by Umberto Eco
The Librairie Sloane truly supplied everything from the cradle to the grave; it even advertised healthy entertainment, a suitable place to take the children before grinding them up in the mortar. I heard a phone ring. The shopkeeper pushed aside a pile of papers until he found the receiver. "Oui, monsieur," he said, "c'est bien ça." He listened for a few minutes, nodded, then assumed a puzzled look, or at least it was the pretense of puzzlement, on account of those present, as if everybody could hear what he was hearing and he didn't want to assume responsibility for it. Then he took on that shocked expression of a Parisian shopkeeper when you ask for something he doesn't have in his shop, or a hotel clerk when there are no rooms available. "Ah, non, monsieur. Ah, ça ... Non, non, monsieur, c'est pas notre boulot. Ici, vous savez, on vend des livres, on peut bien vous conseiller sur des catalogues, mais ça ... Il s'agit de problèmes très personnels, et nous ... Oh, alors, il ya a—sais pas, moi—des curés, des ... oui, si vous voulez, des exorcistes. D'accord, je le sais, on connaît des confrères qui si prêtent ... Mais pas nous. Non, vraiment la description ne me suffit pas, et quand même ... Désolé, monsieur. Comment? Oui ... si vous voulez. C'est un endroit bien connu, mais ne demandez pas mon avis. C'est bien ça, vous savez, dans ces cas, la confiance c'est tout. A votre service, monsieur."
The other two customers left. I felt ill at ease but steeled myself and attracted the old man's attention with a cough. I told him I was looking for an acquaintance, a friend who, I thought, often stopped by here: Monsieur Agliè. Again the man had the shocked look he had had while on the telephone. Perhaps, I said, he didn't know him as Agliè, but as Rakosky or Soltikoff or ... The bookseller looked at me again, narrowing his eyes, and remarked coldly that I had friends with curious names. I told him never mind, it was not important, I was merely inquiring. Wait, he said; my partner is arriving and he may know the person you are looking for. Have a seat, please; there's a chair in the back, there. I'll just make a call and check. He picked up the phone, dialed a number, and spoke in a low voice.
Casaubon, I said to myself, you're even stupider than Belbo. What are you waiting for? For Them to come and say, Oh, what a fine coincidence, Jacopo Belbo's friend as well; come, come along, yes, you too....
I stood up abruptly, said good-bye, and left. In a minute I was out of rue de la Manticore, in another alley, then at the Seine. Fool! I said to myself. What did you expect? To walk in, find Agliè, take him by the lapels, and hear him apologize and say it was all a misunderstanding, here's your friend, we didn't touch a hair on his head. And now they know that you're here, too.
It was past noon, and that evening something would take place in the Conservatoire. What was I to do? I turned into rue Saint-Jacques, every now and then looking over my shoulder. An Arab seemed to be following me. But what made me think he was an Arab? The thing about Arabs is that they don't look like Arabs, or at least not in Paris. In Stockholm it would be different.
I passed a hotel, went in, asked for a room, got a key. As I was going upstairs, wooden stairs with a railing, from the second-floor landing the desk was still visible and I saw the presumed Arab enter. Then I noticed that in the corridor there were other people who could have been Arabs. Of course, that neighborhood was full of little hotels for Arabs. What did I expect?
I went into the room. It was decent; there was even a telephone. Too bad I didn't know anyone I could call.
I dozed fitfully until three. Then I washed my face and headed for the Conservatoire. Now there was nothing else for me to do but enter the museum, stay on after closing, and wait for midnight.
Which I did. And a few hours before midnight, I found myself in the periscope, waiting.
Nezah, for some interpreters, is the Sefirah of endurance, forbearance, constant patience. In fact, a test lay ahead of us. But for other interpreters, it is victory. Whose victory? Perhaps, in this story full of the defeated, of the Diabolicals mocked by Belbo, of Belbo mocked by the Diabolicals, of Diotallevi mocked by his cells, I was—for the moment—the only victorious one. Lying in wait in the periscope, I knew about the others, but the others didn't know about me. The first part of my scheme had gone according to plan.
And the second? Would it, too, go according to plan, or would it go according to the Plan, which now was no longer mine?
HOD
112
Four our Ordinances and Rites: We have two very long and faire Galleries in the Temple of the Rosie Cross; In one of these we place patterns and samples of all manners of the more rare and excellent inventions; In the other we place the Statues of all principal Inventours.
—John Heydon, The English Physilians Guide: Or A Holy Guide,
London, Ferris, 1662, The Preface
I had stayed in the periscope too long. It must have been ten, ten-thirty. If something was going to happen, it would happen in the nave, before the Pendulum. I had to go down there and find a hiding place, an observation post. If I arrived too late, after They entered (from where?), They would notice me.
Go downstairs. Move ... For hours I had waited for this, but now that it was possible, even wise, to do it, I felt somehow paralyzed. I would have to cross the rooms at night, using my flashlight only when necessary. The barest hint of a nocturnal glow filtered through the big windows. I had imagined a museum made ghostly by the moon's rays; I was wrong. The glass cases reflected vague glints from outside; that was all. If I didn't move carefully, I could go sprawling on the floor, could knock over something with a shatter of glass, a clang of metal. Now and then I turned on the flashlight, turned it off. Proceeding, I felt as if I were at the Crazy Horse. The sudden beam revealed a nakedness, not of flesh, but of screws, clamps, rivets.
What if I were suddenly to reveal a living presence, the figure of an envoy of the Masters echoing, mirroring my progress? Who would be the first to shout? I listened. In vain. Gliding, I made no noise. Neither did he.
That afternoon I had studied carefully the sequence of the rooms, in order to be able to find the great staircase even in the darkness. But instead I was wandering, groping. I had lost my bearings.
Perhaps I was going in circles, crossing some of the rooms for the second time; perhaps I would never get out of this place; perhaps this groping among meaningless machines was the rite.
The truth was, I didn't want to go down. I wanted to postpone the rendezvous.
I had emerged from the periscope after a long and merciless examination of conscience, I had reviewed our error of the last years and tried to understand why, without any reasonable reason, I was now here hunting for Belbo, who was here for reasons even less reasonable. But the moment I set foot outside the periscope, everything changed. As I advanced, I advanced with another man's head. I became Belbo. Like Belbo, now at the end of his long journey toward enlightenment, I knew that every earthly object, even the most squalid, must be read as the hieroglyph of something else, and that there is nothing, no object, as real as the Plan. How clever I was! A flash of light, a glance, was all it took, and I understood. I would not let myself be deceived.
...Froment's Motor: a vertical structure on a rhomboid base. It enclosed, like an anatomical figure exhibiting its ribs and viscera, a series of reels, batteries, circuit breakers—what the hell did the textbooks call them?—and the thing was driven by a transmission belt fed by a toothed wheel.... What could it have been used for? Answer: for measuring the telluric currents, of course.
Accumulators. What did they accumulate? I imagined the Thirty-six Invisibles as stubborn secretaries (keepers of the secret) tapping all night on their clavier-scribes to produce from this machine a sound, a spark, all of them intent on a dialog from coast to coast, from abyss to surface, from Machu Picchu to Avalon, come in, come in, hello hello hello, Pamersiel Pamersiel, we've caught a tremor, current Mu 36, the one the Brahmans worshiped as the breath of God, now I'll plug in the tap, the valve, all micro-macrocosmic circuits operational, all the mandrake roots shuddering beneath the crust of the globe, you hear the son
g of the Universal Sympathetic, over and out.
My God, armies slaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurled anathemas, emperors met, hemophiliac and incestuous, in the hunting lodge of the Palatine gardens, all to supply a cover, a sumptuous façade for the work of these wireless operators who in the House of Solomon were listening for pale echoes from the Umbilicus Mundi.
And as they operated these pseudothermic hexatetragrammatic electrocapillatories—that's how Garamond would have put it—every now and then someone would invent, say, a vaccine or an electric bulb, a triumph in the wonderful adventure of metals, but the real task was quite different: here they are, assembled at midnight, to spin this staticelectricity machine of Ducretet, a transparent wheel that looks like a bandoleer, and, inside it, two little vibrating balls supported by arched sticks, and when they touch, sparks fly, and Dr. Frankenstein hopes to give life to his golem, but no, the signal has another purpose: Dig, dig, old mole....
A sewing machine (what else? One of those engraving-advertisements, along with pills for developing one's bust, and the great eagle flying over the mountains with the restorative cordial in its talons, Robur le Conquérant, R. C), but when you turn it on, it turns a wheel, and the wheel turns a coil, and the coil ... What does the coil do? Who is listening to the coil? The label says, "Currents induced from the terrestrial field." Shameless! There to be read even by children on their afternoon visits! Mankind believed it was going in a different direction, believed everything was possible, believed in the supremacy of experiment, of mechanics. The Masters of the World have deceived us for centuries. Enfolded, swaddled, seduced by the Plan, we wrote poems in praise of the locomotive.
I passed by. I imagined myself dwindling, an ant-sized, dazed pedestrian in the streets of a mechanical city, metallic skyscrapers on every side. Cylinders, batteries, Leyden jars one above the other, merry-go-round centrifuges, tourniquet électrique à attraction et repulsion, a talisman to stimulate the sympathetic currents, colonnade étincelante formée de neuf tubes, électroaimant, a guillotine, and in the center—it looked like a printing press—hooks hung from chains, the kind you might see in a stable. A press in which you could crush a hand, a head. A glass bell with a pneumatic pump, two-cylinder, a kind of alembic, with a cup underneath and, to the right, a copper sphere. In it Saint-Germain concocted his dyes for the landgrave of Hesse.
A pipe rack with two rows of little hourglasses, ten to a row, their necks elongated like the neck of a Modigliani woman, some unspecified material inside, and the upper bulge of each expanded to a different size, like balloons about to take off. This, an apparatus for the production of the Rebis, where anyone could see it.
Then the glassworks section. I had retraced my steps. Little green bottles: a sadist host offering me poisons in quintessence. Iron machines for making bottles, opened and closed by two cranks. What if, instead of a bottle, someone put a wrist in there? Whack! And it would be the same with those great pincers, those immense scissors, those curved scalpels that could be inserted into sphincters or ears, into the uterus to extract the still-living fetus, which would be ground with honey and pepper to sate the appetite of Astarte.... The room I was now crossing had broad cases, and buttons to set in motion corkscrews that would advance inexorably toward the victim's eye, the Pit and the Pendulum. We were close to caricature now, to the ridiculous contraptions of Rube Goldberg, the torture racks on which Big Pete bound Mickey Mouse, the engrenage extérieur à trois pignons, triumph of Renaissance mechanics, Branca, Ramelli, Zonca. I knew these gears, I had put them in the wonderful adventure of metals, but they had been added here later, in the last century, and were ready to restrain the unruly after the conquest of the world; the Templars had learned from the Assassins how to shut up Noffo Dei when the time of his capture came; the swastika of Sebottendorf would twist, in the direction of the sun, the twitching limbs of the enemies of the Masters of the World. All ready, these instruments awaited a sign, everything in full view, the Plan was public, but nobody could have guessed it, the creaking mechanical maws would sing their hymn of conquest, great orgy of mouths, all teeth that locked and meshed exactly, mouths singing in tick-tock spasms.
Finally I came to the émetteur à étincelles soufflées designed for the Eiffel Tower, for the emission of time signals between France, Tunisia, and Russia, the Templars of Provins, the Paulicians, the Assassins of Fez. (Fez isn't in Tunisia, and the Assassins, anyway, were in Persia, but you can't split hairs when you live in the coils of Transcendent Time.) I had seen it before, this immense machine, taller than I, its walls perforated by a series of portholes, air ducts. The sign said it was a radio apparatus, but I knew better, I had passed it that same afternoon. The Beaubourg!
For all to see. And, for that matter, what was the real purpose of that enormous box in the center of Lutetia (Lutetia, the air duct in a subterranean sea of mud), where once there was the Belly of Paris, with those prehensile proboscises of vents, that insanity of pipes, conduits, that Ear of Dionysius open to the sky to capture sounds, messages, signals, and send them to the very center of the globe, and then to return them, vomiting out information from hell? First the Conservatoire, a laboratory, then the 'Power, a probe, and finally the Beaubourg, a global transmitter and receiver. Had they set up that huge suction cup just to entertain a handful of hairy, smelly students, who went there to listen to the latest record with a Japanese headset? For all to see. The Beaubourg, gate to the underground kingdom of Agarttha, the monument of the Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. And the rest—two, three, four billion of them—were unaware of this, or forced themselves to look the other way. Idiots and hvlics. While the pneumatics headed straight for their goal, through six centuries.
Unexpectedly, I found the staircase. I went down, with increasing caution. Midnight was approaching. I had to hide in my observation post before They arrived.
It was about eleven. I crossed the Lavoisier hall without turning on the flashlight, remembering the hallucinations of that afternoon. I crossed the corridor with the model trains.
There were already people in the nave: dim lights moving, the sound of shuffling, of objects being dragged.
Would I have time to make it to the sentry box? I slipped along the cases with the model trains and was soon close to the statue of Gramme, in the transept. On a wooden pedestal, cubic in form (the cubic stone of Yesod!), it stood as if to guard the entrance to the choir. My Statue of Liberty was almost directly behind it.
The front panel of the pedestal had been lowered, a kind of gangplank allowing people to enter the nave from some concealed passage. In fact, an individual emerged from there with a lantern—a gas lantern, with colored glass, which illuminated his face in red patches. I pressed myself into a corner, and he didn't see me. A second man joined him from the choir. "Vite," he said. "Hurry. In an hour they'll be here."
So this was the vanguard, preparing something for the rite. If there weren't too many of them, I could still reach Liberty before They arrived—God knows from where, and in what numbers—by the same route. For a long while I crouched low, following the glints of the lanterns in the church, the regular alternation of the lights between greater and lesser intensity. I calculated how far they moved away from Liberty and how much of it remained in shadow. Then, at a certain moment, I risked it, squeezed past the left side of Gramme, a tight fit, painful, even sucking in my stomach. Luckily, I was thin as a rail. Lia ... I made a dash, slipped into the sentry box, where I sank to the floor and curled up in a fetal position. My heart raced; my teeth chattered.
I had to relax. I breathed through my nose rhythmically, my breaths gradually deeper and deeper. This is how, under torture, you can make yourself lose consciousness and escape the pain. And, in fact, I sank slowly into the embrace of the Subterranean World.
113
Our cause is a secret within a secret, a secret that only another secret can explain; it is a secret about a secret that is veiled by a secret.
—Ja'fa
r as-Sādiq, sixth Imam
Slowly, I regained consciousness, heard sounds; the light, now stronger, made me blink. My feet were numb. When I tried to get up, making no noise, I felt I was standing on a bed of spiny sea urchins. The Little Mermaid. Silently I stood on tiptoe, then bent my knees, and the pain lessened. Peering out cautiously, left and right, I saw that the sentry box was still pretty much in the shadows. Only then did I take in the scene.
The nave was illuminated on all sides. There were now dozens and dozens of lanterns, carried by new arrivals, who were entering from the passage behind me. They moved by on my left, into the choir, or lined up in the nave. My God, I said to myself, a Night on Bald Mountain, Walt Disney version.
They didn't raise their voices; they whispered, together creating a noise like a crowd scene in a play: rhubarb rhubarb.
To the left, the lanterns were set on the floor in a semicircle, completing, with a flattened arc, the eastern curve of the choir, and touching, at the southernmost point, the statue of Pascal. A burning brazier had been placed there, and on it someone was throwing herbs, essences. The smoke reached me in the box, parched my throat, gave me a feeling of dazed excitement.
In the center of the choir, in the flickering of the lanterns, something stirred, a slender shadow.
The Pendulum! The Pendulum no longer swayed in its familiar place in the center of the transept. A larger version of it had been hung from the keystone in the center of the choir. The sphere was larger; the wire much thicker, like a hawser, I thought, or a cable of braided metal strands. The Pendulum, now enormous, must have appeared this way in the Panthéon. It was like beholding the moon through a telescope.