I went along the tunnel, mindless, like Postel, perhaps lost in the same darkness, and suddenly I saw the sign. A brighter lamp, attached to the wall, showed me another ladder, temporary, leading to a wooden trapdoor. I tried it, and I found myself in a basement filled with empty bottles, then a corridor with two toilets, a little man on one door, a little woman on the other. I was in the world of the living.
I stopped, breathless. Only then did I remember Lorenza. Now I was crying. But she was slipping away, leaving my bloodstream, as if she had never existed. I couldn’t even see her face. In that world of the dead, she was the most dead.
At the end of the corridor I came to another stairway, a door. I entered a smoky, evil-smelling place, a tavern, a bistro, an Oriental bar, black waiters, sweating customers, greasy skewers, and mugs of beer. I appeared, like an ordinary customer who had gone to urinate and returned. Nobody noticed me. Perhaps the man at the cash desk, seeing me arrive from the back, gave me an almost imperceptible signal, narrowing his eyes as if to say: Yes, I understand, go ahead, I haven’t seen a thing.
If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible.
—Talmud, Berakhot, 6
Leaving the bar, I find myself among the lights of Porte Saint-Martin. The bar is Arab, and the shops around it, still open, are Arab, too. A composite odor of couscous and falafel, and crowd. Clumps of young people, thin, many with sleeping bags. I ask a boy what is going on. The march, he says. Tomorrow there will be a big march against the Savary law. Marchers are arriving by the busload.
A Turk—a Druze, an Ismaili in disguise—invites me in bad French to go into some kind of club. Never. Flee Alamut. You do not know who is in the service of whom. Trust no one.
I cross the intersection. Now I hear only the sound of my footsteps. The advantage of a big city: move on a few meters, and you find solitude again.
Suddenly, after a few blocks, on my left, the Conservatoire, pale in the night. From the outside, perfect peace, a monument sleeping the sleep of the just. I continue southward, toward the Seine. I have a destination, but I’m not sure what it is. I want to ask someone what has happened.
Belbo dead? The sky is serene. I encounter a group of students. They are silent, influenced by the genius loci. On the left, the hulk of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs.
I continue along rue Saint-Martin, I cross rue aux Ours, broad, a boulevard, almost; I’m afraid of losing my way, but what way? Where am I going? I don’t know. I look around, and on my right, at the corner, I see two display windows of Editions Rosicruciennes. They’re dark, but in the light of the street lamp and with the help of my flashlight I manage to make out their contents.
Books, objects. Histoire des juifs, Comte de St.-Germain, alchemy, monde caché, les maisons secrètes de la Rose-Croix, the message of the builders of the cathedrals, the Cathars, The New Atlantis, Egyptian medicine, the temple of Karnak, the Bhagavad-Gita, reincarnation, Rosicrucian crosses and candelabra, busts of Isis and Osiris, incense in boxes and tablets, tarots. A dagger, a tin letter opener with a round hilt bearing the seal of the Rosicrucians. What are they doing, making fun of me?
I pass the façade of the Beaubourg. During the day the place is a village fair; now the plaza is almost deserted. A few silent groups, sleeping, a few lights from the brasseries opposite. It’s all true. Giant air ducts that absorb energy from the earth. Perhaps the crowds that come during the day serve to supply them with vibrations; perhaps the hermetic machine is fed on fresh meat.
The church of Saint-Merri. Opposite, the Librairie la Vouivre, three-quarters occultist. I must not give in to hysteria. I take rue des Lombards, to avoid an army of Scandinavian girls coming out of a bistro laughing. Shut up; Lorenza is dead.
But is she? What if I am the one who is dead? Rue des Lombards intersects, at right angles, rue Nicolas-Flamel, and at the end of that you can see, white, the Tour Saint-Jacques. At the corner, the Librairie Arcane 22, tarots and pendulums.
Nicolas Flamel the alchemist, an alchemistic bookshop, and then the Tour Saint-Jacques, with those great white lions at the base, a useless late-Gothic tower near the Seine, after which an esoteric review was named. Pascal conducted experiments there on the weight of air, and even today, at a height of fifty-two meters, the tower has a station for meteorological research. Maybe They began with the Tour Saint-Jacques, before erecting the Eiffel Tower. There are special locations. And no one notices.
I go back toward Saint-Merri. More girls’ laughter. I don’t want to see people. I skirt the church. Along rue du Cloitre-Saint-Merri, a transept door, old, of rough wood. At the foot of the street, a square extends, the end of the Beaubourg area, here brilliantly lit. In the open space, machines by Tinguely, and other multicolored artifacts that float on the surface of a pool, a small artificial lake, their cogged wheels clanking insinuatingly.
In the background I see again the scaffolding of Dalmine pipes, the Beaubourg with its gaping mouths—like an abandoned Titanic near a wall devoured by ivy, a shipwreck in a crater of the moon. Where the cathedrals failed, the great transatlantic ducts whisper, in contact with the Black Virgins. They are discovered only by one who knows how to circumnavigate Saint-Merri. And so I must go on; I have a clue, I must expose Their plot in the very center of the Ville Lumière, the plot of the Dark Ones.
I find myself at the façade of Saint-Merri. Something impels me to train my flashlight on the portal. Flamboyant Gothic, arches in accolade.
And suddenly, finding what I didn’t expect to find, on the archivolt of the portal I see it.
The Baphomet. Where two curves join. At the summit of the first, a dove of the Holy Spirit with a glory of stone rays, but on the second, besieged by praying angels, there he is, the Baphomet, with his awful wings. On the façade of a church. Shameless.
Why here? Because we aren’t far from the Temple. Where is the Temple, or what’s left of it? I retrace my steps, north, and find myself at the corner of rue de Montmorency. At number 51, the house of Nicolas Flamel. Between the Baphomet and the Temple. The shrewd spagyric knew well with whom he was dealing. Poubelles full of foul rubbish opposite a house of undefined period, Taverne Nicolas Flamel. The house is old, restored for the tourists, for Diabolicals of the lowest order, hylics. Next door, an American shop with an Apple poster: “Secouez-vous les puces.” Microsoft-Hermes. Directory, temurah.
Now I’m in rue du Temple, I walk along it and come to the corner of rue de Bretagne, and the Square du Temple, a garden blanched as a cemetery, the necropolis of the martyred knights.
Rue de Bretagne to rue Vieille du Temple. Rue Vieille du Temple, after rue Barbette, has novelty shops: electric bulbs in odd shapes, like ducks or ivy leaves. Too blatantly modern. They don’t fool me.
Rue des Francs-Bourgeois: I’m in the Marais, I know, and soon the old kosher butcher shops will appear. What do the Jews have to do with the Templars, now that we gave their place in the Plan to the Assassins of Alamut? Why am I here? Is it an answer I am looking for? Perhaps I’m only trying to get away from the Conservatoire. Unless I do have a destination, a place I’m going to. But it can’t be here. I rack my brain to remember where it is, as Belbo hunted in a dream for a lost address.
An obscene group approaches. Laughing nastily, they march in open order, forcing me to step off the sidewalk. For a moment I fear they are agents of the Old Man of the Mountain, that they have come for me. Not so; they vanish into the night, but they speak a foreign language, a sibilant Shiite, Talmudic, Coptic, like a serpent of the desert.
Androgynous figures loom, in long cloaks. Rosicrucian cloaks. They pass, turn into rue de Sévigné. It is late, very late. I fled the Conservatoire to find again the city of all, but now I realize that the city of all is a catacomb with special paths for the initiated.
A drunk. But he may be pretending. Trust no one, no one. I pass a still-open bar; the waiters, in aprons down to their ankles, are putting chairs on tables. I manage to enter just in time. I order a beer, drain it, ask for another. “A healthy thirst, eh?” one of them says. But without cordiality, suspicious. Of course I’m thirsty; I’ve had nothing to drink since five yesterday afternoon. A man can be thirsty without having spent the night under a pendulum. Fools. I pay and leave before they can commit my features to memory.
I’m at the corner of Place des Vosges. I walk along the arcades. What was that old movie in which the solitary footsteps of
