Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (62 page)

And so it happened that
Rabbi Ismahel ben Elisha and his disciples, who were studying the
book Yesirah and mistook he movements and walked backward, sank
into the earth, to its navel, tnanks to the strength of
letters.

-Pseudo Saadya,
Commentary on the Sefer Yesirah

He had never seen his
friend so white. Diotall vi had hardly any hair now on his head or
eyebrows or lashes. He looked like a billiard ball.

"Forgive me," Belbo
said. "Can we discuss my situation?"

"Go ahead. I don't have
a situation. Only needs."

"I heard they have a new
therapy. These things devour twenty-year-olds, but at fifty it's
slower; there's time to find a cure."

"Speak for yourself. I'm
not fifty yet. My body is still young. I have the privilege of
dying more quickly. Bv it's hard for me to talk. Tell me what you
have to say, so I can rest."

Obedient, respectful,
Belbo told him the whole story.

Then Diotallevi,
breathing like the Thing in the science-fiction movie, talked. He
had, also, the transparency of the Thing, that absence of boundary
between exterior and interior, between skin and flesh, between the
light fuzz on his belly, discernible in the gap of his pajamas, and
the mucilaginous tangie of viscera that only X rays or a disease in
an advanced state can make visible.

"Jacopo, I'm stuck here
in a bed. I can't decide whether what you're telling me is
happening only inside your head, or whether it's happening outside.
But it doesn't matter. Whether you've gone crazy or the world has
makes no difference. In either case, someone has mixed and shuffled
the words o. the Book more than was right."

"What do you
mean?"

"We've sinned against
the Word, against that which created and sustains the world. Now
you are punishe.. for it, as I am punished for it. There's no
difference between you and me."

A nurse came in and put
water on his table. She told Belbo not to tire him, but Diotallevi
waved her away: "Leave us alone. I have to tell him. The Truth. Do
you know L Truth?"

"Who, me? What a
question, sir..."

"Then go. I have to tell
my friend something important. Now listen, Jacopo. Just as man's
body has limbs and joints and organs, so does the Torah. And as the
Torah, so a man's body. You follow me?"

"Yes."

"Rabbi Meir, when he was
learning from Rabbi Akiba, mixed vitriol in the ink, and the master
said nothing. But when Rabbi Meir asked Rabbi Ismahel if he was
doing the right thing, the rabbi said to him: Son, be cautious in
your work, because it is divine work, and if you omit one letter or
write one letter too many, you destroy the whole world....We tried
to rewrite the Torah, but we paid no heed to whether there were too
many letters or too few...."

"We were
joking...."

"You don't joke with the
Torah."

"We were joking with
history, with other people's writings..."

"Is there a writing that
founds the world and is not the Book? Give me a little water. No,
not the glass; wet that cloth... Thanks. Now listen. Rearranging
the letters of the Book means rearranging the world. There's no
getting away from it. Any book, even a speller. People like your
Dr. Wagner, don't they say that a man who plays with words and
makes anagrams and violates the language has ugliness in his soul
and hates his father?"

"But those are
psychoanalysts. They say that to make money. They aren't your
rabbis."

"They're all rabbis.
They're all saying the same thing. Do you think the rabbis, when
they spoke of the Torah, were talking about a scroll? They were
talking about us, about remaking our body through language. Now,
listen. To manipulate the letters of the Book takes great piety,
and we didn't have it. But every book is interwoven with the name
of God. And we anagram-matized all the books of history, and we did
it without praying. Listen to me, damn it. He who concerns himself
with the Torah keeps the world in motion, and he keeps in motion
his own body as he reads, studies, rewrites, because there's no
part of the body that doesn't have an equivalent in the world. Wet
the cloth for me... Thanks. If you alter the Book, you alter the
world; if you alter the world, you alter the body. This is what we
didn't understand.

"The Torah allows a word
to come out of its coffer; the word appears for a moment, then
hides immediately. It is revealed only for a moment and only to its
lover. It's a beautiful woman who hides in a remote chamber of her
palace. She waits for one whose existence nobody knows of. If
another tries to take her, to put his dirty hands on her, she
dismisses him. She knows her beloved; she opens the door just a
little, shows herself, and immediately hides again. The word of the
Torah reveals itself only to him who loves it. But we approached
books without love, in mockery...."

Belbo again moistened
his friend's lips with the cloth. "And so?"

"So we attempted to do
what was not allowed us, what we were not prepared for.
Manipulating the words of the Book, we attempted to construct a
golem."

"I don't
understand...."

"You can't understand.
You're the prisoner of what you created. But your story in the
outside world is still unfolding. I don't know how, but you can
still escape it. For me it's different. I am experiencing in my
body everything we did, as a joke, in the Plan."

"Don't talk nonsense.
It's a matter of cells...."

"And what are cells? For
months, like devout rabbis, we uttered different combinations of
the letters of the Book. GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG. What our lips said,
our cells learned. What did my cells do? They invented a different
Plan, and now they are proceeding on their own, creating a history,
a unique, private history. My cells have learned that you can
blaspheme by ana-grammatizing the Book, and all the books of the
world. And they have learned to do this now with my body. They
invert, transpose, alternate, transform themselves into cells
unheard of, new cells without meaning, or with meaning contrary to
the right meaning. There must be a right meaning and a wrong
meaning; otherwise you die. My cells joke, without faith,
blindly.

"Jacopo, while I could
still read, during these past months, I read dictionaries, I
studied histories of words, to understand what was happening in my
body. I studied like a rabbi. Have you ever reflected that the
linguistic term ¡¥metathesis' is similar to the oncological term
¡¥metastasis'? What is metathesis? Instead of ¡¥clasp' one says
¡¥claps.' Instead of ¡¥beloved' one says ¡¥be-voled.' It's the
temurah. The dictionary says that metathesis means transposition or
interchange, while metastasis indicates change and shifting. How
stupid dictionaries are! The root is the same. Either it's the verb
metatithemi or the verb methistemi. Metatithemi means I interpose,
I shift, I transfer, I substitute, I abrogate a law, I change a
meaning. And methistemi? It's the same thing: I move, I transform,
I transpose, I switch cliches, I take leave of my senses. And as we
sought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took leave of our
senses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. That's why I'm
dying, Jacopo, and you know it."

"You talk like this
because you're ill..."

"I talk like this
because finally I understand everything about my body. I've studied
it day after day, I know what's happening in it, but I can't
intervene; the cells no longer obey. I'm dying because I convinced
myself that there was no order, that you could do whatever you
liked with any text. I spent my life convincing myself of this, I,
with my own brain. And my brain must have transmitted the message
to them. Why should I expect them to be wiser than my brain? I'm
dying because we were imaginative beyond bounds."

"Listen, what's
happening to you has no connection with our Plan."

"It doesn't? Then
explain what's happening to you. The world is behaving like my
cells."

He sank back, exhausted.
The doctor came in and whispered to Belbo that it was wrong to
submit a dying man to such stress.

Belbo left, and that was
the last time he saw Diotallevi.

Very well, he wrote, the
police are after me for the same reason that Diotallevi has cancer.
Poor friend, he's dying, and I, who don't have cancer, what am I
doing? I'm going to Paris to find the principle of
neoplasm.

But he didn't give in
immediately. He stayed shut up in his apartment for four days,
reviewed his files sentence by sentence, to find an explanation.
Then he wrote out this account, a final testament, so to speak,
telling it to himself, to Abulafia, to me, or to anyone else who
was able to read it. And finally, Tuesday, he left.

I believe Belbo went to
Paris to say to them there was no secret, that the real secret was
to let the cells proceed according to their own instinctive wisdom,
that seeking mysteries beneath the surface reduced the world to a
foul cancer, and that of all the people in the world, the most
foul, the most stupid person was Belbo himself, who knew nothing
and had invented everything. Such a step must have cost him dear,
but he had accepted for too long the premise that he was a coward,
and De Angelis had certainly shown him that heroes were
few.

In Paris, after the
first meeting, Belbo must have realized They wouldn't believe him.
His words were too undramatic, too simple. It was a revelation They
wanted, on pain of death. Belbo had no revelation to give, and¡Xhis
final cowardice¡Xhe feared death. So he tried to cover his tracks,
and he called me. But They caught him.

C'est une le^on par la
suite. Quand votre ennemi se reproduira, car il n'est pas ii son
dernier masque, congediez-le brusquement, et surtout n'allez pas le
chercher dans les grottes.

¡XJacques Cazotte, Le
diable amoureux, 1772, from a page suppressed in later
editions

Now, in Belbo's
apartment, as I finished reading his confessions, I asked myself:
What should I do? No point going to Garamond. De Angelis had left.
Diotallevi had said everything he had to say. Lia was far off, in a
place without a telephone. It was six in the morning, Saturday,
June 23, and if something was going to happen, it would happen
tonight, in the Conservatoire. I had to decide quickly.

Why¡XI asked myself
later, in the periscope¡Xdidn't you pretend nothing had happened?
You had before you the texts of a madman, a madman who had talked
with other madmen, including a last conversation with an
overexcited (or overde-pressed) dying friend. You weren't even sure
Belbo had called you from Paris. Maybe he was talking from
somewhere a few kilometers outside Milan, or maybe from the booth
on the corner. Why involve yourself in a story that was imaginary
and that didn't concern you anyway?

This was the question I
set myself in the periscope, as my feet were growing numb and the
light was fading, and I felt the unnatural yet very natural fear
that anyone would feel at night, alone, in a deserted museum. But
early that morning, I had felt no fear. Only curiosity. And,
perhaps, duty, friendship.

I told myself that I,
too, should go to Paris. I wasn't quite sure why, but I couldn't
desert Belbo now. Maybe he was counting on me to slip, under cover
of night, into Jhe cave of the Thugs, and, as Suyodhana was about
to plunge the sacrificial knife into his heart, to burst into the
underground temple with my sepoys, their muskets loaded
with.grapeshot, and carry him to safety.

Luckily, I had a little
money on me. In Paris I got into^a taxi and told the driver to take
me to rue de la Manticore. He grumbled, cursed; the street couldn't
be found even in those guides they have. In fact, it turned out to
be an alley no wider than the aisle of a train. It was in the
neighborhood of the old Bievre, behind Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. The
taxi couldn't even enter it; the driver left me at the
corner.

Uneasily, I entered the
alley. There were no doorways. At a certain point the street
widened a little, and I came to a bookshop. Why it had the number 3
I don't know, since there was no number 1 or 2, or any other street
number. It was a grimy little shop, lighted by a single bulb. Half
of the double door served as a display case. Its sides held perhaps
a few dozen books, indicating the shop's specialties. On a shelf,
some pendulums, dusty boxes of incense sticks, little amulets,
Oriental or South American, and tarot decks of diverse
origin.

The interior was no more
welcoming: a mass of books on the walls and on the floor, with a
little table at the back, and a bookseller who seemed put there
deliberately, so that a writer could write that the man was more
decrepit than his books. This person, his nose in a big handwritten
ledger, was taking no interest in his customers, of which at the
moment there were only two, and they raised clouds of dust as they
drew out old volumes, nearly all without bindings, from teetering
shelves, and began reading them, giving no impression of wanting to
buy.

The only space not
cluttered with shelves was occupied by a poster. Garish colors, a
series of oval portraits with double borders, as in the posters of
the magician Houdini. "Le Petit Cirque de PIncroyable. Madame
Olcott et ses liens avec 1'Invisible." An olive-skinned, mannish
face, two bands of black hair gathered in a knot at the nape. I had
seen that face before, I thought. "Les Derviches Hurleurs et leur
danse sacree. Les Freaks Mig-nons, ou Les Petits-fils de Fortunio
Liceti." An assortment of pathetic, abominable little monsters.
"Alex et Denys, les Geants d'Avalon. Theo, Leo et Geo Fox, les
Enlumineurs de 1'Ecto-plasme..."

The Librairie Sloane
truly supplied everything from the cradle to the grave; it even
advertised healthy entertainment, a suitable place to take the
children before grinding them up in the mortar. I heard a phone
ring. The shopkeeper pushed aside a pile of papers until he found
the receiver. "Oui, monsieur," he said, "c'est bien ca." He
listened for a few minutes, nodded, then assumed a puzzled look, or
at least it was the pretense of puzzlement, on account of those
present, as if everybody could hear what he was hearing and he
didn't want to assume responsibility for it. Then he took on that
shocked expression of a Parisian shopkeeper when you ask for
something he doesn't have in his shop, or a hotel clerk when there
are no rooms available. "Ah, non, monsieur. Ah, ca... Non, non,
monsieur, c'est pas notre oulot. Ici, vous savez, on vend des
livres, on peut bien vous conseiller sur des catalogues, mais ca...
II s'agit de problemes tres personnels, et nous...Oh, alors, il y
a¡Xsais pas, moi¡X des cures, des... oui, si vous voulez, des
exorcistes. D'accord, je le sais, on connait des confreres qui se
pretent... Mais pas nous. Non, vraiment la description ne me suffit
pas, et quand meme... Desole', monsieur. Comment? Oui...si vous
voulez. C'est un endroit bien connu, mais ne demandez pas mon avis.
C'est bien ca, vous savez, dans ces cas, la confiance c'est tout. A
votre service, monsieur."

The other two customers
left. I felt ill at ease but steeled myself and attracted the old
man's attention with a cough. I told him I was looking for an
acquaintance, a friend who, I thought, often stopped by here:
Monsieur Aglie. Again the man had the shocked look he had had while
on the telephone. Perhaps, I said, he didn't know him as Aglie, but
as Rakosky or Soltikoff or... The bookseller looked at me again,
narrowing his eyes, and remarked coldly that I had friends with
curious names. I told him never mind, it was not important, I was
merely inquiring. Wait, he said; my partner is arriving and he may
know the person you are looking for. Have a seat, please; there's a
chair in the back, there. I'll just make a call and check. He
picked up the phone, dialed a number, and spoke in a low
voice.

Casaubon, I said to
myself, you're even stupider than Belbo. What are you waiting for?
For Them to come and say, Oh, what a fine coincidence, Jacopo
Belbo's friend as well; come, come along, yes, you
too....

I stood up abruptly,
said good-bye, and left. In a minute I was out of rue de la
Manticore, in another alley, then at the Seine. Fool! I said to
myself. What did you expect? To walk in, find Aglie, take him by
the lapels, and hear him apologize and say it was all a
misunderstanding, here's your friend, we didn't touch a hair on his
head. And now they know that you're here, too.

It was past noon, and
that evening something would take place in the Conservatoire. What
was I to do? I turned into rue Saint-Jacques, every now and then
looking over my shoulder. An Arab seemed to be following me. But
what made me think he was an Arab? The thing about Arabs is that
they don't look like Arabs, or at least not in Paris. In Stockholm
it would be different.

I passed a hotel, went
in, asked for a room, got a key. As I was going upstairs, wooden
stairs with a railing, from the second-floor landing the desk was
still visible and I saw the presumed Arab enter. Then I noticed
that in the corridor there were other people who could have been
Arabs. Of course, that neighborhood was full of little hotels for
Arabs. What did I expect?

I went into the room. It
was decent; there was even a telephone. Too bad I didn't know
anyone I could call.

I dozed fitfully until
three. Then I washed my face and headed for the Conservatoire. Now
there was nothing else for me to do but enter the museum, stay on
after closing, and wait for midnight.

Which I did. And a few
hours before midnight, I found myself in the periscope,
waiting.

Nezah, for some
interpreters, is the Sefirah of endurance, forbearance, constant
patience. In fact, a test lay ahead of us. But for other
interpreters, it is victory. Whose victory? Perhaps, in this story
full of the defeated, of the Diabolicals mocked by Belbo, of Belbo
mocked by the Diabolicals, of Diotallevi mocked by his cells, I
was¡Xfor the moment¡Xthe only victorious one. Lying in wait in the
periscope, I knew about the others, but the others didn't know
about me. The first part of my scheme had gone according to
plan.

And the second? Would
it, too, go according to plan, or would it go according to the
Plan, which now was no longer mine?