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.
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.
Between eleven at night and two in the morning you might see a young publisher, an architect, a crime reporter trying to work his way up to the arts page, some Brera Academy painters, a few semisuccessful writers, and students like me.
A minimum of alcoholic stimulation was the rule, and old Pilade, while he still stocked his big bottles of white for the tram drivers and the most aristocratic customers, replaced root beer and cream soda with pétillant wines with the right labels for the intellectuals and Johnnie Walker for the revolutionaries. I could write the political history of those years based on how Red Label gradually gave way to twelve-year-old Ballantine and then to single malt.
At the old billiard table the painters and motormen still challenged each other to games, but with the arrival of the new clientele, Pilade also put in a pinball machine.
I was never able to make the little balls last. At first I attributed that to absent-mindedness or a lack of manual dexterity. I learned the truth years later after watching Lorenza Pellegrini play. At the beginning I hadn’t noticed her, but then she came into focus one evening when I followed the direction of Belbo’s gaze.
Belbo had a way of standing at the bar as if he were just passing through (he had been a regular there for at least ten years). He often took part in conversations, at the counter or at a table, but almost always he did no more than drop some short remark that would instantly freeze all enthusiasm, no matter what subject was being discussed. He had another freezing technique: asking a question.
Someone would be talking about an event, the whole group would be completely absorbed, then Belbo, turning his pale, slightly absent eyes on the speaker, with his glass at hip level, as though he had long forgotten he was drinking, would ask, “Is that a fact?” Or, “Really?”
At which point everyone, including the narrator, would suddenly begin to doubt the story. Maybe it was the way Belbo’s Piedmont drawl made his statements interrogative and his interrogatives taunting. And he had yet another Piedmont trick: looking into his interlocutor’s eyes, but as if he were avoiding them. His gaze didn’t exactly shirk dialogue, but he would suddenly seem to concentrate on some distant convergence of parallel lines no one had paid attention to. He made you feel that you had been staring all this time at the one place that was unimportant.
It wasn’t just his gaze. Belbo could dismiss you with the smallest gesture, a brief interjection. Suppose you were trying hard to show that it was Kant who really completed the Copernican revolution in modern philosophy, suppose you were staking your whole future on that thesis. Belbo, sitting opposite you, with his eyes half-closed, would suddenly look down at his hands or at his knee with an Etruscan smile.
Or he would sit back with his mouth open, eyes on the ceiling, and mumble, “Yes, Kant…” Or he would commit himself more explicitly, in an assault on the whole system of transcendental idealism: “You really think Kant meant all that stuff?” Then he would look at you with solicitude, as if you, and not he, had disturbed the spell, and he would then encourage you: “Go ahead, go ahead. I mean, there must be something to
