Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [145]
—Thomaso Garzoni, // Theatre de vari e diversi cervelli mondani, Venice, Zanfretti, 1583, discorso XXXVI
The illustrations I found in Milan and Paris weren’t enough. Signer Garamond authorized me to spend a few days at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
I spent my evenings in the bars of Schwabing—or in the immense crypts where elderly mustached gentlemen in lederhosen played music and lovers smiled at each other through a thick cloud of pork steam over full-liter beer steins—and in the afternoons I went through card catalogs of reproductions. Now and then I would leave the archive and stroll through the museum, where every human invention had been reconstructed. You pushed a button, and dioramas of oil exploration came to life with working drills, you stepped inside a real submarine, you made the planets revolve, you played at producing acids and chain reactions. A less Gothic Conservatoire, totally of the future, peopled by unruly school groups being taught to idealize engineers.
In the Deutsches Museum you also learned everything about mines: you went down a ladder and found yourself in a mine complete with tunnels, elevators for men and horses, narrow passages where scrawny exploited children (made of wax, I hoped) were crawling. You went along endless dark corridors, you stopped at the edge of bottomless pits, you felt chilled to the bone, and you could almost catch a whiff of firedamp. Everything life-size.
I was wandering in a tunnel, despairing of ever seeing the light of day again, when I came upon a man looking down over the railing, someone I seemed to recognize. The face was wrinkled and pale, the hair white, the look owlish. But the clothes were not right—I had seen that face before, above some uniform. It was like meeting, after many years, a priest now in civilian clothes, or a Capuchin without a beard. The man looked back at me, also hesitating. As usually happens in such situations, there was some fencing of furtive glances before he took the initiative and greeted me in Italian. Suddenly I could picture him in his usual dress: if he had been wearing a long yellow smock, he would have been Signer Salon: A. Salon, taxidermist. His laboratory was next door to my office on the corridor of the former factory building where I was the Marlowe of culture. I had encountered him at times on the stairs, and we had nodded to each other.
“Strange,” he said, holding out his hand. “We have been fellow-tenants for so long, and we introduce ourselves in the bowels of the earth a thousand miles away.”
We exchanged a few polite remarks. I got the impression that he knew exactly what I did, which was an achievement of sorts, since I wasn’t sure myself. “How do you happen to be in a technological museum? I thought your publishing firm was concerned with more spiritual things.”
“How did you know that?”
“Oh”—he gestured vaguely—”people talk, I have many customers...”
“What sort of people go to a taxidermist?”
“You are thinking, like everyone else, that it’s not an ordinary profession. But I do not lack for customers, and I have all kinds: museums, private collectors.”
“I don’t often see stuffed animals in people’s homes,” I said.
“No? It depends on the homes you visit...Or the cellars.”
“Stuffed animals are kept in cellars?”
“Some people keep them in cellars. Not all creches are in the light of the sun or the moon. I’m suspicious of such customers, but you know how it is: a job is a job...I’m suspicious of everything underground.”
“Then why are you strolling in tunnels?”
“I’m checking. I distrust the underground world, but I want to understand it. There aren’t many opportunities. The Roman catacombs, you’ll say. No mystery there, too many tourists, and everything is under the control of the Church. And then there are the sewers of Paris...Have you been? They can be visited on Monday, Wednesday, and the last Saturday of every month. But that’s another tourist attraction. Naturally, there