Working with Belbo, I often wondered why he accepted this arrangement. I don’t think it was the money. He knew his trade well enough to find a better-paying position.
For a long time I thought he did it because it enabled him to pursue his study of human folly from an ideal observation point.
As he never tired of pointing out, he was fascinated by what he called stupidity—the impregnable paralogism, the insidious delirium hidden behind the impeccable argument. But that, too, was a mask. It was Diotallevi who did it for fun, or perhaps hoping that a Manutius book might someday offer an unprecedented combination of the Torah. And I, too, participated, for the amusement, the irony, out of curiosity, especially after Garamond launched Project Hermes.
For Belbo it was a different story. This became clear to me after I went into his files.
FILENAME: Vendetta
She simply arrives. Even if there are people in the office, she grabs me by my lapels, thrusts her face forward, and kisses me. How does that song go? “Anna stands on tiptoe to kiss me.” She kisses me as if she were playing pinball.
She knows it embarrasses me. Puts me on the spot.
She never lies.
I love you, she says.
See you Sunday?
No. I’m spending the weekend with a friend….
A girlfriend, naturally.
No, a man friend. You know him. He’s the one who was at the bar with me last week. I promised. You wouldn’t want me to break my promise?
Don’t break your promise, but don’t come here to make me… Please, I have an author coming in.
A genius to launch?
A poor bastard to destroy.
A poor bastard to destroy.
I went to pick you up at Pilade’s. You weren’t there. I waited a long time, then I went by myself; otherwise the gallery would have been closed. Somebody there told me you had all gone on to the restaurant. I pretended to look at the pictures, though they tell me art’s been dead since Hölderlin. It took me twenty minutes to find the restaurant, because dealers always pick ones that are going to become famous next month.
You were there, among the usual faces, and beside you was the man with the scar. You weren’t the least embarrassed. You looked at me with complicity and—how do you manage both at the same time?—defiance, as if to say: So what? The intruder with the scar looked me up and down, as if I, not he, were the intruder. The others, in on the story, waited. I should have found an excuse to pick a fight. I’d have come out of it well, even if he hit me. Everybody knew you were there with him to provoke me. My role was assigned. One way or the other, I was to put on a show.
Since there had to be a show, I chose drawing-room comedy. I joined the conversation, amiable, hoping someone would admire my control.
The only one who admired me was me.
You’re a coward when you feel you’re a coward.
The masked avenger. As Clark Kent I take care of misunderstood young geniuses; as Superman I punish justly misunderstood old geniuses. I collaborate in the exploitation of those who, lacking my courage, have been unable to confine themselves to the role of spectator.
Is this possible? To spend a life punishing people who will never know they have been punished? So you wanted to be a Homer, eh? Take that, wretch, and that!
I hate anyone who tries to see me as an illusion of passion.
When it is recalled that Daath is situated at the point where the abyss bisects the Middle Pillar, and that up the Middle Pillar lies the Path of the Arrow, the way by which consciousness goes when the psychic rises on the planes, and that here also is Kundalini, we see that in Daath is the secret of both generation and regeneration, the key to the manifestation of all things through the differentiation into pairs of Opposites and their union in a Third.
—Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah, London, Fraternity of the Inner Light, 1957, 7.19
In any case I wasn’t supposed to concern myself with Manutius; my job was the wonderful adventure of metals. I began by exploring the Milan libraries. I started with textbooks, made a bibliography on file cards, and from there I went back to the original sources, old or new, looking for decent pictures. There’s nothing worse than illustrating a chapter on space travel with a photograph of the latest American satellite. Signor Garamond had taught me that it needs, at the very least, an angel by Dore.
I reaped a harvest of curious reproductions, but they weren’t enough. To choose the right picture for an illustrated book, you have to reject at least ten others.
I got permission to go to Paris for four days. Not much time to visit all the archives. Lia came with me. We arrived Thursday and had return reservations for the Monday-evening train, and I scheduled the Conservatoire for Monday, a mistake, because I found out the Conservatoire was closed Mondays. Too late. I left Paris crestfallen.
Belbo was vexed, but I had collected plenty of interesting things, and we went to show them to Signor Garamond. He leafed through the reproductions, many of them in color, then looked at the bill and let out a whistle. “My dear friend,” he said, “our work is a mission, true, we toil in the fields of culture, ça va sans dire, but we’re not the Red Cross—more, we’re not UNICEF. Was it necessary to buy all this material? I mean, I see here a mustachioed gentleman in his underwear who looks like d’Artagnan, surrounded by abracadabras and capricorns. Who is he? Mandrake?”
“Primitive medicine. Influence of the zodiac on the different parts of the body, with the corresponding curative herbs. And minerals, including metals. The doctrine of the cosmic signatures. Those were times when the boundary between magic and science was rather ill-defined.”
“Interesting. But what does this title page mean? Philosophia Moysaica. What’s Moses got to do with it? Isn’t that being a little too primitive?”
“It’s the dispute over unguentum armarium, otherwise known as weapon salve. Illustrious physicians spent fifty years arguing whether this salve could heal wounds by being smeared on the weapon that had dealt the blow.”
“Incredible. And that’s science?”
“Not in today’s sense of the word. But they considered this seriously, because they had just discovered the marvels of the magnet, the magic possibility of action at a distance….These men were wrong, but later, Volta and Marconi were not. What are electricity and radio if not action at a distance?”
“Well, well. Bravo, Casaubon. Science and magic going arm in arm, eh? Great idea. Let’s pursue this. Throw out some of those revolting generators and put in a few more Mandrakes. Perhaps a summoning of the Devil, say, on a gold background.”
“I wouldn’t want to go too far. This is the wonderful adventure of metals. Oddities work only when they’re to the point.”
“The wonderful adventure of metals must be, most of all, the story of science’s mistakes. Stick in the catchy oddity, and in the caption say it’s wrong. In the meantime, the reader’s hooked, because he sees that even the greats had crazy ideas, just like him.”
I told them about a strange thing I had seen in Paris, a bookshop near quai Saint-Michel. Its symmetrical windows advertised its own schizophrenia: on one side, books on computers and the electronics of the future; on the other, occult sciences. And it was the same inside: Apple and cabala.
“Unbelievable,” Belbo said.
“Obvious,” Diotallevi said. “Or, at least, you’re the last person who should be surprised, Jacopo. The world of machines seeking to rediscover the secret of creation: letters and numbers.”
Garamond said nothing. He had clasped his hands as if in prayer, and his eyes were turned heavenward. Then he smacked his hands together. “What you’ve said today confirms an idea of mine. For a while now I’ve … But all in good time; it needs more thought. Meanwhile, carry on. You’ve done well, Casaubon. We must look at your contract again; you’re a valuable colleague. And, yes, put in plenty of cabala and computers. Computers are made with silicon, aren’t they?”
“But silicon isn’t a metal. It’s a nonmetallic element.”
“Metallic, nonmetallic, why split hairs? What is this, Rosa rosarum? Computers and cabala.”
“Cabala isn’t a metal either,” I said.
He accompanied us to the door. At the threshold he said: “Casaubon, publishing is an art, not a science. Let’s not think like revolutionaries, eh? Those days are past. Put in the cabala. Oh, yes, about your expenses: I’ve taken the liberty of disallowing the couchette. Not to be stingy, believe me. It’s just that research requires—how shall I put it?—a Spartan spirit. Otherwise you lose your faith.”
He summoned us again a few days later, telling Belbo there was a visitor in his office he wanted us to meet.
We went. Garamond was entertaining a fat gentleman with a face like a tapir’s, no chin, a little blond mustache beneath a large, animal nose. I thought I recognized him; then I knew who it was: Professor Bramanti, the man I had gone to hear in Rio, the referendary or whatever of that Rosicrucian order.
“Professor Bramanti,” Garamond said, “believes this is the right moment for a smart publisher, alert to the cultural
