I don’t mean the usual seekers after transcendental consolation, I don’t mean the melancholy spirits, but men of profound knowledge and great intellectual refinement who nevertheless indulge in nocturnal fantasies and lose the ability to distinguish between traditional truth and the archipelago of the prodigious. The people with whom I spoke just now were arguing about childish conjectures. Alas, it happens in the best families, as they say. But do come into my little study, please, where we can converse in more comfortable surroundings.”
He raised the leather curtain and showed us into the next room. “Little study” is not how I would have described it; it was spacious, with walls of exquisite antique shelving crammed with handsomely bound books all of venerable age. What impressed me more than the books were some small glass cases filled with objects hard to identify—they looked like stones. And there were little animals, whether stuffed, mummified, or delicately reproduced I couldn’t say.
Everything was bathed in a diffuse crepuscular light that came from a large double-mullioned window at the end, with leaded diamond panes of transparent amber. The light from the window blended with that of a great lamp on a dark mahogany table covered with papers. It was one of those lamps sometimes found on reading tables in old libraries, with a dome of green glass that could cast a white oval on the page while leaving the surroundings in an opalescent penumbra. This play of two sources of light, both unnatural, somehow enlivened the polychrome of the ceiling.
The ceiling was vaulted, supported on all four sides by a decorative fiction: little brick-red columns with tiny gilded capitals. The many trompe l’oeil images, divided into seven areas, enhanced the effect of depth, and the whole room had the feeling of a mortuary chapel, impalpably sinful, melancholy, sensual.
“My little theater,” Agliè said, “in the style of those Renaissance fantasies where visual encyclopedias were laid out, sylloges of the universe. Not so much a dwelling as a memory machine. There is no image that, when combined with the others, does not embody a mystery of the world. You will notice that line of figures there, painted in imitation of those in the palace of Mantua: they are the thirty-six decans, the Masters of the Heavens.
And respecting the tradition, after I found this splendid reconstruction—the work of an unknown artist—I went about acquiring the little objects in the glass cases, which correspond to the images on the ceiling. They represent the fundamental elements of the universe: air, water, earth, and fire.
Hence the presence of this charming salamander, the masterwork of a taxidermist friend, and this delicate reproduction in miniature, a rather late piece, of the aeolipile of Hero, in which the air contained in the sphere, were I to activate this little alcohol stove, warming it, would escape from these lateral spouts and thereby cause rotation.
A magic instrument. Egyptian priests used it in their shrines, as so many texts inform us. They exploited it to claim a miracle, which the masses venerated, while the true miracle is the golden law that governs this secret and simple mechanism of the elements earth and fire. Here is learning that our ancients possessed, as did the men of alchemy, but that the builders of cyclotrons have lost. And so I cast my gaze on my theater of memory, this child of so many vaster theaters that beguiled the great minds of the past, and I know. I know better than the so-called learned. As it is below, so it is above. And there is nothing more to know.”
He offered us Cuban cigars, curiously shaped—not straight, but contorted, curled—though they were thick. We uttered cries of admiration. Diotallevi went over to the shelves.
“Oh,” Agliè said, “a minimal library, as you see, barely two hundred volumes; I have more in my family home. But, if I may say so, all these have some merit, some value. And they are not arranged at random. The order of the subjects follows that of the images and the objects.”
Diotallevi timidly reached out as if to touch a volume. “Help yourself,” Agliè said. “That is the Oedypus Aegyptiacus of Athanasius Kircher. As you know, he was the first after Horapollon to try to interpret hieroglyphics. A fascinating man. I wish this study of mine were like his museum of wonders, now presumed lost, scattered, because one who knows not how to seek will never find….
A charming conversationalist. How proud he was the day he discovered that this hieroglyph meant ‘The benefices of the divine Osiris are provided by sacred ceremonies and by the chain of spirits….’ Then that mountebank Champollion came along, a hateful man, believe me, childishly vain, and he insisted that the sign corresponded only to the name of a pharaoh.
How ingenious the moderns are in debasing sacred symbols. The work is actually not all that rare: it costs less than a Mercedes. But look at this, a first edition, 1595, of the Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae of Khunrath. It is said there are only two copies in the world.
This is the third. And this volume is a first edition of the Telluris Theoria Sacra of Burnetius. I cannot look at the illustrations in the evening without feeling a wave of mystical claustrophobia. The profundities of our globe … Unsuspected, are they not? I see that Dr. Diotallevi is fascinated by the Hebrew characters of Vigenère’s Traicté des Chiffres.
Then look at this: a first edition of the Kabbala denudata of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. The book was translated into English—in part and badly—at the beginning of this century by that wretch McGregor Mathers….You must know something of that scandalous conventicle that so fascinated the British esthetes, the Golden Dawn.
Only from that band of counterfeiters of occult documents could such an endless series of debasements spring, from the Stella Matutina to the satanic churches of Aleister Crowley, who called up demons to win the favors of certain gentlemen devoted to the vice anglais. If you only knew, dear friends, the sort of people one has to rub elbows with in devoting oneself to such studies. You will see for yourselves if you undertake to publish in this field.”
Belbo seized this opportunity to broach the subject. He explained that Garamond wished to bring out, each year, a few books of an esoteric nature.
“Ah, esoteric.” Agliè smiled, and Belbo blushed.
“Should we say … hermetic?”
“Ah, hermetic.” Agliè smiled.
“Well,” Belbo said, “perhaps I am using the wrong word, but surely you know the genre.”
Agliè smiled again. “It is not a genre. It is knowledge. What you wish to do is publish a survey of knowledge that has not been debased. For you it may be simply an editorial choice, but for me, if I am to concern myself with it, it will be a search for truth, a queste du Graal.”
Belbo warned that just as the fisherman who casts his net could pull in empty shells and plastic bags, so Garamond Press might receive many manuscripts of dubious value, and that we were looking for a stern reader who would separate the wheat from the chaff, while also taking note of any curious by-products, because there was a friendly publishing firm that would be happy if we redirected less worthy authors to it…. Naturally, a suitable form of compensation would be worked out.
“Thank heavens I am what is called a man of means. Even a shrewd man of means. If, in the course of my explorations, I come upon another copy of Khunrath, or another handsome stuffed salamander, or a narwhal’s horn (which I would be ashamed to display in my collection, though the Treasure of Vienna exhibits one as a unicorn’s horn), with a brief and agreeable transaction I can earn more than you would pay me in ten years of consultancy.
I will look at your manuscripts in the spirit of humility. I am convinced that even in the most commonplace text I will find a spark, if not of truth, at least of bizarre falsehood, and often the extremes meet. I will be bored only by the ordinary, and for that boredom you will compensate me.
Depending on the boredom I have undergone, I will confine myself to sending you, at the end of the year, a little note, and I will keep my request within the confines of the symbolical. If you consider it excessive, you will just send me a case of fine wine.”
Belbo was nonplussed. He was accustomed to dealing with consultants who were querulous and starving. He opened the briefcase he had brought with him and drew out a thick manuscript.
“I wouldn’t want you to be overoptimistic. Look at this, for example. It seems to me typical.”
Agliè took the manuscript: “The Secret Language of the Pyramids … Let’s see the index…. Pyramidion … Death of Lord Carnarvon … Testimony of Herodotus…” He looked up. “You gentlemen have read it?”
“I skimmed through it,” Belbo said.
Agliè returned the manuscript to him. “Now tell me if my summary is correct.” He sat down behind the desk, reached into the pocket of his vest, drew out the
