“You never can tell. Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Enjoying myself?” I asked. I quoted him: “It’s the only thing I seem to be able to do well.”
“Bon pour vous,” he said.
We saw each other again after that, and I told him about my Brazilian experience, but he seemed more absent than usual. When Lorenza Pellegrini wasn’t there, he kept his eyes glued to the door, and when she was, he glanced nervously along the bar, following her every move. One night near closing time, he said, without looking at me, “Listen, we might be able to use your services, but not for a single consultation. Could you give us, say, a few afternoons each week?”
“We can discuss it. What does it involve?”
“A steel company has commissioned a book about metals. Something with a lot of illustrations. Serious, but for the mass market. You know the sort of thing: metals in history, from the Iron Age to spaceships. We need somebody who’ll dig around in libraries and archives and find beautiful illustrations, old miniatures, engravings from nineteenth-century volumes on smelting, for instance, or lightning rods.”
“All right. I’ll drop by tomorrow.”
Lorenza Pellegrini came over to him. “Would you take me home?”
“Why me?” Belbo asked.
“Because you’re the man of my dreams.”
He blushed, as only he could blush, and looked away. “There’s a witness,” he said. And to me: “I’m the man of her dreams. This is Lorenza.”
“Ciao.”
“Ciao.”
He got up, whispered something in her ear.
She shook her head. “I asked for a ride home, that’s all.”
“Ah,” he said. “Excuse me, Casaubon, I have to play chauffeur to the woman of someone else’s dreams.”
“Idiot,” she said to him tenderly, and kissed him on the cheek.
Yet one caution let me give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually melancholy—that he read not the symptomes or prognos-ticks of the following tract, lest, by applying that which he reads to himself, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his own person (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurt himself, and get, in conclusion, more harm than good. I advise them therefore warily to peruse that tract.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621, Introduction
It was obvious that there was something between Belbo and Lorenza Pellegrini. I didn’t know exactly what it was or how long it had been going on. Abulafia’s files did not help me to reconstruct the story.
There is no date, for example, on the file about the dinner with Dr. Wagner. Belbo knew Dr. Wagner before my departure, and may well have been in contact with him after I started working at Garamond, which was when, in fact, I got to know him myself. So the dinner could have been before or after the evening I have in mind. If it was before, then I understand Belbo’s embarrassment, his solemn desperation.
Dr. Wagner—an Austrian who for years had been practicing in Paris (hence the pronunciation “Vagnere” for those who wanted to boast of their familiarity with him)—had been coming to Milan regularly for about ten years, at the invitation of two revolutionary groups of the post-’68 period. They fought over him, and of course each group gave a radically different interpretation of his thought.
How and why this famous man allowed himself to be sponsored by extremists, I never understood. Wagner’s theories had no political color, so to speak, and, had he wanted, he could easily have been invited by the universities, the clinics, the academies. I believe he accepted the invitations because he was basically an epicurean and required regal expense accounts. The private hosts could raise more money than the institutions, and for Dr. Wagner this meant first-class tickets, luxury hotels, plus fees in keeping with his therapist rates, for the lectures and seminars.
Why the two groups found ideological inspiration in Wagner’s theories was another story. But in those days Wagner’s brand of psychoanalysis seemed sufficiently deconstructive, diagonal, libidinal, and non-Cartesian to provide some theoretical justification for revolutionary activity.
It proved difficult to get the workers to swallow it, so at a certain point the two groups had to choose between the workers and Wagner. They chose Wagner. Which gave rise to the theory that the new revolutionary protagonist was not the proletarian but the deviate.
“Instead of deviating the proletariat, they would do better to prole-tarianize the deviates, which would be more economical, considering Dr. Wagner’s prices,” Belbo said to me one day.
The Wagnerian revolution was the most expensive in history.
Garamond, subsidized by a university psychology department, had published a translation of Wagner’s minor essays—very technical, nearly impossible to find, and therefore in great demand among the faithful. Wagner had come to Milan for a publicity launch, and that was when his acquaintance with Belbo began.
FILENAME: Doktor Wagner
The diabolical Doktor Wagner
Twenty-sixth installment
Who, on that gray morning of
During the discussion I raised an objection. The satanic old man must have been irritated, but he didn’t let it show. On the contrary, he replied as if he wanted to seduce me.
Like Charlus with Jupien, bee and flower. A genius can’t bear not being loved; he must immediately seduce the dissenter, make the dissenter love him. He succeeded. I loved him.
But he must not have forgiven me, because that evening of the divorce he dealt me a mortal blow. Unconsciously, instinctively, not thinking, he seduced me, and unconsciously, he punished me. Though it cost him deontologically, he psychoanalyzed me free. The unconscious bites even its handlers.
Story of the Marquis de Lantenac in Quatre-vingt-treize. The ship of the Vendéeiens is sailing through a storm off the Breton coast. Suddenly a cannon slips its moorings, and as the ship pitches and rolls it begins a mad race from rail to rail, an immense beast smashing larboard and starboard.
A cannoneer (alas, the very one whose negligence had left the cannon improperly secured) seizes a chain and with unparalleled courage flings himself at the monster, which nearly crushes him, but he stops it, bolts it fast, leads it back to its stall, saving the ship, the crew, the mission. With sublime liturgy, the fearsome Lantenac musters all the men on deck, praises the cannoneer’s heroism, takes an impressive medal from around his own neck and puts it on the man, embraces him, and the crew makes the welkin ring with its hurrahs.
Then stern Lantenac, reminding the honored sailor that he was responsible for the danger in the first place, orders him to be shot.
Splendid, just Lantenac, man of virtue, above corruption. And this is what Dr. Wagner did for me: he honored me with his friendship, and executed me with the truth.
and executed me, revealing to me what I desired
revealing to me that the thing that I desired, I feared.
Begin the story in a bar. The need to fall in love.
Some things you can feel coming. You don’t fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
Because at that time I felt the need. I had just given up drinking. Relationship between the liver and the heart. A new love is a good reason for going back to drink. Somebody to go to a bar with. Feel good with.
The bar is brief, furtive. It allows you a long, sweet expectation through the day, then you go and hide in the shadows among the leather chairs; at six in the evening there’s nobody there, the sordid clientele comes later, with the piano man. Choose a louche American bar empty in the late afternoon. The waiter comes only if you call him three times, and he has the next martini ready.
It has to be a martini. Not whiskey, a martini. The liquid is clear. You raise your glass and you see her over the olive. The difference between looking at your beloved through a dry martini straight up, where the glass is small, thin, and looking at her through a martini on the rocks, through thick glass, and her face broken by the transparent cubism of the ice. The effect is doubled if you each press your glass to your forehead, feeling the chill, and lean close until the glasses touch. Forehead to forehead with two glasses in between. You can’t do that with martini glasses.
The brief hour of the bar. Afterward, trembling, you await another day. Free of the blackmail of certainty.
He who falls in love in bars doesn’t need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
His role. He allowed her great freedom, he was always traveling. His suspect generosity: I could telephone even at midnight. He was there, you weren’t. He said you were out. Actually, while I have you on the line, do you have any idea where she is? The only moments of jealousy. But still, in that way I was taking Cecilia from the sax player. To love, or believe you love, as an eternal priest of an ancient vengeance.
With Sandra, things were complicated. That time she decided I was too involved. Our life as a couple had become strained. Should we break up? Let’s break up, then. No, wait, let’s talk it over. No, we can’t go on like this. The
