Someone¡XRubinstein,maybe¡Xonce said, when asked if he believed in God: "Oh, no, Ibelieve...in something much bigger." And someone else¡Xwas itChesterton?¡Xsaid that when men stop believing in God, it isn'tthat they then believe in nothing: they believe ineverything.
But everything is not abigger secret. There are no "bigger secrets," because the moment asecret is revealed, it seems little. There is only an empty secret.A secret that keeps slipping through your fingers. The secret ofthe orchid is that it signifies and affects the testicles. But thetesticles signify a sign of the zodiac, which in turn signifies anangelic hierarchy, which then signifies a musical scale, and thescale signifies a relationship among the humors. And so on.Initiation is learning never to stop. The universe is peeled likean onion, and an onion is all peel. Let us imagine an infiniteonion, which has its center everywhere and its circumferencenowhere. Initiation travels an endless Mobius strip.
The true initiate is hewho knows that the most powerful secret is a secret withoutcontent, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, norival devotee will be able to take it from him.
Now I found more logicaland consequential the dynamic of that nocturnal rite before thePendulum. Belbo had claimed to possess a secret, and because ofthis he had gained power over Them. Their first impulse, even in aman as clever as Aglie, who had immediately beat the tom-tom tosummon all the others, had been to wrest it from him. And the moreBelbo refused to reveal it, the bigger They believed the secret tobe; the more he vowed he didn't possess it, the more convinced Theywere that he did possess it, and that it was a true secret, becauseif it were false, he would have revealed it.
Through the centuriesthe search for this secret had been the glue holding Them alltogether, despite excommunications, internecine fighting, coups demain. Now They were on the verge of knowing it. But They wereassailed by two fears: that the secret would be a disappointment,and that once it was known to all, there would be no secret left.Which would be the end of Them.
Aglie then thought: IfBelbo spoke, all would know, and he, Aglie, would lose themysterious aura that granted him charisma and power. But if Belboconfided in him alone, Aglie could go on being Saint-Germain, theimmortal. The deferment of Agile's death coincided with thedeferment of the secret. He tried to persuade Belbo to whisper itin his ear, and when he realized that wouldn't be possible, heprovoked him by predicting his surrender and, further, by puttingon a display of pompous melodrama. Oh, the old count knew very wellthat for people from Piedmont stubbornness and a sense of theridiculous could defeat even the fear of death. Thus he forcedBelbo to raise the tone of his refusal and to say nodefinitively.
The others, out of thesame fear, preferred to kill him. They might be losing themap¡Xthey would have centuries to continue the search for it¡Xbutthey were preserving the vigor of their base, slobberingdesire.
I remembered a storyAmparo told me. Before coming to Italy, she had spent some monthsin New York City, living in a neighborhood of the kind where evenon quiet days you could shoot a TV series featuring the homicidesquad. She used to come home alone at two in the morning. When Iasked if she wasn't afraid of sexual maniacs, she told me hermethod. When a sexual maniac approached, threatening, she wouldtake his arm and say, "Come on, let's do it." And he would go away,bewildered.
If you're a sexualmaniac, you don't want sex; you want the excitement of its theft,you want the victim's resistance and despair. If sex is handed toyou on a platter, here it is, go to it, naturally you're notinterested, otherwise what sort of sexual maniac would yoube?
* * *
We had awakened theirlust, offering them a secret that couldn't have been emptier,because not only did we know it ourselves, but, even better, weknew that it was false.
The plane was flyingover Mont Blanc, and the passengers all rushed to the same side soas not to miss the view of that blunt bubo that had grown therethanks to a fluke in the telluric currents. If what I was thinkingwas correct, then the currents didn't exist any more than theProvins message existed. But the story of the deciphering of thePlan, as we had reconstructed it, that was History.
My memory went back toBelbo's last file. But if existence is so empty and fragile that itcan be endured only by the illusion of a search for its secret,then¡Xas Amparo said that evening in the tenda, after herdefeat¡Xthere's no redemption; we are all slaves, give us a master,that's what we deserve...
No. Lia taught me thereis more, and I have the proof: his name is Giulio, and at thismoment he is playing in a valley, pulling a goat's tail. No,because Belbo twice said no.
The first no he said toAbulafia, and to those who would try to steal its secret. "Do youhave the password?" was the question. And the answer, the key toknowledge, was "No." Not only does the magic word not exist, but wedo not know that it does not exist. Those who
