Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [208]
“Yes,” Lia said, running her hand over her swelling, taut vessel, “here is where your good primal matter is steeping.
“Those people you saw at the castle, what did they think happened in the vessel?”
“Oh, they thought that melancholy was grumbling in it, sul-ftirous earth, black lead, oil of Saturn, a Styx of purifications, distillations, pulverizations, ablutions, b’quefactions, submersions, terra foetida, stinking sepulcher...”
“What are they, impotent? Don’t they know that in the vessel our Thing ripens, all white and pink and beautiful?”
“They know, but for them your dear little belly is also a metaphor, full of secrets...”
“There are no secrets, Pow. We know exactly how the Thing is formed, its little nerves and muscles, its little eyes and spleens and pancreases...”
“Oh my God, more than one spleen? What is it, Rosemary’s baby?”
“I was speaking in general. But of course we’ll have to be ready to love it even if it has two heads.”
“Of course! I’ll teach it to play duets: trumpet and clarinet...No, then it would need four hands, and that’s too many. But, come to think about it, he’d make a great pianist. A concerto for two left hands? Nothing to it! Brr....But then, my Diabolicals also know that on that day, in the hospital, there will be born the Great Work, the White, the Rebis, the androgyne...”
“That’s all we need. Listen. We’ll call him Giulio, or her Giulia, after my grandfather. What do you say?”
“I like it. Good.”
If I had only stopped there. If I had only written a white book, a good grimoire, for all the adepts of Isis Unveiled, explaining to them that the secretum secretorum no longer needed to be sought, that the book of life contained no hidden meaning; it was all there, in the bellies of all the Lias of the world, in the hospital rooms, on straw pallets, on riverbanks, and that the stones in exile and the Holy Grail were nothing but screaming monkeys with their umbilical cord still dangling and the doctor giving them a slap on the ass. And that the Unknown Superiors, in the eyes of the Thing, were only me and Lia, and the Thing would immediately recognize us, without having to go ask that old fool de Maistre.
But no. We, the sardonic, insisted on playing games with the Diabolicals, on showing them that if there had to be a cosmic plot, we could invent the most cosmic of all.
Serves you right, I said to myself that other evening. Now here you are, waiting for what will happen under Foucault’s Pendulum.
78
Surely this monstrous hybrid comes not from a mother’s womb but from an Ephialtes, an Incubus, or some other horrendous demon, as though spawned in a putrid and venomous fungus, son of Fauns and Nymphs, more devil than man.
—Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, Amsterdam, Jansson, 1665, II, pp. 279-280
That day, I wanted to stay home—I had a presentiment—but Lia told me to stop acting the prince consort and go to work. “There’s time, Pow; it won’t be born yet. I have to go out, too. Run along.”
I had almost reached my office when Signer Salon’s door opened. The old man appeared in his yellow apron. I couldn’t avoid greeting him, and he asked me to come inside. I had never seen his laboratory.
It must have been an apartment once, but Salon had had all the dividing walls demolished, and what I saw was a cave, vast, hazy. For some obscure architectural reason, this wing of the building had a mansard roof, and the light entered obliquely. I don’t know whether the glass panes were dirty or frosted, or if Salon had installed shades to keep out the direct sun, or if it was the heap of objects on all sides proclaiming a fear of spaces left empty, but the light in the cave was late dusk. The room was divided by old pharmacy shelves in which arches opened to passages, junctions, perspectives. The dominant color was brown: the objects, the shelves, the tables, the diffuse blend of daylight