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

Republic, at that time, wasa bad word. The voice was a partisan's, asking a passerby orsomeone at a window, and that meant the Fascists had gone. It wasgrowing dark. After a little while both Papa and Grandmotherarrived, and told of their adventures. Mama and Aunt preparedsomething to eat, while Uncle and Adelino Canepa ceremoniouslystopped speaking to each other again. For the rest of the eveningwe heard shooting in the distance, toward the hills. The partisanswere after the fugitives. We had won."

Lorenza kissed Belbo onthe head, and he wrinkled his nose. He knew he had won, though withsome help from the Fascists. In reality it had been like watching amovie. For a moment, risking the ricocheting bullet, he had enteredthe action on the screen, but only for a moment, on the run, as inHellzapoppin, Where the reels get mixed up and an Indian onhorseback rides into a ballroom and asks which way did they go.Somebody says, "That way," and the Indian gallops off into anotherstory.

56

He began playing hisshining trumpet with such power that the whole mountainrang.

¡XJohann ValentinAndreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz,Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 1, p. 4

We had reached thechapter on the wonders of hydraulic pipes, and a sixteenth-centuryengraving from the Spiritalia of Heron depicted a kind of altarwith a steam-driven apparatus that played a trumpet.

I brought Belbo back tohis reminiscing. "How did it go, then, the story of that Don TychoBrahe, or whatever his name was¡Xthe man who taught you to play thetrumpet?"

"Don Tico. I never foundout if Tico was a nickname or his last name. I've never gone backto the parish hall. The first time I went there, it was by chance:Mass, catechism, all sorts of games, and if you won, he gave you alittle holy card of Blessed Domenico Savio, that adolescent withthe wrinkled canvas pants, always hanging on to Don Bosco in thestatues, his eyes raised to heaven, not listening to the otherboys, who are telling dirty jokes. I learned that Don Tico hadformed a band, boys between ten and fourteen. The little onesplayed toy clarinets, fifes, soprano sax, and the bigger onescarried the tubas and the bass drum. They had uniforms, khakitunics and blue trousers, and visored caps. A dream, and I wantedto be part of it. Don Tico said he needed a bombardon."

He gave us a superiorlook, and said, as if repeating familiar information: "A bombardonis a kind of tuba, a bass horn in E flat. It's the stupidestinstrument in the whole band. Most of the time it just goesoompah-oompah-oompah, or¡Xwhen the beat changes¡Xpa-pah, pa-pah,pa-pah, It's easy to learn, though. Belonging to the brass family,it works more or less like the trumpet. The trumpet demands morebreath, and you need an embouchure¡Xyou know, that kind of calluson the upper lip, like Louis Armstrong...Then you get a clear,clean sound, and you don't hear the blowing. The important thing isnot to puff out your cheeks: that only happens in movies, cartoons,or New Orleans brothels."

"What about thetrumpet?"

"The trumpet I learnedon my own, during those summer afternoons when there was nobody atthe parish hall, and I would hide in the seats of the littletheater...But I studied the trumpet for erotic reasons. You seethat little villa over there, a kilometer from the hall? That'swhere Cecilia lived, the daughter of the Salesians' greatpatroness. So every time the band performed, on holy days ofobligation, after the procession, in the yard of the parish hall,and especially in the theater before performances of the amateurdramatic society, Cecilia and her mama were always in the frontrow, in the place of honor, next to the provost of the cathedral.In the theater the band would begin with a march that was called¡¥A Good Start.' It opened with trumpets, the trumpets in B flat,gold and silver, carefully polished for the occasion. The trumpetsstood up, played by themselves. Then they sat down, and the bandbegan. Playing the trumpet was the only way for me to attractCecilia's attention."

"The only way?" Lorenzaasked, moved.

"There was no other way.First, I was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half, and a girlthirteen and a half is already a woman; a boy at thirteen is asnot-nose kid. Besides, she loved an alto sax, a certain Papi, amangy horror, he seemed to me, but she only had eyes for him, as hebleated lasciviously, because the saxophone, when it isn't OrnetteColeman's and it's part of a band¡Xand played by the horrendousPapi¡Xis a goatish, guttural instrument, with the voice of, say, afashion model who's taken to drink and turningtricks..."

"What do you know aboutmodels who turn tricks?"

"Anyway, Cecilia didn'teven know I existed. Of course, in the evening, when I struggled upthe hill to fetch the milk from a farm above us, I inventedsplendid stories in which she was kidnapped by the Black Brigadesand I rushed to save her as the bullets whistled around my head andwent chack-chack as they hit the sheaves of wheat. I revealed toher what she couldn't have known: that in my secret identity Iheaded the Resistance in the whole Monferrato region, and sheconfessed to me that this was what she had always hoped, and atthat point I would feel a guilty flood of honey in my veins¡XIswear, not even my foreskin got wet; it was something else,something much more awesome and grand¡Xand on coming home, I wouldgo and confess...I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when youslide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters,and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she'salways dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, theperpetuation of the vile species. In short, if I were switched tothe trumpet, Cecilia would be unable to ignore me: on my feet,gleaming, while the saxophone sits miserably on his chair. Thetrumpet is warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious; it sounds thecharge. The saxophone plays so that young punks in the slums, theirhair slicked down with brilliantine, can dance cheek to cheek withsweating girls. I studied the trumpet like a madman, then went toDon Tico and said: Listen to this. And I was Oscar Levant when hehad his first tryout on