Quickening our steps, we arrived at the door of a hovel in a poorly lit alley, sinister and Semitic.
We knocked, and the door opened as if by magic. We entered a spacious room: there were seven-branched candelabra, tetragrams in relief, Stars of David like monstrances. Old violins, the color of the veneer on certain old paintings, were piled in the entrance on a refectory table of anamorphic irregularity. A great crocodile hung, mummified, from the ceiling, swaying slightly in the dim glow of a single torch, or of many, or of none. In the rear, before a kind of curtain or canopy under which stood a tabernacle, kneeling in prayer, ceaselessly and blasphemously murmuring the seventy-two names of God, was an old man. I knew, by a sudden stroke of nous, that this was Heinrich Khunrath.
"Come to the point, Dee," he said, turning and breaking off his prayer. "What do you want?" He resembled a stuffed armadillo, an ageless iguana.
"Khunrath," Dee said, "the third encounter did not take place."
Khunrath exploded in a horrible curse: "Lapis exillis! Now what?"
"Khunrath," Dee said, "you could throw out some bait; you could put me in touch with the German line."
"Let me see," Khunrath said. "I could ask Maier, who is in touch with many people at the court. But you will tell me the secret of Virgin's Milk, the Most Secret Oven of the Philosophers."
Dee smiled. Oh the divine smile of that Sophos! He concentrated then as if in prayer, and said in a low voice: "When you wish to translate into water or Virgin's Milk a sublimate of Mercury, place the Thing duly pulverized over the lamina between the little weights and the goblet. Do not cover it but see that the hot air strikes the naked matter, administer it to the fire of three coals, and keep it alive for eight solar days, then remove it and pound it well on marble until it is a fine paste. This done, put it inside a glass alembic and distill it in a Balneum Mariae over a cauldron of water set in such a way that it does not touch the water below by the space of two fingers but remains suspended in air, and at the same time light the fire beneath the Balneum. Then, and only then, though the Silver does not touch the water, finding itself in this warm and moist womb, will it change to liquid."
"Master," said Khunrath, sinking to his knees and kissing the bony, diaphanous hand of Dr. Dee. "Master, so I will do. And you will have what you wish. Remember these words: the Rose and the Cross. You will hear talk of them."
Dee wrapped himself in his cloaklike coat, and only his eyes, glistening and malign, could be seen. "Come, Kelley," he said. "This man is now ours. And you, Khunrath, keep the golem well away from us until our return to London. And then, let all Prague burn as a sole pyre."
He started to go off. Crawling, Khunrath seized him by the hem of his coat. "One day, perhaps, a man will come to you. He will want to write about you. Be his friend."
"Give me the Power," Dee said with an unspeakable expression on his fleshless face, "and his fortune is assured."
We went out. Over the Atlantic a low-pressure air mass was advancing in an easterly direction toward Russia.
"Let's go to Moscow," I said to him.
"No," he said. "We're returning to London."
"To Moscow, to Moscow," I murmured crazily. You knew very well, Kelley, that you would never go there. The Tower awaited you.
***
Back in London, Dee said: "They're trying to reach the solution before we do. Kelley, you must write something for William ... something diabolically insinuating about them."
Belly of the demon, I did it, but William ruined the text, shifting everything from Prague to Venice. Dee flew into a rage. But the pale, shifty William felt protected by his royal concubine. And still he wasn't satisfied. As I handed over to him, one by one, his finest sonnets, he asked me, with shameless eyes, about Her, about You, my Dark Lady. How horrible to hear your name on that mummer's lips! (I didn't know that he, his soul damned to duplicity and to the vicarious, was seeking her for Bacon.) "Enough," I said to him. "I'm tired of building your glory in the shadows. Write for yourself."
"I can't," he answered with the gaze of one who has seen a lemure. "He won't let me."
"Who? Dee?"
"No, Verulam. Don't you know he's now the one in charge? He's forcing me to write works that later he'll claim as his own. You understand, Kelley? I'm the true Bacon, and posterity will never know. Oh, parasite! How I hate that firebrand of hell!"
"Bacon's a pig, but he has talent," I said. "Why doesn't he write his own stuff?"
He didn't have the time. We realized this only years later, when Germany was invaded by the Rosy Cross madness. Then, from scattered references, certain phrases, putting two and two together, I saw that the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes was really he. He wrote under the pseudonym of Johann Valentin Andreae!
Now, in the darkness of this cell where I languish, more clear-headed than Don Isidro Parodi, I know for whom Andreae was writing. I was told by Soapes, my companion in imprisonment, a former Portuguese Templar. Andreae was writing a novel of chivalry for a Spaniard, who was languishing meanwhile in another prison. I don't know why, but this project served the infamous Bacon, who wanted to go down in history as the secret author of the adventures of the knight of La Mancha. Bacon asked Andreae to pen for him, in secret, a novel whose hidden author he would then pretend to be, enjoying in the shadows (but why? why?) another man's triumph.
But I digress. I am cold in this dungeon and my thumb hurts. I am writing, in the dim light of a dying lamp, the last works that will pass under William's name.
***
Dr. Dee died, murmuring, "Light, more light!" and asking for a toothpick. Then he said: "Qualis Artifcx Pereo!" It was Bacon who had him killed. Before the queen died, for years unhinged of mind and heart, Verulam managed to seduce her. Her features then were changed; she was reduced to the condition of a skeleton. Her food was limited to a little white roll and some soup of chicory greens. At her side she kept a sword, and in moments of wrath she would thrust it violently into the curtains and arras that covered the walls of her refuge. (And what if there were someone behind there, listening? How now! A rat? Good idea, old Kelley, must make a note of it.) With the poor woman in this condition, it was easy for Bacon to make her believe he was William, her bastard—presenting himself at her knees, she being now blind, covered in a sheep's skin. The Golden Fleece! They said he was aiming at the throne, but I knew he was after something quite different, control of the Plan. That was when he became Viscount St. Albans. His position strengthened, he eliminated Dee.
***
The queen is dead, long live the king.... Now, I was an embarrassing witness. He led me into an ambush one night when at last the Dark Lady could be mine and was dancing in my arms with abandon under the influence of a grass capable of producing visions, she, the eternal Sophia, with her wrinkled face like an old nanny goat's....He entered with a handful of armed men, made me cover my eves with a cloth. I guessed at once: vitriol! And how he laughed. And she! How you laughed, Pinball Lady—and gilded honor shamefully misplaced and maiden virtue rudely strumpeted—while he touched her with his greedy hands and you called him Simon—and kissed his sinister scar...
"To the Tower, to the Tower." Verulam laughed. Since then, here I lie, with this human wraith who says he is Soapes, and the jailers know me only as Seven Seas Jim. I have studied thoroughly, and with ardent zeal, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and, unfortunately, also theology. Here I am, poor madman, and I know as much as I did before.
***
Through a slit of a window I witnessed the royal wedding, the knights with red crosses cantering to the sound of a trumpet. I should have been there playing the trumpet, for Cecilia, but once again the prize had been taken from me. It was William playing. I was writing in the shadows, for him.
"I'll tell you how to avenge yourself," Soapes whispered, and that day he revealed to me what he truly is: a Bonapartist abbé buried in this dungeon for centuries.
"Will you get out?" I asked him.
"If..." h
e began to reply, but then was silent. Striking his spoon on the wall, in a mysterious alphabet that, he confided in me, he had received from Trithemius, he began transmitting messages to the prisoner in the next cell. The count of Monsalvat.
***
Years have gone by. Soapes never stops striking the wall. Now I know for whom and to what end. His name is Noffo Dei. This Dei (through what mysterious cabala do Dei and Dee sound so alike?), prompted by Soapes, has denounced Bacon. What he said, I do not know, but a few days ago Verulam was imprisoned. Accused of sodomy, because, they said (I tremble at the thought that it may be true), you, the Dark Lady, Black Virgin of Druids and of Templars, are none other ... none other than the eternal androgyne created by the knowing hands of ... of...? Now, now I know ... of your lover, the Comte de Saint-Germain! But who is Saint-Germain if not Bacon himself? (Soapes knows all sorts of things, this obscure Templar of many lives....)
***
Verulam has been released from prison, has regained through his magic arts the favor of the monarch. Now, William tells me, he spends his nights along the Thames, in Pilad's Pub, playing that strange machine invented for him by an Italian from Nola whom he then had burned at the stake in Rome. It is an astral device, which devours small mad spheres that race through infinite worlds in a sparkle of angelic light. Verulam gives obscene blows of triumphant bestiality with his groin against the frame, miming the events of the celestial orbs in the domain of the decans in order to understand the ultimate secrets of the Great Establishment and the secret of the New Atlantis itself, which he calls Gottlieb's, parodying the sacred language of the manifestoes attributed to Andreae.... Ah! I cry, now lucidly aware, but too late and in vain, as my heart beats conspicuously beneath the laces of my corset: this is why he took away my trumpet, amulet, talisman, cosmic bond that could command demons. What will he be plotting in the House of Solomon? It's late, I repeat to myself, by now he has been given too much power.
***
They say Bacon is dead. Soapes assures me it is not true. No one has seen the body. He is living under a false name with the landgrave of Hesse; he is now initiated into the supreme mysteries and hence immortal, ready to continue his grim battle for the triumph of the Plan—in his name and under his control.
After this alleged death, William came to see me, with his hypocritical smile, which the bars could not hide from me. He asked me why I wrote, in Sonnet in, about a certain dyer. He quoted the verse: "To what it works in, like the dyer's hand...."
"I never wrote that," I told him. And it was true.... It's obvious: Bacon inserted those words before disappearing, to send some sign to those who will then welcome Saint-Germain in one court after another, as an expert in dyes....I believe that in the future he will try to make people believe he wrote William's works himself. How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!
***
Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long? I feel weary, sick. William is expecting new material from me for his crude clowneries at the Globe.
Soapes is writing. I look over his shoulder. An incomprehensible message: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..." He hides the page, looks at me, sees me paler than a ghost, reads Death in my eyes. He whispers to me, "Rest. Never fear. I'll write for you."
And so he is doing, mask behind a mask. I slowly fade, and he takes from me even the last light, that of obscurity.
74
Though his will be good, his spirit and his prophecies are illusions of the Devil.... They are capable of deceiving many curious people and of causing great harm and scandal to the Church of Our Lord God.
—Opinion on Guillaume Postel sent to Ignatius Loyola by the Jesuit fathers Salmeron, Lhoost, and Ugoletto, May 10, 1545
Belbo, detached, told us what he had concocted, but he didn't read his pages to us and eliminated all personal references. Indeed, he led us to believe that Abulafia had supplied him with the connections. The idea that Bacon was the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes he had already come upon somewhere or other. But one thing in particular struck me: that Bacon was Viscount St. Albans.
It buzzed in my head; it had something to do with my old thesis. I spent that night digging in my card file.
"Gentlemen," I said to my accomplices with a certain solemnity the next morning, "we don't have to invent connections. They exist. When, in 1164, Saint Bernard launched the idea of a council at Troves to legitimize the Templars, among those charged to organize everything was the prior of Saint Albans. Saint Alban was the first English martyr, who evangelized the British Isles. He lived in Verulamium, which became Bacon's property. He was a Celt and unquestionably a Druid initiate, like Saint Bernard."
"That's not very much," Bclbo said.
"Wait. This prior of Saint Albans was abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the abbey where the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers was later installed!"
Belbo reacted. "My God!"
"And that's not all," I said. "The Conservatoire was conceived as homage to Bacon. On 25 Brumaire of the year 111, the Convention authorized its Comité d'Instruction Publique to have the complete works of Bacon printed. And on 18 Vendémiaire of the same year the same Convention had passed a law providing for the construction of a house of arts and trades that would reproduce the House of Solomon as described by Bacon in his New Atlantis, a place where all the inventions of mankind are collected."
"And so?" Diotallevi asked.
"The Pendulum is in the Conservatoire," Belbo said. And from Diotallevi's reaction I realized that Belbo had told him about Foucault's Pendulum.
"Not so fast," I said. "The Pendulum was invented and installed only in the last century. We should skip it."
"Skip it?" Belbo said. "Haven't you ever seen the Monad Hieroglyph of John Dee, the talisman that is supposed to concentrate all the wisdom of the universe? Doesn't it look like a pendulum?"
"All right," I said, "let's suppose a connection can be established. But how do we go from Saint Albans to the Pendulum?"
I was to learn how in the space of a few days.
"So then, the prior of Saint Albans is the abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, which therefore becomes a Templar center. Bacon, through his property, establishes a contact with the Druid followers of Saint Albans. Now listen carefully: as Bacon is beginning his career in England, Guillaume Postel in France is ending his."
An almost imperceptible twitch on Belbo's face. I recalled the dialog at Riccardo's show: Postel made Belbo think of the man who, in his mind, had robbed him of Lorenza. But it was the matter of an instant.
"Postel studies Hebrew, tries to demonstrate that it's the common matrix of all languages, translates the Zohar and the Bahir, has contacts with the cabalists, broaches a plan for universal peace similar to that of the German Rosicrucian groups, tries to convince the king of France to form an alliance with the sultan, visits Greece, Syria, Asia Minor, studies Arabic—in a word, he retraces the itinerary of Christian Rosencreutz. And it is no accident that he signs some writings with the name of Rosispergius, 'he who scatters dew.' Gassendi in his Examen Philosophiae Flud- danae says that Rosencreutz does not derive from rosa but from ros, dew. In one of his manuscripts he speaks of a secret to be guarded until the time is ripe, and he says: 'That pearls may not be cast before swine.' Do you know where else this gospel quotation appears? On the title page of The Chemical Wedding. And Father Marin Mersenne, in denouncing the Rosicrucian Fludd, says he is made of the same stuff as atheus magnus Postel. Furthermore, it seems Dee and Postel met in 1550, but perhaps they didn't yet know that they were both grand masters of the Plan, scheduled to meet thirty years later, in 1584.
"Now, Postel declares—hear ye, hear ye—that, being a direct descendant of the oldest son of Noah, and since Noah is the founder of the Celtic race and therefore of the civilization of the Druids, the king of France is the only legitimate pretender to the title king of the world. That's right, he talks about the King of the World—but three centuries before d'Alveydre.
We'll skip the fact that he falls in love with an old hag, Joanna, and considers her the divine Sophia; the man probably didn't have all his marbles. But powerful enemies he did have; they called him dog, execrable monster, cloaca of all heresies, a being possessed by a legion of demons. All the same, even with the Joanna scandal, the Inquisition doesn't consider him a heretic, only amens, a bit of a nut, let's say. The truth is, the Church doesn't dare destroy the man, because they know he's the spokesman of some fairly powerful group. I would point out to you, Diotallevi, that Postel travels also in the Orient and is a contemporary of Isaac Luria. Draw whatever conclusions you like. Well, in 1564, the year in which Dee writes his Mori as Hieroglyphica, Postel retracts his heresies and retires to ... guess where? The monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs! What's he waiting for? Obviously, he's waiting for 1584."
"Obviously," Diotallevi said.
I went on: "Are we agreed, then? Postel is grand master of the French group, awaiting the appointment with the English. But he dies in 1581, three years before it. Conclusions: First, the 1584 mishap took place because at that crucial moment a keen mind was missing, since Postel would have been able to figure out what was going on in the confusion of the calendars; second, Saint-Martin was a place where the Templars were safe, always at home, where the man responsible for the third meeting immured himself and waited. Saint-Martin-des-Champs was the Refuge!"