Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [207]
“To Aglie, what happened made no sense. But it’s obvious— to us, now. The various national groups entered the lists, one against the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if Martfnez Pasqualis was an agent of the Tomar group. The English rejected the Scottish; then there were the French, obviously divided into two groups, pro-English and pro-German. Masonry was the cover, the pretext behind which all these agents of different groups-God knows where the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites were— met and clashed, each trying to tear a piece of the secret from the others.”
“Masonry was like Rick’s in Casablanca,” Belbo said. “Which turns upside down the common view that it is a secret society.”
“No, no, it’s a free port, a Macao. A facade. The secret is elsewhere.”
“Poor Masons.”
Progress demands its victims. But you must admit we are uncovering an immanent rationality of history.”
“The rationality of history is the result of a good recombining of the Torah,” Diotallevi said. “And that’s what we’re doing, and blessed be the name of the Most High.”
“All right,” Belbo said. “Now the Baconians have Saint-Martin-des-Champs, while the Franco-Roman neo-Templar line is breaking down into a hundred sects...And we still haven’t decided what this secret is all about.”
“That’s up to you two,” Diotallevi said.
“Us two? All three of us are in this. If we don’t come out honorably, we’ll all look silly.”
“Silly to whom?”
“Why, to history. Before the tribunal of Truth.”
“Quid est veritas?” Belbo asked.
“Us,” I said.
77
This herb is called Devilbane by the Philosophers. It has been demonstrated that only its seed can expel devils and their hallucinations...When given to a young woman who was tormented by a devil during the night, this herb made him flee.
—Johannes de Rupescissa, Tractatus de Quinta Essentia, 11
During the next few days, I neglected the Plan. Lia’s pregnancy was coming to term, and whenever possible I stayed with her. I was anxious, but she calmed me, saying the time had not yet come. She was taking a course in painless childbirth, and I was trying to follow her exercises. Lia had rejected science’s offer to tell us the baby’s sex in advance. She wanted to be surprised. Accepting this eccentricity on her part, I touched her belly and did not ask myself what would come out. We called it the Thing.
I asked how I could take part in the birth. “It’s mine, too, this Thing,” I said. “I don’t want to be one of those movie fathers, pacing up and down the corridor, chain-smoking.”
“Pow, there’s only so much you can do. The moment comes when it’s all up to me. Besides, you don’t smoke. Surely you’re not going to start smoking just for this occasion.”
“What’ll I do, then?”
“You’ll take part before and afterward. Afterward, if it’s a boy, you’ll teach him, guide him, give him a fine old Oedipus complex in the usual way, with a smile you’ll play out the ritual parricide when the time comes—no fuss—and at some point you’ll show him your squalid office, the card files, the page proofs of the wonderful adventure of metals, and you’ll say to him, ‘My son, one day all this will be yours.’ “
“And if it’s a girl?”
“You’ll say to her, ‘My daughter, one day all this will be your no-good husband’s.’ “
“And what do I do before?”
“During labor, between one wave of pain and the next, you have to count, because as the interval grows shorter, the moment approaches. We’ll count together, and you’ll set the rhythm for me, like rowers in a galley. It’ll be as if you, too, were coaxing the Thing out from its dark lair. Poor little Thing....Feel it. Now it’s so cozy there in the dark, sucking up humors like an octopus, all free, and then—wham—it pops out into the daylight, blinks, and says, Where the hell am I?”
“Poor little Thing. And it hasn’t even met Signer Garamond. Come on, let’s rehearse the counting part.”
We counted in the darkness, holding hands. I daydreamed. The Thing, with its birth, would give reality and meaning to all the old wives’ tales of the Diabolicals. Poor Diabolicals, who spent their nights enacting