I took a quick shower to clear my head. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The Plan real? Absurd. We had invented it ourselves. But who had captured Belbo? The Rosicrucians? The Comte de Saint-Germain? The Okhrana? The Knights of the Temple? The Assassins? Anything was possible, if the impossible was true. But Belbo might have gone off the deep end. He had been very tense lately, whether because of Lorenza Pellegrini or because he was becoming more and more fascinated by his creature…. The Plan, actually, was our creature, his, mine, Diotallevi’s, but Belbo was the one who seemed obsessed by it now, beyond the confines of the game. It was useless to speculate further.
I went to the office. Gudrun welcomed me with the acid remark that she had to keep the business going all on her own. I found the envelope, the keys, and rushed to Belbo’s apartment.
The stale, rancid smell of cigarette butts, the ashtrays all brimming. The kitchen sink piled high with dirty dishes, the garbage bin full of disemboweled cans. On a shelf in the study, three empty bottles of whiskey, and a little left—two fingers—in a fourth bottle. This was the apartment of a man who had worked nonstop for days without budging, eating only when he had to, working furiously, like an addict.
There were two rooms in all, books piled in every corner, shelves sagging under their weight. The table with the computer, printer, and boxes of disks. A few pictures in the space not occupied by shelves. Directly opposite the table, a seventeenth-century print carefully framed, an allegory I hadn’t noticed last month, when I came up to have a beer before going off on my vacation.
On the table, a photograph of Lorenza Pellegrini, with an inscription in a tiny, almost childish hand. You saw only her face, but her eyes were unsettling, the look in her eyes. In a gesture of instinctive delicacy (or jealousy?) I turned the photograph facedown, not reading the inscription.
There were folders. I looked through them. Nothing of interest, only accounts, publishing cost estimates. But in the midst of these papers I found the printout of a file that, to judge by its date, must have been one of Belbo’s first experiments with the word processor. It was titled “Abu.” I remembered, when Abulafia made its appearance in the office, Belbo’s infantile enthusiasm, Gudrun’s muttering, Diotallevi’s sarcasm.
Abu had been Belbo’s private reply to his critics, a kind of sophomoric joke, but it said a lot about the combinatory passion with which he had used the machine. Here was a man who had said, with his wan smile, that once he realized that he would never be a protagonist, he decided to become, instead, an intelligent spectator, for there was no point in writing without serious motivation.
Better to rewrite the books of others, which is what a good editor does. But Belbo found in the machine a kind of LSD and ran his fingers over the keyboard as if inventing variations on “The Happy Farmer” on the old piano at home, without fear of being judged.
Not that he thought he was being creative: terrified as he was by writing, he knew that this was not writing but only the testing of an electronic skill. A gymnastic exercise. But, forgetting the usual ghosts that haunted him, he discovered that playing with the word processor was a way of giving vent to a fifty-year-old’s second adolescence.
His natural pessimism, his reluctant acceptance of his own past were somehow dissolved in this dialog with a memory that was inorganic, objective, obedient, nonmoral, transistorized, and so humanly inhuman that it enabled him to forget his chronic nervousness about life.
FILENAME: Abu
O what a beautiful morning at the end of November, in the beginning was the word, sing to me, goddess, the son of Peleus, Achilles, now is the winter of our discontent. Period, new paragraph. Testing testing parakalò, parakalò, with the right program you can even make anagrams, if you’ve written a novel with a Confederate hero named Rhett Butler and a fickle girl named Scarlett and then change your mind, all you have to do is punch a key and Abu will global replace the Rhett Butlers to Prince Andreis, the Scarletts to Natashas, Atlanta to Moscow, and lo! you’ve written war and peace.
Abu, do another thing now: Belbo orders Abu to change all words, make each “a” become “akka” and each “o” become “ulla,” for a paragraph to look almost Finnish.
Akkabu, dulla akkanullather thing nullaw: Belbulla ullarders Akkabu tulla chakkange akkall wullards, makkake eakkach “akka” becullame “akkakkakka” akkand eakkach “ulla” becullame “ullakka,” fullar akka pakkarakkagrakkaph tulla lullaullak akkalmullast Finnish.
O joy, O new vertigo of difference, O my platonic reader-writer racked by a most platonic insomnia, O wake of finnegan, O animal charming and benign. He doesn’t help you think but he helps you because you have to think for him. A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goose quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type, the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him (it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you are borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light of critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter.
An loo what I doo now, I tak this pac of speling monnstrosties an I orderr the macchin to coppy them an file them in temrary memry an then brring them bak from tha limbo onto the scren, folowing itsel.
There, I was typing blindly, but now I have taken that pack of spelling monstrosities and ordered the machine to copy the mess, and on the copy I made all the corrections, so it comes out perfect on the page. From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola. Repenting, I could have deleted the first draft. I left it to show how the “is” and the “ought,” accident and necessity, can coexist on this screen.
If I wanted, I could remove the offending passage from the screen but not from the memory, thereby creating an archive of my repressions while denying omnivorous Freudians and virtuosi of variant texts the pleasure of conjecture, the exercise of their occupation, their academic glory.
This is better than real memory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns to remember but not to forget. Diotallevi goes Sephardically mad over those palaces with grand staircases, that statue of a warrior doing something unspeakable to a defenseless woman, the corridors with hundreds of rooms, each with the depiction of a portent, and the sudden apparitions, disturbing incidents, walking mummies.
To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea, processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of gymnosophists—and so on, to infinity.
O Raimundo, O Camillo, you had only to cast your mind back to your visions and immediately you could reconstruct the great chain of being, in love and joy, because all that was disjointed in the universe was joined in a single volume in your mind, and Proust would have made you smile. But when Diotallevi and I tried to construct an ars oblivionalis that day, we couldn’t come up with rules for forgetting. It’s impossible.
It’s one thing to go in search of a lost time, chasing labile clues, like Hop-o’-My-Thumb in the woods, and quite another deliberately to misplace time refound. Hop-o’-My-Thumb always comes home, like an obsession. There is no discipline of forgetting; we are at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke and amnesia, and such selfinterventions as drugs, alcohol, or suicide.
Abu, however, can perform on himself precise local suicides, temporary amnesias, painless aphasias.
Where were you last night, L
There, indiscreet reader: you will never know it, but that half-line hanging in space was actually the beginning of a long sentence that I wrote but then wished I hadn’t, wished I hadn’t even thought let alone written it, wished that it had never happened. So I pressed a key, and a milky film spread over the fatal and inopportune lines, and I pressed DELETE and, whoosh, all gone.
But that’s not all. The problem with suicide is that sometimes you jump out the window and then change your mind between the eighth floor and the seventh. “Oh, if only I could go back!” Sorry, you can’t, too bad. Splat. Abu, on the other hand, is merciful, he grants you the right to change your mind: you can recover your deleted text by pressing RETRIEVE. What a relief! Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget.
Never again will I go from one bar to another, disintegrating alien spacecraft with tracer bullets, until the invader monster disintegrates me. This is far more beautiful: here you disintegrate thoughts instead of aliens. The screen is a galaxy of thousands and thousands of asteroids, all in a row, white or green, and you have created them yourself. Fiat Lux, Big Bang, seven days, seven minutes, seven seconds, and a universe is born before your eyes, a universe in constant
