by Umberto Eco
Then stern Lantenac, reminding the honored sailor that he was responsible for the danger in the first place, orders him to be shot.
Splendid, just Lantenac, man of virtue, above corruption. And this is what Dr. Wagner did for me: he honored me with his friendship, and executed me with the truth.
and executed me, revealing to me what I desired
revealing to me that the thing that I desired, I feared.
Begin the story in a bar. The need to fall in love.
Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
Because at that time I felt the need. I had just given up drinking. Relationship between the liver and the heart. A new love is a good reason for going back to drink. Somebody to go to a bar with. Feel good with.
The bar is brief, furtive. It allows you a long, sweet expectation through the day, then you go and hide in the shadows among the leather chairs; at six in the evening there's nobody there, the sordid clientele comes later, with the piano man. Choose a louche American bar empty in the late afternoon. The waiter comes only if you call him three times, and he has the next martini ready.
It has to be a martini. Not whiskey, a martini. The liquid is clear. You raise your glass and you see her over the olive. The difference between looking at your beloved through a dry martini straight up, where the glass is small, thin, and looking at her through a martini on the rocks, through thick glass, and her face broken by the transparent cubism of the ice. The effect is doubled if you each press your glass to your forehead, feeling the chill, and lean close until the glasses touch. Forehead to forehead with two glasses in between. You can't do that with martini glasses.
The brief hour of the bar. Afterward, trembling, you await another day. Free of the blackmail of certainty.
He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
His role. He allowed her great freedom, he was always traveling. His suspect generosity: I could telephone even at midnight. He was there, you weren't. He said you were out. Actually, while I have you on the line, do you have any idea where she is? The only moments of jealousy. But still, in that way I was taking Cecilia from the sax player. To love, or believe you love, as an eternal priest of an ancient vengeance.
With Sandra, things were complicated. That time she decided I was too involved. Our life as a couple had become strained. Should we break up? Let's break up, then. No, wait, let's talk it over. No, we can't go on like this. The problem, in a nutshell, was Sandra.
When you hang out in bars, the drama of love isn't the women you find but the women you leave.
Then comes the dinner with Dr. Wagner. At the lecture he had just given a heckler a definition of psychoanalysis. La psychanalyse? C'est qu'entre l'homme et la femme ... chers amis ... ça ne colle pas.
There was discussion: the couple, divorce as a legal fiction. Taken up by my own problems, I participated intensely. We allowed ourselves to be drawn into dialectical exchanges, speaking while Wagner was silent, forgetting there was an oracle in our presence. And it was with a pensive
and it was with a sly expression
and it was with melancholy detachment
and it was as if he entered our conversation playfully, off the subject, he said (I remember his exact words; they are carved on my mind): In professional life not once have I had a patient made neurotic by his own divorce. The cause of the trouble was always the divorce of the Other.
Dr. Wagner always said Other with a capital O. I gave a start, as if bitten by an asp.
the viscount started, as if bitten by an asp
a cold sweat beaded his brow
the baron peered at him through the lazy whorls of smoke from his thin Russian cigarette
Are you saying, I asked, that a person has a breakdown not because he is divorced but on account of the divorce, which may or may not happen, of the third party, that is, of the one who created the crisis for the couple of which he is a member?
Wagner looked at me with the puzzlement of a layman who encounters a mentally disturbed person for the first time. He asked me what I meant. To tell the truth, whatever I meant, I had expressed it badly. I tried to be more concrete. I took a spoon from the table and put it next to a fork. Here, this is me, Spoon, married to her, Fork. And here is another couple: she's Fruit Knife, married to Steak Knife, alias Mackie Messer. Now I, Spoon, believe I'm suffering because I have to leave Fork and I don't want to; I love Fruit Knife, but it's all right with me if she stays with Steak Knife. And now you're telling me, Dr. Wagner, that the real reason I'm suffering is that Fruit Knife won't leave Steak Knife. Is that it?
Wagner told someone else at the table that he had said nothing of the sort.
What do you mean, you didn't say it? You said that not once had you come across anyone made neurotic by his own divorce, it was always the divorce of the Other.
That may be, I don't remember, Wagner said then, bored.
If you did say it, did you mean what I understood you to mean?
Wagner was silent for a few moments.
While the others waited, not even swallowing, Wagner signaled for his wineglass to be filled. He looked carefully at the liquid against the light and finally spoke.
What you understood was what you wanted to understand.
Then he looked away, said it was hot, hummed an aria, moved a breadstick as if he were conducting an orchestra, yawned, concentrated on a cake with whipped cream, and finally, after another silence, asked to be taken back to his hotel.
The others looked at me as if I had ruined a symposium from which Words of Wisdom might have come.
The truth is that I had heard Truth speak.
I telephoned. You were at home, and with the Other. I spent a sleepless night. It was all clear: I couldn't bear your being with him. Sandra had nothing to do with it.
Six dramatic months followed, in which I clung to you, breathed down your neck, trying to undermine your couplehood, telling you I wanted you for myself, convincing you that you hated the Other. You began quarreling with him, and he grew jealous, demanding; he never went out in the evening, and when he was traveling he called twice a day, in the middle of the night, and one night he slapped you. You asked me for money so you could run away. I collected the little I had in the bank. You abandoned the conjugal bed, went off to the mountains with friends, no forwarding address. The Other telephoned me in despair, asked if I knew where you were; I didn't know, but it looked as if I were lying, because you had told him you were leaving him for me.
When you returned, you announced, radiant, that you had written him a letter of farewell. I wondered then what would happen with me and Sandra, but you didn't give me time to worry, you told me you had met this man with a scar on his cheek and a very gypsy apartment. You were going to live with him.
Don't you love me anymore?
Of course I do, you're the only man in my life, but after everything that's happened I need to have this experience, don't be childish, try to understand. After all, I left my husband for you. Let people follow their tempo.
Their tempo? You're telling me you're going off with another man.
You're an intellectual and a leftist. Don't act like a mafioso. I'll see you soon.
***
I owe everything to Dr. Wagner.
37
Whoever reflects on four things, it were better he had never been born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, and that which is after.
—Talmud, Hagigah 2.1
I showed up at Garamond the morning they were installing Abulafia, as Belbo and Diotallevi were lost in a diatribe about the names of God, and Gudrun suspiciously watched the men who were introducing this new, disturbing presence
among the increasingly dusty piles of manuscripts.
"Sit down, Casaubon. Here are the plans for our history of metals." We were left alone, and Belbo showed me indexes, chapter outlines, suggested layouts. I was to read the texts and find illustrations. I mentioned several Milan libraries that seemed promising sources.
"That won't be enough," Belbo said. "You'll have to visit other places, too. The science museum in Munich, for instance, has a splendid photographic archive. In Paris there's the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. I'd go back there myself, if I had time."
"Interesting?"
"Disturbing. The triumph of the machine, housed in a Gothic church..." He hesitated, realigned some papers on his desk. Then, as if afraid of giving too much importance to the statement, he said, "And there's the Pendulum."
"What pendulum?"
"The Pendulum. Foucault's Pendulum."
And he described it to me, just as I saw it two days ago, Saturday. Maybe I saw it the way I saw it because Belbo had prepared me for the sight. But at that time I must not have shown much enthusiasm, because Belbo looked at me as if I were a man who, seeing the Sistine Chapel, asks: Is this all?
"It may be the atmosphere—that it's in a church—but, believe me, you feel a very strong sensation. The idea that everything else is in motion and up above is the only fixed point in the universe ... For those who have no faith, it's a way of finding God again, and without challenging their unbelief, because it is a null pole. It can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."
"My generation ate even more disappointment."
"Don't brag. Anyway, you're wrong. For you it was just a phase. You sang the 'Carmagnole,' and then you all met in the Vendée. For us it was different. First there was Fascism, and even if we were kids and saw it as an adventure story, our nation's immortal destiny was a fixed point. The next fixed point was the Resistance, especially for people like me, who observed it from the outside and turned it into a rite of passage, the return of spring—like an equinox or a solstice; I always get them mixed up.... For some, the next thing was God; for some, the working class; and for many, both. Intellectuals felt good contemplating the handsome worker, healthy, strong, ready to remake the world. And now; as you've seen for yourself, workers exist, but not the working class. Perhaps it was killed in Hungary. Then came your generation. For you personally, what happened was natural; it probably seemed like a holiday. But not for those my age. For us, it was a settling of scores, a time of remorse, repentance, regeneration. We had failed, and you were arriving with your enthusiasm, courage, self-criticism. Bringing hope to us, who by then were thirty-five or forty, hope and humiliation, but still hope. We had to be like you, even at the price of starting over from the beginning. We stopped wearing ties, we threw away our trench coats and bought secondhand duffle coats. Some quit their jobs rather than serve the Establishment...."
He lit a cigarette and pretended that he had only been pretending bitterness. An apology for letting himself go.
"And then you gave it all up. We, with our penitential pilgrimages to Buchenwald, refused to write advertising copy for Coca-Cola because we were antifascists. We were content to work for peanuts at Garamond, because at least books were for the people. But you, to avenge yourselves on the bourgeoisie you hadn't managed to overthrow, sold them videocassettes and fanzines, brainwashed them with Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. You've made us buy, at a discount, your copies of the thoughts of Chairman Mao, and used the money to purchase fireworks for the celebration of the new creativity. Shamelessly. While we spent our lives being ashamed. You tricked us, you didn't represent purity; it was only adolescent acne. You made us feel like worms because we lacked the courage to face the Bolivian militia, and you started shooting a few poor bastards in the back while they were walking down the street. Ten years ago, we had to lie to get you out of jail; you lied to send your friends to jail. That's why I like this machine: it's stupid, it doesn't believe, it doesn't make me believe, it just does what I tell it. Stupid me, stupid machine. An honest relationship."
"But I—"
"You're innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got your degree, you didn't shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too, were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything."
"Everything?"
"Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmos, but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same. And there are other pendulums: there's one in New York, in the UN building, there's one in the science museum in San Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it."
"God is everywhere?"
"In a sense, yes. That's why the Pendulum disturbs me. It promises the infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. So it isn't enough to worship the Pendulum; you still have to make a decision, you have to find the best point for it. And yet..."
"And yet?"
"And yet ... You're not taking me seriously by any chance, are you, Casaubon? No, I can rest easy; we're not the type to take things seriously.... Well, as I was saying, the feeling you have is that you've spent a lifetime hanging the Pendulum in many places, and it's never worked, but there, in the Conservatoire, it works.... Do you think there are special places in the universe? On the ceiling of this room, for example? No, nobody would believe that. You need atmosphere. I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe, to recognize it, we have to believe in it. Well, let's go see Signor Garamond."
"To hang the Pendulum?"
"Ah, human folly! Now we have to be serious. If you're going to be paid, the boss must see you, touch you, sniff you, and say you'll do. Come and let the boss touch you; the boss's touch heals scrofula."
38
Prince of Babylon, Knight of the Black Cross, Knight of Death, Sublime Master of the Luminous Ring, Priest of the Sun, Grand Architect, Knight of the Black and White Eagle, Holy Royal Arch, Knight of the Phoenix, Knight of Iris, Priest of Eleusis, Knight of the Golden Fleece.
—High grades of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite
We walked along the corridor, climbed three steps, went through a frosted-glass door, and abruptly entered another universe. The rooms I had seen so far were dark, dusty, with peeling paint, but this looked like a VIP lounge at an airport. Soft music, a plush waiting room with designer furniture, pale-blue walls decorated with photographs showing gentlemen who looked like Members of Parliament presenting Winged Victories to gentlemen who looked like senators. On a coffee table, as in a dentist's office, were slick magazines, in casual disarray, with titles like Literature and Wit, The Poetic Athanor, The Rose and the Thorn, The Italic Parnassus, Free Verse. I had never seen any of them before, and I later found out why: they were distributed only to Manutius clients.
At first I thought these were the offices of the Garamond directors, but I soon learned otherwise. This was another publishing firm entirely. The Garamond lobby had a little glass case, dusty and clouded, displaying the latest publications, but the books were unassuming, with uncut pages and sober gray covers imitating French university publications. The paper was the kind that turned yellow in a few years, giving the impression that the author, no matter how young, had been publishing for a long time. But here the glass case, lighted inside, displayed Manutius books, some of them opened to reveal bright pages. They had gleaming white covers sheathed in elegant transparent plastic, with handsome rice paper and clean print.
Whereas the Garamond catalog contained such scholarly series as Humanist Studies and Philosoph
ia, the Manutius series were delicately, poetically named: The Flower Unplucked (poetry), Terra Incognita (fiction), The Hour of the Oleander (including Diary of a Young Girl's Illness), Easter Island (assorted nonfiction, I believe), New Atlantis (the most recent release being Königsberg Revisited: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Presented as Both a Transcendental System and a Science of the Phenomenal Noumenon). On every cover there was the firm's logo: a pelican under a palm tree, with the D'Annunzian motto "I have what I have given."
Belbo had been laconic: Signor Garamond owned two publishing houses. In the days that followed, I realized that the passageway between Garamond and Manutius was private and secret. The official entrance to Manutius Press was on Via Marchese Gualdi, the street in which the purulent world of Via Sincero Renato ceded to spotless façades, spacious sidewalks, lobbies with aluminum elevators. No one could have suspected that an apartment in an old Via Sincero Renato building might be joined, by a mere three steps, to a building on Via Marchese Gualdi. To obtain permission for this, Signor Garamond must have had to perform feats of persuasion. I believe he had help from one of his authors, an official in the City Planning Bureau.
