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That’s why Salon knew about Garamond and Ardenti. What was the connection, exactly, between Salon and De Angelis? But I confined myself to asking Aglie: “What is a police informer doing at a party like this?”

“Police informers,” Aglie said, “go everywhere. They can use any experience for inventing their confidential reports. For the police, the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.”

“But why was Salon invited?” I asked.

“My friend,” Aglie replied, “probably because our host respects the golden rule of sapiental thought, which says that any error can be the unrecognized bearer of truth. True esotericism does not fear contradiction.”

“You’re telling me that, finally, all contradictions agree.”

“Quod ubique, quod ab omnibus^et quod semper. Initiation is the discovery of the underlying and perennial philosophy.”

With all this philosophizing, we had reached the top terrace and were on a path through a broad garden that led to the entrance of the castle or villa. In the light of a torch larger than the others and set upon a column, we saw a girl wrapped in a blue garment spangled with golden stars. In her hand she held a trumpet, the kind heralds blow in operas. As in one of those holy plays where the angels are adorned with tissue-paper feathers, the girl wore on her shoulders two large white wings decorated with almond-shaped figures, each with a dot in the center, looking almost like an eye.

Professor Camestres was there, one of the first Diabolicals to visit us at Garamond, the adversary of the Ordo Templi Orientis. We had difficulty recognizing him, because he was costumed most singularly, though Aglie said it was appropriate to the occasion: a white linen toga, loins girt by a red ribbon that also crisscrossed both chest and back, and a seventeenth-century hat to which were pinned four red roses. He knelt before the girl with the trumpet and uttered some words.

“It’s true,” Garamond murmured, “there are more things in heaven and earth...”

We went through a storied doorway, which reminded me of the Genoa cemetery. Above it, an intricate neoclassical allegory and the carved words: CONDOLED ET CONGRATULATOR.

Inside, the guests were many and lively, crowding around a buffet in a spacious hall from which two staircases rose to upper floors. I saw other faces not unknown to me, among them Bra-manti and—to my surprise—Commendatore De Gubernatis, an SEA already exploited by Garamond, but perhaps not yet made to face the terrible prospect of having all the copies of his masterpiece pulped, because he approached my boss with a show of obsequious gratitude. Aglie was in turn approached obsequiously by a tiny man with wild eyes, whose thick French accent told us that this was the Pierre we had heard accusing Bramanti of sorcery through the curtain of Aglie’s study.

I went to the buffet. There were pitchers with colored liquids I couldn’t identify. I poured myself a yellow beverage that resembled wine; it wasn’t bad, tasting like an old-fashioned cordial, and it was definitely alcoholic. Perhaps there was a drug in it as well: my head began to swim. Around me facies her-meticae swarmed, the stern countenances of retired prefects, fragments of conversation...

“In the first stage you must renounce all communication with other minds; in the second you project thoughts and images into beings, infuse places with emotional auras, gain control over the animal kingdom, and in the third stage you project your double— bilocation—like the yogis, and you can appear in different plates simultaneously and in different forms. Beyond that, it’s a question of passing to hypersensitive knowledge of vegetable essences. Then, you achieve dissociation, you assume telluric form, dissolving in one place, reappearing in another, but intact, not just as a double. The final stage is the extension of physical life,...”

“Not immortality...”