Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [269]
I had emerged from the periscope after a long and merciless examination of conscience, I had reviewed our error of the last years and tried to understand why, without any reasonable reason, I was now here hunting for Belbo, who was here for reasons even less reasonable. But the moment I set foot outside the periscope, everything changed. As I advanced, I advanced with another man’s head. I became Belbo. Like Belbo, now at the end of his long journey toward enlightenment, I knew that every earthly object, even the most squalid, must be read as the hieroglyph of something else, and that there is nothing, no object, as real as the Plan. How clever I was! A flash of light, a glance, was all it took, and I understood. I would not let myself be deceived.
...Froment’s Motor: a vertical structure on a rhomboid base. It enclosed, like an anatomical figure exhibiting its ribs and viscera, a series of reels, batteries, circuit breakers—what the hell did the textbooks call them?—and the thing was driven by a transmission belt fed by a toothed wheel... What could it have been used for? Answer: for measuring the telluric currents, of course.
Accumulators. What did they accumulate? I imagined the Thirty-six Invisibles as stubborn secretaries (keepers of the secret) tapping all night on their clavier-scribes to produce from this machine a sound, a spark, all of them intent on a dialog from coast to coast, from abyss to surface, from Machu Picchu to Avalon, come in, come in, hello hello hello, Pamersiel Pa-mersiel, we’ve caught a tremor, current Mu 36, the one the Brahmans worshiped as the breath of God, now I’ll plug in the tap, the valve, aU micro-macrocosmic circuits operational, all the mandrake roots shuddering beneath the crust of the globe, you hear the song of the Universal Sympathetic, over and out.
My God, armies slaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurled anathemas, emperors met, hemophiliac and incestuous, in the hunting lodge of the Palatine gardens, all to supply a cover, a sumptuous facade for the work of these wireless operators who in the House of Solomon were listening for pale echoes from the Umbilicus Mundi.
And as they operated these pseudothermic hexatetragrammatic electrocapillatories—that’s how Garamond would have put it— every now and then someone would invent, say, a vaccine or an electric bulb, a triumph in the wonderful adventure of metals, but the real task was quite different: here they are, assembled at midnight, to spin this static-electricity machine of Ducretet, a transparent wheel that looks like a bandoleer, and, inside it, two little vibrating balls supported by arched sticks, and when they touch, sparks fly, and Dr. Frankenstein hopes to give life to his golem, but no, the signal has another purpose: Dig, dig, old mole...
A sewing machine (what else? One of those engraving-advertisements, along with pills for developing one’s bust, and the great eagle flying over the mountains with the restorative cordial in its talons, Robur le Conquerant, R. C.), but when you turn it on, it turns a wheel, and the wheel turns a coil, and the coil... What does the coil do? Who is listening to the coil? The label says, “Currents induced from the terrestrial field.” Shameless! There to be read even by children on their afternoon visits! Mankind believed it was going in a different direction, believed everything was possible, believed in the supremacy of experiment, of mechanics. The Masters of the World have deceived us for centuries. Enfolded, swaddled, seduced by the Plan, we wrote poems in praise of the locomotive.
I passed by. I imagined myself dwindling, an ant-sized, dazed pedestrian in the streets of a mechanical city, metallic skyscrapers on every side. Cylinders, batteries, Leyden jars one above the other, merry-go-round centrifuges, tourniquet elec-trique a attraction et repulsion, a talisman to stimulate the sympathetic currents, colonnade etincelante formee de rieuf tubes, electroaimant, a guillotine, and in the center—it looked like a printing press—hooks hung from