by Umberto Eco
But perhaps in that simsun, that diminishment, that lonely separation—Diotallevi said—there was already the promise of the return.
HOKHMAH
3
In hanc utilitatem clementes angelí saepe figuras, characteres, formas ct voces invenerunt proposueruntque nobis mortalibus et ignotas et stupendas nullius rei iuxta consuetum linguae usum significativas, sed per rationis nostrae summam admirationem in assiduam intelligibilium pervestigationem, deinde in illorum ipsorum venerationem et amorem inductivas.
—Johannes Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica, Hagenhau, 1517, III
It had been two days earlier, a Thursday. I was lazing in bed, undecided about getting up. I had arrived the previous afternoon and had telephoned my office. Diotallevi was still in the hospital, and Gudrun sounded pessimistic: condition unchanged; in other words, getting worse. I couldn't bring myself to go and visit him.
Belbo was away. Gudrun told me he telephoned to say he had to go somewhere for family reasons. What family? The odd thing was, he took away the word processor—Abulafia, he called it—and the printer, too. Gudrun also told me he had set it up at home in order to finish some work. Why had he gone to all that trouble? Couldn't he do it in the office?
I felt like a displaced person. Lia and the baby wouldn't be back until next week. The previous evening I'd dropped by Pilade's, but found no one there.
The phone woke me. It was Belbo; his voice different, remote.
"Where the hell are you? Lost in the jungle?"
"Don't joke, Casaubon. This is serious. I'm in Paris."
"Paris? But I was the one who was supposed to go to the Conservatoire."
"Stop joking, damn it. I'm in a booth—in a bar. I may not be able to talk much longer...."
"If you're running out of change, call collect. I'll wait here."
"Change isn't the problem. I'm in trouble." He was talking fast, not giving me time to interrupt. "The Plan. The Plan is real. I know, don't say it. They're after me."
"Who?" I still couldn't understand.
"The Templars, Casaubon, for God's sake. You won't want to believe this, I know, but it's all true. They think I have the map, they tricked me, made me come to Paris. At midnight Saturday they want me at the Conservatoire. Saturday—you understand—Saint John's Eve...." He was talking disjointedly; and I couldn't follow him. "I don't want to go. I'm on the run, Casaubon. They'll kill me. Tell De Angelis—no, De Angelis is useless—keep the police out of it...."
"Then what do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. Read the floppy disks, use Abulafia. I put everything there these last few days, including all that happened this month. You weren't around, I didn't know who to tell it to, I wrote for three days and three nights.... Listen, go to the office; in my desk drawer there's an envelope with two keys in it. The large one you don't need: it's the key to my house in the country. But the small one's for the Milan apartment. Go there and read everything, then decide for yourself, or maybe we'll talk. My God, I don't know what to do...."
"All right. But where can I find you?"
"I don't know. I change hotels here every night. Do it today and wait at my place tomorrow morning. I'll call if I can. My God, the password—"
I heard noises. Belbo's voice came closer, moved away, as if someone was wresting the receiver from him.
"Belbo! What's going on?"
"They found me. The word—"
A sharp report, like a shot. It must have been the receiver falling, slamming against the wall or onto that little shelf they have under telephones. A scuffle. Then the click of the receiver being hung up. Certainly not by Belbo.
I took a quick shower to clear my head. I couldn't figure out what was going on. The Plan real? Absurd. We had invented it ourselves. But who had captured Belbo? The Rosicrucians? The Comte de Saint-Germain? The Okhrana? The Knights of the Temple? The Assassins? Anything was possible, if the impossible was true. But Belbo might have gone off the deep end. He had been very tense lately, whether because of Lorenza Pellegrini or because he was becoming more and more fascinated by his creature.... The Plan, actually, was our creature, his, mine, Diotallevi's, but Belbo was the one who seemed obsessed by it now, beyond the confines of the game. It was useless to speculate further.
I went to the office. Gudrun welcomed me with the acid remark that she had to keep the business going all on her own. I found the envelope, the keys, and rushed to Belbo's apartment.
The stale, rancid smell of cigarette butts, the ashtrays all brimming. The kitchen sink piled high with dirty dishes, the garbage bin full of disemboweled cans. On a shelf in the study, three empty bottles of whiskey, and a little left—two fingers—in a fourth bottle. This was the apartment of a man who had worked nonstop for days without budging, eating only when he had to, working furiously, like an addict.
There were two rooms in all, books piled in every corner, shelves sagging under their weight. The table with the computer, printer, and boxes of disks. A few pictures in the space not occupied by shelves. Directly opposite the table, a seventeenth-century print carefully framed, an allegory I hadn't noticed last month, when I came up to have a beer before going off on my vacation.
On the table, a photograph of Lorenza Pellegrini, with an inscription in a tiny, almost childish hand. You saw only her face, but her eyes were unsettling, the look in her eyes. In a gesture of instinctive delicacy (or jealousy?) I turned the photograph facedown, not reading the inscription.
There were folders. I looked through them. Nothing of interest, only accounts, publishing cost estimates. But in the midst of these papers I found the printout of a file that, to judge by its date, must have been one of Belbo's first experiments with the word processor. It was titled "Abu." I remembered, when Abulafia made its appearance in the office, Belbo's infantile enthusiasm, Gudrun's muttering, Diotallevi's sarcasm.
Abu had been Belbo's private reply to his critics, a kind of sophomoric joke, but it said a lot about the combinatory passion with which he had used the machine. Here was a man who had said, with his wan smile, that once he realized that he would never be a protagonist, he decided to become, instead, an intelligent spectator, for there was no point in writing without serious motivation. Better to rewrite the books of others, which is what a good editor does. But Belbo found in the machine a kind of LSD and ran his fingers over the keyboard as if inventing variations on "The Happy Farmer" on the old piano at home, without fear of being judged. Not that he thought he was being creative: terrified as he was by writing, he knew that this was not writing but only the testing of an electronic skill. A gymnastic exercise. But, forgetting the usual ghosts that haunted him, he discovered that playing with the word processor was a way of giving vent to a fifty-year-old's second adolescence. His natural pessimism, his reluctant acceptance of his own past were somehow dissolved in this dialog with a memory that was inorganic, objective, obedient, nonmoral, transistorized, and so humanly inhuman that it enabled him to forget his chronic nervousness about life.
FILENAME: Abu
O what a beautiful morning at the end of November, in the beginning was the word, sing to me, goddess, the son of Peleus, Achilles, now is the winter of our discontent. Period, new paragraph. Testing testing parakalo, parakalo, with the right program you can even make anagrams, if you've written a novel with a Confederate hero named Rhett Butler and a fickle girl named Scarlett and then change your mind, all you have to do is punch a key and Abu will global replace the Rhett Butlers to Prince Andreis, the Scarletts to Natashas, Atlanta to Moscow, and lo! you've written war and peace.
Abu, do another thing now: Belbo orders Abu to change all words, make each "a" become "akka" and each "o" become "ulla," for a paragraph to look almost Finnish.
Akkabu, dulla akkanullather thing nullaw: Belbulla ullarders Akkabu tulla chakkange akkall wullards, makkake eakkach "akka" becullame "akkakkakka" akkand eakkach "ulla" becullame "ullakka," fullar akka pakkarakkagrakkaph tulla lullaullak akkalmullast Finnish.
&
nbsp; O joy, O new vertigo of difference, O my platonic reader-writer racked by a most platonic insomnia, O wake of finnegan, O animal charming and benign. He doesn't help you think but he helps you because you have to think for him. A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goose quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type, the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him (it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you are borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light of critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter.
An loo what I doo now, I tak this pac of speling monnstrosties an I orderr the macchin to coppy them an file them in temrary memry an then brring them bak from tha limbo onto the scren, folowing itsel.
There, I was typing blindly, but now I have taken that pack of spelling monstrosities and ordered the machine to copy the mess, and on the copy I made all the corrections, so it comes out perfect on the page. From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola. Repenting, I could have deleted the first draft. I left it to show how the "is" and the "ought," accident and necessity, can coexist on this screen. If I wanted, I could remove the offending passage from the screen but not from the memory, thereby creating an archive of my repressions while denying omnivorous Freudians and virtuosi of variant texts the pleasure of conjecture, the exercise of their occupation, their academic glory.
This is better than real memory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns to remember but not to forget. Diotallevi goes Sephardically mad over those palaces with grand staircases, that statue of a warrior doing something unspeakable to a defenseless woman, the corridors with hundreds of rooms, each with the depiction of a portent, and the sudden apparitions, disturbing incidents, walking mummies. To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea, processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of gymnosophists—and so on, to infinity. O Raimundo, O Camillo, you had only to cast your mind back to your visions and immediately you could reconstruct the great chain of being, in love and joy, because all that was disjointed in the universe was joined in a single volume in your mind, and Proust would have made you smile. But when Diotallevi and I tried to construct an ars oblivionalis that day, we couldn't come up with rules for forgetting. It's impossible. It's one thing to go in search of a lost time, chasing labile clues, like Hop-o'-My-Thumb in the woods, and quite another deliberately to misplace time refound. Hop-o'-My-Thumb always comes home, like an obsession. There is no discipline of forgetting; we are at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke and amnesia, and such self-interventions as drugs, alcohol, or suicide.
Abu, however, can perform on himself precise local suicides, temporary amnesias, painless aphasias.
Where were you last night, L
There, indiscreet reader: you will never know it, but that half-line hanging in space was actually the beginning of a long sentence that I wrote but then wished I hadn't, wished I hadn't even thought let alone written it, wished that it had never happened. So I pressed a key, and a milky film spread over the fatal and inopportune lines, and I pressed DELETE and, whoosh, all gone.
But that's not all. The problem with suicide is that sometimes you jump out the window and then change your mind between the eighth floor and the seventh. "Oh, if only I could go back!" Sorry, you can't, too bad. Splat. Abu, on the other hand, is merciful, he grants you the right to change your mind: you can recover your deleted text by pressing RETRIEVE. What a relief! Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget.
Never again will I go from one bar to another, disintegrating alien spacecraft with tracer bullets, until the invader monster disintegrates me. This is far more beautiful: here you disintegrate thoughts instead of aliens. The screen is a galaxy of thousands and thousands of asteroids, all in a row, white or green, and you have created them yourself. Fiat Lux, Big Bang, seven days, seven minutes, seven seconds, and a universe is born before your eyes, a universe in constant flux, where sharp lines in space and time do not exist. No numerus Clausius here, no constraining law of thermodynamics. The letters bubble indolently to the surface, they emerge from nothingness and obediently return to nothingness, dissolving like ectoplasm. It's an underwater symphony of soft linkings and unlinkings, a gelatinous dance of self-devouring moons, like the big fish in the Yellow Submarine. At a touch of your fingertip the irreparable slides backward toward a hungry word and disappears into its maw with a slurrrp, then darkness. If you don't stop, the word swallows itself as well, fattening on its own absence like a Cheshire-cat black hole.
And if you happen to write what modesty forbids, it all goes onto a floppy disk, and you can give the disk a password, and no one will be able to read you. Excellent for secret agents. You write the message, save it, then put the disk in your pocket and walk off. Not even Torquemada could find out what you've written: It's between you and it (It?). And if they torture you, you pretend to confess; you start entering the password, then press a secret key, and the message disappears forever. Oh, I'm so sorry, you say, my hand slipped, an accident, and now it's gone. What was it? I don't remember. It wasn't important. I have no Message to reveal. But later on—who knows?—I might.
4
He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the key resembles a man who would walk without feet.
—Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Oppenheim, De Bry, 1618, emblem XXVII
That was the only file that had been printed out. I would have to go through the disks on the computer. They were arranged by number, and I thought I might as well start with the first. But Belbo had mentioned a password. He had always been possessive with Abulafia's secrets.
When I loaded the machine, a message promptly appeared: "Do you have the password?" Not in the imperative. Belbo was a polite man.
The machine doesn't volunteer its help. It must be given the word; without the word, it won't talk. As though it were saying: "Yes, what you want to know is right here in my guts. Go ahead and dig, dig, old mole; you'll never find it." We'll see about that, I said to myself; you got such a kick out of playing with Diotallevi's permutations and combinations, and you were the Sam Spade of publishing. As Jacopo Belbo would have said: Find the falcon.
The password to get into Abulafia had to be seven letters or fewer. Letters or numbers. How many groups of seven could be made from all the letters of the alphabet, including the possibility of repetition, since there was no reason the word couldn't be "cadabra"? I knew the formula. The number was six billion and something. A giant calculator capable of running through all six billion at the rate of a million per second would still have to feed them to Abulafia one at a time. And it took Abulafia about ten seconds to ask for the password and verify it. That made sixty billion seconds. There were over thirty-one million seconds in a year. Say thirty, to have a round figure. It would take, therefore, two thousand years to go through all the possibilities. Nice work.
I would have to proceed, instead, by inductive guesswork. What word would Belbo have chosen? Was it a word he had decided on at the start, when he began using the machine, or was it one he had come up with only recently, when he realized that these disks were dangerous and that, for him at least, the game was no longer a game? This would make a big difference.
Better assume the latter, I thought. Belbo feels he is being hunted by the Plan, which he now takes seriously (as he told me on the phone). For a password, then, he would use some term connected with our story.
But maybe not: a term associated with the Tradition might also occur to Them. Then I thought: What if They had already broken into the apartment and made copies of the disks, and were now, at this very moment, trying all the
combinations of letters in some remote place? Using the supreme computer, in a castle in the Carpathians.
Nonsense, I told myself. They weren't computer people. They would use the notarikon, the gematria, the temurah, treating the disks like the Torah, and therefore would require as much time as had passed since the writing of the Sefer Yesirah. No, if They existed, They would proceed cabalistically, and if Belbo believed that They existed, he would follow the same path.
Just to be on the safe side, I tried the ten Sefirot: Keter, Hokhmah, Binah, Hesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Nezah, Hod, Yesod, Malkhut. They didn't work, of course: it was the first thing that would have occurred to anyone.
Still, the word had to be something obvious, something that would come to mind at once, because when you work on a text as obsessively as Belbo must have during the past few days, you can't think of anything else, of any other subject. It would not be human for him to drive himself crazy over the Plan and at the same time pick Lincoln or Mombasa for the password. The password had to be connected with the Plan. But what?
