Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

by eco umberto foucault

  He gave us a superior look, and said, as if repeating familiar information: "A bombardon is a kind of tuba, a bass horn in E flat. It's the stupidest instrument in the whole band. Most of the time it just goes oompah-oompah-oompah, or¡Xwhen the beat changes¡Xpa-pah, pa-pah, pa-pah, It's easy to learn, though. Belonging to the brass family, it works more or less like the trumpet. The trumpet demands more breath, and you need an embouchure¡Xyou know, that kind of callus on the upper lip, like Louis Armstrong...Then you get a clear, clean sound, and you don't hear the blowing. The important thing is not to puff out your cheeks: that only happens in movies, cartoons, or New Orleans brothels."

  "What about the trumpet?"

  "The trumpet I learned on my own, during those summer afternoons when there was nobody at the parish hall, and I would hide in the seats of the little theater...But I studied the trumpet for erotic reasons. You see that little villa over there, a kilometer from the hall? That's where Cecilia lived, the daughter of the Salesians' great patroness. So every time the band performed, on holy days of obligation, after the procession, in the yard of the parish hall, and especially in the theater before performances of the amateur dramatic society, Cecilia and her mama were always in the front row, in the place of honor, next to the provost of the cathedral. In the theater the band would begin with a march that was called ¡¥A Good Start.' It opened with trumpets, the trumpets in B flat, gold and silver, carefully polished for the occasion. The trumpets stood up, played by themselves. Then they sat down, and the band began. Playing the trumpet was the only way for me to attract Cecilia's attention."

  "The only way?" Lorenza asked, moved.

  "There was no other way. First, I was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half, and a girl thirteen and a half is already a woman; a boy at thirteen is a snot-nose kid. Besides, she loved an alto sax, a certain Papi, a mangy horror, he seemed to me, but she only had eyes for him, as he bleated lasciviously, because the saxophone, when it isn't Ornette Coleman's and it's part of a band¡Xand played by the horrendous Papi¡Xis a goatish, guttural instrument, with the voice of, say, a fashion model who's taken to drink and turning tricks..."

  "What do you know about models who turn tricks?"

  "Anyway, Cecilia didn't even know I existed. Of course, in the evening, when I struggled up the hill to fetch the milk from a farm above us, I invented splendid stories in which she was kidnapped by the Black Brigades and I rushed to save her as the bullets whistled around my head and went chack-chack as they hit the sheaves of wheat. I revealed to her what she couldn't have known: that in my secret identity I headed the Resistance in the whole Monferrato region, and she confessed to me that this was what she had always hoped, and at that point I would feel a guilty flood of honey in my veins¡XI swear, not even my foreskin got wet; it was something else, something much more awesome and grand¡Xand on coming home, I would go and confess...I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species. In short, if I were switched to the trumpet, Cecilia would be unable to ignore me: on my feet, gleaming, while the saxophone sits miserably on his chair. The trumpet is warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious; it sounds the charge. The saxophone plays so that young punks in the slums, their hair slicked down with brilliantine, can dance cheek to cheek with sweating girls. I studied the trumpet like a madman, then went to Don Tico and said: Listen to this. And I was Oscar Levant when he had his first tryout on Broadway with Gene Kelly. Don Tico said: You're a trumpet, all right, but...

  "How dramatic this is," Lorenza said. "Go on. Don't keep us on pins and needles."

  "But I had to find somebody to take my place on the bombardon. Work out something, Don Tico said. So I worked out something. Now I must tell you, dear children, that in those days there lived in ***, a couple of wretches, classmates of mine, though they were two years older than I, and this fact tells you something about their mental ability. These two brutes were named Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo. Asterisk: Historical fact."

  "What?" Lorenza asked.

  I explained, smugly: "When Salgari, in his adventure stories, includes a true event, or something he thinks is true¡Xlet's say that, after Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull eats General Custer's heart¡Xhe always puts an asterisk and a footnote that says: Historical fact."

  "Yes, and it's a historical fact that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo really had those names, but the names were the least of it. A real pair of sneaks: they stole comic books from the newsstand, shell cases from other boys' collections. And they would think nothing of parking their greasy salami sandwich on your prized Christmas book, a deluxe volume of tales of the high seas. Cantalamessa called himself a Communist, Bo, a Fascist, but they were both ready to sell themselves to the enemy for a slingshot. They told stories about their sexual prowess, with erroneous anatomical information, and argued over who had masturbated more the night before. Here were two villains ready for anything; why not the bombardon? So I decided to seduce them. I sang the praises of the band uniform, I took them to public performances, I held out hopes of amatory triumphs with the Daughters of Mary...They fell for it. I spent my days in the theater with a long stick, as I had seen in illustrated pamphlets about missionaries; I rapped them on the knuckles when they missed a note. The bombardon has only three keys, but it's the embouchure that matters, as I said. I won't bore you any further, my little listeners. The day came, after long sleepless afternoons, when I could introduce to Don Tico two bombardons¡XI won't say perfect, but at least acceptable. Don Tico was convinced; he put them in uniform and moved me to the trumpet. Within the space of a week, for the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, for the opening of the theatrical season with They Had to See Paris, there before the curtain, in the presence of the authorities, I was standing to play the opening bars of ¡¥Good Start.' "

  "Oh, joyous moment," Lorenza said, making a face of tender jealousy. "And Cecilia?"

  "She wasn't there. Maybe she was sick. I don't know. But she wasn't there."

  He raised his eyes and surveyed the audience, and at that moment he was bard¡Xor jester. He calculated the pause. "Two days later, Don Tico sent for me and told me that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo had ruined the evening. They wouldn't keep time, their minds wandered when they weren't playing, they joked and never came in at the right place. ¡¥The bombardon,' Don Tico said to me, ¡¥is the backbone of the band, its rhythmic conscience, its soul. The band, it is a flock; the instruments are the sheep, the bandmaster the shepherd, but the bombardon is the faithful snarling dog that keeps the flock together. The bandmaster looks first to the bombardon, for if the bombardon follows him, the sheep will follow. Jacopo, my boy, I must ask of you a great sacrifice: to go back to the bombardon. You have a good sense of rhythm, you will keep those other two in time for me. I promise, as soon as they can play on their own, I'll let you play the trumpet.' I owed everything to Don Tico. I said yes. And on the next holy day the trumpets rose to their feet and played the opening of ¡¥Good Start' in front of Cecilia, once more in the first row. But I was in the darkness, a bombardon among bombardons. As for those two wretches, they never were able to play on their own, and I never went back to the trumpet.

  The war ended, I returned to the city, abandoned music, the brass family, and never even learned Cecilia's last name."

  "Poor boy," Lorenza said, hugging him from behind. "But you still have me."

  "I thought you like saxophones," Belbo said. Then he turned and kissed her hand. "But, to work," he said, serious again. "We're here to create a story of the future, not a remembrance of things past.''

  That evening, the lifting of the ban on alcohol was much celebrated. Jacopo seemed to have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in imagining absurd machines¡Xonly to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented. At midnight,
after a full day, we all decided it was time to experience what it was like sleeping in the hills.

  On my bed the sheets were even damper than they had been in the afternoon. Jacopo had insisted that we use a "priest": an oval frame that kept the covers raised and had a place for a little brazier with embers¡Xhe wanted to make sure we tasted all the pleasures of rural life. But when dampness is inherent, a bed-warmer encourages it: you feel welcome warmth, but the sheets remain humid. Oh, well. I lit a lamp, the kind with a fringed shade, where the mayflies flutter until they die, as the poet says, and I tried to make myself sleepy by reading the newspaper.

  For an hour or two I heard footsteps in the corridor, an opening and closing of doors, and the last closing was a violent slam. Lorenza Pellegrini putting Belbo's nerves to the test.

  I was half-asleep when I heard a scratching at the door, my door. I couldn't tell whether it was an animal or not (I had seen neither dogs nor cats in the house), but I had the impression that it was an invitation, a request, a trap. Maybe Lorenza was doing it because she knew Belbo was spying on her. Maybe not. Until then, I had considered Lorenza Belbo's property¡Xat least as far as I was concerned¡Xand besides, now that I was living with Lia, other women didn't interest me. The sly glances, often conspiratorial, that Lorenza gave me in the office or in a bar when she was teasing Belbo, as if seeking an ally or a witness, were part¡XI had always thought¡Xof the game she played. Without a doubt, Lorenza had a talent for looking at any man as if challenging his sexual capacity. But it was a curious challenge, as if she were saying: "I want you, but only to show how afraid you really are..." That night, however, hearing her fingernails scrape my door, I felt something different. It was desire: I desired Lorenza.

  I stuck my head under the pillow and thought of Lia. I want to have a child with Lia, I said to myself. And I'll make him (or her) learn the trumpet as soon as he (or she) has enough breath.

  57

  On every third tree a lantern had been hung, and a splendid virgin, also dressed in blue, lighted them with a raarvelous torch, and I lingered, longer than necessary, to admire the sight, which was of an ineffable beauty.

  ¡XJohann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 2, p. 21

  Toward noon Lorenza joined us on the terrace, smiling, and announced that she had found a terrific train that stopped at *** at twelve-thirty, and with only one change she could get back to Milan in the afternoon. Would we drive her, she asked, to the station?

  Belbo continued leafing through some notes. "I thought Aglie was expecting you, too," he said. "In fact, it seemed to me he organized the whole expedition just for you."

  "That's his problem," Lorenza said. "Who's driving me?"

  Belbo stood up and said to us, "It'll only take a moment; I'll be right back. Then we can stay here another couple of hours. Lorenza, you had a bag?"

  I don't know if they said anything to each other during the trip to the station. Belbo was back in about twenty minutes and resumed working without referring to the incident.

  At two o'clock we found a comfortable restaurant in the market square, and the choosing of food and wine gave Belbo further opportunity to recall his childhood. But he spoke as if he were quoting from someone else's biography. He had lost the narrative felicity of the day before. In midafternoon we set off to join Aglie and Garamond.

  Belbo drove southwest, and the landscape changed gradually, kilometer by kilometer. The hills of ***, even in late autumn, were gentle, domestic, but as we went on, the horizons became more vast, at every curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages; we glimpsed endless vistas. Like Darien, Diotallevi remarked, verbalizing these discoveries. We climbed in third gear toward great expanses and the outline of mountains, which at the end of the plateau was already fading into a wintry haze. Though we were already in the mountains, it seemed to be a plain modulated by dunes. As if the hand of a clumsy demiurge had compressed heights that seemed to him excessive, transforming them into a lumpy dough that extended all the way to the sea or¡Xwho knows?¡Xto the slopes of harsher and more determined chains.

  We reached the specified village and met Aglie and Gara-mond, as arranged, at the cafe in the main square. If Aglie was displeased to hear that Lorenza wasn't coming, he gave no indication of it. "Our exquisite friend does not wish to take part, in the presence of others, in the mysteries that define her. A singular modesty, which I appreciate," he said. And that was all.

  We continued, Garamond's Mercedes in the lead and Belbo's Renault behind, until, as the sunlight was dying, we came within sight of a strange yellow edifice on a hill, a kind of eighteenth-century castle, from which extended terraces with flowers and trees, flourishing despite the season.

  As we reached the foot of the hill, we found ourselves in an open space where many cars were parked. "We stop here," Aglie said, "and continue on foot."

  Dusk was now becoming night. The path was illuminated for us by a host of torches that burned along the slope.

  It's odd, but of everything that happened, from that moment until late at night, I have memories at once clear and confused. I reviewed them the other evening in the periscope and sensed a family resemblance between the two experiences. Yes, I said to myself, now you are here, in an unnatural situation, groggy from the smell of old wood, imagining yourself in a tomb or in the belly of a ship as a transformation is taking place. You have only to peer outside the cabin, and you will see objects in the gloom that earlier today were motionless, but now they stir like Eleusinian shadows among the fumes of a spell. And so it had been that evening at the castle: the lights, the surprises of the route, the words I heard, and then the incense; everything conspired to make me feel I was dreaming, but dreaming the way you dream when you are on the verge of waking, when you dream that you are dreaming.

  I should remember nothing, yet, on the contrary, I remember everything, not as if I had lived it, but as if it had been told to me by someone else.

  I do not know if what I remember, with such anomalous clarity, is what happened or is only what I wished had happened, but it was definitely on that evening that the Plan first stirred in our minds, stirred as a desire to give shape to shapelessness, to transform into fantasized reality that fantasy that others wanted to be real.

  "The route itself is ritual," Aglie was telling us as we climbed the hill. "These are hanging gardens, just like¡Xor almost¡Xthe ones Salomon de Caus devised for Heidelberg, that is, for the Palatine elector Frederick V, in the great Rosicrucian century. The light is poor, and so it should be, because it is better to sense than to see: our host has not reproduced the Salomon de Caus design literally; he had concentrated it in a narrower space. The gardens of Heidelberg imitated the macrocosm, but the person who reconstructed them here has imitated only the microcosm. Look at that rocaille grotto...Decorative, no doubt. But Caus had in mind the emblem of the Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, where coral is the philosopher's stone. Caus knew that the heavenly bodies can be influenced by the form of a garden, because there are patterns whose configuration mimes the harmony of the universe..."

  "Fantastic," Garamond said. "But how does a garden influence the planets?"

  "There are signs that attract one another, that look at one another, embrace, and enforce love. But they do not have¡Xthey must not have¡Xa certain and definite form. A man will try out giveij forces according to the dictates of his passion or the impulse of his spirit; this happened with the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. For there can be no relationship between us and divine beings except through seals, figures, characters, and ceremonies. Thus the divinities speak to us through dreams and oracles. And that is what these gardens are. Every aspect of this terrace reproduces a mystery of the alchemist's art, but unfortunately we can no longer read it, not even our host can. An unusual devotion to secrecy, you will agree, in this man who spends what he has saved over the years in order to design ideograms whose meaning he has lost."

  As we
climbed from terrace to terrace, the gardens changed. Some were in the form of a labyrinth, others in the form of an emblem, but each terrace could be viewed in its entirety only from a higher one. Looking down, I saw the outline of a crown, and other patterns I had been unable to embrace as I was passing through them. But even from above, I could not decipher them. Each terrace, seen as one moved among its hedges, presented some images, but the perspective from above revealed new, even contradictory images, as if every step of that stairway spoke two different languages at once.

  As we moved higher, we noticed some small structures. A fountain of phallic shape stood beneath a kind of arch or portico, and there was a Neptune trampling a dolphin, a door with vaguely Assyrian columns, an arch of imprecise form, as if polygons had been set upon other polygons, and each construction was surmounted by the statue of an animal: an elk, a monkey, a lion...

  "And all this means something?" Garamond asked.

  "Unquestionably! Just read the Mundus Symbolicus of Pici-nelli, which, incidentally, Alciati foresaw with extraordinary prophetic power. The whole garden may be read as a book, or as a spell, which is, after all, the same thing. If you knew the words, you could speak what the garden says and you would then be able to control one of the countless forces that act in the sublunar world. This garden is an instrument for ruling the universe."