Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

  Between *** and San Davide were five or six kilometers of uphill curves. This road was taken, on Sunday afternoons, by the retired men; they would walk, playing bowls as they walked, take a rest, have some wine, play a second game, and so on until they reached the sanctuary at the top.

  A few uphill kilometers are nothing for men who play bowls, and perhaps it's nothing to cover them in formation, rifle on your shoulder, eyes staring straight ahead, lungs inhaling the cool spring air. But try climbing them while playing an instrument, cheeks swollen, sweat trickling, breath short. The town band had done nothing else for a lifetime, but for the boys of the parish hall it was torture. They held out like heroes. Don Tico beat his pitch pipe in the air, the clarinets whined with exhaustion, the saxophones gave strangled bleats, the bombardons and the trumpets let out squeals of agony, but they made it, all the way to the village, to the foot of the steep path that led to the cemetery. For some time Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo had only pretended to play, but Jacopo stuck to his role of sheepdog, under Don Tico's benedictive eye. Compared to the town band, they made not a bad showing, and Mongo himself and the other brigade commanders said as much: Good for you, boys. It was magnificent.

  A commander with a blue kerchief and a rainbow of ribbons from both world wars said: "Reverend, let the boys rest here in the town; they're worn out. Climb up later, at the end. There'll be a truck to take you back to ***."

  They rushed to the tavern. The men of the town band, veterans toughened by countless funerals, showed no restraint in grabbing the tables and ordering tripe and all the wine they could drink. They would stay there having a spree until evening. Don Tico's boys, meanwhile, crowded at the counter, where the host was serving mint ices as green as a chemistry experiment. The ice, sliding down the throat, gave you a pain in the middle of your forehead, like sinusitis.

  Then they struggled up to the cemetery, where a pickup truck was waiting. They climbed in, yelling, and were all packed together, all standing, jostling one another with the instruments, when the commander who had spoken before came out and said: "Reverend, for the final ceremony we need a trumpet. You know, for the usual bugle calls. It's a matter of five minutes."

  "Trumpet," Don Tico said, very professional. And the hapless holder of that title, now sticky with green mint ice and yearning for the family meal, a treacherous peasant insensitive to aesthetic impulses and higher ideals, began to complain: It was late, he wanted to go home, he didn't have any saliva left, and so on, mortifying Don Tico in the presence of the commander.

  Then Jacopo, seeing in the glory of noon the sweet image of Cecilia, said: "If he'll give me the trumpet, I'll go."

  A gleam of gratitude in the eyes of Don Tico; the sweaty relief of the miserable titular trumpet. An exchange of instruments, like two guards.

  Jacopo proceeded to the cemetery, led by the psychopomp with the Addis Ababa ribbons. Everything around them was white: the wall struck by the sun, the graves, the blossoming trees along the borders, the surplice of the provost ready to impart benediction. The only brown was the faded photographs on the tombstones. And a big patch of color was created by the ranks lined up beside the two graves.

  "Boy," the commander said, "you stand here, beside me, and at my order play Assembly. Then, again at my order, Taps. That's easy, isn't it?"

  Very easy. Except that Jacopo had never played Assembly or Taps.

  He held the trumpet with his right arm bent, against his ribs, the horn at a slight angle, as if it were a carbine, and he waited, head erect, belly in, chest out.

  Mongo was delivering a brief speech, with very short sentences. Jacopo thought that to emit the blast he would have to lift his eyes to heaven, and the sun would blind him. But that was the trumpeter's death, and since you only died once, you might as well do it right.

  The commander murmured to him: "Now." He ordered Assembly. Jacopo played only do mi sol do. For those rough men of war, that seemed to suffice. The final do was played after a deep breath, so he could hold it, give it time—Belbo wrote—to reach the sun.

  The partisans stood stiffly at attention. The living as still as the dead.

  Only the gravediggers moved. The sound of the coffins being lowered could be heard, the creak of the ropes, their scraping against the wood. But there was little motion, no more than the flickering glint on a sphere, when a slight variation of light serves only to emphasize the sphere's invariability.

  Then, the dry sound of Present Arms. The provost murmured the formulas of the aspersion; the commanders approached the graves and flung, each of them, a fistful of earth. A sudden order unleashed a volley toward the sky, rat-tat-tat-a-boom, and the birds rose up, squawking, from the trees in blossom. But all that, too, was not really motion. It was as if the same instant kept presenting itself from different perspectives. Looking at one instant forever doesn't mean that, as you look at it, time passes.

  For this reason, Jacopo stood fast, ignoring even the fall of the shell cases now rolling at his feet; nor did he put his trumpet back at his side, but kept it to his lips, fingers on the valves, rigid at attention, the instrument aimed diagonally upward. He played on.

  His long final note had never broken off: inaudible to those present, it still issued from the bell of the trumpet, like a light breath, a gust of air that he kept sending into the mouthpiece, holding his tongue between barely parted lips, without pressing them to the metal. The instrument, not resting on his face, remained suspended by the tension alone in his elbows and shoulders.

  He continued holding that virtual note, because he felt he was playing out a string that kept the sun in place. The planet had been arrested in its course, had become fixed in a noon that could last an eternity. And it all depended on Jacopo, because if he broke that contact, dropped that string, the sun would fly off like a balloon, and with it this day and the event of this day, this action without transition, this sequence without before and after, which was unfolding, motionless, only because it was in his power to will it thus.

  If he stopped, stopped to attack a new note, a rent would have been heard, far louder than the volleys that had deafened him, and the clocks would all resume their tachycardial palpitation.

  Jacopo wished with his whole soul that this man beside him would not order Taps. I could refuse, he said to himself, and stay like this forever.

  He had entered that trance state that overwhelms the diver when he tries not to surface, wanting to prolong the inertia that allows him to glide along the ocean floor. Trying to express what he felt then, Belbo, in the notebook I was now reading, resorted to broken, twisted, unsyntactical sentences, mutilated by rows of dots. But it was clear to me that in that moment—though he didn't come out and say it—in that moment he was possessing Cecilia.

  The fact is that Jacopo Belbo did not understand, not then and not later, when he was writing of his unconscious self, that at that moment he was celebrating once and for all his chemical wedding—with Cecilia, with Lorenza, with Sophia, with the earth and with the sky. Alone among mortals, he was bringing to a conclusion the Great Work.

  No one had yet told him that the Grail is a chalice but also a spear, and his trumpet raised like a chalice was at the same time a weapon, an instrument of the sweetest dominion, which shot toward the sky and linked the earth with the Mystic Pole. With the only Fixed Point in the universe. With what he created, for that one instant, with his breath.

  Diotallevi had not yet told him how you can dwell in Yesod, the Sefirah of foundation, the sign of the superior bow drawn to send arrows to Malkhut, its target. Yesod is the drop that springs from the arrow to produce the tree and the fruit, it is the anima mundi, the moment in which virile force, procreating, binds all the states of being together.

  Knowing how to spin this Cingulum Veneris means knowing how to repair the error of the Demiurge.

  ***

  You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has alr
eady passed. It will not return, but it was—full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.

  That day, Jacopo Belbo stared into the eyes of Truth. The only truth that was to be granted him. Because—he would learn—truth is brief (afterward, it is all commentary). So he tried to arrest the rush of time.

  He didn't understand. Not as a child. Not as an adolescent when he was writing about it. Not as a man who decided to give up writing about it.

  I understood it this evening: the author has to die in order for the reader to become aware of his truth.

  The Pendulum, which haunted Jacopo Belbo all his adult life, had been—like the lost addresses of his dream—the symbol of that other moment, recorded and then repressed, when he truly touched the ceiling of the world. But that moment, in which he froze space and time, shooting his Zeno's arrow, had been no symbol, no sign, symptom, allusion, metaphor, or enigma: it was what it was. It did not stand for anything else. At that moment there was no longer any deferment, and the score was settled.

  Jacopo Belbo didn't understand that he had had his moment and that it would have to be enough for him, for all his life. Not recognizing it, he spent the rest of his days seeking something else, until he damned himself. But perhaps he suspected this. Otherwise he wouldn't have returned so often to the memory of the trumpet. But he remembered it as a thing lost, not as a thing possessed.

  I believe, I hope, I pray that as he was dying, swaying with the Pendulum, Jacopo Belbo finally understood this, and found peace.

  Then Taps was ordered. But Jacopo would have stopped in any case, because his breath was failing. He broke the contact, then blared a single note, high, with a decrescendo, tenderly, to prepare the world for the melancholy that lay in store.

  The commander said, "Bravo, young fellow. Run along now. Handsome trumpet."

  The provost slipped away, the partisans made for a rear gateway where their vehicles awaited them, the gravediggers went off after filling the graves. Jacopo was the last to go. He couldn't bring himself to leave that place of happiness.

  ***

  In the yard below, the pickup truck of the parish hall was gone.

  Jacopo asked himself why Don Tico had abandoned him like this. From a distance in time, the most probable answer is that there had been a misunderstanding; someone had told Don Tico that the partisans would bring the boy back down. But Jacopo at that moment thought—and not without reason—that between Assembly and Taps too many centuries had passed. The boys had waited until their hair turned white, until death, until their dust scattered to form the haze that now was turning the expanse of hills blue before his eyes.

  He was alone. Behind him, an empty cemetery. In his hands, the trumpet. Before him, the hills fading, bluer and bluer, one behind the other, into an infinity of humps. And, vindictive, over his head, the liberated sun.

  He decided to cry.

  But suddenly the hearse appeared, with its Automedon decorated like a general of the emperor, all cream and silver and black, the horses decked with barbaric masks that left only their eyes visible, caparisoned like coffins, the little twisted columns that supported the Assyro-Greco-Egyptian tympanum all white and gold. The man with the cocked hat stopped a moment by the solitary trumpeter, and Jacopo asked: "Will you take me home?"

  The man smiled. Jacopo climbed up beside him on the box, and so it was on a hearse that he began his return to the world of the living. That off-duty Charon, taciturn, urged his funereal chargers down the slopes, as Jacopo sat erect and hieratic, the trumpet clutched under his arm, his visor shining, absorbed in his new, unhoped-for role.

  They descended, and at every curve a new view opened up, of vines blue with verdigris in dazzling light, and after an incalculable time they arrived in ***. They crossed the big square, all arcades, deserted as only Monferrato squares can be deserted at two o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. A schoolmate at the corner saw Jacopo on the hearse, the trumpet under his arm, eyes fixed on infinity, and gave him an admiring wave.

  Jacopo went home, wouldn't eat anything, wouldn't tell anything. He huddled on the terrace and began playing the trumpet as if it had a mute, blowing softly so as not to disturb the silence of the siesta.

  His father joined him and, guilelessly, with the serenity of one who knows the laws of life, said: "In a month, if all goes as it should, we'll be going home. You can't play the trumpet in the city. Our landlord would evict us. So you'll have to forget that. If you really like music, we'll have you take piano lessons." And then, seeing the boy with moist eyes, he added: "Come now, silly. Don't you realize the bad days are over?"

  The next day, Jacopo returned the trumpet to Don Tico. Two weeks later, the family left ***, to rejoin the future.

  MALKHUT

  120

  "But that which seems to me should be deplored is the fact that I see some senseless and foolish idolaters who no more imitate the excellence of the cult of Egypt, than the shadow approaches the nobility of the body, and who seek Divinity, for which they have no reason whatsoever, in the excrements of dead and inanimate things. These idolaters, nevertheless, mock not only those of us who are divine and sagacious worshipers but also those of us who are reputed to be beasts. And what is worse, with this they triumph by seeing their mad rites in so great repute..."

  "Let not this trouble you, oh Momus," said Isis, "because fate has ordained the vicissitude of shadows and light." "But the evil," answered Momus, "is that they hold for certain that they are in the light."

  —Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of The Triumphant Beast, Third Dialogue, Second Part, translated by Arthur D. Imerti, Rutgers University Press, 1964, p. 236

  I should be at peace. I have understood. Don't some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and triumph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys....

  I should be at peace. From the window of Uncle Carlo's study I look at the hill, and the little slice of rising moon. The Bricco's broad hump, the more tempered ridges of the hills in the background tell the story of the slow and drowsy stirrings of Mother Earth, who stretches and yawns, making and unmaking blue plains in the dread flash of a hundred volcanoes. The Earth turned in her sleep and traded one surface for another. Where ammonoids once fed, diamonds. Where diamonds once grew, vineyards. The logic of the moraine, of the landslip, of the avalanche. Dislodge one pebble, by chance, it becomes restless, rolls down, in its descent leaves space (ah, horror vacui!), another pebble falls on top of it, and there's height. Surfaces. Surfaces upon surfaces. The wisdom of the Earth. And of Lia.

  Why doesn't understanding give me peace? Why love Fate if Fate kills you just as dead as Providence or the Plot of the Archons? Perhaps I haven't understood, after all; perhaps I am missing one piece of the puzzle, one space.

  Where have I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand.

  Now I know what the Law of the Kingdom is, of poor, desperate, tattered Malkhut, where Wisdom has gone into exile, groping to recover its former lucidity. The truth of Malkhut, the only truth that shines in the night of the Sefirot, is that Wisdom is revealed naked in Malkhut, and its mystery lies not in existence but in the leaving of existence. Afterward, the Others begin again.

  And, with the others, the Diabolicals, seeking abysses where the secret of their madness lies hidden.

  Along the Bricco's slopes are rows and rows of vines. I know them, I have seen similar
rows in my day. No doctrine of numbers can say if they are in ascending or descending order. In the midst of the rows—but you have to walk barefoot, with your heels callused, from childhood—there are peach trees. Yellow peaches that grow only between rows of vines. You can split a peach with the pressure of your thumb; the pit comes out almost whole, as clean as if it had been chemically treated, except for an occasional bit of pulp, white, tiny, clinging there like a worm. When you eat the peach, the velvet of the skin makes shudders run from your tongue to your groin. Dinosaurs once grazed here. Then another surface covered theirs. And yet, like Belbo when he played the trumpet, when I bit into the peach I understood the Kingdom and was one with it. The rest is only cleverness. Invent; invent the Plan, Casaubon. That's what everyone has done, to explain the dinosaurs and the peaches.

  I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph. But I am here, and They are looking for me, thinking I possess the revelation They sordidly desire. It isn't enough to have understood, if others refuse and continue to interrogate. They are looking for me, They must have picked up my trail in Paris, They know I am here now, They still want the Map. And when I tell Them that there is no Map, They will want it all the more. Belbo was right. Fuck you, fool! You want to kill me? Kill me, then, but I won't tell you there's no Map. If you can't figure it out for yourself, tough shit.