Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [175]
“But the subject matter is so different,” I said. “What can I do with a photograph of a cyclotron?’’
“What can you do with it? Imagination, Casaubon, use your imagination! What happens in those atomic machines, in those megatronic positrons or whatever they’re called? Matter is broken down; you put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks, black holes, churned uranium! It’s magic made flesh, Hermes and Hermes. Here on the left, the engraving of Paracelsus, old Abracadabra with his alembics, against a gold background, and on the right, quasars, the Cuisinart of heavy water, gravitational galactic antimatter, et cetera. Don’t you see? The real magician isn’t the bleary-eyed guy who doesn’t understand a thing; it’s the scientist who has grasped the hidden secrets of the universe. Discover the miraculous all around us! Hint that at Mount Pal-omar they know more than they’re letting on...”
To encourage me, he gave me a raise, almost perceptible. I concentrated on the miniatures of the Liber Solis of Trismosin, the Mutus Liber of Pseudo-Lullus; I filled folders with pentacles, sefirotic trees, decans, talismans; I combed the loneliest rooms of libraries; I bought dozens of volumes from booksellers who in the old days had peddled the cultural revolution.
Among the Diabolicals, I moved with the ease of a psychiatrist who becomes fond of his patients, enjoying the balmy breezes that waft from the ancient park of his private clinic. After a while he begins to write pages on delirium, then pages of delirium, unaware that his sick people have seduced him. He thinks he has become an artist. And so the idea of the Plan was born.
Diotallevi went along with the game because, for him, it was a form of prayer. As for Jacopo Belbo, I thought he was having as much fun as I was. I realize only now that he derived no real pleasure from it. He took part in it nervously, anxiously biting his nails. Or, rather, he played along, in the hope of finding at least one of the unknown addresses, the stage without footlights, which he mentions in the file named Dream. A surrogate theology for an angel that will never appear.
FILENAME: Dream
I don’t remember if I dreamed one dream within another, or if they followed one another in the course of the same night, or if they alternated night by night.
I am looking for a woman, a woman I know, I have had an intense relationship with her, but cannot figure out why I let it cool, it was my fault, not keeping in touch. Inconceivable, that I could have allowed so much time to go by. I am looking for her—or for them, there is more than one woman, there are many, I lost them all in the same way, through neglect—and I am seized by uncertainty, because even just one would be enough for me, because I know this: in losing them, I have lost much. As a rule, in my dream, I cannot find, no longer possess, am unable to bring myself to open the address book where the phone number is written, and even if I do open it, it’s as if I were farsighted, I can’t read the names.
I know where she is, or, rather, I don’t know where the place is, but I know what it’s like. I have the distinct memory of a stairway, a lobby, a landing. I don’t rush about the city looking for the place; instead, I am frozen, blocked by anguish, I keep racking my brain for the reason I permitted—or wanted—the relationship to cool, the reason I failed to show up at our last meeting. She’s waiting for a call from me, I’m sure. If only I knew her name. I know perfectly well who she is, I just can’t reconstruct her features.
Sometimes, in the half-waking doze that follows, I argue with the dream. You remember everything, I say, you’ve settled all your scores, there’s no unfinished business. There is no place you remember whose location you don’t know. There is nothing to the dream.
But the suspicion remains that I have forgotten something, left something among the folds of my eagerness, the way you forget a bank note or a paper with an important