Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (55 page)

Ah, irony of
language¡Xthis gift nature has given us to keep silent the secrets
of our spirit! The Daughter of Enlightenment falls victim to
Darkness. I hear her spewing horrible curses, impenitent, as
Luciano twists the knife three times in her heart. Deja
vu....

It is the turn of Nilus,
who for a moment thought to possess both the tsarina and the map.
Filthy lewd monk, you wanted the Antichrist? He stands before you,
but you do not know him. I send him on, blind, amid a thousand
mystical flatteries, to the evil trap awaiting him. Luciano rips
open his breast with a wound in the form of a cross, and he sinks
into eternal sleep.

I must overcome the
ancestral distrust in the last, the Elder of Zion, who claims to be
Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, immortal like me. He is suspicious as
he smiles unctuously, his beard still steeped in the blood of the
tender Christian creatures he habitually slaughters in the cemetery
of Prague. But I will be as clever as a Rachkovsky, cleverer. I
hint that the coffer contains not only a map but also uncut
diamonds. I know the fascination uncut diamonds have for this
deicide race. He approaches his destiny, dragged by his greed, and
it is his own God, cruel and vengeful, that he curses as he dies,
pierced like Hiram, but it is difficult for him to curse even now,
because his God's name cannot be uttered.

In my delusion, I
thought I had concluded the Great Work.

As if struck by a gust
of wind, once again the door opens, and a figure appears, a livid
face, numbed fingers devoutly held to the chest, a hooded gaze: he
cannot conceal his identity, for he wears the black habit of his
black Society. A son of Loyola!

"Cre'tineau!" I cry,
misled.

He raises his hand in a
hypocritical gesture of benediction. "I am not I am that I am," he
says to me with a smile that contains nothing human.

It is true: this has
always been the Jesuits' method. Sometimes they deny their own
existence, and sometimes they proclaim the power of their order to
intimidate the uninitiated.

"We are always other
than what you think, sons of Belial," that seducer of sovereigns
says now. "But you, O Saint-Germain...."

"How do you know who I
really am?" I ask, alarmed.

He sneers. "We met in
other times, when you tried to pull me away from the deathbed of
Postel, when under the name of Abbe d'Herblay I led you to end one
of your incarnations in the heart of the Bastille. (Oh, how I still
feel on my face the iron mask to which the Society, with Colbert's
help, had sentenced me!) We met when I spied on your secret talks
with d'Holbach and Condorcet..."

"Rodin!" I exclaim,
thunderstruck.

"Yes, Rodin, the secret
general of the Jesuits! Rodin, whom you will not trick into falling
through the trapdoor, as you did with the others. Know this, O
Saint-Germain: there is no crime, no evil machination that we did
not invent before you, to the greater glory of that God of ours who
justifies the means! How many crowned heads have we made tumble
into the night that has no morning, or into snares more subtle, to
achieve dominion over the world! And now, when we are within sight
of the goal, you would prevent us from laying our rapacious hands
on the secret that for five centuries has moved the history of the
world?"

Rodin, speaking in this
way, becomes fearsome. All the bloodthirsty ambition, all the
execrable sacrilege that had smoldered in the breasts of the
Renaissance popes, now appears on the brow of this son of Loyola. I
see clearly: an insatiable thirst for power stirs his impure blood,
a burning sweat soaks him, a nauseating vapor spreads around
him.

How to strike this last
enemy? To my aid comes an unexpected intuition...an intuition that
can come only to one from whom the human soul, for centuries, has
kept no inviolable secret place.

"Look at me," I say. "I,
too, am a Tiger."

With one move I thrust
you into the middle of the room, I rip from you your T-shirt, I
tear the belt of the skin-tight armor that conceals the charms of
your amber belly. Now, in the pale lights of the moon that seeps
through the half-open door, you stand erect, more beautiful than
the serpent that seduced Adam, haughty and lascivious, virgin and
prostitute, clad only in your carnal power, because a naked woman
is an armed woman.

The Egyptian klaft
descends over your thick hair, so black it seems blue; your breast
throbs beneath the filmy muslin. The gold uraeus, arched and
stubborn, with emerald eyes, flashes on your head its triple tongue
of ruby. And oh, your tunic of black gauze with silver glints, your
girdle embroidered in sinister rainbows, with black pearls! Your
swelling pubis shaved so that for your lovers you are sleek as a
statue! Your nipples gently touched by the brush of your Malabar
slave girl, who has dipped it into the same carmine that bloodies
your lips, inviting as a wound!

Rodin is now panting.
The long abstinences of a life spent in a dream of power have only
prepared him all the more for enslavement to uncontrollable desire.
Faced by this queen, beautiful and shameless, her eyes black as the
Devil's, her rounded shoulders, scented hair, white and tender
skin, Rodin is seized by the possibility of unknown caresses,
ineffable voluptuousness; his flesh yearns as a sylvan god yearns
when gazing on a naked nymph mirrored in the water that has already
doomed Narcissus. Against the light I see him stiffen, as one
petrified by Medusa, sculpted by the desire of a repressed virility
now at its sunset. The obsessive flame of lust surges through his
body; he is like an arrow aimed at its target, a bow drawn to the
breaking point.

Suddenly he falls to the
floor and crawls before this apparition, his hand extended like a
claw to implore a sip of balm. , "Oh, how beautiful you are," he
groans, "with those little vixen teeth that gleam when you part
your red and swollen lips....your green emerald eyes that flash,
then fade...Oh, demon of lust!"

He's not all that wrong,
the wretch, as you now move your hips, sheathed in their blue
denim, and thrust forward your groin to drive the pinball to its
supreme folly.

"Vision," Rodin says,
"be mine; for just one instant crown with pleasure a life spent in
the hard service of a jealous divinity, assuage with one lubricious
embrace the eternity of flame to which your sight now plunges me. I
beseech you, brush my face with your lips, you Antinea, you Mary
Magdalene, you whom I have desired in the presence of saints dazed
in ecstasy, whom I have coveted during my hypocritical worship of
virginity. O Lady, fair art thou as the sun, white as the moon; lo
I deny both God and the saints, and the Roman pontiff himself¡Xno,
more, I deny Loyola and the criminal vow that binds me to my
Society. A kiss, one kiss, then let me die!"

On numbed knees he
crawls, his habit pulled up over his loins, his hand outstretched
toward unattainable happiness. Suddenly he falls back, his eyes
bulging, his features convulsed, like the unnatural shocks produced
by Volta's pile on the face of a corpse. A bluish foam purples his
lips; from his mouth comes a strangled hissing, like a
hydrophobe's, for when it reaches its paroxysmal phase, as Charcot
rightly puts it, this terrible disease, which is satyriasis, the
punishment of lust, impresses the same stigmata as rabid
madness.

It is the end. Rodin
bursts into insane laughter, then crumples to the floor, lifeless,
the living image of cadaveric rigor.

In a single moment he
went mad and died in mortal sin.

I push the body toward
the trapdoor, careful not to dirty my patent-leather boots on the
greasy soutane of my last enemy.

There is no need for
Luciano's dagger, but the assassin can no longer control his
actions, his bestial compulsion to murder over and over. Laughing,
he stabs a lifeless, dead cadaver.

Now I move with you to
the trap's rim, I stroke your throat as you lean forward to enjoy
the scene, I say to you, "Are you pleased with your Rocambole, my
inaccessible love?"

And as you nod
lasciviously and sneer, drooling into the void, I slowly tighten my
fingers.

"What are you doing, my
love?"

"Nothing, Sophia. I am
killing you. I am now Guiseppe Balsamo and have no further need of
you."

The harlot of the
Archons dies, drops to the water. With a thrust of his knife,
Luciano seconds the verdict of my merciless hand, and I say to him:
"Now you can climb up again, my trusty one, my black soul." As he
climbs, his back to me, I insert between his shoulder blades a thin
stiletto with a triangular blade that leaves hardly a mark. Down he
plunges; I close the trapdoor: it is done. I abandon the sordid
room as eight bodies float toward the Chatelet by conduits known
only to me.

I return to my small
apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Honore", I look at myself in the
mirror. There, I say to myself, I am the King of the World. From my
hollow spire I rule the universe. My power makes my head spin. I am
a master of energy. I am drunk with command.

Alas, life's vengeance
is not slow in coming. Months later, in the deepest crypt of the
castle of Tomar, I¡Xnow master of the secret of the subterranean
currents and lord of the six sacred places of those who had been
the Thirty-six Invisibles, last of the last Templars and Unknown
Superior of all Unknown Superiors¡Xshould win the hand of Cecilia,
the androgyne with eyes of ice, from whom nothing now can separate
me. I have found her again, after the centuries that intervened
since she was stolen from me by the man with the saxophone. Now she
walks on the back of the bench as on a tightrope, blue-eyed and
blond; nor do I know what she is wearing beneath the filmy tulle
that bedecks her.

The chapel has been
hollowed from the rock; the altar is surmounted by a canvas
depicting the torments of the damned in the bowels of Hell. Some
hooded monks stand tenebrously at my side, but I am not disturbed,
I am fascinated by the Iberian imagination...

Then¡XO horror¡Xthe
canvas is raised, and behind it, the admirable work of some
Arcimboldo of caves, another chapel appears, exactly like this one.
There before the altar Cecilia is kneeling, and beside her¡Xicy
sweat beads my brow, my hair stands on end¡Xwhom do I see,
mockingly displaying his scar? The Other, the real Giuseppe
Balsamo. Someone has freed him from the dungeon of San
Leo!

And I? It is at this
point that the oldest of the monks raises his hood, and I recognize
the ghastly smile of Luciano, who¡XGod knows how-escaped my
stiletto, the sewers, the bloody mire that should have dragged his
corpse to the silent depths of the ocean. He has gone over to my
enemies in his rightful thirst for revenge.

The monks slough off
their habits; they are head to toe in armor, a flaming cross on
their snow-white cloaks. The Templars of Provins!

They seize me, turn me
around, toward an executioner standing between two deformed
assistants. I am bent over, and with a searing brand I am made the
eternal prey of the jailer as the evil smile of Baphomet is
impressed forever on my shoulder. Now I understand: I am to replace
Balsamo at San Leo¡Xor, rather, to resume the place that was
assigned to me for all eternity.

But they will recognize
me, I tell myself, and somebody will surely come to my aid¡Xmy
accomplices, at least¡Xa prisoner cannot be replaced without
anybody's noticing, these are no longer the days of the Iron
Mask...Fool! In a flash I understand, as the executioner forces my
head over a copper basin from which greenish fumes are rising:
vitriol!

A cloth is placed over
my eyes, my face is thrust into the devouring liquid, a piercing
unbearable pain, the skin of my cheeks shrivels, my nose, mouth,
chin, a moment is all it takes, and as I am pulled up again by the
hair, my face is unrecognizable¡Xparalysis, pox, and indescribable
absence of a face, a hymn to hideousness. I will go back to the
dungeon like those fugitives who, to avoid recapture, had the
courage to disfigure themselves.

Ah, I cry, defeated, and
as the narrator says, one word escapes my shapeless lips, a sigh,
an appeal: Redemption!

But Redemption from
what, old Rocambole? You knew better than to try to be a
protagonist! You have been punished, and with your own arts. You
mocked the creators of illusion, and now¡Xas you see¡Xyou write
using the alibi of a machine, telling yourself you are a spectator,
because you read yourself on the screen as if the words belonged to
another, but you have fallen into the trap: you, too, are trying to
leave footprints on the sands of time. You have dared to change the
text of the romance of the world, and the romance of the world has
taken you instead into its coils and involved you in its plot, a
plot not of your making.

You would have done
better to remain among your islands, Seven Seas Jim, and let her
believe you were dead.

The National Socialist
party did not tolerate secret societies, because it was itself a
secret society, with its grand master, its racist gnosis, its rites
and initiations.

¡XRene Alleau, Les
sources occultes du nazisme. Paris, Grasset 1969, p. 214

It was around this time
that Aglie slipped through our fingers. That was the expression
Belbo used, with a tone of excessive indifference. I attributed the
indifference once again to jealousy. Silently obsessed by Aglie's
power over Lorenza, aloud he wisecracked about the power Aglie was
gaining at Garamond.

Perhaps it was our own
fault. Aglie had begun seducing Garamond almost a year earlier,
from the time of the alchemistie party in Piedmont. Soon after
that, Garamond entrusted the SFA file to him, for him to recruit
new victims to flesh out the Isis Unveiled catalog; by now,
Garamond consulted him on every decision, and no doubt gave him a
monthly check. Gudrun, who carried out periodic expeditions to the
end of the corridor and beyond the glass door that gave access to
the padded world of Manutius, told us from time to time, in a
worried voice, that Aglie had practically established himself in
the office of Signora Grazia; he dictated letters to her, escorted
new visitors into Gar-amond's office, and, in short¡Xand here
Gudrun's indignation robbed her of even more vowels¡Xacted as if he
owned the place. We really should have wondered why Aglie spent
hours and hours on the Manutius address file. Selecting the SFAs to
invite to join the list of authors for Isis Unveiled should not
have taken that much time. Yet he went on writing, contacting,
making appointments.

But we actually fostered
his autonomy. The situation suited Belbo. More Aglie in Via
Marchese Gualdi meant less Aglie in Via Sincere Renato. Thus, when
Lorenza Pellegrini made one of her sudden appearances, and Belbo,
with unconcealed excitement, became pathetically radiant, there was
less likelihood that "Simon" would barge in ruinously.

I wasn't displeased,
either, since by now I had lost interest in Isis Unveiled and was
more and more involved in my history of magic. Feeling I had
learned from the Diabolicals everything there was to learn, I let
Aglie handle the contacts (and contracts) with the new
authors.

Nor did Diotallevi
object. In general, the world seemed to matter less and less to
him. Now that I think back, I realize that he continued losing
weight in a troubling way. At times I would see him in his office
bent over a manuscript, his eyes vacant, his pen about to drop from
his hand. He wasn't asleep; he was exhausted.

There was another reason
we accepted the increasing rarity of Aglie's appearances, and their
brevity¡Xfor he would simply hand back to us the manuscripts he had
rejected, then vanish into the corridor. The fact was, we didn't
want him to hear our discussions. If anyone had asked us why, we
would have said it was out of delicacy, or embarrassment, since we
were parodying the metaphysics in which he somehow believed. But it
was really distrust on our part; we were slowly assuming the
natural reserve of those who possess a secret, we were putting
Aglie in the role of the profane masses as we took more and more
seriously the thing we had invented. Perhaps, too, as Diotallevi
said in a moment of good humor, now that we had a real
Saint-Germain, we didn't need an imitation.

Aglie didn't seem to
take offense at our reserve. He would greet us, then leave us, with
a politeness that bordered on hauteur.

One Monday morning I
arrived at work late, and Belbq eagerly asked me to come to his
office, calling Diotallevi, too. "Big news," he said. But before he
could begin, Lorenza arrived. Belbo was torn between his joy at
this visit and his impatience to tell what he had discovered. A
moment later, there was a knock, and Aglie stuck his head in. "I
don't want to disturb you. Please don't get up. I haven't the
authority to intrude on such a consistory. I only wanted to tell
our dearest Lorenza that I'm in Signor Garamond's office. And I
hope I have at least the authority to summon her for a sherry at
noon, in my office."

In his office! This time
Belbo lost self-control. To the extent, that is, that he could lose
it. He waited for Aglie to leave, then muttered through clenched
teeth: "Ma gavte la nata."

Lorenza, still showing
her pleasure at the invitation, asked Belbo what that
meant.

"It's Turin dialect. It
means, literally, ¡¥Be so kind as to remove the cork.' A pompous,
self-important, overweening individual is thought to hold himself
the way he does because of a cork stuck in his sphincter ani, which
prevents his vaporific dignity from being dispersed. The removal of
the cork causes the individual to deflate, a process usually
accompanied by a shrill whistle and the reduction of the outer
envelope to a poor flesh-less phantom of its former
self."

"I didn't know you could
be so vulgar."

¡¥¡¥ Now you
know."

Lorenza went out,
pretending to be annoyed. I knew this distressed Belbo all the
more: real anger would have reassured him, but a pretense of
irritation only confirmed his fear that, from Lorenza, the display
of any passion was always staged, theatrical.

He said then, with grim
determination, "To business." Meaning: Let's proceed with the Plan,
seriously.

"I don't much want to,"
Diotallevi said. "I don't feel well. I have a pain here,"¡Xhe
touched his stomach¡X"I think it's gastritis."

"Ridiculous," Belbo said
to him. "/don't have gastritis...What could give you gastritis?
Mineral water?"

"Could be," Diotallevi
said with a wan smile. "Last night I overdid it. I'm accustomed to
still Fiuggi, and I drank some fizzy San Pellegrino."

"You must be careful.
Such excesses could kill you. But to business, gentlemen. I've been
dying to tell you for two days now...Finally, I know why the
Thirty-six Invisibles were unable, for centuries, to work out the
form of the map. John Dee got it wrong; the geography has to be
done over. We live inside a hollow earth, enclosed by the
terrestrial surface. Hitler realized this."