Belbo again moistenedhis friend's lips with the cloth. "And so?"
"So we attempted to dowhat was not allowed us, what we were not prepared for.Manipulating the words of the Book, we attempted to construct agolem."
"I don'tunderstand...."
"You can't understand.You're the prisoner of what you created. But your story in theoutside world is still unfolding. I don't know how, but you canstill escape it. For me it's different. I am experiencing in mybody everything we did, as a joke, in the Plan."
"Don't talk nonsense.It's a matter of cells...."
"And what are cells? Formonths, like devout rabbis, we uttered different combinations ofthe letters of the Book. GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG. What our lips said,our cells learned. What did my cells do? They invented a differentPlan, and now they are proceeding on their own, creating a history,a unique, private history. My cells have learned that you canblaspheme by ana-grammatizing the Book, and all the books of theworld. And they have learned to do this now with my body. Theyinvert, transpose, alternate, transform themselves into cellsunheard of, new cells without meaning, or with meaning contrary tothe right meaning. There must be a right meaning and a wrongmeaning; otherwise you die. My cells joke, without faith,blindly.
"Jacopo, while I couldstill read, during these past months, I read dictionaries, Istudied histories of words, to understand what was happening in mybody. I studied like a rabbi. Have you ever reflected that thelinguistic term ¡¥metathesis' is similar to the oncological term¡¥metastasis'? What is metathesis? Instead of ¡¥clasp' one says¡¥claps.' Instead of ¡¥beloved' one says ¡¥be-voled.' It's thetemurah. The dictionary says that metathesis means transposition orinterchange, while metastasis indicates change and shifting. Howstupid dictionaries are! The root is the same. Either it's the verbmetatithemi or the verb methistemi. Metatithemi means I interpose,I shift, I transfer, I substitute, I abrogate a law, I change ameaning. And methistemi? It's the same thing: I move, I transform,I transpose, I switch cliches, I take leave of my senses. And as wesought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took leave of oursenses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. That's why I'mdying, Jacopo, and you know it."
"You talk like thisbecause you're ill..."
"I talk like thisbecause finally I understand everything about my body. I've studiedit day after day, I know what's happening in it, but I can'tintervene; the cells no longer obey. I'm dying because I convincedmyself that there was no order, that you could do whatever youliked with any text. I spent my life convincing myself of this, I,with my own brain. And my brain must have transmitted the messageto them. Why should I expect them to be wiser than my brain? I'mdying because we were imaginative beyond bounds."
"Listen, what'shappening to you has no connection with our Plan."
"It doesn't? Thenexplain what's happening to you. The world is behaving like mycells."
He sank back, exhausted.The doctor came in and whispered to Belbo that it was wrong tosubmit a dying man to such stress.
Belbo left, and that wasthe last time he saw Diotallevi.
Very well, he wrote, thepolice are after me for the same reason that Diotallevi has cancer.Poor friend, he's dying, and I, who don't have cancer, what am Idoing? I'm going to Paris to find the principle ofneoplasm.
But he didn't give inimmediately. He stayed shut up in his apartment for four days,reviewed his files sentence by sentence, to find an explanation.Then he wrote out this account, a final testament, so to speak,telling it to himself, to Abulafia, to me, or to anyone else whowas able to read it. And finally, Tuesday, he left.
I believe Belbo went toParis to say to them there was no secret, that the real secret wasto let the cells proceed according to their own instinctive wisdom,that seeking mysteries beneath the surface reduced the world to afoul cancer, and that of all the people in the world, the mostfoul, the most stupid person was Belbo himself, who knew nothingand had invented everything. Such a step must have cost him dear,but he had accepted for too long the premise that he was a coward,and De Angelis had certainly shown him that heroes werefew.
In Paris, after thefirst meeting, Belbo must have realized They wouldn't believe him.His words were too undramatic, too simple. It was a revelation Theywanted, on pain of death. Belbo had no revelation to give, and¡Xhisfinal cowardice¡Xhe feared death. So he tried to cover his tracks,and he called me. But They caught him.
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C'est une le^on par lasuite. Quand votre ennemi se reproduira, car il n'est pas ii sondernier masque, congediez-le brusquement, et surtout n'allez pas lechercher dans les grottes.
¡XJacques Cazotte, Lediable amoureux, 1772, from a page suppressed in latereditions
Now, in Belbo'sapartment, as I finished reading his confessions, I asked myself:What should I do? No point going to Garamond. De Angelis had left.Diotallevi had said everything he had to say. Lia was far off, in aplace without a telephone. It was six in the morning, Saturday,June 23, and if something was going to happen, it would happentonight, in the Conservatoire. I had to decide quickly.
Why¡XI asked myselflater, in the periscope¡Xdidn't you pretend nothing had happened?You had before you the texts of a madman, a madman who had talkedwith other madmen, including a last conversation with anoverexcited (or overde-pressed) dying friend. You weren't even sureBelbo had called you from Paris. Maybe he was talking fromsomewhere a few kilometers outside Milan, or maybe from the boothon the corner. Why involve yourself in a story that was imaginaryand that didn't concern you anyway?
This was the question Iset myself in the periscope, as my feet were growing numb and thelight was fading, and I felt the unnatural yet
