118

The conspiracy theory of society... comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?”

—Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge, 1969, iv, p. 123

The flight did me good. I not only left Paris behind, I left the underground, the ground itself, the terrestial crust. Sky and mountains still white with snow. Solitude at ten thousand meters, and that sense of intoxication always produced by flying, the pressurization, the passage through slight turbulence. It was only up here, I thought, that I was finally putting my feet on solid ground. Time to draw conclusions, to list points in my notebook, then close my eyes and think.

I decided to list, first of all, the incontestable facts.

There is no doubt that Diotallevi is dead. Gudrun told me so. Gudrun was never part of our story—she wouldn’t have understood it—so she is the only one left who tells the truth. Also, Garamond is not in Milan. He could be anywhere, of course, but the fact that he’s not there and hasn’t been there the past few days suggests he was indeed in Paris, where I saw him.

Similarly, Belbo is not there.

Now, let’s assume that what I saw Saturday night in Saint-Martin-des-Champs really happened. Perhaps not the way I saw it, befuddled as I was by the music and the incense; but something did happen. It’s like that time with Amparo. Afterward, she didn’t believe she had been possessed by Pomba Gira, but she knew that in the tenda de umbanda something had possessed her.

Finally, what Lia told me in the mountains is true. Her interpretation is completely convincing: the Provins message is a laundry list. There were never any Templars’ meetings at the Grange-aux-Dimes. There was no Plan and there was no message.

The laundry list, for us, had been a crossword puzzle with the squares empty and no definitions. The squares had to be filled in such a way that everything would fit. But perhaps that metaphor isn’t precise. In a crossword puzzle the words, intersecting,  have to have letters in common. In our game we crossed not words but concepts, events, so the rules were different. Basically there were three rules.

Rule One: Concepts are connected by analogy. There is no way to decide at once whether an analogy is good or bad, because to some degree everything is connected to everything else. For example, potato crosses with apple, because both are vegetable and round in shape. From apple to snake, by Biblical association. From snake to doughnut, by formal likeness. From doughnut to life preserver, and from life preserver to bathing suit, then bathing to sea, sea to ship, ship to shit, shit to toilet paper, toilet to cologne, cologne to alcohol, alcohol to drugs, drugs to syringe, syringe to hole, hole to ground, ground to potato.

Rule Two says that if tout se tient in the end, the connecting works. From potato to potato, tout se tient. So it’s right.

Rule Three: The connections must not be original. They must have been made before, and the more often the better, by others. Only then do the crossings seem true, because they are obvious.

This, after all, was Signor Garamond’s idea. The books of the Diabolicals must not innovate; they must repeat what has already been said. Otherwise what becomes of the authority of Tradition?

And this is what we did. We didn’t invent anything; we only arranged the pieces. Colonel Ardenti hadn’t invented anything either, but his arrangement of the pieces was clumsy. Furthermore, he was much less educated than we, so he had fewer pieces.

They had all the pieces, but They didn’t know the design of the crossword. We—once again—were smarter.

I remembered something Lia said to me in the mountains, when she was scolding me for having played the nasty game that was our Plan: “People are starved for plans. If you offer them one, they fall on it like a pack of wolves. You invent, and they’ll believe. It’s wrong to add to the inventings that already exist.”

This is what always happens. A young Herostratus broods because he doesn’t know how to become famous. Then he sees a movie in which a frail young man shoots a country music star and becomes the center of attention. Herostratus has found the formula; he goes put and shoots John Lennon.

It’s the same with the SFAs. How can I become a published poet whose name appears in an encyclopedia? Garamond explains: It’s simple, you pay. The SFA never thought of that before, but since the Manutius plan exists, he identifies with it, is convinced he’s been waiting for Manutius all his life; he just didn’t know it was there.

We invented a nonexistent Plan, and They not only believed it was real but convinced themselves that They had been part of it for ages, or rather, They identified the fragments of their muddled mythology as moments of our Plan, moments joined in a logical, irrefutable web of analogy, semblance, suspicion.

But if you invent a plan and others carry it out, it’s as if the Plan exists. At that point it does exist.

Hereafter, hordes of Diabolicals will swarm through the world in search of the map.

We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep, private frustration. What frustration? Belbo’s first file suggested it to me: There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr.

You don’t complain about being mortal, prey to a thousand microorganisms you can’t control; you aren’t responsible for the fact that your feet are not very prehensile, that you have no tail, that your hair and teeth don’t grow back when you lose them, that your arteries harden with time. It’s because of the Envious Angels.

The same applies to everyday life. Take stock-market crashes. They happen because each individual makes a wrong move, and all the wrong moves put together create panic. Then whoever lacks steady nerve asks himself: Who’s behind this plot, who’s benefiting? He has to find an enemy, a plotter, or it will be, God forbid, his fault.

If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model. Which is what happened when Jesuits and Baconians, Paulicians and neo-Templars each complained of the other’s plan. Diotallevi’s remark was: “Of course, you attribute to the others what you’re doing yourself, and since what you’re doing yourself is hateful, the others become hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would like to do the same hateful thing that you’re doing, they collaborate with you, hinting that—yes— what you attribute to them is actually what they have always desired. God blinds those He wishes to destroy; you just have to lend Him a helping hand.”

A plot, if there is to be one, must be a secret. A secret that, if we only knew it, would dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the knowing of it in itself would be salvation. Does such a luminous secret exist?

Yes, provided it is never known. Known, it will only disappoint us. Hadn’t Aglie spoken of the yearning of mystery that stirred the age of the Antonines? Yet someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God, the Son of God made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all: you only had to love your neighbor. Was that a trivial secret? And he bequeathed the idea that whoever uttered the right words at the right time could turn a chunk of bread and a half-glass of wine into the body and blood of the Son of God, and be nourished by it. Was that a paltry riddle? And then he led the Church fathers to ponder and proclaim that God was One and Triune and that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, but that the Son did not proceed from the Father and the Spirit. Was that some easy formula for hylics? And yet they, who now had salvation within their grasp—do-it-yourself salvation—turned deaf ears. Is that all there is to it? How trite. And they kept on scouring the Mediterranean in their boats, looking for a lost knowledge, of which those thirty-denarii dogmas were but the superficial veil, the parable for the poor in spirit, the allusive hieroglyph, the wink of the eye at the pneumatics. The mystery of the Trinity? Too simple: there had to be more to it.

Someone—Rubinstein, maybe—once said, when asked if he believed in God: “Oh, no, I believe...in something much bigger.” And someone else—was it Chesterton?—said that when men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

But everything is not a bigger secret. There are no “bigger secrets,” because the moment a secret is revealed, it seems little. There is only an empty secret. A secret that keeps slipping through your fingers. The secret of the orchid is that it signifies and affects the testicles. But the testicles signify a sign of the zodiac, which in turn signifies an angelic hierarchy, which then signifies a musical scale, and the scale signifies a relationship among the humors. And so on. Initiation is learning never to stop. The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel. Let us imagine an infinite onion, which has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Initiation travels an endless Mobius strip.

The true initiate is he who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no rival devotee will be able to take it from him.

Now I found more logical and consequential the dynamic of that nocturnal rite before the Pendulum. Belbo had claimed to possess a secret, and because of this he had gained power over Them. Their first impulse, even in a man as clever as Aglie, who had immediately beat the tom-tom to summon all the others, had been to wrest it from him. And the more Belbo refused to reveal it, the bigger They believed the secret to be; the more he vowed he didn’t possess it, the more convinced They were that he did possess it, and that it was a true secret, because if it were false, he would have revealed it.

Through the centuries the search for this secret had been the glue holding Them all together, despite excommunications, internecine fighting, coups de main. Now They were on the verge of knowing it. But They were assailed by two fears: that the secret would be a disappointment, and that once it was known to all, there would be no secret left. Which would be the end of Them.

Aglie then thought: If Belbo spoke, all would know, and he, Aglie, would lose the mysterious aura that granted him charisma and power. But if Belbo confided in him alone, Aglie could go on being Saint-Germain, the immortal. The deferment of Agile’s death coincided with the deferment of the secret. He tried to persuade Belbo to whisper it in his ear, and when he realized that wouldn’t be possible, he provoked him by predicting his surrender and, further, by putting on a display of pompous melodrama. Oh, the old count knew very well that for people from Piedmont stubbornness and a sense of the ridiculous could defeat even the fear of death. Thus he forced Belbo to raise the tone of his refusal and to say no definitively.

The others, out of the same fear, preferred to kill him. They might be losing the map—they would have centuries to continue the search for it—but they were preserving the vigor of their base, slobbering desire.

I remembered a story Amparo told me. Before coming to Italy, she had spent some months in New York City, living in a neighborhood of the kind where even on quiet days you could shoot a TV series featuring the homicide squad. She used to come home alone at two in the morning. When I asked if she wasn’t afraid of sexual maniacs, she told me her method. When a sexual maniac approached, threatening, she would take his arm and say, “Come on, let’s do it.” And he would go away, bewildered.

If you’re a sexual maniac, you don’t want sex; you want the excitement of its theft, you want the victim’s resistance and despair. If sex is handed to you on a platter, here it is, go to it, naturally you’re not interested, otherwise what sort of sexual maniac would you be?

* * *

We had awakened their lust, offering them a secret that couldn’t have been emptier, because not only did we know it ourselves, but, even better, we knew that it was false.

The plane was flying over Mont Blanc, and the passengers all rushed to the same side so as not to miss the view of that blunt bubo that had grown there thanks to a fluke in the telluric currents. If what I was thinking was correct, then the currents didn’t exist any more than the Provins message existed. But the story of the deciphering of the Plan, as we had reconstructed it, that was History.

My memory went back to Belbo’s last file. But if existence is so empty and fragile that it can be endured only by the illusion of a search for its secret, then—as Amparo said that evening in the tenda, after her defeat—there’s no redemption; we are all slaves, give us a master, that’s what we deserve...

No. Lia taught me there is more, and I have the proof: his name is Giulio, and at this moment he is playing in a valley, pulling a goat’s tail. No, because Belbo twice said no.

The first no he said to Abulafia, and to those who would try to steal its secret. “Do you have the password?” was the question. And the answer, the key to knowledge, was “No.” Not only does the magic word not exist, but we do not know that it does not exist. Those who admit their ignorance, therefore, can learn something, at least what I was able to learn.

The second no he said on Saturday night, when he refused the salvation held out to him. He could have invented a map, or used one of the maps I had shown him. In any event, with the Pendulum hung as it was, incorrectly, that bunch of lunatics would never have found the X marking the Umbilicus Mundi, and even if they did, it would have been several more decades before they realized this wasn’t the one. But Belbo refused to bow, he preferred to die.

It wasn’t that he refused to bow to the lust for power; he refused to bow to nonmeaning. He somehow knew that, fragile as our existence may be, however ineffectual our interrogation of the world, there is nevertheless something that has more meaning than the rest.

What had Belbo sensed, perhaps only at that moment, which allowed him to contradict his last, desperate file, and not surrender his destiny to someone who guaranteed him a mere Plan? What had he understood—at last—that allowed him to sacrifice his life, as if he had learned everything there was to learn without realizing it, and as if compared to this one, true, absolute secret of his, everything that took place in the Conservatoire was irreparably stupid—and it was stupid, now, stubbornly to go on living?

There was still something, a link missing in the chain. I had all of Belbo’s feats before me now, from life to death, except one.

On arrival, as I was looking for my passport, I found in one of my pockets the key to this house. I had taken it last Thursday, along with the key to Belbo’s apartment. I remembered that day when Belbo showed us the old cupboard that contained, he said, his opera omnia or, rather, his juvenilia. Perhaps Belbo had written something there that couldn’t be found in Abulafia, perhaps it was buried somewhere in ***.

There was nothing reasonable about this conjecture of mine. All the more reason to consider it good. At this point.

I collected my car, and I came here.

I didn’t find the old relative of the Canepas, the caretaker, or whatever she was. Maybe she, too, had died in the meantime. There was no one. I went through the various rooms. A strong smell of mildew. I considered lighting the bedwarmer in one of the bedrooms, but it made no sense to warm the bed in June. Once the windows were opened, the warm evening air would enter.

After sunset, there was no moon. As in Paris, Saturday night. The moon rose late, I saw less of it now than in Paris, as it slowly climbed above the lower hills, in a dip between the Bricco and another yellowish hump, perhaps already harvested.

I arrived around six in the evening. It was still light. But I had brought nothing with me to eat. Roaming the house, I found a salami in the kitchen, hanging from a beam. My supper was salami and fresh water: going on ten o’clock, I think. Now I’m thirsty. I’ve brought a big pitcher of water to Uncle Carlo’s study and drink a glass every ten minutes. Then I go down, refill the pitcher, and start again.

It must be at least three in the morning. I have the light off and can hardly read my watch. I look out the window. On the flanks of the hills, what seem to be fireflies, shooting stars: the headlights of occasional cars going down into the valley or climbing toward the villages on the hilltops. When Belbo was a boy, this sight did not exist. There were no cars then, no roads. At night there was the curfew.

As soon as I arrived, I opened the cupboard of juvenilia. Shelves and shelves of paper, from elementary-school exercises to bundles of adolescent poems and prose. Everyone has written poems in adolescence; true poets destroy them, bad poets publish them. Belbo, too cynical to save them, too weak to chuck them out, stuck them in Uncle Carlo’s cupboard.

I read for hours. And for hours, up to this moment, I meditated on the last text, which I found just when I was about to give up.

I don’t know when Belbo wrote it. There are pages where different handwritings, insertions, are interwoven, or else it’s the same hand in different years. As if he wrote it very early, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, then put it away, then went back to it at twenty, again at thirty, and maybe later. Until he gave up the idea of writing altogether—only to begin again with Abu-lafia, but not having the heart to recover these lines and subject them to electronic humiliation.

Reading them, I followed a familiar story: the events of *** between 1943 and 1945, Uncle Carlo, the partisans, the parish hall, Cecilia, the trumpet. These were the obsessive themes of the romantic Belbo, disappointed, grieving, drunk. The literature of memory: he knew himself that it was the last refuge of scoundrels.

But I’m no literary critic. I’m Sam Spade again, looking for the final clue.

And so I found the Key Text. It must represent the last chapter of the story of Belbo in ***. For, after it, nothing more could have happened.

119

The garland of the trumpet was set afire, and then I saw the aperture of the dome open and a splendid arrow of fire shoot down through the tube of the trumpet and enter the lifeless body. The aperture then was closed again, and the trumpet, too, was put away.

—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, pp. 125-126

Belbo’s text had some gaps, some overlappings, some lines crossed out. I am not so much rereading it as reconstructing, reliving it.

It must have been toward the end of April of 1945. The German armies were already routed, the Fascists were scattering, and *** was firmly in the hands of the partisans.

After the last battle, the one Belbo narrated to us in this very house almost two years ago, various partisan brigades gathered in ***, in order to head for the city. They were awaiting a signal from Radio London; they would depart when Milan was ready for the insurrection.

The Garibaldi Brigades also arrived, commanded by Ras, a giant with a black beard, very popular in the town. They were dressed in invented uniforms, each one different except for the kerchiefs and the star on the chest, red in both cases, and they were armed in makeshift fashion, some with old shotguns, some with submachine guns taken from the enemy. A marked contrast to the Badoglio Brigades, with their blue kerchiefs, khaki uniforms similar to the British, and brand-new Sten guns. The Allies assisted the Badoglio forces with generous nighttime parachute drops, after the passage, every evening at eleven for the past two years, of the mysterious Pippetto, a British reconnaissance plane. Nobody could figure out what it reconnoitered, since not a light was visible on the ground for kilometers and kilometers.

There was tension between the Garibaldini and the Badogli-ani. It was said that on the evening of the battle the Badogliani had flung themselves at the enemy, shouting “Forward, Savoy!” Well, but that was out of habit, some said. What else could you shout when you attacked? It didn’t necessarily mean they were monarchists; they, too, knew that the king had grave things to answer for. The Garibaldini sneered: You could cry Savoy if you attacked with fixed bayonets in the open field, but not darting around a corner with a Sten. The fact was, the Badogliani had sold out to the British.

The two forces arrived, nevertheless, at a modus vivendi; a joint command under one head was needed for the assault on the city. The choice fell on Mongo; he led the best-equipped brigade, was the oldest, had fought in the First World War, was a hero, and enjoyed the trust of the Allied command.

In the days that followed, sometime before the Milan insurrection, I believe, they set out to take the city. Good news arrived: the operation had succeeded, the brigades were returning victorious to ***. There had been some casualties, however. Rumor had it that Ras had fallen in battle, and Mongo was wounded.

Then one afternoon the sound of vehicles was heard, songs of victory, and people rushed into the main square. From the highway the first units were arriving, clenched fists upraised, flags and weapons brandished from the windows of the cars and the running boards of the trucks. The men had already been strewn with flowers along the way.

Suddenly some people shouted, “Ras, Ras!” and Ras was there, seated on the front fender of a Dodge, his beard tangled and his sweaty, black, hairy chest visible through his open shirt. He waved to the crowd, laughing.

Beside Ras, Rampini also climbed down from the Dodge. He was a nearsighted boy who played in the band, a little older than the others; he had disappeared three months earlier, and it was said he’d joined the partisans. And there he was, with a red kerchief around his neck, a khaki tunic, a pair of blue trousers— the uniform of Don Tico’s band—but now he had a big belt with a holster and a pistol. Through the thick eyeglasses that had earned him so much teasing from his old companions at the parish hall, he now looked at the girls who crowded around him, as if he were Flash Gordon. Jacopo asked himself if Cecilia was there, among the people.

In half an hour the whole square was full of colorful partisans, and the people called in loud voices for Mongo; they wanted a speech.

On a balcony of the town hall, Mongo appeared, leaning on his crutch, pale, and with one hand he tried to calm the crowd. Jacopo waited for the speech, because his whole childhood, like that of others his age, had been marked by the great historic speeches of il Duce, whose most significant passages were memorized in school. Actually, the students memorized whole speeches, because every sentence was a significant declaration.

Silence. Mongo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices... here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.”

And that was it. He went back inside.

The crowd yelled, and the partisans raised their submachine guns, their Stens, their shotguns, their ‘91s, and fired festive volleys. With shell cases falling on all sides, the kids slipped between the legs of the armed men and civilians, because they’d never be able to add to their collections like this again, not with the war looking like it would end in a month, worst luck.

But there had been some casualties: two men killed. By a grim coincidence, both were from San Davide, a little village above ***, and the families asked permission to bury the victims in the local cemetery.

The partisan command decided that there should be a solemn funeral: companies in formation, decorated hearses, the village band, the provost of the cathedral—and the parish hall band.

Don Tico accepted immediately. Because, he said, he had always harbored anti-Fascist sentiments. And because, as the musicians murmured, for a year he had been making them practice two funeral marches, and he had to have them performed sooner or later. Also because, the sharp tongues of the village said, he wanted to make up for “Giovinezza.”

The “Giovinezza” story went like this:

Months earlier, before the arrival of the partisans, Don Tico’s band had gone out for some saint’s feast or other, and they were stopped by the Black Brigades. “Play ‘Giovinezza,’ Reverend,” the captain ordered, drumming his fingers on the barrel of his submachine gun. What could Don Tico do? He said, “Boys, let’s try it; you only have one skin.” He beat time with his pitch pipe, and horrible clattering cacophony drifted over ***. Only someone desperate to save his skin would have agreed that the sounds heard were “Giovinezza.” Shameful for everyone. Shameful for having consented, Don Tico said afterward, but even more shameful for having played like dogs. Priest he was, and anti-Fascist, but, above all, damn it, he was an artist.

Jacopo had been absent on that day. He had tonsillitis. On the bombardons there were only Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo, and their presence, without Jacopo, must have made a crucial contribution to the collapse of Nazism-Fascism. But this was not what troubled Belbo, at least at the time he was writing. He had missed’another opportunity to find out if he would have had the courage to say no. Perhaps that is why he died on the gallows of the Pendulum.

The funeral, anyway, was scheduled for Sunday morning. In the cathedral square everyone was present: Mongo with his troops, Uncle Carlo and other municipal dignitaries, with their Great War decorations—and it didn’t matter who had been a Fascist and who had not, it was a question of honoring heroes. The clergy were there, the town band in dark suits, and the hearses with the horses decked in trappings of cream, black, and gold. The Automedon was dressed like one of Napoleon’s marshals, cocked hat, short cape, and great cloak, in the same colors as the horses’ trappings. And there was the parish hall band, their visored caps, khaki tunics, and blue trousers, brasses shining, woodwinds severe black, cymbals and drums sparkling.

Between *** and San Davide were five or six kilometers of uphill curves. This road was taken, on Sunday afternoons, by the retired men; they would walk, playing bowls as they walked, take a rest, have some wine, play a second game, and so on until they reached the sanctuary at the top.

A few uphill kilometers are nothing for men who play bowls, and perhaps it’s nothing to cover them in formation, rifle on your shoulder, eyes staring straight ahead, lungs inhaling the cool spring air. But try climbing them while playing an instrument, cheeks swollen, sweat trickling, breath short. The town band had done nothing else for a lifetime, but for the boys of the parish hall it was torture. They held out like heroes. Don Tico beat his pitch pipe in the air, the clarinets whined with exhaustion, the saxophones gave strangled bleats, the bombardons and the trumpets let out squeals of agony, but they made it, all the way to the village, to the foot of the steep path that led to the cemetery. For some time Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo had only pretended to play, but Jacopo stuck to his role of sheepdog, under Don Tico’s benedictive eye. Compared to the town band, they made not a bad showing, and Mongo himself and the other brigade commanders said as much: Good for you, boys. It was magnificent.

A commander with a blue kerchief and a rainbow of ribbons from both world wars said: “Reverend, let the boys rest here in the town; they’re worn out. Climb up later, at the end. There’ll be a truck to take you back to ***.”

They rushed to the tavern. The men of the town band, veterans toughened by countless funerals, showed no restraint in grabbing the tables and ordering tripe and all the wine they could drink. They would stay there having a spree until evening. Don Tico’s boys, meanwhile, crowded at the counter, where the host was serving mint ices as green as a chemistry experiment. The ice, sliding down the throat, gave you a pain in the middle of your forehead, like sinusitis.

Then they struggled up to the cemetery, where a pickup truck was waiting. They climbed in, yelling, and were all packed together, all standing, jostling one another with the instruments, when the commander who had spoken before came out and said: “Reverend, for the final ceremony we need a trumpet. You know, for the usual bugle calls. It’s a matter of five minutes.”

“Trumpet,” Don Tico said, very professional. And the hapless holder of that title, now sticky with green mint ice and yearning for the family meal, a treacherous peasant insensitive to aesthetic impulses and higher ideals, began to complain: It was late, he wanted to go home, he didn’t have any saliva left, and so on, mortifying Don Tico in the presence of the commander.

Then Jacopo, seeing in the glory of noon the sweet image of Cecilia, said, “If he’ll give me the trumpet, I’ll go.”

A gleam of gratitude in the eyes of Don Tico; the sweaty relief of the miserable titular trumpet. An exchange of instruments, like two guards.

Jacopo proceeded to the cemetery, led by the psychopomp with the Addis Ababa ribbons. Everything around them was white: the wall struck by the sun, the graves, the blossoming trees along the borders, the surplice of the provost ready to impart benediction. The only brown was the faded photographs on the tombstones. And a big patch of color was created by the ranks lined up beside the two graves.

“Boy,” the commander said, “you stand here, beside me, and at my order play Assembly. Then, again at my order, Taps. That’s easy, isn’t it?”

Very easy. Except that Jacopo had never played Assembly or Taps.

He held the trumpet with his right arm bent, against his ribs, the horn at a slight angle, as if it were a carbine, and he waited, head erect, belly in, chest out.

Mongo was delivering a brief speech, with very short sentences. Jacopo thought that to emit the blast he would have to lift his eyes to heaven, and the sun would blind him. But that was the trumpeter’s death, and since you only died once, you might as well do it right.

The commander murmured to him: “Now.” He ordered Assembly. Jacopo played only do mi sol do. For those rough men of war, that seemed to suffice. The final do was played after a deep breath, so he could hold it, give it time—Belbo wrote—to reach the sun.

The partisans stood stiffly at attention. The living as still as the dead.

Only the gravediggers moved. The sound of the coffins being lowered could be heard, the creak of the ropes, their scraping against the wood. But there was little motion, no more than the flickering glint on a sphere, when a slight variation of light serves only to emphasize the sphere’s invariability.

Then, the dry sound of Present Arms. The provost murmured the formulas of the aspersion; the commanders approached the graves and flung, each of them, a fistful of earth. A sudden order unleashed a volley toward the sky, rat-tat-tat-a-boom, and the birds rose up, squawking, from the trees in blossom. But all that, too, was not really motion. It was as if the same instant kept presenting itself from different perspectives. Looking at one instant forever doesn’t mean that, as you look at it, time passes.

For this reason, Jacopo stood fast, ignoring even the fall of the shell cases now rolling at his feet; nor did he put his trumpet back at his side, but kept it to his lips, fingers on the valves, rigid at attention, the instrument aimed diagonally upward. He played on.

His long final note had never broken off: inaudible to those present, it still issued from the bell of the trumpet, like a light breath, a gust of air that he kept sending into the mouthpiece, holding his tongue between barely parted lips, without pressing them to the metal. The instrument, not resting on his face, remained suspended by the tension alone in his elbows and shoulders.

He continued holding that virtual note, because he felt he was playing out a string that kept the sun in place. The planet had been arrested in its course, had become fixed in a noon that could last an eternity. And it all depended on Jacopo, because if he broke that contact, dropped that string, the sun would fly off like a balloon, and with it this day and the event of this day, this action without transition, this sequence without before and after, which was unfolding, motionless, only because it was in his power to will it thus.

If he stopped, stopped to attack a new note, a rent would have been heard, far louder than the volleys that had deafened him, and the clocks would all resume their tachycardial palpitation.

Jacopo wished with his whole soul that this man beside him would not order Taps. I could refuse, he said to himself, and stay like this forever.

He had entered that trance state that overwhelms the diver when he tries not to surface, wanting to prolong the inertia that allows him to glide along the-ocean floor. Trying to express what he felt then, Belbo, in the notebook I was now reading, resorted to broken, twisted, unsyntactical sentences, mutilated by rows of dots. But it was clear to me that in that moment—though he didn’t come out and say it—in that moment he was possessing Cecilia.

The fact is that Jacopo Belbo did not understand, not then and not later, when he was writing of his unconscious self, that at that moment he was celebrating once and for all his chemical wedding—with Cecilia, with Lorenza, with Sophia, with the earth and with the sky. Alone among mortals, he was bringing to a conclusion the Great Work.

No one had yet told him that the Grail is a chalice but also a spear, and his trumpet raised like a chalice was at the same time a weapon, an instrument of the sweetest dominion, which shot toward the sky and linked the earth with the Mystic Pole. With the only Fixed Point in the universe. With what he created, for that one instant, with his breath.

Diotallevi had not yet told him how you can dwell in Yesod, the Sefirah of foundation, the sign of the superior bow drawn to send arrows to Malkhut, its target. Yesod is the drop that springs from the arrow to produce the tree and the fruit, it is the anima mundi, the moment in which virile force, procreating, binds all the states of being together.

Knowing how to spin this Cingulum Veneris means knowing how to repair the error of the Demiurge.

You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was—full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.

That day, Jacopo Belbo stared into the eyes of Truth. The only truth that was to be granted him. Because—he would learn— truth is brief (afterward, it is all commentary). So he tried to arrest the rush of time.

He didn’t understand. Not as a child. Not as an adolescent when he was writing about it. Not as a man who decided to give up writing about it.

I understood it this evening: the author has to die in order for the reader to become aware of his truth.

The Pendulum, which haunted Jacopo Belbo all his adult life, had been—like the lost addresses of his dream—the symbol of that other moment, recorded and then repressed, when he truly touched the ceiling of the world. But that moment, in which he froze space and time, shooting his Zeno’s arrow, had been no symbol, no sign, symptom, allusion, metaphor, or enigma: it was what it was. It did not stand for anything else. At that moment there was no longer any deferment, and the score was settled.

Jacopo Belbo didn’t understand that he had had his moment and that it would have to be enough for him, for all his life. Not recognizing it, he spent the rest of his days seeking something else, until he damned himself. But perhaps he suspected this. Otherwise he wouldn’t have returned so often to the memory of the trumpet. But he remembered it as a thing lost, not as a thing possessed.

I believe, I hope, I pray that as he was dying, swaying with the Pendulum, Jacopo Belbo finally understood this, and found peace.

Then Taps was ordered. But Jacopo would have stopped in any case, because his breath was failing. He broke the contact, then blared a single note, high, with a decrescendo, tenderly, to prepare the world for the melancholy that lay in store.

The commander said, “Bravo, young fellow. Run along now. Handsome trumpet.”

The provost slipped away, the partisans made for a rear gateway where their vehicles awaited them, the gravediggers went off after filling the graves. Jacopo was the last to go. He couldn’t bring himself to leave that place of happiness.

* * *

In the yard below, the pickup truck of the parish hall was gone.

Jacopo asked himself why Don Tico had abandoned him like this. From a distance in time, the most probable answer is that there had been a misunderstanding; someone had told Don Tico that the partisans would bring the boy back down. But Jacopo at that moment thought—and not without reason—that between Assembly and Taps too many centuries had passed. The boys had waited until their hair turned white, until death, until their dust scattered to form the haze that now was turning the expanse of hills blue before his eyes.

He was alone. Behind him, an empty cemetery. In his hands, the trumpet. Before him, the hills fading, bluer and bluer, one behind the other, into an infinity of humps. And, vindictive, over his head, the liberated sun.

He decided to cry.

But suddenly the hearse appeared, with its Automedon decorated like a general of the emperor, all cream and silver and black, the horses decked with barbaric masks that left only their eyes visible, caparisoned like coffins, the little twisted columns that supported the Assyro-Greco-Egyptian tympanum all white and gold. The man with the cocked hat stopped a moment by the solitary trumpeter, and Jacopo asked: “Will you take me home?”

The man smiled. Jacopo climbed up beside him on the box, and so it was on a hearse that he began his return to the world of the living. That off-duty Charon, taciturn, urged his funereal chargers down the slopes, as Jacopo sat erect and hieratic, the trumpet clutched under his arm, his visor shining, absorbed in his new, unhoped-for role.

They descended, and at every curve a new view opened up, of vines blue with verdigris in dazzling light, and after an incalculable time they arrived in ***. They crossed the big square, all arcades, deserted as only Monferrato squares can be deserted at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. A schoolmate at the corner saw Jacopo on the hearse, the trumpet under his arm, eyes fixed on infinity, and gave him an admiring wave.

Jacopo went home, wouldn’t eat anything, wouldn’t tell anything. He huddled on the terrace and began playing the trumpet as if it had a mute, blowing softly so as not to disturb the silence of the siesta.

His father joined him and, guilelessly, with the serenity of one who knows the laws of life, said: “In a month, if all goes as it should, we’ll be going home. You can’t play the trumpet in the city. Our landlord would evict us. So you’ll have to forget that. If you really like music, we’ll have you take piano lessons.” And then, seeing the boy with moist eyes, he added: “Come now, silly. Don’t you realize the bad days are over?”

The next day, Jacopo returned the trumpet to Don Tico Two weeks later, the family left ***, to rejoin the future.