Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [281]
As for a double pendulum, one with two weights attached to the same wire...If you shift A, A oscillates; then after a while it stops and B will oscillate. If the paired weights are different or if their lengths are different, the energy passes from one to the other, but the periods of these oscillations will not be equal... This eccentricity of movement also occurs if, instead of beginning to make A oscillate freely by setting it in motion, you apply a force to the system already in motion. That is to say, if the wind blows in gusts onjhe hanged man in asynchronous fashion, after a while, the hanged man will become motionless and his gallows will oscillate as if its fulcrum were the hanged man.
—From a private letter of Mario Salvador!, Columbia University, 1984
Having nothing more to learn in that place, I took advantage of the melee to reach the statue of Gramme.
The pedestal was still open. I entered, went down a narrow ladder, and found myself on a small landing illuminated by a light bulb, where a spiral stone staircase began. At the end of this, I came to a dim passage with a higher, vaulted ceiling. At first I didn’t realize where I was, and couldn’t identify the source of the rippling sound I heard. Then my eyes adjusted: I was in a sewer, with a handrail that kept me from falling into the water but not from inhaling an awesome stink, half chemical, half organic. At least something in our story was true: the sewers of Paris, of Colbert, Fantomas, Caus.
I followed the biggest conduit, deciding against the darker ones that branched off, and hoped that some sign would tell me where to end my subterranean flight. In any case, I was escaping, far from the Conservatoire, and compared to that kingdom of darkness the Paris sewers were relief, freedom, clean air, light.
I carried with me a single image, the hieroglyph traced in the choir by Belbo’s corpse. What was that symbol? To what other symbol did it correspond? I couldn’t figure it out. I know now it was a law of physics, but this knowledge only makes the phenomenon more symbolic. Here, now, in Belbo’s country house, among his many notes, I found a letter from someone who, replying to a question of his, told him how a pendulum works, and how it would behave if a second weight were hung elsewhere along the length of its wire. So Belbo—God knows for how long—had been thinking of the Pendulum as both a Sinai and a Calvary. He hadn’t died as the victim of a Plan of recent manufacture; he had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
Somehow, losing, Belbo had won. Or does he who devotes himself to this single way of winning then lose all? He loses all if he does not understand that the victory is a different victory. But on that Saturday evening I hadn’t yet discovered this.
I went along the tunnel, mindless, like Postel, perhaps lost in the same darkness, and suddenly I saw the sign. A brighter lamp, attached to the wall, showed me another ladder, temporary, leading to a wooden trapdoor. I tried it, and I found myself in a basement filled with empty bottles, then a corridor with two toilets, a little man on one door, a little woman on the other. I was in the world of the living.
I stopped, breathless. Only then did I remember Lorenza. Now I was crying. But she was slipping away, leaving my bloodstream, as if she had never existed. I couldn’t even see her face. In that world of the dead, she was the most dead.
At the end of the corridor I came to another stairway, a door. I entered a smoky, evil-smelling place, a tavern, a bistro, an Oriental bar, black waiters, sweating customers, greasy skewers, and mugs of beer. I appeared, like an ordinary customer who had gone to urinate and returned. Nobody noticed me. Perhaps