Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [256]
The sun was beating down on Belbo, on Lorenza, on the car, on the dog, and on the bystanders; it seemed to have no intention of setting. BeJbo felt as if he were in his pajamas but unable to wake up; the lady was implacable, the sergeant couldn’t be found, the dog went on bleeding and panting and making weak noises. He’s whimpering, Belbo said, and then, with Eliotlike detachment: He’s ending with a whimper. Of course he’s whimpering, the lady said; he’s suffering, poor darling, and why couldn’t you look where you were going?
The village underwent a demographic boom; Belbo, Lorenza, and the dog had become the entertainment of that gloomy Sunday. A little girl with an ice-cream cone came over and asked if they were the people from the TV who were organizing the Miss Ligurian Apennine contest. Belbo told her to beat it or he’d do to her what he did to the dog. The girl started crying. The local doctor arrived, said the girl was his daughter, and Belbo didn’t realize to whom he was talking. In a rapid exchange of apologies and introductions, it transpired that the physician had published a Diary of a Village Doctor with the famous Manutius Press in Milan. Belbo incautiously said that he was magna pars of that press. The doctor insisted that he and Lorenza stay for supper. Lorenza fumed, nudged Belbo: Now we’ll end up in the papers, the diabolical lovers. Couldn’t you keep your mouth shut?
The sun still beat down as the church bell rang compline. We’re in Ultima Thule, Belbo muttered through clenched teeth: sun six months of the year, from midnight to midnight, and I ‘m out of cigarettes. The dog confined itself to suffering, and nobody paid it any further attention. Lorenza said she was having an asthma attack. Belbo was sure by now that the cosmos was a practical joke of the Demiurge. Finally it occurred to him that they could take the car and look for help in the nearest town. The animal-loving lady agreed: they should go, they should hurry, she trusted a gentleman from a publishing house that published poetry, she herself was a great admirer of Khalil Gibran.
Belbo drove off and, when they reached the nearest town, cynically drove through it, as Lorenza cursed all the animals with which the Lord had befouled the earth from the first through the fifth day. Belbo agreed, and went so far as to curse the work of the sixth day, too, and perhaps also the rest on the seventh, because this was the most ill-starred Sunday he had ever lived through.
They began to cross the Apennines. On the map it looked easy, but it took them hours. They didn’t stop at Bobbio, and toward evening they arrived at Piacenza. Belbo was tired, but at least he could have supper with Lorenza. He took a double room in the only available hotel, near the station. When they went upstairs, Lorenza said she wouldn’t sleep in such a place. Belbo said they’d look for something else, if she would just give him time to go down to the bar and have a martini. He found nothing but cognac, domestic. When he went back up to the room, Lorenza wasn’t there. At the front desk he found a message: “Darling, I’ve discovered a marvelous train for Milan. I’m leaving. See you next week.”
Belbo rushed to the station: the track was empty. Just like a Western.
He had to spend the night in Piacenza. He looked for a paperback thriller, but the station newsstand was closed. All he could find in the hotel was a Touring Club magazine.
It had an article on Apennine passes like the one he had just crossed. In his memory—faded, as if the day’s events had happened long ago—they were arid, sun-baked, dusty, scattered with mineral flotsam. But on the glossy pages of the magazine they were dream country, to return to even on foot, to be savored step by step. The Samoas of Seven Seas Jim.
How can a man rush to his own destruction simply because he runs over a dog? Yet that’s how it was. That night in Piacenza, Belbo decided to withdraw once more into the Plan, where he would suffer no more defeats, because there he was the one who decided who,