Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [108]
“All right. I’ll drop by tomorrow.”
Lorenza Pellegrini came over to him. “Would you take me home?”
“Why me?” Belbo asked.
“Because you’re the man of my dreams.”
He blushed, as only he could blush, and looked away. “There’s a witness,” he said. And to me: “I’m the man of her dreams. This is Lorenza.”
“Ciao.”
“Ciao.”
He got up, whispered something in her ear.
She shook her head. “I asked for a ride home, that’s all.”
“Ah,” he said. “Excuse me, Casaubon, I have to play chauffeur to the woman of someone else’s dreams.”
“Idiot,’’ she said to him tenderly, and kissed him on the cheek.
36
Yet one caution let me give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually melancholy—that he read not the symptomes or prog-nosticks of the following tract, lest, by applying that which he reads to himself, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his own person (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurt himself, and get, in conclusion, more harm than good. I advise them therefore warily to peruse that tract.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621, Introduction
It was obvious that there was something between Belbo and Lorenza Pellegrini. I didn’t know exactly what it was or how long it had been going on. Abulafia’s files did not help me to reconstruct the story.
There is no date, for example, on the file about the dinner with Dr. Wagner. Belbo knew Dr. Wagner before my departure, and may well have been in contact with him after I started working at Garamond, which was when, in fact, I got to know him myself. So the dinner could have been before or after the evening I have in mind. If it was before, then I understand Belbo’s embarrassment, his solemn desperation.
Dr. Wagner—an Austrian who for years had been practicing in Paris (hence the pronunciation “Vagnere” for those who wanted to boast of their familiarity with him)—had been coming to Milan regularly for about ten years, at the invitation of two revolutionary groups of the post-’68 period. They fought over him, and of course each group gave a radically different interpretation of his thought. How and why this famous man allowed himself to be sponsored by extremists, I never understood. Wagner’s theories had no political color, so to speak, and, had he wanted, he could easily have been invited by the universities, the clinics, the academies. I believe he accepted the invitations because he was basically an epicurean and required regal expense accounts. The private hosts could raise more money than the institutions, and for Dr. Wagner this meant first-class tickets, luxury hotels, plus fees in keeping with his therapist rates, for the lectures and seminars.
Why the two groups found ideological inspiration in Wagner’s theories was another story. But in those days Wagner’s brand of psychoanalysis seemed sufficiently deconstructive, diagonal, li-bidinal, and non-Cartesian to provide some theoretical justification for revolutionary activity.
It proved difficult to get the workers to swallow it, so at a certain point the two groups had to choose between the workers and Wagner. They chose Wagner. Which gave rise to the theory that the new revolutionary protagonist was not the proletarian but the deviate.
“Instead of deviating the proletariat, they would do better to proletarianize the deviates, which would be more economical, considering Dr. Wagner’s prices,” Belbo said to me one day.
The Wagnerian revolution was the most expensive in history.
Garamond, subsidized by a university psychology department, had published a translation of Wagner’s minor essays—very technical, nearly impossible to find, and therefore in great demand among the faithful. Wagner had come