by Umberto Eco
In time I lost any sense of contradiction, just as I gradually abandoned any attempt to distinguish the different races in that land of age-old, unbridled hybridization. I gave up trying to establish where progress lay, and where revolution, or to see the plot—as Amparo's comrades expressed it—of capitalism. How could I continue to think like a European once I learned that the hopes of the far left were kept alive by a Nordeste bishop suspected of having harbored Nazi sympathies in his youth but who now faithfully and fearlessly held high the torch of revolt, upsetting the wary Vatican and the barracudas of Wall Street, and joyfully inflaming the atheism of the proletarian mystics won over by the tender yet menacing banner of a Beautiful Lady who, pierced by seven sorrows, gazed down on the sufferings of her people?
One morning Amparo and I were driving along the coast after having attended a seminar on the class structure of the lumpenproletariat. I saw some votive offerings on the beach, little candles, white garlands. Amparo told me they were offerings to Yemanjá, goddess of the waters. We stopped, and she got out and walked demurely onto the sand, stood a few moments in silence. I asked her if she believed in this. She retorted angrily: How could I think such a thing? Then she added, "My grandmother used to bring me to the beach here, and she would pray to the goddess to make me grow up beautiful and good and happy. Who was that Italian philosopher who made that comment about black cats and coral horns? 'It's not true, but I believe in it'? Well, I don't believe in it, but it's true." That was the day I decided to save some money to venture a trip to Bahia.
It was also the day I began to let myself be lulled by feelings of resemblance: the notion that everything might be mysteriously related to everything else.
Later, when I returned to Europe, I converted this metaphysics into mechanics—and thus fell into the trap in which I now lie. But back then I was living in a twilight that blurred all distinctions. Like a racist, I believed that a strong man could regard the faiths of others as an opportunity for harmless daydreaming and no more.
I learned some rhythms, ways of letting go with body and mind. Recalling them the other evening in the periscope, to fight off growing numbness I moved my limbs as if I were once again striking the agogô. You see? I said to myself. To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don't believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn't exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone.
What happened to me was like what might happen to a pedantic ethnologist who has spent years studying cannibalism. He challenges the smugness of the whites by assuring everybody that actually human flesh is delicious. Then one day a doubter decides to see for himself and performs the experiment—on him. As the ethnologist is devoured piece by piece, he hopes, for he will never know who was right, that at least he is delicious, which will justify the ritual and his death. The other evening I had to believe the Plan was true, because if it wasn't, then I had spent the past two years as the omnipotent architect of an evil dream. Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
24
Sauvez la faible Aischa des vertiges de Nahash, sauvez la plaintive Héva des mirages de la sensibilité, et que les Khérubs me gardent.
—Joséphin Péladan, Comment on devient Fée, Paris, Chamuel, 1893, p. XIII
As I was advancing into the forest of resemblances, I received Belbo's letter.
Dear Casaubon,
I didn't know until the other day that you were in Brazil. I lost touch completely, not even knowing that you had graduated (congratulations). Anyway, someone at Pilade's gave me your coordinates, and I thought it would be a good idea to bring you up to date on some developments in that unfortunate Colonel Ardenti business. It's been more than two years now, I know, and again I must apologize: I was the one who got you into trouble that morning, though I didn't mean to.
I had almost forgotten the whole nasty story, but two weeks ago I was driving around in the Montefeltro area and happened upon the fortress of San Leo. In the eighteenth century, it seems, the region was under papal rule, and the pope imprisoned Cagliostro there, in a cell with no real door (you entered it, for the first and last time, through a trapdoor in the ceiling) and with one little window from which the prisoner could see only the two churches of the village. I saw a bunch of roses on the shelf where Cagliostro had slept and died, and I was told that many devotees still make the pilgrimage to the place of his martyrdom. Among the most assiduous pilgrims are the members of Picatrix, a group of Milanese students of the occult. It publishes a magazine entitled—with great imagination— Picatrix.
You know how curious I am about these oddities. So back in Milan I got hold of a copy of Picatrix, from which I learned that an evocation of the spirit of Cagliostro was to be held in a few days. I went.
The walls were draped with banners covered with cabalistic signs, an abundance of owls of all kinds, scarabs and ibises, and Oriental divinities of uncertain origin. Near the rear wall was a dais, a proscenium of burning torches held up by rough logs, and in the background an altar with a triangular altarpiece and statuettes of Isis and Osiris. The room was ringed by an amphitheater of figures of Anubis, and there was a portrait of Cagliostro (it could hardly have been of anyone else, could it?), a gilded mummy in Cheops format, two five-armed candelabra, a gong suspended from two rampant snakes, on a podium a lectern covered by calico printed with hieroglyphics, and two crowns, two tripods, a little portable sarcophagus, a throne, a fake seventeenth-century fauteuil, four unmatched chairs suitable for a banquet with the sheriff of Nottingham, and candles, tapers, votive lights, all flickering very spiritually.
Anyway, to go on with the story: seven altar boys entered in red cassocks and carrying torches, followed by the celebrant, apparently the head of Picatrix—he rejoiced in the commonplace name of Brambilla—in pink-and-olive vestments. He was, in turn, followed by the neophyte, or medium, and six acolytes in white, who all looked like Bing Crosby, but with infulas, the god's, if you recall our poets.
Brambilla put on a triple crown with a half-moon, picked up a ritual sword, drew magic symbols on the dais, and summoned various angelic spirits with names ending in "el." At this point I was vaguely reminded of those pseudo-Semitic incantations in Ingolf's message, but only for a moment, because I was immediately distracted by something unusual. The microphones on the dais were connected to a tuner that was supposed to pick up random waves in space, but the operator must have made a mistake, because first we heard a burst of disco music and then Radio Moscow came on. Brambilla opened the sarcophagus, took out a book of magic spells, swung a thurible, and cried, "O Lord, Thy kingdom come." This seemed to achieve something, because Radio Moscow fell silent, but then, at the most magical moment, it came on again, with a drunken Cossack song, the kind they dance to with their behinds scraping the ground. Brambilla invoked the Clavicula Salomonis, risked self-immolation by burning a parchment on a tripod, summoned several divinities of the temple of Karnak, testily asked to be placed on the cubic stone of Yesod, and insistently called out for "Familiar 39," who must have been familiar enough to the audience, since a shiver ran through the hall. One woman sank into a trance, her eyes rolling back until only the whites were visible. People called for a doctor, but Brambilla invoked the Power of the Pentacles, and the neophyte, who had meanwhile sat down on the fake fauteuil, began to writhe and groan. Brambilla hovered over her, anxiously asking questions of her, or, rather, of Familiar 39, who, I suddenly realized, was Cagliostro himself.
And now came the disturbing part, because the pathetic girl seemed to be in real pain: she trembled, sweated, bellowed, and began to speak in broken phrases of a temple and a door that must be opened. She said a vortex of power was being created, and we had to asce
nd to the Great Pyramid. Brambilla, up on the dais, became agitated; he banged the gong and called Isis in a loud voice. I was enjoying the performance until I heard the girl, still sighing and moaning, say something about six seals, a one-hundred-and-twenty-vear wait, and thirty-six invisibles. Now, there could be no doubt: she was talking about the message of Provins. I waited to hear more, but the girl slumped back, exhausted. Brambilla stroked her brow, blessed the audience with his thurible, and proclaimed the rite over.
I was slightly awed, and also eager to understand. I tried to move closer to the girl, who in the meantime had come to her senses, slipped into a scruffy overcoat, and was on her way out through the rear exit. I was about to touch her on the shoulder, when I felt someone grasp my arm. I turned and it was Inspector De Angelis, who told me to let her go: he knew where to find her. He invited me out for coffee. I went, as if he had caught me doing something wrong, which in a sense he had. At the café he asked me what I was doing there and why I had tried to approach the girl. This irritated me. We aren't living in a dictatorship, I said. I can approach anyone I choose. He apologized and explained that, although the Ardenti investigation had no priority, they had tried to reconstruct the two days he had spent in Milan before his meeting at Garamond and with the mysterious Rakosky. A year after Ardenti's disappearance, the police had found out, by sheer luck, that someone had seen him leaving the Picatrix offices in the company of the psychic girl, who, incidentally, was of interest to De Angelis because she lived with an individual not unknown to the narcotics squad.
I told him I was there by chance, and I had been struck by the fact that the girl had spoken a phrase about six seals, which I had heard from the colonel. He remarked how strange it was that I could remember so clearly what the colonel said two years ago, yet, at the time, I had spoken only of some vague talk about the treasure of the Templars. I replied that the colonel had indeed said that the treasure was protected by six seals of some kind, but I hadn't considered this an important detail because all treasures are protected by seals, usually seven, and by gold bugs. He observed that if all treasures were protected by gold bugs, he couldn't see why I should have been struck by what the girl had said. I asked him to stop treating me like a suspect, and he laughed and changed his tone. He said he didn't find it strange that the girl had said what she did, because Ardenti must have talked to her about his fantasies, perhaps trying to use her to establish some astral contact, as they say in those circles. A psychic, he went on, was like a sponge, a photographic plate with an unconscious that must look like an amusement park. The Picatrix bunch probably give her a brainwashing all year round, so it was not unlikely that once in a trance—because the girl was in earnest, wasn't faking, and there was something wrong with her head—she would see images that had been impressed on her long ago.
But two days later De Angelis dropped in at the office to say that, curiously enough, when he went to see the girl the day after the ceremony, she was gone. The neighbors said nobody had seen her since the afternoon before the evening of the ceremony. His suspicions were aroused, so he entered the apartment and found it torn to pieces: sheets on the floor, pillows in one corner, trampled newspapers, emptied drawers. No sign of her. Or of her boyfriend, or roommate or whatever you wanted to call him.
He told me that if I knew anything more, I'd be wise to talk, because it was strange how the girl had disappeared into thin air, and he could think of only two reasons: either somebody realized that De Angelis had her under surveillance, or it was noticed that one Jacopo Belbo had tried to talk to her. The things she had said in the trance might therefore have concerned something serious, some unfinished business. They—whoever they were—hadn't realized she knew so much. "Now suppose some colleague of mine gets it into his head that you killed her," De Angelis added with a beautiful smile. "You can see we have every interest in working together." I almost lost my temper, and God knows I don't do that often. I asked him why a person who's not home is assumed to have been murdered, and he asked if I remembered what happened to the colonel. Then I told him that if she had been killed, or kidnapped, it must have happened that evening, when I was with him. He asked how I could be so sure of that, since we had said good-bye around midnight and he had no way of knowing what had happened after that. I asked him if he was serious, and he said what, hadn't I ever read a detective story? Didn't I know that the prime suspect was always the one who didn't have an alibi as radiant as Hiroshima? He said he would donate his head to an organ bank if I had an alibi for the time between one A.M. and the next morning.
What can I say, Casaubon? Maybe I should have told him the truth, but where I come from, men are stubborn and never back down.
I'm writing you because if I found your address, then De Angelis can find it, too. If he gets in touch with you, at least you know the line I've taken. But since it doesn't seem a very straight line to me, go ahead and tell him everything if you want to. I'm embarrassed, I apologize. I feel like some kind of accomplice. Try as I might, I can't seem to find any noble justification for myself. Must be my peasant origins; in our part of the country, we're a mean bunch.
The whole thing is—as the Germans say—unheimlich.
Yours,
Jacopo Belbo
25
...of these mysterious initiates—now become numerous, bold, conspiring—all was born: Jesuitism, magnetism, Martinism, philosopher's stone, somnambulism, eclecticism.
—C.-L. Cadet-Gassicourt, Le tombeau de Jacques de Molay, Paris, Desenne, 1797, p. 91
The letter upset me. Not that I was afraid of being tracked down by De Angelis—we were in different hemispheres, after all—but for less definable reasons. At the time, I thought I was upset because a world I had left behind had bounced back at me. But today I realize that what bothered me was yet another strand of resemblance, the suspicion of an analogy. I was annoyed, too, at having to deal with Belbo again, Belbo and his eternal guilty conscience. I decided not to mention the letter to Amparo.
A reassuring second letter arrived from Belbo two days later.
The story of the psychic had had a reasonable ending. A police informer reported that the girl's lover had been involved in a settling of scores over a drug shipment, which he had sold retail instead of delivering it to the honest wholesaler who had already paid. They frown on that sort of behavior in those circles, and he vanished to save his neck. Obviously he took the woman with him. Rummaging then among the newspapers left in their apartment, De Angelis found some magazines on the order of Picatrix, with a series of articles heavily underlined in red. One was about the treasure of the Templars, another about Rosicrucians who lived in a castle, cave, or some damn place where "post CXX annos patebo" was written and they called themselves the thirty-six invisibles. So for De Angelis it was all clear. The psychic, consuming the same sort of literature that the colonel had, regurgitated it when she was in a trance. The matter was closed, passed on to the narcotics squad.
Belbo's letter exuded relief. De Angelis's explanation seemed the most economical.
The other evening in the periscope, I told myself that the facts might have been quite different. Granted, the psychic quoted something she had heard from Ardenti, but it was something her magazines never mentioned, something no one was supposed to know. Whoever had got rid of the colonel was in the Picatrix group, and this someone noticed that Belbo was about to question the psychic, so he eliminated her. To throw the investigators off the track, he also eliminated her lover, then instructed a police informer to say that the couple had fled.
Simple enough, if there was really a plan. But how could there have been? Since we invented "the Plan" ourselves, and only much later was it possible for reality not only to catch up with fiction but actually to precede it, or, rather, to rush ahead of it and repair the damage that it would cause.
At the time, though, in Brazil, these were not my thoughts on receiving Belbo's second letter. Instead, I felt once more that something was resembling something else
. I had been thinking about my trip to Bahia and had spent an afternoon visiting bookstores and shops that sold cult objects, places I had ignored till then. I went to out-of-the-way little emporiums crammed with statues and idols. I purchased perfumadores of Yemanjá, pungently scented mystical smoke sticks, incense, sweetish spray cans labeled "Sacred Heart of Jesus," cheap amulets. I also found many books, some for devotees, others for people studying devotees, a mixture of exorcism manuals like Como adivinhar o futuro na bola de cristal and anthropology textbooks. And a monograph on the Rosicrucians.
Suddenly it all seemed to come together: satanic and Moorish rites in the Temple of Jerusalem, African witchcraft for the subproletarians of the Brazilian Northeast, the message of Provins with its hundred and twenty years, and the hundred and twenty years of the Rosicrucians.