Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [257]
That must also have been the night he decided to avenge himself on Aglie,,even if he didn’t have a clear reason. He would put him into the Plan without Aglie’s knowing. It was typical of Belbo to seek revenges of which he would be the only witness. Not out of modesty, but because he distrusted the ability of others to appreciate them. Slipped into the Plan, Aglie would be annulled, would dissolve in smoke like the wick of a candle. Unreal as the Templars of Provins, the Rosicrucians: as unreal as Belbo himself.
It shouldn’t be difficult, Belbo thought. We’ve cut Bacon and Napoleon down to size: why not Aglie? We’ll send him out looking for the map, too. I freed myself of Ardenti and his memory by putting him into a fiction better than his own. The same will happen with Aglie.
I believe he really believed this; such is the power of frustrated desire. The file ended—it could not have been otherwise—with the quotation required of all those whom life has defeated: Bin ich ein Gott?
108
What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the subversive movements going on around us? Are there several Powers at work? Or is there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest—the circle of the real Initiates!
—Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, London, Boswell, 1924, p.348
Maybe he would have forgotten his decision. Maybe it would have been enough for him just to write it. Maybe, if he had seen Lorenza again at once, he would have been caught up by desire, and desire would have forced him to come to terms with life. But, instead, that Monday afternoon, Aglie appeared in his office, wafting exotic cologne, smiling as he handed over some manuscripts to be rejected, saying he had read them during a splendid weekend at the seashore. Belbo, seized once more by rancor, decided to taunt Aglie—by giving him a glimpse of the magic bloodstone.
Assuming the manner of Boccaccio’s Buifamalcco, he said that for more than ten years he had been burdened by an occult secret. A manuscript, entrusted to him by a certain Colonel Ar-denti, who claimed to be in possession of the Plan of the Templars... The colonel had been abducted or killed, and his papers had been taken. Garamond Press had been left with a red-herring text, deliberately erroneous, fantastic, even puerile, whose sole purpose was to let others know that .the colonel had seen the Provins message and Ingolf’s final notes, the notes In-golf’s murderers were still looking for. But there was also a very slim file, containing ten pages only, but those ten pages were the authentic text, the one really found among Ingolf’s papers. They had remained in Belbo’s hands.
What a curious story—this was Aglie’s reaction—do tell me more. Belbo told him more. He told him the whole Plan, just as we had conceived it, as if it were all contained in that remote manuscript. He even told him, in an increasingly cautious and confidential tone, that there was also a policeman, by the name of De Angelis, who had arrived at the brink of the truth but had come up against the hermetic—no other way to describe it— silence of Belbo himself, keeper of mankind’s greatest secret: a secret that boiled down to the secret of the Map.
Here he paused, in a silence charged with unspoken meaning, like all great pauses. His reticence about the final truth guaranteed the truth of its premises. For those who really believed in a secret tradition, he calculated, nothing was louder than silence.
“How interesting, how extremely interesting!” Aglie said, taking the snuffbox from his vest, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. “And... and the map?”
Belbo thought: You old voyeur, you’re getting aroused; serves you right. With all your Saint-Germain airs, you’re just another petty charlatan living off the shell game, and then you buy the Brooklyn Bridge from the first charlatan who’s a bigger charlatan than you are. Now I’ll send you on a wild-goose chase looking for maps, so you’ll vanish into the bowels of the earth, carried away by the telluric currents, until you crack