Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (13 page)

After which, brother
Etienne de Provins, brought into the presence of the aforesaid
officials and asked by them to defend the order, said he did not
wish to. If the masters wished to defend it, they could, but before
his arrest, he had been in the order only nine months.

¡XDeposition, November
27, 1309

In Abulafia I found
other tales of Belbo's running away. And I thought about them that
evening as I stood in the darkness in the periscope listening to a
sequence of rustling sounds, squeaks, creaks and telling myself not
to panic, because that was how museums, libraries, and antique
palaces talked to themselves at night. It is only old cupboards
settling, window frames reacting to the evening's humidity, plaster
crumbling at a miserly millimeter-per-century rate, walls yawning.
You can't run away, I told myself. You're here to learn what
happened to a man who, in a mad (or desperate) act of courage,
tried once and for all to stop running away¡Xperhaps in order to
hasten his encounter, so many times postponed, with the
truth.

FILENAME:
Canal

Was it from a police
charge or, once again, from history that I ran away? Does it make
any difference? Did I go to the march because of a moral choice or
to subject myself to yet another test of Opportunity? Granted, I
was either too early or too late for all the great Opportunities,
but that was the fault of my birth date. I would have liked to be
in that field of bullets, shooting, even at the price of hitting
Granny. But I was absent because of age, not because of cowardice.
All right. And what about the march? Again I ran away for a
generational reason: it was not my conflict. But I could have taken
the risk even so, without enthusiasm, to prove that if I had been
in the field of bullets, I would have known how to choose. Does it
make sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convince
yourself that you would have chosen the right one¡Xhad you had the
Opportunity? I wonder how many of those who opt for fighting today
do it for that reason. But a contrived Opportunity is not the right
Opportunity.

Can you call yourself a
coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of
proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates
cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on
the lookout for it. You have to seize Opportunity instinctively,
without knowing at the time that it is the Opportunity. Is it
possible that I really did seize it once, without knowing? How can
you feel like a coward because you were born in the wrong decade?
The answer: You feel like a coward because once you were a
coward.

But suppose you passed
up the Opportunity because you felt it was inadequate?

Describe the house in
***, isolated on the hill among the vineyards¡Xdon't they call
those breast-shaped hills?¡Xand then the road that led to the edge
of town, to the last row of houses (or the first, depending on the
direction you come from). The little evacuee who abandons the
protection of his family and ventures into the tentacular town,
walking the broad avenue, skirting the Alley he so enviously
fears.

The Alley was the
gathering place of the Alley gang. Country boys, dirty, loud. I was
too citified: better to stay away from them. But to reach the
square, and the newspaper kiosk and the stationery store, unless I
essayed a circumnavigation almost equatorial and quite undignified,
the only course was to go along the Canal. And the boys of the
Alley gang were little gentlemen compared to the Canal gang, named
after a former stream, now a drainage ditch, that ran through the
poorest part of town. The Canal kids were filthy subproletarians,
and violent.

The Alley kids couldn't
cross the Canal area without being attacked and beaten up. At first
I didn't know that I was an Alley kid. I had just arrived, but
already the Canal gang had identified me as an enemy. I walked
through their area with a children's magazine open before my face,
reading as I went. They saw me. I ran. They chased me, throwing
stones. One stone went right through a page of the magazine, which
I was still holding in front of me as I ran, trying to retain a
little dignity. I got away but lost the magazine. The next day I
decided to join the Alley gang.

I presented myself at
their Sanhedrin and was greeted with cackles. My hair was very
thick at the time, and it tended to stand up on my head a bit like
Struwwelpeter's. The style in those days, as shown in movies and
ads, or on Sunday strolls after Mass, featured young men with
broad-shouldered, double-breasted jackets, greased mustaches, and
gleaming hair combed straight back and stuck to their skulls. And
that's what I wanted, sleek hair like that. In the market square,
on a Monday, I spent what for me was an enormous sum on some boxes
of brilliantine thick as beanflower honey. Then I spent hours
smearing it on until my hair was laminated, a leaden cap, a
camauro. Then I put on a net, to keep the hair tightly compressed.
The Alley gang had seen me go by wearing the net, and had shouted
taunts in that harsh dialect of theirs, which I understood but
couldn't speak. That particular day, after staying two hours in the
house with the net on, I took it off, checked the splendid result
in the mirror, and set out to meet the gang to which I hoped to
swear allegiance. I approached them just as the brilliantine was
losing its glutinous power and my hair was again assuming, in slow
motion, its vertical position. Delight among the Alley kids, in a
circle around me, nudging one another. I asked to be
admitted.

Unfortunately, I spoke
in Italian. An outsider. Their leader, Marti-netti, who seemed a
giant to me then, came forward, splendid, barefoot. He decided I
should undergo one hundred kicks in the behind. Perhaps the kicks
were meant to reawaken the serpent Kundalini. I agreed and stood
against the wall. Two sergeants held my arms, and I received one
hundred barefoot kicks. Martinetti applied himself to his task with
vigor and skill, striking sideways so he wouldn't hurt his toes.
The gang served as chorus for the ritual, keeping count in their
dialect. Then they shut me up in a rabbit hutch for half an hour,
while they passed the time in guttural conversation. They let me
out when I complained that my legs were numb. I was proud because I
had been able to stand up to the liturgy of a savage tribe. I was a
man called Horse.

In *** in those days
were stationed latter-day Teutonic Knights, who were not
particularly alert, because the partisans hadn't yet made
themselves felt¡Xthis was toward the end of ¡¥43, the beginning of
¡¥44. One of our first exploits was to slip into a shed, while some
of us flattered the soldier on guard duty, a great Langobard eating
an enormous sandwich of¡Xwe thought, and were horrified¡Xsalami and
jam. The decoys distracted the German, praising his weapons, while
the rest of us crept through some loose planks in the back of the
shed and stole a few sticks of TNT. I don't believe the explosive
was ever used subsequently, but the idea was, according to
Martinetti's plan, to set it off in the countryside, for purely
pyrotechnical purposes and by methods I now know were very crude
and would not have worked. Later, the Germans were replaced by the
Fascist marines of the Decima Mas, who set up a roadblock near the
river, right at the crossroads where the girls from the school of
Santa Maria Ausiliatrice came down the avenue at six in the
evening. Martinetti convinced the Decima marines (who couldn't have
been over eighteen) to tie together a bunch of hand grenades left
by the Germans, the ones with a long pin, and remove the safeties
so they could explode at the water's edge at the exact moment the
girls arrived. Martinetti knew how to calculate the timing. He
explained it to the Fascists, and the effect was prodigious: a
sheet of water rose up along the bank in a thunderous din just as
the girls were turning the corner. General flight, much squeaking,
and we and the Fascists split our sides laughing. The survivors of
Allied imprisonment would remember that day of glory, second only
to the burning of Molay.

The chief amusement of
the Alley kids was collecting shell cases and other war residue,
which after September 8 and the German occupation of Italy were
plentiful: old helmets, cartridge pouches, knapsacks, sometimes
live bullets. This is what you did with a good bullet: holding the
shell case in one hand, you stuck the projectile into a keyhole,
twisted it, and pulled out the case, adding it to your collection.
The gunpowder was emptied out (sometimes there were thin strips of
ballistite) and deposited in serpentine trails that were set
alight. The casings, especially prized if the caps were intact,
went to enrich one's army. A good collector would have a lot of
them, arranged in rows by make, color, shape, and origin. There
were squads of foot soldiers, which were submachine-gun and Sten
casings, then squires and knights, which were 1891 rifle shells (we
saw Garands only after the Americans came), and finally, a boy's
supreme ambition, towering grand masters, which were empty
machine-gun shells.

One evening, as we were
absorbed in these peaceful pursuits, Mar-tinetti informed us that
the moment had come. A challenge had been sent to the Canal gang,
and they had accepted. The battle was to take place on neutral
ground, behind the station. That night, at nine.

It was late afternoon,
on a summer day, enervating but charged with excitement. We decked
ourselves out in the most terrifying paraphernalia, looking for
pieces of wood that could be easily gripped, filling pouches and
knapsacks with stones of various sizes. Some of us made whips out
of rifle slings, awesome if wielded with decision. During those
twilight hours we all felt like heroes, me most of all. It was the
excitement before the attack: bitter, painful, splendid. So long,
Mama, I'm off to Yokohama; send the word over there. We were
sacrificing our youth to the Fatherland, just as they had taught us
in school before September 8.

Martinetti's plan was
shrewd. We would cross the railroad embankment farther to the north
and come at them from behind, take them by surprise, and thus would
be victors from the start. Then no quarter would be
granted.

At dusk we crossed the
embankment, scrambling up ramps and across gullies, loaded down
with stones and clubs. From the crest of the embankment we saw them
lying in ambush behind the station latrines. But they saw us, too,
because they were watching their backs, suspecting we would arrive
from that direction. The only thing for us to do was to move in
without giving them time for astonishment at the obviousness of our
ploy.

Nobody had passed around
any grappa before we went over the top, but we flung ourselves into
battle anyway, yelling. Then came the turning point, when we were
about a hundred meters from the station. There stood the first
houses of the town, and though they were few, they created a web of
narrow paths. There, the boldest group dashed forward, fearless,
while I and (luckily for me) a few others slowed down and ducked
behind the corners of the houses, to watch from a
distance.

If Martinetti had
organized us into vanguard and rear guard, we would have done our
duty, but this was a spontaneous deployment: those with guts in
front, and the cowards behind. So from our refuges¡Xmine was
farther back than the others¡Xwe observed the conflict. Which never
took place.

The two groups came
within a few meters of each other, and stood in confrontation,
snarling. Then the leaders stepped forward to confer. Yalta. They
decided to divide their territories into zones and agreed to allow
an occasional safe-conduct pass, like Christians and Moslems in the
Holy Land. Solidarity between groups of knights had prevailed over
the ineluctability of battle. Each side had proved itself. The
opposing camps withdrew in harmony, still opponents, in opposite
directions.

Now I tell myself that I
didn't rush into the attack because I found it laughable. But
that's not what I told myself then. Then, I felt like a coward, and
that was that.

Today, even more
cowardly, I tell myself that as it turned out I would have risked
nothing had I charged with the others, and my life afterward would
have been better. I missed Opportunity at the age of twelve. If you
fail to have an erection the first time, you're impotent for the
rest of your life.

A month later, some
random trespass brought the Alley and Canal gangs face to face in a
field, and clods of earth began to fly. I don't know whether it was
because the outcome of the earlier conflict had reassured me or
because I desired martyrdom, but one way or another, this time I
stood in the front line. A clod, which concealed a stone, struck my
lip and split it. I ran home crying, and my mother had to use the
tweezers from her toilet case to pick pieces of earth out of the
wound on the inside of my lip. In fact I was left with a lump next
to the lower right canine, and even now, when I run my tongue over
it, I feel a vibration, a shudder.

But this lump does not
absolve me, because I got it through heed-lessness, not through
courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But
bad literature brings no redemption.

After the day of the
march I didn't see Belbo again for about a year. I fell in love
with Amparo and stopped going to Pi-lade's¡Xor, at least, the few
times I did drop in with Amparo, Belbo wasn't there. Amparo didn't
like the place anyway. In her moral and political severity¡Xequaled
only by her grace, her magnificent pride¡Xshe considered Pilade's a
clubhouse for liberal dandies, and liberal dandysme, as far as she
was concerned, was a subtle thread in the fabric of the capitalist
plot. For me this was a year of great commitment, seriousness, and
enchantment. I worked joyfully but serenely on my
thesis.