Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [236]
“Rodin!” I exclaim, thunderstruck.
“Yes, Rodin, the secret general of the Jesuits! Rodin, whom you will not trick into falling through the trapdoor, as you did with the others. Know this, O Saint-Germain: there is no crime, no evil machination that we did not invent before you, to the greater glory of that God of ours who justifies the means! How many crowned heads have we made tumble into the night that has no morning, or into snares more subtle, to achieve dominion over the world! And now, when we are within sight of the goal, you would prevent us from laying our rapacious hands on the secret that for five centuries has moved the history of the world?”
Rodin, speaking in this way, becomes fearsome. All the bloodthirsty ambition, all the execrable sacrilege that had smoldered in the breasts of the Renaissance popes, now appears on the brow of this son of Loyola. I see clearly: an insatiable thirst for power stirs his impure blood, a burning sweat soaks him, a nauseating vapor spreads around him.
How to strike this last enemy? To my aid comes an unexpected intuition...an intuition that can come only to one from whom the human soul, for centuries, has kept no inviolable secret place.
“Look at me,” I say. “I, too, am a Tiger.”
With one move I thrust you into the middle of the room, I rip from you your T-shirt, I tear the belt of the skin-tight armor that conceals the charms of your amber belly. Now, in the pale lights of the moon that seeps through the half-open door, you stand erect, more beautiful than the serpent that seduced Adam, haughty and lascivious, virgin and prostitute, clad only in your carnal power, because a naked woman is an armed woman.
The Egyptian klaft descends over your thick hair, so black it seems blue; your breast throbs beneath the filmy muslin. The gold uraeus, arched and stubborn, with emerald eyes, flashes on your head its triple tongue of ruby. And oh, your tunic of black gauze with silver glints, your girdle embroidered in sinister rainbows, with black pearls! Your swelling pubis shaved so that for your lovers you are sleek as a statue! Your nipples gently touched by the brush of your Malabar slave girl, who has dipped it into the same carmine that bloodies your lips, inviting as a wound!
Rodin is now panting. The long abstinences of a life spent in a dream of power have only prepared him all the more for enslavement to uncontrollable desire. Faced by this queen, beautiful and shameless, her eyes black as the Devil’s, her rounded shoulders, scented hair, white and tender skin, Rodin is seized by the possibility of unknown caresses, ineffable voluptuousness; his flesh yearns as a sylvan god yearns when gazing on a naked nymph mirrored in the water that has already doomed Narcissus. Against the light I see him stiffen, as one petrified by Medusa, sculpted by the desire of a repressed virility now at its sunset. The obsessive flame of lust surges through his body; he is like an arrow aimed at its target, a bow drawn to the breaking point.
Suddenly he falls to the floor and crawls before this apparition, his hand extended like a claw to implore a sip of balm. , “Oh, how beautiful you are,” he groans, “with those little vixen teeth that gleam when you part your red and swollen lips....your green emerald eyes that flash, then fade...Oh, demon of lust!”
He’s not all that wrong, the wretch, as you now move your hips, sheathed in their blue denim, and thrust forward your groin to drive the pinball to its supreme folly.
“Vision,” Rodin says, “be mine; for just one instant crown with pleasure a life spent in the hard service of a jealous divinity, assuage with one lubricious embrace the eternity of flame to which your sight now plunges me. I beseech you, brush my face with your lips, you Antinea, you Mary Magdalene, you whom I have desired in the presence of saints dazed in ecstasy, whom I have coveted during my hypocritical worship of virginity. O Lady, fair art thou as the sun, white as the moon; lo I deny both God and the saints,