I passed a hotel, went in, asked for a room, got a key. As I was going upstairs, wooden stairs with a railing, from the second-floor landing the desk was still visible and I saw the presumed Arab enter. Then I noticed that in the corridor there were other people who could have been Arabs. Of course, that neighborhood was full of little hotels for Arabs. What did I expect?
I went into the room. It was decent; there was even a telephone. Too bad I didn’t know anyone I could call.
I dozed fitfully until three. Then I washed my face and headed for the Conservatoire. Now there was nothing else for me to do but enter the museum, stay on after closing, and wait for midnight.
Which I did. And a few hours before midnight, I found myself in the periscope, waiting.
Nezah, for some interpreters, is the Sefirah of endurance, forbearance, constant patience. In fact, a test lay ahead of us. But for other interpreters, it is victory. Whose victory? Perhaps, in this story full of the defeated, of the Diabolicals mocked by Belbo, of Belbo mocked by the Diabolicals, of Diotallevi mocked by his cells, I was—for the moment—the only victorious one. Lying in wait in the periscope, I knew about the others, but the others didn’t know about me. The first part of my scheme had gone according to plan.
And the second? Would it, too, go according to plan, or would it go according to the Plan, which now was no longer mine?
HOD
Four our Ordinances and Rites: We have two very long and faire Galleries in the Temple of the Rosie Cross; In one of these we place patterns and samples of all manners of the more rare and excellent inventions; In the other we place the Statues of all principal Inventours.
—John Heydon, The English Physitians Guide: Or A Holy Guide, London, Ferris, 1662, The Preface
I had stayed in the periscope too long. It must have been ten, ten-thirty. If something was going to happen, it would happen in the nave, before the Pendulum. I had to go down there and find a hiding place, an observation post. If I arrived too late, after They entered (from where?), They would notice me.
Go downstairs. Move … For hours I had waited for this, but now that it was possible, even wise, to do it, I felt somehow paralyzed. I would have to cross the rooms at night, using my flashlight only when necessary. The barest hint of a nocturnal glow filtered through the big windows. I had imagined a museum made ghostly by the moon’s rays; I was wrong. The glass cases reflected vague glints from outside; that was all.
If I didn’t move carefully, I could go sprawling on the floor, could knock over something with a shatter of glass, a clang of metal. Now and then I turned on the flashlight, turned it off. Proceeding, I felt as if I were at the Crazy Horse. The sudden beam revealed a nakedness, not of flesh, but of screws, clamps, rivets.
What if I were suddenly to reveal a living presence, the figure of an envoy of the Masters echoing, mirroring my progress? Who would be the first to shout? I listened. In vain. Gliding, I made no noise. Neither did he.
That afternoon I had studied carefully the sequence of the rooms, in order to be able to find the great staircase even in the darkness. But instead I was wandering, groping. I had lost my bearings.
Perhaps I was going in circles, crossing some of the rooms for the second time; perhaps I would never get out of this place; perhaps this groping among meaningless machines was the rite.
The truth was, I didn’t want to go down. I wanted to postpone the rendezvous.
I had emerged from the periscope after a long and merciless examination of conscience, I had reviewed our error of the last years and tried to understand why, without any reasonable reason, I was now here hunting for Belbo, who was here for reasons even less reasonable. But the moment I set foot outside the periscope, everything changed. As I advanced, I advanced with another man’s head. I became Belbo.
Like Belbo, now at the end of his long journey toward enlightenment, I knew that every earthly object, even the most squalid, must be read as the hieroglyph of something else, and that there is nothing, no object, as real as the Plan. How clever I was! A flash of light, a glance, was all it took, and I understood. I would not let myself be deceived.
… Froment’s Motor: a vertical structure on a rhomboid base. It enclosed, like an anatomical figure exhibiting its ribs and viscera, a series of reels, batteries, circuit breakers—what the hell did the textbooks call them?—and the thing was driven by a transmission belt fed by a toothed wheel…. What could it have been used for? Answer: for measuring the telluric currents, of course.
Accumulators. What did they accumulate? I imagined the Thirty-six Invisibles as stubborn secretaries (keepers of the secret) tapping all night on their clavier-scribes to produce from this machine a sound, a spark, all of them intent on a dialog from coast to coast, from abyss to surface, from Machu Picchu to Avalon, come in, come in, hello hello hello, Pamersiel Pamersiel, we’ve caught a tremor, current Mu 36, the one the Brahmans worshiped as the breath of God, now I’ll plug in the tap, the valve, all micro-macrocosmic circuits operational, all the mandrake roots shuddering beneath the crust of the globe, you hear the song of the Universal Sympathetic, over and out.
My God, armies slaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurled anathemas, emperors met, hemophiliac and incestuous, in the hunting lodge of the Palatine gardens, all to supply a cover, a sumptuous façade for the work of these wireless operators who in the House of Solomon were listening for pale echoes from the Umbilicus Mundi.
And as they operated these pseudothermic hexatetragrammatic elec-trocapillatories—that’s how Garamond would have put it—every now and then someone would invent, say, a vaccine or an electric bulb, a tri— umph in the wonderful adventure of metals, but the real task was quite different: here they are, assembled at midnight, to spin this static-electricity machine of Ducretet, a transparent wheel that looks like a bandoleer, and, inside it, two little vibrating balls supported by arched sticks, and when they touch, sparks fly, and Dr. Frankenstein hopes to give life to his golem, but no, the signal has another purpose: Dig, dig, old mole….
A sewing machine (what else? One of those engraving-advertisements, along with pills for developing one’s bust, and the great eagle flying over the mountains with the restorative cordial in its talons, Robur le Conquérant, R. C.), but when you turn it on, it turns a wheel, and the wheel turns a coil, and the coil …
What does the coil do? Who is listening to the coil? The label says, “Currents induced from the terrestrial field.” Shameless! There to be read even by children on their afternoon visits! Mankind believed it was going in a different direction, believed everything was possible, believed in the supremacy of experiment, of mechanics. The Masters of the World have deceived us for centuries. Enfolded, swaddled, seduced by the Plan, we wrote poems in praise of the locomotive.
I passed by. I imagined myself dwindling, an ant-sized, dazed pedestrian in the streets of a mechanical city, metallic skyscrapers on every side. Cylinders, batteries, Leyden jars one above the other, merry-go-round centrifuges, tourniquet électrique à attraction et repulsion, a talisman to stimulate the sympathetic currents, colonnade étincelante formée de neuf tubes, électroaimant, a guillotine, and in the center—it looked like a printing press—hooks hung from chains, the kind you might see in a stable. A press in which you could crush a hand, a head. A glass bell with a pneumatic pump, two-cylinder, a kind of alembic, with a cup underneath and, to the right, a copper sphere. In it Saint-Germain concocted his dyes for the landgrave of Hesse.
A pipe rack with two rows of little hourglasses, ten to a row, their necks elongated like the neck of a Modigliani woman, some unspecified material inside, and the upper bulge of each expanded to a different size, like balloons about to take off. This, an apparatus for the production of the Rebis, where anyone could see it.
Then the glassworks section. I had retraced my steps. Little green bottles: a sadist host offering me poisons in quintessence. Iron machines for making bottles, opened and closed by two cranks. What if, instead of a bottle, someone put a wrist in there? Whack! And it would be the same with those great pincers, those immense scissors, those curved scalpels that could be inserted into sphincters or ears, into the uterus to extract the still-living fetus, which would be ground with honey and pepper to sate the appetite of Astarte…. The room I was now crossing had broad cases, and buttons to set in motion corkscrews that would advance inexorably toward the victim’s eye, the Pit and the Pendulum.
We were close to caricature now, to the ridiculous contraptions of Rube Goldberg, the torture racks on which Big Pete bound Mickey Mouse, the engrenage extérieur à trois pignons, triumph of Renaissance mechanics, Branca, Ramelli, Zonca.
I knew these gears, I had put
