Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [18]
Belbo would have been more original. Besides which, when you choose a password, you pick something easy to remember, something that comes to mind automatically. Ihvhea, indeed! In that case he would have had to apply the notarikon to the temurah, to invent an acrostic to remember the word. Something like Imelda Has Vindicated Hiram’s Evil Assassination.
But why should Belbo have thought in DiotallevFs cabalistic terms? Belbo was obsessed by the Plan, and into the Plan we had put all sorts of other ingredients: Rosicrucians, Synarchy, Homunculi, the Pendulum, the Tower, the Druids, the Ennoia...
Ennoia. I thought of Lorenza Pellegrini. I reached out, picked up her censored photograph, looked at it, and an inopportune thought surfaced, the memory of that evening in Piedmont...I read the inscription on the picture: “For I am the first and the last, the honored and the hated, the saint and the prostitute. Sophia.”
She must have written that after Riccardo’s party. Sophia. Six letters. And why would they need to be scrambled? I was the one with the devious mind. Belbo loves Lorenza, loves her precisely because she is the way she is, and she is Sophia. And at that very moment she might be...No, no good. Belbo was devious, too. I recalled Diotallevi’s words: “In the second se-firah the dark aleph changes into the luminous aleph. From the Dark Point spring the letters of the Torah. The consonants are the body, the vowels the breath, and together they accompany the worshiper as he chants. When the chant moves, the consonants and vowels move with it, and from them rises Hokhmah— wisdom, knowledge, the primordial thought that contains, as in a box, everything, all that will unfold in creation. Hokhmah holds the essence of all that will emanate from it.”
And what was Abulafia, with its secret files? The box that held everything Belbo knew, or thought he knew. His Sophia. With her secret name he would enter Abulafia, the thing—the only thing—he made love to. But, making love to Abulafia, he thinks of Lorenza. So he needs a word that will give him possession of Abulafia but also serve as a talisman to give him possession of Lorenza, to penetrate Lorenza’s heart as he penetrates Abulafia’s. But Abulafia should be impenetrable to others, as Lorenza is impenetrable to him. It is Belbo’s hope that he can enter, know, and conquer Lorenza’s secret in the same way that he possesses Abulafia.
But I was making this up. My explanation was just like the Plan: substituting wishes for reality.
Drunk, I sat down at the keyboard again and tapped out SOPHIA. Again, nothing, and again the machine asked me politely: “Do you have the password?” You stupid machine, you feel no emotion at the thought of Lorenza.
6
Juda Leon se dio a permutaciones
De letras y a complejas variaciones
Y alfin pronuncio el Nombre que es la Clave,
La Puerta, el Eco, el Hue’sped y el Palacio...
—Jorge Luis Borges, El Golem
And then, in a fit of hate, as I worked again at Abulafia’s obtuse question “Do you have the password?” I typed: NO.
The screen began to fill with words, lines, codes, a flood of communication.
I had broken into Abulafia.
Thrilled by my triumph, I didn’t ask myself why Belbo had chosen that, of all words. Now I know, and I know, too, that in a moment of lucidity he understood what I have come to understand only now. But last Thursday, my only thought was that I had won.
I danced, clapped my hands, sang an old army song. Then I went to the bathroom and washed my face. When I came back, I began printing out the files, last files first, what Belbo had written just before his flight to Paris. As the printer chattered implacably, I devoured some food and drank some more whiskey.
When the printer stopped and I read what Belbo had written, I was aghast, unable to decide whether this was an extraordinary revelation or the wild raving of a madman.
What did I really know about Jacopo Belbo? What had I learned