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

saw him in such despair,I'd say, ¡¥All right, I'll buy you a trumpet.' It was only a toy,after all, it wouldn't have cost a fortune. But my parents nevereven considered such a thing. Spending money was a serious businessin those days. And they were serious, too, about teaching a childhe couldn't have everything he wanted. ¡¥I can't stand cabbagesoup,' I'd tell them¡Xand it was true, for God's sake; cabbage mademe sick. But they never said: ¡¥Skip the soup today, then, and justeat your meat.' We may have been poor, but we still had a firstcourse, a main course, and fruit. No. It was always: ¡¥Eat what'son the table.' Sometimes, as a compromise, my grandmother wouldpick the cabbage out of my bowl, stringy piece by stringy piece.Then I'd have to eat the expurgated soup, which was more disgustingthan before. And even this was a concession my father disapprovedof."

"But what about thetrumpet?"

He looked at me,hesitant. "Why are you so interested in the trumpet?"

"I'm not. You were theone who brought it up, to show how the Object of Desire is neverwhat others think."

"The trumpet...My uncleand aunt from *** arrived that evening. They had no children, and Iwas their favorite nephew. Well, when they saw me bawling over mydream trumpet, they said they would fix everything: tomorrow wewould go to the department store where there was a whole counter oftoys-wonder of wonders¡Xand I'd have the trumpet I wanted. I didn'tsleep all night, and I couldn't sit still all the next morning. Inthe afternoon we went to the store, and they had at least threekinds of trumpets there. Little tin things, probably, but to methey were magnificent brass worthy of die Philharmonic. There wasan army bugle, a slide trombone, and a trumpet of gold with a realtrumpet mouthpiece but the keys of a saxophone. I couldn't decide,and maybe I took too long. Wanting them all, I must have given theimpression that I didn't want any of them. Meanwhile, I believe myuncle and aunt looked at the price tags. My uncle and aunt weren'tstingy; on the other hand, a Bakelite clarinet with silver keys wasmuch cheaper. ¡¥Wouldn't you like this better?' they asked. I triedit, produced a reasonable honk, and told myself that it wasbeautiful, but actually I was rationalizing. I knew they wanted meto take the clarinet because the trumpet cost a fortune. I couldn'tdemand such a sacrifice from my relatives, having been taught thatif a person offers you something you like, you must say, ¡¥No,thank you,' and not just once, not ¡¥No, thank you,' with your handout, but ¡¥No, thank you' until the giver insists, until he says,¡¥Please, take it.' A well-bred child doesn't accept until thatpoint. So I said maybe I didn't care about the trumpet, maybe theclarinet was all right, if that's what they wanted. And I looked upat them, hoping they would insist. They didn't, God bless them,they were delighted to buy me the clarinet, since¡Xthey said¡Xthatwas what I wanted. It was too late to backtrack. I got theclarinet."

Belbo looked at me outof the corner of his eyes. "You want to know if I dreamed about thetrumpet again?''

"I want to know," Isaid, "what the Object of Desire was."

"Ah," he said, turningback to his manuscript. "You see? You're obsessed by the Object ofDesire, too. But it's not all that simple...Suppose I had taken thetrumpet. Would I have been truly happy then? What do you think,Casaubon?"

"I think you would havedreamed about the clarinet."

"I got the clarinet," heconcluded sharply, "but I never played it."

"Never played it? Ornever dreamed it?"

"Played it," he said,underlining his words, and for some reason I felt like afool.

10

And finally nothing iscabalistically inferred from vinum save VIS NUMerorum, upon whichnumbers this Magia depends.

¡XCesare della Riviera,Il Mondo Magico degli Eroi, Mantua, Osanna, 1603, pp.65-66

But I was talking aboutmy first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, hadexchanged a few words at Pilade's, but I didn't know much abouthim, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but seriouspublisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at theuniversity.

"And what do you do?" heasked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far endof the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He usedthe formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by thefamiliar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele atPilade's. "Tu¡Xbuy me a drink," a student wearing a parka would sayto the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was likeMoscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, notone Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but heused it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he wasresponding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyssbetween acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu withreal affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi,one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people herespected but hadn't known long. He addressed me formally the wholetime we worked together, and I valued that.

"And what do you do?" heasked, with what I now know was friendliness.

"In real life or in thistheater?" I said, nodding at our surroundings.

"In reallife."

"I study."

"You mean you go to theuniversity, or you study?"

"You may not believethis, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I'm finishing athesis on the Templars."

"What an awful subject,"he said. "I thought that was for lunatics."

"No. I'm studying thereal stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about theTemplars, anyway?"

"I work for a publishingcompany. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a whilean editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody bringsup the Templars, he's almost always a lunatic."

"Don't I know! Theirname is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. Howdo you identify the others?"

"I'll explain. By theway, what's your name?"

"Casaubon."

"Casaubon. Wasn't he acharacter in Middlemarch?"

"I don't know. There wasalso a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we're notrelated."

"The next round's on me.Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of peoplein this world: cretins, fools,