Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [176]
Of the city I have a clearer image. It’s Paris. I’m on the Left Bank. And when I cross the river, I find myself in a square that could be Place des Vosges...no, more open, because at the end stands a kind of Madeleine. Passing the square, moving behind the temple, I come to a street—there’s a secondhand bookshop on the corner—that curves to the right, through a series of alleys that are unquestionably the Barrio Gotico of Barcelona. It could turn into a very broad avenue full of lights, and it’s on this avenue—and I remember it with the clarity of a photograph—that I see, to the right, at the end of a blind alley, the Theater.
I’m not sure what happens in that place of pleasure, no doubt something entertaining and slightly louche, like a striptease. For this reason I don’t dare make inquiries, but I know enough to want to return, full of excitement. In vain: toward Chatham Road the streets become confused.
I wake with the taste of failure, an encounter missed. I cannot resign myself to not knowing what I’ve lost.
Sometimes I’m in a country house. It’s big, I know there’s another wing, but I’ve forgotten how to reach it, as if the passage has been walled up. In that other wing there are rooms and rooms. I saw them once, and in detail, thoroughly—it’s impossible that I dreamed them in another dream—with old furniture and faded engravings, brackets supporting little nineteenth-century toy theaters made of punched cardboard, sofas with embroidered coverlets, and shelves filled with books, a complete set of the Illustrated Journal of Travel and of Adventures on Land and Sea. It’s not true that they came apart from being read so often and that Mama gave them to the trash man. I wonder who got the corridors and stairs mixed up, because that is where I would have liked to build my buen retire, in that odor of precious junk.
* * *
Why can’t I dream of college entrance exams like everybody else?
65
....the frame....was twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with paper pasted on them, and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order...The pupils at his command took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys...
—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, III, 5
I believe that in embellishing his dream, Belbo returned once again to the idea of lost opportunity and his vow of renunciation, to his life’s failure to seize—if it ever existed—the Moment. The Plan began because Belbo had now resigned himself to creating private, fictitious moments.
I asked him for some text or other, and he rummaged through the papers on his desk, where there was a heap of manuscripts perilously piled one on top of the other, with no concern for weight or size. He found the one he was looking for and tried to slip it out, thus causing the others to spill to the floor. Folders came open; pages escaped their flimsy containers.
“Couldn’t you have moved the top half first?” I asked. Wasting my breath: this was how he always did it.
He replied, as he always did: “Gudrun will pick them up this evening. She has to have a mission in life; otherwise she loses her identity.”
But this time I had a personal stake in the safety of the manuscripts, because I was now part of the firm. “Gudrun won’t be able to put them back together,