And Pierre said, transported: “Assez, assez, le sacrifice humain, le sacrifice humain!”
“Yes, let him die. We’ll find the answer anyway,” cried Madame Olcott, equally carried away, as she now returned to the scene, rushing toward Belbo.
At the same time, Lorenza moved. She freed herself from the giants’ grasp and stood before Belbo, at the foot of the gallows, her arms opened wide, as if to stop an invading army. In tears, she exclaimed: “Are you all crazy? You can’t do this!”
Agliè, who was withdrawing, stood rooted to the spot for a moment, then ran to her, to restrain her.
What happened next took only seconds. Madame Olcott’s knot of hair came undone; all rancor and flames, like a Medusa, she bared her talons, scratched at Agliè’s face, shoved him aside with the force of the momentum of her leap.
Agliè fell back, stumbled over a leg of the brazier, spun around like a dervish, and banged his head against a machine; he sank to the ground, his face covered with blood. Pierre, meanwhile, flung himself on Lorenza, drawing the dagger from the sheath on his chest as he moved, but he blocked my view, so I didn’t see what happened. Then I saw Lorenza slumped at Belbo’s feet, her face waxen, and Pierre, holding up the red blade, shouted: “Enfin, le sacrifice humain!” Turning toward the nave, he said in a loud voice: “I’a Cthulhu! I’a S’ha-t’n!”
In a body, the horde in the nave moved forward: some fell and were swept aside; others, pushing, threatened to topple Cugnot’s car. I heard—I must have heard it, I can’t have imagined such a grotesque detail—the voice of Garamond saying: “Gentlemen, please! Manners!…” Bramanti, in ecstasy, was kneeling by Lorenza’s body, declaiming: “Asar, Asar! Who is clutching me by the throat? Who is pinning me to the ground? Who is stabbing my heart? I am unworthy to cross the threshold of the house of Maat!”
Perhaps no one intended it, perhaps the sacrifice of Lorenza was to have sufficed, but the acolytes were now pressing inside the magic circle, which was made accessible by the immobility of the Pendulum, and someone—Ardenti, I think—was hurled by the others against the table, which literally disappeared from beneath Belbo’s feet.
It skidded away, and, thanks to the same push, the Pendulum began a rapid, violent swing, taking its victim with it. The wire, pulled by the weight of the sphere, tightened around the neck of my poor friend, yanked him into the air, and he swung above and with the Pendulum, swung toward the eastern extremity of the choir, then returned, I hoped without life, in my direction.
Trampling one another, the crowd drew back, retreated to the edges of the semicircle, to allow room for the wonder. The man in charge of the oscillation, intoxicated by the rebirth of the Pendulum, supplied pushes directly on the hanged man’s body. The axis of motion made a diagonal from my eyes to one of the windows, no doubt the window with the colorless spot through which, in a few hours, the first ray of the rising sun would fall. Therefore, I did not see Belbo swing in front of me, but this, I believe, was the pattern he drew in space…
His head seemed a second sphere, trapped in the loops of the wire that stretched from the center of the keystone; and when the metal sphere tilted to the right, Belbo’s head tilted to the left, and vice versa. For most of the long swing, the two spheres tended in opposite directions, one on either side of the wire, so what cleaved the air was no longer a single line, but a kind of triangular structure.
And, while Belbo’s head followed the pull of the wire, his body—at first in its final spasms, then with the disarticulated agility of a wooden marionette, arm here, leg there—described other arcs in the void, arcs independent of the head, the wire, and the sphere beneath. I had the thought that if someone were to photograph the scene using Muybridge’s system—fixing on the plate every moment as a succession of positions, recording the two extreme points the head reached in each period, the two rest points of the sphere, the points of intersection of the wire with time, independent of both head and sphere, and the intermediary points marked by the plane of oscillation of the trunk and legs—Belbo hanged from the Pendulum would have drawn, in space, the tree of the Sefirot, summing up in his final moment the vicissitude of all universes, fixing forever in his motion the ten stages of the mortal exhalation and defecation of the divine in the world.
Then, as the Mandrake in tails continued to encourage that funereal swing, Belbo’s body, through a grisly addition and cancellation of vectors, a migration of energies, suddenly became immobile, and the wire and the sphere moved, but only from his body down; the rest—which connected Belbo with the vault—now remained perpendicular.
Thus Belbo had escaped the error of the world and its movements, had now become, himself, the point of suspension, the Fixed Pin, the Place from which the vault of the world is hung, while beneath his feet the wire and the sphere went on swinging, from pole to pole, without peace, the earth slipping away under them, showing always a new continent. The sphere could not point out, nor would it ever know, the location of the World’s Navel.
As the pack of Diabolicals, dazed for a moment in the face of this portent, began to yowl again, I told myself that the story was now finished. If Hod is the Sefirah of glory, Belbo had had glory. A single fearless act had reconciled him with the Absolute.
The ideal pendulum consists of a very thin wire, which will not hinder flexion and torsion, of length L, with the weight attached to its barycenter. For a sphere, the barycenter is the center; for the human body, it is a point 0.65 of the height, measuring from the feet. If the hanged man is 1.70m tall, his barycenter is located 1.10m from his feet, and the length L includes this distance. In other words, if the distance from the man’s head to neck is 0.60m, the barycenter is 1.70 − 1.10 = 0.60m from his head, and 0.60 − 0.30 = 0.30m from his neck.
The period of the pendulum, discovered by Huygens, is given by:
where L is the length in meters, π = 3.1415927…, and g = 9.8m/sec2. Thus (I) gives:
or, more or less:
Note: T is independent of the weight of the hanged man. (In God’s eyes all men are equal….)
As for a double pendulum, one with two weights attached to the same wire … If you shift A, A oscillates; then after a while it stops and B will oscillate. If the paired weights are different or if their lengths are different, the energy passes from one to the other, but the periods of these oscillations will not be equal….
This eccentricity of movement also occurs if, instead of beginning to make A oscillate freely by setting it in motion, you apply a force to the system already in motion. That is to say, if the wind blows in gusts on the hanged man in asynchronous fashion. After a while, the hanged man will become motionless and his gallows will oscillate as if its fulcrum were the hanged man.
—From a private letter of Mario Salvadori, Columbia University, 1984
Having nothing more to learn in that place, I took advantage of the melee to reach the statue of Gramme.
The pedestal was still open. I entered, went down a narrow ladder, and found myself on a small landing illuminated by a lightbulb, where a spiral stone staircase began. At the end of this, I came to a dim passage with a higher, vaulted ceiling.
At first I didn’t realize where I was, and couldn’t identify the source of the rippling sound I heard. Then my eyes adjusted: I was in a sewer, with a handrail that kept me from falling into the water but not from inhaling an awesome stink, half chemical, half organic. At least something in our story was true: the sewers of Paris, of Colbert, Fantomas, Caus.
I followed the biggest conduit, deciding against the darker ones that branched off, and hoped that some sign would tell me where to end my subterranean flight. In any case, I was escaping, far from the Conservatoire, and compared to that kingdom of darkness the Paris sewers were relief, freedom, clean air, light.
I carried with me a single image, the hieroglyph traced in the choir by Belbo’s corpse. What was that symbol? To what other symbol did it correspond? I couldn’t figure it out. I know now it was a law of physics, but this knowledge only makes the phenomenon more symbolic. Here, now, in Belbo’s country house, among his many notes, I found a letter from someone who, replying to a question of his, told him how a pendulum works, and how it would behave if a second weight were hung elsewhere along the length of its wire.
So Belbo—God knows for how long—had been thinking of the Pendulum as both a Sinai and a Calvary. He hadn’t died as the victim of a Plan of recent manufacture; he had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
Somehow, losing, Belbo had won. Or does
