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 great 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—no, 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 Giuseppe 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-Honoré, 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—now 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—should 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—O horror—the canvas is raised, and behind it, the admirable work of some Arcimboldo of caves, another chapel appears, exactly like this one. There before the other altar Cecilia is kneeling, and beside her—icy sweat beads my brow, my hair stands on end—whom 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—God 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—or, 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—my accomplices, at least—a 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—paralysis, pox, an 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—as you see—you 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.
—René Alleau, Les sources occultes du nazisme, Paris, Grasset, 1969, p. 214
It was around this time that Agliè 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 Agliè’s power over Lorenza, aloud he wisecracked about the power Agliè was gaining at Garamond.
Perhaps it was our own fault. Agliè had begun seducing Garamond almost a year earlier, from the time of the alchemistic 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 Agliè had practically
