Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [126]
When she heard about the project of the firm next door, she said: “Terrific! I have this fantastic friend, an ex-Tupamaro from Uruguay, who works for a magazine called Picatrix. He’s always taking me to seances. There, I met a fantastic ectoplasm; he asks for me now every time he materializes!”
Belbo looked at Lorenza as if to ask her something, then changed his mind. Perhaps he was becoming accustomed to hearing about Lorenza’s alarming friends and had decided to worry only about the ones that threatened his relationship with her (did they have a relationship?). In that reference to Picatrix he saw the threat not of the colonel but of the fantastic ex-Tupamaro. But Lorenza was now talking about something else, telling us that she visited many of those little shops that sold the kind of books Isis Unveiled wanted to publish.
“That’s a real trip, you know,” she was saying. “They tell all about medicinal herbs or list instructions for making a ho-munculus, remember what Faust did with Helen of Troy. Oh, Jacopo, let’s! I’d love to have your homunculus, and then we could keep it like a dachshund. It’s easy, the book says: you just have to collect a little human seed in a test tube. That wouldn’t be hard for you—don’t blush, silly. Then you mix it with hip-pomene, which is some liquid that is excreted—no, not excreted—what’s the word?”
“Secreted,” Diotallevi suggested.
“Really? Anyway, pregnant mares make it. I realize that’s a bit harder to get. If I were a pregnant mare, I wouldn’t like
Ceople coming to collect my hippomene, especially strangers, ut I think you can buy it in packages, like joss sticks. Then you put it all in a pot and let it steep for forty days, and little by little you see a tiny form take shape, a fetus thing, which in another two months becomes a dear little homunculus, and he comes out and puts himself at your service. And they never die. Imagine: they’ll even put flowers on your grave after you’re dead!”
“What about the customers in those bookshops?” “Fantastic people, people who talk with angels, people who make gold, and professional sorcerers with faces exactly like professional sorcerers...”
“What’s the face of a professional sorcerer like?” “An aquiline nose, Russian eyebrows, piercing eyes. The hair is long, like painters in the old days, and there’s a beard, not thick, with bare patches between the chin and the cheeks, and the mustache droops forward and falls in clumps over their lips, but that’s only natural, because their lips are thin, poor things, and their teeth stick out. They shouldn’t smile, with those teeth, but they do, very sweetly, but the eyes—I said they were piercing, didn’t I?—look at you in an unsettling way.” “Facies hermetica,” Diotallevi remarked. “Really? Well, you understand, then. When somebody comes in and asks for a book, say, of prayers against evil spirits, they immediately suggest the right title to the bookseller, and, of course, it’s always a title he doesn’t have in stock. But then, if you make friends and ask if the book works, they smile again, indulgently, as if they were talking to children, and they say that with this sort of thing you have to be quite careful. They tell you about cases of devils that did horrible things to friends of theirs, but when you get frightened, they say that often it’s only hysteria. In other words, you never know whether they believe it or not. Sometimes the booksellers give me sticks of incense as presents; once one of them gave me a little ivory hand to ward off the evil eye.”
“Then, if the occasion arises,” Belbo said to her, “while you’re browsing in those places, ask if they know anything about the new Manutius series, and show them our flier.”
Lorenza went off with a dozen fliers. I guess she did a good job in the weeks that followed, but, even so, I wouldn’t have believed things could move so fast. Within a few months, Si-gnora Grazia simply couldn’t keep up