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

to be apioneer). Instead, I had cross-referenced index cards. Nebulae,Laplace; Laplace, Kant; Kant, Konigs-berg, the seven bridges ofKonigsberg, theorems of topology...It was a little like that gamewhere you have to go from sausage to Plato in five steps, byassociation of ideas. Let's see: sausage, pig bristle, paintbrush,Mannerism, Idea, Plato. Easy. Even the sloppiest manuscript wouldbring twenty new cards for my hoard. I had a strict rule, which Ithink secret services follow, too: No piece of information issuperior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file andthen finding the connections. There are always connections; youhave only to want to find them.

After about two years inbusiness, I was pleased with myself. I was having fun. Meanwhile Ihad met Lia.

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Sappia qualunque il mionome dimanda ch'i' mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno le belle mani afarmi una ghirlanda.

¡XDante, Purgatorio,XXVII, 100-102

Lia. Now, I despair ofseeing her again, but I might never have met her, and that wouldhave been worse. I wish she were here, to hold my hand while Ireconstruct the stages of my undoing. Because she told me so. Butno, she must remain outside this business, she and the child. Ihope they put off their return, that they come back when everythingis finished, however it may finish.

It was July 16, 1981.Milan was emptying; the reference room of the library was almostdeserted.

"Hey, I need volume 109myself."

"Then why did you leaveit here?"

"I just went back to myseat for a minute to check a note."

"That's noexcuse."

She took the volumestubbornly and went to her table. I sat down across from her,trying to get a better look at her face.

"How can you read itlike that, unless it's in Braille?" I asked.

She raised her head, andI really couldn't tell whether I was looking at her face or thenape of her neck. "What?" she asked. "Oh. I can see through it allright." But she lifted her hair as she spoke, and she had greeneyes.

"You have greeneyes."

"Of course I do. Is thatbad?"

"No. There should bemore eyes like that."

That's how itbegan.

"Eat. You're thin as arail," she said to me at supper. At midnight we were still in theGreek restaurant near Pilade's, the candle guttering in the neck ofthe bottle as we told each other everything. We did almost the samework: she checked encyclopedia entries.

I felt I had to tellher. At twelve-thirty, when she pulled her hair aside to see mebetter, I aimed a forefinger at her, thumb raised^ and went:"Pow."

"Me too," shesaid.

That night we becameflesh of one flesh, and from then on she called me Pow.

We couldn't afford a newhouse. I slept at her place, and sometimes she stayed with me atthe office, or went off investigating, because she was smarter thanI when it came to following up clues. She was good, also, atsuggesting connections.

"We seem to have ahalf-empty file on the Rosicrucians," she said.

"I should go back to itone of these days. They're notes I took in Brazil..."

"Well, put in a crossreference to Yeats."

"What's Yeats got to dowith it?"

"Plenty. I see here thathe belonged to a Rosicrucian society that was called StellaMatutina."

"What would I do withoutyou?"

I resumed going toPilade's, because it was like a marketplace where I could findcustomers.

One evening I saw Belboagain. He must have been coming rarely in the past few years, buthe showed up regularly after meeting Lorenza Pellegrini. He lookedthe same, maybe a bit grayer, maybe slightly thinner.

It was a cordialmeeting, given the limits of his expansiveness: a few remarks aboutthe old days, sober reticence about our complicity in that lastevent and its epistolary sequel. Inspector De Angelis hadn't beenheard from again. Case closed? Who could say?

I told him about mywork, and he seemed interested. "Just the kind of thing I'd like todo: the Sam Spade of culture. Twenty bucks a day andexpenses."

"Except that nofascinating, mysterious women have dropped in on me, and nobodyever comes to talk about the Maltese falcon," I said.

"You never can tell. Areyou enjoying yourself?"

"Enjoying myself?" Iasked. I quoted him: "It's the only thing I seem to be able to dowell."

"Bon pour vous," hesaid.

We saw each other againafter that, and I told him about my Brazilian experience, but heseemed more absent than usual. When Lorenza Pellegrini wasn'tthere, he kept his eyes glued to the door, and when she was, heglanced nervously along the bar, following her every move. Onenight near closing time, he said, without looking at me, "Listen,we might be able to use your services,- but not for a singleconsultation. Could you give us, say, a few afternoons eachweek?"

"We can discuss it. Whatdoes it involve?"

"A steel company hascommissioned a book about metals. Something with a lot ofillustrations. Serious, but for the mass market. You know the sortof thing: metals in history, from the Iron Age to spaceships. Weneed somebody who'll dig around in libraries and archives and findbeautiful illustrations, old miniatures, engravings fromnineteenth-century volumes on smelting, for instance, or lightningrods."

"All right. I'll drop bytomorrow."

Lorenza Pellegrini cameover to him. "Would you take me home?"

"Why me?" Belboasked.

"Because you're the manof my dreams."

He blushed, as only hecould blush, and looked away. "There's a witness," he said. And tome: "I'm the man of her dreams. This is Lorenza."

"Ciao."

"Ciao."

He got up, whisperedsomething in her ear.

She shook her head. "Iasked for a ride home, that's all."

"Ah," he said. "Excuseme, Casaubon, I have to play chauffeur to the woman of someoneelse's dreams."

"Idiot,'' she said tohim tenderly, and kissed him on the cheek.

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Yet one caution let megive by the way to my present or future reader, who is actuallymelancholy¡Xthat he read not the symptomes or prog-nosticks of thefollowing tract, lest, by applying that which he reads to himself,aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his ownperson (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurthimself, and get, in conclusion, more harm than good. I advise themtherefore warily to peruse that tract.

¡XRobert Burton, TheAnatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621, Introduction

It was obvious thatthere was something between Belbo and Lorenza Pellegrini. I didn'tknow exactly what it was or how long it had been going on.Abulafia's files did not help me to reconstruct thestory.

There is no date, forexample, on