by Umberto Eco
Between eleven at night and two in the morning you might see a young publisher, an architect, a crime reporter trying to work his way up to the arts page, some Brera Academy painters, a few semisuccessful writers, and students like me.
A minimum of alcoholic stimulation was the rule, and old Pilade, while he still stocked his big bottles of white for the tram drivers and the most aristocratic customers, replaced root beer and cream soda with pétillant wines with the right labels for the intellectuals and Johnnie Walker for the revolutionaries. I could write the political history of those years based on how Red Label gradually gave way to twelve-year-old Ballantine and then to single malt.
At the old billiard table the painters and motormen still challenged each other to games, but with the arrival of the new clientele, Pilade also put in a pinball machine.
I was never able to make the little balls last. At first I attributed that to absent-mindedness or a lack of manual dexterity. I learned the truth years later after watching Lorenza Pellegrini play. At the beginning I hadn't noticed her, but then she came into focus one evening when I followed the direction of Belbo's gaze.
Belbo had a way of standing at the bar as if he were just passing through (he had been a regular there for at least ten years). He often took part in conversations, at the counter or at a table, but almost always he did no more than drop some short remark that would instantly freeze all enthusiasm, no matter what subject was being discussed. He had another freezing technique: asking a question. Someone would be talking about an event, the whole group would be completely absorbed, then Belbo, turning his pale, slightly absent eyes on the speaker, with his glass at hip level, as though he had long forgotten he was drinking, would ask, "Is that a fact?" Or, "Really?" At which point everyone, including the narrator, would suddenly begin to doubt the story. Maybe it was the way Belbo's Piedmont drawl made his statements interrogative and his interrogatives taunting. And he had yet another Piedmont trick: looking into his interlocutor's eyes, but as if he were avoiding them. His gaze didn't exactly shirk dialogue, but he would suddenly seem to concentrate on some distant convergence of parallel lines no one had paid attention to. He made you feel that you had been staring all this time at the one place that was unimportant.
It wasn't just his gaze. Belbo could dismiss you with the smallest gesture, a brief interjection. Suppose you were trying hard to show that it was Kant who really completed the Copernican revolution in modern philosophy, suppose you were staking your whole future on that thesis. Belbo, sitting opposite you, with his eyes half-closed, would suddenly look down at his hands or at his knee with an Etruscan smile. Or he would sit back with his mouth open, eyes on the ceiling, and mumble, "Yes, Kant..." Or he would commit himself more explicitly, in an assault on the whole system of transcendental idealism: "You really think Kant meant all that stuff?" Then he would look at you with solicitude, as if you, and not he, had disturbed the spell, and he would then encourage you: "Go ahead, go ahead. I mean, there must be something to it. The man had a mind, after all."
But sometimes Belbo, when he became really angry, lost his composure. Since loss of composure was the one thing he could not tolerate in others, his own was wholly internal—and regional. He would purse his lips, raise his eyes, then look down, tilt his head to the left, and say in a soft voice: "Ma gavte la nata." For anyone who didn't know that Piedmontese expression, he would occasionally explain: "Ma gavte la nata. Take out the cork." You say it to one who is full of himself, the idea being that what causes him to swell and strut is the pressure of a cork stuck in his behind. Remove it, and phsssssh, he returns to the human condition.
Belbo's remarks had a way of making you see the vanity of things, and they delighted me. But I drew the wrong conclusion from them, considering them an expression of supreme contempt for the banality of other people's truth.
Now, having breached the secret of Abulafia and, with it, Belbo's soul, I see that what I thought disenchantment and a philosophy of life was a form of melancholy. His intellectual disrespect concealed a desperate thirst for the Absolute. This was not immediately obvious, because Belbo had many moods—irresponsibility, hesitation, indifference—and there were also moments when he relaxed and enjoyed conversation, asserting absolutely contradictory ideas with lighthearted disbelief. Then he and Diotallevi would create handbooks for impossibilities, or invent upside-down worlds or bibliographical monstrosities. When you saw him so enthusiastically talkative, constructing his Rabelaisian Sorbonne, there was no way of knowing how much he suffered at his exile from the faculty of theology, the real one.
I had deliberately thrown that address away; he had mislaid it and could never resign himself to the loss.
In Abulafia's files I found many pages of a pseudo diary that Belbo had entrusted to the password, confident that he was not betraying his often-repeated vow to remain a mere spectator of the world. Some entries carried old dates; obviously he had put these on the computer out of nostalgia, or because he planned to recycle them eventually. Others were more recent, after the advent of Abu. His writing was a mechanical game, a solitary pondering on his own errors, but it was not—he thought—"creation," for creation had to be inspired by love of someone who is not ourselves.
But Belbo, without realizing it, had crossed that Rubicon; he was creating. Unfortunately. His enthusiasm for the Plan came from his ambition to write a book. No matter if the book were made entirely of errors, intentional, deadly errors. As long as you remain in your private vacuum, you can pretend you are in harmony with the One. But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil.
FILENAME: A bevy of fair women
It's like this: toutes les femmes que j'ai recontrées se dressent aux horizons—avec les gestes piteux et les regards tristes des semaphores sous la pluie...
Aim high, Belbo. First love, the Most Blessed Virgin. Mama singing as she holds me on her lap as if rocking me though I'm past the age for lullabies, but I asked her to sing because I love her voice and the lavender scent of her bosom. "O Queen of Heaven fair and pure, hail, O daughter, queen demure, hail, mother of our Savior!"
Naturally, the first woman in my life was not mine. By definition she was not anyone's. I fell immediately in love with the only person capable of doing everything without me.
Then, Marilena (Marylena? Mary Lena?). Describe the lyric twilight, her golden hair, big blue bow, me standing in front of the bench with my nose upward, she tightrope-walking on the top rail of the back, swaying, arms outstretched for balance (delicious extrasystoles!), skirt flapping around her pink thighs. High above me, unattainable.
Sketch: that same evening as Mama sprinkles talcum powder on my sister's pink skin. I ask when her wee-wee will finally grow out. Mama's answer is that little girls don't grow wee-wees, they stay like that. Suddenly I see Mary Lena again, the white of her underpants visible beneath the fluttering blue skirt, and I realize that she is blond and haughty and inaccessible because she is different. No possible relationship; she belongs to another race.
My third woman, swiftly lost in the abyss, where she has plunged. She has died in her sleep, virginal Ophelia amid flowers on her bier. The priest is reciting the prayer for the dead, when suddenly she sits up on the catafalque, pale, frowning, vindictive, pointing her finger, and her voice cavernous: "Don't pray for me, Father. Before I fell asleep last night, I had an impure thought, the only one in my life, and now I am damned." Find the book of my first communion. Does it have this illustration, or did I make the whole thing up? She must have died while thinking of me; I was the impure thought, desiring the untouchable Mary Lena, she of a different species and fate. I am guilty of her damnation, I am guilty of the damnation of all women who are damned. It is right that I should not have had these three women: my punishment for wanting them.
I lose the first because she's in paradise, the second because she's in purgatory en
vying the penis that will never be hers, and the third because she's in hell. Theologically symmetrical. But this has already been written.
On the other hand, there's the story of Cecilia, and Cecilia is here on earth. I used to think about her before falling asleep: I would be climbing the hill on my way to the farm for milk, and when the partisans started shooting at the roadblock from the hill opposite, I pictured myself rushing to her rescue, saving her from the horde of Fascist brigands who chased her, brandishing their weapons. Blonder than Mary Lena, more disturbing than the maiden in the sarcophagus, more pure and demure than the Virgin—Cccilia, alive and accessible. I could have talked to her so easily, for I was sure she could love one of my species. And, in fact, she did. His name was Papi; he had wispy blond hair and a tiny skull, was a year older than I, and had a saxophone. I didn't even have a trumpet. I never saw the two of them together, but all the kids at Sunday School laughed, poked one another in the ribs, and whispered, giggling, that the pair made love. They were probably lying, little peasants, horny as goats, but they were probably right that she (Marylena Cecilia bride and queen) was accessible, so accessible that someone had already gained access to her. In any case—the fourth case—I was out in the cold.
Could a story like this be made into a novel? Perhaps I should write, instead, about the women I avoid because I can have them. Or could have had them. Same story.
If you can't even decide what the story is, better stick to editing books on philosophy.
9
In his right hand he held a golden trumpet.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 1
In this file, I find the mention of a trumpet. The day before yesterday, in the periscope, I wasn't aware of its importance. The file had only one reference to it, and that marginal.
During the long afternoons at the Garamond office, Belbo, tormented by a manuscript, would occasionally look up and try to distract me, too, as I sat at the desk across from his sorting through old engravings of the World Fair. Then he would drift into reminiscence, prompt to ring down the curtain if he suspected I was taking him too seriously. He would recall scenes from his past, but only to illustrate a point, to castigate some vanity.
"I wonder where all this is heading," he remarked one day.
"Do you mean the twilight of Western civilization?"
"Twilight? Let the sun handle twilight. No. I was talking about our writers. This is my third manuscript this week: one on Byzantine law, one on the Finis Austriae, and one on the poems of the Earl of Rochester. Three very different subjects, wouldn't you say?"
"I would."
"Yet in all these manuscripts, at one point or another, Desire appears, and the Object of Desire. It must be a trend. With the Earl of Rochester I can understand it, but Byzantine law?"
"Just reject them."
"I can't. All three books have been funded by the National Research Council. Actually, they're not that bad. Maybe I'll just call the three authors and ask them to delete those parts. The Desire stuff doesn't make them look good either."
"What can the Object of Desire possibly be in Byzantine law?"
"Oh, you can slip it in. If there ever was an Object of Desire in Byzantine law, of course, it wasn't what this guy says it was. It never is."
"Never is what?"
"What you think it is. Once—I was five or six—I dreamed I had a trumpet. A gold trumpet. It was one of those dreams where you can feel honey flowing in your veins; you know what I mean? A kind of prepubescent wet dream. I don't think I've ever been as happy as I was in that dream. When I woke up, I realized there was no trumpet, and I started crying. I cried all day. This was before the war—it must have been '38—a time of poverty. If I had a son today and saw him in such despair, I'd say, 'All right, I'll buy you a trumpet.' It was only a toy, after all, it wouldn't have cost a fortune. But my parents never even considered such a thing. Spending money was a serious business in those days. And they were serious, too, about teaching a child he couldn't have everything he wanted. 'I can't stand cabbage soup,' I'd tell them—and it was true, for God's sake; cabbage made me sick. But they never said: 'Skip the soup today, then, and just eat your meat.' We may have been poor, but we still had a first course, a main course, and fruit. No. It was always: 'Eat what's on the table.' Sometimes, as a compromise, my grandmother would pick the cabbage out of my bowl, stringy piece by stringy piece. Then I'd have to eat the expurgated soup, which was more disgusting than before. And even this was a concession my father disapproved of."
"But what about the trumpet?"
He looked at me, hesitant. "Why are you so interested in the trumpet?"
"I'm not. You were the one who brought it up, to show how the Object of Desire is never what others think."
"The trumpet ... My uncle and aunt from *** arrived that evening. They had no children, and I was their favorite nephew. Well, when they saw me bawling over my dream trumpet, they said they would fix everything: tomorrow we would go to the department store where there was a whole counter of toys—wonder of wonders—and I'd have the trumpet I wanted. I didn't sleep all night, and I couldn't sit still all the next morning. In the afternoon we went to the store, and they had at least three kinds of trumpets there. Little tin things, probably, but to me they were magnificent brass worthy of the Philharmonic. There was an army bugle, a slide trombone, and a trumpet of gold with a real trumpet mouthpiece but the keys of a saxophone. I couldn't decide, and maybe I took too long. Wanting them all, I must have given the impression that I didn't want any of them. Meanwhile, I believe my uncle and aunt looked at the price tags. My uncle and aunt weren't stingy; on the other hand, a Bakelite clarinet with silver keys was much cheaper. 'Wouldn't you like this better?' they asked. I tried it, produced a reasonable honk, and told myself that it was beautiful, but actually I was rationalizing. I knew they wanted me to take the clarinet because the trumpet cost a fortune. I couldn't demand such a sacrifice from my relatives, having been taught that if a person offers you something you like, you must say, 'No, thank you,' and not just once, not 'No, thank you,' with your hand out, but 'No, thank you' until the giver insists, until he says, 'Please, take it.' A well-bred child doesn't accept until that point. So I said maybe I didn't care about the trumpet, maybe the clarinet was all right, if that's what they wanted. And I looked up at them, hoping they would insist. They didn't, God bless them, they were delighted to buy me the clarinet, since—they said—that was what I wanted. It was too late to backtrack. I got the clarinet."
Belbo looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. "You want to know if I dreamed about the trumpet again?"
"I want to know," I said, "what the Object of Desire was."
"Ah," he said, turning back to his manuscript. "You see? You're obsessed by the Object of Desire, too. But it's not all that simple.... Suppose I had taken the trumpet. Would I have been truly happy then? What do you think, Casaubon?"
"I think you would have dreamed about the clarinet."
"I got the clarinet," he concluded sharply, "but I never played it."
"Never played it? Or never dreamed it?"
"Played it," he said, underlining his words, and for some reason I felt like a fool.
10
And finally nothing is cabalistically inferred from vinum save VIS NUMerorum, upon which numbers this Magia depends.
—Cesare della Riviera, Il Mondo Magico degli Eroi, Mantua, Osanna, 1603, pp. 65–66
But I was talking about my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had exchanged a few words at Pilade's, but I didn't know much about him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the university.
"And what do you do?" he asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the familiar tu, even
students and professors, even the clientele at Pilade's. "Tu—buy me a drink," a student wearing a parka would say to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Diotallevi, one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he respected but hadn't known long. He addressed me formally the whole time we worked together, and I valued that.
"And what do you do?" he asked, with what I now know was friendliness.
"In real life or in this theater?" I said, nodding at our surroundings.
"In real life."
"I study."
"You mean you go to the university, or you study?"
"You may not believe this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I'm finishing a thesis on the Templars."