“Do you like it?”
“Like it? It’s the only thing I know how to do well.”
We were interrupted by a man in his forties wearing a jacket a few sizes too big, with wispy light hair that fell over thick blond eyebrows. He spoke softly, as if he were instructing a child.
“I’m sick of this Taxpayer’s Vade Mecum. The whole thing needs to be rewritten, and I don’t feel like it. Am I intruding?”
“This is Diotallevi,” Belbo said, introducing us.
“Oh, you’re here to look at that Templar thing. Poor man. Listen, Jacopo, I thought of a good one: Urban Planning for Gypsies.”
“Great,” Belbo said admiringly. “I have one, too: Aztec Equitation.”
“Excellent. But would that go with Potio-section or the Adynata?”
“We’ll have to see,” Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. “Potio-section…” He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. “Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no,” he said to Diotallevi. “It’s not a department, it’s a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all fall under the heading of Tetrapyloctomy.”
“What’s tetra…?” I asked.
“The art of splitting a hair four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We’re not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it’s the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn’t seem completely useless.”
“All right, gentlemen,” I said, “I give up. What are you two talking about?”
“Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given. The school’s aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.”
“And how many departments are there?”
“Four so far, but that may be enough for the whole syllabus. The Tetrapyloctomy department has a preparatory function; its purpose is to inculcate a sense of irrelevance. Another important department is Adynata, or Impossibilia. Like Urban Planning for Gypsies. The essence of the discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reasons for a thing’s absurdity.
We have courses in Morse syntax, the history of antarctic agriculture, the history of Easter Island painting, contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading, Assyrio-Babylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent film.”
“How about crowd psychology in the Sahara?”
“Wonderful,” Belbo said.
Diotallevi nodded. “You should join us. The kid’s got talent, eh, Jacopo?”
“Yes, I saw that right away. Last night he constructed some moronic arguments with great skill. But let’s continue. What did we put in the Oxymoronics department? I can’t find my notes.”
Diotallevi took a slip of paper from his pocket and regarded me with friendly condescension. “In Oxymoronics, as the name implies, what matters is self-contradiction. That’s why I think it’s the place for Urban Planning for Gypsies.”
“No,” Belbo said. “Only if it were Nomadic Urban Planning. The Adynata concern empirical impossibilities; Oxymoronics deal with contradictions in terms.”
“Maybe. But what courses did we put under Oxymoronics? Oh, yes, here we are: Tradition in Revolution, Democratic Oligarchy, Parmenidean Dynamics, Heraclitean Statics, Spartan Sybaritics, Tautological Dialectics, Boolean Eristic.”
I couldn’t resist throwing in “How about a Grammar of Solecisms?”
“Excellent!” they both said, making a note.
“One problem,” I said.
“What?”
“If the public gets wind of this, people will show up with manuscripts.”
“The boy’s sharp, Jacopo,” Diotallevi said. “Unwittingly, we’ve drawn up a real prospectus for scholarship. We’ve shown the necessity of the impossible. Therefore, mum’s the word. But I have to go now.”
“Where?” Belbo asked.
“It’s Friday afternoon.”
“Jesus Christ!” Belbo said, then turned to me. “Across the street are a few houses where Orthodox Jews live; you know, black hats, beards, earlocks. There aren’t many of them in Milan. This is Friday, and the Sabbath begins at sundown, so in the afternoon they start preparing in the apartment across the way: polishing the candlesticks, cooking the food, setting everything up so they won’t have to light any fires tomorrow. They even leave the TV on all night, picking a channel in advance. Anyway, Diotallevi here has a pair of binoculars; he spies on them with delight, pretending he’s on the other side of the street.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Our Diotallevi thinks he’s Jewish.”
“What do you mean, ‘thinks’?” Diotallevi said, annoyed. “I am Jewish. Do you have anything against that, Casaubon?”
“Of course not.”
“Diotallevi is not Jewish,” Belbo said firmly.
“No? And what about my name? Just like Graziadio or Diosiacontè. A traditional Jewish name. A ghetto name, like Sholom Aleichem.”
“Diotallevi is a good-luck name given to foundlings by city officials. Your grandfather was a foundling.”
“A Jewish foundling.”
“Diotallevi, you have pink skin, you’re practically an albino.”
“There are albino rabbits; why not albino Jews?”
“Diotallevi, a person can’t just decide to be a Jew the way he might decide to be a stamp collector or a Jehovah’s Witness. Jews are born. Admit it! You’re a gentile like the rest of us.”
“I’m circumcised.”
“Come on! Lots of people are circumcised, for reasons of hygiene. All you need is a doctor with a knife. How old were you when you were circumcised?”
“Let’s not nitpick.”
“No, let’s. Jews nitpick.”
“Nobody can prove my grandfather wasn’t Jewish.”
“Of course not; he was a foundling. He could have been anything, the heir to the throne of Byzantium or a Hapsburg bastard.”
“He was found near the Portico d’Ottavia, in the ghetto in Rome.”
“But your grandmother wasn’t Jewish, and Jewish descent is supposed to be matrilineal….”
“And skipping registry reasons—and municipal ledgers can also be read beyond the letter—there are reasons of blood. The blood in me says that my thoughts are exquisitely Talmudic, and it would be racist for you to claim that a gentile can be as exquisitely Talmudic as I am.”
He left. “Don’t pay any attention,” Belbo said. “We have this argument almost every day. The fact is, Diotallevi is a devotee of the cabala. But there were also Christian cabalists. Anyway, if Diotallevi wants to be Jewish, why should I object?”
“Why indeed. We’re all liberals here.”
“So we are.”
He lit a cigarette. I remembered why I had come. “You mentioned a manuscript about the Templars,” I said.
“That’s right…. Let’s see. It was in a fake-leather folder….” He tried to pick a manuscript out of the middle of a pile without disturbing the others. A hazardous operation. Part of the pile fell to the floor. Now Belbo was holding the fake-leather folder.
I looked at the table of contents and the introduction. “It deals with the arrest of the Templars,” I said. “In 1307, Philip the Fair decided to arrest all the Templars in France. There’s a legend that two days before Philip issued the arrest warrant, an ox-drawn hay wain left the enclave of the Temple in Paris for an unknown destination. They say that hidden in the wain was a group of knights led by one Aumont.
These knights supposedly escaped, took refuge in Scotland, and joined a Masonic lodge in Kilwinning. According to the legend, they became part of the society of Freemasons, who served as guardians of the secrets of the Temple of Solomon. Ah, here we are; I thought so. This writer, too, claims that the origins of Masonry lie in the Templars’ escape to Scotland. A story that’s been rehashed for a couple of centuries, with no foundation to it.
I can give you at least fifty pamphlets that tell the same tale, each cribbed from the other. Here, listen to this—just a page picked at random: ‘The proof of the Scottish expedition lies in the fact that even today, six hundred and fifty years later, there still exist in the world secret orders that hark back to the Temple Militia. How else is one to explain the continuity of this heritage?’ You see what I mean? How can the Marquis de Carabas not exist when Puss in Boots says he’s in the marquis’s service?”
“All right,” Belbo said, “I’ll throw it out. But this Templar business interests me. For once I have an expert handy, and I don’t want to let him get away. Why is there all this talk about the Templars and nothing about the Knights of Malta? No, don’t tell me now. It’s late. Diotallevi and I have to go to dinner with Signor Garamond in a little while. We should be through by about ten-thirty. I’ll try to persuade Diotallevi to drop by Pilade’s—he goes to bed early and usually doesn’t drink. Will you be there?”
“Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.”
Li frere, li mestre du Temple
Qu’estoient rempli et ample
D’or et d’argent et de richesse
Et qui menoient tel noblesse,
Où sont ils? que sont devenu?
—Chronique à la suite du roman de Favel
Et in Arcadia ego. That evening Pilade’s was the image of the golden age. One of those evenings when you feel that not only will there definitely be a revolution, but that the Association of Manufacturers will foot the bill for it. Where but at Pilade’s could you watch the bearded owner of a cotton mill, wearing a parka, play hearts with a future fugitive from justice dressed in a double-breasted jacket and tie?
This was the dawn of great changes in style. Until the beginning of the sixties, beards were fascist, and you had to trim them, and shave your cheeks, in the style of
