Diotallevi’s cancer

Diotallevi’s cancer is a worsening illness that Diotallevi, one of the creators of the Plan, comes to understand through the Plan’s own habits of textual interpretation. As his body weakens, he describes his cells as if they were making uncontrolled alterations to a sacred text; the analogy turns the group’s intellectual game into a source of guilt and, in Diotallevi’s account, a possible explanation for his death. The narrative does not establish that the Plan caused his cancer: it shows how illness and the men’s imaginative excess become entangled in Diotallevi’s final attempt to make sense of his body.

Diagnosis and Decline

In late November, Diotallevi called the office to say that he was going into the hospital. His doctor had told him there was nothing to worry about, while also recommending tests. The measured reassurance did not keep the illness from becoming more serious. After being away for about two weeks, he returned to tell his colleagues that he had asked Garamond for sick leave and had been prescribed treatment requiring hospital visits every two or three days. He did not explain the treatment in detail, but said it would leave him weak.

By then, the illness was visible. Casaubon describes Diotallevi’s face as white as his hair. At a later visit, Belbo sees that he has lost almost all the hair on his head, eyebrows, and eyelashes; his bald head resembles a billiard ball. The doctor’s earlier reassurance and the stark physical changes stand in contrast, marking the distance between the initial suggestion of routine tests and the advanced condition his friends now confront.

Illness and the Plan

Belbo and Casaubon connect Diotallevi’s illness to the Plan, although they recognize that the connection is irrational. They feel guilty because they think they may have carried their speculations too far. Casaubon recalls this as a second occasion on which he and Belbo were partners in wrongdoing: earlier they had kept information from De Angelis, and now, in their view, they had talked too much. They tell one another that the guilt is foolish, but cannot shake it. For a month or more, they stop discussing the Plan.

Diotallevi gives that unease a bitterly comic form when he calls the illness the Rosicrucians’ revenge and warns his friends to forget their stories. Belbo answers that they will make life unpleasant for the Rosicrucians until they leave Diotallevi alone, punctuating the promise with a snap of his fingers. The joke briefly treats the Plan’s imagined enemies as if they could be confronted, but it cannot alter the bodily reality of the disease.

Diotallevi’s Interpretation

During Belbo’s final visit, Diotallevi refuses the consoling hope that a new therapy might save him. He says that he has no situation, only needs, and insists that his body is still young; because he is not yet fifty, he claims, he has the privilege of dying more quickly. He is tired and asks Belbo to say what he came to say. Belbo obeys and tells him the whole story.

Diotallevi then explains his illness by extending the group’s experiments with letters into his own body. For months, he says, they had combined letters from the Book, repeating sequences such as GCC, CGC, GCG, and CGG. In his account, the cells learned from what their lips had said: they now rearrange, transpose, and transform themselves, producing cells without meaning or with a meaning contrary to the proper one. The metaphor makes cancer resemble an anarchic act of textual interpretation, but Diotallevi presents it not merely as an image: he says that the cells have begun creating a private history of their own.

He has spent the preceding months reading dictionaries and histories of words to understand what is happening in his body. He draws a connection between the linguistic term “metathesis” and the oncological term “metastasis,” and between both words and the Kabbalistic practice of temurah, or letter substitution. To him, their shared ideas of shifting and transformation make the language of textual rearrangement a way to describe the disease. He argues that the cells have learned to blaspheme by anagrammatizing the Book and all other books, then apply the same operation to the body. The diagnosis becomes, in his speech, a crisis of meaning: there must be a right meaning and a wrong one, he insists, or one dies.

Final Meeting and Significance

Belbo protests that Diotallevi speaks this way because he is ill. Diotallevi rejects the distinction: he says he understands what is happening in his body because he has studied it day after day, though he can no longer intervene as his cells cease to obey. He believes he is dying because he spent his life persuading himself that there was no order and that any text could be made to mean anything. In his account, his brain passed that lesson on to his cells; their disorder is the bodily counterpart of the group’s limitless interpretive play. He concludes that he and his friends had been imaginative beyond bounds.

The confrontation exhausts him. He asks whether the world, too, is behaving like his cells, then sinks back; the doctor whispers to Belbo that it is wrong to subject a dying man to such stress. Belbo leaves, and this is the last time he sees Diotallevi. The illness thus becomes a turning point in their relation to the Plan: it gives Belbo’s guilt a personal and irreversible consequence, while Diotallevi’s own explanation remains his interpretation of his illness rather than proof that their conversations caused it. His death is not narrated here, but the final meeting leaves the friends facing the certainty of his decline and the limits of the meanings they had tried to impose.