A pause. Belbo looked at his hands, which he had clasped, as if in prayer. Then he held them apart and said, “That was the proof that he wasn’t a spy.”
“The moral of the story?”
“Who said stories have to have a moral? But, now that I think about it, maybe the moral is that sometimes, to prove something, you have to die.”
I am that I am.
—Exodus 3:14
Ego sum qui sum. An axiom of hermetic philosophy.
—Madame Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1877, p. 1
“Who are you?” three hundred voices asked as one, while twenty swords flashed in the hands of the nearest ghosts….
“I am that I am,” he said.
—Alexandre Dumas, Giuseppe Balsamo, ii
I saw Belbo the next morning. “Yesterday we sketched a splendid dime novel,” I said to him. “But maybe, if we want to make a convincing Plan, we should stick closer to reality.”
“What reality?” he asked me. “Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the true measure of reality. Maybe they’ve deceived us.”
“How?”
“Making us believe that on one hand there is Great Art, which portrays typical characters in typical situations, and on the other hand you have the thriller, the romance, which portrays atypical characters in atypical situations. No true dandy, I thought, would have made love to Scarlett O’Hara or even to Constance Bonacieux or Princess Daisy. I played with the dime novel, in order to take a stroll outside of life. It comforted me, offering the unattainable. But I was wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Wrong. Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is—or at least the world as it will become. Women are a lot more like Milady than they are like Little Nell, Fu Manchu is more real than Nathan the Wise, and History is closer to what Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects. Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls.”
“The fact is, it’s easier for reality to imitate the dime novel than to imitate art. Being a Mona Lisa is hard work; becoming Milady follows our natural tendency to choose the easy way.”
Diotallevi, silent until now, remarked: “Or our Agliè, for example. He finds it easier to imitate Saint-Germain than Voltaire.”
“Yes,” Belbo said, “and women find Saint-Germain more interesting than Voltaire.”
Afterward, I found this file, in which Belbo translated our discussion into fictional form, amusing himself by reconstructing the story of Saint-Germain without adding anything of his own, only a few sentences here and there to provide transitions, in a furious collage of quotes, plagiarisms, borrowings, clichés. Once again, to escape the discomfort of History, Belbo wrote and reexamined life through a literary stand-in.
FILENAME: The Return of Saint-Germain
For five centuries now the avenging hand of the All-Powerful has driven me from deepest Asia all the way to this cold, damp land. I carry with me fear, despair, death. But no, I am the notary of the Plan, even if nobody else knows of it. I have seen things far more terrible; preparing the night of Saint Bartholomew was more irksome than the thing I am now preparing to do. Oh, why do my lips curl in this satanic smile? I am that I am. If only that wretch Cagliostro had not usurped from me even this last privilege.
But my triumph is near. Soapes, when I was Kelley, told me everything in the Tower of London. The secret is to become someone else.
By shrewd plotting I had Giuseppe Balsamo imprisoned in the fortress of San Leo, and I stole his secrets. Saint-Germain has vanished; now all believe I am the Conte di Cagliostro.
Midnight is struck by all the clocks of the city. What unnatural peace. This silence does not persuade me. A beautiful evening, though cold; the high moon casts an icy glow over the impenetrable alleys of old Paris. It is ten o’clock: the spire of the abbey of the Black Friars has just tolled eight, slowly. The wind with mournful creaks moves the iron weathercocks on the desolate expanse of rooftops. A thick blanket of clouds covers the sky.
Skipper, are we turning back? No. We’re sinking! Damnation, the Patna’s going to the bottom. Jump, Seven Seas Jim, jump! To be free of this anguish I’d give a diamond the size of a walnut. Luff the mainsail, take the tiller, the topgallant, whatever you like, curse you, it’s blowing up!
Horribly I clench the cloister of my teeth as a deathly pallor flushes my green, waxen face.
How did I come here, I who am the very image of revenge? The spirits of Hell will smile with contempt at the tears of the creature whose menacing voice so often made them tremble even in the womb of their fiery abyss.
Holla, lights!
How many steps did I come down to reach this den? Seven? Thirty-six? There is no stone I grazed, no step taken that did not hide a hieroglyph. When I have uncovered them all, the Mystery will be revealed at last to my faithful followers. The Message will be deciphered, its solution will be the Key, and to the initiate, but only to the initiate, the Enigma will then be revealed.
Between the Enigma and the deciphering of the Message, the step is brief, and from it, radiant, the Hierogram will emerge, upon which the Prayer of Interrogation will be defined. Then the Arcanum will be drawn aside, the veil, the Egyptian tapestry that covers the Pentacle. And thence to the light, to announce the Occult Meaning of the Pentacle, the Cabalistic Question to which only a few can reply, and to recite in a voice of thunder the Impenetrable Sign. Bent over it, the Thirty-six Invisibles will have to give the Answer, the uttering of the Rune whose Meaning is open only to the sons of Hermes. To them let the Mocking Seal be given, the Mask behind which is outlined the Countenance they seek to bare, the Mystic Rebus, the Sublime Anagram….
“Sator Arepo!” I shout in a voice to make a specter tremble. And Sator Arepo appears, abandoning the wheel he grips with the clever hands of a murderer. At my command, he prostrates himself. I recognize him, for I had already suspected his identity. He is Luciano, the handicapped shipping clerk, who the Unknown Superiors have decreed will be the executor of my evil and bloody task.
“Sator Arepo,” I ask mockingly, “do you know what is the Final Answer concealed behind the Sublime Anagram?”
“No, Count,” the imprudent one replies. “I wait to learn it from your lips.”
From my pale lips infernal laughter bursts and reechoes through the ancient vaults.
“Fool! Only the true initiate knows he does not know it!”
“Yes, master,” the maimed clerk replies stupidly. “As you wish. I am ready.”
We are in a squalid den in Clignancourt. This evening I must punish, first of all, you, who initiated me into the noble art of crime, who pretend to love me, and who, what is worse, believe you love me, along with the nameless enemies with whom you will spend the next weekend. Luciano, unwelcome witness of my humiliations, will lend me his arm—his one arm—then he, too, will die.
The room has a trapdoor over a ditch or chamber, a subterranean passage used since time immemorial for the storage of contraband goods, a place always dank because it is connected to the Paris sewers, that labyrinth of crime, and the ancient walls exude unspeakable miasmas, so that when with the help of Luciano, ever faithful in evil, I make a hole in the wall, water enters in spurts; it floods the cellar, the already rotting walls collapse, and the passage joins the sewers, and dead rats float past. The blackish surface that can be seen from above is now the vestibule to perdition: far, far off, the Seine, and then the sea….
A ladder hangs down, fixed to the upper edge of the trap. On this, at water level, Luciano takes his place, with a knife: one hand gripping the bottom rung, the other holding the knife, the third ready to seize the victim. “Now wait in silence,” I say to him, “and you will see.”
I have convinced you to destroy all men with a scar. Come with me, be mine forever, let us do away with those importunate presences. I know well that you do not love them—you told me as much—but we two will remain, we and the subterranean currents.
Now you enter, haughty as a vestal, hoarse and numb as a witch.
O vision of hell that stirs my age-old loins and grips my bosom in the clutch of desire, O splendid half-caste, instrument of my doom! With talonlike hands I rip the shirt of fine batiste that adorns my chest, and with my nails I stripe my flesh with bleeding furrows, while a horrible burning sears my lips as cold as the scales of the Serpent. A hollow
