Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco umberto foucault Read Free Book Online Page B

had surely thought as
I was thinking. So I must have made some mistake, a stupid, trivial
mistake. I was getting closer. Had Belbo, for some reason that
escaped me, perhaps counted from the end of the list?
    Casaubon, you fool, I
said to myself. Of course he started from the end. That is, he
counted from right to left. Belbo had fed the computer the name of
God transliterated into Latin letters, including the vowels, but
the word was Hebrew, so he had written it from right to left. The
input hadn't been IAHVEH, but HEVHAI. The order of the permutations
had to be inverted.
    I counted from the end
and tried both names again.
    Nothing.
    This was all wrong. I
was clinging stubbornly to an elegant but false hypothesis. It
happens to the best scientists.
    No, not the best
scientists. To everyone. Only a month ago we had remarked that in
three recent novels, at least three, there was a protagonist trying
to find the name of God in a computer.
    Belbo would have been
more original. Besides which, when you choose a password, you pick
something easy to remember, something that comes to mind
automatically. Ihvhea, indeed! In that case he would have had to
apply the notarikon to the temurah, to invent an acrostic to
remember the word. Something like Imelda Has Vindicated Hiram's
Evil Assassination.
    But why should Belbo
have thought in DiotallevFs cabalistic terms? Belbo was obsessed by
the Plan, and into the Plan we had put all sorts of other
ingredients: Rosicrucians, Synarchy, Homunculi, the Pendulum, the
Tower, the Druids, the Ennoia...
    Ennoia. I thought of
Lorenza Pellegrini. I reached out, picked up her censored
photograph, looked at it, and an inopportune thought surfaced, the
memory of that evening in Piedmont...I read the inscription on the
picture: "For I am the first and the last, the honored and the
hated, the saint and the prostitute. Sophia."
    She must have written
that after Riccardo's party. Sophia. Six letters. And why would
they need to be scrambled? I was the one with the devious mind.
Belbo loves Lorenza, loves her precisely because she is the way she
is, and she is Sophia. And at that very moment she might be...No,
no good. Belbo was devious, too. I recalled Diotallevi's words: "In
the second se-firah the dark aleph changes into the luminous aleph.
From the Dark Point spring the letters of the Torah. The consonants
are the body, the vowels the breath, and together they accompany
the worshiper as he chants. When the chant moves, the consonants
and 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 the
essence of all that will emanate from it."
    And what was Abulafia,
with its secret files? The box that held everything Belbo knew, or
thought he knew. His Sophia. With her secret name he would enter
Abulafia, the thing¡Xthe only thing¡Xhe made love to. But, making
love to Abulafia, he thinks of Lorenza. So he needs a word that
will give him possession of Abulafia but also serve as a talisman
to give him possession of Lorenza, to penetrate Lorenza's heart as
he penetrates Abulafia's. But Abulafia should be impenetrable to
others, as Lorenza is impenetrable to him. It is Belbo's hope that
he can enter, know, and conquer Lorenza's secret in the same way
that he possesses Abulafia.
    But I was making this
up. My explanation was just like the Plan: substituting wishes for
reality.
    Drunk, I sat down at the
keyboard again and tapped out SOPHIA. Again, nothing, and again the
machine asked me politely: "Do you have the password?" You stupid
machine, you feel no emotion at the thought of Lorenza.

6
    Juda Leon se dio a
permutaciones
    De letras y a complejas
variaciones
    Y alfin pronuncio el
Nombre que es la Clave,
    La Puerta, el Eco, el
Hue'sped y el Palacio...
    ¡XJorge Luis Borges, El
Golem
    And then, in a fit of
hate, as I worked again at Abulafia's obtuse question "Do you have
the password?" I