Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [110]
With Sandra, things were complicated. That time she decided I was too involved. Our life as a couple had become strained. Should we break up? Let’s break up, then. No, wait, let’s talk it over. No, we can’t go on like this. The problem, in a nutshell, was Sandra.
When you hang out in bars, the drama of love isn’t the women you find but the women you leave.
Then comes the dinner with Dr. Wagner. At the lecture he had just given a heckler a definition of psychoanalysis. La psychanalyse? C’est qu’entre 1’homme et la femme...chers amis...ca ne colle pas.
There was discussion: the couple, divorce as a legal fiction. Taken up by my own problems, I participated intensely. We allowed ourselves to be drawn into dialectical exchanges, speaking while Wagner was silent, forgetting there was an oracle in our presence. And it was with a pensive
and it was with a sly expression
and it was with melancholy detachment
and it was as if he entered our conversation playfully, off the subject, he said (I remember his exact words; they are carved on my mind): In professional life not once have I had a patient made neurotic by his own divorce. The cause of the trouble was always the divorce of the Other.
Dr. Wagner always said Other with a capital O. I gave a start, as if bitten by an asp.
the viscount started, as if bitten by an asp a cold sweat beaded his brow
the baron peered at him through the” lazy whorls of smoke from his thin Russian cigarette
Are you saying, I asked, that a person has a breakdown not because he is divorced but on account of the divorce, which may or may not happen, of the third party, that is, of the one who created the crisis for the couple of which he is a member?
Wagner looked at me with the puzzlement of a layman who encounters a mentally disturbed person for the first time. He asked me what I meant. To tell the truth, whatever I meant, I had expressed it badly. I tried to be more concrete. I took a spoon from the table and put it next to a fork. Here, this is me, Spoon, married to her, Fork. And here is another couple: she’s Fruit Knife, married to Steak Knife, alias Mackie Messer. Now I, Spoon, believe I’m suffering because I have to leave Fork and I don’t want to; I love Fruit Knife, but it’s all right with me if she stays with Steak Knife. And now you’re telling me, Dr. Wagner, that the real reason I’m suffering is that Fruit Knife won’t leave Steak Knife. Is that it?
Wagner told someone else at the table that he had said nothing of the sort.
What do you mean, you didn’t say it? You said that not once had you come across anyone made neurotic by his own divorce, it was always the divorce of the Other.
That may be, I don’t remember, Wagner said then, bored.
If you did say it, did you mean what I understood you to mean?
Wagner was silent for a few moments.
While the others waited, not even swallowing, Wagner signaled for his wineglass to be filled. He looked carefully at the liquid against the light and finally spoke.
What you understood was what you wanted to understand.
Then he looked away, said it was hot, hummed an aria, moved a breadstick as if he were conducting an orchestra, yawned, concentrated on a cake with whipped cream, and finally, after another silence, asked to be taken back to his hotel.
The others looked at me as if I had ruined a symposium from which Words of Wisdom might have come.
The truth is that I had heard Truth speak.
I telephoned. You were at home, and with the Other. I spent a sleepless night. It was all clear: I couldn’t bear your being with him. Sandra had nothing to do with it.
Six dramatic months followed, in which I clung to you, breathed down your neck, trying to undermine your couplehood, telling you I wanted you for myself, convincing you that you hated the Other. You began quarreling with him, and he grew jealous, demanding; he never went out in the evening, and when