Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [253]
“My Diabolicals could always argue that the Templars knew the secret of the peak, and therefore the message was written in Provins in the fourteenth century....”
“Of course; I realize that. But now comes the third message. Third wheel applied to the sixth letter of each word. Listen: ‘Merde j’en ai marre de cette steganographie.’ And this is modern French; the Templars didn’t talk like that. ‘Shit, I’m sick of this hermetic writing.’ That’s how Ingolf talked, and having given Tiimself a headache coding all this nonsense, he got a final kick cursing in code what he was doing. But he was not without shrewdness. Notice that each of these three messages has thirty-six letters. Poor Pow, Ingolf was having fun, just like the three of you, and that imbecile colonel took him seriously.”
“Then why did Ingolf disappear? “
“Who says he was murdered? Ingolf got fed up living in Aux-erre, seeing nobody but the pharmacist and a spinster daughter who whined all day. So maybe he went to Paris, pulled off a good deal selling one of his old books, found himself a buxom and willing widow, and started a new life. Like those men who go out to buy cigarettes, and the wives never see them again.”
“And the colonel?”
“Didn’t you tell me that not even that detective is sure they killed him? He got into some jam, his victims tracked him down, and he took to his heels. Maybe at this very moment he’s selling the Eiffel Tower to an American tourist and going under the name Dupont.”
I couldn’t give in all along the line. “All right, we started out with a laundry list. Yet we were clever enough, inventive enough, to turn a laundry list into poetry.”
“Your plan isn’t poetic; it’s grotesque. People don’t get the idea of going back to burn Troy just because they read Homer. With Homer, the burning of Troy became something that it never was and never will be, and yet the Iliad endures, full of meaning, because it’s all clear, limpid. Your Rosicrucian manifestoes are neither clear nor limpid; they’re mud, hot air, and promises. This is why so many people have tried to make them come true, each finding in them what he wants to find. In Homer there’s no secret, but your plan is full of secrets, full of contradictions. For that reason you could find thousands of insecure people ready to identify with it. Throw the whole thing out. Homer wasn’t faking, but you three have been faking. Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don’t go together, that he’s not being logical, that he’s not speaking in good faith. But they’ve been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to a miracle. You’ve invented hair oil. I don’t like it. It’s a nasty joke.”
This disagreement didn’t spoil our weeks in the mountains. I took long walks, read serious books, became closer to the child than I’d ever been. But between me and Lia there was something left unsaid. On the one hand, she had put me in a tight corner, and was sorry to have humiliated me; on the other, she wasn’t convinced that she had convinced me.
Indeed, I felt a pull to the Plan. I didn’t want to abandon it, I had lived with it too long.
A few days ago I got up early to catch the one train for Milan, and in Milan I received Belbo’s call from Paris,