Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (37 page)

"And if, on a train, I
find a bomb wrapped in a flier that talks about synarchy, is it
enough for me to say that this is a simple solution to a complex
problem?"

"Why? Have you found
bombs on trains that...No, excuse me. That's really not my
business. But why did you say that to me, then?"

"Because I was hoping
you'd know more than I do. Because perhaps I'm relieved to see you
can't make head or tail of it either. You say you have to read
lunatics by the carload and you consider it a waste of time. I
don't. For me, the works of your lunatics¡Xby ¡¥your' I'm referring
to you normal people¡Xare important texts. What a lunatic writes
may explain the thinking of the man who puts the bomb on the train.
Or are you afraid of becoming a police informer?"

"No, not at all.
Besides, looking for things in card catalogs is my business. If the
right piece of information turns up, I'll keep you in
mind."

As he rose from his
chair, De Angelis dropped the last question: "Among your
manuscripts...have you ever found any reference to the
Tres?"

"What's
that?"

"I don't know. An
organization, maybe. I don't even know if it exists. I've heard it
mentioned, and it occurred to me in connection with your lunatics.
Say hello to your friend Belbo for me. Tell him I'm not keeping
tabs on any of you. The fact is, I have a dirty job, and my
misfortune is that I enjoy it."

As I went home, I asked
myself who had come out ahead. He had told me a number of things;
I'd told him nothing. If I wanted to be suspicious, I could think
perhaps that he had got something out of me without my being aware
of it. But if you're too suspicious, you fall into the psychosis of
synarchic plots.

When I told Lia about
this episode, she said: "If you ask me, he was sincere. He really
did want to get it all off his chest. You think he can find anyone
at police headquarters who will listen to him wonder whether Jeanne
Canudo was right-wing or left? He only wanted to find out if it's
his fault he can't understand it or if the whole thing is too
difficult. And you weren't able to give him the one true
answer.''

"The one true
answer?"

"Of course. That there's
nothing to understand. Synarchy is God."

"God?"

"Yes. Mankind can't
endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake,
just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a
slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found¡XGod, angels,
devils. Synarchy performs the same function on a lesser
scale."

"Then I should have told
him that people put bombs on trains because they're looking for
God?" "Why not?"

The prince of darkness
is a gentleman.

¡XShakespeare, King
Lear, III, iv

It was autumn. One
morning I went to Via Marchese Gualdi, because I had to get Signer
Garamond's authorization to order some color photographs from
abroad. I glimpsed Aglie in Si-gnora Grazia's office, bent over the
file of Manutius authors, but I didn't disturb him, because I was
late for my meeting.

When our business was
over, I asked Signor Garamond what Aglie was doing in the
secretary's office.

"The man's a genius,"
Garamond said. "An extraordinary mind, keen, learned. The other
evening, I took him to dinner with some of our authors, and he made
me look great. What conversation! What style! A gentleman of the
old school, an aristocrat; they've thrown away the mold. What
knowledge, what culture¡Xno, more, what information! He told
delightful anecdotes about characters of a century ago, and I swear
it was as if he had known them personally. Do you want to hear the
idea he gave me as we were going home? He said we shouldn't just
sit and wait for Isis Unveiled authors to turn up on their own.
It's a waste of time and effort to read when you don't even know
whether the authors are willing to underwrite the expenses.
Instead, we have a gold mine at our disposal: the list of all the
Manutius authors of the last twenty years! You understand? We write
to our old, glorious authors, or at least the ones who bought up
their remainders, and we say to them: Dear sir, are you aware that
we have inaugurated a series of works of erudition, tradition, and
the highest spirituality? Would you, as an author of distinction
and refinement, be interested in venturing into this terra
incognita, et cetera, et cetera? A genius, I tell you. I believe he
wants us all to join him Sunday evening. Plans to take us to a
castle, a fortress¡Xno, more, a villa in the Turin area. It seems
that extraordinary things are to happen there, a rite, a sabbath,
where someone will make gold or quicksilver. It's a whole world to
be discovered, my dear Casaubon, even if, as you know, I have the
greatest respect for science, the science to which you are devoting
yourself with such passion. Indeed, I am very, very pleased with
your work, and yes, there's that little financial adjustment you
mentioned; I haven't forgotten it, and in due course we'll talk
about it. Aglie told me the lady will also be there, the beautiful
lady¡Xor perhaps not beautiful, but attractive; there's something
about her eyes¡Xthat friend of Bel-bo's¡Xwhat's her
name¡X?"

"Lorenza
Pellegrini."

"Yes. There's
something¡Xno?¡Xbetween her and our Belbo."

"I believe they're good
friends."

"Ah! A gentleman's
answer. Bravo, Casaubon. But I do not inquire out of idle
curiosity; the fact is that I feel like a father to all of you
and...glissons, a la guerre comme a la guerre...Good-bye, dear
boy."

We really did have an
appointment with Aglie in the hills near Turin, Belbo told me. A
double appointment. The early hours of the evening would be a party
in the castle of a very well-to-do Rosicrucian. Then Aglie would
take us a few kilometers away, to a place where¡Xat midnight,
naturally¡Xsome kind of druidic rite, Belbo wasn't sure what, would
be held.

"I was also thinking,"
Belbo added, "that we should sit down somewhere and give some
thought to our history of metals, because here we keep being
interrupted. Why don't we leave Saturday and spend a couple of days
in my old house in ***? It's a beautiful spot; you'll see, the
hills are worth it. Diotallevi is coming, and maybe Lorenza will,
too. Of course you can bring along anyone you want."

He didn't know Lia, but
he knew I had a companion. I said I'd come alone. Lia and I had
quarreled two days before. Nothing serious; it would be forgotten
in a few days, but meanwhile I wanted to get away from
Milan.

So we all went to ***,
the Garamond trio and Lorenza Pellegrini. At our departure, a tense
moment. When it came time to get into the car, Lorenza said, "Maybe
I'll stay behind, so you three can work in peace. I'll join you
later with Simon."

Belbo, both hands on the
wheel, locked his elbows, stared straight ahead, and said in a low
voice, "Get in." Lorenza got in, and all through the trip, sitting
up front, she kept her hand on the back of Belbo's neck as he drove
in silence.

I call a theatre [a
place in which] all actions, all words, all particular subjects are
shown as in a public theatre, where comedies and tragedies are
acted.

¡XRobert Fludd,
Utriusque Cosmi Historia, Tomi Secundi Tractatus Primi Sectio
Secunda, Oppenheim (?), 1620 (?), p. 55

We arrived at the villa.
Villa¡Xactually, a large farmhouse, with great cellars on the
ground floor, where Adeline Canepa¡Xthe quarrelsome tenant who had
denounced Uncle Carlo to the partisans¡Xonce made wine from the
vineyards of the Covasso land. It had long been
unoccupied.

In a little peasant
house nearby Adeline Canepa's aunt still lived¡Xa .very old woman,
Belbo told us, who tended a little vegetable garden, kept a few
hens and a pig. The others were now long dead, uncle and aunt, the
Canepas; only this centenarian remained. The land had been sold
years before to pay the inheritance taxes and other debts. Belbo
knocked at the door of the little house. The old woman appeared on
the threshold, took a while to recognize the visitor, then made a
great show of deference, inviting us in, but Belbo, after having
embraced and calmed her, cut the meeting short.

We entered the villa,
and Lorenza gave cries of joy as she discovered stairways,
corridors, shadowy rooms with old furniture. As usual, Belbo played
everything down, remarking only that each of us has the Tara he
deserves, but he was clearly moved. He continued to visit the
house, from time to time, he told us, but not often.

"It's a good place to
work: cool in summer, and in winter the thick walls protect you
against the cold, and there are stoves everywhere. Naturally, when
I was a child, an evacuee, we lived only in two side rooms at the
end of the main corridor. Now I've taken possession of my uncle and
aunt's wing. I work here, in Uncle Carlo's study." There was a
secretaire with little space for a sheet of paper but plenty of
small drawers, both visible and concealed. "I couldn't put Abulafia
here," Belbo said. "But the rare times I come, I like to write by
hand, as I did then." He showed us a majestic cupboard. "When I'm
dead, remember this contains all my juvenilia, the poems I wrote
when I was sixteen, the sketches for sagas in six volumes made at
eighteen, and so on..."

"Let's see! Let's see!"
Lorenza cried, clapping her hands and advancing with exaggerated
feline tread toward the cupboard.

"Stop right where you
are," Belbo said. "There's nothing to see. I don't even look at it
myself anymore. And, in any case, when I'm dead, I'll come back and
burn everything."

"This place has ghosts,
I hope," Lorenza said.

"It does now. In Uncle
Carlo's day, no; it was lots of fun then. Georgic. That's why I
come. It's wonderful working at night while the dogs bark in the
valley."

He showed us the rooms
where we would be sleeping: mine, Diotallevi's, Lorenza's. Lorenza
looked at her room, touched the old bed and its great white
counterpane, sniffed the sheets, said it was like being in one of
her grandmother's stories, because everything smelled of lavender.
Belbo said it wasn't lavender, it was mildew. Lorenza said it
didn't matter, and then, leaning against the wall, her hips thrust
forward as if she were at the pinball machine, she asked, "Am I
sleeping here by myself?"

Belbo looked away, then
at us, then away again. He made as if to leave and said: "We'll
talk about it later. In any case, if you want it, you have a refuge
all your own." Diotallevi and I moved off, but we heard Lorenza ask
Belbo if he was ashamed of her. He said that if he hadn't offered
her the room, she would have asked him where she was supposed to
sleep. "I made the first move, so you have a choice," he said. "The
wily Turk," she said. "In that case, I'll sleep here in my darling
little room." "Sleep where you want," Belbo said, irritated. "But
the others are here to work. Let's go out on the
terrace."

So we set to work on the
broad terrace, where a pergola stood, supplied with cold drinks and
plenty of coffee. Alcohol forbidden till evening.

From the terrace we
could see the Bricco, and below it a large plain building with a
yard and a soccer field¡Xall inhabited by multicolored little
figures, children, it seemed to me. "It's the Salesian parish
hall," Belbo explained. "That's where Don Tico taught me to play.
In the band."

I remembered the trumpet
Belbo had denied himself after the dream. I asked: "Trumpet or
clarinet?"

He had a moment's panic.
"How did you...Ah, yes, I told you about the dream, the trumpet.
Don Tico taught Tie the trumpet, but in the band I played the
bombardon."

"What's a
bombardon?"

"Oh, that's all kid
stuff. Back to work now."

But as we worked, I
noticed that he often glanced at that hall. I had the impression
that he talked about other things as an excuse to look at it. For
example, he would interrupt our discussion and say:

"Just down there was
some of the heaviest shooting at the end of the war. Here in ***
there was a kind of tacit agreement between the Fascists and the
partisans. Two years in a row the partisans came down from the
hills in spring and occupied the town, and the Fascists kept their
distance and didn't make trouble. The Fascists weren't from around
here; the partisans were all local boys. In the event of a fight,
they could move easily; they knew every cornfield and the woods and
hedgerows. The Fascists mostly stayed holed up in the town and
ventured out only for raids. In winter it was harder for the
partisans to stay down in the plain: there was no place to hide,
and in the snow they could be seen from a distance and picked off
by a machine gun even a kilometer away. So they climbed up into the
higher hills. There, too, they knew the passes, the caves, the
shelters. The Fascists returned to control the plain. But that
spring we were- on the eve of liberation, the Fascists were still
here, and they were dubious about going back to the city, sensing
that the final blow would be delivered there, as it in fact was,
around April 25. I believe there was communication between the
Fascists and the partisans. The latter held off, wanting to avoid a
clash, sure that something would happen soon. At night Radio London
gave more and more reassuring news, the special messages for the
Franchi brigade became more frequent: Tomorrow it will rain again;
Uncle Pietro has brought the bread¡Xthat sort of thing. Maybe you
heard them, Diotallevi...Anyway, there must have been a
misunderstanding, because the partisans came down and the Fascists
hadn't left.

"One day my sister was
here on the terrace, and she came inside and told us there were two
men playing tag with guns. We weren't surprised: they were kids, on
both sides, whiling away the time with their weapons. Once¡Xit was
only in fun¡X two of them really did shoot, and a bullet hit the
trunk of a tree in the driveway. My sister was leaning on the tree;
she didn't even notice, but the neighbors did, and after that she
was told that when she saw men playing with guns, she must go
inside. ¡¥They're playing again,' she said, coming in, to show how
obedient she was. And at that point we heard the first volley. Then
a second, a third, and then the rounds came thick and fast. You
cquld hear the bark of the shotguns, the ratatat of the automatic
rifles, and a duller sound, maybe hand grenades. Finally, the
machine guns. We realized they weren't playing any longer, but we
didn't have time to discuss it, because by then we couldn't hear
our own voices. Bang, wham, ratatat! We crouched under the
sink¡Xme, my sister, and Mama. Then Uncle Carlo arrived, along the
corridor, on all fours, to tell us that we were too exposed, we
should come over to their wing. We did, and Aunt Caterina was
crying because Grandmother was out..."

"Is that when your
grandmother found herself facedown in a field, in the cross
fire?"

"How did you know about
that?"

"You told me in ¡¥73,
after the demonstration that day."

"My God, what a memory!
A man has to be careful what he says around you...Yes. But my
father was also out. As we learned later, he had taken shelter in a
doorway in town, and couldn't leave it because of all the shooting
back and forth in the street, and from the tower of the town hall a
Black Brigade squad was raking the square with a machine gun. The
former mayor of the city, a Fascist, was standing in the same
doorway. At a certain point, he said he was going to run for it: to
get home, all he had to do was reach the corner. He waited for a
quiet moment, then flung himself out of the doorway, reached the
corner, and was mowed down. But the instinctive reaction of my
father, who had also gone through the First World War, was: Stay in
the doorway."

"This is a place full of
sweet memories," Diotallevi remarked.

"You won't believe it,"
Belbo said, "but they are sweet. They're the only real things I
remember."

The others didn't
understand, and I was only beginning to. Now I know for sure. In
those months especially, when he was navigating the sea of
falsehoods of the Diabolicals, and after years of wrapping his
disillusion in the falsehoods of fiction, Belbo remembered his days
in *** as a time of clarity: a bullet was a bullet, you ducked or
got it, and the two opposing sides were distinct, marked by their
colors, red or black, without ambiguities¡Xor at least it had
seemed that way to him. A corpse was a corpse was a corpse was a
corpse. Not like Colonel Ardenti, with his slippery disappearance.
I thought that perhaps I should tell Belbo about synarchy, which in
those years was already making inroads. Hadn't the encounter
between Uncle Carlo and Mongo been synarchic, really, since both
men, on opposing sides, were inspired by the same ideal of
chivalry? But why should I deprive Belbo of his Combray? The
memories were sweet because they spoke to him of the one truth he
had known; doubt would begin only afterward. Though, as he had
hinted to me, even in the days of truth he had been a spectator,
watching, the birth of other men's memories, the birth of History,
or of many histories: all stories that he would not be the one to
write.

Or had there been, for
him, too, a moment of glory and of choice? Because now he said,
"And also, that day I performed the one heroic deed of my
life."

"My John Wayne," Lorenza
said. "Tell me."

"Oh, it was nothing.
After crawling to my uncle's part of the house, I stubbornly
insisted on standing up in the corridor. The window was at the end,
we were on the upper floor, nobody could hit me, I argued. I felt
like a captain standing erect in the center of the battle while the
bullets whistle around him. Uncle Carlo became angry, roughly
pulled me into the room; I almost started crying because the fun
was over, and at that moment we heard three shots, glass
shattering, and a kind of ricochet, as if someone were bouncing a
tennis ball in the corridor. A bullet had come through the window,
glanced off a water pipe, and buried itself in the floor at the
very spot where I had been standing. If I had stayed there, I would
have been wounded. Maybe."

"My God, I wouldn't want
you a cripple," Lorenza said.

"Maybe today I'd be
happier," Belbo said.

But the fact was that
even in this case he hadn't chosen. He had let his uncle pull him
away.

About an hour later, he
was again distracted. "Then Adeline Canepa came upstairs. He said
we'd all be safer in the cellar. He and my uncle hadn't spoken for
years, as I told you. But in this tragic moment, Adeline Canepa had
become a human being again, and Uncle even shook his hand. So we
spent an hour in the darkness among the barrels, with the smell of
countless vintages, which made your head swim a little, not to
mention the shooting outside. Then the gunfire died down, became
muffled. We realized one side was retreating, but we didn't know
which, until, from a window above our heads, which overlooked a
little path, we heard a voice, in dialect: ¡¥Monssu, i'e d'la
repubblica bele si?' "

"What does that mean?"
Lorenza asked.

"Roughly: Sir, would you
be so kind as to inform me if there are still any sustainers of the
Italian Social Republic in these parts? Republic, at that time, was
a bad word. The voice was a partisan's, asking a passerby or
someone at a window, and that meant the Fascists had gone. It was
growing dark. After a little while both Papa and Grandmother
arrived, and told of their adventures. Mama and Aunt prepared
something to eat, while Uncle and Adelino Canepa ceremoniously
stopped speaking to each other again. For the rest of the evening
we heard shooting in the distance, toward the hills. The partisans
were after the fugitives. We had won."

Lorenza kissed Belbo on
the head, and he wrinkled his nose. He knew he had won, though with
some help from the Fascists. In reality it had been like watching a
movie. For a moment, risking the ricocheting bullet, he had entered
the action on the screen, but only for a moment, on the run, as in
Hellzapoppin, Where the reels get mixed up and an Indian on
horseback rides into a ballroom and asks which way did they go.
Somebody says, "That way," and the Indian gallops off into another
story.