When the printer stopped and I read what Belbo had written, I was aghast, unable to decide whether this was an extraordinary revelation or the wild raving of a madman.
What did I really know about Jacopo Belbo? What had I learned about him in the two years I worked at his side, almost every day? How much faith could I put in the word of a man who, by his own admission, was writing under exceptional circumstances, in a fog of alcohol, tobacco, and terror, completely cut off from the world for three days?
It was already night, Thursday, June 21. My eyes were watering. I had been staring at the screen and then at the printer’s pointillist anthill since morning. What I had read might be true or it might be false, but Belbo said he would call in the morning. I would have to wait here. My head swam.
I staggered into the bedroom and fell, still dressed, onto the unmade bed.
At around eight I awoke from a deep, sticky sleep, not realizing at first where I was. Luckily I found a can of coffee and was able to make myself a few cups. The phone didn’t ring. I didn’t dare go out to buy anything, because Belbo might call while I was gone.
I went back to the machine and began printing out the other disks in chronological order. I found games, exercises, and accounts of events I knew about, but told from Belbo’s private point of view, so that they were reshaped and appeared to me now in a different light. I found diary fragments, confessions, outlines for works of fiction made with the bitter obstinacy of a man who knows that his efforts are doomed to failure. I found descriptions of people I remembered, but now I saw them with different faces—sinister faces, unless this was because I was seeing them as part of a horrible final mosaic.
And I found a file devoted entirely to quotations taken from Belho’s most recent reading. I recognized them immediately. Together we had pored over so many texts during those months…. The quotations were numbered: one hundred and twenty in all. The number was probably a deliberate choice; if not, the coincidence was disturbing. But why those passages and not others?
Today I reinterpret Belbo’s files, the whole story they tell, in the light of that quotation file. I tell the passages like the beads of a heretical rosary. For Belbo some of them may have been an alarm, a hope of rescue. Or am I, too, no longer able to distinguish common sense from unmoored meaning? I try to convince myself that my reinterpretation is correct, but as recently as this morning, someone told me—me, not Belbo—that I was mad.
On the horizon, beyond the Bricco, the moon is slowly rising. This big house is filled with strange rustling sounds, termites perhaps, mice, or the ghost of Adelino Canepa…. I dare not walk along the hall. I stay in Uncle Carlo’s study and look out the window. From time to time I step onto the terrace, to see if anyone is coming up the hill. I feel that I’m in a movie. How pathetic! “Here come the bad guys….”
Yet the hill is so calm tonight, a summer night now.
Adventurous, dubious, and demented were the events I reconstructed to pass the time, and to keep up my spirits, as I stood waiting in the periscope two nights ago, between five and ten o’clock, moving my legs as if to some Afro-Brazilian beat to help the blood circulate.
I thought back over the last few years, abandoning myself to the magic rolling of the atabaques, accepting the revelation that our fantasies, begun as a mechanical ballet, were about to be transformed, in this temple of things mechanical, into rite, possession, apparition, and the dominion of Exu.
In the periscope I had no proof that what I had learned from the printout was true. I could still take refuge in doubt. At midnight, perhaps, I would discover that I had come to Paris and hidden myself like a thief in a harmless museum of technology only because I had foolishly fallen into a macumba staged for credulous tourists, letting myself be hypnotized by the perfumadores and the rhythm of the pontos.
As I recomposed the mosaic, my mood changed from disenchantment to pity to suspicion—and I wish that now I could rid myself of this present lucidity and recover that same vacillation between mystic illusion and the presentiment of a trap; recover what I thought then as I mulled over the documents I had read so frantically the day before and reread that morning at the airport and during the flight to Paris.
How irresponsibly Belbo, Diotallevi, and I had rewritten the world, or—as Diotallevi would have put it—had rediscovered what in the Book had been engraved at white heat between the black lines formed by the letters, like black insects, that supposedly made the Torah clear!
And now, two days later, having achieved, I hope, serenity and amor fati, I can tell the story I reconstructed so anxiously (hoping it was false) inside the periscope, the story I had read two days ago in Belbo’s apartment, the story I had lived for twelve years between Pilade’s whiskey and the dust of Garamond Press.
BINAH
Do not expect too much of the end of the world.
—Stanisław J. Lec, Aforyzmy. Fraszki, Kraków, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977, “Myśli nieuczesane”
To enter a university a year or two after 1968 was like being admitted to the Académie de Saint-Cyr in 1793: you felt your birth date was wrong. Jacopo Belbo, who was almost fifteen years older than I, later convinced me that every generation feels this way. You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature.
My father, not because he was stingy, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. “The purpose of this magazine,” I pontificated, quoting the ad, “is to educate the reader in an entertaining way.” “The purpose of your magazine,” my father replied without looking up from his paper, “is the purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it can.”
That day, I began to be incredulous.
Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.
Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.
Incredulity doesn’t kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don’t believe in them, the collision of two ideas—both false—can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.
“You live on the surface,” Lia told me years later. “You sometimes seem profound, but it’s only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you tried to stand it up.”
“Are you saying I’m superficial?”
“No,” she answered. “What others call profundity is only a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. You walk in one side and come out another, and you’re in their universe, which can’t coexist with yours.”
(Lia, now that They have walked into the cube and invaded our world, I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. And it was all my fault: I made Them believe there was a depth, a depth that They, in their weakness, desired.)
What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can’t hurt, and you might get better.
So there I was, in the midst of the Revolution, or at least in the most stupendous imitation of it, seeking an honorable faith. It was honorable, for example, to take part in rallies and marches. I chanted “Fascist scum, your time has come!” with everybody else.
I never threw paving stones or ball bearings, out of fear that others might do unto me as I did unto them, but I experienced a kind of moral excitement escaping along narrow downtown streets when the police charged. I would come home with the sense of having performed a duty. In the meetings I remained untouched by the disagreements that divided the various groups: I always had the feeling that if you substituted the right phrase for another phrase, you
