Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (66 page)

If the eye could see the
demons that people the universe, existence would be
impossible.

¡XTalmud, Berakhot,
6

Leaving the bar, I find
myself among the lights of Porte Saint-Martin. The bar is Arab, and
the shops around it, still open, are Arab, too. A composite odor of
couscous and falafel, and crowd. Clumps of young people, thin, many
with sleeping bags. I ask a boy what is going on. The march, he
says. Tomorrow there will be a big march against the Savary law.
Marchers are arriving by the busload. A Turk¡Xa Druze, an Ismaili
in disguise¡Xinvites me in bad French to go into some kind of club.
Never. Flee Alamut. You do not know who is in the service of whom.
Trust no one.

I cross the
intersection. Now I hear only the sound of my footsteps. The
advantage of a big city: move on a few meters, and you find
solitude again.

Suddenly, after a few
blocks, on my left, the Conservatoire, pale in the night. From the
outside, perfect peace, a monument sleeping the sleep of the just.
I continue southward, toward the Seine. I have a destination, but
I'm not sure what it is. I want to ask someone what has
happened.

Belbo dead? The sky is
serene. I encounter a group of students. They are silent,
influenced by the genius loci. On the left, the hulk of
Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs.

I continue along rue
Saint-Martin, I cross rue aux Ours, broad, a boulevard, almost; I'm
afraid of losing my way, but what way? Where am I going? I don't
know. I look around, and on my right, at the comer, I see two
display windows of Editions Ros-icruciennes. They're dark, but in
the light of the street lamp and with the help of my flashlight I
manage to make out their contents. Books, objects, Histoire
desjuifs, Comte de St.-Germain, alchemy, monde cache, les maisons
secretes de la Rose-Croix, the message of the builders of the
cathedrals, the Cathars, The New Atlantis, Egyptian medicine, the
temple of Karnak, the Bhagavad-Gita, reincarnation, Rosicrucian
crosses and candelabra, busts of Iris and Osiris, incense in boxes
and tablets, tarots. A dagger, a tin letter opener with a round
hilt bearing the seal of the Rosicrucians. What are they doing,
making fun of me?

I pass the facade of the
Beaubourg. During the day the place is a village fair; now the
plaza is almost deserted. A few silent groups, sleeping, a few
lights from the brasseries opposite. It's all true. Giant air ducts
that absorb energy from the earth. Perhaps the crowds that come
during the day serve to supply them with vibrations; perhaps the
hermetic machine is fed on fresh meat.

The church of
Saint-Merri. Opposite, the Librairie la Vouivre, three-quarters
occultist. I must not give in to hysteria. I take rue des Lombards,
to avoid an army of Scandinavian girls coming out of a bistro
laughing. Shut up; Lorenza is dead.

But is she? What if I am
the one who is dead? Rue des Lombards intersects, at right angles,
rue Nicolas-Flamel, and at the end of that you can see, white, the
Tour Saint-Jacques. At the corner, the Librairie Arcane 22, tarots
and pendulums. Nicolas Flamel the alchemist, an alchemistic
bookshop, and then the Tour Saint-Jacques, with those great white
lions at the base, a useless late-Gothic tower near the Seine,
after which an esoteric review was named. Pascal conducted
experiments there on the weight of air, and even today, at a height
of fifty-two meters, the tower has a station for meteorological
research. Maybe They began with the Tour Saint-Jacques, before
erecting the Eiffel Tower. There are special locations. And no one
notices.

I go back toward
Saint-Merri. More girls' laughter. I don't want to see people. I
skirt the church. Along rue du Cloitre-Saint-Merri, a transept
door, old, of rough wood. At the foot of the street, a square
extends, the end of the Beaubourg area, here brilliantly lit. In
the open space, machines by Tinguely, and other multicolored
artifacts that float on the surface of a pool, a small artificial
lake, their cogged wheels clanking insinuatingly. In the background
I see again the scaffolding of Dalmine pipes, the Beaubourg with
its gaping mouths¡Xlike an abandoned 71-tanic near a wall devoured
by ivy, a shipwreck in a crater of the moon. Where the cathedrals
failed, the great transatlantic ducts whisper, in contact with the
Black Virgins. They are discovered only by one who knows how to
circumnavigate Saint-Merri. And so I must go on; I have a clue, I
must expose Their plot in the very center of the Ville Lumiere, the
plot of the Dark Ones.

I find myself at the
facade of Saint-Merri. Something impels me to train my flashlight
on the portal. Flamboyant Gothic, arches in accolade.

And suddenly, finding
what I didn't expect to find, on the archivolt of the portal I see
it.

The Baphomet. Where two
curves join. At the summit of the first, a dove of the Holy Spirit
with a glory of stone rays, but on the second, besieged by praying
angels, there he is, the Baphomet, with his awful wings. On the
facade of a church. Shameless.

Why here? Because we
aren't far from the Temple. Where is the Temple, or what's left of
it? I retrace my steps, north, and find myself at the corner of rue
de Montmorency. At number 51, the house of Nicolas Flamel. Between
the Baphomet and the Temple. The shrewd spagyric knew well with
whom he was dealing. Poubelles full of foul rubbish opposite a
house of undefined period, Taverne Nicolas Flamel. The house is
old, restored for the tourists, for Diabolicals of the lowest
order, hylics. Next door, an American shop with an Apple poster:
"Secouez-vous les puces." Microsoft-Hermes. Directory,
temurah.

Now I'm in rue du
Temple, I walk along it and come to the corner of rue de Bretagne,
and the Square du Temple, a garden blanched as a cemetery, the
necropolis of the martyred knights.

Rue de Bretagne to rue
Vieille du Temple. Rue Vieille du Temple, after rue Barbette, has
novelty shops: electric bulbs in odd shapes, Jike ducks or ivy
leaves. Too blatantly modern. They don't fool me.

Rue des
Francs-Bourgeois: I'm in the Marais, I know, and soon the old
kosher butcher shops will appear. What do the Jews have to do with
the Templars, now that we gave their place in the Plan to the
Assassins of Alamut? Why am I here? Is it an answer I am looking
for? Perhaps I'm only trying to get away from the Conservatoire.
Unless I do have a destination, a place I'm going to. But it can't
be here. I rack my brain to remember where it is, as Belbo hunted
in a dream for a lost address.

An obscene group
approaches. Laughing nastily, they march in open order, forcing me
to step off the sidewalk. For a moment I fear they are agents of
the Old Man of the Mountain, that they have come for me. Not so;
they vanish into the night, but they speak a foreign language, a
sibilant Shiite, Talmudic, Coptic, like a serpent of the
desert.

Androgynous figures
loom, in long cloaks. Rosicrucian cloaks. They pass, turn into rue
de Sevigne. It is late, very late. I fled the Conservatoire to find
again the city of all, but now I realize that the city of all is a
catacomb with special paths for the initiated.

A drunk. But he may be
pretending. Trust no one, no one. I pass a still-open bar; the
waiters, in aprons down to their ankles, are putting chairs on
tables. I manage to enter just in time. I order a beer, drain it,
ask for another. "A healthy thirst, eh?" one of them says. But
without cordiality, suspicious. Of course I'm thirsty; I've had
nothing to drink since five yesterday afternoon. A man can be
thirsty without having spent the night under a pendulum. Fools. I
pay and leave before they can commit my features to
memory.

I'm at the corner of
Place des Vosges. I walk along the arcades. What was that old movie
in which the solitary footsteps of Mathias, the mad killer, echoed
at night in Place des Vosges? I stop. Do I hear footsteps behind
me? But I wouldn't, of course; the killer has stopped, too. These
arcades¡Xall they need is a few glass cases, and they could be
rooms in the Conservatoire.

Low sixteenth-century
ceilings, round-headed arches, galleries selling prints, antiques,
furniture. Place des Vosges, with its old doorways, cracked and
worn and leprous. The people here haven't moved for hundreds of
years. Men with yellow cloaks. A square inhabited exclusively by
taxidermists. They appear only at night. They know the movable
slab, the manhole through which you penetrate the Mundus
Subterraneus. In full view.

The Union de
Recouvrement des Cotisation de Securite so-ciale et D'allocations
familiales de la Patellerie, number 75, apartment 1. A new
door¡Xrich people must live there¡Xbut right next to it is an old
door, peeling, like a door on Via Sincero Renato. Then, at number
3, a door recently restored. Hylics alternating with pneumatics.
The Masters and their slaves. Then planks nailed across what must
have been an arch. It's obvious; there was an occultist bookshop
here and now it's gone. A whole block has been emptied. Evacuated
overnight. Like Aglie. They know someone knows; they are beginning
to cover their tracks.

At the corner of rue de
Birague, I see the line of arcades, infinite, without a living
soul. I want darkness, not these yellow street lamps. I could cry
out, but no one would hear me. Behind all the closed windows,
through which not a thread of light escapes, the taxidermists in
their yellow smocks will snicker.

But no; between the
arcades and the garden in the center are parked cars, and an
occasional shadow passes. A big Belgian shepherd crosses my path. A
black dog alone in the night. Where is Faust? Did he send the
faithful Wagner out for a piss?

Wagner. That's the word
that was churning in my mind without surfacing. Dr. Wagner: he's
the one I need. He will be able to tell me that I'm raving, that
I've given flesh to ghosts, that none of it's true, Belbo's alive,
and the Tres don't exist. What a relief it would be to learn that
I'm sick.

I abandon the square,
almost running. I'm followed by a car. But maybe it's only looking
for a parking place. I trip on a plastic garbage bag. The car
parks. It didn't want me. I'm on rue Saint-Antoine. I look for a
taxi. As if invoked, one passes.

I say to the driver:
"Sept, Avenue Elisee-Reclus."

Je voudrais etre la
tour, pendre a la Tour Eiffel.

¡XBlaise
Cendrars

I didn't know where 7,
Avenue Elisee-Reclus was, and I didn't dare ask the driver, because
anyone who takes a taxi at that hour either is heading for his own
home or is a murderer at the very least. The man was grumbling that
the center of the city was still full of those damn students, buses
parked everywhere, it was a scandal,'if he was in charge, they'd
all be lined up against a wall, and the best thing was to go the
long way round. He practically circled Paris, leaving me finally at
number 7 of a lonely street. There was no Dr. Wagner at that
address. Was it seventeen, then? Or twenty-seven? I walked, looked
at two or three houses, then came to my senses. Even if I found the
house, was I thinking of dragging Dr. Wagner out of bed at this
time of night to tell him my story? I had ended up here for the
same reason that I had roamed from Porte Saint-Martin to Place des
Vosges: I was fleeing. I didn't need a psychoanalyst, I needed a
strait-jacket. Or the cure of sleep. Or Lia. To have her hold my
head, press it between her breast and armpit, and whisper
soothingly to me.

Was it Dr. Wagner I
wanted or Avenue Elisee-Reclus? Because¡Xnow I remembered¡XI had
come across that name in the course of my reading for the Plan.
Elisee Reclus was someone in the last century who wrote a book
about the earth, the underground, volcanoes; under the pretext of
academic geography he stuck his nose into the Mundus Subterraneus.
One of Them, in other words. I ran from Them, yet kept finding Them
around me. Little by little, in the space of a few hundred years,
They had occupied all of Paris. And the rest of the
world.

I should go back to the
hotel. Would I find another taxi? This was probably an
out-of-the-way suburb. I headed in the direction where the night
sky was brighter, more open. The Seine?

When I reached the
corner, I saw it.

On my left. I should
have known it would be there, in ambush, because in this city the
street names wrote unmistakable messages; they gave you warnings.
It was my own fault that I hadn't been paying attention.

There it was, foul metal
spider, the symbol and instrument of their power. I should have
run, but I felt drawn to that web, craning my neck, then looking
downward, because from where I stood the thing could not be
encompassed in one glance. I was swallowed by it, slashed by its
thousand edges, bombarded by metal curtains that fell on every
side. With the slightest move it could have crushed me with one of
those Meccano paws.

La Tour. I was at the
one place in the city where you don't see it in the distance, in
profile, benevolent above the ocean of roofs, light-hearted as a
Dufy painting. It was on top of me, it sailed at me. I could
glimpse the tip, but I moved inward, between its legs, and saw its
haunches, underside, genitalia, sensed the vertiginous intestine
that climbed to join the esophagus of that polytechnical giraffe's
neck. Perforated, it yet had the power to douse the light around
it, and as I moved, it offered me, from different perspectives,
different cavernous niches that framed sudden zooms into
darkness.

To its right, in the
northeast, still low on the horizon, a sickle moon. At times, the
Tower framed it; and to me it looked like an optical illusion, the
fluorescence of one of those skewed screens the Tower's structure
formed; but if I walked on a little, the screens assumed new forms,
the moon vanished, tangled in the metal ribs; the spider crushed
it, digested it, and it went into another dimension.

Tesseract.
Four-dimensional cube. Through an arch I saw a flashing light¡Xno,
two, one red, one white¡Xsurely a plane looking for Roissy or Orly.
The next moment¡XI had moved, or the plane, or the Tower¡Xthe
lights hid behind a rib; I waited for them to reappear in the next
frame, but they were gone for good. The Tower had a hundred
windows, all mobile, and each gave onto a different segment of
space-time. Its ribs didn't form Euclidean curves, they ripped the
very fabric of the cosmos, they overturned realities, they leafed
through pages of parallel worlds.

Who was it who said that
this spire of Notre Dame de la Brocante served "a suspendre Paris
au plafond de 1'univers"? On the contrary, it suspended the
universe from its spire. It was thus the substitute for the
Pendulum.

What had they called it?
Lone suppository, hollow obelisk, Magnificat of wire, apotheosis of
the battery, aerial altar of an idolatrous cult, bee in the heart
of the rose of the winds, piteous ruin, hideous night-colored
colossus, misshapen emblem of useless strength, absurd wonder,
meaningless pyramid, guitar, inkwell, telescope, prolix as a
cabinet minister's speech, ancient god, modern beast...It was all
this and more. And, had I had the sixth sense of the Masters of the
World, now that I stood within its bundle of vocal cords encrusted
with rivet polyps, I would have heard the Tower hoarsely whisper
the music of the spheres as it sucked waves from the heart of our
hollow planet and transmitted them to all the menhirs of the world.
Rhizome of junctures, cervical arthrosis, prothesis of protheses.
The horror of it! To dash my brains out, from where I was, They
would have to launch me toward the peak. Surely I was coming out of
a journey through the center of the earth, I was dizzy,
antigrav-itational, in the antipodes.

No, we had not been
daydreaming: here was the looming proof of the Plan. But soon the
Tower would realize that I was the spy, the enemy, the grain of
sand in the gear system it served, soon it would imperceptibly
dilate a diamond window in that lace of lead and swallow me, grab
me in a fold of its hyperspace, and put me Elsewhere.

If I remained a little
longer under its tracery, its great talons would clench, curve like
claws, draw me in, and then the animal would slyly assume its
former position. Criminal, sinister pencil sharpener!

Another plane: this one
came from nowhere; the Tower itself had generated it between two of
its plucked-mastodon vertebrae.

I looked up. The Tower
was endless, like the Plan for which it had been born. If I could
remain there without being devoured, I would be able to follow the
shifts, the slow revolutions, the infinitesimal decompositions and
recompositions in the chill of the currents. Perhaps the Masters of
the World knew how to interpret it as a geomantic design, perhaps
in its metamorphoses they knew how to read their instructions,
their unconfessable mandates. The Tower spun above my head,
screwdriver of the Mystic Pole. Or else it was immobile, like a
magnetized pin, and it made the heavenly vault rotate. The vertigo
was the same. How well the Tower defends itself! I said silently.
From the distance it winks affectionately, but should you approach,
should you attempt to penetrate its mystery, it will kill you, it
will freeze your bones, simply by revealing the meaningless horror
of which it is made. Now I know that Belbo is dead, and the Plan is
real, because the Tower is real. If I don't get away now, fleeing
once again, I won't be able to tell anyone. I must sound the
alarm.

A noise. Stop, return to
reality. A taxi bearing down. With a leap I managed to tear myself
from the magic girdle, I waved my arms, and was almost run OjVer,
because the driver braked only at the last moment, stopping as if
with great reluctance. During the ride he explained mat he, too,
when he passed beneath it at night, found the Tower frightening, so
he speeded up. "Why?" I asked him.

"Parce que... parce que
ca fait peur, c'est tout."

At my hotel, I had to
ring and ring before the sleepy night porter came. I said to
myself: You have to sleep now. The rest, tomorrow. I took some
pills, enough to poison myself. Then I don't remember.