Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (important books to read .txt) 📗

fed the computer the name ofGod transliterated into Latin letters, including the vowels, butthe word was Hebrew, so he had written it from right to left. Theinput hadn't been IAHVEH, but HEVHAI. The order of the permutationshad to be inverted.

I counted from the endand tried both names again.

Nothing.

This was all wrong. Iwas clinging stubbornly to an elegant but false hypothesis. Ithappens to the best scientists.

No, not the bestscientists. To everyone. Only a month ago we had remarked that inthree recent novels, at least three, there was a protagonist tryingto find the name of God in a computer.

Belbo would have beenmore original. Besides which, when you choose a password, you picksomething easy to remember, something that comes to mindautomatically. Ihvhea, indeed! In that case he would have had toapply the notarikon to the temurah, to invent an acrostic toremember the word. Something like Imelda Has Vindicated Hiram'sEvil Assassination.

But why should Belbohave thought in DiotallevFs cabalistic terms? Belbo was obsessed bythe Plan, and into the Plan we had put all sorts of otheringredients: Rosicrucians, Synarchy, Homunculi, the Pendulum, theTower, the Druids, the Ennoia...

Ennoia. I thought ofLorenza Pellegrini. I reached out, picked up her censoredphotograph, looked at it, and an inopportune thought surfaced, thememory of that evening in Piedmont...I read the inscription on thepicture: "For I am the first and the last, the honored and thehated, the saint and the prostitute. Sophia."

She must have writtenthat after Riccardo's party. Sophia. Six letters. And why wouldthey need to be scrambled? I was the one with the devious mind.Belbo loves Lorenza, loves her precisely because she is the way sheis, and she is Sophia. And at that very moment she might be...No,no good. Belbo was devious, too. I recalled Diotallevi's words: "Inthe second se-firah the dark aleph changes into the luminous aleph.From the Dark Point spring the letters of the Torah. The consonantsare the body, the vowels the breath, and together they accompanythe worshiper as he chants. When the chant moves, the consonantsand vowels move with it, and from them rises Hokhmah¡X wisdom,knowledge, the primordial thought that contains, as in a box,everything, all that will unfold in creation. Hokhmah holds theessence of all that will emanate from it."

And what was Abulafia,with its secret files? The box that held everything Belbo knew, orthought he knew. His Sophia. With her secret name he would enterAbulafia, the thing¡Xthe only thing¡Xhe made love to. But, makinglove to Abulafia, he thinks of Lorenza. So he needs a word thatwill give him possession of Abulafia but also serve as a talismanto give him possession of Lorenza, to penetrate Lorenza's heart ashe penetrates Abulafia's. But Abulafia should be impenetrable toothers, as Lorenza is impenetrable to him. It is Belbo's hope thathe can enter, know, and conquer Lorenza's secret in the same waythat he possesses Abulafia.

But I was making thisup. My explanation was just like the Plan: substituting wishes forreality.

Drunk, I sat down at thekeyboard again and tapped out SOPHIA. Again, nothing, and again themachine asked me politely: "Do you have the password?" You stupidmachine, you feel no emotion at the thought of Lorenza.

6

Juda Leon se dio apermutaciones

De letras y a complejasvariaciones

Y alfin pronuncio elNombre que es la Clave,

La Puerta, el Eco, elHue'sped y el Palacio...

¡XJorge Luis Borges, ElGolem

And then, in a fit ofhate, as I worked again at Abulafia's obtuse question "Do you havethe password?" I typed: NO.

The screen began to fillwith words, lines, codes, a flood of communication.

I had broken intoAbulafia.

Thrilled by my triumph,I didn't ask myself why Belbo had chosen that, of all words. Now Iknow, and I know, too, that in a moment of lucidity he understoodwhat I have come to understand only now. But last Thursday, my onlythought was that I had won.

I danced, clapped myhands, sang an old army song. Then I went to the bathroom andwashed my face. When I came back, I began printing out the files,last files first, what Belbo had written just before his flight toParis. As the printer chattered implacably, I devoured some foodand drank some more whiskey.

When the printer stoppedand I read what Belbo had written, I was aghast, unable to decidewhether this was an extraordinary revelation or the wild raving ofa madman.

What did I really knowabout Jacopo Belbo? What had I learned about him in the two years Iworked at his side, almost every day? How much faith could I put inthe word of a man who, by his own admission, was writing underexceptional circumstances, in a fog of alcohol, tobacco, andterror, completely cut off from the world for threedays?

It was already night,Thursday, June 21. My eyes were watering. I had been staring at thescreen and then at the printer's pointillist anthill since morning.What I had read might be true or it might be false, but Belbo saidhe would call in the morning. I would have to wait here. My headswam.

I staggered into thebedroom and fell, still dressed, onto the unmade bed.

* * *

At around eight I awokefrom a deep, sticky sleep, not realizing at first where I was.Luckily I found a can of coffee and was able to make myself a fewcups. The phone didn't ring. I didn't dare go out to buy anything,because Belbo might call while I was gone.

I went back to themachine and began printing out the other disks in chronologicalorder. I found games, exercises, and accounts of events I knewabout, but told from Belbo's private point of view, so that theywere reshaped and appeared to me now in a different light. I founddiary fragments, confessions, outlines for works of fiction madewith the bitter obstinacy of a man who knows that his efforts aredoomed to failure. I found descriptions of people I remembered, butnow I saw them with different faces¡Xsinister faces, unless thiswas because I was seeing them as part of a horrible finalmosaic.

And I found a filedevoted entirely to quotations taken from Belbo's most recentreading. I recognized them immediately. Together we had pored overso many texts during those months...The quotations were numbered:one hundred and twenty in all. The number was probably a deliberatechoice; if not, the