Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [25]
Could a story like this be made into a novel? Perhaps I should write, instead, about the women I avoid because I can have them. Or could have had them. Same story.
If you can’t even decide what the story is, better stick to editing books on philosophy.
9
In his right hand he held a golden trumpet.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, I
In this file, I find the mention of a trumpet. The day before yesterday, in the periscope, I wasn’t aware of its importance. The file had only one reference to it, and that marginal.
During the long afternoon at the Garamond office, Belbo, tormented by a manuscript, would occasionally look up and try to distract me, too, as I sat at the desk across from his sorting through old engravings of the World Fair. Then he would drift into reminiscence, prompt to ring down the curtain if he suspected I was taking him too seriously. He would recall scenes from his past, but only to illustrate a point, to castigate some vanity.
“I wonder where all this is heading?” he remarked one day.
“Do you mean the twilight of Western civilization?”
“Twilight? Let the sun handle twilight. No. I was talking about our writers. This is my third manuscript this week: one on Byzantine law, one on the Finis Austriae, and one on the poems of the Earl of Rochester. Three very different subjects, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would.”
“Yet in all these manuscripts, at one point or another, Desire appears, and the Object of Desire. It must be a trend. With the Earl of Rochester I can understand it, but Byzantine law?”
“Just reject them.”
“I can’t. All three books have been funded by the National Research Council. Actually, they’re not that bad. Maybe I’ll just call the three authors and ask them to delete those parts. The Desire stuff doesn’t make them look good either.”
“What can the Object of Desire possibly be in Byzantine law?”
“Oh, you can slip it in. If there ever was an Object of Desire in Byzantine law, of course, it wasn’t what this guy says it was. It never is.”
“Never is what?”
“What you think it is. Once—I was five or six—I dreamed I had a trumpet. A gold trumpet. It was one of those dreams where you can feel honey flowing in your veins; you know what I mean? A kind of prepubescent wet dream. I don’t think IVe ever been as happy as I was in that dream. When I woke up, I realized there was no trumpet, and I started crying. I cried all day. This was before the war—it must have been ‘38-<-a time of poverty. If I had a son today and saw him in such despair, I’d say, ‘All right, I’ll buy you a trumpet.’ It was only a toy, after all, it wouldn’t have cost a fortune. But my parents never even considered such a thing. Spending money was a serious business in those days. And they were serious, too, about teaching a child he couldn’t have everything he wanted. ‘I can’t stand cabbage soup,’ I’d tell them—and it was true, for God’s sake; cabbage made me sick. But they never said: ‘Skip the soup today, then, and just eat your meat.’ We may have been poor, but we still had a first course, a main course, and fruit. No. It was always: ‘Eat what’s on the table.’ Sometimes, as a compromise, my grandmother would pick the cabbage out of my bowl, stringy piece by stringy piece. Then I’d have to eat the expurgated soup, which was more disgusting than before. And even this was a concession my father disapproved of.”
“But what about the trumpet?”
He looked at me, hesitant. “Why are you so interested in the trumpet?”
“I’m not. You were the one who brought it up, to show how the Object of Desire is never what others think.”
“The trumpet...My uncle and aunt from *** arrived that evening. They had no children, and I was their favorite