Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [81]
What can I say, Casaubon? Maybe I should have told him the truth, but where I come from, men are stubborn and never back down.
I’m writing you because if I found your address, then De Angelis can find it, too. If he gets in touch with you, at least you know the line I’ve taken. But since it doesn’t seem a very straight line to me, go ahead and tell him everything if you want to. I’m embarrassed, I apologize. I feel like some kind of accomplice. Try as I might, I can’t seem to find any noble justification for myself. Must be my peasant origins; in our part of the country, we’re a mean bunch. The whole thing is—as the Germans says—unheimlich.
Yours, Jacopo Belbo
25
...of these mysterious initiates—now become numerous, bold, conspiring—all was born: Jesuitism, magnetism, Martinism, philosopher’s stone, somnambulism, eclecticism.
—C.-L. Cadet-Gassicourt, Le tombeau de Jacques de Malay, Paris, Desenne, 1797, p. 91
The letter upset me. Not that I was afraid of being tracked down by De Angelis—we were in different hemispheres, after all—but for less definable reasons. At the time, I thought I was upset because a world I had left behind had bounced back at me. But today I realize that what bothered me was yet another strand of resemblance, the suspicion of an analogy. I was annoyed, too, at having to deal with Belbo again, Belbo and his eternal guilty conscience. I decided not to mention the letter to Amparo.
A reassuring second letter arrived from Belbo two days later.
The story of the psychic had had a reasonable ending. A police informer reported that the girl’s lover had been involved in a settling of scores over a drug shipment, which he had sold retail instead of delivering it to the honest wholesaler who had already paid. They frown on that sort of behavior in those circles, and he vanished to save his neck. Obviously he took the woman with him. Rummaging then among the newspapers left in their apartment, De Angelis found some magazines on the order of Picatrix, with a series of articles heavily underlined in red. One was about the treasure of the Templars, another about Rosicrucians who lived in a castle, cave, or some damn place where “post CXX annos patebo” was written and they called themselves the thirty-six invisibles. So for De Angelis it was all clear. The psychic, consuming the same sort of literature that the colonel had, regurgitated it whin she was in a trance. The matter was closed, passed on to the narcotics squad.
Belbo’s letter exuded relief. De Angelis’s explanation seemed the most economical.
The other evening in the periscope, I told myself that the facts might have been quite different. Granted, the psychic quoted something she had heard from Ardenti, but it was something her magazines never mentioned, something no one was supposed to know. Whoever had got rid of the colonel was in the Picatrix group, and this someone noticed that Belbo was about to question the psychic, so he eliminated her. To throw the investigators off the track, he also eliminated her lover, then instructed a police informer to say that the couple had fled.
Simple enough, if there was really a plan. But how could there have been? Since we invented “the Plan” ourselves, and only much later was it possible for reality not only to catch up with fiction, but actually to precede it, or, rather, to rush ahead of it and repair the damage that it would cause.
At the time, though, in Brazil, these were not my thoughts on receiving Belbo’s second letter. Instead, I felt once more that something was resembling something else. I had been thinking about my trip to Bahia and had spent an afternoon visiting bookstores and shops that sold cult objects, places I had ignored till then. I went to out-of-the-way little emporiums crammed with statues and idols. I purchased perfumadores of Yemanja, pun-gently scented mystical smoke sticks, incense, sweetish spray cans labeled “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” cheap amulets. I also found many books, some for devotees, others for people studying devotees, a mixture of