Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [209]
Then, as my eyes gradually adjusted, I saw that I was in a petrified zoo. A bear cub with glassy eyes climbed an artificial bough; a dazed and hieratic owl stood beside me; on the table in front of me was a weasel—or marten or skunk; I couldn’t tell. Behind it was a prehistoric animal, feline, its bones showing. It might have been a puma, a leopard, or a very big dog. Part of the skeleton had already been covered with straw and paste, and it was all supported by an iron armature.
“The Great Dane of a rich lady with a soft heart,” Salon said with a snicker, “who wants to remember it as it was in the days of their conjugal life. You see? You skin the animal, on the inside of the skin you smear arsenic soap, then you soak and bleach the bones...Look at that shelf and you’ll see a great collection of spinal columns and rib cages. A lovely ossuary, don’t you think? You connect the bones with wire, reconstruct the skeleton, mount it on an armature. To stuif it, I use hay, papier-mache, or plaster. Finally you fit the skin back on. I repair the damage done by death and corruption. This owl—doesn’t it seem alive to you?”
From then on, every live owl would seem dead to me, consigned by Salon to a sclerotic eternity. I regarded the face of that embalmer of animal pharaohs, his bushy eyebrows, his gray cheeks, and I could not decide whether he was a living being or a masterpiece of his own art.
The better to look at him, I took a step backward, and felt something graze my nape. I turned with a shudder and saw I had set a pendulum in motion.
A great disemboweled bird swayed, following the movement of the lance that pierced it. The weapon had entered the head, and through the open breast you could see it pass where the heart and gizzard had once been, then branch out to form an upside-down trident. One, thicker prong went through the now-emptied belly and pointed toward the ground like a sword, while the two other prongs entered the feet and emerged symmetrically from the talons. The bird swung, and the three points cast their shadow on the floor, a mystic sign.
“A fine specimen of the golden eagle,” Salon said. “But I still have a few days’ work to do on it. I was just choosing the eyes.” He showed me a box full of glass corneas and pupils, as if the executioner of Saint Lucy had collected the trophies of his entire career. “It’s not always easy, as it is with insects, where all you need is a box and a pin. This, for example, has to be treated with formalin.”
I smelled its morgue odor. “It must be an enthralling job,” I said. And meanwhile I was thinking of the living creature that throbbed in Lia’s belly. A chilling thought seized’ me. If the Thing dies, I said to myself, I want to bury it. I want it to feed the worms underground and enrich the earth. That’s the only way I’ll feel it’s still alive...
Salon was still talking. He took a strange specimen from one of the shelves. It was about thirty centimeters long. A dragon, a reptile with black membranous wings, a cock’s crest, and gaping jaws that bristled with tiny sawlike teeth. “Handsome, isn’t he? My own composition. I used a salamander, a bat, snake’s scales...A subterranean dragon. I was inspired by this...”
He showed me, on another table, a great folio volume, bound in ancient parchment, with leather ties. “It cost me a fortune. I’m not a bibliophile, but this was something I had to have. It’s the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher, first edition, 1665. Here’s the dragon. Identical, don’t you think? It lives in the caves of volcanoes, that good Jesuit said, and he knew everything about the known, the unknown, and the nonexistent...”
“You think always of the underground world,” I said, recalling our conversation in Munich and the words I had overheard through the Ear of Dionysius.
He opened the volume to another page, to an image of the