by Umberto Eco
No, we had not been daydreaming: here was the looming proof of the Plan. But soon the Tower would realize that I was the spy, the enemy, the grain of sand in the gear system it served, soon it would imperceptibly dilate a diamond window in that lace of lead and swallow me, grab me in a fold of its hyperspace, and put me Elsewhere.
If I remained a little longer under its tracery, its great talons would clench, curve like claws, draw me in, and then the animal would slyly assume its former position. Criminal, sinister pencil sharpener!
Another plane: this one came from nowhere; the Tower itself had generated it between two of its plucked-mastodon vertebrae. I looked up. The Tower was endless, like the Plan for which it had been born. If I could remain there without being devoured, I would be able to follow the shifts, the slow revolutions, the infinitesimal decompositions and recompositions in the chill of the currents. Perhaps the Masters of the World knew how to interpret it as a geomantic design, perhaps in its metamorphoses they knew how to read their instructions, their unconfessable mandates. The Tower spun above my head, screwdriver of the Mystic Pole. Or else it was immobile, like a magnetized pin, and it made the heavenly vault rotate. The vertigo was the same.
How well the Tower defends itself! I said silently. From the distance it winks affectionately, but should you approach, should you attempt to penetrate its mystery, it will kill you, it will freeze your bones, simply by revealing the meaningless horror of which it is made. Now I know that Belbo is dead, and the Plan is real, because the Tower is real. If I don't get away now, fleeing once again, I won't be able to tell anyone. I must sound the alarm.
***
A noise. Stop, return to reality. A taxi bearing down. With a leap I managed to tear myself from the magic girdle, I waved my arms, and was almost run over, because the driver braked only at the last moment, stopping as if with great reluctance. During the ride he explained that he, too, when he passed beneath it at night, found the Tower frightening, so he speeded up. "Why?" I asked him.
"Parce que ... parce que ça fait peur, c'est tout."
At my hotel, I had to ring and ring before the sleepy night porter came. I said to myself: You have to sleep now. The rest, tomorrow. I took some pills, enough to poison myself. Then I don't remember.
117
Madness has an enormous pavilion Where it receives folk from every region, Especially if they have gold in profusion.
—Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, 1494, 46
I woke at two in the afternoon, dazed, catatonic. I remembered everything clearly, but didn't know if what I remembered was true. My first thought was to run downstairs and buy the newspapers; then I told myself that even if a company of spahis had stormed the Conservatoire immediately after the event, the news wouldn't have had time to appear in the morning papers.
Besides, Paris had other things on its mind that day. The desk clerk informed me as soon as I went down to look for some coffee. The city was in an uproar. Many Métro stations were closed; in some places the police were using force to disperse the crowds; the students were too numerous, they were going too far.
I found Dr. Wagner's number in the telephone book. I tried calling, but his office was obviously closed on Sunday. Anyway, I had to go and check at the Conservatoire. It was open on Sunday afternoons.
In the Latin Quarter groups of people were shouting and waving flags. On the Ile de la Cité I saw a police barricade. Shots could be heard in the distance. This is how it must have been in '68. At Sainte-Chapelle there must have been a confrontation, I caught a whiff of tear gas. I heard people charging, I didn't know if they were students or policemen; everybody around me was running. Some of us took refuge inside a fence behind a cordon of police, while there was some scuffling in the street. The shame of it: here I was with the aging bourgeoisie, waiting for the revolution to subside.
Then the way was clear, and I took back streets around the old Halles, until I was again in rue Saint-Martin. The Conservatoire was open, with its white forecourt, the plaque on the façade: "Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, established by decree of the Convention on 19 Vendémiaire, Year III ... in the former priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, founded in the eleventh century." Everything normal, with a little Sunday crowd ignoring the students' kermesse.
I went inside—Sundays free—and everything was as it had been at five o'clock yesterday afternoon. The guards, the visitors, the Pendulum in its usual place ... I looked for signs of what had happened, but if it had happened, someone had done a thorough cleaning. If it had happened.
I don't recall how I spent the rest of the afternoon. Nor do I recall what I saw, wandering the streets, forced every now and then to turn in to an alley to avoid a scuffle. I called Milan, just to see, dialed Belbo's number, then Lorenza's. Then Garamond Press, which would of course be closed.
As I sit here tonight, all this happened yesterda}'. But between the day before yesterday and this night an eternity has passed.
Toward evening I realized that I hadn't eaten anything. I wanted quiet, and a little comfort. Near the Forum des Halles I entered a restaurant that promised fish. There was too much fish. My table was directly opposite an aquarium. A universe sufficiently surreal to plunge me again into paranoia. Nothing is accidental. That fish seems an asthmatic Hesychast that is losing its faith and accusing God of having lessened the meaning of the cosmos. Sabaoth, Sabaoth, how can you be so wicked as to make me believe you don't exist? The flesh is covering the world like gangrene.... That other fish looks like Minnie; she bats her long lashes and purses her lips into a heart shape. Minnie Mouse is Mickey's fiancée. I eat a salade folle with a haddock tender as a baby's flesh. With honey and pepper. The Paulicians are here. That one glides among the coral like Bréguet's airplane, a leisurely lepidopteral fluttering of wings; a hundred to one he saw his homunculus abandoned at the bottom of an athanor, now with a hole in it, thrown into the garbage opposite Flamel's house. And now a Templar fish, all armored in black, looking for Noffo Dei. He grazes the asthmatic Hesychast, who navigates pensively, frowning, toward the Unspeakable. I look away. Across the street I glimpse the sign of another restaurant, Chez R ... Rosie Cross? Reuchlin? Rosispergius? Rachkovskyragotgkyzarogi? Signatures, signatures...
Let's see. The only way to discomfit the Devil is to make him believe you don't believe in him. There's no mystery in your nighttime flight across Paris, in your vision of the Tower. To come out of the Conservatoire after what you saw, or believe you saw, and to experience the city as a nightmare—that is normal. But what did I see in the Conservatoire?
I absolutely had to talk to Dr. Wagner. I don't know why, but I had to. Talking was the panacea. The therapy of the word.
How did I pass the time till this morning? I went into a movie theater where they were showing The Lady from Shanghai by Orson Welles. When the scene with the mirrors came, it was too much for me, and I left. But maybe that's not true, maybe I imagined the whole thing.
This morning I called Dr. Wagner at nine. The name Garamond enabled me to get past the secretary; the doctor seemed to remember me, and, impressed by the urgency in my voice, he said to come at once, at nine-thirty, before his regular appointments. He seemed cordial, sympathetic.
Did I dream the visit to Dr. Wagner, too? The secretary asked for my vital statistics, prepared a card, had mc pay in advance. Luckily I had my return ticket.
An office of modest size, with no couch. Windows overlooking the Seine. To the left, the shadow of the Tower. Dr. Wagner received me with professional affability. I was not his publisher now, I was his patient. With a wide gesture he had me sit opposite him, at his desk, like a government clerk called on the carpet. "Et alors?" He said this, and gave his rotating chair a push, turning his back to me. He sat with his head bowed and hands clasped. There was nothing left but for me to speak.
I spoke, and it was like a dam bursting; everything came out, from beginning to end: what I thought two years ago, what I thought last year, what I thought Belbo had thou
ght, and Diotallevi. Above all, what had happened on Saint John's Eve.
Wagner did not interrupt once, did not nod or show disapproval. For all the response he made, he could have been fast asleep. But that must have been his technique. I talked and talked. The therapy of the word.
Then I waited for the word, his word, that would save me.
Wagner stood up very, very slowly. Without turning to me, he came around his desk and went to the window. He looked out, his hands folded behind his back, absorbed in thought.
In silence, for ten, fifteen minutes.
Then, still with his back to me, in a colorless voice, calm, reassuring: "Monsieur, vous êtes fou."
He did not move, and neither did I. After another five minutes, I realized that he wasn't going to add anything. That was it. End of session.
I left without saving good-bye. The secretary gave me a bright smile, and I found myself once more in Avenue Elisée-Reclus.
It was eleven. I picked up my things at the hotel and rushed to the airport. I had to wait two hours. In the meantime, I called Garamond Press, collect, because I didn't have a cent left. Gudrun answered. She seemed more obtuse than usual, I had to shout three times for her to say Si, oui, yes, that she would accept the call.
She was crying: Diotallevi had died Saturday night at midnight.
"And nobody, not one of his friends was at the funeral this morning. The shame of it! Not even Signor Garamond! They say he's out of the country. There was only me, Grazia, Luciano, and a gentleman all in black, with a beard, side curls, and a big hat: he looked like an undertaker. God knows where he came from. But where were you, Casaubon? And where was Belbo? What's going on?"
I muttered something in the way of an explanation and hung up. My flight was called, and I boarded the plane.
YESOD
118
The conspiracy theory of society ... comes from abandoning God and then asking: "Who is in his place?"
—Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge, 1969, iv, p. 123
The flight did me good. I not only left Paris behind, I left the underground, the ground itself, the terrestrial crust. Sky and mountains still white with snow. Solitude at ten thousand meters, and that sense of intoxication always produced by flying, the pressurization, the passage through slight turbulence. It was only up here, I thought, that I was finally putting my feet on solid ground. Time to draw conclusions, to list points in my notebook, then close my eyes and think.
I decided to list, first of all, the incontestable facts.
There is no doubt that Diotallevi is dead. Gudrun told me so. Gudrun was never part of our story—she wouldn't have understood it—so she is the only one left who tells the truth. Also, Garamond is not in Milan. He could be anywhere, of course, but the fact that he's not there and hasn't been there the past few days suggests he was indeed in Paris, where I saw him.
Similarly, Belbo is not there.
Now, let's assume that what I saw Saturday night in Saint-Martin-des-Champs really happened. Perhaps not the way I saw it, befuddled as I was by the music and the incense; but something did happen. It's like that time with Amparo. Afterward, she didn't believe she had been possessed by Pomba Gira, but she knew that in the tenda de umbanda something had possessed her.
Finally, what Lia told me in the mountains is true. Her interpretation is completely convincing: the Provins message is a laundry list. There were never any Templars' meetings at the Grange-aux-Dimes. There was no Plan and there was no message.
The laundry list, for us, had been a crossword puzzle with the squares empty and no definitions. The squares had to be filled in such a way that everything would fit. But perhaps that metaphor isn't precise. In a crossword puzzle the words, intersecting, have to have letters in common. In our game we crossed not words but concepts, events, so the rules were different. Basically there were three rules.
Rule One: Concepts are connected by analogy. There is no way to decide at once whether an analogy is good or bad, because to some degree everything is connected to everything else. For example, potato crosses with apple, because both are vegetable and round in shape. From apple to snake, by Biblical association. From snake to doughnut, by formal likeness. From doughnut to life preserver, and from life preserver to bathing suit, then bathing to sea, sea to ship, ship to shit, shit to toilet paper, toilet to cologne, cologne to alcohol, alcohol to drugs, drugs to syringe, syringe to hole, hole to ground, ground to potato.
Rule Two says that if tout se tient in the end, the connecting works. From potato to potato, tout se tient. So it's right.
Rule Three: The connections must not be original. They must have been made before, and the more often the better, by others. Only then do the crossings seem true, because they are obvious.
This, after all, was Signor Garamond's idea. The books of the Diabolicals must not innovate; they must repeat what has already been said. Otherw ise what becomes of the authority of Tradition?
And this is what we did. We didn't invent anything; we only arranged the pieces. Colonel Ardenti hadn't invented anything either, but his arrangement of the pieces was clumsy. Furthermore, he was much less educated than we, so he had fewer pieces.
They had all the pieces, but They didn't know the design of the crossword. We—once again—were smarter.
I remembered something Lia said to me in the mountains, when she was scolding me for having played the nasty game that was our Plan: "People are starved for plans. If you offer them one, they fall on it like a pack of wolves. You invent, and they'll believe. It's wrong to add to the inventings that already exist."
This is what always happens. A young Herostratus broods because he doesn't know how to become famous. Then he sees a movie in which a frail young man shoots a country music star and becomes the center of attention. Herostratus has found the formula; he goes out and shoots John Lennon.
It's the same with the SFAs. How can I become a published poet whose name appears in an encyclopedia? Garamond explains: It's simple, you pay. The SFA never thought of that before, but since the Manutius plan exists, he identifies with it, is convinced he's been waiting for Manutius all his life; he just didn't know it was there.
We invented a nonexistent Plan, and They not only believed it was real but convinced themselves that They had been part of it for ages, or, rather, They identified the fragments of their muddled mythology as moments of our Plan, moments joined in a logical, irrefutable web of analogy, semblance, suspicion.
But if you invent a plan and others carry it out, it's as if the Plan exists. At that point it does exist.
Hereafter, hordes of Diabolicals will swarm through the world in search of the map.
We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep, private frustration. What frustration? Belbo's last file suggested it to me: There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr.
You don't complain about being mortal, prey to a thousand microorganisms you can't control; you aren't responsible for the fact that your feet are not very prehensile, that you have no tail, that your hair and teeth don't grow back when you lose them, that your arteries harden with time. It's because of the Envious Angels.
The same applies to everyday life. Take stock-market crashes. They happen because each individual makes a wrong move, and all the wrong moves put together create panic. Then whoever lacks steady nerves asks himself: Who's behind this plot, who's benefiting? He has to find an enemy, a plotter, or it will be, God forbid, his fault.
If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model. Which is what happened when Jesuits and Baconians, Paulicians and neo-Templars each complained of the other's plan. Diotallevi's remark was: "Of
course, you attribute to the others what you're doing yourself, and since what you're doing yourself is hateful, the others become hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would like to do the same hateful thing that you're doing, they collaborate with you, hinting that—yes—what you attribute to them is actually what they have always desired. God blinds those He wishes to destroy; you just have to lend Him a helping hand."
A plot, if there is to be one, must be a secret. A secret that, if we only knew it, would dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the knowing of it in itself would be salvation. Does such a luminous secret exist?
Yes, provided it is never known. Known, it will only disappoint us. Hadn't Agliè spoken of the yearning for mystery that stirred the age of the Antonines? Yet someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God, the Son of God made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all: you only had to love your neighbor. Was that a trivial secret? And he bequeathed the idea that whoever uttered the right words at the right time could turn a chunk of bread and a half-glass of wine into the body and blood of the Son of God, and be nourished by it. Was that a paltry riddle? And then he led the Church fathers to ponder and proclaim that God was One and Triune and that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, but that the Son did not proceed from the Father and the Spirit. Was that some easy formula for hylics? And yet they, who now had salvation within their grasp—do-it-yourself salvation—turned deaf ears. Is that all there is to it? How trite. And they kept on scouring the Mediterranean in their boats, looking for a lost knowledge, of which those thirtydenarii dogmas were but the superficial veil, the parable for the poor in spirit, the allusive hieroglyph, the wink of the eye at the pneumatics. The mystery of the Trinity? Too simple: there had to be more to it.