The others gathered around, mildly aroused. Belbo sat down and looked at the scene with an impenetrable face, like a producer watching a screen test. He was sweating, and there was a tic by his left eye, which I had never noticed before. Lorenza danced for at least five minutes, with movements increasingly suggestive. Then suddenly he said: “Now you come here.”
Lorenza stopped, spread her legs, held her arms straight out, and cried: “I am the saint and the prostitute!”
“You are the pain in the ass.” Belbo got up, went straight to her, grabbed her by the wrist, and dragged her toward the door.
“Stop it!” she shouted. “Don’t you dare…” Then she burst into tears and flung her arms around his neck. “But darling, I’m your Sophia; you can’t get mad….”
Belbo tenderly put an arm around her shoulders, kissed her on the temple, smoothed her hair, then said to everybody: “Excuse her; she isn’t used to drinking like this.”
I heard some snickers from those present, and I believe Belbo heard them, too. He saw me on the threshold, and did something—whether for me, for the others, or for himself, I’ve never figured out. It was a whisper, when everybody else had turned away from the couple, losing interest.
Still holding Lorenza by the shoulders, he addressed the room, softly, in the tone of a man stating the obvious: “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”
When therefore a Great Cabalist wishes to tell you something, what he says will not be frivolous, vulgar, common, but, rather, a mystery, an oracle….
—Thomaso Garzoni, II Theatro de vari e diversi cervelli mondani, Venice, Zanfretti, 1583, discorso XXXVI
The illustrations I found in Milan and Paris weren’t enough. Signor Garamond authorized me to spend a few days at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
I spent my evenings in the bars of Schwabing—or in the immense crypts where elderly mustached gentlemen in lederhosen played music and lovers smiled at each other through a thick cloud of pork steam over full-liter beer steins—and in the afternoons I went through card catalogs of reproductions. Now and then I would leave the archive and stroll through the museum, where every human invention had been reconstructed. You pushed a button, and dioramas of oil exploration came to life with working drills, you stepped inside a real submarine, you made the planets revolve, you played at producing acids and chain reactions.
A less Gothic Conservatoire, totally of the future, peopled by unruly school groups being taught to idealize engineers.
In the Deutsches Museum you also learned everything about mines: you went down a ladder and found yourself in a mine complete with tunnels, elevators for men and horses, narrow passages where scrawny exploited children (made of wax, I hoped) were crawling. You went along endless dark corridors, you stopped at the edge of bottomless pits, you felt chilled to the bone, and you could almost catch a whiff of firedamp. Everything life-size.
I was wandering in a tunnel, despairing of ever seeing the light of day again, when I came upon a man looking down over the railing, someone I seemed to recognize. The face was wrinkled and pale, the hair white, the look owlish. But the clothes were not right—I had seen that face before, above some uniform. It was like meeting, after many years, a priest now in civilian clothes, or a Capuchin without a beard.
The man looked back at me, also hesitating. As usually happens in such situations, there was some fencing of furtive glances before he took the initiative and greeted me in Italian. Suddenly I could picture him in his usual dress: if he had been wearing a long yellow smock, he would have been Signor Salon: A. Salon, taxidermist. His laboratory was next door to my office on the corridor of the former factory building where I was the Marlowe of culture. I had encountered him at times on the stairs, and we had nodded to each other.
“Strange,” he said, holding out his hand. “We have been fellow-tenants for so long, and we introduce ourselves in the bowels of the earth a thousand miles away.”
We exchanged a few polite remarks. I got the impression that he knew exactly what I did, which was an achievement of sorts, since I wasn’t sure myself. “How do you happen to be in a technological museum? I thought your publishing firm was concerned with more spiritual things.”
“How did you know that?”
“Oh”—he gestured vaguely—“people talk, I have many customers….”
“What sort of people go to a taxidermist?”
“You are thinking, like everyone else, that it’s not an ordinary profession. But I do not lack for customers, and I have all kinds: museums, private collectors.”
“I don’t often see stuffed animals in people’s homes,” I said.
“No? It depends on the homes you visit….Or the cellars.”
“Stuffed animals are kept in cellars?”
“Some people keep them in cellars. Not all crèches are in the light of the sun or the moon. I’m suspicious of such customers, but you know how it is: a job is a job…. I’m suspicious of everything underground.”
“Then why are you strolling in tunnels?”
“I’m checking. I distrust the underground world, but I want to understand it. There aren’t many opportunities. The Roman catacombs, you’ll say. No mystery there, too many tourists, and everything is under the control of the Church. And then there are the sewers of Paris…. Have you been? They can be visited on Monday, Wednesday, and the last Saturday of every month. But that’s another tourist attraction. Naturally, there are catacombs in Paris, too, and caves. Not to mention the Métro. Have you ever been to 145 rue Lafayette?”
“I must confess I haven’t.”
“It’s a bit out of the way, between Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord. An unremarkable building at first sight. But if you look at it more closely, you realize that though the door looks wooden, it is actually painted iron, and the windows appear to belong to rooms unoccupied for centuries. People walk past and don’t know the truth.”
“What is the truth?”
“That the house is fake. It’s a façade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Métro. And once you know this, you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld: if you could penetrate those walls, you would have access to subterranean Paris. I have had occasion to spend hours and hours in front of that door that conceals the door of doors, the point of departure for the journey to the center of the earth. Why do you think they made it?”
“To ventilate the Métro, as you said.”
“A few ducts would have been enough for that. No, when I see those subterranean passages, my suspicions are aroused. Do you know why?”
As he spoke of darkness, he seemed to give off light. I asked him why his suspicions were aroused.
“Because if the Masters of the World exist, they can only be underground: this is a truth that all sense but few dare utter. Perhaps the only man bold enough to say it in print was Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. You know him?”
I may have heard the name mentioned by one of our Diabolicals, but I wasn’t sure.
“He is the one who told us about Agarttha, the underground headquarters of the King of the World, the occult center of the Synarchy,” the taxidermist said. “He had no fear; he felt sure of himself. But all those who spoke out after him were eliminated, because they knew too much.”
As we walked along the tunnel, Signor Salon cast nervous glances at the mouths of new passageways, as if in those shadows he was seeking confirmation of his suspicions.
“Have you ever wondered why in the last century all the great metropolises hastened to build subways?”
“To solve traffic problems?”
“Before there were automobiles, when there were only horse-drawn carriages? From a man of your intelligence I would have expected a more perceptive explanation.”
“You have one?”
“Perhaps,” Signor Salon said, and he looked pensive, absent. The conversation died. Then he said that he had to be running along. But, after shaking my hand, he lingered another few seconds, as if struck by a thought. “Apropos, that colonel—what was his name?—the one who came to Garamond some time ago to talk to you about a Templar treasure … have you had any news of him?”
It was like a slap in the face, this brutal and indiscreet display of knowledge about something I considered private and buried. I wanted to ask him how he knew, but I was afraid. I confined myself to saying, in an indifferent tone, “Oh, that old story. I’d forgotten all about it. But apropos: why did you say apropos?”
“Did I say that? Ah, yes, well, it seemed to me he had discovered something, underground….”
“How do you know?”
“I really can’t say. I can’t remember who spoke to me about it. A customer, perhaps. But my curiosity is always aroused when the underground world is involved. The little manias of old age. Good evening.”
He went off, and I stood there, to ponder the meaning of this encounter.
In certain regions of the Himalayas, among the twenty-two temples that represent the twenty-two Arcana of Hermes and the twenty-two letters of some sacred alphabets, Agarttha forms the mystic Zero, which cannot be found….A colossal chessboard that extends beneath the earth, through almost all the regions of the Globe.
—Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de l’Inde en Europe, Paris,
