“Listen, what’s happening to you has no connection with our Plan.”
“It doesn’t? Then explain what’s happening to you. The world is behaving like my cells.”
He sank back, exhausted. The doctor came in and whispered to Belbo that it was wrong to submit a dying man to such stress.
Belbo left, and that was the last time he saw Diotallevi.
Very well, he wrote, the police are after me for the same reason that Diotallevi has cancer. Poor friend, he’s dying, and I, who don’t have cancer, what am I doing? I’m going to Paris to find the principle of neoplasm.
But he didn’t give in immediately. He stayed shut up in his apartment for four days, reviewed his files sentence by sentence, to find an explanation. Then he wrote out this account, a final testament, so to speak, telling it to himself, to Abulafia, to me, or to anyone else who was able to read it. And finally, Tuesday, he left.
I believe Belbo went to Paris to say to them there was no secret, that the real secret was to let the cells proceed according to their own instinctive wisdom, that seeking mysteries beneath the surface reduced the world to a foul cancer, and that of all the people in the world, the most foul, the most stupid person was Belbo himself, who knew nothing and had invented everything. Such a step must have cost him dear, but he had accepted for too long the premise that he was a coward, and De Angelis had certainly shown him that heroes were few.
In Paris, after the first meeting, Belbo must have realized They wouldn’t believe him. His words were too undramatic, too simple. It was a revelation They wanted, on pain of death. Belbo had no revelation to give, and—his final cowardice—he feared death. So he tried to cover his tracks, and he called me. But They caught him.
C’est une leçon par la suite. Quand votre ennemi se reproduira, car il n’est pas à son dernier masque, congédiez-le brusquement, et surtout n’allez pas le chercher dans les grottes.
—Jacques Cazotte, Le diable amoureux, 1772, from a page suppressed in later editions
Now, in Belbo’s apartment, as I finished reading his confessions, I asked myself: What should I do? No point going to Garamond. De Angelis had left. Diotallevi had said everything he had to say. Lia was far off, in a place without a telephone. It was six in the morning, Saturday, June 23, and if something was going to happen, it would happen tonight, in the Conservatoire. I had to decide quickly.
Why—I asked myself later, in the periscope—didn’t you pretend nothing had happened? You had before you the texts of a madman, a madman who had talked with other madmen, including a last conversation with an overexcited (or overdepressed) dying friend. You weren’t even sure Belbo had called you from Paris. Maybe he was talking from somewhere a few kilometers outside Milan, or maybe from the booth on the corner. Why involve yourself in a story that was imaginary and that didn’t concern you anyway?
This was the question I set myself in the periscope, as my feet were growing numb and the light was fading, and I felt the unnatural yet very natural fear that anyone would feel at night, alone, in a deserted museum. But early that morning, I had felt no fear. Only curiosity. And, perhaps, duty, friendship.
I told myself that I, too, should go to Paris. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I couldn’t desert Belbo now. Maybe he was counting on me to slip, under cover of night, into the cave of the Thugs, and, as Suyodhana was about to plunge the sacrificial knife into his heart, to burst into the underground temple with my sepoys, their muskets loaded with grapeshot, and carry him to safety.
Luckily, I had a little money on me. In Paris I got into a taxi and told the driver to take me to rue de la Manticore. He grumbled, cursed; the street couldn’t be found even in those guides they have. In fact, it turned out to be an alley no wider than the aisle of a train. It was in the neighborhood of the old Bièvre, behind Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. The taxi couldn’t even enter it; the driver left me at the corner.
Uneasily, I entered the alley. There were no doorways. At a certain point the street widened a little, and I came to a bookshop. Why it had the number 3 I don’t know, since there was no number 1 or 2, or any other street number. It was a grimy little shop, lighted by a single bulb. Half of the double door served as a display case. Its sides held perhaps a few dozen books, indicating the shop’s specialties. On a shelf, some pendulums, dusty boxes of incense sticks, little amulets, Oriental or South American, and tarot decks of diverse origin.
The interior was no more welcoming: a mass of books on the walls and on the floor, with a little table at the back, and a bookseller who seemed put there deliberately, so that a writer could write that the man was more decrepit than his books.
This person, his nose in a big handwritten ledger, was taking no interest in his customers, of which at the moment there were only two, and they raised clouds of dust as they drew out old volumes, nearly all without bindings, from teetering shelves, and began reading them, giving no impression of wanting to buy.
The only space not cluttered with shelves was occupied by a poster.
Garish colors, a series of oval portraits with double borders, as in the posters of the magician Houdini. “Le Petit Cirque de l’Incroyable. Madame Olcott et ses liens avec l’lnvisible.” An olive-skinned, mannish face, two bands of black hair gathered in a knot at the nape. I had seen that face before, I thought. “Les Derviches Hurleurs et leur danse sacree. Les Freaks Mignons, ou Les Petits-fils de Fortunio Liceti.” An assortment of pathetic, abominable little monsters. “Alex et Denys, les Geants d’Avalon. Theo, Leo et Geo Fox, les Enlumineurs de l’Ectoplasme…”
The Librairie Sloane truly supplied everything from the cradle to the grave; it even advertised healthy entertainment, a suitable place to take the children before grinding them up in the mortar. I heard a phone ring. The shopkeeper pushed aside a pile of papers until he found the receiver. “Oui, monsieur,” he said, “c’est bien ça.” He listened for a few minutes, nodded, then assumed a puzzled look, or at least it was the pretense of puzzlement, on account of those present, as if everybody could hear what he was hearing and he didn’t want to assume responsibility for it. Then he took on that shocked expression of a Parisian shopkeeper when you ask for something he doesn’t have in his shop, or a hotel clerk when there are no rooms available. “Ah, non, monsieur. Ah, ça … Non, non, monsieur, c’est pas notre boulot.
Ici, vous savez, on vend des livres, on peut bien vous conseiller sur des catalogues, mais ça … Il s’agit de problèmes très personnels, et nous … Oh, alors, il ya a—sais pas, moi—des curés, des … oui, si vous voulez, des exorcistes. D’accord, je le sais, on connaît des confrères qui si prêtent… Mais pas nous. Non, vraiment la description ne me suffit pas, et quand même … Désolé, monsieur. Comment? Oui … si vous voulez. C’est un endroit bien connu, mais ne demandez pas mon avis. C’est bien ça, vous savez, dans ces cas, la confiance c’est tout. A votre service, monsieur.”
The other two customers left. I felt ill at ease but steeled myself and attracted the old man’s attention with a cough. I told him I was looking for an acquaintance, a friend who, I thought, often stopped by here: Monsieur Agliè. Again the man had the shocked look he had had while on the telephone. Perhaps, I said, he didn’t know him as Agliè, but as Rakosky or Soltikoff or … The bookseller looked at me again, narrowing his eyes, and remarked coldly that I had friends with curious names.
I told him never mind, it was not important, I was merely inquiring. Wait, he said; my partner is arriving and he may know the person you are looking for. Have a seat, please; there’s a chair in the back, there. I’ll just make a call and check. He picked up the phone, dialed a number, and spoke in a low voice.
Casaubon, I said to myself, you’re even stupider than Belbo. What are you waiting for? For Them to come and say, Oh, what a fine coincidence, Jacopo Belbo’s friend as well; come, come along, yes, you too….
I stood up abruptly, said good-bye, and left. In a minute I was out of rue de la Manticore, in another alley, then at the Seine. Fool! I said to myself. What did you expect? To walk in, find Agliè, take him by the lapels, and hear him apologize and say it was all a misunderstanding, here’s your friend, we didn’t touch a hair on his head. And now they know that you’re here, too.
It was past noon, and that evening something would take place in the Conservatoire. What was I to do? I turned into rue Saint-Jacques, every now and then looking over my shoulder. An Arab seemed to be
