Belbo retreats into the Plan after the Riviera trip

Belbo retreats into the Plan after the Riviera trip when a Sunday intended as an outing with Lorenza becomes a sequence of evasions, mishaps, and disappointments. The day ends with him alone in Piacenza, where he decides that the Plan offers refuge from defeats he cannot control—and a means of privately avenging himself on Aglie. The episode makes the Plan less an intellectual game than a shelter built from frustration, where people can be reduced to roles and apparent setbacks rewritten as acts of mastery.

The Riviera outing and its concealed tension

Lorenza asks Belbo to drive her to the Riviera so she can visit a friend and collect a document or other item. The errand seems as though it could have been handled by mail, but Belbo accepts because he is captivated by the prospect of spending Sunday by the sea with her. Their destination is uncertain, perhaps near Portofino. Belbo’s account records the emotional tension of the day more than its scenery: Lorenza completes her errand while he waits in a cafe, and then proposes that they eat at a restaurant on a bluff above the sea.

At the restaurant, a reserved card bearing the name of Aglie turns the outing into a predicament. Lorenza does not want Aglie to know she is there with Belbo. She explains that Aglie had invited her out and that she had told him she was busy; although she argues that spending the day with Belbo does not make her a liar, she still wants to avoid being seen. Her concern is framed as a matter of tact, leaving Belbo to confront a relationship in which their time together must be managed around Aglie’s expectations.

The effort to avoid that discovery becomes a physical detour. When people Lorenza identifies as Aglie’s friends approach, she hides her face behind a newspaper by a small bridge over an olive-filled ravine, while Belbo stands apart and smokes as if they were strangers. After one of the friends passes, Lorenza warns that they may meet Aglie if they continue along the path. They cut across the slopes to reach the car; in the hurried escape, Belbo loses the heel of a shoe. Lorenza presents the detour as more beautiful than the path, while also chiding him for being out of breath and smoking too much.

A forced journey inland

Belbo suggests returning to Milan, but Lorenza worries that Aglie might be late and recognize Belbo’s car on the highway. She proposes instead that they drive inland, cross the Apennines, and reach the Autostrada del Sole, perhaps stopping for supper near Pavia. The plan grows into an improvised route involving the mountains beyond Uscio, Bobbio, and Piacenza. Belbo objects that the journey is unreasonable; Lorenza treats it as an adventure and points to the possibility of finding charming restaurants.

Their attempt at a promising meal goes badly. Manuelina’s is full, and they eventually eat at half past two in a poor village, where the food is overcooked pasta with canned-meat sauce. Belbo asks why Lorenza has brought him to a place where Aglie might also be. He suspects that she is trying to provoke either Aglie or him, but cannot determine which. Lorenza asks whether he is paranoid. The uncertainty follows them into the drive: what began as a romantic invitation now seems to Belbo like a situation whose motives he cannot read.

On the road after Uscio, the car hits a dog. Belbo asks who owns it and offers to pay, but the villagers say it has no owner. Some propose calling the local carabinieri sergeant, while an animal-loving woman insists that someone should be found to help. Belbo is in a hurry and argues that the animal is dying; the woman rebukes him, and the sergeant cannot be found. The dog remains in pain as the people dispute what to do. The episode turns the trip’s accumulating frustration into an immediate, unresolved responsibility: Belbo cannot simply proceed, but the available response is slow and confused.

The delay stretches on under the afternoon sun. Belbo feels trapped in an unreal, interminable interval, while Lorenza says she is having an asthma attack. At last he suggests driving to the nearest town for help. The woman agrees, trusting a gentleman associated with a publisher of poetry and mentioning her admiration for Khalil Gibran. Belbo drives away with Lorenza, who curses the animals of creation; he joins her in condemning the day’s misfortunes. The episode does not resolve the dog’s fate. Instead, it leaves Belbo with the sense of having been caught in an absurd situation that he could neither control nor bring to a clean conclusion.

Abandonment in Piacenza

The crossing of the Apennines takes hours, and they do not stop in Bobbio. By evening they reach Piacenza. Belbo is tired, but expects at least to have supper with Lorenza. He takes a double room in the only available hotel near the station. Lorenza refuses to sleep there. Belbo asks her to wait while he goes down to the bar for a martini, but finds only domestic cognac. When he returns, she has disappeared from the room.

At the front desk, Belbo finds her message: “Darling, I’ve discovered a marvelous train for Milan. I’m leaving. See you next week.” He rushes to the station, but the track is empty. The sudden departure gives the day its clearest personal defeat: after following Lorenza’s shifting plans and helping her avoid Aglie, Belbo is left behind without a conversation or a chance to alter the outcome. He spends the night in Piacenza. With the station newsstand closed, he finds only a Touring Club magazine in the hotel.

The magazine’s account of Apennine passes sharply contrasts with Belbo’s memory of the journey. The roads he recalls as dry, dusty, and difficult appear in its glossy pages as landscapes worth revisiting and savoring. The contrast does not undo the experience; it shows how distance and presentation can recast it. On that night, however, Belbo’s own recollection remains bound to exhaustion and disappointment.

Retreat into the Plan and revenge on Aglie

Belbo’s decision to retreat into the Plan is tied, in the account, to the whole disastrous journey, including the dog he hit. The Plan promises an escape from defeat because within it Belbo can decide who acts, how events unfold, and when they happen. What reality has made uncertain—the purpose of Lorenza’s invitation, Aglie’s place in it, the dog’s fate, and Lorenza’s departure—can be reorganized as material in a system of his own making.

The same night, Belbo appears to resolve to take revenge on Aglie, although he has no clear reason for doing so. He will insert Aglie into the Plan without Aglie’s knowledge. Such revenge suits Belbo because he expects to be its only witness, not from modesty but from distrust that others would appreciate it. Once incorporated, Aglie can be made to dissolve into fiction, just as the Templars of Provins and the Rosicrucians have become unreal within the Plan. Belbo’s imagined victory is therefore also a form of erasure: rather than confront Aglie directly, he can reduce him to a figure whose significance Belbo controls.

Belbo believes he can do this because he has already reduced figures such as Bacon and Napoleon to manageable proportions within the Plan. He recalls having freed himself from Ardenti and Ardenti’s memory by placing him in a fiction better than his own, and expects the same operation to work on Aglie. The comparison reveals how thoroughly the invented system has become a means of managing personal memory and resentment, not merely a structure for interpreting history.

The episode closes with the file’s required quotation, “Bin ich ein Gott?” Its placement gives Belbo’s withdrawal an unsettled final note. The Plan grants him the position of author over its internal world, but the question makes that imagined power sound like the response of someone defeated by life. His refuge depends on control over fiction precisely because he has so little control over the day that produced it.