A commander with a blue kerchief and a rainbow of ribbons from both world wars said: “Reverend, let the boys rest here in the town; they’re worn out. Climb up later, at the end. There’ll be a truck to take you back to ***.”
They rushed to the tavern. The men of the town band, veterans toughened by countless funerals, showed no restraint in grabbing the tables and ordering tripe and all the wine they could drink. They would stay there having a spree until evening. Don Tico’s boys, meanwhile, crowded at the counter, where the host was serving mint ices as green as a chemistry experiment. The ice, sliding down the throat, gave you a pain in the middle of your forehead, like sinusitis.
Then they struggled up to the cemetery, where a pickup truck was waiting. They climbed in, yelling, and were all packed together, all standing, jostling one another with the instruments, when the commander who had spoken before came out and said: “Reverend, for the final ceremony we need a trumpet. You know, for the usual bugle calls. It’s a matter of five minutes.”
“Trumpet,” Don Tico said, very professional.
And the hapless holder of that title, now sticky with green mint ice and yearning for the family meal, a treacherous peasant insensitive to aesthetic impulses and higher ideals, began to complain: It was late, he wanted to go home, he didn’t have any saliva left, and so on, mortifying Don Tico in the presence of the commander.
Then Jacopo, seeing in the glory of noon the sweet image of Cecilia, said: “If he’ll give me the trumpet, I’ll go.”
A gleam of gratitude in the eyes of Don Tico; the sweaty relief of the miserable titular trumpet. An exchange of instruments, like two guards.
Jacopo proceeded to the cemetery, led by the psychopomp with the Addis Ababa ribbons. Everything around them was white: the wall struck by the sun, the graves, the blossoming trees along the borders, the surplice of the provost ready to impart benediction. The only brown was the faded photographs on the tombstones. And a big patch of color was created by the ranks lined up beside the two graves.
“Boy,” the commander said, “you stand here, beside me, and at my order play Assembly. Then, again at my order, Taps. That’s easy, isn’t it?”
Very easy. Except that Jacopo had never played Assembly or Taps.
He held the trumpet with his right arm bent, against his ribs, the horn at a slight angle, as if it were a carbine, and he waited, head erect, belly in, chest out.
Mongo was delivering a brief speech, with very short sentences. Jacopo thought that to emit the blast he would have to lift his eyes to heaven, and the sun would blind him. But that was the trumpeter’s death, and since you only died once, you might as well do it right.
The commander murmured to him: “Now.” He ordered Assembly. Jacopo played only do mi sol do. For those rough men of war, that seemed to suffice. The final do was played after a deep breath, so he could hold it, give it time—Belbo wrote—to reach the sun.
The partisans stood stiffly at attention. The living as still as the dead.
Only the gravediggers moved. The sound of the coffins being lowered could be heard, the creak of the ropes, their scraping against the wood. But there was little motion, no more than the flickering glint on a sphere, when a slight variation of light serves only to emphasize the sphere’s invariability.
Then, the dry sound of Present Arms. The provost murmured the formulas of the aspersion; the commanders approached the graves and flung, each of them, a fistful of earth. A sudden order unleashed a volley toward the sky, rat-tat-tat-a-boom, and the birds rose up, squawking, from the trees in blossom. But all that, too, was not really motion. It was as if the same instant kept presenting itself from different perspectives. Looking at one instant forever doesn’t mean that, as you look at it, time passes.
For this reason, Jacopo stood fast, ignoring even the fall of the shell cases now rolling at his feet; nor did he put his trumpet back at his side, but kept it to his lips, fingers on the valves, rigid at attention, the instrument aimed diagonally upward. He played on.
His long final note had never broken off: inaudible to those present, it still issued from the bell of the trumpet, like a light breath, a gust of air that he kept sending into the mouthpiece, holding his tongue between barely parted lips, without pressing them to the metal. The instrument, not resting on his face, remained suspended by the tension alone in his elbows and shoulders.
He continued holding that virtual note, because he felt he was playing out a string that kept the sun in place. The planet had been arrested in its course, had become fixed in a noon that could last an eternity. And it all depended on Jacopo, because if he broke that contact, dropped that string, the sun would fly off like a balloon, and with it this day and the event of this day, this action without transition, this sequence without before and after, which was unfolding, motionless, only because it was in his power to will it thus.
If he stopped, stopped to attack a new note, a rent would have been heard, far louder than the volleys that had deafened him, and the clocks would all resume their tachycardial palpitation.
Jacopo wished with his whole soul that this man beside him would not order Taps. I could refuse, he said to himself, and stay like this forever.
He had entered that trance state that overwhelms the diver when he tries not to surface, wanting to prolong the inertia that allows him to glide along the ocean floor. Trying to express what he felt then, Belbo, in the notebook I was now reading, resorted to broken, twisted, unsyntactical sentences, mutilated by rows of dots. But it was clear to me that in that moment—though he didn’t come out and say it—in that moment he was possessing Cecilia.
The fact is that Jacopo Belbo did not understand, not then and not later, when he was writing of his unconscious self, that at that moment he was celebrating once and for all his chemical wedding—with Cecilia, with Lorenza, with Sophia, with the earth and with the sky. Alone among mortals, he was bringing to a conclusion the Great Work.
No one had yet told him that the Grail is a chalice but also a spear, and his trumpet raised like a chalice was at the same time a weapon, an instrument of the sweetest dominion, which shot toward the sky and linked the earth with the Mystic Pole. With the only Fixed Point in the universe. With what he created, for that one instant, with his breath.
Diotallevi had not yet told him how you can dwell in Yesod, the Sefirah of foundation, the sign of the superior bow drawn to send arrows to Malkhut, its target. Yesod is the drop that springs from the arrow to produce the tree and the fruit, it is the anima mundi, the moment in which virile force, procreating, binds all the states of being together.
Knowing how to spin this Cingulum Veneris means knowing how to repair the error of the Demiurge.
You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was—full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.
That day, Jacopo Belbo stared into the eyes of Truth. The only truth that was to be granted him. Because—he would learn—truth is brief (afterward, it is all commentary). So he tried to arrest the rush of time.
He didn’t understand. Not as a child. Not as an adolescent when he was writing about it. Not as a man who decided to give up writing about it.
I understood it this evening: the author has to die in order for the reader to become aware of his truth.
The Pendulum, which haunted Jacopo Belbo all his adult life, had been—like the lost addresses of his dream—the symbol of that other moment, recorded and then repressed, when he truly touched the ceiling of the world.
But that moment, in which he froze space and time, shooting his Zeno’s arrow, had been no symbol, no sign, symptom, allusion, metaphor, or enigma: it was what it was. It did not stand for anything else. At that moment there was no longer any deferment, and the score was settled.
Jacopo Belbo didn’t understand that he had had his moment and that it would have to be enough for him, for all his life. Not recognizing it, he spent the rest of his days seeking something else, until he damned himself. But perhaps he suspected this. Otherwise he wouldn’t have returned so often to the memory of the trumpet. But he remembered it as a thing lost, not as a thing possessed.
I believe, I hope, I pray that as he was dying, swaying with the Pendulum, Jacopo Belbo finally understood this, and found peace.
Then Taps was ordered. But Jacopo would have stopped in any case, because his breath was failing. He broke the contact, then blared a single note, high,
