The second no he said onSaturday night, when he refused the salvation held out to him. Hecould have invented a map, or used one of the maps I had shown him.In any event, with the Pendulum hung as it was, incorrectly, thatbunch of lunatics would never have found the X marking theUmbilicus Mundi, and even if they did, it would have been severalmore decades before they realized this wasn't the one. But Belborefused to bow, he preferred to die.
It wasn't that herefused to bow to the lust for power; he refused to bow tononmeaning. He somehow knew that, fragile as our existence may be,however ineffectual our interrogation of the world, there isnevertheless something that has more meaning than therest.
What had Belbo sensed,perhaps only at that moment, which allowed him to contradict hislast, desperate file, and not surrender his destiny to someone whoguaranteed him a mere Plan? What had he understood¡Xat last¡Xthatallowed him to sacrifice his life, as if he had learned everythingthere was to learn without realizing it, and as if compared to thisone, true, absolute secret of his, everything that took place inthe Conservatoire was irreparably stupid¡Xand it was stupid, now,stubbornly to go on living?
There was stillsomething, a link missing in the chain. I had all of Belbo's featsbefore me now, from life to death, except one.
On arrival, as I waslooking for my passport, I found in one of my pockets the key tothis house. I had taken it last Thursday, along with the key toBelbo's apartment. I remembered that day when Belbo showed us theold cupboard that contained, he said, his opera omnia or, rather,his juvenilia. Perhaps Belbo had written something there thatcouldn't be found in Abulafia, perhaps it was buried somewhere in***.
There was nothingreasonable about this conjecture of mine. All the more reason toconsider it good. At this point.
I collected my car, andI came here.
I didn't find the oldrelative of the Canepas, the caretaker, or whatever she was. Maybeshe, too, had died in the meantime. There was no one. I wentthrough the various rooms. A strong smell of mildew. I consideredlighting the bedwarmer in one of the bedrooms, but it made no senseto warm the bed in June. Once the windows were opened, the warmevening air would enter.
After sunset, there wasno moon. As in Paris, Saturday night. The moon rose late, I sawless of it now than in Paris, as it slowly climbed above the lowerhills, in a dip between the Bricco and another yellowish hump,perhaps already harvested.
I arrived around six inthe evening. It was still light. But I had brought nothing with meto eat. Roaming the house, I found a salami in the kitchen, hangingfrom a beam. My supper was salami and fresh water: going on teno'clock, I think. Now I'm thirsty. I've brought a big pitcher ofwater to Uncle Carlo's study and drink a glass every ten minutes.Then I go down, refill the pitcher, and start again.
It must be at leastthree in the morning. I have the light off and can hardly read mywatch. I look out the window. On the flanks of the hills, what seemto be fireflies, shooting stars: the headlights of occasional carsgoing down into the valley or climbing toward the villages on thehilltops. When Belbo was a boy, this sight did not exist. Therewere no cars then, no roads. At night there was thecurfew.
As soon as I arrived, Iopened the cupboard of juvenilia. Shelves and shelves of paper,from elementary-school exercises to bundles of adolescent poems andprose. Everyone has written poems in adolescence; true poetsdestroy them, bad poets publish them. Belbo, too cynical to savethem, too weak to chuck them out, stuck them in Uncle Carlo'scupboard.
I read for hours. Andfor hours, up to this moment, I meditated on the last text, which Ifound just when I was about to give up.
I don't know when Belbowrote it. There are pages where different handwritings, insertions,are interwoven, or else it's the same hand in different years. Asif he wrote it very early, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, thenput it away, then went back to it at twenty, again at thirty, andmaybe later. Until he gave up the idea of writing altogether¡Xonlyto begin again with Abu-lafia, but not having the heart to recoverthese lines and subject them to electronic humiliation.
Reading them, I followeda familiar story: the events of *** between 1943 and 1945, UncleCarlo, the partisans, the parish hall, Cecilia, the trumpet. Thesewere the obsessive themes of the romantic Belbo, disappointed,grieving, drunk. The literature of memory: he knew himself that itwas the last refuge of scoundrels.
But I'm no literarycritic. I'm Sam Spade again, looking for the final clue.
And so I found the KeyText. It must represent the last chapter of the story of Belbo in***. For, after it, nothing more could have happened.
119
The garland of thetrumpet was set afire, and then I saw the aperture of the dome openand a splendid arrow of fire shoot down through the tube of thetrumpet and enter the lifeless body. The aperture then was closedagain, and the trumpet, too, was put away.
¡XJohann ValentinAndreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz,Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, pp. 125-126
Belbo's text had somegaps, some overlappings, some lines crossed out. I am not so muchrereading it as reconstructing, reliving it.
It must have been towardthe end of April of 1945. The German armies were already routed,the Fascists were scattering, and *** was firmly in the hands ofthe partisans.
After the last battle,the one Belbo narrated to us in this very house almost two yearsago, various partisan brigades gathered in ***, in order to headfor the city. They were awaiting a signal from Radio London; theywould depart when Milan was ready for the insurrection.
The Garibaldi Brigadesalso arrived, commanded by Ras, a giant with a black beard, verypopular in the town. They were dressed in invented uniforms, eachone different except for the kerchiefs and the star on the chest,red in both cases, and they were armed in makeshift fashion, somewith old shotguns, some with submachine guns taken from
