Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [160]
We reached the specified village and met Aglie and Gara-mond, as arranged, at the cafe in the main square. If Aglie was displeased to hear that Lorenza wasn’t coming, he gave no indication of it. “Our exquisite friend does not wish to take part, in the presence of others, in the mysteries that define her. A singular modesty, which I appreciate,” he said. And that was all.
We continued, Garamond’s Mercedes in the lead and Belbo’s Renault behind, until, as the sunlight was dying, we came within sight of a strange yellow edifice on a hill, a kind of eighteenth-century castle, from which extended terraces with flowers and trees, flourishing despite the season.
As we reached the foot of the hill, we found ourselves in an open space where many cars were parked. “We stop here,” Aglie said, “and continue on foot.”
Dusk was now becoming night. The path was illuminated for us by a host of torches that burned along the slope.
It’s odd, but of everything that happened, from that moment until late at night, I have memories at once clear and confused. I reviewed them the other evening in the periscope and sensed a family resemblance between the two experiences. Yes, I said to myself, now you are here, in an unnatural situation, groggy from the smell of old wood, imagining yourself in a tomb or in the belly of a ship as a transformation is taking place. You have only to peer outside the cabin, and you will see objects in the gloom that earlier today were motionless, but now they stir like Eleusinian shadows among the fumes of a spell. And so it had been that evening at the castle: the lights, the surprises of the route, the words I heard, and then the incense; everything conspired to make me feel I was dreaming, but dreaming the way you dream when you are on the verge of waking, when you dream that you are dreaming.
I should remember nothing, yet, on the contrary, I remember everything, not as if I had lived it, but as if it had been told to me by someone else.
I do not know if what I remember, with such anomalous clarity, is what happened or is only what I wished had happened, but it was definitely on that evening that the Plan first stirred in our minds, stirred as a desire to give shape to shapelessness, to transform into fantasized reality that fantasy that others wanted to be real.
“The route itself is ritual,” Aglie was telling us as we climbed the hill. “These are hanging gardens, just like—or almost—the ones Salomon de Caus devised for Heidelberg, that is, for the Palatine elector Frederick V, in the great Rosicrucian century. The light is poor, and so it should be, because it is better to sense than to see: our host has not reproduced the Salomon de Caus design literally; he had concentrated it in a narrower space. The gardens of Heidelberg imitated the macrocosm, but the person who reconstructed them here has imitated only the microcosm. Look at that rocaille grotto...Decorative, no doubt. But Caus had in mind the emblem of the Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, where coral is the philosopher’s stone. Caus knew that the heavenly bodies can be influenced by the form of a garden, because there are patterns whose configuration mimes the harmony of the universe...”
“Fantastic,” Garamond said. “But how does a garden influence the planets?”
“There are signs that attract one another, that look at one another, embrace, and enforce love. But they do not have—they must not have—a certain and definite form. A man will try out giveij forces according to the dictates of his passion or the impulse of his spirit; this happened with the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians.