The true initiate is he who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no rival devotee will be able to take it from him.
Now I found more logical and consequential the dynamic of that nocturnal rite before the Pendulum. Belbo had claimed to possess a secret, and because of this he had gained power over Them. Their first impulse, even in a man as clever as Agliè, who had immediately beat the tom-tom to summon all the others, had been to wrest it from him. And the more Belbo refused to reveal it, the bigger They believed the secret to be; the more he vowed he didn’t possess it, the more convinced They were that he did possess it, and that it was a true secret, because if it were false, he would have revealed it.
Through the centuries the search for this secret had been the glue holding Them all together, despite excommunications, internecine fighting, coups de main. Now They were on the verge of knowing it. But They were assailed by two fears: that the secret would be a disappointment, and that once it was known to all, there would be no secret left. Which would be the end of Them.
Agliè then thought: If Belbo spoke, all would know, and he, Agliè, would lose the mysterious aura that granted him charisma and power. But if Belbo confided in him alone, Agliè could go on being Saint-Germain, the immortal. The deferment of Agliè’s death coincided with the deferment of the secret. He tried to persuade Belbo to whisper it in his ear, and when he realized that wouldn’t be possible, he provoked him by predicting his surrender and, further, by putting on a display of pompous melodrama.
Oh, the old count knew very well that for people from Piedmont stubbornness and a sense of the ridiculous could defeat even the fear of death. Thus he forced Belbo to raise the tone of his refusal and to say no definitively.
The others, out of the same fear, preferred to kill him. They might be losing the map—they would have centuries to continue the search for it—but they were preserving the vigor of their base, slobbering desire.
I remembered a story Amparo told me. Before coming to Italy, she had spent some months in New York City, living in a neighborhood of the kind where even on quiet days you could shoot a TV series featuring the homicide squad. She used to come home alone at two in the morning. When I asked if she wasn’t afraid of sexual maniacs, she told me her method. When a sexual maniac approached, threatening, she would take his arm and say, “Come on, let’s do it.” And he would go away, bewildered.
If you’re a sexual maniac, you don’t want sex; you want the excitement of its theft, you want the victim’s resistance and despair. If sex is handed to you on a platter, here it is, go to it, naturally you’re not interested, otherwise what sort of sexual maniac would you be?
We had awakened their lust, offering them a secret that couldn’t have been emptier, because not only did we not know it ourselves, but, even better, we knew that it was false.
The plane was flying over Mont Blanc, and the passengers all rushed to the same side so as not to miss the view of that blunt bubo that had grown there thanks to a fluke in the telluric currents. If what I was thinking was correct, then the currents didn’t exist any more than the Provins message existed. But the story of the deciphering of the Plan, as we had reconstructed it, that was History.
My memory went back to Belbo’s last file. But if existence is so empty and fragile that it can be endured only by the illusion of a search for its secret, then—as Amparo said that evening in the tenda, after her defeat—there’s no redemption; we are all slaves, give us a master, that’s what we deserve….
No. Lia taught me there is more, and I have the proof: his name is Giulio, and at this moment he is playing in a valley, pulling a goat’s tail. No, because Belbo twice said no.
The first no he said to Abulafia, and to those who would try to steal its secret. “Do you have the password?” was the question. And the answer, the key to knowledge, was “No.” Not only does the magic word not exist, but we do not know that it does not exist. Those who admit their ignorance, therefore, can learn something, at least what I was able to learn.
The second no he said on Saturday night, when he refused the salvation held out to him.
He could have invented a map, or used one of the maps I had shown him. In any event, with the Pendulum hung as it was, incorrectly, that bunch of lunatics would never have found the X marking the Umbilicus Mundi, and even if they did, it would have been several more decades before they realized this wasn’t the one. But Belbo refused to bow, he preferred to die.
It wasn’t that he refused to bow to the lust for power; he refused to bow to nonmeaning. He somehow knew that, fragile as our existence may be, however ineffectual our interrogation of the world, there is nevertheless something that has more meaning than the rest.
What had Belbo sensed, perhaps only at that moment, which allowed him to contradict his last, desperate file, and not surrender his destiny to someone who guaranteed him a mere Plan? What had he understood—at last—that allowed him to sacrifice his life, as if he had learned everything there was to learn without realizing it, and as if compared to this one, true, absolute secret of his, everything that took place in the Conservatoire was irreparably stupid—and it was stupid, now, stubbornly to go on living?
There was still something, a link missing in the chain. I had all of Belbo’s feats before me now, from life to death, except one.
On arrival, as I was looking for my passport, I found in one of my pockets the key to this house. I had taken it last Thursday, along with the key to Belbo’s apartment. I remembered that day when Belbo showed us the old cupboard that contained, he said, his opera omnia or, rather, his juvenilia. Perhaps Belbo had written something there that couldn’t be found in Abulafia, perhaps it was buried somewhere in ***.
There was nothing reasonable about this conjecture of mine. All the more reason to consider it good. At this point.
I collected my car, and I came here.
I didn’t find the old relative of the Canepas, the caretaker, or whatever she was. Maybe she, too, had died in the meantime. There was no one. I went through the various rooms. A strong smell of mildew. I considered lighting the bedwarmer in one of the bedrooms, but it made no sense to warm the bed in June. Once the windows were opened, the warm evening air would enter.
After sunset, there was no moon. As in Paris, Saturday night. The moon rose late, I saw less of it now than in Paris, as it slowly climbed above the lower hills, in a dip between the Bricco and another yellowish hump, perhaps already harvested.
I arrived around six in the evening. It was still light. But I had brought nothing with me to eat. Roaming the house, I found a salami in the kitchen, hanging from a beam. My supper was salami and fresh water: going on ten o’clock, I think. Now I’m thirsty. I’ve brought a big pitcher of water to Uncle Carlo’s study and drink a glass every ten minutes. Then I go down, refill the pitcher, and start again.
It must be at least three in the morning. I have the light off and can hardly read my watch. I look out the window. On the flanks of the hills, what seem to be fireflies, shooting stars: the headlights of occasional cars going down into the valley or climbing toward the villages on the hilltops. When Belbo was a boy, this sight did not exist. There were no cars then, no roads. At night there was the curfew.
As soon as I arrived, I opened the cupboard of juvenilia. Shelves and shelves of paper, from elementary-school exercises to bundles of adolescent poems and prose. Everyone has written poems in adolescence; true poets destroy them, bad poets publish them. Belbo, too cynical to save them, too weak to chuck them out, stuck them in Uncle Carlo’s cupboard.
I read for hours. And for hours, up to this moment, I meditated on the last text, which I found just when I was about to give up.
I don’t know when Belbo wrote it. There are pages where different handwritings, insertions, are interwoven, or else it’s the same hand in different years. As if he wrote it very early, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, then put it away, then went back to it at twenty, again at thirty, and maybe later. Until he gave up the idea of writing altogether—only to begin again with Abulafia, but not having the heart to recover these lines and subject them to electronic humiliation.
Reading them, I followed a familiar story: the events of *** between 1943 and 1945, Uncle Carlo, the partisans, the parish hall, Cecilia, the trumpet. These were
