Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [171]
She was a sibyl with a great, Dantean nose over a mouth thin as a cicatrix, which opened like a submarine flower, toothless but for two incisors and one skewed canine. The eyes were shifty, hawklike, piercing. I heard, or thought I heard—or think now that I remember hearing, but I may be superimposing other memories—a series of Gaelic words mixed with evocations in a kind of Latin, something on the order of “O pegnia (oh, e oh!) et eee uluma!!!” Suddenly the fog lifted, disappeared, the clearing became bright again, and I saw that it had been invaded by a troop of pigs, their short necks encircled by garlands of green apples. The Druidess who had blown the trumpet, still atop the dolmen, now brandished a knife.
“We go now,” Aglie said sharply. “It’s over.”
I realized, as I heard him, that the cloud was above us and around us, and I could barely make out my companions.
“What do you mean, over?” Garamond said. “Looks to me like the real stuff is just beginning!”
“What you were permitted to see is over. Now it is not permitted. We must respect the rite. Come.”
He reentered the wood, was promptly swallowed up by the mist that enfolded us. We shivered as we moved, slipping 01 dead leaves, panting, in disarray, like a fleeing army, and regrouped at the road. We could be in Milan in less than two hours. Before getting back into Garamond’s car, Aglie said goodbye to us: “You must forgive me for interrupting the show for you. I wanted you to learn something, to see the people for whom you are now working. But it was not possible to stay. When I was informed of this event, I had to promise I wouldn’t disturb the ceremony. Our continued presence would have had a negative effect on what follows.”
“And the pigs? What happens to them?” Belbo asked.
“What I could tell you, I have told you.”
63
‘What does the fish remind you of?” ‘Other fish.”
‘And what do other fish remind you of?” ‘Other fish.”
—Joseph Heller, Catch-22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii
I came back from Piedmont with much guilt. But as soon as I saw Lia again, I forgot the desires that had grazed me.
Still, our expedition left other marks on me, and now it troubles me that at the time I wasn’t troubled by them. I was putting in final order, chapter by chapter, the illustrations for the wonderful adventure of metals, but once again I could not elude the demon of resemblance, any more than I had been able to in Rio. How was this Reaumur cylindrical stove, 1750, different from this incubation chamber for eggs, or from this seventeenth-century athanor, maternal womb, dark uterus for the creation of God knows what mystic metals? It was as if they had installed the Deutsches Museum in the Piedmont castle I had visited the week before.
It was becoming harder for me to keep apart the world of magic and what today we call the world of facts. Men I had studied in school as bearers of mathematical and physical enlightenment now turned up amid the murk of superstition, for I discovered they had worked with one foot in cabala and the other in the laboratory. Or was I rereading all history through the eyes of our Diabolicals? But then I would find texts above all suspicion that told me how in the time of positivism physicists barely out of the university dabbled in stances and astrological cena-cles, and how Newton had arrived at the law of gravity because he believed in the existence of occult forces, which recalled his investigations into Rosicrucian cosmology.
I had always thought that doubting was a scientific duty, but now I came to distrust the very masters who had taught me to doubt.
I said to myself: I’m like Amparo; I don’t believe in it, yet I surrender to it. Yes, I caught myself marveling over