Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [106]
That same evening I was at a party with old friends and recognized a man who worked for a publisher. He had joined the staff after the firm had switched from novels by French collaborationists to Albanian political texts. They were still publishing political books, but with government backing. And they didn’t reject an occasional good work in philosophy—provided it was in the classical line, he added.
“By the way,” he said to me then, “since you’re a philosopher—”
“Thanks, but unfortunately I’m not.”
“Come on, in your day you knew everything. I was just looking over the translation of a book on the crisis of Marxism, and I came across a quotation from Anselm of Canterbury. Who’s he? I couldn’t even find him in the Dictionary of Authors.’” I told him it was Anselmo d’Aosta, and that only the English, who had to be different from everybody else, called him Anselm of Canterbury.
A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning.
Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I’d sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup, the whiskey I’d brought up from the corner store in a paper bag. The phone rings and a man says: “Listen, I’m translating this book and came across something or someone called Motakallimun. What the hell is it?”
Give me two days, I tell him. Then I go to the library, flip through some card catalogs, give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a clue.
That evening I invite an instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple of beers and he drops his guard, gives me the lowdown for nothing. I call the client back. “All right, the Motakallimun were radical Moslem theologians at the time of Avicenna. They said the world was a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would fall to pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you? The job took me three days. Pay what you think is fair.”
I was lucky enough to find two rooms and a little kitchen in an old building in the suburbs. It must have been a factory once, with a wing for offices. All the apartments that had been made from it opened onto one long corridor. I was between a real estate agent and a taxidermist’s laboratory (A. Salon, the sign said). It was like being in an American skyscraper of the thirties; if I’d had a glass door, I’d have felt like Marlowe. I put a sofa bed in the back room and made the front one an office. In a pair of bookcases I arranged the atlases, encyclopedias, catalogs I acquired bit by bit. In the beginning, I had to turn a deaf ear to my conscience and write theses for desperate students. It wasn’t hard: I just went and copied some from the previous decade. But then my friends in publishing began sending me manuscripts and foreign books to read—naturally, the least appealing and for little money.
Still, I was accumulating experience and information, and I never threw anything away. I kept files on everything. I didn’t think to use a computer (they were coming on the market just then; Belbo was to be a pioneer). Instead, I had cross-referenced index cards. Nebulae, Laplace; Laplace, Kant; Kant, Konigs-berg, the seven bridges of Konigsberg, theorems of topology...It was a little like that game where you have to go from sausage to Plato in five steps, by association of ideas. Let’s see: sausage, pig bristle, paintbrush, Mannerism, Idea, Plato. Easy. Even the sloppiest manuscript would bring twenty new cards for my hoard. I had a strict rule, which I think secret services follow, too: No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.
After about two years in business, I was pleased with myself.