Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [194]
On the face of the Virgin Queen a ghastly smile appeared. “Very well then, my good Dee,” she said. “I do not ask much, only Total Power. For you, if you succeed, the garter. For you, William”—and she addressed the little parasite with lewd sweetness—”another garter, and another golden fleece. Follow me.”
I murmured into William’s ear: “I perforce am thine, and all that is in me...” William rewarded me with a look of unctuous gratitude and followed the queen, disappearing beyond the curtain. Je tiens la
* * *
I was with Dr. Dee in the Golden City. We went along narrow and evil-smelling passageways not far from the cemetery of the Jews, and Dee told me to be careful. “If the news of the failed encounter has spread,” he said, “the other groups will even now be acting on their own. I fear the Jews; the Jerusalemites have too many agents here in Prague...”
It was evening. The snow glistened, bluish. At the dark entrance to the Jewish quarter clustered the little stands of the Christmas market, and in their midst, decked in red cloth, was the obscene stage of a puppet theater lit by smoky torches. We passed beneath an arch of dressed stone, near a bronze fountain from whose grille long icicles hung, and there another passage opened. On old doors, gilded lion’s heads sank their teeth into bronze rings. A slight shudder ran along the walls, inexplicable sounds came from the low roofs, rattlings from the drainpipes. The houses betrayed a ghostly life of their own, a hidden life...An old usurer, wrapped in a worn coat, brushed us in passing, and I thought I heard him murmur, “Beware Athanasius Per-nath...” Dee murmured back, “I fear quite another Athanasius...” And suddenly we were in the Alley of the Goldsmiths.
There, in the gloom of another alley—and the ears I no longer have, at this memory, quiver under my worn cap—a giant loomed up before us, a horrible gray creature with a dull expression, his body sheathed in bronze verdigris, leaning on a gnarled and knobby stick of white wood. The apparition gave off an intense odor of sandalwood. Mortal horror magically coalesced in that being that confronted me, yet I could not take my eyes off the nebulous globe that sat atop his shoulders, and in it discerned, barely, the rapacious face of an Egyptian ibis, and behind that face, more faces, incubi of my imagination and my memory. The outlines of the ghost, in the darkness of that alley, dilated, contracted, as in a slow, nonliving respiration....And—oh, horror!— instead of feet, I saw, as I stared at him, on the snow two shapeless stumps whose flesh, gray and bloodless, was rolled up, as if in concentric swellings.
My voracious memories....
“The golem!” Dee cried, raising both arms to heaven. His black coat with broad sleeves fell to the ground, as if to create a cingulum, an umbilical cord between the aerial position of the hands and the surface, or the depths, of the earth. “Jezebel, Malkuth, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes!” he said. And suddenly the golem dissolved like a sand castle struck by a gust of wind. We were blinded by the particles of its clay body, which tore through the air like atoms, until finally at our feet was a little pile of ashes. Dee bent down, searched in the ashes with his bony fingers, and drew out a scroll, which he hid in his bosom.
From the shadows then rose an old rabbi, with a greasy hat that greatly resembled my cap. “Dr. Dee, I presume,” he said.
“Here Comes Everybody,” Dee replied humbly. “Rabbi Allevi, what a pleasant surprise...”
The man said, “Did you happen to see a creature roaming these parts?”
“A creature?” Dee said, feigning amazement. “What sort of creature?”
“Come off it, Dee,” Rabbi Allevi said. “It was my golem.”
“Your golem? I know nothing about a golem.”
“Take care, Dr. Dee!” Rabbi Allevi said, livid. “You’re playing a dangerous