I went to the office. Gudrun welcomed me with the acid remark that she had to keep the business going all on her own. I found the envelope, the keys, and rushed to Belbo's apartment.
The stale, rancid smell of cigarette butts, the ashtrays all brimming. The kitchen sink piled nigh with dirty dishes, the garbage bin full of disemboweled cans. On a shelf in the study, three empty bottles of whiskey, and a little left¡Xtwo fingers¡Xin a fourth bottle. This was the apartment of a man who had worked nonstop for days without budging, eating only when he had to, working furiously, like an addict.
There were two rooms in all, books piled in every corner, shelves sagging under their weight. The table with the computer, printer, and boxes of disks. A few pictures in the space not occupied by shelves. Directly opposite the table, a seventeenth-century print carefully framed, an allegory I hadn't noticed last month, when I came up to have a beer before going off on my vacation.
On the table, a photograph of Lorenza Pellegrini, with an inscription in a tiny, almost childish hand. You saw only her face, but her eyes were unsettling, the look in her eyes. In a gesture of instinctive delicacy (or jealousy?) I turned the photograph facedown, not reading the inscription.
There were folders. I looked through them. Nothing of interest, only accounts, publishing cost estimates. But in the midst of these papers I found the printout of a file that, to judge by its date, must have been one of Belbo's first experiments with the word processor. It was titled "Abu." I remembered, when Abulafia made its appearance in the office, Belbo's infantile enthusiasm, Gudrun's muttering, Diotallevi's sarcasm.
Abu had been Belbo's private reply to his critics, a kind of sophomoric joke, but it said a lot about the combinatory passion with which he had used the machine. Here was a man who had said, with his wan smile, that once he realized that he would never be a protagonist, he decided to become, instead, an intelligent spectator, for there was no point in writing without serious motivation. Better to rewrite the books of others, which is what a good editor does. But Belbo found in the machine a kind of LSD and ran his fingers over the keyboard as if inventing variations on "The Happy Farmer" on the old piano at home, without fear of being judged. Not that he thought he was being creative: terrified as he was by writing, he knew that this was not writing but only the testing of an electronic skill. A gymnastic exercise. But, forgetting die usual ghosts that haunted him, he discovered that playing with the word processor was a way of giving vent to a fifty-year-old's second adolescence. His natural pessimism, his reluctant acceptance of his own past were somehow dissolved in this dialog with a memory that was inorganic, objective, obedient, nonmoral, transistorized, and so humanly inhuman that it enabled him to forget his chronic nervousness about life.
FILENAME: Abu
O what a beautiful morning at the end of November, in the beginning was the word, sing to me, goddess, the son of Peleus, Achilles, now is the winter of our discontent. Period, new paragraph. Testing testing parakalo, parakalo, with the right program you can even make anagrams, if you've written a novel with a Confederate hero named Rhett Butler and a fickle girl named Scarlett and then change your mind, all you have to do is punch a key and Abu will global replace the Rhett Butlers to Prince Andreis, the Scarletts to Natashas, Atlanta to Moscow, and lo! you've written war and peace.
Abu, do another thing now: Belbo orders Abu to change all words, make each "a" become "akka" and each "o" become "ulla," for a paragraph to look almost Finnish.
Akkabu, dulla akkanullather thing nullaw: Belbulla ullarders Ak-kabu tulla chakkange akkall wullards, makkake eakkach "akka" be-cullame "akkakkakka" akkand eakkach "ulla" becullame "ullakka," fullar akka pakkarakkagrakkaph tulla lullaullak akkalmullast Finnish.
O joy, O new vertigo of difference, O my platonic reader-writer racked by a most platonic insomnia, O wake of finnegan, O animal charming and benign. He doesn't help you think but he helps you because you have to think for him. A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goose quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type, the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him (it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you are borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light of critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter.
An loo what I doo now, I tak this pac of speling monnstrosties an I orderr the macchin to coppy them an file them in temrary memry an then brring them bak from tha limbo onto the scren, folowing itsel.
There, I was typing blindly, but now I have taken that pack of spelling monstrosities and ordered the machine to copy the mess, and on the copy I made all the corrections, so it comes out perfect on the page. From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola. Repenting, I could have deleted the first draft. I left it to show how the "is" and the "ought," accident and necessity, can co-exist on this screen. If I wanted, I could remove the offending passage from the screen but not from the memory, thereby creating an archive of my repressions while denying omnivorous Freudians and virtuosi of variant texts the pleasure of conjecture, the exercise of their occupation, their academic glory.
This is better than real memory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns to remember but not to forget. Diotallevi goes Sephardically mad over those palaces with grand staircases, that statue of a warrior doing something unspeakable to a defenseless woman, the corridors with hundreds of rooms, each with the depiction of a portent, and the sudden apparitions, disturbing incidents, walking mummies. To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea, processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of gymnosophists¡X and so on, to infinity. O Raimundo, O Camillo, you had only to cast your mind back to your visions and immediately you could reconstruct the great chain of being, in love and joy, because all that was disjointed in the universe was joined in a single volume in your mind, and Proust would have made you smile. But when Diotallevi and I tried to construct an ars oblivionalis that day, we couldn't come up with rules for forgetting. It's impossible. It's one thing to go in search of a lost time, chasing labile clues, like Hop-o'-My-Thumb in the woods, and quite another deliberately to misplace time refound. Hop-o'-My-Thumb always comes home, like an obsession. There is no discipline of forgetting; we are at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke and amnesia, and such self-interventions as drugs, alcohol, or suicide.
Abu, however, can perform on himself precise local suicides, temporary amnesias, painless aphasias.
Where were you last night, L
There, indiscreet reader: you will never know it, but that half-line hanging in space was actually the beginning of a long sentence that I wrote but then wished I hadn't, wished I hadn't even thought let alone written it, wished that it had never happened. So I pressed a key, and a milky film spread over the fatal and inopportune lines, and I pressed DELETE and, whoosh, all gone.
But that's not all. The problem with suicide is that sometimes you jump out the window and then change your mind between the eighth floor and the seventh. "Oh, if only I could go back!" Sorry, you can't, too bad. Splat. Abu, on the other hand, is merciful, he grants you the right to change your mind: you can recover your deleted text by pressing RETRIEVE. What a relief! Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget.
Never again will I go from one bar to another, disintegrating alien spacecraft with tracer bullets, until the invader monster disintegrates me. This is far more beautiful: here you disintegrate thoughts instead of aliens. The screen is a galaxy of thousands and thousands of asteroids, all in a row, white or green, and you have created them yourself. Fiat Lux, Big Bang, seven days, seven minutes, seven seconds, and a universe is born before your eyes, a universe in consta
nt flux, where sharp lines in space and time do not exist. No numerus Clausius here, no constraining law of thermodynamics. The letters bubble indolently to the surface, they emerge from nothingness and obediently return to nothingness, dissolving like ectoplasm. It's an underwater symphony of soft linkings and unlinkings, a gelatinous dance of self-devouring moons, like the big fish in the Yellow Submarine. At a touch of your fingertip the irreparable slides backward toward a hungry word and disappears into its maw with a slump, then darkness. If you don't stop, the word swallows itself as well, fattening on its own absence like a Cheshire-cat black hole.
And if you happen to write what modesty forbids, it all goes onto a floppy disk, and you can give the disk a password, and no one will be able to read you. Excellent for secret agents. You write the message, save it, then put the disk in your pocket and walk off. Not even Tor-quemada could find out what you've written: It's between you and it (It?). And if they torture you, you pretend to confess; you start entering the password, then press a secret key, and the message disappears forever. Oh, I'm so sorry, you say, my hand slipped, an accident, and now it's gone. What was it? I don't remember. It wasn't important. I have no Message to reveal. But later on¡Xwho knows?¡XI might.
4
He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the key resembles a man who would walk without feet.
¡XMichael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Oppenheim, De Bry, 1618, emblem XXVII
That was the only file that had been printed out. I would have to go through the disks on the computer. They were arranged by number, and I thought I might as well start with the first. But Belbo had mentioned a password. He had always been possessive with Abulafia's secrets.
When I loaded the machine, a message promptly appeared: "Do you have the password?" Not in the imperative. Belbo was a polite man.
The machine doesn't volunteer its help. It must be given the word; without the word, it won't talk. As though it were saying: "Yes, what you want to know is right here hi my guts. Go ahead and dig, dig, old mole; you'll never find it." We'll see about that, I said to myself; you got such a kick out of playing with Diotallevi's permutations and combinations, and you were the Sam Spade of publishing. As Jacopo Belbo would have said: Find the falcon.
* * *
The password to get into Abulafia had to be seven letters or fewer. Letters or numbers. How many groups of seven could be made from all the letters of the alphabet, including the possibility of repetition, since there was no reason the word couldn't be "cadabra"? I knew the formula. The number was six billion and something. A giant calculator capable of running through all six billion at the rate of a million per second would still have to feed them to Abulafia one at a time. And it took Abulafia about ten seconds to ask for the password and verify it. That made sixty billion seconds. There were over thirty-one million seconds in a year. Say thirty, to have a round figure. It would take, therefore, two thousand years to go through all the possibilities. Nice work.
I would have to proceed, instead, by inductive guesswork. What word would Belbo have chosen? Was it a word he had decided on at the start, when he began using the machine, or was it one he had come up with only recently, when he realized that these disks were dangerous and that, for him at least, the game was no longer a game? This would make a big difference.
Better assume the latter, I thought. Belbo feels he is being hunted by the Plan, which he now takes seriously (as he told me on the phone). For a password, then, he would use some term connected with our story.
But maybe not: a term associated with the Tradition might also occur to Them. Then I thought: What if They had already broken into the apartment and made copies of the disks, and were now, at this very moment, trying all the combinations of letters in some remote place? Using the supreme computer, in a castle in the Carpathians.
Nonsense, I told myself. They weren't computer people. They would use the notarikon, the gematria, the temurah, treating the disks like the Torah, and therefore would require as much time as had passed since the writing of the Sefer Yesirah. No, if They existed, They would proceed cabalistically, and if Belbo believed that They existed, he would follow the same path.
Just to be on the safe side, I tried the ten Sefirot: Keter, Hokh-mah, Binah, Hesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Nezah, Hod, Yesod, Malkhut. They didn't work, of course: it was the first thing that would have occurred to anyone.
Still, the word had to be something obvious, something that would come to mind at once, because when you work on a text as obsessively as Belbo must have during the past few days, you can't think of anything else, of any other subject. It would not be human for him to drive himself crazy over the Plan and at the same time pick Lincoln or Mombasa for the password. The password had to be connected with the Plan. But what?
I tried to put myself inside Belbo's head. He had been chainsmoking as he wrote, and drinking. I went to the kitchen for a clean glass, found only one, poured myself the last of the whiskey, sat down at the keyboard again, leaned back in the chair, and propped my feet on the table. I sipped my drink (wasn't that how Sam Spade did it? Or was it Philip Marlowe?) and looked around. The books were too far away; I couldn't read the titles on their spines.
I finished the whiskey, shut my eyes, opened them again. Facing me was the seventeenth-century engraving, a typical Rosi-crucian allegory of the period, rich in coded messages addressed to the members of the Fraternity. Obviously it depicted the Temple of the Rosy-Cross, a tower surmounted by a dome in accordance with the Renaissance iconographic model, both Christian and Jewish, of the Temple of Jerusalem, reconstructed on the pattern of the Mosque of Omar.
The landscape around the tower was incongruous, and inhabited incongruously, like one of those rebuses where you see a palace, a frog in the foreground, a mule with its pack, and a king receiving a gift from a page. In the lower left was a gentleman emerging from a well, clinging to a pulley that was attached, through ridiculous winches, to some point inside the tower, the rope passing through a circular window. In the center were a horseman and a wayfarer. On the right, a kneeling pilgrim held a heavy anchor as though it were his staff. Along the right margin, almost opposite the tower, was a precipice from which a character with a sword was falling, and on the other side, foreshortened, stood Mount Ararat, the Ark aground on its summit. In each of the upper corners was a cloud illuminated by a star that cast oblique rays along which two figures floated, a nude man in the coils of a serpent, and a swan. At the top center, a nimbus was surmounted by the word "Oriens" and bore Hebrew letters from which the hand of God emerged to hold the tower by a string.
The tower moved on wheels. Its main part was square, with windows, a door, and a drawbridge on the right. Higher up, there was a kind of gallery with four observation turrets, each turret occupied by an armed man who waved a palm branch and carried a shield decorated with Hebrew letters. Only three of these men were visible; the fourth had to be imagined, since he was behind the octagonal dome, from which rose a lantern, also octagonal, with a pair of great wings affixed. Above the winged lantern was another, smaller, cupola, with a quadrangular turret whose open arches, supported by slender columns, revealed a bell inside. To the final small four-vaulted dome at the top was tied the thread held by the hand of God. The word "Fa/ma" appeared here, and above that, a scroll that read "Collegium Fraternitatis."
There were other oddities. An enormous arm, out of all proportion to the figures, jutted from a round window in the tower on the left. It held a sword, and belonged perhaps to the winged creature shut up in the tower. From a similar window on the right jutted a great trumpet. Once again, the trumpet.
The number of openings in the tower drew my attention. There were too many of them, and the ones in the dome were too regular, whereas the ones in the base seemed random. Since only half the tower was shown in this orthogonal perspective, you could assume that symmetry was preserved and the doors, windows, and portholes on this side were repeated in the same order on
the other side. That would mean, altogether, four arches in the dome of the bell tower, eight windows in the lower dome, four turrets, six openings in the east and west facades, and fourteen in the north and south facades. I added it up.
Thirty-six. For more than ten years that number had haunted me. The Rosicrucians. One hundred and twenty divided by thirty-six came to 3.333333, going to seven digits. Almost too perfect, but it was worth a try. I tried. And failed.
It occurred to me then that the same number, multiplied by two, yielded the number of the Beast: 666. That guess also proved too farfetched.
Suddenly I was struck by the nimbus in the middle, the divine throne. The Hebrew letters were large; I could see them even from my chair. But Belbo couldn't write Hebrew on Abulafia. I took a closer look: I knew them, of course, from right to left, yod, he, vav, he. The Tetragrammaton, Yahweh, the name of God.
5
And begin by combining this name, YHWH, at the beginning alone, and examine all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the fear of confusion of your imagination and the rolling about of your thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask it, until there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not abandon it.
¡XAbulafia, Hayye ha-Nefes, MS Munchen 408, fols. 65a-65b
The name of God...Of course! I remembered the first conversation between Belbo and Diotallevi, the day Abulafia was set up in the office.
Diotallevi was at the door of his room, pointedly tolerant. Diotallevi's tolerance was always exasperating, but Belbo didn't seem to mind it. He tolerated it.
Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum Page 3