Numero zero

by Umberto Eco

  “This is Via Bagnera, Milan’s narrowest street, though not as narrow as Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche in Paris, where you can’t walk along side by side. They call it Via Bagnera but once it was called Stretta Bagnera, and before that Stretta Bagnaria, named after some public baths that were here in Roman times.”

  At that moment a woman appeared around a corner with a stroller. “Either reckless or badly informed,” commented Braggadocio. “If I were a woman, I wouldn’t be walking along here, especially in the dark. They could knife you as soon as look at you. What a shame that would be, such a waste of a pert little creature like her, a good little mother happy to get fucked by the plumber. Look, turn around, see how she wiggles her hips. Murderous deeds have taken place here. Behind these doors, now bricked up, there must still be abandoned cellars and perhaps secret passages. Here, in the nineteenth century, a certain artless wretch called Antonio Boggia enticed a bookkeeper into downstairs rooms to check over some accounts and attacked him with a hatchet. The victim managed to escape, and Boggia was arrested, judged insane, and locked up in a lunatic asylum for two years. As soon as he was released he was back to hunting out rich and gullible folk, luring them into his cellar, robbing them, murdering them, and burying them there. A serial killer, as we’d say today, but an imprudent one, since he left evidence of his commercial transactions with the victims and in the end was caught. The police dug down in the cellar, found five or six bodies, and Boggia was hanged near Porta Ludovica. His head was given to the anatomical laboratory at the Ospedale Maggiore—it was the days of Cesare Lombroso, when they were looking at the cranium and facial features for signs of congenital criminality. Then it seems the head was buried in the main cemetery, but who knows, relics of that kind were tasty morsels for occultists and maniacs of all kinds . . . Here you can feel the presence of Boggia, even today, like being in the London of Jack the Ripper. I wouldn’t want to spend the night here, yet it intrigues me. I come back often, arrange meetings here.”

  From Via Bagnera we found ourselves in Piazza Mentana, and Braggadocio then took me into Via Morigi, another dark street, though with several small shops and decorative entrances. We reached an open space with a vast parking area surrounded by ruins. “You see,” said Braggadocio, “those on the left are Roman ruins—almost no one remembers that Milan was once the capital of the empire. So they can’t be touched, though there isn’t the slightest interest in them. But those ruins behind the parking lot are what remains of houses bombed in the last war.”

  The bombed-out houses didn’t have the timeworn tranquility of those ancient remains that now seemed reconciled with death, but peeped out sinisterly from their grim voids as though affected by lupus.

  “I don’t know why there’s been no attempt to build in this area,” said Braggadocio. “Perhaps it’s protected, perhaps the owners make more money from the parking lot than from rental houses. But why leave evidence of the bombings? This area frightens me more than Via Bagnera, though it’s good because it tells me what Milan was like after the war. Not many places bring back what the city was like almost fifty years ago. And this is the Milan I try to seek out, the place where I used to live as a child. The war ended when I was nine. Every now and then, at night, I still seem to hear the sound of bombing. But not just the ruins are left: look at the corner of Via Morigi, that tower dates back to the 1600s, and not even the bombs could bring it down. And below, come, there’s this tavern, Taverna Moriggi, that dates back to the early 1900s—don’t ask why the tavern has one g more than the road, the city authority must have gotten its street signs wrong, the tavern is much older, and that should be the correct spelling.

  We walked into a large room with red walls and a bare ceiling from which hung an old wrought-iron chandelier, a stag’s head at the bar, hundreds of dusty wine bottles along the walls, and bare wooden tables (it was before dinnertime, said Braggadocio, and they still had no tablecloths . . . later they’d put on those red-checked cloths and, to order, you had to study the writing on the blackboard, as in a French brasserie). At the tables were students, old-fashioned bohemian types with long hair—not in the ’60s style but that of poets who once wore broad-brimmed hats and lavallière cravats—and a few old men in fairly high spirits; it was difficult to tell whether they had been there since the beginning of the century or whether the new proprietors had hired them as extras. We picked at a plate of cheeses, cured meats, and lardo di Colonnata, and drank some extremely good merlot.

  “Nice, eh?” said Braggadocio. “Seems like another world.”

  “But what attracts you to this Milan, which ought to have vanished?”

  “I’ve told you, I like to see what I’ve almost forgotten, the Milan of my grandfather and of my father.”

  He had started to drink, his eyes began to shine, with a paper napkin he dried a circle of wine that had formed on the old wooden table.

  “I have a pretty wretched family history. My grandfather was a Fascist leader in what was later called the ominous regime. And back in 1945, on April 25, he was spotted by a partisan as he was trying to slip away not far from here, in Via Cappuccio; they took him and shot him, right there at that corner. It wasn’t until much later that my father found out. He, true to my grandfather’s beliefs, had enlisted in 1943 with the Decima Mas commando unit, and had then been captured at Salò and sent off for a year to Coltano concentration camp. He got through it by the skin of his teeth, they couldn’t find any real accusations against him, and then, in 1946, Togliatti gave the go-ahead for a general amnesty—one of those contradictions of history, the Fascists rehabilitated by the Communists, though perhaps Togliatti was right, we had to return to normality at all costs. But the normality was that my father, with his past, and the shadow of his father, was jobless, and supported by my seamstress mother. And he gradually let himself go, he drank, and all I remember about him is his face full of little red veins and watery eyes, as he rambled on about his obsessions. He didn’t try to justify fascism (he no longer had any ideals), but said that to condemn fascism, the antifascists had told many hideous stories. He didn’t believe in the six million Jews gassed in the camps. I mean, he wasn’t one of those who, even today, argue there was no Holocaust, but he didn’t trust the story that had been put together by the liberators. ‘All exaggerated accounts,’ he used to say. ‘Some survivors say, or that’s what I’ve read at least, that at the center of one camp the mountains of clothes belonging to the murdered were over a hundred meters high. A hundred meters? But do you realize,’ he’d say, ‘that a pile a hundred meters high, seeing it has to rise up like a pyramid, needs to have a base wider than the area of the camp?’”

  “But didn’t he realize that anyone who has a terrible experience tends to exaggerate when describing it? You witness a road accident and you describe how the bodies lay in a lake of blood. You’re not trying to make them believe it was as large as Lake Como, you’re simply trying to give the idea that there was a lot of blood. Put yourself in the position of someone remembering one of the most tragic experiences of his life—”

  “I’m not denying it, but my father taught me never to take news as gospel truth. The newspapers lie, historians lie, now the television lies. Did you see those news stories a year ago, during the Gulf War, about the dying cormorant covered in tar in the Persian Gulf? Then it was shown to be impossible for cormorants to be in the Gulf at that time of year, and the pictures had been taken eight years earlier, during the time of the Iran-Iraq War. Or, according to others, cormorants had been taken from the zoo and covered with crude oil, which was what they must have done with Fascist crimes. Let’s be clear, I have no sympathy for the beliefs of my father and my grandfather, nor do I want to pretend that Jews were not murdered. But I no longer trust anything. Did the Americans really go to the Moon? It’s not impossible that they staged the whole thing in a studio—if you look at the shadows of the astronauts after the Moon landing, they’re not believable. And did the Gulf War really happen, or did they just show
us old clips from the archives? There are lies all around us, and if you know they’re feeding you lies, you’ve got to be suspicious all the time. I’m suspicious, I’m always suspicious. The only real proven thing, for me, is this Milan of many decades ago. The bombing actually happened, and what’s more, it was done by the English, or the Americans.”

  “And your father?”

  “He died an alcoholic when I was thirteen. And to rid myself of those memories, once I’d grown up, I decided to throw myself in the opposite direction. In 1968 I was already thirty, but I let my hair grow, wore a parka and a sweater, and joined a Maoist commune. Later I discovered not only that Mao had killed more people than Stalin and Hitler put together, but also that the Maoists may well have been infiltrated by the secret services. And so I stuck to being a journalist and hunting out conspiracies. That way, I managed to avoid getting caught up with the Red terrorists (and I had some dangerous friends). I’d lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there’s always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us.”

  “And now?”

  “And now, if this newspaper takes off, maybe I’ve found a place where my discovery will be appreciated . . . I’m working on a story that . . . Apart from the newspaper, there might even be a book in it. And then . . . But let’s change the subject, let’s say we’ll talk about it once I’ve put all the facts together . . . It’s just that I have to get it done soon, I need the money. The few lire we’re getting from Simei will go some way, but not enough.”

  “To live on?”

  “No, to buy me a car. Obviously I’ll have to get a loan, but I still have to pay. And I need it now, for my investigation.”

  “Sorry, you say you want to make money from your investigation to buy the car, but you need the car to do your investigation.”

  “To piece a number of things together I need to travel, visit a few places, perhaps interview some people. Without the car and having to go to the office each day, I have to put it together from memory, do it all in my head. As if that was the only problem.”

  “So what’s the real problem?”

  “Well, it’s not that I’m indecisive, but to understand what I have to do, I must put together all the data. A bit of data on its own means nothing, all of it together lets you understand what you were unable to see at first. You have to uncover what they’re trying to hide from you.”

  “You’re talking about your investigation?”

  “No, I’m talking about choosing the car . . .”

  He was drawing on the table with a finger dipped in wine, almost as if he were marking out a series of dots that had to be joined together to create a figure, like in a puzzle magazine.

  “A car needs to be fast and classy, I’m certainly not looking for a minivan, and then for me it’s either front-wheel drive or nothing. I was thinking of a Lancia Thema turbo sixteen-valve, it’s one of the more expensive, almost sixty million lire. I could even attempt two hundred and thirty-five kilometers an hour and acceleration from a standstill in seven point two. That’s almost the top.”

  “It’s expensive.”

  “Not just that, but you have to go and search out the information they’re hiding from you. Car ads, when they’re not lying, are keeping quiet about something. You have to go through the specifications in the trade magazines, and you find it’s one hundred and eighty-three centimeters wide.”

  “That’s not good?”

  “You don’t even notice that in all the ads they give you the length, which certainly counts when it comes to parking or prestige, but they rarely give the width, which is pretty important if you have a small garage or a parking space that’s even narrower, not to mention how many times you have to go around before you find a space wide enough for you to park. Width is fundamental. You’ve got to aim somewhere under a hundred and seventy centimeters.”

  “You can find them, I suppose.”

  “Sure, but you’re cramped in a car that’s a hundred and seventy centimeters if there’s someone next to you and you don’t have enough space for your right elbow. And then you don’t have all those conveniences of the wider cars that have a whole range of controls available for the right hand, just by the gears.”

  “And so?”

  “You’ve got to make sure the instrument panel is fairly generous and there are controls on the steering wheel, so you don’t have to fumble around with your right hand. And that’s how I came up with the Saab Nine Hundred turbo, one hundred and sixty-eight centimeters, maximum speed two hundred and thirty, and we’re down to fifty million.”

  “That’s your car.”

  “Yes, but only in one little corner do they tell you it has an acceleration to eight-fifty, whereas ideally it should be at least seven, like in the Rover Two Twenty turbo, forty million, width a hundred and sixty-eight, maximum speed two hundred and thirty-five, and acceleration at six point six, a thunderbolt.”

  “And so that’s where you ought to be going . . .”

  “No, because it’s only at the bottom of the specifications they tell you it has a height of a hundred and thirty-seven centimeters. Too low for a well-built individual like me, almost like a racer for young sporty types, whereas the Lancia is a hundred and forty-three high and the Saab a hundred and forty-four and you fit in there like a lord. And that’s fine—if you’re one of those sporty types, you don’t go looking at the specifications, which are like the side effects of drugs, written so small on the information slips you don’t notice that if you take them, you’re going to die the next day. The Rover Two Twenty-five weighs only one thousand one hundred and eighty-five kilos—that’s not much, if you run into a truck, it will rip you apart like nothing, whereas you need to look toward heavier cars with steel strengthening. I don’t say a Volvo, which is built like a tank only too slow, but at least a Rover Eight Twenty TI, around fifty million, two hundred and thirty an hour, and one thousand four hundred and twenty kilos.”

  “But I imagine you ruled it out because . . .” I commented, now as paranoid as him.

  “Because it has an acceleration of eight point two, it’s a tortoise, it has no sprint. Like the Mercedes Two Eighty C, which might be a hundred and seventy-two wide but, apart from costing seventy-seven million, it has an acceleration of eight point eight. And then they tell you it’s five months’ delivery. Something else to bear in mind if you reckon that some of those I’ve mentioned say it’s two months’ wait, and others are ready right away. And why ready right away? Because no one wants them. Always beware. It seems as though right away they’ll give you the Calibra turbo sixteen-valve, two hundred and forty-five kilometers an hour, full traction, acceleration six point eight, one hundred and sixty-nine wide, and little more than fifty million.”

  “Excellent, I’d say.”

  “No, because it weighs only one thousand one hundred and thirty-five, too light, and only one hundred and thirty-two high, worse than all the others, for a customer with loads of money but who’s a dwarf. As if these were the only problems. What about luggage space? The roomiest is the Thema sixteen-valve turbo, but it’s a hundred and seventy-five wide. Among the narrower ones, I looked at the Dedra Two Point Zero XL, with plenty of luggage space, but not only does it have an acceleration of nine point four, it weighs little more than one thousand two hundred kilos and does only two hundred and ten an hour.”

  “And so?”

  “And so I don’t know which way to turn. I’m busy thinking about the investigation, but I wake up at night comparing cars.”

  “And you know everything by heart?”

  “I’ve drawn up charts. The trouble is, I’ve memorized them, but it becomes unbearable. I think cars have been designed so I can’t buy them.”

  “Isn’t that going a bit far?”

  “Suspicions never go too far. Suspect, always suspect, that’s the only way you get to the truth. Isn’t that what science says?”

  “That’s what it says, and that’s what it does.”

 
“Bullshit, even science lies. Look at the story of cold fusion. They lied to us for months and then it was found to be total nonsense.”

  “But it was discovered.”

  “By who? The Pentagon, who may have wanted to cover up an embarrassing incident. Perhaps the cold-fusion people were right and those who lied were the ones who say the others have lied.”

  “And that’s fine for the Pentagon and the CIA, but you’re not trying to tell me that all car magazines are in the hands of the secret services of the demoplutojudeocracy who are out to get you.” I was trying to bring back a note of common sense.

  “Oh yes?” he said with a bitter smile. “Those people have links to big American industry, to the Seven Sisters of petroleum. They are the ones who assassinated Enrico Mattei, something I really couldn’t care less about, except that they’re the very same people who had my grandfather shot by funding the partisans. You see how it’s all linked together?”

  The waiters were now putting on the tablecloths and giving us to understand that the moment had passed for anyone drinking just two glasses.

  “There was a time when with two glasses you could stay till two in the morning,” sighed Braggadocio, “but now even here they’re only interested in customers with money. Perhaps one day they’ll turn the place into a discotheque with strobe lights. Here it’s all still real—don’t get me wrong—but it’s already reeking as if fake. Would you believe it, this place in the heart of Milan has been run for the past few years by Tuscans, so I’m told. I’ve nothing against Tuscans, they’re probably quite decent people, but I always remember, when I was a child, someone mentioned the daughter of friends who had made a bad marriage, and one of our cousins exclaimed, ‘They ought to put a wall up from coast to coast just below Florence.’ ‘Below Florence?’ my mother retorted. ‘Farther north! Farther north!’”

  As we were waiting for the bill, Braggadocio asked, almost in a whisper, “You couldn’t do me a loan? I’ll pay you back in two months.”