Foucault's Pendulum Read online

  But why should Belbo have thought in Diotallevi's cabalistic terms? Belbo was obsessed by the Plan, and into the Plan we had put all sorts of other ingredients: Rosicrucians, Synarchy, Homunculi, the Pendulum, the Tower, the Druids, the Ennoia...

  Ennoia. I thought of Lorenza Pellegrini. I reached out, picked up her censored photograph, looked at it, and an inopportune thought surfaced, the memory of that evening in Piedmont....I read the inscription on the picture: "For I am the first and the last, the honored and the hated, the saint and the prostitute. Sophia."

  She must have written that after Riccardo's party. Sophia. Six letters. And why would they need to be scrambled? I was the one with the devious mind. Belbo loves Lorenza, loves her precisely because she is the way she is, and she is Sophia. And at that very moment she might be ... No, no good. Belbo was devious, too. I recalled Diotallevi's words: "In the second sefirah the dark aleph changes into the luminous aleph. From the Dark Point spring the letters of the Torah. The consonants are the body, the vowels the breath, and together they accompany the worshiper as he chants. When the chant moves, the consonants and vowels move with it, and from them rises Hokhmah—wisdom, knowledge, the primordial thought that contains, as in a box, everything, all that will unfold in creation. Hokhmah holds the essence of all that will emanate from it."

  And what was Abulafia, with its secret files? The box that held everything Belbo knew, or thought he knew. His Sophia. With her secret name he would enter Abulafia, the thing—the only thing—he made love to. But, making love to Abulafia, he thinks of Lorenza. So he needs a word that will give him possession of Abulafia but also serve as a talisman to give him possession of Lorenza, to penetrate Lorenza's heart as he penetrates Abulafia's. But Abulafia should be impenetrable to others, as Lorenza is impenetrable to him. It is Belbo's hope that he can enter, know, and conquer Lorenza's secret in the same way that he possesses Abulafia.

  But I was making this up. My explanation was just like the Plan: substituting wishes for reality.

  Drunk, I sat down at the keyboard again and tapped out SOPHIA. Again, nothing, and again the machine asked me politely: "Do you have the password?" You stupid machine, you feel no emotion at the thought of Lorenza.

  6

  Judá León se dio a permutaciones

  De letras y a complejas variaciones

  Y alfin pronunció el Nombre que es la Clave,

  La Puerta, el Eco, el Huésped y el Palacio...

  —Jorge Luis Borges, El Golem

  And then, in a fit of hate, as I worked again at Abulafia's obtuse question "Do you have the password?" I typed: NO.

  The screen began to fill with words, lines, codes, a flood of communication.

  I had broken into Abulafia.

  Thrilled by my triumph, I didn't ask myself why Belbo had chosen that, of all words. Now I know, and I know, too, that in a moment of lucidity he understood what I have come to understand only now. But last Thursday, my only thought was that I had won.

  I danced, clapped my hands, sang an old army song. Then I went to the bathroom and washed my face. When I came back, I began printing out the files, last files first, what Belbo had written just before his flight to Paris. As the printer chattered implacably, I devoured some food and drank some more whiskey.

  When the printer stopped and I read what Belbo had written, I was aghast, unable to decide whether this was an extraordinary revelation or the wild raving of a madman.

  What did I really know about Jacopo Belbo? What had I learned about him in the two years I worked at his side, almost every day? How much faith could I put in the word of a man who, by his own admission, was writing under exceptional circumstances, in a fog of alcohol, tobacco, and terror, completely cut off from the world for three days?

  It was already night, Thursday, June 21. My eyes were watering. I had been staring at the screen and then at the printer's pointillist anthill since morning. What I had read might be true or it might be false, but Belbo said he would call in the morning. I would have to wait here. My head swam.

  I staggered into the bedroom and fell, still dressed, onto the unmade bed.

  At around eight I awoke from a deep, sticky sleep, not realizing at first where I was. Luckily I found a can of coffee and was able to make myself a few cups. The phone didn't ring. I didn't dare go out to buy anything, because Belbo might call while I was gone.

  I went back to the machine and began printing out the other disks in chronological order. I found games, exercises, and accounts of events I knew about, but told from Belbo's private point of view, so that they were reshaped and appeared to me now in a different light. I found diary fragments, confessions, outlines for works of fiction made with the bitter obstinacy of a man who knows that his efforts are doomed to failure. I found descriptions of people I remembered, but now I saw them with different faces—sinister faces, unless this was because I was seeing them as part of a horrible final mosaic.

  And I found a file devoted entirely to quotations taken from Belho's most recent reading. I recognized them immediately. Together we had pored over so many texts during those months.... The quotations were numbered: one hundred and twenty in all. The number was probably a deliberate choice; if not, the coincidence was disturbing. But why those passages and not others?

  Today I reinterpret Belbo's files, the whole story they tell, in the light of that quotation file. I tell the passages like the beads of a heretical rosary. For Belbo some of them may have been an alarm, a hope of rescue. Or am I, too, no longer able to distinguish common sense from unmoored meaning? I try to convince myself that my reinterpretation is correct, but as recently as this morning, someone told me—me, not Belbo—that I was mad.

  On the horizon, beyond the Bricco, the moon is slowly rising. This big house is filled with strange rustling sounds, termites perhaps, mice, or the ghost of Adelino Canepa....I dare not walk along the hall. I stay in Uncle Carlo's study and look out the window. From time to time I step onto the terrace, to see if anyone is coming up the hill. I feel that I'm in a movie. How pathetic! "Here come the bad guys...."

  Yet the hill is so calm tonight, a summer night now.

  Adventurous, dubious, and demented were the events I reconstructed to pass the time, and to keep up my spirits, as I stood waiting in the periscope two nights ago, between five and ten o'clock, moving my legs as if to some Afro-Brazilian beat to help the blood circulate.

  I thought back over the last few years, abandoning myself to the magic rolling of the atabaques, accepting the revelation that our fantasies, begun as a mechanical ballet, were about to be transformed, in this temple of things mechanical, into rite, possession, apparition, and the dominion of Exu.

  In the periscope I had no proof that what I had learned from the printout was true. I could still take refuge in doubt. At midnight, perhaps, I would discover that I had come to Paris and hidden my self like a thief in a harmless museum of technology only because I had foolishly fallen into a macumba staged for credulous tourists, letting myself be hypnotized by the perfumadores and the rhythm of the pontos.

  As I recomposed the mosaic, my mood changed from disenchantment to pity to suspicion—and I wish that now I could rid myself of this present lucidity and recover that same vacillation between mystic illusion and the presentiment of a trap; recover what I thought then as I mulled over the documents I had read so frantically the day before and reread that morning at the airport and during the flight to Paris.

  How irresponsibly Belbo, Diotallevi, and I had rewritten the world, or—as Diotallevi would have put it—had rediscovered what in the Book had been engraved at white heat between the black lines formed by the letters, like black insects, that supposedly made the Torah clear!

  And now, two days later, having achieved, I hope, serenity and amor fati, I can tell the story I reconstructed so anxiously (hoping it was false) inside the periscope, the story I had read two days ago in Belbo's apartment, the story I had lived for twelve years between Pilade's whiskey and the dus
t of Garamond Press.

  BINAH

  7

  Do not expect too much of the end of the world.

  —Stanislaw J. Lec, Aforyzmy. Fraszki, Kraków,

  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977, "Myśli nieuczesane"

  To enter a university a year or two after 1968 was like being admitted to the Académie de Saint-Cyr in 1793: you felt your birth date was wrong. Jacopo Belbo, who was almost fifteen years older than I, later convinced me that every generation feels this way. You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

  I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature. My father, not because he was stingy, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. "The purpose of this magazine," I pontificated, quoting the ad, "is to educate the reader in an entertaining way." "The purpose of your magazine," my father replied without looking up from his paper, "is the purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it can."

  That day, I began to be incredulous.

  Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.

  Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.

  Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't believe in them, the collision of two ideas—both false—can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.

  "You live on the surface," Lia told me years later. "You sometimes seem profound, but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you tried to stand it up."

  "Are you saying I'm superficial?"

  "No," she answered. "What others call profundity is only a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. You walk in one side and come out another, and you're in their universe, which can't coexist with yours."

  (Lia, now that They have walked into the cube and invaded our world, I don't know if I'll ever see you again. And it was all my fault: I made Them believe there was a depth, a depth that They, in their weakness, desired.)

  What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt, and you might get better.

  So there I was, in the midst of the Revolution, or at least in the most stupendous imitation of it, seeking an honorable faith. It was honorable, for example, to take part in rallies and marches. I chanted "Fascist scum, your time has come!" with everybody else. I never threw paving stones or ball bearings, out of fear that others might do unto me as I did unto them, but I experienced a kind of moral excitement escaping along narrow downtown streets when the police charged. I would come home with the sense of having performed a duty. In the meetings I remained untouched by the disagreements that divided the various groups: I always had the feeling that if you substituted the right phrase for another phrase, you could move from group to group. I amused myself by finding the right phrases. I modulated.

  At the demonstrations, I would fall in behind one banner or another, drawn by a girl who had aroused my interest, so I came to the conclusion that for many of my companions political activism was a sexual thing. But sex was a passion. I wanted only curiosity. True, in the course of my reading about the Templars and the various atrocities attributed to them, I had come across Carpocrates's assertion that to escape the tyranny of the angels, the masters of the cosmos, every possible ignominy should be perpetrated, that you should discharge all debts to the world and to your own body, for only by committing every act can the soul be freed of its passions and return to its original purity. When we were inventing the Plan, I found that many addicts of the occult pursued that path in their search for enlightenment. According to his biographers, Aleister Crowley, who has been called the most perverted man of all time and who did everything that could be done with his worshipers, both men and women, chose only the ugliest partners of either sex. I have the nagging suspicion, however, that his lovemaking was incomplete.

  There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism. I was almost clubbed. A tall guy with a Tartar mustache said I was a fascist. I'll never forget him. He later shaved his head and now belongs to a commune where they weave baskets.

  I evoke the mood of those days only to reconstruct my state of mind when I began to visit Garamond Press and made friends with Jacopo Belbo. I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

  That's why I wisely chose philology. The University of Milan was the place to be in those years. Everywhere else in the country students were taking over classrooms and telling the professors they should teach only proletarian sciences, but at our university, except for a few incidents, a constitutional pact—or, rather, a territorial compromise—held. The Revolution occupied the grounds, the auditorium, and the main halls, while traditional Culture, protected, withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, where it went on talking as if nothing had happened.

  The result was that I could spend the morning debating proletarian matters downstairs and the afternoon pursuing aristocratic knowledge upstairs. In these two parallel universes I lived comfortably and felt no contradiction. I firmly believed that an egalitarian society was dawning, but I also thought that the trains, for example, in this better society ought to run better, and the militants around me were not learning how to shovel coal into the furnace, work the switches, or draw up timetables. Somebody had to be ready to operate the trains.

  I felt like a kind of Stalin laughing to himself, somewhat remorsefully, and thinking: "Go ahead, you poor Bolsheviks. I'm going to study in this seminary in Tiflis, and we'll see which one of us gets to draft the Five-Year Plan."

  Perhaps because I was always surrounded by enthusiasm in the morning, in the afternoon I came to equate learning with distrust. I wanted to study something that confined itself to what could be documented, as opposed to what was merely a matter of opinion.

  For no particular reason I signed up for a seminar on medieval history and chose, for my thesis subject, the trial of the Templars. It was a story that fascinated me from the moment I first glanced at the documents. At that time, when we were struggling against those in power, I was wholeheartedly outraged by the trial in which the Templars, through evidence it would be generous to call circumstantial, were sentenced to the stake. Then I quickly learned that, for centuries after their execution, countless lovers of the occult persisted in looking for them, seeking everywhere, without ever producing proof of their existence. This visionary excess
offended my incredulity, and I resolved to waste no more time on these hunters of secrets. I would stick to primary sources. The Templars were monastic knights; their order was recognized by the Church. If the Church dissolved that order, as in fact it had seven centuries ago, then the Templars could no longer exist. Therefore, if they existed, they weren't Templars. I drew up a bibliography of more than a hundred books, but in the end read only about thirty of them.

  It was through the Templars that I first got to know Jacopo Belbo—at Pilade's toward the end of '72, when I was at work on my thesis.

  8

  Having come from the light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from them.

  —Fragment of Turfa'n M7

  In those days Pilade's Bar was a free port, a galactic tavern where alien invaders from Ophiulco could rub elbows peaceably with the soldiers of the Empire patrolling the Van Allen belt. It was an old bar near one of the navigli, the Milan canals, with a zinc counter and a billiard table. Local tram drivers and artisans would drop in first thing in the morning for a glass of white wine. In '68 and in the years that followed, Pilade's became a kind of Rick's Café, where Movement activists could play cards with a reporter from the bosses' newspaper who had come in for a whiskey after putting the paper to bed, while the first trucks were already out distributing the Establishment's lies to the newsstands. But at Pilade's the reporter also felt like an exploited proletarian, a producer of surplus value chained to an ideological assembly line, and the students forgave him.