Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [163]
“Not at once.”
“What about you?”
“It takes concentration, it’s hard work, and, you know, I’m not twenty anymore...”
I found my group again. They were just entering a room with white walls, curved corners. In the rear, as in a muse’e Grevin— but the image that came into my mind that evening was the altar I had seen in Rio,’ in the tenda de umbanda—were two wax statues, almost life-size, clad in material that glittered like sequins, pure thrift shop. One statue was of a lady on a throne, with an immaculate (or almost immaculate) garment studded with rhinestones. Above her, from wires, hung creatures of indefinite form, made, I thought, out of Lenci felt. In one corner, a loudspeaker: a distant sound of trumpets, music of good quality, perhaps Gabrieli. The sound effects showed better taste than the visuals. To the right, a second female figure, dressed in crimson velvet with a white girdle, and on her head a crown of laurel. She held gilded scales. Aglie explained to us the various symbols, but I was not paying attention; I was interested in the expressions of many of the guests, who moved from image to image with an air of reverence and emotion.
“They’re no different from those who go to the sanctuary to see the Black Madonna in an embroidered dress covered with silver hearts,” I said to Belbo. “Do the pilgrims think it’s the mother of Christ in flesh and blood? No, but they don’t think the opposite, either. They delight in the similarity, seeing the spectacle as a vision and the vision as a reality.”
“Yes,” Belbo said, “but the question isn’t whether these people here are better or worse than Christians who go to shrines. I was asking myself: Who do we think we are? We for whom Hamlet is more real than our janitor? Do I have any right to judge—I who keep searching for my own Madame Bovary so we can have a big scene?”
Diotallevi shook his head and said to me in a low voice that it was wrong to make images of divine things, that these were all epiphanies of the Golden Calf. But he was enjoying himself.
58
Alchemy, however, is a chaste prostitute, who has many lovers but disappoints all and grants her favors to none. She transforms the haughty into fools, the rich into paupers, the philosophers into dolts, and the deceived into loquacious deceivers...
—Trithemius, Annalium Hirsaugensium Tomi II, S. Gallo, 1690,141
Suddenly the room was plunged into darkness and the walls lighted up. I realized that three-quarters of the wall space was a semicircular screen on which pictures were about to be projected. When these appeared, I became aware that a part of the ceiling and of the floor was made of reflecting material, as were some of the objects that had first struck me as cheap because of the tawdry way they sparkled: the sequins, the scales, a shield, some copper vases. We were immersed in a subaqueous world where images were multiplied, fragmented, fused with the shadows of those present. The floor reflected the ceiling, the ceiling the floor, and together they mirrored the figures that appeared on the screen. Along with the music, subtle odors spread through the room: first Indian incense, then others, less distinct, and sometimes disagreeable.
At first the penumbra about us fell into absolute night. Then a grumbling was heard, a churning of lava, and we were in a crater, where dark and slimy matter bubbled up in the fitful light of yellow and bluish flames.
Oily vapors rose, to descend again, condensing as dew or rain and an odor of fetid earth drifted up, a stench of decay. I inhaled sepulcher, tartar, darkness; a poisonous liquid oozed around me, snaking between tongues of dung, humus, coal dust, mud, smoke, lead, scum, naphtha, a black blacker than black, which now paled to allow two reptiles to appear—one light blue, the other reddish—entwined in an embrace, each biting the other’s tail, to form a single circle.
It was as if I had drunk too much alcohol: I could no longer see my companions, who were lost in the shadows, I could not recognize the forms gliding past me, hazy, fluid outlines...Then I felt my