by Umberto Eco
He raises his hand in a hypocritical gesture of benediction. "I am not I am that I am," he says to me with a smile that contains nothing human.
It is true: this has always been the Jesuits' method. Sometimes they deny their own existence, and sometimes they proclaim the power of their order to intimidate the uninitiated.
"We are always other than what you think, sons of Belial," that seducer of sovereigns says now, "But you, O Saint-Germain..."
"How do you know who I really am?" I ask, alarmed.
He sneers. "We met in other times, when you tried to pull me away from the deathbed of Postel, when under the name of Abbé d'Herblay I led you to end one of your incarnations in the heart of the Bastille. (Oh, how I still feel on my face the iron mask to which the Society, with Colbert's help, had sentenced me!) We met when I spied on your secret talks with d'Holbach and Condorcet...."
"Rodin!" I exclaim, thunderstruck.
"Yes, Rodin, the secret general of the Jesuits! Rodin, whom you will not trick into falling through the trapdoor, as you did with the others. Know this, O Saint-Germain: there is no crime, no evil machination that we did not invent before you, to the greater glory of that God of ours who justifies the means! How many crowned heads have we made tumble into the night that has no morning, or into snares more subtle, to achieve dominion over the world! And now, when we are within sight of the goal, you would prevent us from laying our rapacious hands on the secret that for five centuries has moved the history of the world?"
Rodin, speaking in this way, becomes fearsome. All the bloodthirsty ambition, all the execrable sacrilege that had smoldered in the breasts of the Renaissance popes, now appears on the brow of this son of Loyola. I see clearly: an insatiable thirst for power stirs his impure blood, a burning sweat soaks him, a nauseating vapor spreads around him.
How to strike this last enemy? To my aid comes an unexpected intuition ... an intuition that can come only to one from whom the human soul, for centuries, has kept no inviolable secret place.
"Look at me," I say. "I, too, am a Tiger."
With one move I thrust you into the middle of the room, I rip from you your T-shirt, I tear the belt of the skin-tight armor that conceals the charms of your amber belly. Now, in the pale light of the moon that seeps through the half-open door, you stand erect, more beautiful than the serpent that seduced Adam, haughty and lascivious, virgin and prostitute, clad only in your carnal power, because a naked woman is an armed woman.
The Egyptian klaft descends over your thick hair, so black it seems blue; your breast throbs beneath the filmy muslin. The gold uraeus, arched and stubborn, with emerald eyes, flashes on your head its triple tongue of ruby. And oh, your tunic of black gauze with silver glints, your girdle embroidered in sinister rainbows, with black pearls! Your swelling pubis shaved so that for your lovers you are sleek as a statue! Your nipples gently touched by the brush of your Malabar slave girl, who has dipped it into the same carmine that bloodies your lips, inviting as a wound!
Rodin is now panting. The long abstinences of a life spent in a dream of power have only prepared him all the more for enslavement to uncontrollable desire. Faced by this queen, beautiful and shameless, her eyes black as the Devil's, her rounded shoulders, scented hair, white and tender skin, Rodin is seized by the possibility of unknown caresses, ineffable voluptuousness; his flesh yearns as a sylvan god yearns when gazing on a naked nymph mirrored in the water that has already doomed Narcissus. Against the light I see him stiffen, as one petrified by Medusa, sculpted by the desire of a re-pressed virility now at its sunset. The obsessive flame of lust surges through his body; he is like an arrow aimed at its target, a bow drawn to the breaking point.
Suddenly he falls to the floor and crawls before this apparition, his hand extended like a claw to implore a sip of balm.
"Oh, how beautiful you are," he groans, "with those little vixen teeth that gleam when you part your red and swollen lips ... your great emerald eyes that flash, then fade.... Oh, demon of lust!"
He's not all that wrong, the wretch, as you now move your hips, sheathed in their blue denim, and thrust forward your groin to drive the pinball to its supreme folly.
"Vision," Rodin says, "be mine; for just one instant crown with pleasure a life spent in the hard service of a jealous divinity, assuage with one lubricious embrace the eternity of flame to which your sight now plunges me. I beseech you, brush my face with your lips, you Antinea, you Mary Magdalene, you whom I have desired in the presence of saints dazed in ecstasy, whom I have coveted during my hypocritical worship of virginity. O Lady, fair art thou as the sun, white as the moon; lo I deny both God and the saints, and the Roman pontiff himself—no, more, I deny Loyola and the criminal vow that binds me to my Society. A kiss, one kiss, then let me die!"
On numbed knees he crawls, his habit pulled up over his loins, his hand outstretched toward unattainable happiness. Suddenly he falls back, his eyes bulging, his features convulsed, like the unnatural shocks produced by Volta's pile on the face of a corpse. A bluish foam purples his lips; from his mouth comes a strangled hissing, like a hydrophobe's, for when it reaches its paroxysmal phase, as Charcot rightly puts it, this terrible disease, which is satyriasis, the punishment of lust, impresses the same stigmata as rabid madness.
It is the end. Rodin bursts into insane laughter, then crumples to the floor, lifeless, the living image of cadaveric rigor.
In a single moment he went mad and died in mortal sin.
I push the body toward the trapdoor, careful not to dirty my patent-leather boots on the greasy soutane of my last enemy.
There is no need for Luciano's dagger, but the assassin can no longer control his actions, his bestial compulsion to murder over and over. Laughing, he stabs a lifeless, dead cadaver.
***
Now I move with you to the trap's rim, I stroke your throat as you lean forward to enjoy the sccne, I say to you, "Are you pleased with your Rocambole, my inaccessible love?"
And as you nod lasciviously and sneer, drooling into the void, I slowly tighten my fingers.
"What are you doing, my love?"
"Nothing, Sophia. I am killing you. I am now Giuseppe Balsamo and have no further need of you."
The harlot of the Archons dies, drops to the water. With a thrust of his knife, Luciano seconds the verdict of my merciless hand, and I say to him: "Now you can climb up again, my trusty one, my black soul." As he climbs, his back to me, I insert between his shoulder blades a thin stiletto with a triangular blade that leaves hardly a mark. Down he plunges; I close the trapdoor: it is done. I abandon the sordid room as eight bodies float toward the Chatelet by conduits known only to me.
I return to my small apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Honore, I look at myself in the mirror. There, I say to myself, I am the King of the World. From my hollow spire I rule the universe. My power makes my head spin. I am a master of energy. I am drunk with command.
***
Alas, life's vengeance is not slow in coming. Months later, in the deepest crypt of the castle of Tomar, I—now master of the secret of the subterranean currents and lord of the six sacred places of those who had been the Thirty-six Invisibles, last of the last Templars and Unknown Superior of all Unknown Superiors—should win the hand of Cecilia, the androgyne with eyes of ice, from whom nothing now can separate me. I have found her again, after the centuries that intervened since she was stolen from me by the man with the saxophone. Now she walks on the back of the bench as on a tightrope, blue-eyed and blond; nor do I know what she is wearing beneath the filmy tulle that bedecks her.
The chapel has been hollowed from the rock; the altar is surmounted by a canvas depicting the torments of the damned in the bowels of Hell. Some hooded monks stand tenebrously at my side, but I am not disturbed, I am fascinated by the Iberian imagination....
Then—O horror—the canvas is raised, and behind it, the admirable work of some Arcimboldo of caves, another chapel appears, exactly like this one. There before the other al
tar Cecilia is kneeling, and beside her—icy sweat beads my brow, my hair stands on end—whom do I see, mockingly displaying his scar? The Other, the real Giuseppe Balsamo. Someone has freed him from the dungeon of San Leo!
And I? It is at this point that the oldest of the monks raises his hood, and I recognize the ghastly smile of Luciano, who—God knows how—escaped my stiletto, the sewers, the bloody mire that should have dragged his corpse to the silent depths of the ocean. He has gone over to my enemies in his rightful thirst for revenge.
The monks slough off their habits; they are head to toe in armor, a flaming cross on their snow-white cloaks. The Templars of Provins!
They seize me, turn me around, toward an executioner standing between two deformed assistants. I am bent over, and with a searing brand I am made the eternal prey of the jailer as the evil smile of Baphomet is impressed forever on my shoulder. Now I understand: I am to replace Balsamo at San Leo—or, rather, to resume the place that was assigned to me for all eternity.
But they will recognize me, I tell myself, and somebody will surely come to my aid—my accomplices, at least—a prisoner cannot be replaced without anybody's noticing, these are no longer the days of the Iron Mask.... Fool! In a flash I understand, as the executioner forces my head over a copper basin from which greenish fumes are rising: vitriol!
A cloth is placed over my eyes, my face is thrust into the devouring liquid, a piercing unbearable pain, the skin of my cheeks shrivels, my nose, mouth, chin, a moment is all it takes, and as I am pulled up again by the hair, my face is unrecognizable—paraly sis, pox, an indescribable absence of a face, a hymn to hideousness. I will go back to the dungeon like those fugitives who, to avoid recapturc, had the courage to disfigure themselves.
Ah, I cry, defeated, and as the narrator says, one word escapcs my shapeless lips, a sigh, an appeal: Redemption!
But Redemption from what, old Rocambole? You knew better than to try to be a protagonist! You have been punished, and with your own arts. You mocked the creators of illusion, and now—as you see—you write using the alibi of a machine, telling yourself you are a spectator, because you read yourself on the screen as if the words belonged to another, but you have fallen into the trap: you, too, are trying to leave footprints on the sands of time. You have dared to change the text of the romance of the world, and the romance of the world has taken you instead into its coils and involved you in its plot, a plot not of your making.
You would have done better to remain among your islands, Seven Seas Jim, and let her believe you were dead.
98
The National Socialist party did not tolerate secret societies, because it was itself a secret society, with its grand master, its racist gnosis, its rites and initiations.
—René Alleati, Les sauries ocadtes du nazisme, Paris, Grasset, 1969, p. 214
It was around this time that Agliè slipped through our fingers. That was the expression Belbo used, with a tone of excessive indifference. I attributed the indifference once again to jealousy. Silently obsessed by Agliè's power over Lorenza, aloud he wisecracked about the power Agliè was gaining at Garamond.
Perhaps it was our own fault. Agliè had begun seducing Garamond almost a year earlier, from the time of the alchemistic party in Piedmont. Soon after that, Garamond entrusted the SFA file to him, for him to recruit new victims to flesh out the Isis Unveiled catalog; by now, Garamond consulted him on every decision, and no doubt gave him a monthly check. Gudrun, who carried out periodic expeditions to the end of the corridor and beyond the glass door that gave access to the padded world of Manutius, told us from time to time, in a worried voice, that Agliè had practically established himself in the office of Signora Grazia; he dictated letters to her, escorted new visitors into Garamond's office, and, in short—and here Gudrun's indignation robbed her of even more vowels—acted as if he owned the place. We really should have wondered why Agliè spent hours and hours on the Manutius address file. Selecting the SFAs to invite to join the list of authors for Isis Unveiled should not have taken that much time. Yet he went on writing, contacting, making appointments.
But we actually fostered his autonomy. The situation suited Belbo. More Agliè in Via Marchese Gualdi meant less Agliè in Via Sincero Renato. Thus, when Lorenza Pellegrini made one of her sudden appearances, and Belbo, with unconcealed excitement, became pathetically radiant, there was less likelihood that "Simon" would barge in ruinously.
I wasn't displeased, either, since by now I had lost interest in Isis Unveiled and was more and more involved in my history of magic. Feeling I had learned from the Diabolicals everything there was to learn, I let Agliè handle the contacts (and contracts) with the new authors.
Nor did Diotallevi object. In general, the world seemed to matter less and less to him. Now that I think back, I realize that he continued losing weight in a troubling way. At times I would see him in his office bent over a manuscript, his eyes vacant, his pen about to drop from his hand. He wasn't asleep; he was exhausted.
There was another reason we accepted the increasing rarity of Agliè's appearances, and their brevity—for he would simply hand back to us the manuscripts he had rejected, then vanish into the corridor. The fact was, we didn't want him to hear our discussions. If anyone had asked us why, we would have said it was out of delicacy, or embarrassment, since we were parodying the metaphysics in which he somehow believed. But it was really distrust on our part; we were slowly assuming the natural reserve of those who possess a secret, we were putting Agliè in the role of the profane masses as we took more and more seriously the thing we had invented. Perhaps, too, as Diotallevi said in a moment of good humor, now that we had a real Saint-Germain, we didn't need an imitation.
Agliè didn't seem to take offense at our reserve. He would greet us, then leave us, with a politeness that bordered on hauteur.
One Monday morning I arrived at work late, and Belbo eagerly asked me to come to his office, calling Diotallevi, too. "Big news," he said. But before he could begin, Lorenza arrived. Belbo was torn between his joy at this visit and his impatience to tell what he had discovered. A moment later, there was a knock, and Agliè stuck his head in. "I don't want to disturb you. Please don't get up. I haven't the authority to intrude on such a consistory. I only wanted to tell our dearest Lorenza that I'm in Signor Garamond's office. And I hope I have at least the authority to summon her for a sherry at noon, in my office."
In his office! This time Belbo lost self-control. To the extent, that is, that he could lose it. He waited for Agliè to leave, then muttered through clenched teeth: "Ma gavte la nata."
Lorenza, still showing her pleasure at the invitation, asked Belbo what that meant.
"It's Turin dialect. It means, literally, 'Be so kind as to remove the cork.' A pompous, self-important, overweening individual is thought to hold himself the way he does because of a cork stuck in his sphincter ani, which prevents his vaporific dignity from being dispersed. The removal of the cork causes the individual to deflate, a process usually accompanied by a shrill whistle and the reduction of the outer envelope to a poor fleshless phantom of its former self."
"I didn't know you could be so vulgar."
"Now you know."
Lorenza went out, pretending to be annoyed. I knew this distressed Belbo all the more: real anger would have reassured him, but a pretense of irritation only confirmed his fear that, from Lorenza, the display of any passion was always staged, theatrical.
He said then, with grim determination, "To business." Meaning: Let's proceed with the Plan, seriously.
"I don't much want to," Diotallevi said. "I don't feel well. I have a pain here"—he touched his stomach—"I think it's gastritis."
"Ridiculous," Belbo said to him. "I don't have gastritis.... What could give you gastritis? Mineral water?"
"Could be," Diotallevi said with a wan smile. "Last night I overdid it. I'm accustomed to still Fiuggi, and I drank some fizzy San Pellegrino."
"You must be careful. Such excesse
s could kill you. But to business, gentlemen. I've been dying to tell you for two days now.... Finally, I know why the Thirty-six Invisibles were unable, for centuries, to work out the form of the map. John Dee got it wrong; the geography has to be done over. We live inside a hollow earth, enclosed by the terrestrial surface. Hitler realized this."
99
Nazism was the moment when the spirit of magic seized the helm of material progress. Lenin said Communism was socialism plus electricity. In a sense, Hitlerism was Guenonism plus armored divisions.
—Pauwels and Bergier, Le matin des magiciens, Paris, Gallimard,
1960, 2, vii
Now Belbo had managed to work Hitler into the Plan. "It's all there, black on white. The founders of Nazism were involved in Teutonic neo-Templarism."
"An airtight case."
"I'm not inventing, Casaubon, for once I'm not inventing!"
"Take it easy. When did we ever invent anything? We've always started with objective data, with information in the public domain."
"This time, too. In 1912 a Germanenorden group is formed, proposing the tenet of Aryan superiority. In 1918 a certain Baron von Sebottendorf founds a related group, the Thule Gesellschaft, a secret society, yet another variation on the Templar Strict Observance, but with strong racist, pan-German, neo-Aryan tendencies. And in '33 Sebottendorf writes that he had sown what Hitler reaped. Furthermore, it is in Thule Gesellschaft circles that the hooked cross appears. And who was among the first to join the Thule? Rudolf Hess, Hitler's evil genius! Then Rosenberg! Then Hitler himself! And note that in his cell in Spandau even today, as you've surely read in the papers, Hess studies the esoteric sciences. Sebottendorf in '24 writes a pamphlet on alchemy, and remarks that the first experiments in atomic fission demonstrate the truths of the Great Work. He also writes a novel on the Rosicrucians! Later he edits an astrological magazine, Astrologische Rundschau, and Trevor-Roper tells us that the Nazi chiefs, Hitler first among them, never made a move without having a horoscope cast. In 1943 a group of psychics is consulted to discover where Mussolini is being held prisoner. In other words, the whole Nazi leadership is connected with Teutonic neooccultism."