Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [131]
—From a ritual of Aleister Crowley
Aglifc lived in the Piazzale Susa area: a little secluded street, a turn-of-the-century building, soberly art nouveau. An elderly butler in a striped jacket opened the door and led us into a small sitting room, where he asked us to wait for the count.
“So he’s a count,” Belbo whispered.
“Didn’t I tell you? He’s Saint-Germain redivivus.”
“He can’t be redivivus if he’s never died,” Diotallevi said. “Sure he’s not Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew?”
“According to some, the Comte de Saint-Germain had also been Ahasuerus.”
“You see?”
Aglte came in, impeccable as always. He shook our hands and apologized: a tiresome meeting, quite unforeseen, forced him to remain in his study for another ten minutes or so. He told the butler to bring coffee and begged us to make ourselves at home. Then he went out, drawing aside a heavy curtain of old leather. It wasn’t a door, and as we were having our coffee, we heard agitated voices coming from the next room. At first we spoke loudly among ourselves, in order not to listen; then Belbo remarked that perhaps we were disturbing the others. In a moment of silence, we heard a voice, and a sentence that aroused our curiosity.
Diotallevi got up and went over, as if he wanted to admire a seventeenth-century print on the wall by the curtain. It showed a mountain cave, to which some pilgrims were climbing by way of seven steps. Soon all three of us were pretending to study the print.
The man we had heard was surely Bramanti, and the sentence was: “See here, I don’t send devils to people’s houses!”
That day we realized Bramanti had not only a tapir’s face but also a tapir’s voice.
The other voice belonged to a stranger: a thick French accent and a shrill, almost hysterical tone. From time to time Aglie’s voice, soft and conciliatory, intervened.
“Come, gentlemen,” he was saying now, “you have appealed to my verdict, and I am honored, but you must therefore listen to me. Allow me, first of all, to say that you, dear Pierre, were imprudent, at the very least, in writing that letter...”
“It’s an extremely simple matter, Monsieur le Comte,” the French voice replied. “This Signer Bramanti, he writes an article, in a publication we all respect, in which he indulges himself in some fairly strong irony about certain Luciferans, who, he says, make hosts fly though they don’t even believe in the Real Presence, and they transmute silver, and so forth and so on. Bon, everyone knows that the only recognized Eglise Luciferienne is the one where I am the humble tauroboliaste and psychopompe, and it is also well known that my church does not indulge itself in vulgar Satanism and does not make ratatouille with hosts—things worthy of chan-oine Docre at Saint-Sulpice. In my letter I said that we are not vieux jeu Satanists, worshipers of the Grand Tenancierdu Mal, and that we do not have to ape the Church of Rome, with all those pyxes and those—comment dit-on?—chasubles...We are, au con-traire, Palladians, as all the world knows, and, for us, Luciferre is the principe of good. If anything, it is Adonai who is the principe of evil, because He created this world, whereas Luciferre tried to oppose...”
“All right,” Bramanti said angrily. “I admit I may have been careless, but this doesn’t entitle him to threaten me with sorcery!”
“Mais voyons! It was a metaphor! You are the one who, in return, caused me to have the envoutement!”
“Oh, of course, my brothers and I have time to waste, sending little devils around! We practice Dogma and the Ritual of High Magic: we are not witch doctors!”
“Monsieur le Comte, I appeal to you. Signer Bramanti is notoriously in touch with the abbe Boutroux, and you well know that this priest is said to have the crucifix tattooed on the sole of his foot so that he may tread on Our Lord, or, rather, on his...Bon, I meet seven days ago this supposed abbe at the Du San-greal