I realized this one night when I followed Belbo's gaze and saw Lorenza Pellegrini at the machine. Or, rather, when I later read one of his files. Lorenza isn't named, but it's obviously about her. She was the only one who played pinball like that.
FILENAME: Pinball
You don't play pinball with just your hands, you play it with the groin too. The pinball problem is not to stop the ball before it's swallowed by the mouth at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a halfback. The problem is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are more numerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering, confused, delirious, but still a free agent. And you achieve this not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to the case, the frame, but gently, so the machine won't catch on and say Tilt. You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the hips that makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this side of an orgasm. And if the hips move according to nature, it's the buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so that when the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as in homeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more the drug dissolves in the water added gradually, until the drug has almost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective and potent it is. Thus from the groin an infinitesimal pulse is transmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball moves against nature, against inertia, against gravity, against the laws of dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, who wanted it disobedient. The ball is intoxicated with vis movendi, remaining in play for memorable and immemorial lengths of time. But a female groin is required, one that interposes no spongy body between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no erectile matter in between, only skin, nerves, padded bone sheathed in a pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a disinterested adaptability to the partner's response, a taste for arousing desire without suffering the excess of one's own: the Amazon must drive the pinball crazy and savor the thought that she will then abandon it.
That, I believe, was when Belbo fell in love with Lorenza Pellegrini: when he realized that she could promise him an unattainable happiness. But I also believe it was through her that he began to be aware of the erotic nature of automated universes, the machine as metaphor of the cosmic body, the mechanical game as talismanic evocation. He was already hooked on Abulafia and perhaps had entered, even then, into the spirit of Project Hermes. Certainly he had seen the Pendulum. Somehow, Lorenza Pellegrini held out the promise of the Pendulum.
I had trouble readjusting to Pilade's. Little by little, but not every evening, in the forest of alien faces, I was rediscovering familiar ones, the faces of survivors, though they were blurred by my effort of recognition. This one was a copywriter in an advertising agency; this one, a tax consultant; and this one sold books on the installment plan—in the old days he peddled the works of Che, but now he was offering herbals, Buddhism, astrology. They had gained a little weight and some gray in their hair, but I felt that the Scotch-on-the-rocks in their hands was the same one they had held ten years ago. They were sipping slowly, one drop every six months.
"What are you up to? Why don't you come by and see us?" one of them asked me.
"Who's us nowadays?"
He looked at me as if I'd been away for a century. "The Cultural Commission at City Hall, of course."
I had skipped too many beats.
I decided to invent a job for myself. I knew a lot of things, unconnected things, but I would be able to connect them after a few hours at a library. I once thought it was necessary to have a theory, and that my problem was that I didn't. But nowadays all you needed was information; everybody was greedy for information, especially if it was out of date. I dropped in at the university, to see if I could fit in somewhere. The lecture halls were quiet; the students glided along the corridors like ghosts, lending one another badly made bibliographies. I knew how to make a good bibliography.
One day, a doctoral candidate, mistaking me for faculty (the teachers now were the same age as the students, or vice versa), asked me what this Lord Chandos they were talking about in an economics course on cyclical crises had written. I told him Chandos was a character in Hofmannsthal, not an economist.
That same evening I was at a party with old friends and recognized a man who worked for a publisher. He had joined the staff after the firm had switched from novels by French collaborationists to Albanian political texts. They were still publishing political books, but with government backing. And they didn't reject an occasional good work in philosophy—provided it was in the classical line, he added.
"By the way," he said to me then, "since you're a philosopher—"
"Thanks, but unfortunately I'm not."
"Come on, in your day you knew everything. I was just looking over the translation of a book on the crisis of Marxism, and I came across a quotation from Anselm of Canterbury. Who's he? I couldn't even find him in the Dictionary of Authors." I told him it was Anselmo d'Aosta, and that only the English, who had to be different from everybody else, called him Anselm of Canterbury.
A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning.
Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I'd sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup, the whiskey I'd brought up from the corner store in a paper bag. The phone rings and a man says: "Listen, I'm translating this book and came across something or someone called Motakallimun. What the hell is it?"
Give me two days, I tell him. Then I go to the library, flip through some card catalogs, give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a clue.
That evening I invite an instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple of beers and he drops his guard, gives me the low-down for nothing. I call the client back. "All right, the Motakallimun were radical Moslem theologians at the time of Avicenna. They said the world was a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would fall to pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you? The job took me three days. Pay what you think is fair."
I was lucky enough to find two rooms and a little kitchen in an old building in the suburbs. It must have been a factory once, with a wing for offices. All the apartments that had been made from it opened onto one long corridor. I was between a real estate agent and a taxidermist's laboratory (A. Salon, the sign said). It was like being in an American sky-scraper of the thirties; if I'd had a glass door, I'd have felt like Marlowe. I put a sofa bed in the back room and made the front one an office. In a pair of bookcases I arranged the atlases, encyclopedias, catalogs I acquired bit by bit. In the beginning, I had to turn a deaf ear to my conscience and write theses for desperate students. It wasn't hard: I just went and copied some from the previous decade. But then my friends in publishing began sending me manuscripts and foreign books to read—naturally, the least appealing and for little money.
Still, I was accumulating experience and information, and I never threw anything away. I kept files on everything. I didn't think to use a computer (they were coming on the market just then; Belbo was to be a pioneer). Instead, I had cross-referenced index cards. Nebulae, Laplace; Laplace, Kant; Kant, Königsberg, the seven bridges of Königsberg, theorems of topology ... It was a little like that game where you have to go from sausage to Plato in five steps, by association of ideas. Let's see: sausage, pig bristle, paintbrush, Mannerism, Idea, Plato. Easy. Even the sloppiest manuscript would bring twenty new cards for my hoard. I had a strict rule, which I think secret services follow, too: No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.
A
fter about two years in business, I was pleased with myself. I was having fun. Meanwhile I had met Lia.
35
Sappia qualunque il mio nome dimanda ch'i' mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno le belle mani a farmi una ghirlanda.
—Dante, Purgatorio, XXVII, 100–102
Lia. Now, I despair of seeing her again, but I might never have met her, and that would have been worse. I wish she were here, to hold my hand while I reconstruct the stages of my undoing. Because she told me so. But no, she must remain outside this business, she and the child. I hope they put off their return, that they come back when everything is finished, however it may finish.
It was July 16, 1981. Milan was emptying; the reference room of the library was almost deserted.
"Hey, I need volume 109 myself."
"Then why did you leave it here?"
"I just went back to my seat for a minute to check a note."
"That's no excuse."
She took the volume stubbornly and went to her table. I sat down across from her, trying to get a better look at her face.
"How can you read it like that, unless it's in Braille?" I asked.
She raised her head, and I really couldn't tell whether I was looking at her face or the nape of her neck. "What?" she asked. "Oh. I can see through it all right." But she lifted her hair as she spoke, and she had green eyes.
"You have green eyes."
"Of course I do. Is that bad?"
"No. There should be more eyes like that."
That's how it began.
"Eat. You're thin as a rail," she said to me at supper. At midnight we were still in the Greek restaurant near Pilade's, the candle guttering in the neck of the bottle as we told each other everything. We did almost the same work: she checked encyclopedia entries.
I felt I had to tell her. At twelve-thirty, when she pulled her hair aside to see me better, I aimed a forefinger at her, thumb raised, and went: "Pow."
"Me too," she said.
That night we became flesh of one flesh, and from then on she called me Pow.
We couldn't afford a new house. I slept at her place, and sometimes she stayed with me at the office, or went off investigating, because she was smarter than I when it came to following up clues. She was good, also, at suggesting connections.
"We seem to have a half-empty file on the Rosicrucians," she said.
"I should go back to it one of these days. They're notes I took in Brazil...."
"Well, put in a cross reference to Yeats."
"What's Yeats got to do with it?"
"Plenty. I see here that he belonged to a Rosicrucian society that was called Stella Matutina."
"What would I do without you?"
I resumed going to Pilade's, because it was like a marketplace where I could find customers.
One evening I saw Belbo again. He must have been coming rarely in the past few years, but he showed up regularly after meeting Lorenza Pellegrini. He looked the same, maybe a bit grayer, maybe slightly thinner.
It was a cordial meeting, given the limits of his expansiveness: a few remarks about the old days, sober reticence about our complicity in that last event and its epistolary sequel. Inspector De Angelis hadn't been heard from again. Case closed? Who could say?
I told him about my work, and he seemed interested. "Just the kind of thing I'd like to do: the Sam Spade of culture. Twenty bucks a day and expenses."
"Except that no fascinating, mysterious women have dropped in on me, and nobody ever comes to talk about the Maltese falcon," I said.
"You never can tell. Are you enjoying yourself?"
"Enjoying myself?" I asked. I quoted him: "It's the only thing I seem to be able to do well."
"Bon pour vous," he said.
We saw each other again after that, and I told him about my Brazilian experience, but he seemed more absent than usual. When Lorenza Pellegrini wasn't there, he kept his eyes glued to the door, and when she was, he glanced nervously along the bar, following her every move. One night near closing time, he said, without looking at me, "Listen, we might be able to use your services, but not for a single consultation. Could you give us, say, a few afternoons each week?"
"We can discuss it. What does it involve?"
"A steel company has commissioned a book about metals. Something with a lot of illustrations. Serious, but for the mass market. You know the sort of thing: metals in history, from the Iron Age to spaceships. We need somebody who'll dig around in libraries and archives and find beautiful illustrations, old miniatures, engravings from nineteenth-century volumes on smelting, for instance, or lightning rods."
"All right. I'll drop by tomorrow."
Lorenza Pellegrini came over to him. "Would you take me home?"
"Why me?" Belbo asked.
"Because you're the man of my dreams."
He blushed, as only he could blush, and looked away. "There's a witness," he said. And to me: "I'm the man of her dreams. This is Lorenza."
"Ciao."
"Ciao."
He got up, whispered something in her ear.
She shook her head. "I asked for a ride home, that's all."
"Ah," he said. "Excuse me, Casaubon, I have to play chauffeur to the woman of someone else's dreams."
"Idiot," she said to him tenderly, and kissed him on the cheek.
36
Yet one caution let me give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually melancholy—that he read not the symptomes or prognosticks of the following tract, lest, by applying that which he reads to himself, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his own person (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurt himself, and get, in conclusion, more harm than good. I advise them therefore warily to peruse that tract.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621, Introduction
It was obvious that there was something between Belbo and Lorenza Pellegrini. I didn't know exactly what it was or how long it had been going on. Abulafia's files did not help me to reconstruct the story.
There is no date, for example, on the file about the dinner with Dr. Wagner. Belbo knew Dr. Wagner before my departure, and may well have been in contact with him after I started working at Garamond, which was when, in fact, I got to know him myself. So the dinner could have been before or after the evening I have in mind. If it was before, then I understand Belbo's embarrassment, his solemn desperation.
Dr. Wagner—an Austrian who for years had been practicing in Paris (hence the pronunciation "Vagnere" for those who wanted to boast of their familiarity with him)—had been coming to Milan regularly for about ten years, at the invitation of two revolutionary groups of the post-'68 period. They fought over him, and of course each group gave a radically different interpretation of his thought. How and why this famous man allowed himself to be sponsored by extremists, I never understood. Wagner's theories had no political color, so to speak, and, had he wanted, he could easily have been invited by the universities, the clinics, the academies. I believe he accepted the invitations because he was basically an epicurean and required regal expense accounts. The private hosts could raise more money than the institutions, and for Dr. Wagner this meant first-class tickets, luxury hotels, plus fees in keeping with his therapist rates, for the lectures and seminars.
Why the two groups found ideological inspiration in Wagner's theories was another story. But in those days Wagner's brand of psychoanalysis seemed sufficiently deconstructive, diagonal, libidinal, and non-Cartesian to provide some theoretical justification for revolutionary activity.
It proved difficult to get the workers to swallow it, so at a certain point the two groups had to choose between the workers and Wagner. They chose Wagner. Which gave rise to the theory that the new revolutionary protagonist was not the proletarian but the deviate.
"Instead of deviating the proletariat, they would do better to proletarianize the deviates, which would be more economical, considering Dr. Wagner's prices," Belbo said to
me one day.
The Wagnerian revolution was the most expensive in history.
Garamond, subsidized by a university psychology department, had published a translation of Wagner's minor essays—very technical, nearly impossible to find, and therefore in great demand among the faithful. Wagner had come to Milan for a publicity launch, and that was when his acquaintance with Belbo began.
FILENAME: Doktor Wagner
The diabolical Doktor Wagner
Twenty-sixth installment
Who, on that gray morning of
During the discussion I raised an objection. The satanic old man must have been irritated, but he didn't let it show. On the contrary, he replied as if he wanted to seduce me.
Like Charlus with Jupien, bee and flower. A genius can't bear not being loved; he must immediately seduce the dissenter, make the dissenter love him. He succeeded. I loved him.
But he must not have forgiven me, because that evening of the divorce he dealt me a mortal blow. Unconsciously, instinctively, not thinking, he seduced me, and unconsciously, he punished me. Though it cost him deontologically, he psychoanalyzed me free. The unconscious bites even its handlers.
***
Story of the Marquis de Lantenac in Quatre-vingt-treize. The ship of the Vendéeiens is sailing through a storm off the Breton coast. Suddenly a cannon slips its moorings, and as the ship pitches and rolls it begins a mad race from rail to rail, an immense beast smashing larboard and starboard. A cannoneer (alas, the very one whose negligence had left the cannon improperly secured) seizes a chain and with unparalleled courage flings himself at the monster, which nearly crushes him, but he stops it, bolts it fast, leads it back to its stall, saving the ship, the crew, the mission. With sublime liturgy, the fearsome Lantenac musters all the men on deck, praises the cannoneer's heroism, takes an impressive medal from around his own neck and puts it on the man, embraces him, and the crew makes the welkin ring with its hurrahs.