This disagreement didn't spoil our weeks in the mountains. I took long walks, read serious books, became closer to the child than I'd ever been. But between me and Lia there was something left unsaid. On the one hand, she had put me in a tight corner, and was sorry to have humiliated me; on the other, she wasn't convinced that she had convinced me.
Indeed, I felt a pull to the Plan. I didn't want to abandon it, I had lived with it too long.
A few days ago I got up early to catch the one train for Milan, and in Milan I received Belbo's call from Paris, and I began this story, which for me is not yet finished.
Lia was right. We should have talked about it earlier. But I wouldn't have believed her, all the same. I had experienced the creation of the Plan like the moment of Tiferet, the heart of the sefirotic body, the harmony of Rule and Freedom. Diotallevi had told me that Moses Cordovero warned: "He who because of his Torah becomes proud over the ignorant, that is, over the whole people of Yahweh, leads Tiferet to grow proud over Malkhut." But what Malkhut is, the kingdom of this earth, in its dazzling simplicity, is something I understand only now—in time to grasp the truth; perhaps too late to survive the truth.
Lia, I don't know if I will see you again. If not, the last image I have of you is half-asleep, under the blankets, a few days ago. I kissed you that morning, and hesitated before I left.
NEZAH
107
Dost thou see yon black dog, ranging through shoot and stubble?...
Meseems he softly coileth magic meshes,
To be a sometime fetter round our feet ...
The circle narrows, now he's near!
—Faust, ii. Without the City-Gate
What had happened during my absence, particularly in the days just before my return, I could deduce from Belbo's files. But only one file, the last, was clear, containing ordered information; he had probably written it before leaving for Paris, so that I, or someone else, could read it. The other files, written for himself alone, as usual, were not easy to interpret. But having entered the private universe of his confidences to Abulafia, I was able to draw something from them.
It was early June. Belbo was upset. The doctors had finally accepted the idea that he and Gudrun were Diotallevi's only relatives, and they talked. When the printers and proofreaders inquired about Diotallevi, Gudrun now answered with pursed lips, uttering a bi-syllable in such a way that no vowel escaped. Thus the taboo illness was named.
Gudrun went to see Diotallevi every day. She must have disturbed him with those eyes of hers, glistening with pity. He knew, but was embarrassed that others knew. He spoke with difficulty. (Belbo wrote: "The face is all cheekbones.") He was losing his hair, but that was from the therapy. (Belbo wrote: "The hands are all fingers.")
In the course of one of their painful dialogues, Diotallevi gave Belbo a hint of what he would say to him on the last day: that identifying oneself with the Plan was bad, that it might be evil. Even before this, perhaps to make the Plan objective and reduce it again to its purely fictional dimension, Belbo had written it down, word for word, as if it were the colonel's memoirs. He narrated it like an initiate communicating the final secret. This, I believe, was to be a cure: he was returning to literature, however second-rate, to that which was not life.
But on June 10, something bad must have happened. The notes are confused; all I have is conjectures.
***
Lorenza asked him to drive her to the Riviera, where she had to see a girlfriend and collect something or other, a document, a notarized deed, some nonsense that could just as well have been sent by mail. Belbo agreed, dazzled by the idea of spending a Sunday at the sea with her.
They went to the place—I haven't been able to figure out exactly where, perhaps near Portofino. Belbo's description was all emotion, tensions, dejections, moods; it contained no landscapes. Lorenza did her errand while Belbo waited in a cafe. Then she said they could go and eat fish in a place on a bluff high above the sea.
After this, the story becomes fragmentary. There are snatches of dialogue without quotation marks, as if transcribed at white heat lest a series of epiphanies fade. They drove as far as they could, then continued on foot, taking those toilsome Ligurian paths along the coast, surrounded by flowers, to the restaurant. When they were seated, they saw, on the table next to theirs, a card reserving it for Conte Agliè.
What a coincidence, Belbo must have said. A nasty coincidence, Lorenza replied; she didn't want Agliè to know she was there, and with Belbo. Why not, what was wrong with that? What gave Agliè the right to be jealous? Right? No, it was a matter of taste; Agliè had invited her out today and she'd told him she was busy. Belbo didn't want her to look like a liar, did he? She wouldn't look like a liar; she was in fact busy, she had a date with Belbo. Was that something to be ashamed of? Not ashamed of, but she had her own rules of tact, if Belbo didn't mind.
They left the restaurant, started back up the path, but Lorenza suddenly stopped; she saw some people arriving. Belbo didn't know them. Friends of Agliè, she said, and she didn't want them to see her. A humiliating situation: she leaned against the railing of a little bridge over a ravine full of olive trees, a newspaper in front of her face, as if she were consumed by a sudden interest in current events. Belbo stood ten paces away, smoking, as if he were just passing by.
A friend of Agliè walked past. Lorenza said that if they continued along the path, they were bound to run into Agliè himself. To hell with this, Belbo said. So what? Lorenza said he was insensitive. The solution: Get to the car without taking the path, cut across the slopes. A breathless flight over a series of sun-baked terraces, and Belbo lost the heel of a shoe. Lorenza said, You see how much more beautiful it is this way? Of course you're out of breath; you shouldn't smoke so much.
They reached the car, and Belbo said they might as well go back to Milan. No, Lorenza said, Agliè might be late, we might meet him on the highway, and he knows your car. It's such a lovely day, let's cut through the interior. It must be charming, and we'll get to the Autostrada del Sole and have supper along the Po somewhere, near Pavia.
Why there, and what do you mean, cut through the interior? There's only one solution; look at the map. We'd have to climb into the mountains after Uscio, then cross the Apennines, stop at Bobbio, and from there go on to Piacenza. You're crazy! Worse than Hannibal and the elephants. You have no sense of adventure, she said, and anyway, think of all the charming little restaurants we'll find in those hills. Before Uscio there's Manuelina's, which has at least twelve stars in the Michelin and all the fish you could want.
Manuelina's was full, with a line of customers eyeing the tables where coffee was being served. Never mind, Lorenza said, a few kilometers higher we'll find a hundred places better than this. They found a restaurant at two-thirty, in a wretched village that, according to Belbo, even the army maps were ashamed to record, and they ate overcooked pasta with a sauce made of canned meat. Belbo asked Lorenza what was behind all this, because it was no accident that she had made him take her to the very place where Agliè would be: she wanted to provoke someone, either Agliè or him, but he couldn't figure out which of the two it was. She asked him if he was paranoid.
After Uscio they tried a mountain pass and, as they were going through a village that looked like Sunday afternoon in Sicily during the reign of the Bourbons, a big black dog came to a stop in the middle of the road, as if it had never seen an automobile before. Belbo hit it. The impact did not seem great, but as soon as they got out, they saw that the poor animal's belly was red with blood, and some strange pink things (intestines?) were sticking out, and the dog was whimpering and drooling. Some villeins gathered, and soon it was like a town meeting. Belbo asked who the dog's owner was, he would pay. The dog had no owner. The dog represented perhaps ten percent of the population of that Godforsaken place, but they knew it only by sight. Some said they should fetch the carabiniere sergeant, who would fire a shot, and that would be that.
As they were looking for
the sergeant, a lady arrived, declaring herself an animal lover. I have six cats, she said. This is a dog, not a cat, Belbo said, and he's dying, and I'm in a hurry. Cat or dog, you should have a heart, the lady said. No sergeant. Somebody must be brought from the SPCA, or from the hospital in the next town. Maybe the animal can be saved.
The sun was beating down on Belbo, on Lorenza, on the car, on the dog, and on the bystanders; it seemed to have no intention of setting. Belbo felt as if he were in his pajamas but unable to wake up; the lady was implacable, the sergeant couldn't be found, the dog went on bleeding and panting and making weak noises. He's whimpering, Belbo said, and then, with Eliotlike detachment: He's ending with a whimper. Of course he's whimpering, the lady said; he's suffering, poor darling, and why couldn't you look where you were going?
The village underwent a demographic boom; Belbo, Lorenza, and the dog had become the entertainment of that gloomy Sunday. A little girl with an ice-cream cone came over and asked if they were the people from the TV who were organizing the Miss Ligurian Apennine contest. Belbo told her to beat it or he'd do to her what he did to the dog. The girl started crying. The local doctor arrived, said the girl was his daughter, and Belbo didn't realize to whom he was talking. In a rapid exchange of apologies and introductions, it transpired that the physician had published a Diary of a Village Doctor with the famous Manutius Press in Milan. Belbo incautiously said that he was magna pars of that press. The doctor insisted that he and Lorenza stay for supper. Lorenza fumed, nudged Belbo: Now we'll end up in the papers, the diabolical lovers. Couldn't you keep your mouth shut?
The sun still beat down as the church bell rang compline. We're in Ultima Thule, Belbo muttered through clenched teeth: sun six months of the year, from midnight to midnight, and I'm out of cigarettes. The dog confined itself to suffering, and nobody paid it any further attention. Lorenza said she was having an asthma attack. Belbo was sure by now that the cosmos was a practical joke of the Demiurge. Finally it occurred to him that they could take the car and look for help in the nearest town. The animal-loving lady agreed: they should go, they should hurry, she trusted a gentleman from a publishing house that published poetry, she herself was a great admirer of Khalil Gibran.
Belbo drove off and, when they reached the nearest town, cynically drove through it, as Lorenza cursed all the animals with which the Lord had befouled the earth from the first through the fifth day. Belbo agreed, and went so far as to curse the work of the sixth day, too, and perhaps also the rest on the seventh, because this was the most ill-starred Sunday he had ever lived through.
They began to cross the Apennines. On the map it looked easy, but it took them hours. They didn't stop at Bobbio, and toward evening they arrived at Piacenza. Belbo was tired, but at least he could have supper with Lorenza. He took a double room in the only available hotel, near the station. When they went upstairs, Lorenza said she wouldn't sleep in such a place. Belbo said they'd look for something else, if she would just give him time to go down to the bar and have a martini. He found nothing but cognac, domestic. When he went back up to the room, Lorenza wasn't there. At the front desk he found a message: "Darling, I've discovered a marvelous train for Milan. I'm leaving. See you next week."
Belbo rushed to the station: the track was empty. Just like a Western.
He had to spend the night in Piacenza. He looked for a paperback thriller, but the station newsstand was closed. All he could find in the hotel was a Touring Club magazine.
It had an article on Apennine passes like the one he had just crossed. In his memory—faded, as if the day's events had happened long ago—they were arid, sun-baked, dusty, scattered with mineral flotsam. But on the glossy pages of the magazine they were dream country, to return to even on foot, to be savored step by step. The Samoas of Seven Seas Jim.
How can a man rush to his own destruction simply because he runs over a dog? Yet that's how it was. That night in Piacenza, Belbo decided to withdraw once more into the Plan, where he would suffer no more defeats, because there he was the one who decided who, how, and when.
That must also have been the night he decided to avenge himself on Anglie, even if he didn't have a clear reason. He would put him into the Plan without Anglie's knowing. It was typical of Belbo to seek revenges of which he would be the only witness. Not out of modesty, but because he distrusted the ability of others to appreciate them. Slipped into the Plan, Anglic would be annulled, would dissolve in smoke like the wick of a candle. Unreal as the Templars of Provins, the Rosicrucians: as unreal as Belbo himself.
It shouldn't be difficult, Belbo thought. We've cut Bacon and Napoleon down to size: why not Agliè? We'll send him out looking for the map, too. I freed myself of Ardenti and his memory by putting him into a fiction better than his own. The same will happen with Anglie.
I believe he really believed this; such is the power of frustrated desire. The file ended—it could not have been otherwise—with the quotation required of all those whom life has defeated: Bin ich ein Gott?
108
What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the subversive movements going on around us? Are there several Powers at work? Or is there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest—the circle of the real Initiates?
—Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, London, Boswell, 1924, p. 348
Maybe he would have forgotten his decision. Maybe it would have been enough for him just to write it. Maybe, if he had seen Lorenza again at once, he would have been caught up by desire, and desire would have forced him to come to terms with life. But, instead, that Monday afternoon, Agliè appeared in his office, wafting exotic cologne, smiling as he handed over some manuscripts to be rejected, saying he had read them during a splendid weekend at the seashore. Bclbo, seized once more by rancor, decided to taunt Anglic—by giving him a glimpse of the magic bloodstone.
Assuming the manner of Boccaccio's Buffamalcco, he said that for more than ten years he had been burdened by an occult secret. A manuscript, entrusted to him by a certain Colonel Ardenti, who claimed to be in possession of the Plan of the Templars ... The colonel had been abducted or killed, and his papers had been taken. Garamond Press had been left with a red-herring text, deliberately erroneous, fantastic, even puerile, whose sole purpose was to let others know that the colonel had seen the Provins message and Ingolf's final notes, the notes Ingolf's murderers were still looking for. But there was also a very slim file, containing ten pages only, but those ten pages were the authentic text, the one really found among Ingolf's papers. They had remained in Belbo's hands.
What a curious story—this was Agliè's reaction—do tell me more. Belbo told him more. He told him the whole Plan, just as we had conceived it, as if it were all contained in that remote manuscript. He even told him, in an increasingly cautious and confidential tone, that there was also a policeman, by the name of De Angelis, who had arrived at the brink of the truth but had come up against the hermetic—no other way to describe it—silence of Belbo himself, keeper of mankind's greatest secret: a secret that boiled down to the secret of the Map.
Here he paused, in a silence charged with unspoken meaning, like all great pauses. His reticence about the final truth guaranteed the truth of its premises. For those who really believed in a secret tradition, he calculated, nothing was louder than silence.
"How interesting, how extremely interesting!" Agliè said, taking the snuffbox from his vest, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. "And ... and the map?"
Belbo thought: You old voyeur, you're getting aroused; serves you right. With all your Saint-Germain airs, you're just another petty charlatan living off the shell game, and then you buy the Brooklyn Bridge from the first charlatan who's a bigger charlatan than you are. Now I'll send you on a wild-goose chase looking for maps, so you'll vanish into the bowels of the earth, carried away by the telluric currents, until you crack your head against the transoceanic monolith of some Celtic valve.
And, very circumsp
ectly, he replied: "In the manuscript, of course, there was also the map, or, rather, a precise description of the map, of the original. It's surprising; you can't imagine how simple the solution is. The map was within everyone's grasp, in full view; why, thousands of people have passed it every day, for centuries. And the method of orientation is so elementary that you just have to memorize the pattern and the map can be reproduced on the spot, anywhere. So simple and so unexpected ... Imagine—this is just to give you an idea—it's as if the map were inscribed in the Pyramid of Cheops, its elements displayed for everyone to see, and for centuries people have read and reread and deciphered the pyramid, seeking other allusions, other calculations, completely overlooking its incredible, splendid simplicity. A masterpiece of innocence. And fiendish cunning. The Templars of Provins were wizards."