“Occultists seem fickle, wouldn’t you say?” Belbo remarked.
“You must be able to distinguish occultism from esotericism. Esotericism is the search for a learning transmitted only through symbols, closed to the profane. The occultism that spread in the nineteenth century was the tip of the iceberg, the little that surfaced of the esoteric secret. The Templars were initiates, and the proof of that is that when subjected to torture, they died to save their secret. It is the strength with which they concealed it that makes us sure of their initiation, and that makes us yearn to know what they knew.
The occultist is an exhibitionist. As Péladan said, an initiatory secret revealed is of no use to anyone. Unfortunately, Péladan was not an initiate, but an occultist. The nineteenth century was the century of informers. Everybody rushed to publish the secrets of magic, theurgy, cabala, tarot. And perhaps they believed in it.”
Agliè continued looking over our list, with an occasional snicker of commiseration. “Elena Petrovna. A good woman, at heart, but she never said a thing that hadn’t already been written everywhere….Guaita, a drug-addict bibliomane. Papus: What a character!” Then he stopped abruptly. “Tres … Where does this come from? Which manuscript?”
Good, I thought, he’s noticed the interpolation. I answered vaguely: “Well, we put together the list from so many texts. Most of them have already been returned. They were plain rubbish. Do you recall, Belbo, where this Tres comes from?”
“I don’t think I do. Diotallevi?”
“It was days ago … Is it important?”
“Not at all,” Agliè said. “It’s just that I never heard of it before. You really can’t tell me who mentioned it?”
We were terribly sorry, we didn’t remember.
Agliè took his watch from his vest. “Heavens, I have another engagement. You gentlemen will forgive me.”
He left, and we stayed on, talking.
“It’s all clear now. The English Templars put forth the Masonic proposal in order to make all the initiates of Europe rally around the Baconian plan.”
“But the plan only half-succeeds. The idea of the Baconians is so fascinating that it produces results contrary to their expectations. The so-called Scottish line sees the new conventicle as a way to reestablish the succession, and it makes contact with the German Templars.”
“To Agliè, what happened made no sense. But it’s obvious—to us, now. The various national groups entered the lists, one against the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if Martínez Pasqualis was an agent of the Tomar group. The English rejected the Scottish; then there were the French, obviously divided into two groups, pro-English and pro-German. Masonry was the cover, the pretext behind which all these agents of different groups—God knows where the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites were—met and clashed, each trying to tear a piece of the secret from the others.”
“Masonry was like Rick’s in Casablanca,” Belbo said. “Which turns upside down the common view that it is a secret society.”
“No, no, it’s a free port, a Macao. A façade. The secret is elsewhere.”
“Poor Masons.”
“Progress demands its victims. But you must admit we are uncovering an immanent rationality of history.”
“The rationality of history is the result of a good recombining of the Torah,” Diotallevi said. “And that’s what we’re doing, and blessed be the name of the Most High.”
“All right,” Belbo said. “Now the Baconians have Saint-Martin-des-Champs, while the Franco-Roman neo-Templar line is breaking down into a hundred sects…. And we still haven’t decided what this secret is all about.”
“That’s up to you two,” Diotallevi said.
“Us two? All three of us are in this. If we don’t come out honorably, we’ll all look silly.”
“Silly to whom?”
“Why, to history. Before the tribunal of Truth.”
“Quid est veritas?” Belbo asked.
“Us,” I said.
This herb is called Devilbane by the Philosophers. It has been demonstrated that only its seed can expel devils and their hallucinations…. When given to a young woman who was tormented by a devil during the night, this herb made him flee.
—Johannes de Rupescissa, Tractatus de Quinta Essentia, II
During the next few days, I neglected the Plan. Lia’s pregnancy was coming to term, and whenever possible I stayed with her. I was anxious, but she calmed me, saying the time had not yet come. She was taking a course in painless childbirth, and I was trying to follow her exercises. Lia had rejected science’s offer to tell us the baby’s sex in advance. She wanted to be surprised. Accepting this eccentricity on her part, I touched her belly and did not ask myself what would come out. We called it the Thing.
I asked how I could take part in the birth. “It’s mine, too, this Thing,” I said. “I don’t want to be one of those movie fathers, pacing up and down the corridor, chain-smoking.”
“Pow, there’s only so much you can do. The moment comes when it’s all up to me. Besides, you don’t smoke. Surely you’re not going to start smoking just for this occasion.”
“‘What’ll I do, then?”
“You’ll take part before and afterward. Afterward, if it’s a boy, you’ll teach him, guide him, give him a fine old Oedipus complex in the usual way, with a smile you’ll play out the ritual parricide when the time comes—no fuss—and at some point you’ll show him your squalid office, the card files, the page proofs of the wonderful adventure of metals, and you’ll say to him, ‘My son, one day all this will be yours.’”
“And if it’s a girl?”
“You’ll say to her, ‘My daughter, one day all this will be your no-good husband’s.’”
“And what do I do before?”
“During labor, between one wave of pain and the next, you have to count, because as the interval grows shorter, the moment approaches. We’ll count together, and you’ll set the rhythm for me, like rowers in a galley. It’ll be as if you, too, were coaxing the Thing out from its dark lair. Poor little Thing … Feel it. Now it’s so cozy there in the dark, sucking up humors like an octopus, all free, and then—wham—it pops out into the daylight, blinks, and says, Where the hell am I?”
“Poor little Thing. And it hasn’t even met Signor Garamond. Come on, let’s rehearse the counting part.”
We counted in the darkness, holding hands. I daydreamed. The Thing, with its birth, would give reality and meaning to all the old wives’ tales of the Diabolicals. Poor Diabolicals, who spent their nights enacting chemical weddings with the hope that eighteen-karat gold would result and wondering if the philosopher’s stone was really the lapis exillis, a wretched terra-cotta grail—and my grail was in Lia’s belly.
“Yes,” Lia said, running her hand over her swelling, taut vessel, “here is where your good primal matter is steeping. Those people you saw at the castle, what did they think happened in the vessel?”
“Oh, they thought that melancholy was grumbling in it, sulfurous earth, black lead, oil of Saturn, a Styx of purifications, distillations, pulverizations, ablutions, liquefactions, submersions, terra foetida, stinking sepulcher…”
“What are they, impotent? Don’t they know that in the vessel our Thing ripens, all white and pink and beautiful?”
“They know, but for them your dear little belly is also a metaphor, full of secrets….”
“There are no secrets, Pow. We know exactly how the Thing is formed, its little nerves and muscles, its little eyes and spleens and pancreases …”
“Oh my God, more than one spleen? What is it, Rosemary’s baby?”
“I was speaking in general. But of course we’ll have to be ready to love it even if it has two heads.”
“Of course! I’ll teach it to play duets: trumpet and clarinet….No, then it would need four hands, and that’s too many. But, come to think about it, he’d make a great pianist. A concerto for two left hands? Nothing to it! Brr … But then, my Diabolicals also know that on that day, in the hospital, there will be born the Great Work, the White, the Rebis, the androgyne….”
“That’s all we need. Listen. We’ll call him Giulio, or her Giulia, after my grandfather. What do you say?”
“I like it. Good.”
If I had only stopped there. If I had only written a white book, a good grimoire, for all the adepts of Isis Unveiled, explaining to them that the secretum secretorum no longer needed to be sought, that the book of life contained no hidden meaning; it was all there, in the bellies of all the Lias of the world, in the hospital rooms, on straw pallets, on riverbanks, and that the stones in exile and the Holy Grail were nothing but screaming monkeys with their umbilical cord still dangling and the doctor giving them a slap on the ass. And that the Unknown Superiors, in the eyes of the Thing, were only me and Lia, and the Thing would immediately recognize us, without having to go ask that old fool de Maistre.
But no. We, the sardonic, insisted on playing games with the Diabolicals, on showing them that if there had to be a cosmic plot, we could invent the most cosmic of all.
Serves you right, I said to myself that other evening. Now here you are, waiting for what will happen under Foucault’s
