Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [159]
On my bed the sheets were even damper than they had been in the afternoon. Jacopo had insisted that we use a “priest”: an oval frame that kept the covers raised and had a place for a little brazier with embers—he wanted to make sure we tasted all the pleasures of rural life. But when dampness is inherent, a bed-warmer encourages it: you feel welcome warmth, but the sheets remain humid. Oh, well. I lit a lamp, the kind with a fringed shade, where the mayflies flutter until they die, as the poet says, and I tried to make myself sleepy by reading the newspaper.
For an hour or two I heard footsteps in the corridor, an opening and closing of doors, and the last closing was a violent slam. Lorenza Pellegrini putting Belbo’s nerves to the test.
I was half-asleep when I heard a scratching at the door, my door. I couldn’t tell whether it was an animal or not (I had seen neither dogs nor cats in the house), but I had the impression that it was an invitation, a request, a trap. Maybe Lorenza was doing it because she knew Belbo was spying on her. Maybe not. Until then, I had considered Lorenza Belbo’s property—at least as far as I was concerned—and besides, now that I was living with Lia, other women didn’t interest me. The sly glances, often conspiratorial, that Lorenza gave me in the office or in a bar when she was teasing Belbo, as if seeking an ally or a witness, were part—I had always thought—of the game she played. Without a doubt, Lorenza had a talent for looking at any man as if challenging his sexual capacity. But it was a curious challenge, as if she were saying: “I want you, but only to show how afraid you really are...” That night, however, hearing her fingernails scrape my door, I felt something different. It was desire: I desired Lorenza.
I stuck my head under the pillow and thought of Lia. I want to have a child with Lia, I said to myself. And I’ll make him (or her) learn the trumpet as soon as he (or she) has enough breath.
57
On every third tree a lantern had been hung, and a splendid virgin, also dressed in blue, lighted them with a raarvelous torch, and I lingered, longer than necessary, to admire the sight, which was of an ineffable beauty.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 2, p. 21
Toward noon Lorenza joined us on the terrace, smiling, and announced that she had found a terrific train that stopped at *** at twelve-thirty, and with only one change she could get back to Milan in the afternoon. Would we drive her, she asked, to the station?
Belbo continued leafing through some notes. “I thought Aglie was expecting you, too,” he said. “In fact, it seemed to me he organized the whole expedition just for you.”
“That’s his problem,” Lorenza said. “Who’s driving me?”
Belbo stood up and said to us, “It’ll only take a moment; I’ll be right back. Then we can stay here another couple of hours. Lorenza, you had a bag?”
I don’t know if they said anything to each other during the trip to the station. Belbo was back in about twenty minutes and resumed working without referring to the incident.
At two o’clock we found a comfortable restaurant in the market square, and the choosing of food and wine gave Belbo further opportunity to recall his childhood. But he spoke as if he were quoting from someone else’s biography. He had lost the narrative felicity of the day before. In midafternoon we set off to join Aglie and Garamond.
Belbo drove southwest, and the landscape changed gradually, kilometer by kilometer. The hills of ***, even in late autumn, were gentle, domestic, but as we went on, the horizons became more vast, at every curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages; we glimpsed endless vistas. Like Darien, Diotallevi remarked, verbalizing these