Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (14 page)

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.

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.

¡XVictor Emile Michelet,
Le secret de la Chevalerie, 1930, p. 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¡Xon 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¡Xmarked
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¡XColonel Ardenti¡Xoffering 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¡Xwell, 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 served 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¡X"

"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¡Xsomething very important¡Xbut 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¡Xsomebody 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?"

"Signer 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¡X 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 I'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 bom, later spreading throughout the world, as everyone knows.
But hi 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¡Xdo 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 caches, 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,
Signer 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¡Xa 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¡Xeven before the war¡XI 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, nearTroyes. 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¡XSaint Bernard's
Benedictines¡Xalso 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 com-mandery 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. Instead 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¡Xand still is¡Xa 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."