If it means so much to him, he must have his reasons, surely worthy of respect; a gentleman is always a gentleman. Go to Paris, shake hands, and it’s done. All right? And don’t worry more than necessary. You know I’m always here.” Then he pressed the intercom: “Signora Grazia … ah, not there. She’s never around when you need her. You have your troubles, my dear Belbo, but if you only knew mine. Good-bye now. If you see Signora Grazia in the corridor, send her to me. And get some rest: don’t forget.”
Belbo went out. Signora Grazia wasn’t in her office, but on her desk he saw that the red light of Garamond’s personal line was on: Garamond was calling someone. Belbo couldn’t resist (I believe it was the first time in his life he committed such an indelicacy); he picked up the receiver and listened in on the conversation. Garamond was saying: “Don’t worry. I think I’ve convinced him. He’ll come to Paris….Only my duty. We belong to the same spiritual knighthood, after all.”
So Garamond, too, was part of the secret. What secret? The one that only he, Belbo, could reveal. The one that did not exist.
It was evening by then. He went to Pilade’s, exchanged a few words with someone or other, drank too much. The next morning, he sought out the only friend he had left, Diotallevi. He went to ask the help of a dying man.
Their last conversation he reported feverishly on Abulafia. It’s a summary. I was unable to tell how much was Diotallevi’s and how much was Belbo’s, because in both cases it was the murmuring of one who speaks the truth because he knows the time has passed for playing with illusion.
And so it happened that Rabbi Ismahel ben Elisha and his disciples, who were studying the book Yesirah and mistook the movements and walked backward, sank into the earth, to its navel, thanks to the strength of letters.
—Pseudo Saadya, Commentary on the Sefer Yesirah
He had never seen his friend so white. Diotallevi had hardly any hair now on his head or eyebrows or lashes. He looked like a billiard ball.
“Forgive me,” Belbo said. “Can we discuss my situation?”
“Go ahead. I don’t have a situation. Only needs.”
“I heard they have a new therapy. These things devour twenty-year-olds, but at fifty it’s slower; there’s time to find a cure.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m not fifty yet. My body is still young. I have the privilege of dying more quickly. But it’s hard for me to talk. Tell me what you have to say, so I can rest.”
Obedient, respectful, Belbo told him the whole story.
Then Diotallevi, breathing like the Thing in the science-fiction movie, talked. He had, also, the transparency of the Thing, that absence of boundary between exterior and interior, between skin and flesh, between the light fuzz on his belly, discernible in the gap of his pajamas, and the mucilaginous tangle of viscera that only X rays or a disease in an advanced state can make visible.
“Jacopo, I’m stuck here in a bed. I can’t decide whether what you’re telling me is happening only inside your head, or whether it’s happening outside. But it doesn’t matter. Whether you’ve gone crazy or the world has makes no difference. In either case, someone has mixed and shuffled the words of the Book more than was right.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve sinned against the Word, against that which created and sustains the world. Now you are punished for it, as I am punished for it. There’s no difference between you and me.”
A nurse came in and put water on his table. She told Belbo not to tire him, but Diotallevi waved her away: “Leave us alone. I have to tell him. The Truth. Do you know the Truth?”
“Who, me? What a question, sir…”
“Then go. I have to tell my friend something important. Now listen, Jacopo. Just as man’s body has limbs and joints and organs, so does the Torah. And as the Torah, so a man’s body. You follow me?”
“Yes.”
“Rabbi Meir, when he was learning from Rabbi Akiba, mixed vitriol in the ink, and the master said nothing. But when Rabbi Meir asked Rabbi Ismahel if he was doing the right thing, the rabbi said to him: Son, be cautious in your work, because it is divine work, and if you omit one letter or write one letter too many, you destroy the whole world….We tried to rewrite the Torah, but we paid no heed to whether there were too many letters or too few….”
“We were joking….”
“You don’t joke with the Torah.”
“We were joking with history, with other people’s writings….”
“Is there a writing that founds the world and is not the Book? Give me a little water. No, not the glass; wet that cloth…. Thanks. Now listen. Rearranging the letters of the Book means rearranging the world. There’s no getting away from it. Any book, even a speller. People like your Dr. Wagner, don’t they say that a man who plays with words and makes anagrams and violates the language has ugliness in his soul and hates his father?”
“But those are psychoanalysts. They say that to make money. They aren’t your rabbis.”
“They’re all rabbis. They’re all saying the same thing. Do you think the rabbis, when they spoke of the Torah, were talking about a scroll? They were talking about us, about remaking our body through language. Now, listen. To manipulate the letters of the Book takes great piety, and we didn’t have it. But every book is interwoven with the name of God. And we anagrammatized all the books of history, and we did it without praying. Listen to me, damn it.
He who concerns himself with the Torah keeps the world in motion, and he keeps in motion his own body as he reads, studies, rewrites, because there’s no part of the body that doesn’t have an equivalent in the world. Wet the cloth for me….Thanks. If you alter the Book, you alter the world; if you alter the world, you alter the body. This is what we didn’t understand.
“The Torah allows a word to come out of its coffer; the word appears for a moment, then hides immediately. It is revealed only for a moment and only to its lover. It’s a beautiful woman who hides in a remote chamber of her palace. She waits for one whose existence nobody knows of. If another tries to take her, to put his dirty hands on her, she dismisses him. She knows her beloved; she opens the door just a little, shows herself, and immediately hides again. The word of the Torah reveals itself only to him who loves it. But we approached books without love, in mockery….”
Belbo again moistened his friend’s lips with the cloth. “And so?”
“So we attempted to do what was not allowed us, what we were not prepared for. Manipulating the words of the Book, we attempted to construct a golem.”
“I don’t understand….”
“You can’t understand. You’re the prisoner of what you created. But your story in the outside world is still unfolding. I don’t know how, but you can still escape it. For me it’s different. I am experiencing in my body everything we did, as a joke, in the Plan.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. It’s a matter of cells….”
“And what are cells? For months, like devout rabbis, we uttered different combinations of the letters of the Book. GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG. What our lips said, our cells learned. What did my cells do? They invented a different Plan, and now they are proceeding on their own, creating a history, a unique, private history. My cells have learned that you can blaspheme by anagrammatizing the Book, and all the books of the world. And they have learned to do this now with my body.
They invert, transpose, alternate, transform themselves into cells unheard of, new cells without meaning, or with meaning contrary to the right meaning. There must be a right meaning and a wrong meaning; otherwise you die. My cells joke, without faith, blindly.
“Jacopo, while I could still read, during these past months, I read dictionaries, I studied histories of words, to understand what was happening in my body. I studied like a rabbi. Have you ever reflected that the linguistic term ‘metathesis’ is similar to the oncological term ‘metastasis’?
What is metathesis? Instead of ‘clasp’ one says ‘claps.’ Instead of ‘beloved’ one says ‘bevoled.’ It’s the temurah. The dictionary says that metathesis means transposition or interchange, while metastasis indicates change and shifting. How stupid dictionaries are! The root is the same. Either it’s the verb metatithemi or the verb methistemi.
Metatithemi means I interpose, I shift, I transfer, I substitute, I abrogate a law, I change a meaning. And methistemi? It’s the same thing: I move, I transform, I transpose, I switch cliches, I take leave of my senses. And as we sought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took leave of our senses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. That’s why I’m dying, Jacopo, and you know it.”
“You talk like this because you’re ill….”
“I talk like this because finally I understand everything about my body. I’ve studied it day after day, I know what’s happening in it, but I can’t intervene; the cells no longer obey. I’m dying because I convinced myself that there was no order, that you could do whatever you liked with any text. I spent my life convincing myself of this, I,
