Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [238]
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—paralysis, pox, and indescribable absence of a face, a hymn to hideousness. I will go back to the dungeon like those fugitives who, to avoid recapture, had the courage to disfigure themselves.
Ah, I cry, defeated, and as the narrator says, one word escapes 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.
—Rene Alleau, Les sources occultes du nazisme. Paris, Grasset 1969, p. 214
It was around this time that Aglie 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 Aglie’s power over Lorenza, aloud he wisecracked about the power Aglie was gaining at Garamond.
Perhaps it was our own fault. Aglie had begun seducing Garamond almost a year earlier, from the time of the alchemistie 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 Aglie had practically established himself in the office of Signora Grazia; he dictated letters to her, escorted new visitors into Gar-amond’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 Aglie 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 Aglie in Via Marchese Gualdi meant less Aglie in Via Sincere 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