Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [266]
Belbo left, and that was the last time he saw Diotallevi.
Very well, he wrote, the police are after me for the same reason that Diotallevi has cancer. Poor friend, he’s dying, and I, who don’t have cancer, what am I doing? I’m going to Paris to find the principle of neoplasm.
But he didn’t give in immediately. He stayed shut up in his apartment for four days, reviewed his files sentence by sentence, to find an explanation. Then he wrote out this account, a final testament, so to speak, telling it to himself, to Abulafia, to me, or to anyone else who was able to read it. And finally, Tuesday, he left.
I believe Belbo went to Paris to say to them there was no secret, that the real secret was to let the cells proceed according to their own instinctive wisdom, that seeking mysteries beneath the surface reduced the world to a foul cancer, and that of all the people in the world, the most foul, the most stupid person was Belbo himself, who knew nothing and had invented everything. Such a step must have cost him dear, but he had accepted for too long the premise that he was a coward, and De Angelis had certainly shown him that heroes were few.
In Paris, after the first meeting, Belbo must have realized They wouldn’t believe him. His words were too undramatic, too simple. It was a revelation They wanted, on pain of death. Belbo had no revelation to give, and—his final cowardice—he feared death. So he tried to cover his tracks, and he called me. But They caught him.
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C’est une le^on par la suite. Quand votre ennemi se reproduira, car il n’est pas ii son dernier masque, congediez-le brusquement, et surtout n’allez pas le chercher dans les grottes.
—Jacques Cazotte, Le diable amoureux, 1772, from a page suppressed in later editions
Now, in Belbo’s apartment, as I finished reading his confessions, I asked myself: What should I do? No point going to Garamond. De Angelis had left. Diotallevi had said everything he had to say. Lia was far off, in a place without a telephone. It was six in the morning, Saturday, June 23, and if something was going to happen, it would happen tonight, in the Conservatoire. I had to decide quickly.
Why—I asked myself later, in the periscope—didn’t you pretend nothing had happened? You had before you the texts of a madman, a madman who had talked with other madmen, including a last conversation with an overexcited (or overde-pressed) dying friend. You weren’t even sure Belbo had called you from Paris. Maybe he was talking from somewhere a few kilometers outside Milan, or maybe from the booth on the corner. Why involve yourself in a story that was imaginary and that didn’t concern you anyway?
This was the question I set myself in the periscope, as my feet were growing numb and the light was fading, and I felt the unnatural yet very natural fear that anyone would feel at night, alone, in a deserted museum. But early that morning, I had felt no fear. Only curiosity. And, perhaps, duty, friendship.
I told myself that I, too, should go to Paris. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I couldn’t desert Belbo now. Maybe he was counting on me to slip, under cover of night, into Jhe cave of the Thugs, and, as Suyodhana was about to plunge the sacrificial knife into his heart, to burst into the underground temple with my sepoys, their muskets loaded with.grapeshot, and carry him to safety.
Luckily, I had a little money on me. In Paris I got into^a taxi and told the driver to take me to rue de la Manticore. He grumbled, cursed; the street couldn’t be found even in those guides they have. In fact, it turned out to be an alley no wider than the aisle of a train. It was in the neighborhood of the old Bievre, behind Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. The taxi couldn’t even enter it; the driver left me at the corner.
Uneasily, I entered the alley. There were no doorways. At a certain point the street widened a little, and I came to a bookshop. Why it had the number 3 I don’t know, since there was no number 1 or 2, or any other street number. It was a grimy little shop, lighted by