by Umberto Eco
Humiliated by his incapacity to create (and all his life he had dined out on his frustrated desires and his unwritten pages, the former a metaphor of the latter and vice versa, all full of his alleged, impalpable cowardice), he came to realize that by inventing the Plan he had actually created. He fell in love with his golem, found it a source of consolation. Life—his life, mankind's—as art, and art as falsehood. Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un livre (faux). But now he wanted to believe in this false book, because, as he had also written, if there was a Plan, then he would no longer be defeated, diffident, a coward.
And this is what finally happened: he used the Plan, which he knew was unreal, to defeat a rival he believed real. And then, aware that the Plan was mastering him as if it existed, or as if he, Belbo, and the Plan, were made of the same stuff, he went to Paris, toward a revelation, a liberation.
Tormented by the daily remorse that for years and years he had lived only with ghosts of his own making, he was now finding solace in ghosts that were becoming objective, since they were known also to others, even though he was the Enemy. Should he fling himself into the lion's maw? Yes, because the lion taking shape was more real than Seven Seas Jim, more real than Cecilia, more real perhaps than Lorenza Pellegrini herself.
Belbo, sick from so many missed appointments, now felt able to make a real appointment. An appointment he could not evade from cowardice, because now his back was to the wall. Fear forced him to be brave. Inventing, he had created the principle of reality.
106
List No. 5
6 undershirts
6 shorts
6 handkerchiefs
has always puzzled scholars, principally because of the total absence of socks.
—Woody Allen, "The Metterling List," Gating Even, New York, Random House, 1966, p. 8
It was during those days, no more than a month ago, that Lia decided a vacation would do me good. "You look tired," she said. Maybe the Plan had worn me out. For that matter, the baby, as its grandparents said, needed clean air. Some friends lent us a house in the mountains.
We didn't leave at once. There were things to attend to in Milan, and Lia said that nothing was more restful than taking a little vacation in the city when you knew you'd soon be going off on your real vacation.
Now, for the first time, I talked to Lia about the Plan. Until then she had been too busy with the baby. She knew vaguely that Belbo, Diotallevi, and I were working on some puzzle, and that it occupied whole days and nights, but I hadn't said anything to her about it, not since the day she preached me that sermon about the psychosis of resemblances. Maybe I was ashamed.
I described the whole Plan to her, down to the smallest details, and told her about Diotallevi's illness, feeling guilty, as if I had done something wrong. I tried to present the Plan for what it was: a display of bravura.
Lia said: "Pow, I don't like your story."
"It isn't beautiful?"
"The sirens were beautiful, too. Listen, what do you know about your unconscious?"
"Nothing. I'm not even sure I have one."
"There. Imagine that a Viennese prankster, to amuse his friends, invented the whole business of the id and Oedipus, and made up dreams he had never dreamed and little Hanses he had never met.... And what happened? Millions of people were out there, all ready and waiting to become neurotic in earnest. And thousands more ready to make money treating them."
"Lia, you're paranoid."
"Me? You!"
"Maybe we're both paranoid, but you have to grant me this: we started with the Ingolf document. It's natural, when one comes across a message of the Templars, to want to decipher it. Maybe we exaggerated a little, to make fun of the decipherers of messages, but there was a message to begin with."
"All you know is what that Ardenti told you, and from your own description he's an out-and-out fraud. Anyway, I'd like to see this message for myself."
Nothing easier; I had it in my files.
Lia took the paper, looked at it front and back, wrinkled her nose, brushed the hair from her eyes to see the first, the coded, part better. She said: "Is that all?"
"Isn't it enough for you?"
"More than enough. Give me two days to think about it." When Lia asks for two days to think about something, she's determined to show me I'm stupid. I always accuse her of this, and she answers: "If I know you're stupid, that means I love you even if you're stupid. You should feel reassured."
For two days we didn't mention the subject again. Anyway, she was almost always out of the house. In the evening I watched her huddled in a corner, making notes, tearing up one sheet of paper after another.
When we got to the mountains, the baby scratched around all day in the grass, Lia fixed supper, and ordered me to eat, because I was thin as a rail. After supper, she asked me to fix her a double whiskey with lots of ice and only a splash of soda. She lit a cigarette, which she does only at important moments, told me to sit down, and then explained.
"Listen carefully, Pow, because I'm going to demonstrate to you that the simplest explanation is always the best. Colonel Ardenti told you Ingolf found a message in Provins. I don't doubt that at all. Yes, Ingolf went down into the well and really did find a case with this text in it," and she tapped the French lines with her finger. "We are not told that he found a case studded with diamonds. All the colonel said was that according to Ingolf's notes the case was sold. And why not? It was an antique; he may have made a little cash, but we are not told that he lived off the proceeds for the rest of his life. He must have had a small inheritance from his father."
"And why should the case be ordinary?"
"Because the message is ordinary. It's a laundry list. Come on, let's read it again."
a la ... Saint Jean
36 p charrete de fein
6 ... entiers avec saiel
p ... les hlancs mantiax
r ... s ... chevaliers de Pruins pour la ... j.nc
6 foiz 6 en 6 places
chascune foiz 20 a ... 120 a...
iceste est l'ordonation
al donjon li premiers
it h secunz joste iceus qui ... pans
it al refuge
it a Nostre Dame d l'altre part d l'iau
it a l'ostel des popelicans
it a la pierre
3 foiz 6 avant la feste ... la Grant Pute.
"A laundry list?"
"For God's sake, didn't it ever occur to you to consult a tourist guide, a brief history of Provins? You discover immediately that the Grange-aux-Dimes, where the message was found, was a gathering place for merchants. Provins was a center for fairs in Champagne. And the Grange is on rue St.-Jean. In Provins they bought and sold everything, but lengths of cloth were particularly popular, draps—or dras, as they wrote it then—and every length was marked by a guarantee, a kind of seal. The second most important product of Provins was roses, red roses that the Crusaders had brought from Syria. They were so famous that when Edmund of Lancaster married Blanche d'Artois and took the title Comte de Champagne, he added the red rose of Provins to his coat of arms. Hence, too, the war of the roses, because the House of York had a white rose as its symbol."
"Who told you all this?"
"A little book of two hundred pages published by the Tourist Bureau of Provins. I found it at the French Center. But that's not all. In Provins there's a fort known as the Donjon, which speaks for itself, and there is a Porte-aux-Pains, an Eglise du Refuge, various churches dedicated to Our Lady of this and that, a rue de la Pierre-Ronde, where there was a pierre de cens, a stone on which the count's subjects set the coins of their tithes. And then a rue des Blancs-Manteaux and a street called de la Grand-Pute-Muce, for reasons not hard to guess. It was a street of brothels."
"And what about the popelicans?"
"In Provins there had been some Cathars, who later were duly burned, and the grand inquisitor himself was a converted Cathar, Robert le Bougre. So it is hardly strange that a street or an area should be ca
lled the place of the Cathars even if the Cathars weren't there anymore."
"Still, in 1344..."
"But who said this document dates from 1344? Your colonel read '36 years after the hay wain,' but in those days a p made in a certain way, with a tail, meant post, but a p without the tail meant pro. The author of this text is an ordinary merchant who made some notes on business transacted at the Grange, or, rather, on the rue St.-Jean—not on the night of Saint Jean—and he recorded a price of thirty-six sous, or crowns, or whatever denomination it was for one or each wagon of hay."
"And the hundred and twenty years?"
"Who said anything about years? Ingolf found something he transcribed as '120 a'...What is an 'a'? I checked a list of the abbreviations used in those days and found that for denier or dinarium odd signs were used; one looks like a delta, another looks like a theta, a circle broken on the left. If you write it carelessly and in haste, as a busy merchant might, a fanatic like Colonel Ardenti could take it for an a, having already read somewhere the story of the one hundred and twenty years. You know where better than I. He could have read it in any history of the Rosicrucians. The point is, he wanted to find something resembling 'post 120 annos patebo.' And then what does he do? He finds 'it' repeated several times and he reads it as iterum. But the abbreviation for iterum was itm, whereas 'it' means item, which means likewise, and is in fact used for repetitious lists. Our merchant is calculating how much he's going to make on the orders he's received, and he's listing the deliveries he has to make. He has to deliver some bouquets of roses of Provins, and that's the meaning of 'r ... s ... chevaliers de Pruins.' And where the colonel read 'vainjance' (because he had the kadosch knights on his mind), you should read 'jonchée.' The roses were used to make either hats or floral carpets on feast days. So here is how your Provins message should read:
"In Rue Saint Jean:
36 sous for wagons of hay.
Six new lengths of cloth with seal
to rue des Blancs-Manteaux.
Crusaders' roses to make a jonchée:
six bunches of six in the six following places,
each 20 deniers, making 120 deniers in all.
Here is the order:
the first to the Fort
item the second to those in Porte-aux-Pains
item to the Church of the Refuge
item to the Church of Notre Dame, across the river
item to the old building of the Cathars
item to rue de la Pierre-Ronde.
And three bunches of six before the feast, in the whores' street.
"Because they, too, poor things, maybe wanted to celebrate the feast day by making themselves nice little hats of roses."
"My God," I said. "I think you're right."
"Of course I'm right. It's a laundry list, I tell you."
"Wait a minute. This may very well be a laundry list, but the first message really is in code, and it talks about thirty-six invisibles."
"True. The French text I polished off in an hour, but the other one kept me busy for two days. I had to examine Trithemius, at both the Am-brosiana and the Trivulziana, and you know what the librarians there are like: before they let you put your hands on an old book, they look at you as if you were planning to eat it. But the first message, too, is a simple matter. You should have discovered this yourself. To begin with, are you sure that 'Les 36 ¡nuisibles separez en six bandes' is in the same French as our merchant's? Yes; this expression was used in a seventeenth-century pamphlet, when the Rosicrucians appeared in Paris. But then you reasoned the way your Diabolicals do: If the message is encoded according to the method of Trithemius, it means that Trithemius copied from the Templars, and since it quotes a sentence that was current in Rosicrucian circles, it means that the plan attributed to the Rosicrucians was none other than the plan of the Templars. Try reversing the argument, as any sensible person would: since the message is written in Trithemius's code, it was written after Trithemius, and since it quotes an expression that circulated among the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians, it was written after the seventeenth century. So, at this point, what is the simplest hypothesis? Ingolf finds the Provins message. Since, like the colonel, he's an enthusiast of hermetic messages, he sees thirty-six and one hundred and twenty and thinks immediately of the Rosicrucians. And since he's also an enthusiast of cryptography, he amuses himself by putting the Provins message into code, as an exercise. So he translates his fine Rosicrucian sentence using a Trithemius cryptosystem."
"An ingenious explanation. But it's no more valid than the colonel's."
"So far, no. But suppose you make one conjecture, then a second and a third, and they all support one another. Already you're more confident that you're on the right track, aren't you? I began with the suspicion that the words used by Ingolf were not the ones taken from Trithemius. They're in the same cabalistic Assyro-Babylonian style, but they're not the same. Yet, if Ingolf had wanted words beginning with the letters that interested him, in Trithemius he could have found as many as he liked. Why didn't he use those words?"
"Well, why didn't he?"
"Maybe he needed specific letters also in the second, third, and fourth positions. Maybe our ingenious Ingolf wanted a multicoded message; maybe he wanted to be smarter than Trithemius. Trithemius suggests forty major cryptosystems: in one, only the initial letters count; in another, the first and third letters; in another, every other initial letter, and so on, until, with a little effort, you can invent a hundred more systems on your own. As for the ten minor cryptosystems, the colonel considered only the first wheel, which is the easiest. But the following ones work on the principle of the second wheel. Here's a copy of it for you. Imagine that the inner circle is mobile and you can turn it so that the letter A coincides with any letter of the outer circle. You will have one system where A is written as X, another where A is U, and so on.... With twenty-two letters on each circle, you can produce not ten but twenty-one cryptosystems. The twenty-second is no good, because there A is A...."
"Don't tell me that for each letter of each word you tried all twenty-one systems...."
"I had brains on my side, and luck. Since the shortest words have six letters, it's obvious that only the first six are important and the rest are just for looks. Why six letters? Suppose Ingolf coded the first letter, then skipped one, then coded the third, then skipped two and coded the sixth. For the first letter I used wheel number i, for the third letter I used wheel number 2, and got a sentence. Then I tried wheel number 3 for the sixth letter, and got a sentence again. I'm not saying Ingolf didn't use other letters, too, but three positive results arc enough for me. If you want to, you can take it further."
"Don't keep me in suspense. What came out?"
"Look at the message again. I've underlined the letters that count.
Kuabris Defrabax Rexulon Ukkazaal Ukzaab Urpaefel
Taculbain Habrak Hacoruin Maquafel Tebrain Hmcatuin
Rokasor Himesor Argaabil Kaquaan Docrabax Reisaz
Reisabrax Decaiquan Oiquaquil Zaitabor Qaxaop Dugraq
Xaelobran Disaeda Magisuan Raitak Huidal Uscolda Arabaom
Zipreus Mecrim Cosmae Duquifas Rocarbis.
"Now, we know what the first message is: it's the one about the thirty-six invisibles. Now listen to what comes out if you substitute the third letters, using the second wheel: chambre des demoiselles, l'aiguille creuse."
"But I know that, it's—"
"'En aval d'Etretat—La Chambre des Demoiselles—Sous le Fort du Fréfossé—Aiguille Creuse,' the message deciphered by Arsène Lupin when he discovers the secret of the Hollow Peak! You remember: at Etretat, at the edge of the beach, stands the Aiguille Creuse, a natural castle, habitable inside, the secret weapon of Julius Caesar when he invaded Gaul, and later used by the kings of France. The source of Lupin's immense power. And you know' how Lupinologists are crazy about this story; they make pilgrimages to Etretat, they look for secret passages, they make anagrams of every word of Leblanc.... Ingolf w
as no less a Lupinologist than he was a Rosicrucianologist, and so code after code...."
"My Diabolicals could always argue that the Templars knew the secret of the peak, and therefore the message was written in Provins in the fourteenth century...."
"Of course; I realize that. But now comes the third message. Third wheel applied to the sixth letter of each word. Listen: 'Merde j'en ai marre de cette steganographie.' And this is modern French; the Templars didn't talk like that. 'Shit, I'm sick of this hermetic writing.' That's how Ingolf talked, and having given himself a headache coding all this nonsense, he got a final kick cursing in code what he was doing. But he was not without shrewdness. Notice that each of these three messages has thirty-six letters. Poor Pow, Ingolf was having fun, just like the three of you, and that imbecile colonel took him seriously."
"Then why did Ingolf disappear?"
"Who says he was murdered? Ingolf got fed up living in Auxerre, seeing nobody but the pharmacist and a spinster daughter who whined all day. So maybe he went to Paris, pulled off a good deal selling one of his old books, found himself a buxom and willing widow, and started a new life. Like those men who go out to buy cigarettes, and the wives never see them again."
"And the colonel?"
"Didn't you tell me that not even that detective is sure they killed him? He got into some jam, his victims tracked him down, and he took to his heels. Maybe at this very moment he's selling the Eiffel Tower to an American tourist and going under the name Dupont."
I couldn't give in all along the line. "All right, we started out with a laundry list. Yet we were clever enough, inventive enough, to turn a laundry list into poetry."
"Your plan isn't poetic; it's grotesque. People don't get the idea of going back to burn Troy just because they read Homer. With Homer, the burning of Troy became something that it never was and never will be, and yet the Iliad endures, full of meaning, because it's all clear, limpid. Your Rosicrucian manifestoes are neither clear nor limpid; they're mud, hot air, and promises. This is why so many people have tried to make them come true, each finding in them what he wants to find. In Homer there's no secret, but your plan is full of secrets, full of contradictions. For that reason you could find thousands of insecure people ready to identify with it. Throw the whole thing out. Homer wasn't faking, but you three have been faking. Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to a miracle. You've invented hair oil. I don't like it. It's a nasty joke."