Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (20 page)

Sauvez la faible Aischa
des vertiges de Nahash, sauvez la plaintive Heva des mirages de la
sensibility, et que les Khe'rubs me gardent.

¡XJose'phin P^ladan,
Comment on devient Fee, Paris, Chamuel, 1893, p. XIII

As I was advancing into
the forest of resemblances, I received Belbo's letter.

Dear
Casaubon,

I didn't know until the
other day that you were in Brazil. I lost touch completely, not
even knowing that you had graduated (congratulations). Anyway,
someone at Pilade's gave me your coordinates, and I thought it
would be a good idea to bring you up to date on some developments
in that unfortunate Colonel Ardenti business. It's been more than
two years now, I know, and again I must apologize: I was the one
who got you into trouble that morning, though I didn't mean
to.

I had almost forgotten
the whole nasty story, but two weeks ago I was driving around in
the Montefeltro area and happened upon the fortress of San Leo. In
the eighteenth century, it seems, the region was under papal rule,
and the pope imprisoned Cagliostro there, in a cell with no real
door (you entered it, for the first and last time, through a
trapdoor in the ceiling) and with one little window from which the
prisoner could see only the two churches of the village. I saw a
bunch of roses on the shelf where Cagliostro had slept and died,
and I was told that many devotees still make the pilgrimage to the
place of his martyrdom. Among the most assiduous pilgrims are the
members of Picatrix, a group of Milanese students of the occult. It
publishes a' magazine entitled¡Xwith great
imagination¡XPicatrix.

You know how curious I
am about these oddities. So back in Milan I got hold of a copy of
Picatrix, from which I learned that an evocation of the spirit of
Cagliostro was to be held in a few days. I went.

The walls were draped
with banners covered with cabalistic signs, an abundance of owls of
all kinds, scarabs and ibises, and Oriental divinities of uncertain
origin. Near the rear wall was a dais, a proscenium of burning
torches held up by rough logs, and in the background an altar with
a triangular altar-piece and statuettes of Isis and Osiris. The
room was ringed by an amphitheater of figures of Anubis, and there
was a portrait of Cagliostro (it could hardly have been of anyone
else, could it?), a gilded mummy in Cheops format, two five-armed
candelabra, a gong suspended from two rampant snakes, on a podium a
lectern covered by calico printed with hieroglyphics, and two
crowns, two tripods, a little portable sarcophagus, a throne, a
fake seventeenth-century fauteuil, four unmatched chairs suitable
for a banquet with the sheriff of Nottingham, and candles, tapers,
votive lights, all flickering very spiritually.

Anyway, to go on with
the story: seven altar boys entered in red cassocks and carrying
torches, followed by the celebrant, apparently the head of
Picatrix¡Xhe rejoiced in the commonplace name of Brambilla¡Xin
pink-and-olive vestments. He was, in turn, followed by the
neophyte, or medium, and six acolytes in white, who all looked like
Bing Crosby, but with infulas, the god's, if you recall our
poets.

Brambilla put on a
triple crown with a half-moon, picked up a ritual sword, drew magic
symbols on the dais, and summoned various angelic spirits with
names ending hi "el." At this point I was vaguely reminded of those
pseudo-Semitic incantations in Ingolf's message, but only for a
moment, because I was immediately distracted by something unusual.
The microphones on the dais were connected to a tuner that was
supposed to picjc up random waves in space, but the operator must
have made a mistake, because first we heard a burst of disco music
and then Radio Moscow came on. Brambilla opened the sarcophagus,
took out a book of magic spells, swung a thurible, and cried, "O
Lord, Thy kingdom come." This seemed to achieve something, because
Radio Moscow fell silent, but then, at the most magical moment, it
came on again, with a drunken Cossack song, the kind they dance to
with their behinds scraping the ground. Brambilla invoked the
Clavicula Salomonis, risked self-immolation by burning a parchment
on a tripod, summoned several divinities of the temple of Karnak,
testily asked to be placed on the cubic stone of Yesod, and
insistently called out for "Familiar 39," who must have been
familiar enough to the audience, since a shiver ran through the
hall. One woman sank into a trance, her eyes rolling back until
only the whites were visible. People called for a doctor, but
Brambilla involved the Power of the Penta-cles, and the neophyte,
who had meanwhile sat down on the fake fauteuil, began to writhe
and groan. Brambilla hovered over her, anxiously asking questions
of her, or, rather, of Familiar 39, who, I suddenly realized, was
Cagliostro himself. And now came the disturbing part, because the
pathetic girl seemed to be in real pain: she trembled, sweated,
bellowed, and began to speak in broken phrases of a temple and a
door that must be opened. She said a vortex of power was being
created, and we had to ascend to the Great Pyramid. Brambilla, up
on the dais, became agitated; he banged the gong and called Isis in
a loud voice. I was enjoying the performance until I heard the
girl, still sighing and moaning, say something about six seals, a
one-hundred-and-twenty-year wait, and thirty-six invisibles. Now,
there could be no doubt: she was talking about the message of
Provins. I waited to hear more, but the girl slumped back,
exhausted. Brambilla stroked her brow, blessed the audience with
his thurible, and proclaimed the rite over.

I was slightly awed, and
also eager to understand. I tried to move closer to the girl, who
in the meantime had come to her senses, slipped into a scruffy
overcoat, and was on her way out through the rear exit. I was about
to touch her on the shoulder, when I felt someone grasp my arm. I
turned and it was Inspector De Angelis, who told me to let her go:
he knew where to find her. He invited me out for coffee. I went, as
if he had caught me doing something wrong, which in a sense he had.
At the cafe he asked me what I was doing there and why I had tried
to approach the girl. This irritated me. We aren't living in a
dictatorship, I said. I can approach anyone I choose. He apologized
and explained that, although the Ar-denti investigation had no
priority, they had tried to reconstruct the two days he had spent
in Milan before his meeting at Garamond and with the mysterious
Rakosky. A year after Ardenti's disappearance, the police had found
out, by sheer luck, that someone had seen him leaving the Picatrix
offices in the company of the psychic girl, who, incidentally, was
of interest to De Angelis because she lived with an individual not
unknown to the narcotics squad.

I told him I was there
by chance, and I had been struck by the fact that the girl had
spoken a phrase about six seals, which I had heard from the
colonel. He remarked how strange it was that I could remember so
clearly what the colonel said two years ago, yet, at the time, I
had spoken only of some vague talk about the treasure of the
Templars. I replied that the colonel had indeed said that the
treasure was protected by six seals of some kind, but I hadn't
considered this an important detail because all treasures are
protected by seals, usually seven, and by gold bugs. He observed
that if all treasures were protected by gold bugs, he couldn't see
why I should have been struck ty what the girl had said. I asked
him to stop treating me like a suspect, and he laughed and changed
his tone. He said he didn't find it strange that the girl had said
what she did, because Ardenti must have talked to her about his
fantasies, perhaps trying to use her to establish some astral
contact, as they say in those circles. A psychic, he went on, was
like a sponge, a photographic plate with an unconscious that must
look like an amusement park. The Picatrix bunch probably give her a
brainwashing all year round, so it was not unlikely that once in a
trance¡Xbecause the girl was in earnest, wasn't faking, and there
was something wrong with her head-she would see images that had
been impressed on her long ago.

But two days later De
Angelis dropped in at the office to say that, curiously enough,
when he went to see the girl the day after the ceremony, she was
gone. The neighbors said nobody had seen her since the afternoon
before the evening of the ceremony. His suspicions were aroused, so
he entered the apartment and found it torn to pieces: sheets on the
floor, pillows in one corner, trampled newspapers, emptied drawers.
No sign of her. Or of her boyfriend, or roommate or whatever you
wanted to call him.

He told me that if I
knew anything more, I'd be wise to talk, because it was strange how
the girl had disappeared into thin air, and he could think of only
two reasons: either somebody realized that De Angelis had her under
surveillance, or it was noticed that one Jacopo Belbo had tried to
talk to her. The things she had said in the trance might therefore
have concerned something serious, some unfinished
business.

They¡Xwhoever they
were¡Xhadn't realized she knew so much.

"Now suppose some
colleague of mine gets it into his head that you killed her," De
Angelis added with a beautiful smile.

"You can see we have
every interest in working together." I almost lost my temper, and
God knows I don't do that often. I asked him why a person who's not
home is assumed to have been murdered, and he asked if I remembered
what happened to the colonel. Then I told him that if she had been
killed, or kidnapped, it must have happened that evening, when I
was with him. He asked how I could be so sure of that, since we had
said good-bye around midnight and he had no way of knowing what had
happened after that. I asked him if he was serious, and he said
what, hadn't I ever read a detective story? Didn't I know that the
prime suspect was always the one who didn't have an alibi as
radiant as Hiroshima? He said he would donate his head to an organ
bank if I had an alibi for the time between one A.M. and the next
morning.

What can I say,
Casaubon? Maybe I should have told him the truth, but where I come
from, men are stubborn and never back down.

I'm writing you because
if I found your address, then De Angelis can find it, too. If he
gets in touch with you, at least you know the line I've taken. But
since it doesn't seem a very straight line to me, go ahead and tell
him everything if you want to. I'm embarrassed, I apologize. I feel
like some kind of accomplice. Try as I might, I can't seem to find
any noble justification for myself. Must be my peasant origins; in
our part of the country, we're a mean bunch. The whole thing is¡Xas
the Germans says¡Xunheimlich.

Yours, Jacopo
Belbo

...of these mysterious
initiates¡Xnow become numerous, bold, conspiring¡Xall was born:
Jesuitism, magnetism, Martinism, philosopher's stone, somnambulism,
eclecticism.

¡XC.-L.
Cadet-Gassicourt, Le tombeau de Jacques de Malay, Paris, Desenne,
1797, p. 91

The letter upset me. Not
that I was afraid of being tracked down by De Angelis¡Xwe were in
different hemispheres, after all¡Xbut for less definable reasons.
At the time, I thought I was upset because a world I had left
behind had bounced back at me. But today I realize that what
bothered me was yet another strand of resemblance, the suspicion of
an analogy. I was annoyed, too, at having to deal with Belbo again,
Belbo and his eternal guilty conscience. I decided not to mention
the letter to Amparo.

A reassuring second
letter arrived from Belbo two days later.

The story of the psychic
had had a reasonable ending. A police informer reported that the
girl's lover had been involved in a settling of scores over a drug
shipment, which he had sold retail instead of delivering it to the
honest wholesaler who had already paid. They frown on that sort of
behavior in those circles, and he vanished to save his neck.
Obviously he took the woman with him. Rummaging then among the
newspapers left in their apartment, De Angelis found some magazines
on the order of Picatrix, with a series of articles heavily
underlined in red. One was about the treasure of the Templars,
another about Rosicrucians who lived in a castle, cave, or some
damn place where "post CXX annos patebo" was written and they
called themselves the thirty-six invisibles. So for De Angelis it
was all clear. The psychic, consuming the same sort of literature
that the colonel had, regurgitated it whin she was in a trance. The
matter was closed, passed on to the narcotics squad.

Belbo's letter exuded
relief. De Angelis's explanation seemed the most
economical.

The other evening in the
periscope, I told myself that the facts might have been quite
different. Granted, the psychic quoted something she had heard from
Ardenti, but it was something her magazines never mentioned,
something no one was supposed to know. Whoever had got rid of the
colonel was in the Picatrix group, and this someone noticed that
Belbo was about to question the psychic, so he eliminated her. To
throw the investigators off the track, he also eliminated her
lover, then instructed a police informer to say that the couple had
fled.

Simple enough, if there
was really a plan. But how could there have been? Since we invented
"the Plan" ourselves, and only much later was it possible for
reality not only to catch up with fiction, but actually to precede
it, or, rather, to rush ahead of it and repair the damage that it
would cause.

At the time, though, in
Brazil, these were not my thoughts on receiving Belbo's second
letter. Instead, I felt once more that something was resembling
something else. I had been thinking about my trip to Bahia and had
spent an afternoon visiting bookstores and shops that sold cult
objects, places I had ignored till then. I went to out-of-the-way
little emporiums crammed with statues and idols. I purchased
perfumadores of Yemanja, pun-gently scented mystical smoke sticks,
incense, sweetish spray cans labeled "Sacred Heart of Jesus," cheap
amulets. I also found many books, some for devotees, others for
people studying devotees, a mixture of exorcism manuals like Como
adivin-harofuturo na bola de cristal and anthropology textbooks.
And a monograph on the Rosicrucians.

Suddenly it all seemed
to come together: Satanic and Moorish rites in the Temple of
Jerusalem, African witchcraft for the sub-proletarians of the
Brazilian Northeast, the message-of Provins with its hundred and
twenty years, and the hundred and twenty years of the
Rosicrucians.

I felt like a walking
blender mixing strange concoctions of different liquors. Or maybe I
had caused some kind of short circuit, tripping over a varicolored
tangle of wires that had been entwining themselves for a long, long
time. I bought the book on the Rosicrucians, thinking that if I
spent a few hours in these bookstores, I would meet at least a
dozen Colonel Ardentis and brainwashed psychics.

I went home and
officially informed Amparo that the world was full of unnatural
characters. She promised me solace, and we ended the day
naturally.

That was late 1975. I
decided to put resemblances aside and concentrate on my work. After
all, I was supposed to be teaching Italian culture, not the
Rosicrucians.

I devoted myself to
Renaissance philosophers and I discovered that the men of secular
modernity, once they had emerged from the darkness of the Middle
Ages, had found nothing better to do than devote themselves to
cabala and magic.

After two years spent
with Neoplatonists who chanted formulas designed to convince nature
to do things she had no intention of doing, I received news from
Italy. It seems my old classmates¡Xor some of them, at least¡Xwere
now shooting people who didn't agree with them, to convince the
stubborn to do things they had no intention of doing.

I couldn't understand
it. Now part of the Third World, I made up my mind to visit Bahia.
I set off with a history of Renaissance culture and the book on the
Rosicrucians, which had remained on a shelf, its pages
uncut.