by Umberto Eco
Martinetti's plan was shrewd. We would cross the railroad embankment farther to the north and come at them from behind, take them by surprise, and thus would be victors from the start. Then no quarter would be granted.
At dusk we crossed the embankment, scrambling up ramps and across gullies, loaded down with stones and clubs. From the crest of the embankment we saw them lying in ambush behind the station latrines. But they saw us, too, because they were watching their backs, suspecting we would arrive from that direction. The only thing for us to do was to move in without giving them time for astonishment at the obviousness of our ploy.
Nobody had passed around any grappa before we went over the top, but we flung ourselves into battle anyway, yelling. Then came the turning point, when we were about a hundred meters from the station. There stood the first houses of the town, and though they were few, they created a web of narrow paths. There, the boldest group dashed forward, fearless, while I and (luckily for me) a few others slowed down and ducked behind the corners of the houses, to watch from a distance.
If Martinetti had organized us into vanguard and rear guard, we would have done our duty, but this was a spontaneous deployment: those with guts in front, and the cowards behind. So from our refuges—mine was farther back than the others—we observed the conflict. Which never took place.
The two groups came within a few meters of each other, and stood in confrontation, snarling. Then the leaders stepped forward to confer. Yalta. They decided to divide their territories into zones and agreed to allow an occasional safe-conduct pass, like Christians and Moslems in the Holy Land. Solidarity between groups of knights had prevailed over the ineluctability of battle. Each side had proved itself. The opposing camps withdrew in harmony, still opponents, in opposite directions.
Now I tell myself that I didn't rush into the attack because I found it laughable. But that's not what I told myself then. Then, I felt like a coward, and that was that.
Today, even more cowardly, I tell myself that as it turned out I would have risked nothing had I charged with the others, and my life afterward would have been better. I missed Opportunity at the age of twelve. If you fail to have an erection the first time, you're impotent for the rest of your life.
A month later, some random trespass brought the Alley and Canal gangs face to face in a field, and clods of earth began to fly. I don't know whether it was because the outcome of the earlier conflict had reassured me or because I desired martyrdom, but one way or another, this time I stood in the front line. A clod, which concealed a stone, struck my lip and split it. I ran home crying, and my mother had to use the tweezers from her toilet case to pick picces of earth out of the wound on the inside of my lip. In fact I was left with a lump next to the lower right canine, and even now, when I run my tongue over it, I feel a vibration, a shudder.
But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness, not through courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.
After the day of the march I didn't see Belbo again for about a year. I fell in love with Amparo and stopped going to Pilade's—or, at least, the few times I did drop in with Amparo, Belbo wasn't there. Amparo didn't like the place anyway. In her moral and political severity—equaled only by her grace, her magnificent pride—she considered Pilade's a clubhouse for liberal dandies, and liberal dandysme, as far as she was concerned, was a subtle thread in the fabric of the capitalist plot. For me this was a year of great commitment, seriousness, and enchantment. I worked joyfully but serenely on my thesis.
Then one day I ran into Belbo along the navigli, not far from the Garamond office. "Well, look who's here," he said cheerfully. "My favorite Templar! Listen, I've just been presented with a bottle of ineffably ancient nectar. Why don't you come up to the office? I have paper cups and a free afternoon."
"A zeugma," I said.
"No. Bourbon. And bottled, I believe, before the fall of the Alamo."
I followed him. We had just taken the first sip when Gudrun came in and said there was a gentleman to see Belbo. He slapped his forehead. He had forgotten the appointment. But chance has a taste for conspiracy, he said to me. From what he had gathered, this individual wanted to show him a book that concerned the Templars. "I'll get rid of him quickly," he said, "but you must lend me a hand with some keen objections."
It had surely been chance. And so I was caught in the net.
17
And thus did the knights of the Temple vanish with their secret, in whose shadow breathed a lofty yearning for the earthly city. But the Abstract to which their efforts aspired lived on, unattainable, in unknown regions ... and its inspiration, more than once in the course of time, has filled those spirits capable of receiving it.
—Victor Emile Michelet, Le secret de la Chevalerie, 1930, 2
He had a 1940s face. Judging by the old magazines I had found in the basement at home, everybody had a face like that in the forties. It must have been wartime hunger that hollowed the cheeks and made the eyes vaguely feverish. This was a face I knew from photographs of firing squads—on both sides. In those days men with the same face shot one another.
Our visitor was wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, and a pearl-gray tie, and instinctively I asked myself why he was in civilian clothes. His hair, unnaturally black, was combed back from the temples in two bands, brilliantined, though with discretion, showing a bald, shiny crown traversed by fine strands, regular as telegraph wires, that formed a centered V on his forehead. His face was tanned, marked—marked not only by the explicitly colonial wrinkles. A pale scar ran across his left cheek from lip to ear, slicing imperceptibly through the left half of his black Adolphe Menjou mustache. The skin must have been opened less than a millimeter and stitched up. Mensur? Or a grazing bullet's wound?
He introduced himself—Colonel Ardenti—offering Belbo his hand and merely nodding at me when Belbo presented me as an assistant. He sat down, crossed his legs, drew up his trousers from the knee, revealing a pair of maroon socks, ankle-length.
"Colonel ... on active service?" Belbo asked.
Ardenti bared some high-quality dentures. "Retired, you could say. Or, if you prefer, in the reserves. I may not look old, but I am."
"You don't look at all old," Belbo said.
"I've fought in four wars."
"You must have begun with Garibaldi."
"No. I was a volunteer lieutenant in Ethiopia. Then a captain, again a volunteer, in Spain. Then a major back in Africa, until we abandoned our colonies. Silver Medal. In '43—well, let's just say I chose the losing side, and indeed I lost everything, save honor. I had the courage to start all over again, in the ranks. Foreign Legion. School of hard knocks. Sergeant in '46, colonel in '58, with Massu. Apparently I always choose the losing side. When De Gaulle's leftists took over, I retired and went to live in France. I had made some good friends in Algiers, so I set up an import-export firm in Marseilles. This time I chose the winning side, apparently, since I now enjoy an independent income and can devote myself to my hobby. These past few years, I've written down the results of my research. Here..." From a leather briefcase he produced a voluminous file, which at the time seemed red to me.
"So," Belbo said, "a book on the Templars?"
"The Templars," the colonel acknowledged. "A passion of mine almost from my youth. They, too, were soldiers of fortune who crossed the Mediterranean in search of glory."
"Signor Casaubon has also been studying the Templars," Belbo said. "He knows the subject better than I do. But tell us about your book."
"The Templars have always interested me. A handful of generous souls who bore the light of Europe among the savages of the two Tripolis..."
"The Templars' adversaries weren't exactly savages," I remarked.
"Have you ever been captured by rebels in the Magreb?" he asked me with heavy sarcasm.
"Not that I recall," I said.
He glared at me, and I was glad I had never ser
ved in one of his platoons. "Excuse me," he said, speaking to Belbo. "I belong to another generation." He looked back at me defiantly. "Is this some kind of trial, or—"
"We're here to talk about your work, Colonel," Belbo said. "Tell us about it, please."
"I want to make one thing clear immediately," the colonel said, putting his hands on the file. "I am prepared to assume the production costs. You won't lose money on this. If you want scholarly references, I'll provide them. Just two hours ago I met an expert in the field, a man who came here from Paris expressly to see me. He could contribute an authoritative preface...." He anticipated Belbo's question and made a gesture, as if to say that for the moment it was best to leave the name unsaid, that it was a delicate matter.
"Dr. Belbo," he said, "these pages contain all the elements of a story. A true story, and a most unusual story. Better than any American thriller. I've discovered something—something very important—but it's only the beginning. I want to tell the world what I know, hoping that there may be somebody out there who can fit the rest of the puzzle together—somebody who might read the book and come forward. In other words, this is a fishing expedition of sorts. And time is of the essence. The one man who knew what I know now has probably been killed, precisely to keep him from divulging it. But if I can reach perhaps two thousand readers with what I know, there will be no further point in doing away with me." He paused. "The two of you know something about the arrest of the Templars?"
"Signor Casaubon told me about it recently, and I was struck by the fact that there was no resistance to the arrest, and the knights were caught by surprise."
The colonel smiled condescendingly. "True. But it's absurd to think that men powerful enough to frighten the king of France would have been unable to find out that a few rogues were stirring up the king and that the king was stirring up the pope. Quite absurd! Which suggests that there had to be a plan. A sublime plan. Suppose the Templars had a plan to conquer the world, and they knew the secret of an immense source of power, a secret whose preservation was worth the sacrifice of the whole Temple quarter in Paris, and of the commanderies scattered throughout the kingdom, also in Spain, Portugal, England, and Italy, the castles in the Holy Land, the monetary wealth—everything. Philip the Fair suspected this. Why else would he have unleashed a persecution that discredited the fair flower of French chivalry? The Temple realized that the king suspected and that he would attempt its destruction. Direct resistance was futile; the plan required time: either the treasure (or whatever it was) had to be found, or it had to be exploited slowly. And the Temple's secret directorate, whose existence everyone now recognizes..."
"Everyone?"
"Of course. It's inconceivable that such a powerful order could have survived so long without having a secret directorate."
"Your reasoning is flawless," Belbo said, giving me a sidelong glance.
The colonel went on. "The grand master belonged to the secret directorate, but he must have served only as its cover, to deceive outsiders. In La Chevalerie et les aspects secrets de l'histoire, Gaulthier Walther says that the Templar plan for world conquest was to be finally realized only in the year 2000. The Temple decided to go underground, and that meant that it had to look as if the order were dead. They sacrificed themselves, that's what they did! The grand master included. Some let themselves be killed; they were probably chosen by lot. Others submitted, blending into the civilian landscape. What became of the minor officials, the lay brothers, the carpenters, the glaziers? That was how the Freemasons were born, later spreading throughout the world, as everyone knows. But in England things happened differently. The king resisted the pope's pressure and pensioned the Templars off. They lived out their days meekly, in the order's great houses. Meekly—do you believe that? I don't. In Spain the order changed its name to the order of Montesa. Gentlemen, these were men who could bring a king to heel; they held so many of his promissory notes that they could have bankrupted him in a week. The king of Portugal, for instance, came to terms. Let us handle it like this, dear friends, he said: Don't call yourselves Knights of the Temple anymore; change the name to Knights of Christ, and I'll be happy. In Germany there were very few trials. The abolition of the order was purely formal, and in any case there was a brother order, the Teutonic Knights, who at the time were not merely a state within the state: they were the state, having acquired a territory as big as those countries now under the Russian heel, and they kept expanding until the end of the fifteenth century, when the Mongols arrived. But that's another story, because the Mongols are at our gates even now. But I mustn't digress."
"Yes, let us not digress," Belbo said.
"Well then. As everyone knows, two days before Philip issued the arrest warrant, and a month before it was carried out, a hay wain drawn by oxen left the precincts of the Temple for an unknown destination. Nostradamus himself alludes to it in one of his Centuries. ..." He looked through his manuscript for the quotation:
Souz la pasture d'animaux ruminant
par eux conduits au ventre herbipolique
soldats cachés, les armes bruit menant...
"The hay wain is a legend," I said. "And I would hardly consider Nostradamus an authority in matters of historical fact."
"People older than you, Signor Casaubon, have had faith in many of Nostradamus's prophecies. Not that I am so ingenuous as to take the story of the hay wain literally. It's a symbol—a symbol of the obvious, established fact that Jacques de Molay, anticipating his arrest, turned over command of the order, as well as its secret instructions, to a nephew, Comte de Beaujeu, who became the head of the now clandestine Temple."
"Are there documents that bear this out?"
"Official history," the colonel said with a bitter smile, "is written by the victors. According to official history, men like me don't exist. No, behind the story of the hay wain lies something else. The Temple's secret nucleus moved to a quiet spot, and from there they began to extend their underground network. This obvious fact was my starting point. For years—even before the war—I kept asking myself where these brothers in heroism might have gone. When I retired to private life, I finally decided to look for a trail. Since the flight of the hay wain had occurred in France, France was where I should find the original gathering of the secret nucleus. But where in France?"
He had a sense of theater. Belbo and I were all ears. We could find nothing better to say than "Well, where?"
"I'll tell you. Where would the Templars have hidden? Where did Hugues de Payns come from? Champagne, near Troyes. And at the time the Templars were founded, Champagne was ruled by Hugues de Champagne, who joined them in Jerusalem just a few years later. When he came back home, he apparently got in touch with the abbot of Citeaux and helped him initiate the study and translation of certain Hebrew texts in his monastery. Think about it: the White Benedictines—Saint Bernard's Benedictines—also invited the rabbis of upper Burgundy to come to Citeaux, to study whatever texts Hugues had found in Palestine. Hugues even gave Saint Bernard's monks a forest at Bar-sur-Aube, where Clairvaux was later built. And what did Saint Bernard do?"
"He became the champion of the Templars," I said.
"But why? Did you know he made the Templars even more powerful than the Benedictines? That he prohibited the Benedictines from receiving gifts of lands and houses, and had them give lands and houses to the Templars instead? Have you ever seen the Foret d'Orient near Troyes? It's immense, one commandery after the other. And in the meantime, you know, the knights in Palestine weren't fighting. They were settled in the Temple, making friends with the Moslems instead of killing them. They communicated with Moslem mystics. In other words, Saint Bernard, with the economic support of the counts of Champagne, built an order in the Holy Land that was in contact with Arab and Jewish secret sects. An unknown directorate ran the Crusades in an effort to keep the order going, and not the other way around. And it set up a network of power that was outside royal jurisdiction. I am a man of action, not a man of science. I
nstead of spinning empty conjectures, I did what all the long-winded scholars have never done: I went to the place the Templars came from, the place that had been their base for two centuries, their home, where they could live like fish in water...."
"Chairman Mao says that revolutionaries must live among the people like fish in water," I said.
"Good for your chairman. But the Templars were preparing a revolution far greater than the revolution of your pigtailed communists."
"They don't wear pigtails anymore."
"No? Well, so much the worse for them. As I was saying, the Templars must have sought refuge in Champagne. Payns? Troyes? The Eastern Forest? No. Payns was—and still is—a tiny village. At the time, it had a castle at most. Troyes was a city: too many of the king's men around. The forest, which the Templars owned, was the first place the royal guards would look. Which they did, by the way. No, I said to myself, the only place that made sense was Provins."
18
If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns.
