Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

thought¡Xof the game sheplayed. Without a doubt, Lorenza had a talent for looking at anyman as if challenging his sexual capacity. But it was a curiouschallenge, as if she were saying: "I want you, but only to show howafraid you really are..." That night, however, hearing herfingernails scrape my door, I felt something different. It wasdesire: I desired Lorenza.

I stuck my head underthe pillow and thought of Lia. I want to have a child with Lia, Isaid to myself. And I'll make him (or her) learn the trumpet assoon as he (or she) has enough breath.

57

On every third tree alantern had been hung, and a splendid virgin, also dressed in blue,lighted them with a raarvelous torch, and I lingered, longer thannecessary, to admire the sight, which was of an ineffablebeauty.

¡XJohann ValentinAndreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz,Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 2, p. 21

Toward noon Lorenzajoined us on the terrace, smiling, and announced that she had founda terrific train that stopped at *** at twelve-thirty, and withonly one change she could get back to Milan in the afternoon. Wouldwe drive her, she asked, to the station?

Belbo continued leafingthrough some notes. "I thought Aglie was expecting you, too," hesaid. "In fact, it seemed to me he organized the whole expeditionjust for you."

"That's his problem,"Lorenza said. "Who's driving me?"

Belbo stood up and saidto us, "It'll only take a moment; I'll be right back. Then we canstay here another couple of hours. Lorenza, you had abag?"

I don't know if theysaid anything to each other during the trip to the station. Belbowas back in about twenty minutes and resumed working withoutreferring to the incident.

At two o'clock we founda comfortable restaurant in the market square, and the choosing offood and wine gave Belbo further opportunity to recall hischildhood. But he spoke as if he were quoting from someone else'sbiography. He had lost the narrative felicity of the day before. Inmidafternoon we set off to join Aglie and Garamond.

Belbo drove southwest,and the landscape changed gradually, kilometer by kilometer. Thehills of ***, even in late autumn, were gentle, domestic, but as wewent on, the horizons became more vast, at every curve the peaksgrew, some crowned by little villages; we glimpsed endless vistas.Like Darien, Diotallevi remarked, verbalizing these discoveries. Weclimbed in third gear toward great expanses and the outline ofmountains, which at the end of the plateau was already fading intoa wintry haze. Though we were already in the mountains, it seemedto be a plain modulated by dunes. As if the hand of a clumsydemiurge had compressed heights that seemed to him excessive,transforming them into a lumpy dough that extended all the way tothe sea or¡Xwho knows?¡Xto the slopes of harsher and moredetermined chains.

We reached the specifiedvillage and met Aglie and Gara-mond, as arranged, at the cafe inthe main square. If Aglie was displeased to hear that Lorenzawasn't coming, he gave no indication of it. "Our exquisite frienddoes not wish to take part, in the presence of others, in themysteries that define her. A singular modesty, which I appreciate,"he said. And that was all.

We continued, Garamond'sMercedes in the lead and Belbo's Renault behind, until, as thesunlight was dying, we came within sight of a strange yellowedifice on a hill, a kind of eighteenth-century castle, from whichextended terraces with flowers and trees, flourishing despite theseason.

As we reached the footof the hill, we found ourselves in an open space where many carswere parked. "We stop here," Aglie said, "and continue onfoot."

Dusk was now becomingnight. The path was illuminated for us by a host of torches thatburned along the slope.

It's odd, but ofeverything that happened, from that moment until late at night, Ihave memories at once clear and confused. I reviewed them the otherevening in the periscope and sensed a family resemblance betweenthe two experiences. Yes, I said to myself, now you are here, in anunnatural situation, groggy from the smell of old wood, imaginingyourself in a tomb or in the belly of a ship as a transformation istaking place. You have only to peer outside the cabin, and you willsee objects in the gloom that earlier today were motionless, butnow they stir like Eleusinian shadows among the fumes of a spell.And so it had been that evening at the castle: the lights, thesurprises of the route, the words I heard, and then the incense;everything conspired to make me feel I was dreaming, but dreamingthe way you dream when you are on the verge of waking, when youdream that you are dreaming.

I should remembernothing, yet, on the contrary, I remember everything, not as if Ihad lived it, but as if it had been told to me by someoneelse.

I do not know if what Iremember, with such anomalous clarity, is what happened or is onlywhat I wished had happened, but it was definitely on that eveningthat the Plan first stirred in our minds, stirred as a desire togive shape to shapelessness, to transform into fantasized realitythat fantasy that others wanted to be real.

"The route itself isritual," Aglie was telling us as we climbed the hill. "These arehanging gardens, just like¡Xor almost¡Xthe ones Salomon de Causdevised for Heidelberg, that is, for the Palatine elector FrederickV, in the great Rosicrucian century. The light is poor, and so itshould be, because it is better to sense than to see: our host hasnot reproduced the Salomon de Caus design literally; he hadconcentrated it in a narrower space. The gardens of Heidelbergimitated the macrocosm, but the person who reconstructed them herehas imitated only the microcosm. Look at that rocaillegrotto...Decorative, no doubt. But Caus had in mind the emblem ofthe Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, where coral is thephilosopher's stone. Caus knew that the heavenly bodies can beinfluenced by the form of a garden, because there are patternswhose configuration mimes the harmony of theuniverse..."

"Fantastic," Garamondsaid. "But how does a garden influence the planets?"

"There are signs thatattract one another, that look at one another, embrace, and enforcelove. But they do not have¡Xthey must not have¡Xa certain anddefinite form. A man will try out giveij forces according to thedictates of his passion