“God’s asthma,” Belbo glossed.
“You try creating from nothing. It’s something you do once in your life. God blows the world as you would blow a glass bubble, and to do that He takes a deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous hiss of the ten Sefirot.”
“A hiss of light?”
“God hissed, and there was light.”
“Multimedia.”
“But the lights of the Sefirot must be gathered in vessels that can contain their splendor without shattering. The vessels destined to receive Keter, Hokhmah, and Binah withstood their magnificence, but for the lower Sefirot, from Hesed to Yesod, light was exhaled too strongly in a single burst, and the vessels broke. Fragments of light were spilled into the universe, and gross matter was thus born.”
The breaking of the vessels was a catastrophe, Diotallevi said. What could be more unbearable than an aborted world? There must have been some defect in the cosmos from the beginning, and not even the most learned rabbis had been able to explain it completely. Perhaps at the moment God exhaled and was emptied, a few drops of oil lay in the first receptacle, a material residue, the reshimu, thus adulterating God’s essence. Or perhaps the seashells—the qelippot, the beginnings of ruin—were slyly waiting in ambush somewhere.
“Slippery folk, those qelippot,” Belbo said. “Agents of the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu. And then what happened?”
And then, Diotallevi patiently explained, in the light of Severe Judgment, or Gevurah—also known as Pachad, or Terror—the Sefirah in which, according to Isaac the Blind, Evil first shows itself, the seashells acquired a real existence.
“Then the seashells are in our midst,” Belbo said.
“Just look around you,” Diotallevi said.
“But is there no way out?”
“There’s a way back in, actually,” Diotallevi said. “All emanates from God, in the contraction of simsum. The problem is to bring about tikkun, the restoration of Adam Qadmon. Then we will rebuild everything in the balanced structure of the parzufim, the faces—or, rather, forms—that will take the place of the Sefirot. The ascension of the soul is like a cord of silk that enables devout intention, groping in the darkness, to find the path to the light. And so the world constantly strives, by combining the letters of the Torah, to regain its natural form, to emerge from its horrible confusion.”
And this is what I am doing now, in the middle of the night, in the unnatural calm of these hills. The other evening in the periscope, however, I was still mired in the slime of the seashells I felt all around me, of the slugs trapped in the crystal cases of the Conservatoire, among the barometers and rusted clockworks, in deaf hibernation. I thought then that if there had been a breaking of the vessels, the first crack probably appeared that evening in Rio, during the rite, but it was on my return to my native country that the shattering occurred. It happened slowly, soundlessly, so that we all found ourselves caught in the morass of gross matter, where noxious vermin emerge by spontaneous generation.
When I returned from Brazil, I hardly knew who I was anymore. I was approaching thirty. At that age, my father was a father; he knew who he was and where he lived.
I had been too far from my country while prodigious things were happening. I had lived in a world swollen with the incredible, where events in Italy wore a halo of legend. Shortly before leaving the other hemisphere—it was near the end of my stay and I was treating myself to an airplane ride over the forests of Amazonia—I picked up a local newspaper during a stopover in Fortaleza. On the front page was a prominent photograph of someone I recognized: I had seen him sipping white wine at Pilade’s for years.
The caption read: “O homem que matou Moro.”
When I got back, I found out that, of course, he wasn’t the man who killed Moro. Handed a loaded pistol, he would have shot himself in the ear when checking to see if it worked. What had happened was simply that an antiterrorist squad had burst in on him and found three pistols and two packs of explosives hidden under the bed. He was lying on the bed, since it was the only piece of furniture in that one-room apartment, whose rent was shared by a group of survivors of ’68 who used it as a place to satisfy the demands of the flesh.
If its sole decoration hadn’t been a poster of Che, the place could have been taken for any bachelor’s pied-à-terre. But one of the tenants belonged to an armed group, and the others had no idea that they were financing the group’s safe house. They all ended up in jail for a year.
I understood very little of what had happened in Italy over the past few years. The country had been on the brink of great changes when I left—left guiltily, feeling almost that I was running away at the moment of the settling of scores. Before I left, I could tell a man’s ideology just by the tone of his voice. I was back and now could not figure out who was on whose side. No one was talking about revolution; the new thing was the unconscious. People who claimed to be leftists quoted Nietzsche and Céline, while right-wing magazines hailed revolution in the Third World.
I went back to Pilade’s, but I felt I was on foreign soil. The billiard table was still there, and more or less the same painters, but the young fauna had changed. I learned that some of the old customers had opened schools of transcendental meditation or macrobiotic restaurants. Apparently nobody had thought of a tenda de umbanda yet. Maybe I was ahead of the times.
To appease the historic hard core, Pilade still had one of those old-fashioned pinball machines, the kind that now seemed copied from a Lichtenstein painting and were bought up wholesale by antique dealers. Next to it, however, the younger customers crowded around other machines, machines with fluorescent screens on which stylized hawks or kamikazes from Planet X hovered, or frogs jumped around grunting in Japanese. Pilade’s was an arcade of sinister flashing lights, and couriers from the Red Brigades on recruiting missions may well have been taking their turn at the Space Invaders screen. But they couldn’t play the pinball; you can’t play pinball with a pistol stuck in your belt.
I realized this one night when I followed Belbo’s gaze and saw Lorenza Pellegrini at the machine. Or, rather, when I later read one of his files. Lorenza isn’t named, but it’s obviously about her. She was the only one who played pinball like that.
FILENAME: Pinball
You don’t play pinball with just your hands, you play it with the groin too. The pinball problem is not to stop the ball before it’s swallowed by the mouth at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a halfback. The problem is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are more numerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering, confused, delirious, but still a free agent. And you achieve this not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to the case, the frame, but gently, so the machine won’t catch on and say Tilt.
You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the hips that makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this side of an orgasm. And if the hips move according to nature, it’s the buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so that when the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as in homeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more the drug dissolves in the water added gradually, until the drug has almost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective and potent it is.
Thus from the groin an infinitesimal pulse is transmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball moves against nature, against inertia, against gravity, against the laws of dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, who wanted it disobedient. The ball is intoxicated with vis movendi, remaining in play for memorable and immemorial lengths of time.
But a female groin is required, one that interposes no spongy body between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no erectile matter in between, only skin, nerves, padded bone sheathed in a pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a disinterested adaptability to the partner’s response, a taste for arousing desire without suffering the excess of one’s own: the Amazon must drive the pinball crazy and savor the thought that she will then abandon it.
That, I believe, was when Belbo fell in love with Lorenza Pellegrini: when he realized that she could promise him an unattainable happiness. But I also believe it was through her that he began to be aware of the erotic nature of automated universes, the machine as metaphor of the cosmic body, the mechanical game as talismanic evocation. He was already hooked on Abulafia and perhaps had entered, even then, into the spirit of Project Hermes. Certainly he had seen the Pendulum. Somehow, Lorenza Pellegrini held out the promise of the Pendulum.
I had trouble readjusting to Pilade’s. Little by little, but not every evening, in the forest of alien faces, I was rediscovering familiar ones, the faces of survivors, though they were blurred by my effort
