like a producer watching a screen test. He was sweating, and there was a tic by his left eye, which I had never noticed before. Lorenza danced for at least five minutes, with movements increasingly suggestive. Then suddenly he said: “Now you come here.”

Lorenza stopped, spread her legs, held her arms straight out, and cried: “I am the saint and the prostitute!”

“You are the pain in the ass.” Belbo got up, went straight to her, grabbed her by the wrist, and dragged her toward the door.

“Stop it!” she shouted. “Don’t you dare...” Then she burst into tears and flung her arms around his neck. “But darling, I’m your Sophia; you can’t get mad...”

Belbo tenderly put an arm around her shoulders, kissed her on the temple, smoothed her hair, then said to everybody: “Excuse her; she isn’t used to drinking like this.”

I heard some snickers from those present, and I believe Belbo heard them, too. He saw me on the threshold, and did something—whether for me, for the others, or for himself, I’ve never figured out. It was a whisper, when everybody else had turned away from the couple, losing interest.

Still holding Lorenza by the shoulders, he addressed the room, softly, in the tone of a man stating the obvious: “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”

51

When therefore a Great Cabalist wishes to tell you something, what he says will not be frivolous, vulgar, common, but, rather, a mystery, an oracle...

—Thomaso Garzoni, // Theatre de vari e diversi cervelli mondani, Venice, Zanfretti, 1583, discorso XXXVI

The illustrations I found in Milan and Paris weren’t enough. Signer Garamond authorized me to spend a few days at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

I spent my evenings in the bars of Schwabing—or in the immense crypts where elderly mustached gentlemen in lederhosen played music and lovers smiled at each other through a thick cloud of pork steam over full-liter beer steins—and in the afternoons I went through card catalogs of reproductions. Now and then I would leave the archive and stroll through the museum, where every human invention had been reconstructed. You pushed a button, and dioramas of oil exploration came to life with working drills, you stepped inside a real submarine, you made the planets revolve, you played at producing acids and chain reactions. A less Gothic Conservatoire, totally of the future, peopled by unruly school groups being taught to idealize engineers.

In the Deutsches Museum you also learned everything about mines: you went down a ladder and found yourself in a mine complete with tunnels, elevators for men and horses, narrow passages where scrawny exploited children (made of wax, I hoped) were crawling. You went along endless dark corridors, you stopped at the edge of bottomless pits, you felt chilled to the bone, and you could almost catch a whiff of firedamp. Everything life-size.

I was wandering in a tunnel, despairing of ever seeing the light of day again, when I came upon a man looking down over the railing, someone I seemed to recognize. The face was wrinkled and pale, the hair white, the look owlish. But the clothes were not right—I had seen that face before, above some uniform. It was like meeting, after many years, a priest now in civilian clothes, or a Capuchin without a beard. The man looked back at me, also hesitating. As usually happens in such situations, there was some fencing of furtive glances before he took the initiative and greeted me in Italian. Suddenly I could picture him in his usual dress: if he had been wearing a long yellow smock, he would have been Signer Salon: A. Salon, taxidermist. His laboratory was next door to my office on the corridor of the former factory building where I was the Marlowe of culture. I had encountered him at times on the stairs, and we had nodded to each other.

“Strange,” he said, holding out his hand. “We have been fellow-tenants for so long, and we introduce ourselves in the bowels of the earth a thousand miles away.”

We exchanged a few polite remarks. I got the impression that he knew exactly what I did, which was an achievement of sorts, since I wasn’t sure myself. “How do you happen to be in a technological museum? I thought your publishing firm was concerned with more spiritual things.”

“How did you know that?”

“Oh”—he gestured vaguely—”people talk, I have many customers...”

“What sort of people go to a taxidermist?”

“You are thinking, like everyone else, that it’s not an ordinary profession. But I do not lack for customers, and I have all kinds: museums, private collectors.”

“I don’t often see stuffed animals in people’s homes,” I said.

“No? It depends on the homes you visit...Or the cellars.”

“Stuffed animals are kept in cellars?”

“Some people keep them in cellars. Not all creches are in the light of the sun or the moon. I’m suspicious of such customers, but you know how it is: a job is a job...I’m suspicious of everything underground.”

“Then why are you strolling in tunnels?”

“I’m checking. I distrust the underground world, but I want to understand it. There aren’t many opportunities. The Roman catacombs, you’ll say. No mystery there, too many tourists, and everything is under the control of the Church. And then there are the sewers of Paris...Have you been? They can be visited on Monday, Wednesday, and the last Saturday of every month. But that’s another tourist attraction. Naturally, there are catacombs in Paris, too, and caves. Not to mention the Metro. Have you ever been to 145 rue Lafayette?’’

“I must confess I haven’t.”

“It’s a bit out of the way, between Gare de 1’Est and Gare du Nord. An unremarkable building at first sight. But if you look at it more closely, you realize that though the door looks wooden, it is actually painted iron, and the windows appear to belong to rooms unoccupied for centuries. People walk past and don’t know the truth.”

“What is the truth?”

“That the house is fake. It’s a facade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Metro. And once you know this, you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld: if you could penetrate those walls, you would have access to subterranean Paris. I have had occasion to spend hours and hours in front of that door that conceals the door of doors, the point of departure for the journey to the center of the earth. Why do you think they made it?”

“To ventilate the Metro, as you said.”

“A few ducts would have been enough for that. No, when I see those subterranean passages, my suspicions are aroused. Do you know why?”

As he spoke of darkness, he seemed to give off light. I asked him why his suspicions were aroused.

“Because if the Masters of the World exist, they can only be underground: this is a truth that all sense but few dare utter. Perhaps the only man bold enough to say it in print was Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. You know him?”

I may have heard the name mentioned by one of our Diabolicals, but I wasn’t sure.

“He is the one who told us about Agarttha, the underground headquarters of the King of the World, the occult center of the Synarchy,” the taxidermist said. “He had no fear; he felt sure of himself. But all those who spoke out after him were eliminated, because they knew too much.”

As we walked along the tunnel, Signer Salon cast nervous glances at the mouths of new passageways, as if in those shadows he was seeking confirmation of his suspicions.

“Have you ever wondered why in the last century all the great metropolises hastened to build subways?’’

“To solve traffic problems?”

“Before there were automobiles, when there were only horse-drawn carriages? From a man of your intelligence I would have expected a more perceptive explanation.”

“You have one?”

“Perhaps,” Signor Salon said, and he looked pensive, absent. The conversation died. Then he said that he had to be running along. But, after shaking my hand, he lingered another few seconds, as if struck by a thought. “Apropos, that colonel—what was his name?—the one who came to Garamond some time ago to talk to you about a Templar treasure...have you had any news of him?’’

It was like a slap in the face, this brutal and indiscreet display of knowledge about something I considered private and buried.

I wanted to ask him how he knew, but I was afraid. I confined myself to saying, in an indifferent tone, “Oh, that old story. I’d forgotten all about it. But apropos: why did you say apropos?”

“Did I say that? Ah, yes, well, it seemed to me he had discovered something, underground...”

“How do you know?”

“I really can’t say. I can’t remember who spoke to me about it. A customer, perhaps. But my curiosity is always aroused when the underground world is involved. The little manias of old age. Good evening.”

He went off, and I stood there, to ponder the meaning of this encounter.

52

In certain regions of the Himalayas, among the twenty-two temples that represent the twenty-two Arcana of Hermes and the twenty-two letters of some sacred alphabets, Agarttha forms the mystic Zero, which cannot be found...A colossal chessboard that extends beneath the earth, through almost all the regions of the Globe.

—Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de I’lnde en Europe, Paris, Calmann Levy, 1886, pp. 54 and 65

When I got back, I told the story to Belbo and Diotallevi, and we ventured various hypotheses. Perhaps Salon, a gossiping eccentric who dabbled in mysteries, had happened to meet Ar-denti, and that was the whole story. Unless Salon knew something about Ardenti’s disappearance and was working for the ones who had caused him to disappear. Another hypothesis: Salon was a police informer...

Then, as our Diabolicals came and went, the memory of Salon faded, was lost among his similars.

One day, Aglie came to the office to report on some manuscripts Belbo had sent him. His opinions were precise, severe, comprehensive. Aglie was clever; it didn’t take him long to figure out the Garamond-Manutius double game, and we now talked openly in front of him. He understood: he would destroy a text with a few sharp observations, then remark with smooth cynicism that it would be fine for Manutius.

I asked him what he could tell me about Agarttha and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre.

“Saint-Yves d’Alveydre...” he said.  “A bizarre man, beyond any doubt. From his youth he spent time with the followers of Fabre d’Olivet. He became a humble clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, but ambitious...We naturally took a dim view of his marriage to Marie-Victoire...”

Aglie couldn’t resist shifting to the first person, as if he were reminiscing.

“Who was Marie-Victoire? I love gossip,” Belbo said. “Marie-Victoire de Risnitch, very beautiful when she was the intimate of the empress Eugenic. But by the time she met Saint-Yves, she was over fifty. And he was in his early thirties. For her, a mesalliance, of course. What’s more, to give him a title, she bought some property—I can’t remember where—that had belonged to a certain Marquis d’Alveydre. So, while our unscrupulous character boasted of his title, in Paris they sang songs about the gigolo. Since he could now live off his income, he devoted himself to his dream, which was to find a political formula that would lead to a harmonious society. Synarchy, as opposed to anarchy. A European society governed by three councils, representing economic power, judicial power, and spiritual power—the Church and the scientists, in other words. An enlightened oligarchy that would eliminate class conflicts. We’ve heard worse.” “What about Agarttha?”

“Saint-Yves claimed to have been visited one day by a mysterious Afghan, a man named Hadji Scharipf, who can’t have been an Afghan, because the name is clearly Albanian...This man revealed to him the secret dwelling place of the King of the World, though Saint-Yves himself never used that expression he called it Agarttha, the place that cannot be found.” “Where did he write this?”

“In his Mission de I’lnde en Europe, a work that, incidentally, has influenced a great deal of contemporary political thought. In Agarttha there are underground cities, and below them, closer to the center, live the five thousand sages that govern it. The number five thousand suggests, of course, the hermetic roots of the Vedic language, as you gentlemen know. And each root is a magic hierogram connected to a celestial power and sanctioned by an infernal power. The central dome of Agarttha is lighted from above by something like mirrors, which allow the light from the planet’s surface to arrive only through the enharmonic spectrum of colors, as opposed to the solar spectrum of our physics books, which is merely diatonic. The wise ones of Agarttha study all holy languages in order to arrive at the universal language, which is Vattan. When they come upon mysteries too profound, they levitate, and would crack their skulls against the vault of the dome if their brothers did not restrain them. They forge the lightning bolts, they guide the cyclic currents of the interpolar and intertropical fluids, the interferential extensions in the different zones of the earth’s latitude and longitude. They select species and have created small animals with extraordinary psychic powers, animals which have a tortoise shell with a yellow cross, a single eye, and a mouth at either end. And polypod animals which can move in all directions. Agarttha is probably where the Templars found refuge after their dispersion, and where they perform custodial duties. Anything else?”

“But...was he serious?” I asked.

“I believe he was. At first, we considered him a fanatic, but then we realized that he was referring, perhaps in a visionary, figurative way, to an occult direction of history. Isn’t it said that history is a bloodstained and senseless riddle? No, impossible; there must be a Design. There must be a Mind. That is why over the centuries men far from ignorant have thought of the Masters or the King of the World not as physical beings but as a collective symbol, as the successive, temporary incarnation of a Fixed Intention. An Intention with which the great priestly orders and the vanished chivalries were in touch.”

“Do you believe this?” Belbo asked.

“Persons more balanced than d’Alveydre seek the Unknown Superiors.”

“And do they find them?”

Aglie laughed, as if to himself. “What sort of Unknown Superiors would they be if they allowed the first person who comes along to know them? Gentlemen, we have work to do. There is one more manuscript here and—what a coincidence!—it’s a treatise on secret societies.”

“Any good?” Belbo asked.

“Perish the thought. But it could do for Manutius.”

53

Unable to control destinies on earth openly because governments would resist, this mystic alliance can act only through secret societies...These, gradually created as the need for them arises, are divided into distinct groups, groups seemingly in opposition, sometimes advocating the most contradictory policies in religion, politics, economics, and literature; but they are all connected, all directed by the invisible center that hides its power as it thus seeks to move all the scepters of the earth.

—J. M. Hoene-Wronski, quoted by P. Sedir, Histoire et doctrine des Rose-Croix, Bibliotheque des Hermetistes, Paris, 1910

One day I saw Signor Salon at the door of his laboratory. Suddenly, for no reason, I expected him to hoot like an owl. He greeted me as if I were an old friend and asked how things were going at work. I made a noncommittal gesture, smiled at him, and hurried on.

I was struck again by the thought of Agarttha. Saint-Yves’s ideas, as Aglie had explained them, might be fascinating to a Diabolical—but certainly not alarming. And yet in Salon’s words and in his face, when we met in Munich, there had been alarm.

So, as I went out, I decided to drop in at the library and look for La Mission de I’lnde en Europe.

There was the usual mob in the catalog room and at the call desk. With some shoving I got hold of the drawer I needed, found the call number, filled out a slip, and handed it to the clerk. He informed me that the book had been checked out— and, as usual in libraries, he seemed to enjoy giving me this news. But at that very moment a voice behind me said, “Actually, it is available. I just returned it.” I looked around and saw Inspector De Angelis.

And he recognized me—too quickly, I thought, since I had seen him in circumstances that for me were exceptional, whereas he had met me in the course of a routine inquiry. Also, in the Ardenti days I had had a wispy beard and longer hair. What a sharp eye!

Had he been keeping me under surveillance since my return to Italy? Or was he simply good at faces? Policemen had to master the science of observation, memorize features, names...

“Signor Casaubon! We’re reading the same books!”

I held out my hand.” “It’s Dr. Casaubon now. Has been for a while. Maybe I’ll take the police entrance exam, as you advised me that morning. Then I’ll be able to get the books first.”

“All you have to do is be here first,” he said. “But the book’s returned now, and you can collect it. Let me buy you a coffee meanwhile.”

The invitation made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t say no. We sat in a neighborhood cafe. He asked me how I happened to be interested in the mission of India, and I was tempted to ask him how he happened to be interested in it, but I decided first to deflect his suspicion. I told him that in my spare time I was continuing my study of the Templars. According to Eschen-bach, the Templars left Europe and went to India, some believe to the kingdom of Agarttha. Now it was his turn. “But tell me,” I asked, “why did you take out the book?”

“Oh, you know how these things go,” he replied. “Ever since you suggested that book on the Templars to me, I’ve been reading up on the subject. I don’t have to tell you that after the Templars, the next logical step is Agarttha.” Touche. Then he said: “I was joking. I took the book because...” He hesitated. “The fact is, when I’m off duty, I like to browse in libraries. It keeps me from turning into a robot, a mechanical cop. You could probably express the idea more elegantly...But tell me about yourself.”

I gave a performance: an autobiographical summary, down to the wonderful adventure of metals.

He asked me: “In that publishing firm, and in the one next door, aren’t you doing books on the occult sciences?”

How did he know about Manutius? From information gathered years before, when he was keeping an eye on Belbo? Or was he still on the Ardenti case?

“With characters like Colonel Ardenti turning up constantly at Garamond, and with Manutius there to handle them,” I said, “Signer Garamond decided that was rich soil, worth tilling. If you look for such types, you can find them by the carload.”

“But Ardenti disappeared. I hope the others don’t.”

“They haven’t yet, though I almost wish they would. However, satisfy my curiosity, Inspector. I imagine in your job people disappear, or worse, every day. Do you devote so much time to all of them?”

He looked at me with amusement. “What makes you think I’m still devoting time to Colonel Ardenti?”

All right, he was gambling, had raised the ante, and it was up to me now to call his bluff if I had the courage, make him show his cards. What was there to lose? “Come, Inspector,” I said, “you know everything about Garamond and Manutius, and you were looking for a book on Agarttha...”

“You mean Ardenti spoke to you about Agarttha?”

Touche again. Yes, Ardenti had spoken to us about Agarttha, too, as far as I could remember. But I parried: “No, only about the Templars.”

“I see,” he said. Then he added: “You mustn’t think we follow a case until it’s solved. That only happens on television. Being a cop is like being a dentist: a patient comes in, you give him a little of the old drill, prescribe something, he comes back in two weeks, and in the meantime you deal with a hundred other patients. A case like the colonel’s can remain in the active file maybe for ten years, and then, while you’re in the middle of a different case, taking some confession, there’s a hint, a clue, and, wham!, a short circuit in the brain, you get an idea—or else you don’t, and that’s it.”

“And what did you find recently that brought on a short circuit?”

“An indiscreet question, don’t you think? But there are no mysteries, believe me. The colonel came up again by chance. We were keeping an eye on a character, for quite different reasons, and found he was spending time at the Picatrix Club. You’ve heard of it?...”

“I know the magazine, not the club. What goes on there?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. People a bit loony, maybe, but well behaved. Then I remembered that Ardenti used to go there—a cop’s talent consists entirely of remembering things, a name, a face, even after ten years have gone by. And so I began wondering what was happening at Garamond. That’s all.”

“What does the Picatrix Club have to do with your political squad?”

“Perhaps it’s the impertinence of a clear conscience, but you seem tremendously curious.”

“You’re the one who invited me for coffee.”

“True, and both of us are off duty. See here: if you look at the world in a certain way, everything is connected to everything else.” A nice hermetic philosopheme, I thought. He immediately added: “I’m not saying that those people are connected with politics, but...There was a time when we went looking for the Red Brigades in squats and the Black Brigades in martial arts clubs; nowadays the opposite could be true. We live in a strange world. My job, I assure you, was easier ten years ago. Today, even among ideologies, there’s no consistency. There are times when I think of switching to narcotics. There, at least you can rely on a heroin pusher to push heroin.”

There was a pause—he was hesitating, I think. Then, from his pocket, he produced a notebook the size of a missal. “Look, Casaubon, you see some strange people as part of your job. You go to the library and look up even stranger books. Help me. What do you know about synarchy?”

“Now you’re embarrassing me. Almost nothing. I heard it mentioned in connection with Saint-Yves; that’s all.”

“What are they saying about it, around?”

“If they’re saying anything, I haven’t heard. To be frank, it sounds like fascism to me.”

“Actually, many of its theses were picked up by Action Francaise. If that were the whole story, I’d be okay. I find a group that talks about synarchy and I can give it a political color. But in my reading, I’ve learned that in 1929 a certain Vivian Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo founded a group called Polaris, which was inspired by the myth of the King of the World. They proposed a synarchic project: social service opposed to capitalist profit, the elimination of the class struggle through cooperatives...It sounds like a kind of Fabian socialism, a libertarian and communitarian movement. Note that both Polaris and the Irish Fabians were accused of being involved in a syn-archic plot led by the Jews. And who accused them? The Revue Internationale des societes secretes, which talks about a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot. Many of its contributors belonged to a secret right-wing organization called La Sapiniere. And they say that all these revolutionary groups are only the front for a diabolical plot hatched by an occultist cenacle. Now you’ll say: All right, Saint-Yves ended up inspiring reformist groups, but these ! days the right lumps everything together and sees it all as a demo-pluto-social-Judaic conspiracy. Mussolini did the same thing. But why accuse them of being controlled by an occultist cenacle? According to the little I know—take Picatrix, for example—those occultism people couldn’t care less about the workers’ movement.” “So it seems also to me, O Socrates. So?” “Thanks for the Socrates. But now we’re coming to the good part. The more I read on the subject, the more I get confused. In the forties various self-styled synarchic groups sprang up; they talked about a new European order led by a government of wise men, above party lines. And where did these groups meet? In Vichy collaborationist circles. Then, you say, we got it wrong; synarchy is right-wing. But hold on! Having read this far, I begin to see that there is one theme that finds them all in agreement: Synarchy exists and secretly rules the world. But here comes the ‘but’...” “But?”

“But on January 24, 1937, Dmitri Navachine, Mason and Martinist (I don’t know what Martinist means, but I think it’s one of those sects), economic adviser of the Front Populaire, after having been director of a Moscow bank, was assassinated by the Organisation secrete d’action revolutionnaire et nationale, better known as La Cagoule, financed by Mussolini. It was said then that La Cagoule was guided by a secret synarchy and that Navachine was killed because he had discovered its mysteries. A document originating from left-wing circles during the Occupation denounced a synarchic Pact of the Empire, which was responsible for the French defeat, a pact that was a manifestation of Portuguese-style fascism. But then it turned out that the pact was drawn up by Du Mas and Canudo and contained ideas they had published and publicized everywhere. Nothing secret about it. But these ideas were revealed as secret, extremely secret, in 1946 by one Husson, who denounced a revolutionary synarchic pact of the left, as he wrote in his Synarchie, panorama de 25 annees d’activite occulte, which he signed...wait, let me find it...Geoffrey de Charnay.” “Fine!” I said. “Charnay was a companion of Molay, the grand master of the Templars. They died together at the stake. Here we have a neo-Templar attacking synarchy from the right. But synarchy is born at Agarttha, which is the refuge of the Templars!”

“What did I tell you? You see, you’ve given me an additional clue. Unfortunately, it only increases the confusion. So, on the right, a synarchic pact of the left is denounced as socialist and secret, though it’s not really secret; it’s the same synarchic pact, as you saw, that was denounced by the left. And now we come to new revelations: synarchy is a Jesuit plot to undermine the Third Republic. A thesis expounded by Roger Mennevee, leftist. To allow me to sleep nights, my reading then tells me that in 1943 in certain Vichy military circles—Petainist, yes, but anti-German—documents circulated that prove synarchy was a Nazi plot: Hitler was a Rosicrucian influenced by the Masons, who now have moved from hatching a Judeo-Bolshevik plot to making an imperial German one.”

“So everything is settled.”

“If only that were all. Yet another revelation: Synarchy is a plot of the international technocrats. This was asserted in 1960 by one Villemarest, Le 14’ complot du 13 mai. The techno-synarchic plot wants to destabilize governments and, to do it, provokes wars, backs coups d’etat, foments schisms in political parties, promotes internecine hatreds...Do you recognize these synarchists? “

“My God, it’s the IMS, the Imperialist Multinational State— what the Red Brigades were talking about a few years ago!”

“The answer is correct. And now what does Inspector De Angelis do if he finds a reference to synarchy somewhere? He asks the advice of Dr. Casaubon, the Templar expert.”

“My answer: There exists a secret society with branches throughout the world, and its plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists.”

“You’re joking, but I—”

“I’m not joking. Come and read the manuscripts that turn up at Manutius. But if you want a more down-to-earth explanation, it’s like the story of the man with a bad stammer who complains that the radio station wouldn’t hire him as an announcer because he didn’t carry- a party card. We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external enemy to bind their followers together. As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”

“And if, on a train, I find a bomb wrapped in a flier that talks about synarchy, is it enough for me to say that this is a simple solution to a complex problem?”

“Why? Have you found bombs on trains that...No, excuse me. That’s really not my business. But why did you say that to me, then?”

“Because I was hoping you’d know more than I do. Because perhaps I’m relieved to see you can’t make head or tail of it either. You say you have to read lunatics by the carload and you consider it a waste of time. I don’t. For me, the works of your lunatics—by ‘your’ I’m referring to you normal people—are important texts. What a lunatic writes may explain the thinking of the man who puts the bomb on the train. Or are you afraid of becoming a police informer?”

“No, not at all. Besides, looking for things in card catalogs is my business. If the right piece of information turns up, I’ll keep you in mind.”

As he rose from his chair, De Angelis dropped the last question: “Among your manuscripts...have you ever found any reference to the Tres?”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. An organization, maybe. I don’t even know if it exists. I’ve heard it mentioned, and it occurred to me in connection with your lunatics. Say hello to your friend Belbo for me. Tell him I’m not keeping tabs on any of you. The fact is, I have a dirty job, and my misfortune is that I enjoy it.”

As I went home, I asked myself who had come out ahead. He had told me a number of things; I’d told him nothing. If I wanted to be suspicious, I could think perhaps that he had got something out of me without my being aware of it. But if you’re too suspicious, you fall into the psychosis of synarchic plots.

When I told Lia about this episode, she said: “If you ask me, he was sincere. He really did want to get it all off his chest. You think he can find anyone at police headquarters who will listen to him wonder whether Jeanne Canudo was right-wing or left? He only wanted to find out if it’s his fault he can’t understand it or if the whole thing is too difficult. And you weren’t able to give him the one true answer.’’

“The one true answer?”

“Of course. That there’s nothing to understand. Synarchy is God.”

“God?”

“Yes. Mankind can’t endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found—God, angels, devils. Synarchy performs the same function on a lesser scale.”

“Then I should have told him that people put bombs on trains because they’re looking for God?” “Why not?”

54

The prince of darkness is a gentleman.

—Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv

It was autumn. One morning I went to Via Marchese Gualdi, because I had to get Signer Garamond’s authorization to order some color photographs from abroad. I glimpsed Aglie in Si-gnora Grazia’s office, bent over the file of Manutius authors, but I didn’t disturb him, because I was late for my meeting.

When our business was over, I asked Signor Garamond what Aglie was doing in the secretary’s office.

“The man’s a genius,” Garamond said. “An extraordinary mind, keen, learned. The other evening, I took him to dinner with some of our authors, and he made me look great. What conversation! What style! A gentleman of the old school, an aristocrat; they’ve thrown away the mold. What knowledge, what culture—no, more, what information! He told delightful anecdotes about characters of a century ago, and I swear it was as if he had known them personally. Do you want to hear the idea he gave me as we were going home? He said we shouldn’t just sit and wait for Isis Unveiled authors to turn up on their own. It’s a waste of time and effort to read when you don’t even know whether the authors are willing to underwrite the expenses. Instead, we have a gold mine at our disposal: the list of all the Manutius authors of the last twenty years! You understand? We write to our old, glorious authors, or at least the ones who bought up their remainders, and we say to them: Dear sir, are you aware that we have inaugurated a series of works of erudition, tradition, and the highest spirituality? Would you, as an author of distinction and refinement, be interested in venturing into this terra incognita, et cetera, et cetera? A genius, I tell you. I believe he wants us all to join him Sunday evening. Plans to take us to a castle, a fortress—no, more, a villa in the Turin area. It seems that extraordinary things are to happen there, a rite, a sabbath, where someone will make gold or quicksilver. It’s a whole world to be discovered, my dear Casaubon, even if, as you know, I have the greatest respect for science, the science to which you are devoting yourself with such passion. Indeed, I am very, very pleased with your work, and yes, there’s that little financial adjustment you mentioned; I haven’t forgotten it, and in due course we’ll talk about it. Aglie told me the lady will also be there, the beautiful lady—or perhaps not beautiful, but attractive; there’s something about her eyes—that friend of Bel-bo’s—what’s her name—?”

“Lorenza Pellegrini.”

“Yes. There’s something—no?—between her and our Belbo.”

“I believe they’re good friends.”

“Ah! A gentleman’s answer. Bravo, Casaubon. But I do not inquire out of idle curiosity; the fact is that I feel like a father to all of you and...glissons, a la guerre comme a la guerre...Good-bye, dear boy.”

We really did have an appointment with Aglie in the hills near Turin, Belbo told me. A double appointment. The early hours of the evening would be a party in the castle of a very well-to-do Rosicrucian. Then Aglie would take us a few kilometers away, to a place where—at midnight, naturally—some kind of druidic rite, Belbo wasn’t sure what, would be held.

“I was also thinking,” Belbo added, “that we should sit down somewhere and give some thought to our history of metals, because here we keep being interrupted. Why don’t we leave Saturday and spend a couple of days in my old house in ***? It’s a beautiful spot; you’ll see, the hills are worth it. Diotallevi is coming, and maybe Lorenza will, too. Of course you can bring along anyone you want.”

He didn’t know Lia, but he knew I had a companion. I said I’d come alone. Lia and I had quarreled two days before. Nothing serious; it would be forgotten in a few days, but meanwhile I wanted to get away from Milan.

So we all went to ***, the Garamond trio and Lorenza Pellegrini. At our departure, a tense moment. When it came time to get into the car, Lorenza said, “Maybe I’ll stay behind, so you three can work in peace. I’ll join you later with Simon.”

Belbo, both hands on the wheel, locked his elbows, stared straight ahead, and said in a low voice, “Get in.” Lorenza got in, and all through the trip, sitting up front, she kept her hand on the back of Belbo’s neck as he drove in silence.

* * * was still the town Belbo had known during the war. But new houses were few, he told us, agriculture was in decline, because the young people had migrated to the city. He pointed to hills, now pasture, that had once been yellow with grain. The town appeared suddenly, after a curve at the foot of the low hill where Belbo’s house was. We got a view, beyond it, of the Mon-ferrato plain, covered with a light, luminous mist. As the car climbed, Belbo directed our attention to the hill opposite, almost completely bare: at the top of it, a chapel flanked by two pines. “It’s called the Bricco,” he said, then added: “It doesn’t matter if it has no effect on you. We used to go there for the Angel’s lunch on Easter Monday. Now you can reach it in the car in five minutes, but then we went on foot, and it was a pilgrimage.”

55

I call a theatre [a place in which] all actions, all words, all particular subjects are shown as in a public theatre, where comedies and tragedies are acted.

—Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Historia, Tomi Secundi Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda, Oppenheim (?), 1620 (?), p. 55

We arrived at the villa. Villa—actually, a large farmhouse, with great cellars on the ground floor, where Adeline Canepa—the quarrelsome tenant who had denounced Uncle Carlo to the partisans—once made wine from the vineyards of the Covasso land. It had long been unoccupied.

In a little peasant house nearby Adeline Canepa’s aunt still lived—a .very old woman, Belbo told us, who tended a little vegetable garden, kept a few hens and a pig. The others were now long dead, uncle and aunt, the Canepas; only this centenarian remained. The land had been sold years before to pay the inheritance taxes and other debts. Belbo knocked at the door of the little house. The old woman appeared on the threshold, took a while to recognize the visitor, then made a great show of deference, inviting us in, but Belbo, after having embraced and calmed her, cut the meeting short.

We entered the villa, and Lorenza gave cries of joy as she discovered stairways, corridors, shadowy rooms with old furniture. As usual, Belbo played everything down, remarking only that each of us has the Tara he deserves, but he was clearly moved. He continued to visit the house, from time to time, he told us, but not often.

“It’s a good place to work: cool in summer, and in winter the thick walls protect you against the cold, and there are stoves everywhere. Naturally, when I was a child, an evacuee, we lived only in two side rooms at the end of the main corridor. Now I’ve taken possession of my uncle and aunt’s wing. I work here, in Uncle Carlo’s study.” There was a secretaire with little space for a sheet of paper but plenty of small drawers, both visible and concealed. “I couldn’t put Abulafia here,” Belbo said. “But the rare times I come, I like to write by hand, as I did then.” He showed us a majestic cupboard. “When I’m dead, remember this contains all my juvenilia, the poems I wrote when I was sixteen, the sketches for sagas in six volumes made at eighteen, and so on...”

“Let’s see! Let’s see!” Lorenza cried, clapping her hands and advancing with exaggerated feline tread toward the cupboard.

“Stop right where you are,” Belbo said. “There’s nothing to see. I don’t even look at it myself anymore. And, in any case, when I’m dead, I’ll come back and burn everything.”

“This place has ghosts, I hope,” Lorenza said.

“It does now. In Uncle Carlo’s day, no; it was lots of fun then. Georgic. That’s why I come. It’s wonderful working at night while the dogs bark in the valley.”

He showed us the rooms where we would be sleeping: mine, Diotallevi’s, Lorenza’s. Lorenza looked at her room, touched the old bed and its great white counterpane, sniffed the sheets, said it was like being in one of her grandmother’s stories, because everything smelled of lavender. Belbo said it wasn’t lavender, it was mildew. Lorenza said it didn’t matter, and then, leaning against the wall, her hips thrust forward as if she were at the pinball machine, she asked, “Am I sleeping here by myself?”

Belbo looked away, then at us, then away again. He made as if to leave and said: “We’ll talk about it later. In any case, if you want it, you have a refuge all your own.” Diotallevi and I moved off, but we heard Lorenza ask Belbo if he was ashamed of her. He said that if he hadn’t offered her the room, she would have asked him where she was supposed to sleep. “I made the first move, so you have a choice,” he said. “The wily Turk,” she said. “In that case, I’ll sleep here in my darling little room.” “Sleep where you want,” Belbo said, irritated. “But the others are here to work. Let’s go out on the terrace.”

So we set to work on the broad terrace, where a pergola stood, supplied with cold drinks and plenty of coffee. Alcohol forbidden till evening.

From the terrace we could see the Bricco, and below it a large plain building with a yard and a soccer field—all inhabited by multicolored little figures, children, it seemed to me. “It’s the Salesian parish hall,” Belbo explained. “That’s where Don Tico taught me to play. In the band.”

I remembered the trumpet Belbo had denied himself after the dream. I asked: “Trumpet or clarinet?”

He had a moment’s panic. “How did you...Ah, yes, I told you about the dream, the trumpet. Don Tico taught Tie the trumpet, but in the band I played the bombardon.”

“What’s a bombardon?”

“Oh, that’s all kid stuff. Back to work now.”

But as we worked, I noticed that he often glanced at that hall. I had the impression that he talked about other things as an excuse to look at it. For example, he would interrupt our discussion and say:

“Just down there was some of the heaviest shooting at the end of the war. Here in *** there was a kind of tacit agreement between the Fascists and the partisans. Two years in a row the partisans came down from the hills in spring and occupied the town, and the Fascists kept their distance and didn’t make trouble. The Fascists weren’t from around here; the partisans were all local boys. In the event of a fight, they could move easily; they knew every cornfield and the woods and hedgerows. The Fascists mostly stayed holed up in the town and ventured out only for raids. In winter it was harder for the partisans to stay down in the plain: there was no place to hide, and in the snow they could be seen from a distance and picked off by a machine gun even a kilometer away. So they climbed up into the higher hills. There, too, they knew the passes, the caves, the shelters. The Fascists returned to control the plain. But that spring we were- on the eve of liberation, the Fascists were still here, and they were dubious about going back to the city, sensing that the final blow would be delivered there, as it in fact was, around April 25. I believe there was communication between the Fascists and the partisans. The latter held off, wanting to avoid a clash, sure that something would happen soon. At night Radio London gave more and more reassuring news, the special messages for the Franchi brigade became more frequent: Tomorrow it will rain again; Uncle Pietro has brought the bread—that sort of thing. Maybe you heard them, Diotallevi...Anyway, there must have been a misunderstanding, because the partisans came down and the Fascists hadn’t left.

“One day my sister was here on the terrace, and she came inside and told us there were two men playing tag with guns. We weren’t surprised: they were kids, on both sides, whiling away the time with their weapons. Once—it was only in fun— two of them really did shoot, and a bullet hit the trunk of a tree in the driveway. My sister was leaning on the tree; she didn’t even notice, but the neighbors did, and after that she was told that when she saw men playing with guns, she must go inside. ‘They’re playing again,’ she said, coming in, to show how obedient she was. And at that point we heard the first volley. Then a second, a third, and then the rounds came thick and fast. You cquld hear the bark of the shotguns, the ratatat of the automatic rifles, and a duller sound, maybe hand grenades. Finally, the machine guns. We realized they weren’t playing any longer, but we didn’t have time to discuss it, because by then we couldn’t hear our own voices. Bang, wham, ratatat! We crouched under the sink—me, my sister, and Mama. Then Uncle Carlo arrived, along the corridor, on all fours, to tell us that we were too exposed, we should come over to their wing. We did, and Aunt Caterina was crying because Grandmother was out...”

“Is that when your grandmother found herself facedown in a field, in the cross fire?”

“How did you know about that?”

“You told me in ‘73, after the demonstration that day.”

“My God, what a memory! A man has to be careful what he says around you...Yes. But my father was also out. As we learned later, he had taken shelter in a doorway in town, and couldn’t leave it because of all the shooting back and forth in the street, and from the tower of the town hall a Black Brigade squad was raking the square with a machine gun. The former mayor of the city, a Fascist, was standing in the same doorway. At a certain point, he said he was going to run for it: to get home, all he had to do was reach the corner. He waited for a quiet moment, then flung himself out of the doorway, reached the corner, and was mowed down. But the instinctive reaction of my father, who had also gone through the First World War, was: Stay in the doorway.”

“This is a place full of sweet memories,” Diotallevi remarked.

“You won’t believe it,” Belbo said, “but they are sweet. They’re the only real things I remember.”

The others didn’t understand, and I was only beginning to. Now I know for sure. In those months especially, when he was navigating the sea of falsehoods of the Diabolicals, and after years of wrapping his disillusion in the falsehoods of fiction, Belbo remembered his days in *** as a time of clarity: a bullet was a bullet, you ducked or got it, and the two opposing sides were distinct, marked by their colors, red or black, without ambiguities—or at least it had seemed that way to him. A corpse was a corpse was a corpse was a corpse. Not like Colonel Ardenti, with his slippery disappearance. I thought that perhaps I should tell Belbo about synarchy, which in those years was already making inroads. Hadn’t the encounter between Uncle Carlo and Mongo been synarchic, really, since both men, on opposing sides, were inspired by the same ideal of chivalry? But why should I deprive Belbo of his Combray? The memories were sweet because they spoke to him of the one truth he had known; doubt would begin only afterward. Though, as he had hinted to me, even in the days of truth he had been a spectator, watching, the birth of other men’s memories, the birth of History, or of many histories: all stories that he would not be the one to write.

Or had there been, for him, too, a moment of glory and of choice? Because now he said, “And also, that day I performed the one heroic deed of my life.”

“My John Wayne,” Lorenza said. “Tell me.”

“Oh, it was nothing. After crawling to my uncle’s part of the house, I stubbornly insisted on standing up in the corridor. The window was at the end, we were on the upper floor, nobody could hit me, I argued. I felt like a captain standing erect in the center of the battle while the bullets whistle around him. Uncle Carlo became angry, roughly pulled me into the room; I almost started crying because the fun was over, and at that moment we heard three shots, glass shattering, and a kind of ricochet, as if someone were bouncing a tennis ball in the corridor. A bullet had come through the window, glanced off a water pipe, and buried itself in the floor at the very spot where I had been standing. If I had stayed there, I would have been wounded. Maybe.”

“My God, I wouldn’t want you a cripple,” Lorenza said.

“Maybe today I’d be happier,” Belbo said.

But the fact was that even in this case he hadn’t chosen. He had let his uncle pull him away.

About an hour later, he was again distracted. “Then Adeline Canepa came upstairs. He said we’d all be safer in the cellar. He and my uncle hadn’t spoken for years, as I told you. But in this tragic moment, Adeline Canepa had become a human being again, and Uncle even shook his hand. So we spent an hour in the darkness among the barrels, with the smell of countless vintages, which made your head swim a little, not to mention the shooting outside. Then the gunfire died down, became muffled. We realized one side was retreating, but we didn’t know which, until, from a window above our heads, which overlooked a little path, we heard a voice, in dialect: ‘Monssu, i’e d’la repubblica bele si?’ “

“What does that mean?” Lorenza asked.

“Roughly: Sir, would you be so kind as to inform me if there are still any sustainers of the Italian Social Republic in these parts? Republic, at that time, was a bad word. The voice was a partisan’s, asking a passerby or someone at a window, and that meant the Fascists had gone. It was growing dark. After a little while both Papa and Grandmother arrived, and told of their adventures. Mama and Aunt prepared something to eat, while Uncle and Adelino Canepa ceremoniously stopped speaking to each other again. For the rest of the evening we heard shooting in the distance, toward the hills. The partisans were after the fugitives. We had won.”

Lorenza kissed Belbo on the head, and he wrinkled his nose. He knew he had won, though with some help from the Fascists. In reality it had been like watching a movie. For a moment, risking the ricocheting bullet, he had entered the action on the screen, but only for a moment, on the run, as in Hellzapoppin, Where the reels get mixed up and an Indian on horseback rides into a ballroom and asks which way did they go. Somebody says, “That way,” and the Indian gallops off into another story.

56

He began playing his shining trumpet with such power that the whole mountain rang.

—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 1, p. 4

We had reached the chapter on the wonders of hydraulic pipes, and a sixteenth-century engraving from the Spiritalia of Heron depicted a kind of altar with a steam-driven apparatus that played a trumpet.

I brought Belbo back to his reminiscing. “How did it go, then, the story of that Don Tycho Brahe, or whatever his name was—the man who taught you to play the trumpet?”

“Don Tico. I never found out if Tico was a nickname or his last name. I’ve never gone back to the parish hall. The first time I went there, it was by chance: Mass, catechism, all sorts of games, and if you won, he gave you a little holy card of Blessed Domenico Savio, that adolescent with the wrinkled canvas pants, always hanging on to Don Bosco in the statues, his eyes raised to heaven, not listening to the other boys, who are telling dirty jokes. I learned that Don Tico had formed a band, boys between ten and fourteen. The little ones played toy clarinets, fifes, soprano sax, and the bigger ones carried the tubas and the bass drum. They had uniforms, khaki tunics and blue trousers, and visored caps. A dream, and I wanted to be part of it. Don Tico said he needed a bombardon.”

He gave us a superior look, and said, as if repeating familiar information: “A bombardon is a kind of tuba, a bass horn in E flat. It’s the stupidest instrument in the whole band. Most of the time it just goes oompah-oompah-oompah, or—when the beat changes—pa-pah, pa-pah, pa-pah, It’s easy to learn, though. Belonging to the brass family, it works more or less like the trumpet. The trumpet demands more breath, and you need an embouchure—you know, that kind of callus on the upper lip, like Louis Armstrong...Then you get a clear, clean sound, and you don’t hear the blowing. The important thing is not to puff out your cheeks: that only happens in movies, cartoons, or New Orleans brothels.”

“What about the trumpet?”

“The trumpet I learned on my own, during those summer afternoons when there was nobody at the parish hall, and I would hide in the seats of the little theater...But I studied the trumpet for erotic reasons. You see that little villa over there, a kilometer from the hall? That’s where Cecilia lived, the daughter of the Salesians’ great patroness. So every time the band performed, on holy days of obligation, after the procession, in the yard of the parish hall, and especially in the theater before performances of the amateur dramatic society, Cecilia and her mama were always in the front row, in the place of honor, next to the provost of the cathedral. In the theater the band would begin with a march that was called ‘A Good Start.’ It opened with trumpets, the trumpets in B flat, gold and silver, carefully polished for the occasion. The trumpets stood up, played by themselves. Then they sat down, and the band began. Playing the trumpet was the only way for me to attract Cecilia’s attention.”

“The only way?” Lorenza asked, moved.

“There was no other way. First, I was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half, and a girl thirteen and a half is already a woman; a boy at thirteen is a snot-nose kid. Besides, she loved an alto sax, a certain Papi, a mangy horror, he seemed to me, but she only had eyes for him, as he bleated lasciviously, because the saxophone, when it isn’t Ornette Coleman’s and it’s part of a band—and played by the horrendous Papi—is a goatish, guttural instrument, with the voice of, say, a fashion model who’s taken to drink and turning tricks...”

“What do you know about models who turn tricks?”

“Anyway, Cecilia didn’t even know I existed. Of course, in the evening, when I struggled up the hill to fetch the milk from a farm above us, I invented splendid stories in which she was kidnapped by the Black Brigades and I rushed to save her as the       ! bullets whistled around my head and went chack-chack as they hit the sheaves of wheat. I revealed to her what she couldn’t have known: that in my secret identity I headed the Resistance in the        j whole Monferrato region, and she confessed to me that this was        j what she had always hoped, and at that point I would feel a       j guilty flood of honey in my veins—I swear, not even my foreskin got wet; it was something else, something much more awesome and grand—and on coming home, I would go and confess...I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she       ! hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she’s always       i dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetua-       ‘ tion of the vile species. In short, if I were switched to the trumpet, Cecilia would be unable to ignore me: on my feet, gleaming, while the saxophone sits miserably on his chair. The trumpet is warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious; it sounds the charge. The saxophone plays so that young punks in the slums, their hair slicked down with brilliantine, can dance cheek to cheek with sweating girls. I studied the trumpet like a madman, then went to Don Tico and said: Listen to this. And I was Oscar Levant when he had his first tryout on Broadway with Gene Kelly. Don Tico said: You’re a trumpet, all right, but...

“How dramatic this is,” Lorenza said. “Go on. Don’t keep us on pins and needles.”

“But I had to find somebody to take my place on the bombardon. Work out something, Don Tico said. So I worked out something. Now I must tell you, dear children, that in those days there lived in ***, a couple of wretches, classmates of mine, though they were two years older than I, and this fact tells you something about their mental ability. These two brutes were named Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo. Asterisk: Historical fact.”

“What?” Lorenza asked.

I explained, smugly: “When Salgari, in his adventure stories, includes a true event, or something he thinks is true—let’s say that, after Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull eats General Custer’s heart—he always puts an asterisk and a footnote that says: Historical fact.”

“Yes, and it’s a historical fact that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo really had those names, but the names were the least of it. A real pair of sneaks: they stole comic books from the newsstand, shell cases from other boys’ collections. And they would think nothing of parking their greasy salami sandwich on your prized Christmas book, a deluxe volume of tales of the high seas. Cantalamessa called himself a Communist, Bo, a Fascist, but they were both ready to sell themselves to the enemy for a slingshot. They told stories about their sexual prowess, with erroneous anatomical information, and argued over who had masturbated more the night before. Here were two villains ready for anything; why not the bombardon? So I decided to seduce them. I sang the praises of the band uniform, I took them to public performances, I held out hopes of amatory triumphs with the Daughters of Mary...They fell for it. I spent my days in the theater with a long stick, as I had seen in illustrated pamphlets about missionaries; I rapped them on the knuckles when they missed a note. The bombardon has only three keys, but it’s the embouchure that matters, as I said. I won’t bore you any further, my little listeners. The day came, after long sleepless afternoons, when I could introduce to Don Tico two bombardons—I won’t say perfect, but at least acceptable. Don Tico was convinced; he put them in uniform and moved me to the trumpet. Within the space of a week, for the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, for the opening of the theatrical season with They Had to See Paris, there before the curtain, in the presence of the authorities, I was standing to play the opening bars of ‘Good Start.’ “

“Oh, joyous moment,” Lorenza said, making a face of tender jealousy. “And Cecilia?”

“She wasn’t there. Maybe she was sick. I don’t know. But she wasn’t there.”

He raised his eyes and surveyed the audience, and at that moment he was bard—or jester. He calculated the pause. “Two days later, Don Tico sent for me and told me that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo had ruined the evening. They wouldn’t keep time, their minds wandered when they weren’t playing, they joked and never came in at the right place. ‘The bombardon,’ Don Tico said to me, ‘is the backbone of the band, its rhythmic conscience, its soul. The band, it is a flock; the instruments are the sheep, the bandmaster the shepherd, but the bombardon is the faithful snarling dog that keeps the flock together. The bandmaster looks first to the bombardon, for if the bombardon follows him, the sheep will follow. Jacopo, my boy, I must ask of you a great sacrifice: to go back to the bombardon. You have a good sense of rhythm, you will keep those other two in time for me. I promise, as soon as they can play on their own, I’ll let you play the trumpet.’ I owed everything to Don Tico. I said yes. And on the next holy day the trumpets rose to their feet and played the opening of ‘Good Start’ in front of Cecilia, once more in the first row. But I was in the darkness, a bombardon among bombardons. As for those two wretches, they never were able to play on their own, and I never went back to the trumpet.

The war ended, I returned to the city, abandoned music, the brass family, and never even learned Cecilia’s last name.”

“Poor boy,” Lorenza said, hugging him from behind. “But you still have me.”

“I thought you like saxophones,” Belbo said. Then he turned and kissed her hand. “But, to work,” he said, serious again. “We’re here to create a story of the future, not a remembrance of things past.’’

That evening, the lifting of the ban on alcohol was much celebrated. Jacopo seemed to have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in imagining absurd machines—only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented. At midnight, after a full day, we all decided it was time to experience what it was like sleeping in the hills.

On my bed the sheets were even damper than they had been in the afternoon. Jacopo had insisted that we use a “priest”: an oval frame that kept the covers raised and had a place for a little brazier with embers—he wanted to make sure we tasted all the pleasures of rural life. But when dampness is inherent, a bed-warmer encourages it: you feel welcome warmth, but the sheets remain humid. Oh, well. I lit a lamp, the kind with a fringed shade, where the mayflies flutter until they die, as the poet says, and I tried to make myself sleepy by reading the newspaper.

For an hour or two I heard footsteps in the corridor, an opening and closing of doors, and the last closing was a violent slam. Lorenza Pellegrini putting Belbo’s nerves to the test.

I was half-asleep when I heard a scratching at the door, my door. I couldn’t tell whether it was an animal or not (I had seen neither dogs nor cats in the house), but I had the impression that it was an invitation, a request, a trap. Maybe Lorenza was doing it because she knew Belbo was spying on her. Maybe not. Until then, I had considered Lorenza Belbo’s property—at least as far as I was concerned—and besides, now that I was living with Lia, other women didn’t interest me. The sly glances, often conspiratorial, that Lorenza gave me in the office or in a bar when she was teasing Belbo, as if seeking an ally or a witness, were part—I had always thought—of the game she played. Without a doubt, Lorenza had a talent for looking at any man as if challenging his sexual capacity. But it was a curious challenge, as if she were saying: “I want you, but only to show how afraid you really are...” That night, however, hearing her fingernails scrape my door, I felt something different. It was desire: I desired Lorenza.

I stuck my head under the pillow and thought of Lia. I want to have a child with Lia, I said to myself. And I’ll make him (or her) learn the trumpet as soon as he (or she) has enough breath.

57

On every third tree a lantern had been hung, and a splendid virgin, also dressed in blue, lighted them with a raarvelous torch, and I lingered, longer than necessary, to admire the sight, which was of an ineffable beauty.

—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 2, p. 21

Toward noon Lorenza joined us on the terrace, smiling, and announced that she had found a terrific train that stopped at *** at twelve-thirty, and with only one change she could get back to Milan in the afternoon. Would we drive her, she asked, to the station?

Belbo continued leafing through some notes. “I thought Aglie was expecting you, too,” he said. “In fact, it seemed to me he organized the whole expedition just for you.”

“That’s his problem,” Lorenza said. “Who’s driving me?”

Belbo stood up and said to us, “It’ll only take a moment; I’ll be right back. Then we can stay here another couple of hours. Lorenza, you had a bag?”

I don’t know if they said anything to each other during the trip to the station. Belbo was back in about twenty minutes and resumed working without referring to the incident.

At two o’clock we found a comfortable restaurant in the market square, and the choosing of food and wine gave Belbo further opportunity to recall his childhood. But he spoke as if he were quoting from someone else’s biography. He had lost the narrative felicity of the day before. In midafternoon we set off to join Aglie and Garamond.

Belbo drove southwest, and the landscape changed gradually, kilometer by kilometer. The hills of ***, even in late autumn, were gentle, domestic, but as we went on, the horizons became more vast, at every curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages; we glimpsed endless vistas. Like Darien, Diotallevi remarked, verbalizing these discoveries. We climbed in third gear toward great expanses and the outline of mountains, which at the end of the plateau was already fading into a wintry haze. Though we were already in the mountains, it seemed to be a plain modulated by dunes. As if the hand of a clumsy demiurge had compressed heights that seemed to him excessive, transforming them into a lumpy dough that extended all the way to the sea or—who knows?—to the slopes of harsher and more determined chains.

We reached the specified village and met Aglie and Gara-mond, as arranged, at the cafe in the main square. If Aglie was displeased to hear that Lorenza wasn’t coming, he gave no indication of it. “Our exquisite friend does not wish to take part, in the presence of others, in the mysteries that define her. A singular modesty, which I appreciate,” he said. And that was all.

We continued, Garamond’s Mercedes in the lead and Belbo’s Renault behind, until, as the sunlight was dying, we came within sight of a strange yellow edifice on a hill, a kind of eighteenth-century castle, from which extended terraces with flowers and trees, flourishing despite the season.

As we reached the foot of the hill, we found ourselves in an open space where many cars were parked. “We stop here,” Aglie said, “and continue on foot.”

Dusk was now becoming night. The path was illuminated for us by a host of torches that burned along the slope.

It’s odd, but of everything that happened, from that moment until late at night, I have memories at once clear and confused. I reviewed them the other evening in the periscope and sensed a family resemblance between the two experiences. Yes, I said to myself, now you are here, in an unnatural situation, groggy from the smell of old wood, imagining yourself in a tomb or in the belly of a ship as a transformation is taking place. You have only to peer outside the cabin, and you will see objects in the gloom that earlier today were motionless, but now they stir like Eleusinian shadows among the fumes of a spell. And so it had been that evening at the castle: the lights, the surprises of the route, the words I heard, and then the incense; everything conspired to make me feel I was dreaming, but dreaming the way you dream when you are on the verge of waking, when you dream that you are dreaming.

I should remember nothing, yet, on the contrary, I remember everything, not as if I had lived it, but as if it had been told to me by someone else.

I do not know if what I remember, with such anomalous clarity, is what happened or is only what I wished had happened, but it was definitely on that evening that the Plan first stirred in our minds, stirred as a desire to give shape to shapelessness, to transform into fantasized reality that fantasy that others wanted to be real.

“The route itself is ritual,” Aglie was telling us as we climbed the hill. “These are hanging gardens, just like—or almost—the ones Salomon de Caus devised for Heidelberg, that is, for the Palatine elector Frederick V, in the great Rosicrucian century. The light is poor, and so it should be, because it is better to sense than to see: our host has not reproduced the Salomon de Caus design literally; he had concentrated it in a narrower space. The gardens of Heidelberg imitated the macrocosm, but the person who reconstructed them here has imitated only the microcosm. Look at that rocaille grotto...Decorative, no doubt. But Caus had in mind the emblem of the Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, where coral is the philosopher’s stone. Caus knew that the heavenly bodies can be influenced by the form of a garden, because there are patterns whose configuration mimes the harmony of the universe...”

“Fantastic,” Garamond said. “But how does a garden influence the planets?”

“There are signs that attract one another, that look at one another, embrace, and enforce love. But they do not have—they must not have—a certain and definite form. A man will try out giveij forces according to the dictates of his passion or the impulse of his spirit; this happened with the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. For there can be no relationship between us and divine beings except through seals, figures, characters, and ceremonies. Thus the divinities speak to us through dreams and oracles. And that is what these gardens are. Every aspect of this terrace reproduces a mystery of the alchemist’s art, but unfortunately we can no longer read it, not even our host can. An unusual devotion to secrecy, you will agree, in this man who spends what he has saved over the years in order to design ideograms whose meaning he has lost.”

As we climbed from terrace to terrace, the gardens changed. Some were in the form of a labyrinth, others in the form of an emblem, but each terrace could be viewed in its entirety only from a higher one. Looking down, I saw the outline of a crown, and other patterns I had been unable to embrace as I was passing through them. But even from above, I could not decipher them. Each terrace, seen as one moved among its hedges, presented some images, but the perspective from above revealed new, even contradictory images, as if every step of that stairway spoke two different languages at once.

As we moved higher, we noticed some small structures. A fountain of phallic shape stood beneath a kind of arch or portico, and there was a Neptune trampling a dolphin, a door with vaguely Assyrian columns, an arch of imprecise form, as if polygons had been set upon other polygons, and each construction was surmounted by the statue of an animal: an elk, a monkey, a lion...

“And all this means something?” Garamond asked.

“Unquestionably! Just read the Mundus Symbolicus of Pici-nelli, which, incidentally, Alciati foresaw with extraordinary prophetic power. The whole garden may be read as a book, or as a spell, which is, after all, the same thing. If you knew the words, you could speak what the garden says and you would then be able to control one of the countless forces that act in the sublunar world. This garden is an instrument for ruling the universe.”

He showed us a grotto. A growth of algae; the skeletons of marine animals, whether natural or not, I couldn’t say; perhaps they were in plaster or stone...A naiad could be discerned embracing a bull with the scaly tail of some great Biblical fish; it lay in a stream of water that flowed from the shell a Triton held like an amphora.

“I will tell you the deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole at the top, also, the water spurts out below.”

“Isn’t that obvious?” I said. “Air enters at the top and presses the water down.”

“A typical scientific explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second case, but why it refuses to come out in the first case.”

“And why does it refuse?” Garamond asked eagerly.

“Because, if it came out, it would leave a vacuum in the vessel, and nature abhors a vacuum. Nequaquam vacui was a Rosicrucian principle, which modern science has forgotten.”

“Very impressive,” Garamond said. “Casaubon, this has to be put in our wonderful adventure of metals, these things must be highlighted: remember that. And don’t tell me water’s not a metal. You must use your imagination.”

“Excuse me,” Belbo said to Aglie, “but your argument is simply post hoc ergo ante hoc. What follows causes what came before.”

“You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn’t. Nature doesn’t; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.’’

* * *

As we climbed, we encountered other guests. Belbo nudged Diotallevi, who said in a whisper: “Ah, yes, facies hermetica.”

And among the pilgrims with the facies hermetica, a little off to one side, a stiff smile of condescension on his lips, was Signer Salon. I nodded, he nodded.

“You know Salon?” Aglie asked me.

“You mean you know him?” I asked. “I do, of course. We live in the same building. What do you think of him?”

“I know him slightly. Some friends, whose word I trust, tell me he’s a police informer.”

That’s why Salon knew about Garamond and Ardenti. What was the connection, exactly, between Salon and De Angelis? But I confined myself to asking Aglie: “What is a police informer doing at a party like this?”

“Police informers,” Aglie said, “go everywhere. They can use any experience for inventing their confidential reports. For the police, the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.”

“But why was Salon invited?” I asked.

“My friend,” Aglie replied, “probably because our host respects the golden rule of sapiental thought, which says that any error can be the unrecognized bearer of truth. True esotericism does not fear contradiction.”

“You’re telling me that, finally, all contradictions agree.”

“Quod ubique, quod ab omnibus^et quod semper. Initiation is the discovery of the underlying and perennial philosophy.”

With all this philosophizing, we had reached the top terrace and were on a path through a broad garden that led to the entrance of the castle or villa. In the light of a torch larger than the others and set upon a column, we saw a girl wrapped in a blue garment spangled with golden stars. In her hand she held a trumpet, the kind heralds blow in operas. As in one of those holy plays where the angels are adorned with tissue-paper feathers, the girl wore on her shoulders two large white wings decorated with almond-shaped figures, each with a dot in the center, looking almost like an eye.

Professor Camestres was there, one of the first Diabolicals to visit us at Garamond, the adversary of the Ordo Templi Orientis. We had difficulty recognizing him, because he was costumed most singularly, though Aglie said it was appropriate to the occasion: a white linen toga, loins girt by a red ribbon that also crisscrossed both chest and back, and a seventeenth-century hat to which were pinned four red roses. He knelt before the girl with the trumpet and uttered some words.

“It’s true,” Garamond murmured, “there are more things in heaven and earth...”

We went through a storied doorway, which reminded me of the Genoa cemetery. Above it, an intricate neoclassical allegory and the carved words: CONDOLED ET CONGRATULATOR.

Inside, the guests were many and lively, crowding around a buffet in a spacious hall from which two staircases rose to upper floors. I saw other faces not unknown to me, among them Bra-manti and—to my surprise—Commendatore De Gubernatis, an SEA already exploited by Garamond, but perhaps not yet made to face the terrible prospect of having all the copies of his masterpiece pulped, because he approached my boss with a show of obsequious gratitude. Aglie was in turn approached obsequiously by a tiny man with wild eyes, whose thick French accent told us that this was the Pierre we had heard accusing Bramanti of sorcery through the curtain of Aglie’s study.

I went to the buffet. There were pitchers with colored liquids I couldn’t identify. I poured myself a yellow beverage that resembled wine; it wasn’t bad, tasting like an old-fashioned cordial, and it was definitely alcoholic. Perhaps there was a drug in it as well: my head began to swim. Around me facies her-meticae swarmed, the stern countenances of retired prefects, fragments of conversation...

“In the first stage you must renounce all communication with other minds; in the second you project thoughts and images into beings, infuse places with emotional auras, gain control over the animal kingdom, and in the third stage you project your double— bilocation—like the yogis, and you can appear in different plates simultaneously and in different forms. Beyond that, it’s a question of passing to hypersensitive knowledge of vegetable essences. Then, you achieve dissociation, you assume telluric form, dissolving in one place, reappearing in another, but intact, not just as a double. The final stage is the extension of physical life,...”

“Not immortality...”

“Not at once.”

“What about you?”

“It takes concentration, it’s hard work, and, you know, I’m not twenty anymore...”

I found my group again. They were just entering a room with white walls, curved corners. In the rear, as in a muse’e Grevin— but the image that came into my mind that evening was the altar I had seen in Rio,’ in the tenda de umbanda—were two wax statues, almost life-size, clad in material that glittered like sequins, pure thrift shop. One statue was of a lady on a throne, with an immaculate (or almost immaculate) garment studded with rhinestones. Above her, from wires, hung creatures of indefinite form, made, I thought, out of Lenci felt. In one corner, a loudspeaker: a distant sound of trumpets, music of good quality, perhaps Gabrieli. The sound effects showed better taste than the visuals. To the right, a second female figure, dressed in crimson velvet with a white girdle, and on her head a crown of laurel. She held gilded scales. Aglie explained to us the various symbols, but I was not paying attention; I was interested in the expressions of many of the guests, who moved from image to image with an air of reverence and emotion.

“They’re no different from those who go to the sanctuary to see the Black Madonna in an embroidered dress covered with silver hearts,” I said to Belbo. “Do the pilgrims think it’s the mother of Christ in flesh and blood? No, but they don’t think the opposite, either. They delight in the similarity, seeing the spectacle as a vision and the vision as a reality.”

“Yes,” Belbo said, “but the question isn’t whether these people here are better or worse than Christians who go to shrines. I was asking myself: Who do we think we are? We for whom Hamlet is more real than our janitor? Do I have any right to judge—I who keep searching for my own Madame Bovary so we can have a big scene?”

Diotallevi shook his head and said to me in a low voice that it was wrong to make images of divine things, that these were all epiphanies of the Golden Calf. But he was enjoying himself.

58

Alchemy, however, is a chaste prostitute, who has many lovers but disappoints all and grants her favors to none. She transforms the haughty into fools, the rich into paupers, the philosophers into dolts, and the deceived into loquacious deceivers...

—Trithemius, Annalium Hirsaugensium Tomi II, S. Gallo, 1690,141

Suddenly the room was plunged into darkness and the walls lighted up. I realized that three-quarters of the wall space was a semicircular screen on which pictures were about to be projected. When these appeared, I became aware that a part of the ceiling and of the floor was made of reflecting material, as were some of the objects that had first struck me as cheap because of the tawdry way they sparkled: the sequins, the scales, a shield, some copper vases. We were immersed in a subaqueous world where images were multiplied, fragmented, fused with the shadows of those present. The floor reflected the ceiling, the ceiling the floor, and together they mirrored the figures that appeared on the screen. Along with the music, subtle odors spread through the room: first Indian incense, then others, less distinct, and sometimes disagreeable.

At first the penumbra about us fell into absolute night. Then a grumbling was heard, a churning of lava, and we were in a crater, where dark and slimy matter bubbled up in the fitful light of yellow and bluish flames.

Oily vapors rose, to descend again, condensing as dew or rain and an odor of fetid earth drifted up, a stench of decay. I inhaled sepulcher, tartar, darkness; a poisonous liquid oozed around me, snaking between tongues of dung, humus, coal dust, mud, smoke, lead, scum, naphtha, a black blacker than black, which now paled to allow two reptiles to appear—one light blue, the other reddish—entwined in an embrace, each biting the other’s tail, to form a single circle.

It was as if I had drunk too much alcohol: I could no longer see my companions, who were lost in the shadows, I could not recognize the forms gliding past me, hazy, fluid outlines...Then I felt my hand grasped. I didn’t turn, not wanting to discover that I had deceived myself, because I caught Lorenza’s perfume, and only then did I realize how great was my desire for her. It must have been Lorenza; she had come to resume the dialog of fingernails scraping on my door, to finish what she had left unfinished the night before. Sulfur and mercury joined in a wet warmth that made my groin throb, but without urgency.

I was expecting the Rebis, the androgynous youth, the philosopher’s salt, the coronation of the Work of the White. I seemed to know everything. All my reading of the past few months was, perhaps, now resurfacing in my mind, or perhaps Lorenza was transmitting the knowledge to me through the touch of her hand. Her palm was moist with sweat.

I surprised myself by murmuring obscure names, names that the philosophers, I knew, had given to the White. With them, perhaps, I was calling Lorenza to me, or perhaps I was only repeating them to myself, in a propitiatory litany: White Copper, Immaculate Lamb, Aibathest, Alborach, Blessed Water, Purified Mercury, Orpiment, Azoch, Baurach, Cambar, Caspa, Cherry, Wax, Chaia, Comerisson, Electron, Euphrates, Eve, Fada, Fa-vonius, Foundation of the Art, Precious Stone of Givinis, Diamond, Zibach, Ziva, Veil, Narcissus, Lily, Hermaphrodite, Hae, Hypostasis, Hyle, Virgin’s Milk, Unique Stone, Full Moon, Mother, Living Oil, Legume, Egg, Phlegm, Point, Root, Salt of Nature, Leafy Earth, Tevos, Tincar, Steam, Evening Star, Wind, Virago, Pharaoh’s Glass, Baby’s Urine, Vulture, Placenta, Menstruum, Fugitive Slave, Left Hand, Sperm of Metals, Spirit, Tin, Juice, Oil of Sulfur...

In the pitch, now grayish, dark, an outline of rocks and withered trees, a black sun setting. Then an almost blinding light, and sparkling figures reflected everywhere, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. Now the smell was liturgical, churchly; my head ached; there was a weight on my brow, I saw a sumptuous hall lined with golden tapestries, perhaps a nuptial banquet, with a princely bridegroom and a bride in white, then an elderly king and queen enthroned, beside them a warrior, and another king with dark skin. Before the dark king, a little altar on which a book was set, covered with black velvet, and a lighted candle in an ivory candlestick. Next to the candlestick, a rotating globe and a clock surmounted by a tiny crystal fountain from which a liquid flowed, blood-red. Above the fountain was a skull; from an eye socket slid a white serpent...

Lorenza was breathing words into my ear. But I couldn’t hear her voice.

The serpent moved to the rhythm of slow, sad music. The king and queen now wore black, and before them were six closed coffins. After a few measures of grim bass tuba, a man in a black hood appeared. At first, in a hieratic performance, as if in slow motion, the king submitted with mournful joy, bowing his meek head. The hooded man raised an ax, and then the rapid slash of a pendulum, the blade multiplied in every reflecting surface, and the heads that rolled were a thousand. After this, the images succeeded one another, but I had difficulty following the story. I believe that all the characters in turn, including the dark king, were decapitated and laid in the coffins. The whole room was transformed into the shore of a sea or a lake, and we saw six vessels land, and the biers were carried aboard them; then the vessels departed across the water, faded into the night. All this took place while the incense curled, almost palpable, in dense fumes, and for a moment I feared I was among the condemned. Around me many murmured, “The wedding, the wedding...”

Lorenza was gone. I turned to look for her among the shadows.

* * *

The room now was a crypt or sumptuous tomb, its vault illuminated by a carbuncle of extraordinary size.

In every corner women appeared in virginal dress. They gathered around a cauldron two stories high, in a framework with a stone base and a portico like an oven. From twin towers emerged two alembics emptying into an egg-shaped bowl; a third, central, tower ended in a fountain...

Inside the base of the framework the bodies of the decapitated were visible. One of the virginal women carried a box and drew from it a round object, which she placed in a niche of the central tower, and immediately the fountain at the top began to spurt. I had time to recognize the object: it was the head of the Moorish king, which now burned like a log, making the water of the fountain boil. Fumes, puffs of steam, gurgling...

Lorenza this time put her hand on the back of my neck, caressing it as I had seen her caress Jacopo in the car.

The woman brought a golden sphere, turned on a tap in the oven, and caused a thick red liquid to flow into the sphere. Then the sphere was opened, and, in place of the red liquid, it contained an egg, large, beautiful, white as snow. The woman took the egg out and set it on the ground in a pile of yellow sand. The egg opened, and a bird came out, still unformed and bloody. But, watered with the blood of the decapitated, it grew before our eyes, became handsome and radiant.

They decapitated the bird and reduced it to ashes on a little altar. Some kneaded the ash into a paste, poured the thin paste into two molds, and set them in the oven to bake, blowing on the fire with some pipes. In the end, the molds were opened, and two pretty figures appeared, pale, almost transparent, a youth and a maiden, no more than four spans high, as soft and fleshy as living creatures but with eyes still glassy, mineral. They were set on two cushions, and an old man poured drops of blood into their mouths...

Other women arrived, with golden trumpets decorated with green garlands. They handed a trumpet to the old man, who put it to the lips of the two creatures still suspended in their vegetable lethargy, their sweet animal sleep, and he began to insufflate soul into their bodies...The room filled with light; the light dimmed to a half-light, then to a darkness broken by orange flashes. There was an immense dawn while the trumpets sounded, loud and ringing, and all was a dazzle of ruby. At that point I again lost Lorenza and realized I would never find her.

Everything turned a flaming red, which slowly dulled to indigo and violet, and the screen went blank. The pain in my forehead became intolerable.

* * *

“Mysterium Magnum,” Aglie said calmly at my side. “The rebirth of the new man through death and passion. A good performance, I must say, even if the taste for allegory perhaps marred the precision of the phases. What you saw was only a performance, but it spoke of a Thing. And our host claims to have produced this Thing. Come, let us go and see the miracle achieved.”

59

And if such monsters are generated, we must believe them the work of nature, even if they be different from man.

—Paracelsus, De Homunculis, in Operum Volumen Secundum, Genevae, De Tournes, 1658, p. 465

He led us out into the garden, and I felt better at once. I didn’t dare ask the others if Lorenza had come after all. Probably I had dreamed it. After a few steps we entered a greenhouse; the stifling heat dazed me. Among tropical plants were six glass ampules in the shape of pears—or tears—hermetically sealed, filled with a pale-blue liquid. Inside each vessel floated a creature about twenty centimeters high: we recognized the gray-haired king, the queen, the Moor, the warrior, and the two adolescents crowned with laurel, one blue and one pink...They swayed with a graceful swimming motion, as if water were their element.

It was hard to determine whether they were models made of plastic or wax, or whether they were living beings, and the slight opacity of the liquid made it impossible to tell if the faint pulse that animated them was an optical illusion or reality.

“They seem to grow every day,” Aglie said. “Each morning, the vessels are buried in fresh horse manure—still warm—which provides the heat necessary for growth. In Paracelsus there are i prescriptions that say homunculi must be grown at the internal temperature of a horse. According to our host, these homunculi speak to him, tell him secrets, utter prophecies. Some revealed to him the true measurements of the Temple of Solomon, others told him how to exorcise demons...I must confess that I have never heard them speak.”

They had very mobile faces. The king looked at the queen tenderly.

 “Our host told me that one morning he found the blue youth, who had escaped somehow from his prison, attempting to break the seal of the maiden’s vessel...But he was out of his element, could not breathe, and they saved him just in time, returning him to his liquid.”

“Terrible,” Diotallevi said. “I wouldn’t want such a responsibility. You’d have to take the vessels with you everywhere and find all that manure wherever you went. And then what would you do in the summer, on vacation? Leave them with the doorman? ‘‘

“But perhaps,” Aglie concluded, “they are only Cartesian imps. Or automata.”

“The devil!” Garamond said. “Dr. Aglie, you’re opening a whole new universe to me. We should all be more humble, my dear friends. There are more things in heaven and earth...But, after all, a la guerre comme a la guerre...”

Garamond was awestruck; Diotallevi maintained an expression of cynical curiosity; Belbo showed no feeling at all.

To dispel my doubt, I said to him, “Too bad Lorenza didn’t come; she would have loved this.”

“Mm, yes,” he replied absently.

So Lorenza hadn’t come.

And I was the way Amparo had been in Rio. I was ill. I felt somehow cheated. They hadn’t brought me the agogo.

I left the group and went back into the building, picking my way through the crowd. I passed the buffet, drank something cool, though I was afraid it might contain a philter. I looked for a bathroom, to splash cold water on my temples and neck. This accomplished, I again felt better. But as I came out, I saw a circular staircase and, suddenly curious, I was unable to resist the new adventure. Perhaps, even though I thought I had recovered, I was still looking for Lorenza.

60

Poor idiot! Are you so foolish as to believe we will openly teach you the greatest and most important of secrets? I assure you that anyone who attempts to study, according to the ordinary and literal sense of their words, what the Hermetic Philosophers write, will soon find himself in the twists of a labyrinth from which he will be unable to escape, having no Ariadne’s thread to lead him out.

—Artephius

Descending, I came to a room below the ground, dimly lighted, with walls in rocaille like those of fountains in a park. In one corner I saw an opening like the bell of a trumpet. I heard sounds coming from it. When I approached, the sounds became more distinct, until I could catch sentences, as clear and precise as if they were being uttered at my side. An Ear of Dionysius! Evidently the ear communicated with one of the upper rooms, picking up the conversation of those who stood near its aperture.

“Signora, I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone else. I’m tired...I’ve worked with cinnabar, with mercury, I sublimated spirits, did distillations with salts of iron, fermentations, and still I haven’t found the Stone. I prepared strong waters, corrosive waters, burning waters, all in vain. I used eggshells, sulfur, vitriol, arsenic, sal ammoniac, quartz, alkalis, oxides of rock, saltpeter, soda, salt of tartar, and potash alum. Believe me, do not trust them, avoid the imperfect metals; otherwise you will be deceived, as I was deceived. I tried everything: blood, hair, the soul of Saturn, marcasites, aes ustum, saffron of Mars, tincture of iron, litharge, antimony. To no avail. I extracted water from silver, calcified silver both with and without salt, and using aqua vitae I extracted corrosive oils. I employed milk, wine, curds, the sperm of the stars which falls to earth, chelidon, placentas, ashes, even...”

“Even...?”

“Signora, there’s nothing in this world that demands more caution than the truth. To tell the truth is like leeching one’s own heart...”

“Enough, enough! You’ve got me all excited.”

“I dare confess my secret only to you. I am of no place and no era. Beyond time and space, I live my eternal existence. There are beings who no longer have guardian angels: I am one of them...”

“But why have you brought me here”

Another voice: “My dear Balsamo! Playing with the myth of immortality, eh?”

“Idiot! Immortality is not a myth. It’s a fact.”

I was about to leave, bored by this chatter, when I heard Salon. He was speaking in a whisper, tensely, as if gripping someone by the arm. I also recognized the voice of Pierre.

“Come now,” Salon was saying, “don’t tell me that you too are here for this alchemical foolishness. And don’t tell me you came to enjoy the cool air of the gardens. Did you know that after Heidelberg, Caus accepted an invitation from the king of France to supervise the cleaning of Paris?”

“Les facades?”

“He wasn’t Malraux. It must have been the sewers. Curious, isn’t it? The man invented symbolic orange groves and apple orchards for emperors, but what really interested him were the underground passages of Paris. In the Paris of those days there wasn’t an actual network of sewers; it was a combination of canals on the surface and, below, conduits, about which little was known. The Romans, from the time of the republic, knew everything about their Cloaca Maxima, yet fifteen hundred years later, in Paris, people were ignorant of what went on beneath their feet. Caus accepted the king’s invitation because he wanted to find out. What did he find out?

“After Caus, Colbert sent prisoners down to clean the conduits—that was the pretext, and bear in mind that this was also the period of the Man in the Iron Mask—but they escaped through the excrement, followed the current to the Seine, and sailed off in a boat, because nobody had the courage to confront those wretches covered with stinking slime and swarms of flies...Then Colbert stationed gendarmes outside the various openings of the sewer, and the prisoners, forced to stay in the passages, died. In three centuries the city engineers managed to map only three kilometers of sewers. But in the eighteenth century there were twenty-six kilometers of sewers, and on the very eve of the Revolution. Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Ah, you know, this—”

“New people were coming to power, and they knew something their predecessors didn’t. Napoleon sent teams of men down into the darkness, through the detritus of the capital. Those who had the courage to work there found many things: gold, necklaces, jewels, rings, and God knows what else that had fallen into those passages. Some bravely swallowed what they found, then came out, took a laxative, and became rich. It was discovered that many houses had cellar trapdoors that led directly to the sewer.”

“Ca alors...”

“In a period when people emptied chamber pots out the window? And why did they have sewers with sidewalks along them, and iron rings set in die wall, to hang on to? These passages were the equivalent of those tapis francs where the lowlife gathered—the pegre, as it was called then—and if the police arrived, they could escape and resurface somewhere else.”

“Legendes...”

“You think so? Whom are you trying to protect? Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann required all the houses of Paris, by law, to construct an independent cesspool, then an underground corridor leading to the sewer system...A tunnel two meters thirty centimeters high and a meter and a half wide. You understand? Every house in Paris was to be connected by an underground corridor to the sewers. And you know the extent of the sewers of Paris today? Two thousand kilometers, and on various levels. And it all began with the man who designed those gardens in Heidelberg...”

“So?”

“I see you do not wish to talk. You know something, but you won’t tell me.”

“Please, leave me. It’s late. I am expected at a meeting.” A sound of footsteps.

I didn’t understand what Salon was getting at. Pressed against the rocaille by the ear, I looked around and felt that I was underground myself, and it seemed to me that the mouth of that phonurgic channel was but the beginning of a descent into dark tunnels that went to the center of the earth, tunnels alive with Nibelungs. I felt cold. I was about to leave when I heard another voice: “Come. We’re ready to begin. In the secret chamber. Call the others.”

61

The Golden Fleece is guarded by a three-headed Dragon, whose first Head derives from the Waters, whose second Head derives from the Earth, and whose third Head derives from the Air. It is necessary that these three Heads belong to a single and very powerful Dragon, who will devour all other Dragons.

—Jean  d’Espagnet,  Arcanum  Hermeticae Philosophiae  Opus, 1623, p. 138

I found my group again, and told Aglie I had overheard something about a meeting.

“Aha,” Aglie said, “what curiosity! But I understand. Having ventured into the hermetic mysteries, you want to find out all about them. Well, as far as I know, this evening there is the initiation of a new member of the Ancient and Accepted Order of the Rosy Cross.”

“Can we watch?” Garamond asked.

“You can’t. You mustn’t. You shouldn’t. But we’ll act like those characters in the Greek myth who gazed upon what was forbidden them to see, and we’ll risk the wrath of the gods. I’ll allow you one peek.”

He led us up a narrow stairway to a dark corridor, drew aside a curtain, and through a sealed window we could glance into the room below, which was lighted by burning braziers. The walls were covered with lilies embroidered on damask, and at the far end stood a throne under a gilded canopy. On one side of the throne was a sun, on the other a moon, both set on tripods and cut out of cardboard on some plastic material, crudely executed, covered with tinfoil or some metal leaf, gold and silver, of course, but effective, because each luminary spun, set in motion by the flames of a brazier. Above the canopy an enormous star hung from the ceiling, shining with precious stones—or bits of glass. The ceiling was covered with blue damask spangled with great silver stars.

Before the throne was a long table decorated with palms. A sword had been placed on it, and between throne and table stood a stuffed lion, its jaws wide. Someone must have put a red light bulb inside the head, because the eyes shone, incandescent, and flames seemed to come from the throat. This, I thought, must be the work of Signer Salon, remembering the odd customers he had referred to that day in the Munich coal mine.

At the table was Bramanti, decked out in a scarlet tunic and embroidered green vestments, a white cape with gold fringe, a sparkling cross on his chest, and a hat vaguely resembling a miter, decorated with a red-and-white plume. Before him, hi-eratically deployed, were about twenty men, also in scarlet tunics but without vestments. On their chests they all wore a gold medal that I thought I recognized: I remembered a Renaissance portrait, the big Hapsburg nose, and the curious lamb with legs dangling, hanging by the waist. They had adorned themselves with imitations, not bad, of the Order of the Golden Fleece.

Bramanti was speaking, his arms upraised, as if uttering a litany, and the others responded from time to time. Then Bramanti raised the sword, and from their tunics the others drew stilettos or paper knives and held them high. At this point Aglie lowered the curtain. We had seen too much.

We stole away with the tread of the Pink Panther (as Diotallevi put it; he was remarkably abreast of the perversions of popular culture) and found ourselves back in the garden, slightly breathless.

Garamond was overwhelmed. “But are they...Masons?”

“And what,” Aglie replied, “does Mason mean? They are the adepts of a chivalric order inspired by the Rosicrucians, and indirectly by the Templars.”

“But what does that have to do with the Masons?’’ Garamond asked again.

“If what you saw has anything in common with the Masons, it’s the fact that Bramanti’s rite is also a pastime for provincial politicians and professional men. It was thus from the beginning: Freemasonry was a weak exploitation of the Templar legend. And this is the caricature of a caricature. Except that those gentlemen take it extremely seriously. Alas! The world is teeming with Rosicrucians and Templars like the, ones you saw this evening. You mustn’t expect any revelation from them, though among their number occasionally you can come across an initiate worthy of trust.”

“But you, after all,” Belbo said, without irony, as if the matter concerned him personally, “spend time with them. Which ones do you believe in? Or did you once believe in?”

“None, of course. Do I look like a credulous individual? I consider them with the cold objectivity, the understanding, the interest with which a theologian might observe a Naples crowd shouting in anticipation of the miracle of San Gennaro. The crowd bears witness to a faith, a deep need, and the theologian wanders among the sweating, drooling people because he might encounter there an unknown saint, the bearer of a higher truth, a man capable of casting new light on the mystery of the most Holy Trinity. But the Holy Trinity is one thing, San Gennaro is another.”

He could not be pinned down. I didn’t know how to define it—hermetic skepticism? liturgical cynicism?—this higher disbelief that led him to acknowledge the dignity of all the superstitions he scorned.

“It’s simple,” he was saying to Belbo. “If the Templars, the real Templars, did leave a secret and did establish some kind of continuity, then it is necessary to seek them out, and to seek them in the places where they could most easily camouflage themselves, perhaps by inventing rites and myths in order to move unobserved, like fish in water. What do the police do when they seek the archvillain, the evil mastermind? They dig into the lower depths, the notorious dives filled with petty crooks who will never conceive the grandiose crimes of the dark genius the police are after. What does the terrorist leader do to recruit new acolytes? Where does he look for them and find them? He circulates in the haunts of the pseudosubversives, the fellow-travelers who would never have the courage to be the real thing, but who openly ape the attitudes of their idols. Concealed light is best sought in fires, or in the brush where, after the blaze, the flames go on brooding under twigs, under trampled muck. What better hiding place for the true Templar than in the crowd of his caricatures?’’

62

We consider societies druidic if they are druidic in their titles of their aims, or if their initiations are inspired by druidism.

—M. Raoult, Les druides. Les societes initiatiqu.es celtes contemporaines, Paris, Rocher, 1983, p. 18

Midnight was approaching, and according to Agile’s program the second surprise of the evening awaited us. Leaving the Palatine gardens, we resumed our journey through the hills.

After we had driven three-quarters of an hour, Aglie made us park the two cars at the edge of a wood. We had to cross some underbrush, he said, to arrive at a clearing, and there were neither roads nor trails.

We proceeded, picking our way through shrubs and vines, our shoes slipping on rotted leaves and slimy roots. From time to time Aglie switched on a flashlight to find a path, but only for a second, because, he said, we should not announce our presence to the celebrants. Diotallevi made a remark—I don’t recall it exactly, something about Little Red Riding-Hood—and Aglie, with tension in his voice, asked him to be quiet.

As we were about to come to the end of the brush, we heard voices. We had reached the edge of the clearing, which was illuminated by a glow from remote torches—or perhaps votive lights, flickering at ground level, faint and silvery, as if a gas were burning with chemical coldness in bubbles drifting over the grass. Aglte told us to stop where we were, still shielded by bushes, and wait.

“In a little while the priestesses will come. The Druidesses, that is. This is an invocation of the great cosmic virgin Mikil. Saint Michael is a popular Christian adaptation, and it’s no accident that he is an angel, hence androgynous, hence able to take the place of a female divinity...”

“Where do they come from?” Diotallevi whispered.

“From many places: Normandy, Norway, Ireland...It is a very special event, and this is a propitious place for the rite.”

“Why?” Garamond asked.

“Certain places have more magic than others.”

“But who are they—in real life?”

 “People. Secretaries, insurance agents, poets. People you might run into tomorrow and not recognize.”

Now we could see a small group preparing to enter the clearing. The phosphorescent light, I realized, came from little lamps the priestesses held up in their hands. They had seemed, earlier, to be at ground level because the clearing was on the top of a hill; the Druidesses had climbed up from below and were approaching the flat, open hilltop. They were dressed in white tunics, which fluttered in the slight breeze. They formed a circle; in the center, three celebrants stood.

“Those are the three hallouines of Lisieux, Clonmacnoise, and Pino Torinese,” Aglie said. Belbo asked why those three in particular. Aglie shrugged and said: “No more. We must wait now in silence. I can’t summarize for you in a few words the whole ritual and hierarchy of Nordic magic. Be satisfied with what I can tell you. If I do not tell you more, it is because I do not know...or am not allowed to tell. I must respect certain vows of privacy.”

In the center of the clearing I noticed a pile of rocks, which suggested a dolmen. Perhaps the clearing had been chosen because of the presence of those boulders. One of the celebrants climbed up on the dolmen and blew a trumpet. Even more than the trumpet we had seen a few hours earlier, this looked like something out of the triumphal march in At da. But a muffled and nocturnal sound came from it, as if from far away. Belbo touched my arm: “It’s the ramsing, the horn of the Thugs around the sacred banyan...”

My reply was cruel, because I didn’t realize he was joking precisely to repress other associations, and it must have twisted the knife in the wound. “It would no doubt be less magical with the bombardon,” I said.

Belbo nodded. “Yes, they’re here precisely because they don’t want a bombardon,” he said.

Was it on that evening he began to see a connection between his private dreams and what had been happening to him in those months?

Aglifc hadn’t followed our words, but heard us whispering. “It’s not a warning or a summons,” he explained, “but a kind of ultrasound, to establish contact with the subterranean currents. You see, now the Druidesses are all holding hands, in a circle. They are creating a kind of living accumulator, to collect and concentrate the telluric vibrations. Now the cloud should appear...”

“What cloud?” I whispered.

“Tradition calls it the green cloud. Wait...”

I didn’t really expect a green cloud. Almost immediately, however, a soft mist rose from the ground—a fog, I would have said, if it had been thicker, more homogeneous. But it was composed of flakes, denser in some places than in others. The wind stirred it, raised it in puffs, like spun sugar. Then it moved with the air to another part of the clearing, where it gathered. A singular effect. For a moment, you could see the trees in the background, then they would be hidden in a whitish steam, while the turf in the center of the clearing would smoke and further obscure our view of whatever was going on, as the moonlight shone around the concealed area. The flake cloud shifted, suddenly, unexpectedly, as if obeying the whims of a capricious wind.

A chemical trick, I thought, but then I reflected: we were at an altitude of about six hundred meters, and it was possible that this was an actual cloud. Foretold by the rite? Summoned? Or was it just that the celebrants knew that on that hilltop, under favorable conditions, those erratic banks of vapor formed just above the ground?

It was difficult to resist the fascination of the scene. The celebrants’ tunics blended with the white of the cloud, and their forms entered and emerged from that milky obscurity as if it had spawned them.

There was a moment when the cloud filled the entire center of the little meadow. Some wisps, rising, separating, almost hid the moon, but the clearing was still bright at its edges. We saw a Druidess come from the cloud and run toward the wood, crying out, her arms in front of her. I thought she had discovered us and was hurling curses. But she stopped within a few meters of us, changed direction, and began running in a circle around the cloud, disappearing in the whiteness to the left, only to reappear after a few minutes from the right. Again she was very close to us, and I could see her face.

She was a sibyl with a great, Dantean nose over a mouth thin as a cicatrix, which opened like a submarine flower, toothless but for two incisors and one skewed canine. The eyes were shifty, hawklike, piercing. I heard, or thought I heard—or think now that I remember hearing, but I may be superimposing other memories—a series of Gaelic words mixed with evocations in a kind of Latin, something on the order of “O pegnia (oh, e oh!) et eee uluma!!!” Suddenly the fog lifted, disappeared, the clearing became bright again, and I saw that it had been invaded by a troop of pigs, their short necks encircled by garlands of green apples. The Druidess who had blown the trumpet, still atop the dolmen, now brandished a knife.

“We go now,” Aglie said sharply. “It’s over.”

I realized, as I heard him, that the cloud was above us and around us, and I could barely make out my companions.

“What do you mean, over?” Garamond said. “Looks to me like the real stuff is just beginning!”

“What you were permitted to see is over. Now it is not permitted. We must respect the rite. Come.”

He reentered the wood, was promptly swallowed up by the mist that enfolded us. We shivered as we moved, slipping 01 dead leaves, panting, in disarray, like a fleeing army, and regrouped at the road. We could be in Milan in less than two hours. Before getting back into Garamond’s car, Aglie said goodbye to us: “You must forgive me for interrupting the show for you. I wanted you to learn something, to see the people for whom you are now working. But it was not possible to stay. When I was informed of this event, I had to promise I wouldn’t disturb the ceremony. Our continued presence would have had a negative effect on what follows.”

“And the pigs? What happens to them?” Belbo asked.

“What I could tell you, I have told you.”

63

‘What does the fish remind you of?” ‘Other fish.”

‘And what do other fish remind you of?” ‘Other fish.”

—Joseph Heller, Catch-22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii

I came back from Piedmont with much guilt. But as soon as I saw Lia again, I forgot the desires that had grazed me.

Still, our expedition left other marks on me, and now it troubles me that at the time I wasn’t troubled by them. I was putting in final order, chapter by chapter, the illustrations for the wonderful adventure of metals, but once again I could not elude the demon of resemblance, any more than I had been able to in Rio. How was this Reaumur cylindrical stove, 1750, different from this incubation chamber for eggs, or from this seventeenth-century athanor, maternal womb, dark uterus for the creation of God knows what mystic metals? It was as if they had installed the Deutsches Museum in the Piedmont castle I had visited the week before.

It was becoming harder for me to keep apart the world of magic and what today we call the world of facts. Men I had studied in school as bearers of mathematical and physical enlightenment now turned up amid the murk of superstition, for I discovered they had worked with one foot in cabala and the other in the laboratory. Or was I rereading all history through the eyes of our Diabolicals? But then I would find texts above all suspicion that told me how in the time of positivism physicists barely out of the university dabbled in stances and astrological cena-cles, and how Newton had arrived at the law of gravity because he believed in the existence of occult forces, which recalled his investigations into Rosicrucian cosmology.

I had always thought that doubting was a scientific duty, but now I came to distrust the very masters who had taught me to doubt.

I said to myself: I’m like Amparo; I don’t believe in it, yet I surrender to it. Yes, I caught myself marveling over the fact that the height of the Great Pyramid really was one-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun, and that you really could draw striking parallels between Celtic and Amerind mythologies. And I began to question everything around me: the houses, die shop signs, the clouds in the sky, and the engravings in the library, asking them to tell me not their superficial story but another, deeper story, which they surely were hiding—but finally would reveal thanks to the principle of mystic resemblances.

Lia saved me, at least temporarily.

I told her everything—or almost—about the trip to Piedmont, and evening after evening I came home with curious new bits of information to add to my file of cross references. She said, “Eat. You’re thin as a rail.” One evening, she sat beside me at the desk. With her hair parted in the middle of her brow, she could now look straight into my eyes. She had her hands in her lap: a housewifely pose. I had never seen her sit like that before, her legs wide, skirt taut from knee to knee. An inelegant position, I thought. But then I saw her face: radiant, slightly flushed. I listened to her—though I didn’t yet know why—with respect.

“Pow,” she said, “I don’t like what’s happening to you with this Manutius business. First you collected facts the way people collect seashells. Now it’s as if you were marking down lottery numbers.”

“I just enjoy myself more, with the Diabolicals.”

“It’s not enjoyment; it’s passion. There’s a difference. Be careful: they’ll make you sick.”

“Now, don’t exaggerate. They’re the sick ones, not I. You don’t go crazy because you work in an asylum.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“You know, I’ve always been suspicious of analogies. But now I find myself at a great feast of analogies, a Coney Island, a Moscow May Day, a Jubilee Year of analogies, and I’m beginning to wonder if by any chance there isn’t a reason.”

“I’ve seen your files, Pow,” Lia said to me, “because I have to keep them in order. Whatever your Diabolicals have discovered is already here: take a good look.” And she patted her belly, her thighs, her forehead; with her spread legs drawing her skirt tight, she sat like a wet nurse, solid and healthy—she so slim and supple—with a serene wisdom that illuminated her and gave her a matriarchal authority.

“Pow, archetypes don’t exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this reason the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth, too, which is made in the image of our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also came from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and then, lo and behold, there’s a little man, a date, a baobab.

“And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn’t stink as much, because it’s better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above—you really have to be in an attic—while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down devilish.

“But because what I said before, about my belly, is also true, both things are true, down and inside are beautiful, and up and outside are beautiful, and the spirit of Mercury and Manichean-ism have nothing to do with it. Fire keeps you warm and cold gives you bronchial pneumonia, especially if you’re a scholar four thousand years ago, and therefore fire has mysterious virtues besides its ability to cook your chicken. But cold preserves that same chicken, and fire, if you touch it, gives you a blister this big; therefore, if you think of something preserved for millennia, like wisdom, you have to think of it on a mountain, up, high (and high is good), but also in a cavern (which is good, too) and in the eternal cold of the Tibetan snows (best of all). And if you then want to know why wisdom comes from the Orient and not from the Swiss Alps, it’s because the body of your ancestors in the morning, when it woke and there was still darkness, looked to the east hoping the sun would rise and there wouldn’t be rain.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Yes indeed, my child. The sun is good because it does the body good, and because it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, whatever returns is good, not what passes and is done with. The easiest way to return from where you’ve been without retracing your steps is to walk in a circle. The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that’s why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it’s hard to represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus. Furthermore, if you have to make a ceremony to invoke the sun, it’s best to move in a circle, because if you go in a straight line, you move away from home, which means the ceremony will have to be kept short. The circle is the most convenient arrangement for any rite, even the fire-eaters in the marketplace know this, because in a circle everybody can see the one who’s in the center, whereas if a whole tribe formed a straight line, like a squad of soldiers, the people at the ends wouldn’t see. And that’s why the circle and rotary motion and cyclic return are fundamental to every cult and every rite.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“We move on to the magic numbers your authors are so fond of. You are one and not two, your cock is one and my cunt is one, and we have one nose and one heart; so you see how many important things come in ones. But we have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, my breasts, your balls, legs, arms, buttocks. Three is the most magical of all, because our body doesn’t know that number; we don’t have three of anything, and it should be a very mysterious number that we attribute to God, wherever we live. But if you think about it, I have one cunt and you have one cock—shut up and don’t joke—and if we put these two together, a new thing is made, and we become three. So you don’t have to be a university professor or use a computer to discover that all cultures on earth have ternary structures, trinities.

“But two arms and two legs make four, and four is a beautiful -number when you consider that animals have four legs and little children go on all fours, as the Sphinx knew. We hardly have to discuss five, the fingers of the hand and then with both hands you get that other sacred number, ten. There have to be ten commandments because, if there were twelve, when the priest counts one, two, three, holding up his fingers, and comes to the last two, he’d have to borrow a hand from the sacristan.

“Now, if you take the body and count all the things that grow from the trunk, arms, legs, head, and cock, you get six; but for women it’s seven. For this reason, it seems to me that among your authors six is never taken seriously, except as the double of three, because it’s familiar to the males, who don’t have any seven. So when the males rule, they prefer to see seven as the mysterious sacred number, forgetting about women’s tits, but what the hell.

“Eight....eight....give me a minute...If arms and legs don’t count as one apiece but two, because of elbows and knees, you have eight parts that move; add the torso and you have nine, add the head and you have ten. Just sticking with the body, you can get all the numbers you want. The orifices, for example.”

“The orifices?”

“Yes. How many holes does the body have?”

I counted. “Eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, ass: eight.”

“You see? Another reason eight is a beautiful number. But I have nine! And with that ninth I bring you into the world, therefore nine is holier than eight! Or, if you like, take the anatomy of your menhir, which your authors are always talking about. Standing up during the day, lying down at night—your thing, too. No, don’t tell me what it does at night. The fact is that erect it works and prone it rests. So the vertical position is life, pointing sunward, and obelisks stand as trees stand, while the horizontal position and night are sleep, death. All cultures worship menhirs, monoliths, pyramids, columns, but nobody bows down to balconies and railings. Did you ever hear of an archaic cult of the sacred banister? You see? And another point: if you worship a vertical stone, even if there are a lot of you, you can all see it; but if you worship, instead, a horizontal stone, only those in the front row can see it, and the others start pushing, me too, me too, which is not a fitting sight for a magical ceremony...”

“But rivers...”

“Rivers are worshiped not because they’re horizontal, but because there’s water in them, and you don’t need me to explain to you the relation between water and the body...Anyway, that’s how we’re put together, all of us, and that’s why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally they all resemble one another. Thus you see that people with a brain in their head, if they’re shown an alchemist’s oven, all shut up and warm inside, think of the belly of the mama making a baby, and only your Diabolicals think that the Madonna about to have the Child is a reference to the alchemist’s oven. They spent thousands of years looking for a message, and it was there all the time: they just had to look at themselves in the mirror.”

“You always tell me the truth. You see my Mirrored Me, my Self seen by You. I want to discover all the secret archetypes of the body.” That evening we inaugurated the expression “discovering archetypes” to indicate our moments of greatest intimacy.

I was half-asleep when Lia touched my shoulder. “I almost forgot,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

I should have listened to Lia. She spoke with the wisdom of life and birth. Venturing into the underground passages of Agart-tha, into the pyramid of Isis Unveiled, we had entered Gevurah, the Sefirah of fear, the moment in which wrath manifests itself in the world. I had let myself be seduced by the thought of Sophia. Moses Cordovero says that the Female is to the left, and all her attributes point to Gevurah....unless the Male, using these attributes, adorns his Bride, and causes her to move to the right, toward good. Every desire must remain within its limits. Otherwise Gevurah becomes Judgment, the dark appearance, the universe of demons.

To discipline desire....This I had done in the tenda de um-banda. I had played the agogd, I had taken an active part in the spectacle, and I had escaped the trance. I had done the same with Lia: I had regulated desite out of homage to the Bride, and I had been rewarded in the depths of my loins; my seed had been blessed.

But I was not to persevere. I was to be seduced by the beauty of Tiferet.