He observed that if all treasures were protected by gold bugs, he couldn’t see why I should have been struck by what the girl had said. I asked him to stop treating me like a suspect, and he laughed and changed his tone.
He said he didn’t find it strange that the girl had said what she did, because Ardenti must have talked to her about his fantasies, perhaps trying to use her to establish some astral contact, as they say in those circles. A psychic, he went on, was like a sponge, a photographic plate with an unconscious that must look like an amusement park. The Picatrix bunch probably give her a brainwashing all year round, so it was not unlikely that once in a trance—because the girl was in earnest, wasn’t faking, and there was something wrong with her head—she would see images that had been impressed on her long ago.
But two days later De Angelis dropped in at the office to say that, curiously enough, when he went to see the girl the day after the ceremony, she was gone. The neighbors said nobody had seen her since the afternoon before the evening of the ceremony. His suspicions were aroused, so he entered the apartment and found it torn to pieces: sheets on the floor, pillows in one corner, trampled newspapers, emptied drawers. No sign of her. Or of her boyfriend, or roommate or whatever you wanted to call him.
He told me that if I knew anything more, I’d be wise to talk, because it was strange how the girl had disappeared into thin air, and he could think of only two reasons: either somebody realized that De Angelis had her under surveillance, or it was noticed that one Jacopo Belbo had tried to talk to her. The things she had said in the trance might therefore have concerned something serious, some unfinished business. They—whoever they were—hadn’t realized she knew so much.
“Now suppose some colleague of mine gets it into his head that you killed her,” De Angelis added with a beautiful smile. “You can see we have every interest in working together.” I almost lost my temper, and God knows I don’t do that often.
I asked him why a person who’s not home is assumed to have been murdered, and he asked if I remembered what happened to the colonel. Then I told him that if she had been killed, or kidnapped, it must have happened that evening, when I was with him.
He asked how I could be so sure of that, since we had said good-bye around midnight and he had no way of knowing what had happened after that. I asked him if he was serious, and he said what, hadn’t I ever read a detective story? Didn’t I know that the prime suspect was always the one who didn’t have an alibi as radiant as Hiroshima? He said he would donate his head to an organ bank if I had an alibi for the time between one A.M. and the next morning.
What can I say, Casaubon? Maybe I should have told him the truth, but where I come from, men are stubborn and never back down.
I’m writing you because if I found your address, then De Angelis can find it, too. If he gets in touch with you, at least you know the line I’ve taken. But since it doesn’t seem a very straight line to me, go ahead and tell him everything if you want to. I’m embarrassed, I apologize. I feel like some kind of accomplice. Try as I might, I can’t seem to find any noble justification for myself. Must be my peasant origins; in our part of the country, we’re a mean bunch.
The whole thing is—as the Germans say—unheimlich.
Yours,
Jacopo Belbo
…of these mysterious initiates—now become numerous, bold, conspiring—all was born: Jesuitism, magnetism, Martinism, philosopher’s stone, somnambulism, eclecticism.
—C.-L. Cadet-Gassicourt, Le tombeau de Jacques de Molay, Paris, Desenne, 1797, p. 91
The letter upset me. Not that I was afraid of being tracked down by De Angelis—we were in different hemispheres, after all—but for less definable reasons. At the time, I thought I was upset because a world I had left behind had bounced back at me. But today I realize that what bothered me was yet another strand of resemblance, the suspicion of an analogy. I was annoyed, too, at having to deal with Belbo again, Belbo and his eternal guilty conscience. I decided not to mention the letter to Amparo.
A reassuring second letter arrived from Belbo two days later.
The story of the psychic had had a reasonable ending. A police informer reported that the girl’s lover had been involved in a settling of scores over a drug shipment, which he had sold retail instead of delivering it to the honest wholesaler who had already paid. They frown on that sort of behavior in those circles, and he vanished to save his neck. Obviously he took the woman with him.
Rummaging then among the newspapers left in their apartment, De Angelis found some magazines on the order of Picatrix, with a series of articles heavily underlined in red. One was about the treasure of the Templars, another about Rosicrucians who lived in a castle, cave, or some damn place where “post CXX annos patebo” was written and they called themselves the thirty-six invisibles. So for De Angelis it was all clear. The psychic, consuming the same sort of literature that the colonel had, regurgitated it when she was in a trance. The matter was closed, passed on to the narcotics squad.
Belbo’s letter exuded relief. De Angelis’s explanation seemed the most economical.
The other evening in the periscope, I told myself that the facts might have been quite different. Granted, the psychic quoted something she had heard from Ardenti, but it was something her magazines never mentioned, something no one was supposed to know. Whoever had got rid of the colonel was in the Picatrix group, and this someone noticed that Belbo was about to question the psychic, so he eliminated her. To throw the investigators off the track, he also eliminated her lover, then instructed a police informer to say that the couple had fled.
Simple enough, if there was really a plan. But how could there have been? Since we invented “the Plan” ourselves, and only much later was it possible for reality not only to catch up with fiction but actually to precede it, or, rather, to rush ahead of it and repair the damage that it would cause.
At the time, though, in Brazil, these were not my thoughts on receiving Belbo’s second letter. Instead, I felt once more that something was resembling something else. I had been thinking about my trip to Bahia and had spent an afternoon visiting bookstores and shops that sold cult objects, places I had ignored till then. I went to out-of-the-way little emporiums crammed with statues and idols. I purchased perfumadores of Yemanjá, pungently scented mystical smoke sticks, incense, sweetish spray cans labeled “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” cheap amulets.
I also found many books, some for devotees, others for people studying devotees, a mixture of exorcism manuals like Como adivinhar o futuro na bola de cristal and anthropology textbooks. And a monograph on the Rosicrucians.
Suddenly it all seemed to come together: Satanic and Moorish rites in the Temple of Jerusalem, African witchcraft for the subproletarians of the Brazilian Northeast, the message of Provins with its hundred and twenty years, and the hundred and twenty years of the Rosicrucians.
I felt like a walking blender mixing strange concoctions of different liquors. Or maybe I had caused some kind of short circuit, tripping over a varicolored tangle of wires that had been entwining themselves for a long, long time. I bought the book on the Rosicrucians, thinking that if I spent a few hours in these bookstores, I would meet at least a dozen Colonel Ardentis and brainwashed psychics.
I went home and officially informed Amparo that the world was full of unnatural characters. She promised me solace, and we ended the day naturally.
That was late 1975. I decided to put resemblances aside and concentrate on my work. After all, I was supposed to be teaching Italian culture, not the Rosicrucians.
I devoted myself to Renaissance philosophers and I discovered that the men of secular modernity, once they had emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, had found nothing better to do than devote themselves to cabala and magic.
After two years spent with Neoplatonists who chanted formulas designed to convince nature to do things she had no intention of doing, I received news from Italy. It seems my old classmates—or some of them, at least—were now shooting people who didn’t agree with them, to convince the stubborn to do things they had no intention of doing.
I couldn’t understand it. Now part of the Third World, I made up my mind to visit Bahia. I set off with a history of Renaissance culture
