Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (27 page)

I was lucky enough to
find two rooms and a little kitchen in an old building in the
suburbs. It must have been a factory once, with a wing for offices.
All the apartments that had been made from it opened onto one long
corridor. I was between a real estate agent and a taxidermist's
laboratory (A. Salon, the sign said). It was like being in an
American skyscraper of the thirties; if I'd had a glass door, I'd
have felt like Marlowe. I put a sofa bed in the back room and made
the front one an office. In a pair of bookcases I arranged the
atlases, encyclopedias, catalogs I acquired bit by bit. In the
beginning, I had to turn a deaf ear to my conscience and write
theses for desperate students. It wasn't hard: I just went and
copied some from the previous decade. But then my friends in
publishing began sending me manuscripts and foreign books to
read¡Xnaturally, the least appealing and for little
money.

Still, I was
accumulating experience and information, and I never threw anything
away. I kept files on everything. I didn't think to use a computer
(they were coming on the market just then; Belbo was to be a
pioneer). Instead, I had cross-referenced index cards. Nebulae,
Laplace; Laplace, Kant; Kant, Konigs-berg, the seven bridges of
Konigsberg, theorems of topology...It was a little like that game
where you have to go from sausage to Plato in five steps, by
association of ideas. Let's see: sausage, pig bristle, paintbrush,
Mannerism, Idea, Plato. Easy. Even the sloppiest manuscript would
bring twenty new cards for my hoard. I had a strict rule, which I
think secret services follow, too: No piece of information is
superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and
then finding the connections. There are always connections; you
have only to want to find them.

After about two years in
business, I was pleased with myself. I was having fun. Meanwhile I
had met Lia.

Sappia qualunque il mio
nome dimanda ch'i' mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno le belle mani a
farmi una ghirlanda.

¡XDante, Purgatorio,
XXVII, 100-102

Lia. Now, I despair of
seeing her again, but I might never have met her, and that would
have been worse. I wish she were here, to hold my hand while I
reconstruct the stages of my undoing. Because she told me so. But
no, she must remain outside this business, she and the child. I
hope they put off their return, that they come back when everything
is finished, however it may finish.

It was July 16, 1981.
Milan was emptying; the reference room of the library was almost
deserted.

"Hey, I need volume 109
myself."

"Then why did you leave
it here?"

"I just went back to my
seat for a minute to check a note."

"That's no
excuse."

She took the volume
stubbornly and went to her table. I sat down across from her,
trying to get a better look at her face.

"How can you read it
like that, unless it's in Braille?" I asked.

She raised her head, and
I really couldn't tell whether I was looking at her face or the
nape of her neck. "What?" she asked. "Oh. I can see through it all
right." But she lifted her hair as she spoke, and she had green
eyes.

"You have green
eyes."

"Of course I do. Is that
bad?"

"No. There should be
more eyes like that."

That's how it
began.

"Eat. You're thin as a
rail," she said to me at supper. At midnight we were still in the
Greek restaurant near Pilade's, the candle guttering in the neck of
the bottle as we told each other everything. We did almost the same
work: she checked encyclopedia entries.

I felt I had to tell
her. At twelve-thirty, when she pulled her hair aside to see me
better, I aimed a forefinger at her, thumb raised^ and went:
"Pow."

"Me too," she
said.

That night we became
flesh of one flesh, and from then on she called me Pow.

We couldn't afford a new
house. I slept at her place, and sometimes she stayed with me at
the office, or went off investigating, because she was smarter than
I when it came to following up clues. She was good, also, at
suggesting connections.

"We seem to have a
half-empty file on the Rosicrucians," she said.

"I should go back to it
one of these days. They're notes I took in Brazil..."

"Well, put in a cross
reference to Yeats."

"What's Yeats got to do
with it?"

"Plenty. I see here that
he belonged to a Rosicrucian society that was called Stella
Matutina."

"What would I do without
you?"

I resumed going to
Pilade's, because it was like a marketplace where I could find
customers.

One evening I saw Belbo
again. He must have been coming rarely in the past few years, but
he showed up regularly after meeting Lorenza Pellegrini. He looked
the same, maybe a bit grayer, maybe slightly thinner.

It was a cordial
meeting, given the limits of his expansiveness: a few remarks about
the old days, sober reticence about our complicity in that last
event and its epistolary sequel. Inspector De Angelis hadn't been
heard from again. Case closed? Who could say?

I told him about my
work, and he seemed interested. "Just the kind of thing I'd like to
do: the Sam Spade of culture. Twenty bucks a day and
expenses."

"Except that no
fascinating, mysterious women have dropped in on me, and nobody
ever comes to talk about the Maltese falcon," I said.

"You never can tell. Are
you enjoying yourself?"

"Enjoying myself?" I
asked. I quoted him: "It's the only thing I seem to be able to do
well."

"Bon pour vous," he
said.

We saw each other again
after that, and I told him about my Brazilian experience, but he
seemed more absent than usual. When Lorenza Pellegrini wasn't
there, he kept his eyes glued to the door, and when she was, he
glanced nervously along the bar, following her every move. One
night near closing time, he said, without looking at me, "Listen,
we might be able to use your services,- but not for a single
consultation. Could you give us, say, a few afternoons each
week?"

"We can discuss it. What
does it involve?"

"A steel company has
commissioned a book about metals. Something with a lot of
illustrations. Serious, but for the mass market. You know the sort
of thing: metals in history, from the Iron Age to spaceships. We
need somebody who'll dig around in libraries and archives and find
beautiful illustrations, old miniatures, engravings from
nineteenth-century volumes on smelting, for instance, or lightning
rods."

"All right. I'll drop by
tomorrow."

Lorenza Pellegrini came
over to him. "Would you take me home?"

"Why me?" Belbo
asked.

"Because you're the man
of my dreams."

He blushed, as only he
could blush, and looked away. "There's a witness," he said. And to
me: "I'm the man of her dreams. This is Lorenza."

"Ciao."

"Ciao."

He got up, whispered
something in her ear.

She shook her head. "I
asked for a ride home, that's all."

"Ah," he said. "Excuse
me, Casaubon, I have to play chauffeur to the woman of someone
else's dreams."

"Idiot,'' she said to
him tenderly, and kissed him on the cheek.

Yet one caution let me
give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually
melancholy¡Xthat he read not the symptomes or prog-nosticks of the
following tract, lest, by applying that which he reads to himself,
aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his own
person (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurt
himself, and get, in conclusion, more harm than good. I advise them
therefore warily to peruse that tract.

¡XRobert Burton, The
Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621, Introduction

It was obvious that
there was something between Belbo and Lorenza Pellegrini. I didn't
know exactly what it was or how long it had been going on.
Abulafia's files did not help me to reconstruct the
story.

There is no date, for
example, on the file about the dinner with Dr. Wagner. Belbo knew
Dr. Wagner before my departure, and may well have been in contact
with him after I started working at Garamond, which was when, in
fact, I got to know him myself. So the dinner could have been
before or after the evening I have in mind. If it was before, then
I understand Belbo's embarrassment, his solemn
desperation.

Dr. Wagner¡Xan Austrian
who for years had been practicing in Paris (hence the pronunciation
"Vagnere" for those who wanted to boast of their familiarity with
him)¡Xhad been coming to Milan regularly for about ten years, at
the invitation of two revolutionary groups of the post-'68 period.
They fought over him, and of course each group gave a radically
different interpretation of his thought. How and why this famous
man allowed himself to be sponsored by extremists, I never
understood. Wagner's theories had no political color, so to speak,
and, had he wanted, he could easily have been invited by the
universities, the clinics, the academies. I believe he accepted the
invitations because he was basically an epicurean and required
regal expense accounts. The private hosts could raise more money
than the institutions, and for Dr. Wagner this meant first-class
tickets, luxury hotels, plus fees in keeping with his therapist
rates, for the lectures and seminars.

Why the two groups found
ideological inspiration in Wagner's theories was another story. But
in those days Wagner's brand of psychoanalysis seemed sufficiently
deconstructive, diagonal, li-bidinal, and non-Cartesian to provide
some theoretical justification for revolutionary
activity.

It proved difficult to
get the workers to swallow it, so at a certain point the two groups
had to choose between the workers and Wagner. They chose Wagner.
Which gave rise to the theory that the new revolutionary
protagonist was not the proletarian but the deviate.

"Instead of deviating
the proletariat, they would do better to proletarianize the
deviates, which would be more economical, considering Dr. Wagner's
prices," Belbo said to me one day.

The Wagnerian revolution
was the most expensive in history.

Garamond, subsidized by
a university psychology department, had published a translation of
Wagner's minor essays¡Xvery technical, nearly impossible to find,
and therefore in great demand among the faithful. Wagner had come
to Milan for a publicity launch, and that was when his acquaintance
with Belbo began.

FILENAME: Doktor
Wagner

The diabolical Doktor
Wagner Twenty-sixth installment

Who, on that gray
morning of

During the discussion I
raised an objection. The satanic old man must have been irritated,
but he didn't let it show. On the contrary, he replied as if he
wanted to seduce me.

Like Charlus with
Jupien, bee and flower. A genius can't bear not being loved; he
must immediately seduce the dissenter, make the dissenter love him.
He succeeded. I loved him.

But he must not have
forgiven me, because that evening of the divorce he dealt me a
mortal blow. Unconsciously, instinctively, not thinking, he seduced
me, and unconsciously, he punished me. Though it cost him
deontologically, he psychoanalyzed me free. The unconscious bites
even its handlers.

Story of the Marquis de
Lantenac in Quatre-vingt-treiie. The ship of the Vendeeiens is
sailing through a storm off the Breton coast. Suddenly a cannon
slips its moorings, and as the ship pitches and rolls it begins a
mad race from rail to rail, an immense beast smashing larboard and
starboard. A cannoneer (alas, the very one whose negligence had
left the cannon improperly secured) seizes a chain and with
unparalleled courage flings himself at the monster, which nearly
crushes him, but he stops it, bolts it fast, leads it back to its
stall, saving the ship, the crew, the mission. With sublime
liturgy, the fearsome Lantenac musters all the men on deck, praises
the cannoneer's heroism, takes an impressive medal from around his
own neck and puts it on the man, embraces him, and the crew makes
the welkin ring with its hurrahs.

Then stern Lantenac,
reminding the honored sailor that he was responsible for the danger
in the first place, orders him to be shot.

Splendid, just Lantenac,
man of virtue, above corruption. And this is what Dr. Wagner did
for me: he honored me with his friendship, and executed me with the
truth.

and executed me,
revealing to me what I desired

revealing to me that the
thing that I desired, I feared.

Begin the story in a
bar. The need to fall in love.

Some things you can feel
coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall
in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you
feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a
philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing
you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.

Because at that time I
felt the need. I had just given up drinking. Relationship between
the liver and the heart. A new love is a good reason for going back
to drink. Somebody to go to a bar with. Feel good with.

The bar is brief,
furtive. It allows you a long, sweet expectation through the day,
then you go and hide in the shadows among the leather chairs; at
six in the evening there's nobody there, the sordid clientele comes
later, with the piano man. Choose a louche American bar empty in
the late afternoon. The waiter comes only if you call him three
times, and he has the next martini ready.

It has to be a martini.
Not whiskey, a martini. The liquid is clear. You raise your glass
and you see her over the olive. The difference between looking at
your beloved through a dry martini straight up, where the glass is
small, thin, and looking at her through a martini on the rocks,
through thick- glass, and her face broken by the transparent cubism
of the ice. The effect is doubled if you each press your glass to
your forehead, feeling the chill, and lean close until the glasses
touch. Forehead to forehead with two glasses in between. You can't
do that with martini glasses.

The brief hour of the
bar. Afterward, trembling, you await another day. Free of the
blackmail of certainty.

He who falls in love in
bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on
loan.

His role. He allowed her
great freedom, he was always traveling. His suspect generosity: I
could telephone even at midnight. He was there, you weren't. He
said you were out. Actually, while I have you on the line, do you
have any idea where she is? The only moments of jealousy. But
still, in that way I was taking Cecilia from the sax player. To
love, or believe you love, as an eternal priest of an ancient
vengeance.

With Sandra, things were
complicated. That time she decided I was too involved. Our life as
a couple had become strained. Should we break up? Let's break up,
then. No, wait, let's talk it over. No, we can't go on like this.
The problem, in a nutshell, was Sandra.

When you hang out in
bars, the drama of love isn't the women you find but the women you
leave.

Then comes the dinner
with Dr. Wagner. At the lecture he had just given a heckler a
definition of psychoanalysis. La psychanalyse? C'est qu'entre
1'homme et la femme...chers amis...ca ne colle pas.

There was discussion:
the couple, divorce as a legal fiction. Taken up by my own
problems, I participated intensely. We allowed ourselves to be
drawn into dialectical exchanges, speaking while Wagner was silent,
forgetting there was an oracle in our presence. And it was with a
pensive

and it was with a sly
expression

and it was with
melancholy detachment

and it was as if he
entered our conversation playfully, off the subject, he said (I
remember his exact words; they are carved on my mind): In
professional life not once have I had a patient made neurotic by
his own divorce. The cause of the trouble was always the divorce of
the Other.

Dr. Wagner always said
Other with a capital O. I gave a start, as if bitten by an
asp.

the viscount started, as
if bitten by an asp a cold sweat beaded his brow

the baron peered at him
through the" lazy whorls of smoke from his thin Russian
cigarette

Are you saying, I asked,
that a person has a breakdown not because he is divorced but on
account of the divorce, which may or may not happen, of the third
party, that is, of the one who created the crisis for the couple of
which he is a member?

Wagner looked at me with
the puzzlement of a layman who encounters a mentally disturbed
person for the first time. He asked me what I meant. To tell the
truth, whatever I meant, I had expressed it badly. I tried to be
more concrete. I took a spoon from the table and put it next to a
fork. Here, this is me, Spoon, married to her, Fork. And here is
another couple: she's Fruit Knife, married to Steak Knife, alias
Mackie Messer. Now I, Spoon, believe I'm suffering because I have
to leave Fork and I don't want to; I love Fruit Knife, but it's all
right with me if she stays with Steak Knife. And now you're telling
me, Dr. Wagner, that the real reason I'm suffering is that Fruit
Knife won't leave Steak Knife. Is that it?

Wagner told someone else
at the table that he had said nothing of the sort.

What do you mean, you
didn't say it? You said that not once had you come across anyone
made neurotic by his own divorce, it was always the divorce of the
Other.

That may be, I don't
remember, Wagner said then, bored.

If you did say it, did
you mean what I understood you to mean?

Wagner was silent for a
few moments.

While the others waited,
not even swallowing, Wagner signaled for his wineglass to be
filled. He looked carefully at the liquid against the light and
finally spoke.

What you understood was
what you wanted to understand.

Then he looked away,
said it was hot, hummed an aria, moved a breadstick as if he were
conducting an orchestra, yawned, concentrated on a cake with
whipped cream, and finally, after another silence, asked to be
taken back to his hotel.

The others looked at me
as if I had ruined a symposium from which Words of Wisdom might
have come.

The truth is that I had
heard Truth speak.

I telephoned. You were
at home, and with the Other. I spent a sleepless night. It was all
clear: I couldn't bear your being with him. Sandra had nothing to
do with it.

Six dramatic months
followed, in which I clung to you, breathed down your neck, trying
to undermine your couplehood, telling you I wanted you for myself,
convincing you that you hated the Other. You began quarreling with
him, and he grew jealous, demanding; he never went out in the
evening, and when he was traveling he called twice a day, in the
middle of the night, and one night he slapped you. You asked me for
money so you could run away. I collected the little I had in the
bank. You abandoned the conjugal bed, went off to the mountains
with friends, no forwarding address. The Other telephoned me in
despair, asked if I knew where you were; I didn't know, but it
looked as if I were lying, because you told him you were leaving
him for me.

When you returned, you
announced, radiant, that you had written him a letter of farewell.
I wondered then what would happen with me and Sandra, but you
didn't give me time to worry, you told me you had met this man with
a scar on his cheek and a very gypsy apartment. You were going to
live with him.

Don't you love me
anymore?

Of course I do, you're
the only man in my life, but after everything that's happened I
need to have this experience, don't be childish, try to understand.
After all, I left my husband for you. Let people follow their
tempo.

Their tempo? You're
telling me you're going off with another man.

You're an intellectual
and a leftist. Don't act like a mafioso. I'll see you
soon.

I owe everything to Dr.
Wagner.