Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [109]
FILENAME: Doktor Wagner
The diabolical Doktor Wagner Twenty-sixth installment
Who, on that gray morning of
During the discussion I raised an objection. The satanic old man must have been irritated, but he didn’t let it show. On the contrary, he replied as if he wanted to seduce me.
Like Charlus with Jupien, bee and flower. A genius can’t bear not being loved; he must immediately seduce the dissenter, make the dissenter love him. He succeeded. I loved him.
But he must not have forgiven me, because that evening of the divorce he dealt me a mortal blow. Unconsciously, instinctively, not thinking, he seduced me, and unconsciously, he punished me. Though it cost him deontologically, he psychoanalyzed me free. The unconscious bites even its handlers.
Story of the Marquis de Lantenac in Quatre-vingt-treiie. The ship of the Vendeeiens is sailing through a storm off the Breton coast. Suddenly a cannon slips its moorings, and as the ship pitches and rolls it begins a mad race from rail to rail, an immense beast smashing larboard and starboard. A cannoneer (alas, the very one whose negligence had left the cannon improperly secured) seizes a chain and with unparalleled courage flings himself at the monster, which nearly crushes him, but he stops it, bolts it fast, leads it back to its stall, saving the ship, the crew, the mission. With sublime liturgy, the fearsome Lantenac musters all the men on deck, praises the cannoneer’s heroism, takes an impressive medal from around his own neck and puts it on the man, embraces him, and the crew makes the welkin ring with its hurrahs.
Then stern Lantenac, reminding the honored sailor that he was responsible for the danger in the first place, orders him to be shot.
Splendid, just Lantenac, man of virtue, above corruption. And this is what Dr. Wagner did for me: he honored me with his friendship, and executed me with the truth.
and executed me, revealing to me what I desired
revealing to me that the thing that I desired, I feared.
Begin the story in a bar. The need to fall in love.
Some things you can feel coming. You don’t fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
Because at that time I felt the need. I had just given up drinking. Relationship between the liver and the heart. A new love is a good reason for going back to drink. Somebody to go to a bar with. Feel good with.
The bar is brief, furtive. It allows you a long, sweet expectation through the day, then you go and hide in the shadows among the leather chairs; at six in the evening there’s nobody there, the sordid clientele comes later, with the piano man. Choose a louche American bar empty in the late afternoon. The waiter comes only if you call him three times, and he has the next martini ready.
It has to be a martini. Not whiskey, a martini. The liquid is clear. You raise your glass and you see her over the olive. The difference between looking at your beloved through a dry martini straight up, where the glass is small, thin, and looking at her through a martini on the rocks, through thick- glass, and her face broken by the transparent cubism of the ice. The effect is doubled if you each press your glass to your forehead, feeling the chill, and lean close until the glasses touch. Forehead to forehead with two glasses in between. You can’t do that with martini glasses.
The brief hour of the bar. Afterward, trembling, you await another day. Free of the blackmail of certainty.
He who falls in love in bars doesn’t need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
His role. He allowed her great freedom, he was always traveling. His suspect generosity: I could telephone even at midnight. He was there, you weren’t. He said you were out. Actually, while I have you on the line, do you have