Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (3 page)

Near a window in the right-hand corner, I
noticed the sentry box of the periscope. I entered it and found
myself facing a glass plate, as on the bridge of a ship, and
through it I saw shifting images of a film, blurred; a scene of a
city. What I saw was projected from a screen above my head, where
everything was upside down, and this second screen was the
eyepiece, as it were, of a primitive periscope made of two packing
cases arranged in an obtuse angle. The longer case stuck out like a
pipe from the cubicle above and behind me, reaching a higher
window, from which a set of wide-angle lenses gathered the light
from outside. Calculating the route I had followed, coming up here,
I realized that the periscope gave me a view of the outside as if I
were looking through a window in the upper part of the apse of
Saint-Martin¡Xas if I were swaying there with the Pendulum, like a
hanged man, taking his last look. After my eyes adjusted to the
pale scene, I could make out rue Vaucanson, which the choir
overlooked, and rue Conte, on a line with the nave. Rue Conte split
into rue Montgolfier to the left and rue de 1
rbigo to the right. There were a couple of bars at the
corners, Le Weekend and La Rotonde, and opposite them a fa?ade with
a sign that I could just barely discern: LES CREATIONS
JACSAM.

The periscope. There was
no real reason it should be in the hall of glass rather than in the
hall of optical instruments, but obviously it was important for
this particular view of the outside to be in this particular place.
But important how? Why should this cubicle, so
positivist-scientific, a thing out of Verne, stand beside the
emblematic lion and serpent?

In any case, if I had
the strength and the courage to stay here for another half hour or
so, the night watchman might not see me.

And so I remained
underwater for what seemed a very long time. I heard the footsteps
of the last of the visitors, then the footsteps of the last guards.
I was tempted to crouch under the bridge to elude a possible random
glance inside, but decided against it. If they discovered me
standing, I could pretend I was an enthusiast who had lingered to
enjoy the marvel.

Later, the lights went
out, and the hall was shrouded in semi-darkness. But the cubicle
seemed less dark now, illuminated as it was by the screen. I stared
steadily at it, my last contact with the world.

The best course was to
stay on my feet¡Xif my feet ached too much, then in a crouch, for
at least two hours. Closing time for visitors was not the same as
quitting time for the employees. I was seized by sudden fear:
Suppose the cleaning staff started going through all the rooms,
inch by inch. But then I remembered: the museum opened late in the
morning, so the cleaners probably worked by daylight and not in the
evening. And that must have been the case, at least in the upper
rooms, because I heard no one else pass by, only distant voices and
an occasional louder sound, perhaps of doors closing. I stood
still. There would be plenty of time for me to get back to the
church between ten and eleven, or even later. The Masters would not
come until close to midnight.

A group of young people
emerged from La Rotonde. A girl walked along rue Conte and turned
into rue Montgolfier. Not a very busy neighborhood. Would I be able
to hold out, watching the humdrum world behind my back for hours on
end? Shouldn't I try to guess the secret of the periscope's
location here? I felt the need to urinate. Ignore it: a nervous
reaction.

So many things run
through your mind when you're hiding alone inside a periscope. This
must be how a stowaway feels, concealed in a ship's hold,
emigrating to some far-off land. To the Statue of Liberty, in fact,
with the diorama of New York. I might grow drowsy, doze; maybe that
would be good. No, then I might wake up too late...

The worst would be an
anxiety attack. You are certain then that in a moment you will
start screaming. Periscope. Submarine. Trapped on the ocean floor.
Maybe the great black fish of the abyss are already circling you,
unseen, and all you know is that you're running out of
air...

I took several deep
breaths. Concentrate. The only thing you can rely on at a time like
this is the laundry list. Stick to facts, causes, effects. I am
here for this reason, and also for this reason and
this...

Memories, distinct,
precise, orderly. Of the past three frantic days, of the past two
years, and the forty-year-old memories I found when I broke into
Jacopo Belbo's electronic brain.

I am remembering now (as
I remembered then) in order to make sense out of the chaos of that
misguided creation of ours.

Now (as then, while I
waited in the periscope) I shrink into one remote corner of my
mind, to draw from it a story. Such as the Pendulum. Diotallevi
told me that the first Sefirah is Keter, the Crown, the beginning,
the primal void. In the beginning He created a point, which became
Thought, where all the figures were drawn. He was and was not, He
was encompassed in the name yet not encompassed in the name, having
as yet no name other than the desire to be called by a name...He
traced signs in the air; a dark light leapt from His most secret
depth, like a colorless mist that gives form to formlessness, and
as the mist spread, a burst of flames took shape in its center, and
the flames streamed down to illuminate the lower Sefirot, and down,
down to the Kingdom.

But perhaps in that
simsun, that diminishment, that lonely separation¡XDiotallevi
said¡Xthere was already the promise of the return.

In hanc utilitatem
clementes angeli saepe figuras, characteres, formas et voces
invenerunt proposueruntque nobis mortalibus et ignotas et stupendas
nullius rei iuxta consuetum linguae usum significativas, sed per
rationis nostrae summam admirationem in assiduam intelligibilium
pervestigationem, deinde in illorum ipsorum venerationem et amorem
inductivas.

¡XJohannes Reuchlin, De
arte cabalistica, Hagenhau, 1517, III

It had been two days
earlier, a Thursday. I was lazing in bed, undecided about getting
up. I had arrived the previous afternoon and had telephoned my
office. Diotallevi was still in the hospital, and Gudrun sounded
pessimistic: condition unchanged; in other words, getting worse. I
couldn't bring myself to go and visit him.

Belbo was away. Gudrun
told me he telephoned to say he had to go somewhere for family
reasons. What family? The odd thing was, he took away the word
processor¡XAbulafia, he called it¡X and the printer, too. Gudrun
also told me he had set it up at home in order to finish some work.
Why had he gone to all that trouble? Couldn't he do it in the
office?

I felt like a displaced
person. Lia and the baby wouldn't be back until next week. The
previous evening I'd dropped by Pi-lade's, but found no one
there.

The phone woke me. It
was Belbo; his voice different, remote.

"Where the hell are you?
Lost in the jungle?"

"Don't joke, Casaubon.
This is serious. I'm in Paris."

"Paris? But I was the
one who was supposed to go to the Conservatoire."

"Stop joking, damn it.
I'm in a booth¡Xin a bar. I may not be able to talk much
longer..."

"If you're running out
of change, call collect. I'll wait here."

"Change isn't the
problem. I'm in trouble." He was talking fast, not giving me time
to interrupt. "The Plan. The Plan is real. I know, don't say it.
They're after me."

"Who?" I still couldn't
understand.

"The Templars, Casaubon,
for God's sake. You won't want to believe this, I know, but it's
all true. They think I have the map, they tricked me, made me come
to Paris. At midnight Saturday they want me at the Conservatoire.
Saturday¡Xyou understand¡XSaint John's Eve..." He was talking
disjointedly; and I couldn't follow him. "I don't want to go. I'm
on the run Casaubon. They'll kill me. Tell De Angelis¡Xno, De
Angelis is useless¡Xkeep the police out of it..."

"Then what do you want
me to do?"

"I don't know. Read the
floppy disks, use Abulafia. I put everything there these last few
days, including all that happened this month. You weren't around, I
didn't know who to tell it to, I wrote for three days and three
nights...Listen, go to the office; in my desk drawer there's an
envelope with two keys in it. The large one you don't need: it's
the key to my house in the country. But the small one's for the
Milan apartment. Go there and read everything, then decide for
yourself, or maybe we'll talk. My God, I don't know what to
do..."

"All right. But where
can I find you?"

"I don't know. I change
hotels here every night. Do it today and wait at my place tomorrow
morning. I'll call if I can. My God, the password¡X"

I heard noises. Belbo's
voice came closer, moved away, as if someone was wresting the
receiver from him.

"Belbo! What's going
on?"

"They found me. The
word¡X"

A sharp report, like a
shot. It must have been the receiver falling, slamming against the
wall or onto that little shelf they have under telephones. A
scuffle. Then the click of the receiver being hung up. Certainly
not by Belbo.

I took a quick shower to
clear my head. I couldn't figure out what was going on. The Plan
real? Absurd. We had invented it ourselves. But who had captured
Belbo? The Rosicrucians? The Comte de Saint-Germain? The Okhrana?
The Knights of the Temple? The Assassins? Anything was possible, if
the impossible was true. But Belbo might have gone off the deep
end. He had been very tense lately, whether because of Lorenza
Pelle-grini or because he was becoming more and more fascinated by
his creature...The Plan, actually, was our creature, his, mine,
Diotallevi's, but Belbo was the one who seemed obsessed by it now,
beyond the confines of the game. It was useless to speculate
further.

I went to the office.
Gudrun welcomed me with the acid remark that she had to keep the
business going all on her own. I found the envelope, the keys, and
rushed to Belbo's apartment.

The stale, rancid smell
of cigarette butts, the ashtrays all brimming. The kitchen sink
piled nigh with dirty dishes, the garbage bin full of disemboweled
cans. On a shelf in the study, three empty bottles of whiskey, and
a little left¡Xtwo fingers¡Xin a fourth bottle. This was the
apartment of a man who had worked nonstop for days without budging,
eating only when he had to, working furiously, like an
addict.

There were two rooms in
all, books piled in every corner, shelves sagging under their
weight. The table with the computer, printer, and boxes of disks. A
few pictures in the space not occupied by shelves. Directly
opposite the table, a seventeenth-century print carefully framed,
an allegory I hadn't noticed last month, when I came up to have a
beer before going off on my vacation.

On the table, a
photograph of Lorenza Pellegrini, with an inscription in a tiny,
almost childish hand. You saw only her face, but her eyes were
unsettling, the look in her eyes. In a gesture of instinctive
delicacy (or jealousy?) I turned the photograph facedown, not
reading the inscription.

There were folders. I
looked through them. Nothing of interest, only accounts, publishing
cost estimates. But in the midst of these papers I found the
printout of a file that, to judge by its date, must have been one
of Belbo's first experiments with the word processor. It was titled
"Abu." I remembered, when Abulafia made its appearance in the
office, Belbo's infantile enthusiasm, Gudrun's muttering,
Diotallevi's sarcasm.

Abu had been Belbo's
private reply to his critics, a kind of sophomoric joke, but it
said a lot about the combinatory passion with which he had used the
machine. Here was a man who had said, with his wan smile, that once
he realized that he would never be a protagonist, he decided to
become, instead, an intelligent spectator, for there was no point
in writing without serious motivation. Better to rewrite the books
of others, which is what a good editor does. But Belbo found in the
machine a kind of LSD and ran his fingers over the keyboard as if
inventing variations on "The Happy Farmer" on the old piano at
home, without fear of being judged. Not that he thought he was
being creative: terrified as he was by writing, he knew that this
was not writing but only the testing of an electronic skill. A
gymnastic exercise. But, forgetting die usual ghosts that haunted
him, he discovered that playing with the word processor was a way
of giving vent to a fifty-year-old's second adolescence. His
natural pessimism, his reluctant acceptance of his own past were
somehow dissolved in this dialog with a memory that was inorganic,
objective, obedient, nonmoral, transistorized, and so humanly
inhuman that it enabled him to forget his chronic nervousness about
life.

FILENAME: Abu

O what a beautiful
morning at the end of November, in the beginning was the word, sing
to me, goddess, the son of Peleus, Achilles, now is the winter of
our discontent. Period, new paragraph. Testing testing parakalo,
parakalo, with the right program you can even make anagrams, if
you've written a novel with a Confederate hero named Rhett Butler
and a fickle girl named Scarlett and then change your mind, all you
have to do is punch a key and Abu will global replace the Rhett
Butlers to Prince Andreis, the Scarletts to Natashas, Atlanta to
Moscow, and lo! you've written war and peace.

Abu, do another thing
now: Belbo orders Abu to change all words, make each "a" become
"akka" and each "o" become "ulla," for a paragraph to look almost
Finnish.

Akkabu, dulla
akkanullather thing nullaw: Belbulla ullarders Ak-kabu tulla
chakkange akkall wullards, makkake eakkach "akka" be-cullame
"akkakkakka" akkand eakkach "ulla" becullame "ullakka," fullar akka
pakkarakkagrakkaph tulla lullaullak akkalmullast
Finnish.

O joy, O new vertigo of
difference, O my platonic reader-writer racked by a most platonic
insomnia, O wake of finnegan, O animal charming and benign. He
doesn't help you think but he helps you because you have to think
for him. A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goose
quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for
ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type,
the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky
pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him
(it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you
are borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light of
critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter.

An loo what I doo now, I
tak this pac of speling monnstrosties an I orderr the macchin to
coppy them an file them in temrary memry an then brring them bak
from tha limbo onto the scren, folowing itsel.

There, I was typing
blindly, but now I have taken that pack of spelling monstrosities
and ordered the machine to copy the mess, and on the copy I made
all the corrections, so it comes out perfect on the page. From
shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola. Repenting, I could have deleted
the first draft. I left it to show how the "is" and the "ought,"
accident and necessity, can co-exist on this screen. If I wanted, I
could remove the offending passage from the screen but not from the
memory, thereby creating an archive of my repressions while denying
omnivorous Freudians and virtuosi of variant texts the pleasure of
conjecture, the exercise of their occupation, their academic
glory.

This is better than real
memory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns to
remember but not to forget. Diotallevi goes Sephardically mad over
those palaces with grand staircases, that statue of a warrior doing
something unspeakable to a defenseless woman, the corridors with
hundreds of rooms, each with the depiction of a portent, and the
sudden apparitions, disturbing incidents, walking mummies. To each
memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece
of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of
apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of
hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea,
processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of
gymnosophists¡X and so on, to infinity. O Raimundo, O Camillo, you
had only to cast your mind back to your visions and immediately you
could reconstruct the great chain of being, in love and joy,
because all that was disjointed in the universe was joined in a
single volume in your mind, and Proust would have made you smile.
But when Diotallevi and I tried to construct an ars oblivionalis
that day, we couldn't come up with rules for forgetting. It's
impossible. It's one thing to go in search of a lost time, chasing
labile clues, like Hop-o'-My-Thumb in the woods, and quite another
deliberately to misplace time refound. Hop-o'-My-Thumb always comes
home, like an obsession. There is no discipline of forgetting; we
are at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke and
amnesia, and such self-interventions as drugs, alcohol, or
suicide.

Abu, however, can
perform on himself precise local suicides, temporary amnesias,
painless aphasias.

Where were you last
night, L

There, indiscreet
reader: you will never know it, but that half-line hanging in space
was actually the beginning of a long sentence that I wrote but then
wished I hadn't, wished I hadn't even thought let alone written it,
wished that it had never happened. So I pressed a key, and a milky
film spread over the fatal and inopportune lines, and I pressed
DELETE and, whoosh, all gone.

But that's not all. The
problem with suicide is that sometimes you jump out the window and
then change your mind between the eighth floor and the seventh.
"Oh, if only I could go back!" Sorry, you can't, too bad. Splat.
Abu, on the other hand, is merciful, he grants you the right to
change your mind: you can recover your deleted text by pressing
RETRIEVE. What a relief! Once I know that I can remember whenever I
like, I forget.

Never again will I go
from one bar to another, disintegrating alien spacecraft with
tracer bullets, until the invader monster disintegrates me. This is
far more beautiful: here you disintegrate thoughts instead of
aliens. The screen is a galaxy of thousands and thousands of
asteroids, all in a row, white or green, and you have created them
yourself. Fiat Lux, Big Bang, seven days, seven minutes, seven
seconds, and a universe is born before your eyes, a universe in
constant flux, where sharp lines in space and time do not exist. No
numerus Clausius here, no constraining law of thermodynamics. The
letters bubble indolently to the surface, they emerge from
nothingness and obediently return to nothingness, dissolving like
ectoplasm. It's an underwater symphony of soft linkings and
unlinkings, a gelatinous dance of self-devouring moons, like the
big fish in the Yellow Submarine. At a touch of your fingertip the
irreparable slides backward toward a hungry word and disappears
into its maw with a slump, then darkness. If you don't stop, the
word swallows itself as well, fattening on its own absence like a
Cheshire-cat black hole.