| you know that before you met me you wore the most dreadful ghastly ties and had dandruff on your shoulders. his behavior had been making me uneasy for some while now. he, as a rule so guarded about his feelings, was having a lovers’ quarrel in front of a witness, in front of a rival, even. but this last remark made me realize that with his baring of himself before the other man—the true rival being yet another—belbo was reasserting, in the only way he could, his possession of lorenza. | |
i’m still a prisoner of base matter. aren’t you having fun? besides, i still haven’t looked at the pictures. did you see? riccardo made one on me. i’m the one pushing you into the arms of old gentlemen. you’re cross because he doesn’t want to take me to bed but considers me an intellectual partner. riccardo, get me something to drink. and besides, the best part of the story is that when sophia realizes who she is and frees herself from the tyranny of the angels, she frees herself from sin. “those things aren’t sins anymore; i can do anything i like. |
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| once you’ve freed yourself from the flesh, you’re beyond good and evil. “i’m sophia, and to free myself from the angels i have to perpet. lorenza led the girl into the center of the room and began to sway with her. they were belly to belly, arms limp at their sides. the others gathered around, mildly aroused. belbo sat down and looked at the scene with an impenetrable face, like a producer watching a screen test. he was sweating, and there was a tic by his left eye, which i had never noticed before. lorenza danced for at least five minutes, with movements increasingly suggestive. then suddenly he said: “now you come here.” belbo got up, went straight to her, grabbed her by the wrist, and dragged her toward the door.” then she burst into tears and flung her arms around his neck. | |
he saw me on the threshold, and did something—whether for me, for the others, or for himself, i’ve never figured out. it was a whisper, when everybody else had turned away from the couple, losing interest. signer garamond authorized me to spend a few days at the deutsches museum in munich. i spent my evenings in the bars of schwabing—or in the immense crypts where elderly mustached gentlemen in lederhosen played music and lovers smiled at each other through a thick cloud of pork steam over full-liter beer steins—and in the afternoons i went through card catalogs of reproductions. now and then i would leave the archive and stroll through the museum, where every human invention had been reconstructed. you pushed a button, and dioramas of oil exploration came to life with working drills, you stepped inside a real submarine, you made the planets revolve, you played at producing acids and chain reactions. a less gothic conservatoire, totally of the future, peopled by unruly school groups being taught to idealize engineers. | |
| in the deutsches museum you also learned everything about mines: you went down a ladder and found yourself in a mine complete with tunnels, elevators for men and horses, narrow passages where scrawny exploited children (made of wax, i hoped) were crawling. you went along endless dark corridors, you stopped at the edge of bottomless pits, you felt chilled to the bone, and you could almost catch a whiff of firedamp. i was wandering in a tunnel, despairing of ever seeing the light of day again, when i came upon a man looking down over the railing, someone i seemed to recognize. the face was wrinkled and pale, the hair white, the look owlish. but the clothes were not right—i had seen that face before, above some uniform. it was like meeting, after many years, a priest now in civilian clothes, or a capuchin without a beard. the man looked back at me, also hesitating. as usually happens in such situations, there was some fencing of furtive glances before he took the initiative and greeted me in italian. suddenly i could picture him in his usual dress: if he had been wearing a long yellow smock, he would have been signer salon: a. | |
| his laboratory was next door to my office on the corridor of the former factory building where i was the marlowe of culture. i had encountered him at times on the stairs, and we had nodded to each other. “we have been fellow-tenants for so long, and we introduce ourselves in the bowels of the earth a thousand miles away. i got the impression that he knew exactly what i did, which was an achievement of sorts, since i wasn’t sure myself. “how do you happen to be in a technological museum? i thought your publishing firm was concerned with more spiritual things. but i do not lack for customers, and i have all kinds: museums, private collectors. | |
| not all creches are in the light of the sun or the moon.i’m suspicious of everything underground. i distrust the underground world, but i want to understand it. no mystery there, too many tourists, and everything is under the control of the church. and then there are the sewers of paris.have you been? they can be visited on monday, wednesday, and the last saturday of every month. but that’s another tourist attraction. naturally, there are catacombs in paris, too, and caves. | |
| an unremarkable building at first sight. but if you look at it more closely, you realize that though the door looks wooden, it is actually painted iron, and the windows appear to belong to rooms unoccupied for centuries. people walk past and don’t know the truth. it’s a facade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. it is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional metro. and once you know this, you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld: if you could penetrate those walls, you would have access to subterranean paris. i have had occasion to spend hours and hours in front of that door that conceals the door of doors, the point of departure for the journey to the center of the earth. no, when i see those subterranean passages, my suspicions are aroused. i asked him why his suspicions were aroused. “because if the masters of the world exist, they can only be underground: this is a truth that all sense but few dare utter. | |
perhaps the only man bold enough to say it in print was saint-yves d’alveydre. “he is the one who told us about agarttha, the underground headquarters of the king of the world, the occult center of the synarchy,” the taxidermist said. but all those who spoke out after him were eliminated, because they knew too much. then he said that had to along. but, after shaking my hand, he lingered another few seconds, as struck by . | |
| “apropos, that —what was his name?—the one who came to some time ago to to about a treasure.. .. |