The commander said, “Bravo, young fellow. Run along now. Handsome trumpet.”
The provost slipped away, the partisans made for a rear gateway where their vehicles awaited them, the gravediggers went off after filling the graves. Jacopo was the last to go. He couldn’t bring himself to leave that place of happiness.
In the yard below, the pickup truck of the parish hall was gone.
Jacopo asked himself why Don Tico had abandoned him like this. From a distance in time, the most probable answer is that there had been a misunderstanding; someone had told Don Tico that the partisans would bring the boy back down. But Jacopo at that moment thought—and not without reason—that between Assembly and Taps too many centuries had passed. The boys had waited until their hair turned white, until death, until their dust scattered to form the haze that now was turning the expanse of hills blue before his eyes.
He was alone. Behind him, an empty cemetery. In his hands, the trumpet. Before him, the hills fading, bluer and bluer, one behind the other, into an infinity of humps. And, vindictive, over his head, the liberated sun.
He decided to cry.
But suddenly the hearse appeared, with its Automedon decorated like a general of the emperor, all cream and silver and black, the horses decked with barbaric masks that left only their eyes visible, caparisoned like coffins, the little twisted columns that supported the Assyro-Greco-Egyptian tympanum all white and gold. The man with the cocked hat stopped a moment by the solitary trumpeter, and Jacopo asked: “Will you take me home?”
The man smiled. Jacopo climbed up beside him on the box, and so it was on a hearse that he began his return to the world of the living. That off-duty Charon, taciturn, urged his funereal chargers down the slopes, as Jacopo sat erect and hieratic, the trumpet clutched under his arm, his visor shining, absorbed in his new, unhoped-for role.
They descended, and at every curve a new view opened up, of vines blue with verdigris in dazzling light, and after an incalculable time they arrived in ***. They crossed the big square, all arcades, deserted as only Monferrato squares can be deserted at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. A schoolmate at the corner saw Jacopo on the hearse, the trumpet under his arm, eyes fixed on infinity, and gave him an admiring wave.
Jacopo went home, wouldn’t eat anything, wouldn’t tell anything. He huddled on the terrace and began playing the trumpet as if it had a mute, blowing softly so as not to disturb the silence of the siesta.
His father joined him and, guilelessly, with the serenity of one who knows the laws of life, said: “In a month, if all goes as it should, we’ll be going home. You can’t play the trumpet in the city. Our landlord would evict us. So you’ll have to forget that. If you really like music, we’ll have you take piano lessons.” And then, seeing the boy with moist eyes, he added: “Come now, silly. Don’t you realize the bad days are over?”
The next day, Jacopo returned the trumpet to Don Tico. Two weeks later, the family left ***, to rejoin the future.
MALKHUT
“But that which seems to me should be deplored is the fact that I see some senseless and foolish idolaters who no more imitate the excellence of the cult of Egypt, than the shadow approaches the nobility of the body, and who seek Divinity, for which they have no reason whatsoever, in the excrements of dead and inanimate things. These idolaters, nevertheless, mock not only those of us who are divine and sagacious worshipers but also those of us who are reputed to be beasts. And what is worse, with this they triumph by seeing their mad rites in so great repute…”
“Let not this trouble you, oh Momus,” said Isis, “because fate has ordained the vicissitude of shadows and light.” “But the evil,” answered Momus, “is that they hold for certain that they are in the light.”
—Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Third Dialogue, Second Part, translated by Arthur D. Imerti, Rutgers University Press, 1964, p. 236
I should be at peace. I have understood. Don’t some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and triumph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys….
I should be at peace. From the window of Uncle Carlo’s study I look at the hill, and the little slice of rising moon. The Bricco’s broad hump, the more tempered ridges of the hills in the background tell the story of the slow and drowsy stirrings of Mother Earth, who stretches and yawns, making and unmaking blue plains in the dread flash of a hundred volcanoes. The Earth turned in her sleep and traded one surface for another. Where ammonoids once fed, diamonds. Where diamonds once grew, vineyards.
The logic of the moraine, of the landslip, of the avalanche. Dislodge one pebble, by chance, it becomes restless, rolls down, in its descent leaves space (ah, horror vacui!), another pebble falls on top of it, and there’s height. Surfaces. Surfaces upon surfaces. The wisdom of the Earth. And of Lia.
Why doesn’t understanding give me peace? Why love Fate if Fate kills you just as dead as Providence or the Plot of the Archons? Perhaps I haven’t understood, after all; perhaps I am missing one piece of the puzzle, one space.
Where have I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand.
Now I know what the Law of the Kingdom is, of poor, desperate, tattered Malkhut, where Wisdom has gone into exile, groping to recover its former lucidity. The truth of Malkhut, the only truth that shines in the night of the Sefirot, is that Wisdom is revealed naked in Malkhut, and its mystery lies not in existence but in the leaving of existence. Afterward, the Others begin again.
And, with the others, the Diabolicals, seeking abysses where the secret of their madness lies hidden.
Along the Bricco’s slopes are rows and rows of vines. I know them, I have seen similar rows in my day. No doctrine of numbers can say if they are in ascending or descending order. In the midst of the rows—but you have to walk barefoot, with your heels callused, from childhood—there are peach trees. Yellow peaches that grow only between rows of vines.
You can split a peach with the pressure of your thumb; the pit comes out almost whole, as clean as if it had been chemically treated, except for an occasional bit of pulp, white, tiny, clinging there like a worm. When you eat the peach, the velvet of the skin makes shudders run from your tongue to your groin.
Dinosaurs once grazed here. Then another surface covered theirs. And yet, like Belbo when he played the trumpet, when I bit into the peach I understood the Kingdom and was one with it. The rest is only cleverness. Invent; invent the Plan, Casaubon. That’s what everyone has done, to explain the dinosaurs and the peaches.
I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph. But I am here, and They are looking for me, thinking I possess the revelation They sordidly desire. It isn’t enough to have understood, if others refuse and continue to interrogate. They are looking for me, They must have picked up my trail in Paris, They know I am here now, They still want the Map.
And when I tell Them that there is no Map, They will want it all the more. Belbo was right. Fuck you, fool! You want to kill me? Kill me, then, but I won’t tell you there’s no Map. If you can’t figure it out for yourself, tough shit.
It hurts me to think I won’t see Lia again, and the baby, the Thing, Giulio, my philosopher’s stone. But stones survive on their own. Maybe even now he is experiencing his Opportunity. He’s found a ball, an ant, a blade of grass, and in it he sees paradise and the abyss. He, too, will know it too late. He will be good; never mind, let him spend his day like this, alone.
Damn. It hurts all the same. Patience. When I’m dead, it won’t hurt.
It’s very late. I left Paris this morning, I left too many clues. They’ve had time to guess where I am. In a little while, They’ll be here. I would have liked to write down everything I thought today. But if They were to read it, They would only derive another dark theory and spend another eternity trying to decipher the secret message hidden behind my words. It’s impossible, They would say; he can’t only have been making fun of us. No. Perhaps, without his realizing it, Being was sending us a
