Casaubon—Lia

Casaubon and Lia’s relationship is the novel’s clearest counterweight to the Plan: a shared, ordinary life in which pregnancy, childbirth, and care for a child matter more than hidden correspondences. Their preparations bring Casaubon into close partnership with Lia and help keep him oriented toward concrete responsibilities, even as his work with Belbo and Diotallevi trains all three men to connect everything to everything else.

Shared preparations for parenthood

As Lia’s pregnancy nears its end, Casaubon neglects the Plan whenever he can and stays with her. He is anxious, but Lia reassures him that the time has not yet come. She is taking a course in painless childbirth, and Casaubon tries to follow the exercises with her. She has declined the offer of a scientific forecast of the baby’s sex because she wants to be surprised; Casaubon accepts this choice and joins her in calling the unborn child the Thing. Their private name makes the child present in their conversations without turning its identity into a puzzle to solve.

Casaubon wants to take part in the birth rather than wait outside, pacing and smoking like a father in a film. Lia answers practically: there is only so much he can do, and when the moment comes the labor will be up to her. She gives him a specific role, however. Between contractions they will count together; he will set the rhythm, like rowers in a galley, and help her through the intervals. Their rehearsal takes place in darkness while they hold hands. The counting is both a modest task and a form of participation: Casaubon cannot take over Lia’s labor, but he can attend to her and share its rhythm.

Names, expectations, and the “Great Work”

The couple gives the child names in advance while leaving its sex unknown: Giulio if a boy, Giulia if a girl, after Lia’s grandfather. Casaubon’s agreement marks a moment of shared decision-making that is intimate and specific, unlike the abstract systems that occupy him at work. Their imagined future also includes humor and uncertainty; the conversation turns to the possibility of a child with two heads and to the prospect of teaching the child music.

That ordinary anticipation coexists with Casaubon’s tendency to translate life into the Plan’s symbolic language. He imagines the baby as the Great Work, the White, the Rebis, and the androgyne. Yet his reflection also points toward a limit to the search for esoteric meaning: the life he seeks is already present in the bodies and rooms of ordinary childbirth. He imagines that the child would recognize its parents as the Unknown Superiors without consulting a philosopher or deciphering a hidden text. The scene does not make Lia merely an emblem, though Casaubon’s narration sometimes frames her pregnancy through his own imagery; her choices and practical direction remain plainly her own.

Labor and the limits of Casaubon’s role

When Casaubon receives word that Lia’s waters have broken and that she has taken a taxi to the hospital, he is away from her and initially cannot be reached at the office. The note asks him to come because she feels alone. He panics, blaming himself for not being there to count with her and imagining that the birth could go terribly wrong. His fear reveals how seriously he has taken the role they rehearsed: the shared counting is no longer an amusing exercise but the form of support he believes he owes her.

At the hospital, Casaubon is present with Lia and their newborn son. He tells her that she is what counts for him. Lia responds that she had to count by herself, undercutting the role he had hoped to play without diminishing the importance of his presence or affection. Their exchange preserves the difference between loving participation and control: Casaubon can accompany Lia, but he cannot perform her part of childbirth.

Lia as a grounding presence

The contrast between Lia’s practical world and the Plan’s escalating interpretation becomes explicit in Casaubon’s retrospective account. The three men had begun by treating their connections as a parody of conspiratorial reasoning, but the repeated practice of collecting evidence and joining one thing to another became habitual. Casaubon describes the danger as a gradual loss of the ability to distinguish the similar from the identical and the metaphorical from the real. He considers himself the least affected of the three partly because he is in daily contact with Lia and the baby.

That contact does not mean Casaubon has escaped the Plan’s influence. He compares himself to someone who controls the emotions of a ritual rather than being controlled by them, but his retrospective account recognizes that he, too, is becoming addicted to the game. Lia and the baby nevertheless supply a recurring point of contact with consequences that cannot be rearranged into a secret history: pregnancy advances, labor begins, and a child is born. Their relationship therefore functions not as an intellectual refutation of every mystery but as a lived alternative to treating every fact as evidence of one.

Relationship and narrative significance

Lia’s importance lies in the way she shares Casaubon’s life while redirecting his attention toward what is immediate and consequential. She reassures him, involves him in preparation, decides how she wants to approach the child’s sex, and sets realistic limits on his role in labor. Casaubon, in turn, tries to be present, learns the exercises, rehearses the count, and comes to the hospital. Their partnership is conveyed through these acts rather than through a grand declaration about the Plan.

The relationship’s central tension is between Casaubon’s imaginative habit of turning experience into allegory and the concrete demands of intimacy. The baby can be made to signify the Great Work, but the birth also requires attention to Lia’s needs and an acceptance that she must undergo what he cannot undergo for her. In this way, Lia and the child help anchor Casaubon without simply resolving his susceptibility to conspiratorial thought: they make another mode of life visible, grounded in shared care, limits, and a future that does not depend on discovering a hidden map.