Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [107]
35
Sappia qualunque il mio nome dimanda ch’i’ mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno le belle mani a farmi una ghirlanda.
—Dante, Purgatorio, XXVII, 100-102
Lia. Now, I despair of seeing her again, but I might never have met her, and that would have been worse. I wish she were here, to hold my hand while I reconstruct the stages of my undoing. Because she told me so. But no, she must remain outside this business, she and the child. I hope they put off their return, that they come back when everything is finished, however it may finish.
It was July 16, 1981. Milan was emptying; the reference room of the library was almost deserted.
“Hey, I need volume 109 myself.”
“Then why did you leave it here?”
“I just went back to my seat for a minute to check a note.”
“That’s no excuse.”
She took the volume stubbornly and went to her table. I sat down across from her, trying to get a better look at her face.
“How can you read it like that, unless it’s in Braille?” I asked.
She raised her head, and I really couldn’t tell whether I was looking at her face or the nape of her neck. “What?” she asked. “Oh. I can see through it all right.” But she lifted her hair as she spoke, and she had green eyes.
“You have green eyes.”
“Of course I do. Is that bad?”
“No. There should be more eyes like that.”
That’s how it began.
“Eat. You’re thin as a rail,” she said to me at supper. At midnight we were still in the Greek restaurant near Pilade’s, the candle guttering in the neck of the bottle as we told each other everything. We did almost the same work: she checked encyclopedia entries.
I felt I had to tell her. At twelve-thirty, when she pulled her hair aside to see me better, I aimed a forefinger at her, thumb raised^ and went: “Pow.”
“Me too,” she said.
That night we became flesh of one flesh, and from then on she called me Pow.
We couldn’t afford a new house. I slept at her place, and sometimes she stayed with me at the office, or went off investigating, because she was smarter than I when it came to following up clues. She was good, also, at suggesting connections.
“We seem to have a half-empty file on the Rosicrucians,” she said.
“I should go back to it one of these days. They’re notes I took in Brazil...”
“Well, put in a cross reference to Yeats.”
“What’s Yeats got to do with it?”
“Plenty. I see here that he belonged to a Rosicrucian society that was called Stella Matutina.”
“What would I do without you?”
I resumed going to Pilade’s, because it was like a marketplace where I could find customers.
One evening I saw Belbo again. He must have been coming rarely in the past few years, but he showed up regularly after meeting Lorenza Pellegrini. He looked the same, maybe a bit grayer, maybe slightly thinner.
It was a cordial meeting, given the limits of his expansiveness: a few remarks about the old days, sober reticence about our complicity in that last event and its epistolary sequel. Inspector De Angelis hadn’t been heard from again. Case closed? Who could say?
I told him about my work, and he seemed interested. “Just the kind of thing I’d like to do: the Sam Spade of culture. Twenty bucks a day and expenses.”
“Except that no fascinating, mysterious women have dropped in on me, and nobody ever comes to talk about the Maltese falcon,” I said.
“You never can tell. Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Enjoying myself?” I asked. I quoted him: “It’s the only thing I seem to be able to do well.”
“Bon pour vous,” he said.
We saw each other again after that, and I told him about my Brazilian experience, but he seemed more absent than usual. When Lorenza Pellegrini wasn’t there, he kept his eyes glued to the door, and when she was, he glanced nervously along the bar, following her every move. One night near closing time, he said, without looking at me, “Listen, we might be able to use your services,- but not for a single consultation. Could you give us, say, a few afternoons each week?”
“We can discuss it. What does it involve?”
“A steel company has commissioned a book about metals.