We parted at the door of the Garamond office, and we were both embarrassed.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Belbo said defensively. “It won’t make any difference if the police don’t learn about Ingolf and the Cathars. It was all raving anyway. Maybe Ardenti had to disappear for other reasons; there could be a thousand reasons. Maybe Rakosky was an Israeli secret-service agent settling old scores. Or maybe he was sent by some big shot the colonel had conned. Or maybe they were in the Foreign Legion together and there was some old grudge. Or maybe Rakosky was an Algerian assassin. And maybe this Templar-treasure story was only a minor episode in the life of our colonel. All right, the briefcase is missing, red or brown. By the way, it was good that you contradicted me: that made it clear we had only had a quick glimpse of it.”
I said nothing, and Belbo didn’t know how to conclude.
“You’ll say I’ve run away again. Like Via Larga.”
“Nonsense. We did the right thing. I’ll see you.”
I was sorry for him, because he felt like a coward. But I didn’t. I had learned in school that when you deal with the police, you lie. As a matter of principle. But a guilty conscience can poison a friendship.
I didn’t see Belbo for a long time after that. I was his remorse, and he was mine.
I worked for another year and produced two hundred and fifty typewritten pages on the trial of the Templars. It was then that I learned that a graduate student is less an object of suspicion than an undergraduate. Those were years when defending a thesis was considered evidence of respectful loyalty to the state, and you were treated with indulgence.
In the months that followed, some students started using guns. The days of mass demonstrations in the open air were drawing to a close.
I was short on ideals, but for that I had an alibi, because loving Amparo was like being in love with the Third World. Amparo was beautiful, Marxist, Brazilian, enthusiastic, disenchanted. She had a fellowship and splendidly mixed blood. All at the same time.
I met her at a party, and acted on impulse. “Excuse me,” I said, “but I would like to make love to you.”
“You’re a filthy male chauvinist pig.”
“Forget I said it.”
“Never. I’m a filthy feminist.”
She was going back to Brazil, and I didn’t want to lose her. She put me in touch with the University of Rio, where the Italian department was looking for a lecturer. They offered me a two-year contract with an option to renew. I didn’t feel at home in Italy anymore; I accepted.
Besides, I told myself, in the New World I wouldn’t run into any Templars.
Wrong, I thought Saturday evening as I huddled in the periscope. Climbing the steps to the Garamond office had been like entering the Palace. Binah, Diotallevi used to say, is the palace Hokhmah builds as He spreads out from the primordial point. If Hokhmah is the source, Binah is the river that flows from it, separating into its various branches until they all empty into the great sea of the last Sefirah. But in Binah all forms are already formed.
HESED
The analogy of opposites is the relation of light to shadow, peak to abyss, fullness to void. Allegory, mother of all dogmas, is the replacement of the seal by the hallmark, of reality by shadow; it is the falsehood of truth, and the truth of falsehood.
—Eliphas Levi, Dogme de la haute magie, Paris, Balliere, 1856, XXII, 22
I went to Brazil out of love for Amparo, I stayed out of love for the country. I never did understand how it was that Amparo, a descendant of Dutch settlers in Recife who intermarried with Indians and Sudanese blacks—with her Jamaican face and Parisian culture—had wound up with a Spanish name. For that matter, I never managed to figure out Brazilian names. They defy all onomastic dictionaries, and exist only in Brazil.
Amparo told me that in their hemisphere, when water drains down a sink, the little eddy swirls counterclockwise, whereas at home, ours swirls clockwise. Or maybe it’s the other way around: I’ve never succeeded in checking the truth of it. Not only because nobody in our hemisphere has ever looked to see which way the water swirls, but also because, after various experiments in Brazil, I realized it’s very hard to tell. The suction is too quick to be studied, and its direction probably depends partly on the force and angle of the jet and the shape of the sink or the tub. Besides, if this is true, what happens at the equator? Maybe the water drains straight down, with no swirling, or maybe it doesn’t drain at all.
At that time I didn’t agonize over the problem, but Saturday night in the periscope I was thinking how everything depended on telluric currents, and the Pendulum contained the secret.
Amparo was steadfast in her faith. “The particular empirical event doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s an ideal principle, which can be verified only under ideal conditions. Which means never. But it’s still true.”
In Milan, Amparo’s disenchantment had been one of her most desirable traits. But in Brazil, reacting to the chemistry of her native land, she became elusive, a visionary capable of subterranean rationality. Stirred by ancient passions, she was careful to keep them in check; but the asceticism which made her reject their seduction was not convincing.
I measured her splendid contradictions when I watched her argue with her comrades. The meetings were held in shabby houses decorated with a few posters and a lot of folk art, portraits of Lenin and Amerindian fetishes, or terra-cotta figures glorifying the cangaceiros, outlaws of the Northeast.
I hadn’t arrived during one of the country’s most lucid moments politically, and, after my experiences at home, I decided to steer clear of ideologies, especially in a place where I didn’t understand them. The way Amparo’s comrades talked made me even more uncertain, but they also roused a new curiosity in me. They were, naturally, all Marxists, and at first they seemed to talk more or less like European Marxists, but the subject somehow was always different. In the middle of an argument about the class struggle, they would suddenly mention “Brazilian cannibalism” or the revolutionary role of Afro-Brazilian religions.
Hearing them talk about these cults convinced me that at least ideological suction, down there, swirled in the opposite direction. They described a panorama of internal migrations back and forth, the disinherited of the north moving down toward the industrial south, where they became subproletarians in immense smog-choked metropolises, eventually returning in desperation to the north, only to repeat their flight southward in the next cycle. But many ran aground in the big cities during these oscillations, and they were absorbed by a plethora of indigenous churches; they worshiped spirits, evoked African divinities …
And here Amparo’s comrades were divided: some considered this a return to their roots, a way of opposing the white world; others thought these cults were the opiate with which the ruling class held an immense revolutionary potential in check; and still others maintained that the cults were a melting pot in which whites, Indians, and blacks could be blended—for what purpose, they were not clear. Amparo had made up her mind: religion was always the opiate of the people, and pseudo-tribal cults were even worse. But when I held her by the waist in the escolas de samba, joining in the snaking lines to the unbearable rhythm of the drums, I realized that she clung to that world with the muscles of her belly, her heart, her head, her nostrils….
Afterward, she was the first to offer a bitter, sarcastic analysis of the orgiastic character of people’s religious devotion—week after week and month after month—to the rite of Carnival. Exactly the same sort of tribal witchcraft, she would say with revolutionary contempt, as the soccer rituals in which the disinherited expended their combative energy and sense of revolt, practicing spells and enchantments to win from the gods of every possible world the death of the opposing halfback, completely unaware of the Establishment, which wanted to keep them in a state of ecstatic enthusiasm, condemned to unreality.
In time I lost any sense of contradiction, just as I gradually abandoned any attempt to distinguish the different races in that land of age-old, unbridled hybridization. I gave up trying to establish where progress lay, and where revolution, or to see the plot—as Amparo’s comrades expressed it—of capitalism. How could I continue to think like a European once I learned that the hopes of the far left were kept alive by a Nordeste bishop suspected of having harbored Nazi sympathies in his youth but who now faithfully and fearlessly held high the torch of revolt, upsetting the wary Vatican and the barracudas of Wall Street, and joyfully inflaming the atheism of the proletarian mystics won over by the tender yet menacing banner of a Beautiful Lady who, pierced by seven sorrows, gazed down on the sufferings of her people?
One morning Amparo and I were driving along the coast after having attended a seminar on the class structure of the lumpenproletariat. I saw some votive offerings on the beach, little candles, white garlands. Amparo told me they were offerings to Yemanjá, goddess of the waters. We stopped, and she got out and walked demurely onto the sand, stood a few moments in silence. I asked
