by Umberto Eco
—From a private letter of Mario Salvadori, Columbia University, 1984
Having nothing more to learn in that place, I took advantage of the melee to reach the statue of Gramme.
The pedestal was still open. I entered, went down a narrow ladder, and found myself on a small landing illuminated by a lightbulb, where a spiral stone staircase began. At the end of this, I came to a dim passage with a higher, vaulted ceiling. At first I didn't realize where I was, and couldn't identify the source of the rippling sound I heard. Then my eyes adjusted: I was in a sewer, with a handrail that kept me from falling into the water but not from inhaling an awesome stink, half chemical, half organic. At least something in our story was true: the sewers of Paris, of Colbert, Fantomas, Caus.
I followed the biggest conduit, deciding against the darker ones that branched off, and hoped that some sign would tell me where to end my subterranean flight. In any case, I was escaping, far from the Conservatoire, and compared to that kingdom of darkness the Paris sewers were relief, freedom, clean air, light.
I carried with mc a single image, the hieroglyph traced in the choir by Belbo's corpse. What was that symbol? To what other symbol did it correspond? I couldn't figure it out. I know now it was a law of physics, but this knowledge only makes the phenomenon more symbolic. Here, now, in Belbo's country house, among his many notes, I found a letter from someone who, replying to a question of his, told him how a pendulum works, and how it would behave if a second weight were hung elsewhere along the length of its wire. So Belbo—God knows for how long—had been thinking of the Pendulum as both a Sinai and a Calvary. He hadn't died as the victim of a Plan of recent manufacture; he had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
Somehow, losing, Belbo had won. Or does he who devotes himself to this single way of winning then lose all? He loses all if he does not understand that the victory is a different victory. But on that Saturday evening I hadn't yet discovered this.
I went along the tunnel, mindless, like Postel, perhaps lost in the same darkness, and suddenly I saw the sign. A brighter lamp, attached to the wall, showed me another ladder, temporary, leading to a wooden trapdoor. I tried it, and I found myself in a basement filled with empty bottles, then a corridor with two toilets, a little man on one door, a little woman on the other. I was in the world of the living.
I stopped, breathless. Only then did I remember Lorenza. Now I was crying. But she was slipping away, leaving my bloodstream, as if she had never existed. I couldn't even see her face. In that world of the dead, she was the most dead.
At the end of the corridor I came to another stairway, a door. I entered a smoky, evil-smelling place, a tavern, a bistro, an Oriental bar, black waiters, sweating customers, greasy skewers, and mugs of beer. I appeared, like an ordinary customer who had gone to urinate and returned. Nobody noticed me. Perhaps the man at the cash desk, seeing me arrive from the back, gave me an almost imperceptible signal, narrowing his eyes as if to say: Yes, I understand, go ahead, I haven't seen a thing.
115
If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible.
—Talmud, Berakhot, 6
Leaving the bar, I find myself among the lights of Porte Saint-Martin. The bar is Arab, and the shops around it, still open, are Arab, too. A composite odor of couscous and falafel, and crowd. Clumps of young people, thin, many with sleeping bags. I ask a boy what is going on. The march, he says. Tomorrow there will be a big march against the Savary law. Marchers are arriving by the busload.
A Turk—a Druze, an Ismaili in disguise—invites me in bad French to go into some kind of club. Never. Flee Alamut. You do not know who is in the service of whom. Trust no one.
I cross the intersection. Now I hear only the sound of my footsteps. The advantage of a big city: move on a few meters, and you find solitude again.
Suddenly, after a few blocks, on my left, the Conservatoire, pale in the night. From the outside, perfect peace, a monument sleeping the sleep of the just. I continue southward, toward the Seine. I have a destination, but I'm not sure what it is. I want to ask someone what has happened.
Belbo dead? The sky is serene. I encounter a group of students. They are silent, influenced by the genius loci. On the left, the hulk of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs.
I continue along rue Saint-Martin, I cross rue aux Ours, broad, a boulevard, almost; I'm afraid of losing my way, but what way? Where am I going? I don't know. I look around, and on my right, at the corner, I see two display windows of Editions Rosicruciennes. They're dark, but in the light of the street lamp and with the help of my flashlight I manage to make out their contents. Books, objects. Histoire des juifs, Comte de St.-Germain, alchemy, monde caché, les maisons secrètes de la Rose-Croix, the message of the builders of the cathedrals, the Cathars, The New Atlantis, Egyptian medicine, the temple of Karnak, the Bhagavad-Gita, reincarnation, Rosicrucian crosses and candelabra, busts of Isis and Osiris, incense in boxes and tablets, tarots. A dagger, a tin letter opener with a round hilt bearing the seal of the Rosicrucians. What are they doing, making fun of me?
I pass the façade of the Beaubourg. During the day the place is a village fair; now the plaza is almost deserted. A few silent groups, sleeping, a few lights from the brasseries opposite. It's all true. Giant air ducts that absorb energy from the earth. Perhaps the crowds that come during the day serve to supply them with vibrations; perhaps the hermetic machine is fed on fresh meat.
The church of Saint-Merri. Opposite, the Librairie la Vouivre, three-quarters occultist. I must not give in to hysteria. I take rue des Lombards, to avoid an army of Scandinavian girls coming out of a bistro laughing. Shut up; Lorenza is dead.
But is she? What if I am the one who is dead? Rue des Lombards intersects, at right angles, rue Nicolas-Flamel, and at the end of that you can see, white, the Tour Saint-Jacques. At the corner, the Librairie Arcane 22, tarots and pendulums. Nicolas Flamel the alchemist, an alchemistic bookshop, and then the Tour Saint-Jacques, with those great white lions at the base, a useless late-Gothic tower near the Seine, after which an esoteric review was named. Pascal conducted experiments there on the weight of air, and even today, at a height of fifty-two meters, the tower has a station for meteorological research. Maybe They began with the Tour Saint-Jacques, before erecting the Eiffel Tower. There are special locations. And no one notices.
I go back toward Saint-Merri. More girls' laughter. I don't want to see people. I skirt the church. Along rue du Cloitre-Saint-Merri, a transept door, old, of rough wood. At the foot of the street, a square extends, the end of the Beaubourg area, here brilliantly lit. In the open space, machines by Tinguely, and other multicolored artifacts that float on the surface of a pool, a small artificial lake, their cogged wheels clanking insinuatingly. In the background I see again the scaffolding of Dalmine pipes, the Beaubourg with its gaping mouths—like an abandoned Titanic near a wall devoured by ivy, a shipwreck in a crater of the moon. Where the cathedrals failed, the great transatlantic ducts whisper, in contact with the Black Virgins. They are discovered only by one who knows how to circumnavigate Saint-Merri. And so I must go on; I have a clue, I must expose Their plot in the very center of the Ville Lumière, the plot of the Dark Ones.
I find myself at the façade of Saint-Merri. Something impels me to train my flashlight on the portal. Flamboyant Gothic, arches in accolade.
And suddenly, finding what I didn't expect to find, on the archivolt of the portal I see it.
The Baphomet. Where two curves join. At the summit of the first, a dove of the Holy Spirit with a glory of stone rays, but on the second, besieged by praying angels, there he is, the Baphomet, with his awful wings. On the façade of a church. Shameless.
Why here? Because we aren't far from the Temple. Where is the Temple, or what's left of it? I retrace my steps, north, and find myself at the corner of rue de Montmorency. At number 51, th
e house of Nicolas Flamel. Between the Baphomet and the Temple. The shrewd spagyric knew well with whom he was dealing. Poubelles full of foul rubbish opposite a house of undefined period, Taverne Nicolas Flamel. The house is old, restored for the tourists, for Diabolicals of the lowest order, hylics. Next door, an American shop with an Apple poster: "Secouez-vous les puces." Microsoft-Hermes. Directory, temurah.
Now I'm in rue du Temple, I walk along it and come to the corner of rue de Bretagne, and the Square du Temple, a garden blanched as a cemetery, the necropolis of the martyred knights.
Rue de Bretagne to rue Vieille du Temple. Rue Vieille du Temple, after rue Barbette, has novelty shops: electric bulbs in odd shapes, like ducks or ivy leaves. Too blatantly modern. They don't fool me.
Rue des Francs-Bourgeois: I'm in the Marais, I know, and soon the old kosher butcher shops will appear. What do the Jews have to do with the Templars, now that we gave their place in the Plan to the Assassins of Alamut? Why am I here? Is it an answer I am looking for? Perhaps I'm only trying to get away from the Conservatoire. Unless I do have a destination, a place I'm going to. But it can't be here. I rack my brain to remember where it is, as Belbo hunted in a dream for a lost address.
An obscene group approaches. Laughing nastily, they march in open order, forcing me to step off the sidewalk. For a moment I fear they are agents of the Old Man of the Mountain, that they have come for me. Not so; they vanish into the night, but they speak a foreign language, a sibilant Shiite, Talmudic, Coptic, like a serpent of the desert.
Androgynous figures loom, in long cloaks. Rosicrucian cloaks. They pass, turn into rue de Sévigné. It is late, very late. I fled the Conservatoire to find again the city of all, but now I realize that the city of all is a catacomb with special paths for the initiated.
A drunk. But he may be pretending. Trust no one, no one. I pass a still-open bar; the waiters, in aprons down to their ankles, are putting chairs on tables. I manage to enter just in time. I order a beer, drain it, ask for another. "A healthy thirst, eh?" one of them says. But without cordiality, suspicious. Of course I'm thirsty; I've had nothing to drink since five yesterday afternoon. A man can be thirsty without having spent the night under a pendulum. Fools. I pay and leave before they can commit my features to memory.
I'm at the corner of Place des Vosges. I walk along the arcades. What was that old movie in which the solitary footsteps of Mathias, the mad killer, echoed at night in Place des Vosges? I stop. Do I hear footsteps behind me? But I wouldn't, of course; the killer has stopped, too. These arcades—all they need is a few glass cases, and they could be rooms in the Conservatoire.
Low sixteenth-century ceilings, round-headed arches, galleries selling prints, antiques, furniture. Place des Vosges, with its old doorways, cracked and worn and leprous. The people here haven't moved for hundreds of years. Men with yellow cloaks. A square inhabited exclusively by taxidermists. They appear only at night. They know the movable slab, the manhole through which you penetrate the Mundus Subterraneus. In full view.
The Union de Recouvrement des Cotisation de Sécurité sociale et D'allocations familiales de la Patellerie, number 75, apartment 1. A new door—rich people must live there—but right next to it is an old door, peeling, like a door on Via Sincero Renato. Then, at number 3, a door recently restored. Hylics alternating with pneumatics. The Masters and their slaves. Then, planks nailed across what must have been an arch. It's obvious; there was an occultist bookshop here and now it's gone. A whole block has been emptied. Evacuated overnight. Like Agliè. They know someone knows; they are beginning to cover their tracks.
At the corner of rue de Birague, I see the line of arcades, infinite, without a living soul. I want darkness, not these yellow street lamps. I could cry out, but no one would hear me. Behind all the closed windows, through which not a thread of light escapes, the taxidermists in their yellow smocks will snicker.
But no; between the arcades and the garden in the center are parked cars, and an occasional shadow passes. A big Belgian shepherd crosses my path. A black dog alone in the night. Where is Faust? Did he send the faithful Wagner out for a piss?
Wagner. That's the word that was churning in my mind without surfacing. Dr. Wagner: he's the one I need. He will be able to tell me that I'm raving, that I've given flesh to ghosts, that none of it's true, Belbo's alive, and the Tres don't exist. What a relief it would be to learn that I'm sick.
I abandon the square, almost running. I'm followed by a car. But maybe it's only looking for a parking place. I trip on a plastic garbage bag. The car parks. It didn't want me. I'm on rue Saint-Antoine. I look for a taxi. As if invoked, one passes.
I say to the driver: "Sept, Avenue Elisee-Reclus."
116
Je voudrais être la tour, pendre à la Tour Eiffel.
—Biaise Cendrars
I didn't know where 7, Avenue Elisée-Reclus was, and I didn't dare ask the driver, because anyone who takes a taxi at that hour either is heading for his own home or is a murderer at the very least. The man was grumbling that the center of the city was still full of those damn students, buses parked everywhere, it was a scandal, if he was in charge, they'd all be lined up against a wall, and the best thing was to go the long way round. He practically circled Paris, leaving me finally at number 7 of a lonely street.
There was no Dr. Wagner at that address. Was it seventeen, then? Or twenty-seven? I walked, looked at two or three houses, then came to my senses. Even if I found the house, was I thinking of dragging Dr. Wagner out of bed at this time of night to tell him my story? I had ended up here for the same reason that I had roamed from Porte Saint-Martin to Place des Vosges: I was fleeing. I didn't need a psychoanalyst, I needed a straitjacket. Or the cure of sleep. Or Lia. To have her hold my head, press it between her breast and armpit, and whisper soothingly to me.
Was it Dr. Wagner I wanted or Avenue Elisée-Reclus? Because—now I remembered—I had come across that name in the course of my reading for the Plan. Elisée Reclus was someone in the last century who wrote a book about the earth, the underground, volcanoes; under the pretext of academic geography he stuck his nose into the Mundus Subterraneus. One of Them, in other words. I ran from Them, yet kept finding Them around me. Little by little, in the space of a few hundred years, They had occupied all of Paris. And the rest of the world.
I should go back to the hotel. Would I find another taxi? This was probably an out-of-the-way suburb. I headed in the direction where the night sky was brighter, more open. The Seine?
When I reached the corner, I saw it.
On my left. I should have known it would be there, in ambush, because in this city the street names wrote unmistakable messages; they gave you warnings. It was my own fault that I hadn't been paying attention.
There it was, foul metal spider, the symbol and instrument of their power. I should have run, but I felt drawn to that web, craning my neck, then looking downward, because from where I stood the thing could not be encompassed in one glance. I was swallowed by it, slashed by its thousand edges, bombarded by metal curtains that fell on every side. With the slightest move it could have crushed me with one of those Meccano paws.
La Tour. I was at the one place in the city where you don't see it in the distance, in profile, benevolent above the ocean of roofs, light-hearted as a Dufy painting. It was on top of me, it sailed at me. I could glimpse the tip, but I moved inward, between its legs, and saw its haunches, underside, genitalia, sensed the vertiginous intestine that climbed to join the esophagus of that polytechnical giraffe's neck. Perforated, it yet had the power to douse the light around it, and as I moved, it offered me, from different perspectives, different cavernous niches that framed sudden zooms into darkness.
To its right, in the northeast, still low on the horizon, a sickle moon. At times, the Tower framed it; and to me it looked like an optical illusion, the fluorescence of one of those skewed screens the Tower's structure formed; but if I walked on a little, the screens assumed new forms, the moon van
ished, tangled in the metal ribs; the spider crushed it, digested it, and it went into another dimension.
Tesseract. Four-dimensional cube. Through an arch I saw a flashing light—no, two, one red, one white—surely a plane looking for Roissy or Orly. The next moment—I had moved, or the plane, or the Tower—the lights hid behind a rib; I waited for them to reappear in the next frame, but they were gone for good. The Tower had a hundred windows, all mobile, and each gave onto a different segment of space-time. Its ribs didn't form Euclidean curves, they ripped the very fabric of the cosmos, they overturned realities, they leafed through pages of parallel worlds.
Who was it who said that this spire of Notre Dame de la Brocante served "a suspendre Paris au plafond de l'univers"? On the contrary, it suspended the universe from its spire. It was thus the substitute for the Pendulum.
What had they called it? Lone suppository, hollow obelisk, Magnificat of wire, apotheosis of the battery, aerial altar of an idolatrous cult, bee in the heart of the rose of the winds, piteous ruin, hideous night-colored colossus, misshapen emblem of useless strength, absurd wonder, meaningless pyramid, guitar, inkwell, telescope, prolix as a cabinet minister's speech, ancient god, modern beast ... It was all this and more. And, had I had the sixth sense of the Masters of the World, now that I stood within its bundle of vocal cords encrusted with rivet polyps, I would have heard the Tower hoarsely whisper the music of the spheres as it sucked waves from the heart of our hollow planet and transmitted them to all the menhirs of the world. Rhizome of junctures, cervical arthrosis, prothesis of protheses. The horror of it! To dash my brains out, from where I was, They would have to launch me toward the peak. Surely I was coming out of a journey through the center of the earth, I was dizzy, antigravitational, in the antipodes.