Ricardo

Riccardo, identified as a scarred painter, is both Lorenza’s companion in a tense social scene and an aspiring initiate within the Tres. His appearances turn on the instability of what can be seen: in the dance he is a rival whom Jacopo Belbo tries to diminish, while at the ritual he speaks as a disciplined adept whose place in the order is deliberately limited by secrecy.

Identity and First Appearance

Riccardo enters the narrative as a man who comes to Lorenza and takes her by the arm, inviting her to dance. The narrator does not initially offer a history of him; his identity is established through his visible relation to Lorenza and his proximity to Belbo. He is later named as a painter, and the scar becomes a distinguishing feature by which the narrator recognizes him in the ritual crowd.

The first scene presents Riccardo through movement rather than exposition. In the middle of the room, he and Lorenza make faint, dreamy gestures that resemble drumming. At intervals, however, he draws her close and places a possessive hand on the back of her neck. She follows with closed eyes, flushed face, and her head thrown back. The contrast between the light, almost abstract dance and his possessive touch gives their interaction a physical insistence that Belbo cannot ignore.

Lorenza, Belbo, and the Dance

Belbo watches the pair while lighting one cigarette after another. Lorenza then draws Riccardo toward him without breaking the dance, takes Belbo’s paper cup, and turns her moist eyes toward him. Her remark that this was not the only time she had met Sophia shifts the conversation into the book’s recurring world of historical and esoteric identifications. Riccardo’s presence is part of the immediate social triangle, but Belbo interprets the exchange through his own jealous contest with Lorenza and with the man standing beside her.

The scene becomes an argument about roles and possession. Belbo casts Lorenza as a prostitute and feminist publicist and Riccardo as her Simon, while Riccardo objects that they are not talking about him. The narrator reads Belbo’s insistence as an attempt to assert his possession of Lorenza, even as he speaks in front of a rival. Lorenza answers Belbo that it is a game and that she loves him. Riccardo’s brief, blunt interjection that he has other things he would like to do with Lorenza prompts her to call him vulgar and to redirect attention to Belbo. The scene does not establish Riccardo’s private feelings, but it shows him participating in a performance in which erotic competition, intellectual joking, and historical role-play overlap.

Admission to the Tres

Riccardo’s later appearance recasts the painter as a member of an occult hierarchy. During Bramanti’s rite, he steps out of the crowd and kneels before the officiant. The narrator recognizes his face for an instant: it is Riccardo, the scarred painter. Bramanti questions him, and Riccardo answers from memory with the formulas of the ritual. The posture and recitation mark him as a participant, not a casual observer.

Asked to identify himself, Riccardo says that he is an adept but has not yet been admitted to the higher mysteries of the Tres. He describes having prepared in silence and meditation upon the mystery of the Baphomet, and says that the Great Work turns on six intact seals, with the secret of the seventh to be known only at the end. His statement places him inside the order’s language and discipline while preserving a boundary between his present rank and the mysteries above it. The six seals and concealed seventh secret also echo the material that has been driving the novel’s search for a hidden plan.

Riccardo explains that he was received through the perpendicular of the Pendulum. When asked whether he would recognize the person who had received him, he says no: that figure was masked. His knowledge is limited to the knight one rank above him, who in turn knows only the naometer above him. Riccardo explicitly accepts this chain of restricted recognition, wishing that each member know only one other. The order’s secrecy is thus not merely an atmosphere around him; he describes it as an arrangement that governs who can know whom.

Narrative Function and Limits

The contrast between Riccardo’s two appearances is central to his small but suggestive role. At the dance, his possessive gesture makes him legible as Belbo’s rival, and Belbo tries to absorb him into a joking historical parallel. At Bramanti’s ceremony, Riccardo speaks within a formal system of ranks, masked superiors, and deferred revelation. In both settings, identity is mediated by performance: the social scene makes roles into flirtatious weapons, while the rite makes rank and recognition instruments of institutional concealment.

The novel does not supply a fuller biography, explain how Riccardo entered the Tres, or show what becomes of him after his testimony. His importance therefore lies less in a developed personal arc than in the recognition that joins the scenes. The scarred painter from the dance is also an adept in the conspiracy’s ritual world. His presence gives that world a concrete human face, while his confession of incomplete knowledge preserves the Tres’s defining promise: that the decisive secret remains one step beyond what any single initiate can see.