Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (38 page)

He began playing his
shining trumpet with such power that the whole mountain
rang.

¡XJohann Valentin
Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz,
Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 1, p. 4

We had reached the
chapter on the wonders of hydraulic pipes, and a sixteenth-century
engraving from the Spiritalia of Heron depicted a kind of altar
with a steam-driven apparatus that played a trumpet.

I brought Belbo back to
his reminiscing. "How did it go, then, the story of that Don Tycho
Brahe, or whatever his name was¡Xthe man who taught you to play the
trumpet?"

"Don Tico. I never found
out if Tico was a nickname or his last name. I've never gone back
to the parish hall. The first time I went there, it was by chance:
Mass, catechism, all sorts of games, and if you won, he gave you a
little holy card of Blessed Domenico Savio, that adolescent with
the wrinkled canvas pants, always hanging on to Don Bosco in the
statues, his eyes raised to heaven, not listening to the other
boys, who are telling dirty jokes. I learned that Don Tico had
formed a band, boys between ten and fourteen. The little ones
played toy clarinets, fifes, soprano sax, and the bigger ones
carried the tubas and the bass drum. They had uniforms, khaki
tunics and blue trousers, and visored caps. A dream, and I wanted
to be part of it. Don Tico said he needed a bombardon."

He gave us a superior
look, and said, as if repeating familiar information: "A bombardon
is a kind of tuba, a bass horn in E flat. It's the stupidest
instrument in the whole band. Most of the time it just goes
oompah-oompah-oompah, or¡Xwhen the beat changes¡Xpa-pah, pa-pah,
pa-pah, It's easy to learn, though. Belonging to the brass family,
it works more or less like the trumpet. The trumpet demands more
breath, and you need an embouchure¡Xyou know, that kind of callus
on the upper lip, like Louis Armstrong...Then you get a clear,
clean sound, and you don't hear the blowing. The important thing is
not to puff out your cheeks: that only happens in movies, cartoons,
or New Orleans brothels."

"What about the
trumpet?"

"The trumpet I learned
on my own, during those summer afternoons when there was nobody at
the parish hall, and I would hide in the seats of the little
theater...But I studied the trumpet for erotic reasons. You see
that little villa over there, a kilometer from the hall? That's
where Cecilia lived, the daughter of the Salesians' great
patroness. So every time the band performed, on holy days of
obligation, after the procession, in the yard of the parish hall,
and especially in the theater before performances of the amateur
dramatic society, Cecilia and her mama were always in the front
row, in the place of honor, next to the provost of the cathedral.
In the theater the band would begin with a march that was called
¡¥A Good Start.' It opened with trumpets, the trumpets in B flat,
gold and silver, carefully polished for the occasion. The trumpets
stood up, played by themselves. Then they sat down, and the band
began. Playing the trumpet was the only way for me to attract
Cecilia's attention."

"The only way?" Lorenza
asked, moved.

"There was no other way.
First, I was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half, and a girl
thirteen and a half is already a woman; a boy at thirteen is a
snot-nose kid. Besides, she loved an alto sax, a certain Papi, a
mangy horror, he seemed to me, but she only had eyes for him, as he
bleated lasciviously, because the saxophone, when it isn't Ornette
Coleman's and it's part of a band¡Xand played by the horrendous
Papi¡Xis a goatish, guttural instrument, with the voice of, say, a
fashion model who's taken to drink and turning
tricks..."

"What do you know about
models who turn tricks?"

"Anyway, Cecilia didn't
even know I existed. Of course, in the evening, when I struggled up
the hill to fetch the milk from a farm above us, I invented
splendid stories in which she was kidnapped by the Black Brigades
and I rushed to save her as the bullets whistled around my head and
went chack-chack as they hit the sheaves of wheat. I revealed to
her what she couldn't have known: that in my secret identity I
headed the Resistance in the whole Monferrato region, and she
confessed to me that this was what she had always hoped, and at
that point I would feel a guilty flood of honey in my veins¡XI
swear, not even my foreskin got wet; it was something else,
something much more awesome and grand¡Xand on coming home, I would
go and confess...I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you
slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters,
and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's
always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the
perpetuation of the vile species. In short, if I were switched to
the trumpet, Cecilia would be unable to ignore me: on my feet,
gleaming, while the saxophone sits miserably on his chair. The
trumpet is warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious; it sounds the
charge. The saxophone plays so that young punks in the slums, their
hair slicked down with brilliantine, can dance cheek to cheek with
sweating girls. I studied the trumpet like a madman, then went to
Don Tico and said: Listen to this. And I was Oscar Levant when he
had his first tryout on Broadway with Gene Kelly. Don Tico said:
You're a trumpet, all right, but...

"How dramatic this is,"
Lorenza said. "Go on. Don't keep us on pins and
needles."

"But I had to find
somebody to take my place on the bombardon. Work out something, Don
Tico said. So I worked out something. Now I must tell you, dear
children, that in those days there lived in ***, a couple of
wretches, classmates of mine, though they were two years older than
I, and this fact tells you something about their mental ability.
These two brutes were named Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo.
Asterisk: Historical fact."

"What?" Lorenza
asked.

I explained, smugly:
"When Salgari, in his adventure stories, includes a true event, or
something he thinks is true¡Xlet's say that, after Little Big Horn,
Sitting Bull eats General Custer's heart¡Xhe always puts an
asterisk and a footnote that says: Historical fact."

"Yes, and it's a
historical fact that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo really had
those names, but the names were the least of it. A real pair of
sneaks: they stole comic books from the newsstand, shell cases from
other boys' collections. And they would think nothing of parking
their greasy salami sandwich on your prized Christmas book, a
deluxe volume of tales of the high seas. Cantalamessa called
himself a Communist, Bo, a Fascist, but they were both ready to
sell themselves to the enemy for a slingshot. They told stories
about their sexual prowess, with erroneous anatomical information,
and argued over who had masturbated more the night before. Here
were two villains ready for anything; why not the bombardon? So I
decided to seduce them. I sang the praises of the band uniform, I
took them to public performances, I held out hopes of amatory
triumphs with the Daughters of Mary...They fell for it. I spent my
days in the theater with a long stick, as I had seen in illustrated
pamphlets about missionaries; I rapped them on the knuckles when
they missed a note. The bombardon has only three keys, but it's the
embouchure that matters, as I said. I won't bore you any further,
my little listeners. The day came, after long sleepless afternoons,
when I could introduce to Don Tico two bombardons¡XI won't say
perfect, but at least acceptable. Don Tico was convinced; he put
them in uniform and moved me to the trumpet. Within the space of a
week, for the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, for the opening
of the theatrical season with They Had to See Paris, there before
the curtain, in the presence of the authorities, I was standing to
play the opening bars of ¡¥Good Start.' "

"Oh, joyous moment,"
Lorenza said, making a face of tender jealousy. "And
Cecilia?"

"She wasn't there. Maybe
she was sick. I don't know. But she wasn't there."

He raised his eyes and
surveyed the audience, and at that moment he was bard¡Xor jester.
He calculated the pause. "Two days later, Don Tico sent for me and
told me that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo had ruined the
evening. They wouldn't keep time, their minds wandered when they
weren't playing, they joked and never came in at the right place.
¡¥The bombardon,' Don Tico said to me, ¡¥is the backbone of the
band, its rhythmic conscience, its soul. The band, it is a flock;
the instruments are the sheep, the bandmaster the shepherd, but the
bombardon is the faithful snarling dog that keeps the flock
together. The bandmaster looks first to the bombardon, for if the
bombardon follows him, the sheep will follow. Jacopo, my boy, I
must ask of you a great sacrifice: to go back to the bombardon. You
have a good sense of rhythm, you will keep those other two in time
for me. I promise, as soon as they can play on their own, I'll let
you play the trumpet.' I owed everything to Don Tico. I said yes.
And on the next holy day the trumpets rose to their feet and played
the opening of ¡¥Good Start' in front of Cecilia, once more in the
first row. But I was in the darkness, a bombardon among bombardons.
As for those two wretches, they never were able to play on their
own, and I never went back to the trumpet.

The war ended, I
returned to the city, abandoned music, the brass family, and never
even learned Cecilia's last name."

"Poor boy," Lorenza
said, hugging him from behind. "But you still have me."

"I thought you like
saxophones," Belbo said. Then he turned and kissed her hand. "But,
to work," he said, serious again. "We're here to create a story of
the future, not a remembrance of things past.''

That evening, the
lifting of the ban on alcohol was much celebrated. Jacopo seemed to
have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in
imagining absurd machines¡Xonly to discover, each time, that the
machines had already been invented. At midnight, after a full day,
we all decided it was time to experience what it was like sleeping
in the hills.

On my bed the sheets
were even damper than they had been in the afternoon. Jacopo had
insisted that we use a "priest": an oval frame that kept the covers
raised and had a place for a little brazier with embers¡Xhe wanted
to make sure we tasted all the pleasures of rural life. But when
dampness is inherent, a bed-warmer encourages it: you feel welcome
warmth, but the sheets remain humid. Oh, well. I lit a lamp, the
kind with a fringed shade, where the mayflies flutter until they
die, as the poet says, and I tried to make myself sleepy by reading
the newspaper.

For an hour or two I
heard footsteps in the corridor, an opening and closing of doors,
and the last closing was a violent slam. Lorenza Pellegrini putting
Belbo's nerves to the test.

I was half-asleep when I
heard a scratching at the door, my door. I couldn't tell whether it
was an animal or not (I had seen neither dogs nor cats in the
house), but I had the impression that it was an invitation, a
request, a trap. Maybe Lorenza was doing it because she knew Belbo
was spying on her. Maybe not. Until then, I had considered Lorenza
Belbo's property¡Xat least as far as I was concerned¡Xand besides,
now that I was living with Lia, other women didn't interest me. The
sly glances, often conspiratorial, that Lorenza gave me in the
office or in a bar when she was teasing Belbo, as if seeking an
ally or a witness, were part¡XI had always thought¡Xof the game she
played. Without a doubt, Lorenza had a talent for looking at any
man as if challenging his sexual capacity. But it was a curious
challenge, as if she were saying: "I want you, but only to show how
afraid you really are..." That night, however, hearing her
fingernails scrape my door, I felt something different. It was
desire: I desired Lorenza.

I stuck my head under
the pillow and thought of Lia. I want to have a child with Lia, I
said to myself. And I'll make him (or her) learn the trumpet as
soon as he (or she) has enough breath.

On every third tree a
lantern had been hung, and a splendid virgin, also dressed in blue,
lighted them with a raarvelous torch, and I lingered, longer than
necessary, to admire the sight, which was of an ineffable
beauty.

¡XJohann Valentin
Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz,
Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 2, p. 21

Toward noon Lorenza
joined us on the terrace, smiling, and announced that she had found
a terrific train that stopped at *** at twelve-thirty, and with
only one change she could get back to Milan in the afternoon. Would
we drive her, she asked, to the station?

Belbo continued leafing
through some notes. "I thought Aglie was expecting you, too," he
said. "In fact, it seemed to me he organized the whole expedition
just for you."

"That's his problem,"
Lorenza said. "Who's driving me?"

Belbo stood up and said
to us, "It'll only take a moment; I'll be right back. Then we can
stay here another couple of hours. Lorenza, you had a
bag?"

I don't know if they
said anything to each other during the trip to the station. Belbo
was back in about twenty minutes and resumed working without
referring to the incident.

At two o'clock we found
a comfortable restaurant in the market square, and the choosing of
food and wine gave Belbo further opportunity to recall his
childhood. But he spoke as if he were quoting from someone else's
biography. He had lost the narrative felicity of the day before. In
midafternoon we set off to join Aglie and Garamond.

Belbo drove southwest,
and the landscape changed gradually, kilometer by kilometer. The
hills of ***, even in late autumn, were gentle, domestic, but as we
went on, the horizons became more vast, at every curve the peaks
grew, some crowned by little villages; we glimpsed endless vistas.
Like Darien, Diotallevi remarked, verbalizing these discoveries. We
climbed in third gear toward great expanses and the outline of
mountains, which at the end of the plateau was already fading into
a wintry haze. Though we were already in the mountains, it seemed
to be a plain modulated by dunes. As if the hand of a clumsy
demiurge had compressed heights that seemed to him excessive,
transforming them into a lumpy dough that extended all the way to
the sea or¡Xwho knows?¡Xto the slopes of harsher and more
determined chains.

We reached the specified
village and met Aglie and Gara-mond, as arranged, at the cafe in
the main square. If Aglie was displeased to hear that Lorenza
wasn't coming, he gave no indication of it. "Our exquisite friend
does not wish to take part, in the presence of others, in the
mysteries that define her. A singular modesty, which I appreciate,"
he said. And that was all.

We continued, Garamond's
Mercedes in the lead and Belbo's Renault behind, until, as the
sunlight was dying, we came within sight of a strange yellow
edifice on a hill, a kind of eighteenth-century castle, from which
extended terraces with flowers and trees, flourishing despite the
season.

As we reached the foot
of the hill, we found ourselves in an open space where many cars
were parked. "We stop here," Aglie said, "and continue on
foot."

Dusk was now becoming
night. The path was illuminated for us by a host of torches that
burned along the slope.

It's odd, but of
everything that happened, from that moment until late at night, I
have memories at once clear and confused. I reviewed them the other
evening in the periscope and sensed a family resemblance between
the two experiences. Yes, I said to myself, now you are here, in an
unnatural situation, groggy from the smell of old wood, imagining
yourself in a tomb or in the belly of a ship as a transformation is
taking place. You have only to peer outside the cabin, and you will
see objects in the gloom that earlier today were motionless, but
now they stir like Eleusinian shadows among the fumes of a spell.
And so it had been that evening at the castle: the lights, the
surprises of the route, the words I heard, and then the incense;
everything conspired to make me feel I was dreaming, but dreaming
the way you dream when you are on the verge of waking, when you
dream that you are dreaming.

I should remember
nothing, yet, on the contrary, I remember everything, not as if I
had lived it, but as if it had been told to me by someone
else.

I do not know if what I
remember, with such anomalous clarity, is what happened or is only
what I wished had happened, but it was definitely on that evening
that the Plan first stirred in our minds, stirred as a desire to
give shape to shapelessness, to transform into fantasized reality
that fantasy that others wanted to be real.

"The route itself is
ritual," Aglie was telling us as we climbed the hill. "These are
hanging gardens, just like¡Xor almost¡Xthe ones Salomon de Caus
devised for Heidelberg, that is, for the Palatine elector Frederick
V, in the great Rosicrucian century. The light is poor, and so it
should be, because it is better to sense than to see: our host has
not reproduced the Salomon de Caus design literally; he had
concentrated it in a narrower space. The gardens of Heidelberg
imitated the macrocosm, but the person who reconstructed them here
has imitated only the microcosm. Look at that rocaille
grotto...Decorative, no doubt. But Caus had in mind the emblem of
the Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, where coral is the
philosopher's stone. Caus knew that the heavenly bodies can be
influenced by the form of a garden, because there are patterns
whose configuration mimes the harmony of the
universe..."

"Fantastic," Garamond
said. "But how does a garden influence the planets?"

"There are signs that
attract one another, that look at one another, embrace, and enforce
love. But they do not have¡Xthey must not have¡Xa certain and
definite form. A man will try out giveij forces according to the
dictates of his passion or the impulse of his spirit; this happened
with the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. For there can be no
relationship between us and divine beings except through seals,
figures, characters, and ceremonies. Thus the divinities speak to
us through dreams and oracles. And that is what these gardens are.
Every aspect of this terrace reproduces a mystery of the
alchemist's art, but unfortunately we can no longer read it, not
even our host can. An unusual devotion to secrecy, you will agree,
in this man who spends what he has saved over the years in order to
design ideograms whose meaning he has lost."

As we climbed from
terrace to terrace, the gardens changed. Some were in the form of a
labyrinth, others in the form of an emblem, but each terrace could
be viewed in its entirety only from a higher one. Looking down, I
saw the outline of a crown, and other patterns I had been unable to
embrace as I was passing through them. But even from above, I could
not decipher them. Each terrace, seen as one moved among its
hedges, presented some images, but the perspective from above
revealed new, even contradictory images, as if every step of that
stairway spoke two different languages at once.

As we moved higher, we
noticed some small structures. A fountain of phallic shape stood
beneath a kind of arch or portico, and there was a Neptune
trampling a dolphin, a door with vaguely Assyrian columns, an arch
of imprecise form, as if polygons had been set upon other polygons,
and each construction was surmounted by the statue of an animal: an
elk, a monkey, a lion...

"And all this means
something?" Garamond asked.

"Unquestionably! Just
read the Mundus Symbolicus of Pici-nelli, which, incidentally,
Alciati foresaw with extraordinary prophetic power. The whole
garden may be read as a book, or as a spell, which is, after all,
the same thing. If you knew the words, you could speak what the
garden says and you would then be able to control one of the
countless forces that act in the sublunar world. This garden is an
instrument for ruling the universe."

He showed us a grotto. A
growth of algae; the skeletons of marine animals, whether natural
or not, I couldn't say; perhaps they were in plaster or stone...A
naiad could be discerned embracing a bull with the scaly tail of
some great Biblical fish; it lay in a stream of water that flowed
from the shell a Triton held like an amphora.

"I will tell you the
deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal
hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and
seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in
the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole at the top,
also, the water spurts out below."

"Isn't that obvious?" I
said. "Air enters at the top and presses the water
down."

"A typical scientific
explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice
versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second
case, but why it refuses to come out in the first case."

"And why does it
refuse?" Garamond asked eagerly.

"Because, if it came
out, it would leave a vacuum in the vessel, and nature abhors a
vacuum. Nequaquam vacui was a Rosicrucian principle, which modern
science has forgotten."

"Very impressive,"
Garamond said. "Casaubon, this has to be put in our wonderful
adventure of metals, these things must be highlighted: remember
that. And don't tell me water's not a metal. You must use your
imagination."

"Excuse me," Belbo said
to Aglie, "but your argument is simply post hoc ergo ante hoc. What
follows causes what came before."

"You must not think
linearly. The water in these fountains doesn't. Nature doesn't;
nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the
West.''

As we climbed, we
encountered other guests. Belbo nudged Diotallevi, who said in a
whisper: "Ah, yes, facies hermetica."

And among the pilgrims
with the facies hermetica, a little off to one side, a stiff smile
of condescension on his lips, was Signer Salon. I nodded, he
nodded.

"You know Salon?" Aglie
asked me.

"You mean you know him?"
I asked. "I do, of course. We live in the same building. What do
you think of him?"

"I know him slightly.
Some friends, whose word I trust, tell me he's a police
informer."

That's why Salon knew
about Garamond and Ardenti. What was the connection, exactly,
between Salon and De Angelis? But I confined myself to asking
Aglie: "What is a police informer doing at a party like
this?"

"Police informers,"
Aglie said, "go everywhere. They can use any experience for
inventing their confidential reports. For the police, the more
things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It
doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to
possess a secret."

"But why was Salon
invited?" I asked.

"My friend," Aglie
replied, "probably because our host respects the golden rule of
sapiental thought, which says that any error can be the
unrecognized bearer of truth. True esotericism does not fear
contradiction."

"You're telling me that,
finally, all contradictions agree."

"Quod ubique, quod ab
omnibus^et quod semper. Initiation is the discovery of the
underlying and perennial philosophy."

With all this
philosophizing, we had reached the top terrace and were on a path
through a broad garden that led to the entrance of the castle or
villa. In the light of a torch larger than the others and set upon
a column, we saw a girl wrapped in a blue garment spangled with
golden stars. In her hand she held a trumpet, the kind heralds blow
in operas. As in one of those holy plays where the angels are
adorned with tissue-paper feathers, the girl wore on her shoulders
two large white wings decorated with almond-shaped figures, each
with a dot in the center, looking almost like an eye.

Professor Camestres was
there, one of the first Diabolicals to visit us at Garamond, the
adversary of the Ordo Templi Orientis. We had difficulty
recognizing him, because he was costumed most singularly, though
Aglie said it was appropriate to the occasion: a white linen toga,
loins girt by a red ribbon that also crisscrossed both chest and
back, and a seventeenth-century hat to which were pinned four red
roses. He knelt before the girl with the trumpet and uttered some
words.

"It's true," Garamond
murmured, "there are more things in heaven and earth..."

We went through a
storied doorway, which reminded me of the Genoa cemetery. Above it,
an intricate neoclassical allegory and the carved words: CONDOLED
ET CONGRATULATOR.

Inside, the guests were
many and lively, crowding around a buffet in a spacious hall from
which two staircases rose to upper floors. I saw other faces not
unknown to me, among them Bra-manti and¡Xto my
surprise¡XCommendatore De Gubernatis, an SEA already exploited by
Garamond, but perhaps not yet made to face the terrible prospect of
having all the copies of his masterpiece pulped, because he
approached my boss with a show of obsequious gratitude. Aglie was
in turn approached obsequiously by a tiny man with wild eyes, whose
thick French accent told us that this was the Pierre we had heard
accusing Bramanti of sorcery through the curtain of Aglie's
study.