Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (67 page)

Madness has an enormous
pavilion Where it receives folk from every region, Especially if
they have gold in profusion.

¡XSebastian Brant, Das
Narrenschiff, 1494, 46

I woke at two in the
afternoon, dazed, catatonic. I remembered everything clearly, but
didn't know if what I remembered was true. My first thought was to
run downstairs and buy the newspapers; then I told myself that even
if a company of spahis had stormed the Conservatoire immediately
after the event, the news wouldn't have had time to appear in the
morning papers.

Besides, Paris had other
things on its mind that day. The desk clerk informed me as soon as
I went down to look for some coffee. The city was in an uproar.
Many Me'tro stations were closed; in some places the police were
using force to disperse the crowds; the students were too numerous,
they were going too far.

I found Dr. Wagner's
number in the telephone book. I tried calling, but his office was
obviously closed on Sunday. Anyway, I had to go and check at the
Conservatoire. It was open on Sunday afternoons.

In the Latin Quarter
groups of people were shouting and waving flags. On the He de la
Cite I saw a police barricade. Shots could be heard in the
distance. This is how it must have been in ¡¥68. At Sainte-Chapelle
there must have been a confrontation, I caught a whiff of tear gas.
I heard people charging, I didn't know if they were students or
policemen; everybody around me was running. Some of us took refuge
inside a fence behind a cordon of police, while there was some
scuffling in the street. The shame of it: here I was with the aging
bourgeoisie, waiting for the revolution to subside.

Then the way was clear,
and I took back streets around the old Halles, until I was again in
rue Saint-Martin. The Conservatoire was open, with its white
forecourt, the plague on the facade: "Conservatoire des Arts et
Metiers, established by decree of the Convention on 19 Vendemiaire,
Year III...in the former priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, founded
in the eleventh century." Everything normal, with a little Sunday
crowd ignoring the students' kermesse.

I went inside¡XSundays
free¡Xand everything was as it had been at five o'clock yesterday
afternoon. The guards, the visitors, the Pendulum in its usual
place...I looked for signs of what had happened, but if it had
happened, someone had done a thorough cleaning. If it had
happened.

I don't recall how I
spent the rest of the afternoon. Nor do I recall what I saw,
wandering the streets, forced every now and then to turn into an
alley to avoid a scuffle. I called Milan, just to see, dialed
Belbo's number, then Lorenza's. Then Garamond Press, which would of
course be closed.

As I sit here tonight,
all this happened yesterday. But between the day before yesterday
and this night an eternity has passed.

Toward evening I
realized that I hadn't eaten anything. I wanted quiet, and a little
comfort. Near the Forum des Halles I entered a restaurant that
promised fish. There was too much fish. My table was directly
opposite an aquarium. A universe sufficiently surreal to plunge me
again into paranoia. Nothing is accidental. That fish seems an
asthmatic Hesychast that is losing its faith and accusing God of
having lessened the meaning of the cosmos. Sabaoth, Sabaoth, how
can you be so wicked as to make me believe you don't exist? The
flesh is covering the world like gangrene... That other fish looks
like Minnie; she bats her long lashes and purses her lips into a
heart shape. Minnie Mouse is Mickey's fiancee. I eat a salade folle
with a haddock tender as a baby's flesh. With honey and pepper. The
Paulicians are here. That one glides among the coral like Breguet's
airplane, a leisurely lepidopteral fluttering of wings; a hundred
to one he saw his homunculus abandoned at the bottom of an athanor,
now with a hole in it, thrown into the garbage opposite Flamel's
house. And now a Templar fish, all armored in black, looking for
Noffo Dei. He grazes the asthmatic Hesychast, who navigates
pensively, frowning, toward the Unspeakable. I look away. Across
the street I glimpse the sign of another restaurant, Chez R...
Rosie Cross? Reuchlin? Rosispergius? Rachkov-skyragotgkyzarogi?
Signatures, signatures...

Let's see. The only way
to discomfit the Devil is to make him believe you don't believe in
him. There's no mystery in your nighttime flight across Paris, in
your vision of the Tower. To come out of the Conservatoire after
what you saw, or believe you saw, and to experience the city as a
nightmare¡Xthat is normal. But what did I see in the
Conservatoire?

I absolutely had to talk
to Dr. Wagner. I don't know why, but I had to. Talking was the
panacea. The therapy of the word.

How did I pass the time
till this morning? I went into a movie theater where they were
showing Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai. When the scene with
the mirrors came, it was too much for me, and I left. But maybe
that's not true, maybe I imagined the whole thing.

This morning I called
Dr. Wagner at nine. The name Garamond enabled me to get past the
secretary; the doctor seemed to remember me, and, impressed by the
urgency in my voice, he said to come at once, at nine-thirty,
before his regular appointments. He seemed cordial,
sympathetic.

Did I dream the visit to
Dr. Wagner, too? The secretary asked for my vital statistics,
prepared a card, had me pay in advance. Luckily I had my return
ticket.

An office of modest
size, with no couch. Windows overlooking the Seine. To the left,
the shadow of the Tower. Dr. Wagner received me with professional
affability. I was not his publisher now, I was his patient. With a
wide gesture he had me sit opposite him, at his desk, like a
government clerk called on the carpet. "Et alors?" He said this,
and gave his rotating chair a push, turning his back to me. He sat
with his head bowed and hands clasped. There was nothing left but
for me to speak.

I spoke, and it was like
a dam bursting; everything came out, from beginning to end: what I
thought two years ago, what I thought last year, what ¡E! thought
Belbo had thought, and Dio-tallevi. Above all, what had happened on
Saint John's Eve.

Wagner did not interrupt
once, did not nod or show disapproval. For all the response he
made, he could have been fast asleep. But that must have been his
technique. I talked and talked. The therapy of the word.

Then I waited for the
word, his word, that would save me.

Wagner stood up very,
very slowly. Without turning to me, he came around his desk and
went to the window. He looked out, his hands folded behind his
back, absorbed in thought.

In silence, for ten,
fifteen minutes.

Then, still with his
back to me, in a colorless voice, calm, reassuring: "Monsieur, vous
etes fou."

He did not move, and
neither did I. After another five minutes, I realized that he
wasn't going to add anything. That was it. End of
session.

I left without saying
good-bye. The secretary gave me a bright smile, and I found myself
once more in Avenue Elise"e-Reclus.

It was eleven. I picked
up my things at the hotel and rushed to the airport. I had to wait
two hours. In the meantime, I called Garamond Press, collect,
because I didn't have a cent left. Gud-run answered. She seemed
more obtuse than usual, I had to shout three times for her to say
Si, oui, yes, that she would accept the call.

She was crying:
Diotallevi had died Saturday night at midnight.

"And nobody, not one of
his friends was at the funeral this morning. The shame of it! Not
even Signer Garamond! They say he's out of the country. There was
only me, Grazia, Luciano, and a gentleman all in black, with a
beard, side curls, and a big hat: he looked like an undertaker. God
knows where he came from. But where were you, Casaubon? And where
was Belbo? What's going on?"

I muttered something in
the way of an explanation and hung up. My flight was called, and I
boarded the plane.

The conspiracy theory of
society... comes from abandoning God and then asking: "Who is in
his place?"

¡XKarl Popper,
Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge, 1969, iv, p.
123

The flight did me good.
I not only left Paris behind, I left the underground, the ground
itself, the terrestial crust. Sky and mountains still white with
snow. Solitude at ten thousand meters, and that sense of
intoxication always produced by flying, the pressurization, the
passage through slight turbulence. It was only up here, I thought,
that I was finally putting my feet on solid ground. Time to draw
conclusions, to list points in my notebook, then close my eyes and
think.

I decided to list, first
of all, the incontestable facts.

There is no doubt that
Diotallevi is dead. Gudrun told me so. Gudrun was never part of our
story¡Xshe wouldn't have understood it¡Xso she is the only one left
who tells the truth. Also, Garamond is not in Milan. He could be
anywhere, of course, but the fact that he's not there and hasn't
been there the past few days suggests he was indeed in Paris, where
I saw him.

Similarly, Belbo is not
there.

Now, let's assume that
what I saw Saturday night in Saint-Martin-des-Champs really
happened. Perhaps not the way I saw it, befuddled as I was by the
music and the incense; but something did happen. It's like that
time with Amparo. Afterward, she didn't believe she had been
possessed by Pomba Gira, but she knew that in the tenda de umbanda
something had possessed her.

Finally, what Lia told
me in the mountains is true. Her interpretation is completely
convincing: the Provins message is a laundry list. There were never
any Templars' meetings at the Grange-aux-Dimes. There was no Plan
and there was no message.

The laundry list, for
us, had been a crossword puzzle with the squares empty and no
definitions. The squares had to be filled in such a way that
everything would fit. But perhaps that metaphor isn't precise. In a
crossword puzzle the words, intersecting, have to have letters in
common. In our game we crossed not words but concepts, events, so
the rules were different. Basically there were three
rules.

Rule One: Concepts are
connected by analogy. There is no way to decide at once whether an
analogy is good or bad, because to some degree everything is
connected to everything else. For example, potato crosses with
apple, because both are vegetable and round in shape. From apple to
snake, by Biblical association. From snake to doughnut, by formal
likeness. From doughnut to life preserver, and from life preserver
to bathing suit, then bathing to sea, sea to ship, ship to shit,
shit to toilet paper, toilet to cologne, cologne to alcohol,
alcohol to drugs, drugs to syringe, syringe to hole, hole to
ground, ground to potato.

Rule Two says that if
tout se tient in the end, the connecting works. From potato to
potato, tout se tient. So it's right.

Rule Three: The
connections must not be original. They must have been made before,
and the more often the better, by others. Only then do the
crossings seem true, because they are obvious.

This, after all, was
Signor Garamond's idea. The books of the Diabolicals must not
innovate; they must repeat what has already been said. Otherwise
what becomes of the authority of Tradition?

And this is what we did.
We didn't invent anything; we only arranged the pieces. Colonel
Ardenti hadn't invented anything either, but his arrangement of the
pieces was clumsy. Furthermore, he was much less educated than we,
so he had fewer pieces.

They had all the pieces,
but They didn't know the design of the crossword. We¡Xonce
again¡Xwere smarter.

I remembered something
Lia said to me in the mountains, when she was scolding me for
having played the nasty game that was our Plan: "People are starved
for plans. If you offer them one, they fall on it like a pack of
wolves. You invent, and they'll believe. It's wrong to add to the
inventings that already exist."

This is what always
happens. A young Herostratus broods because he doesn't know how to
become famous. Then he sees a movie in which a frail young man
shoots a country music star and becomes the center of attention.
Herostratus has found the formula; he goes put and shoots John
Lennon.

It's the same with the
SFAs. How can I become a published poet whose name appears in an
encyclopedia? Garamond explains: It's simple, you pay. The SFA
never thought of that before, but since the Manutius plan exists,
he identifies with it, is convinced he's been waiting for Manutius
all his life; he just didn't know it was there.

We invented a
nonexistent Plan, and They not only believed it was real but
convinced themselves that They had been part of it for ages, or
rather, They identified the fragments of their muddled mythology as
moments of our Plan, moments joined in a logical, irrefutable web
of analogy, semblance, suspicion.

But if you invent a plan
and others carry it out, it's as if the Plan exists. At that point
it does exist.

Hereafter, hordes of
Diabolicals will swarm through the world in search of the
map.

We offered a map to
people who were trying to overcome a deep, private frustration.
What frustration? Belbo's first file suggested it to me: There can
be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but
never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no
shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr.

You don't complain about
being mortal, prey to a thousand microorganisms you can't control;
you aren't responsible for the fact that your feet are not very
prehensile, that you have no tail, that your hair and teeth don't
grow back when you lose them, that your arteries harden with time.
It's because of the Envious Angels.

The same applies to
everyday life. Take stock-market crashes. They happen because each
individual makes a wrong move, and all the wrong moves put together
create panic. Then whoever lacks steady nerve asks himself: Who's
behind this plot, who's benefiting? He has to find an enemy, a
plotter, or it will be, God forbid, his fault.

If you feel guilty, you
invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to
organize your own plot. But the more you invent enemy plots, to
exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love
with them, and you pattern your own on their model. Which is what
happened when Jesuits and Baconians, Paulicians and neo-Templars
each complained of the other's plan. Diotallevi's remark was: "Of
course, you attribute to the others what you're doing yourself, and
since what you're doing yourself is hateful, the others become
hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would like to do the same
hateful thing that you're doing, they collaborate with you, hinting
that¡Xyes¡X what you attribute to them is actually what they have
always desired. God blinds those He wishes to destroy; you just
have to lend Him a helping hand."

A plot, if there is to
be one, must be a secret. A secret that, if we only knew it, would
dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the knowing
of it in itself would be salvation. Does such a luminous secret
exist?

Yes, provided it is
never known. Known, it will only disappoint us. Hadn't Aglie spoken
of the yearning of mystery that stirred the age of the Antonines?
Yet someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God,
the Son of God made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was
that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all:
you only had to love your neighbor. Was that a trivial secret? And
he bequeathed the idea that whoever uttered the right words at the
right time could turn a chunk of bread and a half-glass of wine
into the body and blood of the Son of God, and be nourished by it.
Was that a paltry riddle? And then he led the Church fathers to
ponder and proclaim that God was One and Triune and that the Spirit
proceeded from the Father and the Son, but that the Son did not
proceed from the Father and the Spirit. Was that some easy formula
for hylics? And yet they, who now had salvation within their
grasp¡Xdo-it-yourself salvation¡Xturned deaf ears. Is that all
there is to it? How trite. And they kept on scouring the
Mediterranean in their boats, looking for a lost knowledge, of
which those thirty-denarii dogmas were but the superficial veil,
the parable for the poor in spirit, the allusive hieroglyph, the
wink of the eye at the pneumatics. The mystery of the Trinity? Too
simple: there had to be more to it.

Someone¡XRubinstein,
maybe¡Xonce said, when asked if he believed in God: "Oh, no, I
believe...in something much bigger." And someone else¡Xwas it
Chesterton?¡Xsaid that when men stop believing in God, it isn't
that they then believe in nothing: they believe in
everything.

But everything is not a
bigger secret. There are no "bigger secrets," because the moment a
secret is revealed, it seems little. There is only an empty secret.
A secret that keeps slipping through your fingers. The secret of
the orchid is that it signifies and affects the testicles. But the
testicles signify a sign of the zodiac, which in turn signifies an
angelic hierarchy, which then signifies a musical scale, and the
scale signifies a relationship among the humors. And so on.
Initiation is learning never to stop. The universe is peeled like
an onion, and an onion is all peel. Let us imagine an infinite
onion, which has its center everywhere and its circumference
nowhere. Initiation travels an endless Mobius strip.

The true initiate is he
who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without
content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no
rival devotee will be able to take it from him.

Now I found more logical
and consequential the dynamic of that nocturnal rite before the
Pendulum. Belbo had claimed to possess a secret, and because of
this he had gained power over Them. Their first impulse, even in a
man as clever as Aglie, who had immediately beat the tom-tom to
summon all the others, had been to wrest it from him. And the more
Belbo refused to reveal it, the bigger They believed the secret to
be; the more he vowed he didn't possess it, the more convinced They
were that he did possess it, and that it was a true secret, because
if it were false, he would have revealed it.

Through the centuries
the search for this secret had been the glue holding Them all
together, despite excommunications, internecine fighting, coups de
main. Now They were on the verge of knowing it. But They were
assailed by two fears: that the secret would be a disappointment,
and that once it was known to all, there would be no secret left.
Which would be the end of Them.

Aglie then thought: If
Belbo spoke, all would know, and he, Aglie, would lose the
mysterious aura that granted him charisma and power. But if Belbo
confided in him alone, Aglie could go on being Saint-Germain, the
immortal. The deferment of Agile's death coincided with the
deferment of the secret. He tried to persuade Belbo to whisper it
in his ear, and when he realized that wouldn't be possible, he
provoked him by predicting his surrender and, further, by putting
on a display of pompous melodrama. Oh, the old count knew very well
that for people from Piedmont stubbornness and a sense of the
ridiculous could defeat even the fear of death. Thus he forced
Belbo to raise the tone of his refusal and to say no
definitively.

The others, out of the
same fear, preferred to kill him. They might be losing the
map¡Xthey would have centuries to continue the search for it¡Xbut
they were preserving the vigor of their base, slobbering
desire.

I remembered a story
Amparo told me. Before coming to Italy, she had spent some months
in New York City, living in a neighborhood of the kind where even
on quiet days you could shoot a TV series featuring the homicide
squad. She used to come home alone at two in the morning. When I
asked if she wasn't afraid of sexual maniacs, she told me her
method. When a sexual maniac approached, threatening, she would
take his arm and say, "Come on, let's do it." And he would go away,
bewildered.

If you're a sexual
maniac, you don't want sex; you want the excitement of its theft,
you want the victim's resistance and despair. If sex is handed to
you on a platter, here it is, go to it, naturally you're not
interested, otherwise what sort of sexual maniac would you
be?

We had awakened their
lust, offering them a secret that couldn't have been emptier,
because not only did we know it ourselves, but, even better, we
knew that it was false.

The plane was flying
over Mont Blanc, and the passengers all rushed to the same side so
as not to miss the view of that blunt bubo that had grown there
thanks to a fluke in the telluric currents. If what I was thinking
was correct, then the currents didn't exist any more than the
Provins message existed. But the story of the deciphering of the
Plan, as we had reconstructed it, that was History.

My memory went back to
Belbo's last file. But if existence is so empty and fragile that it
can be endured only by the illusion of a search for its secret,
then¡Xas Amparo said that evening in the tenda, after her
defeat¡Xthere's no redemption; we are all slaves, give us a master,
that's what we deserve...