Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [284]
Low sixteenth-century ceilings, round-headed arches, galleries selling prints, antiques, furniture. Place des Vosges, with its old doorways, cracked and worn and leprous. The people here haven’t moved for hundreds of years. Men with yellow cloaks. A square inhabited exclusively by taxidermists. They appear only at night. They know the movable slab, the manhole through which you penetrate the Mundus Subterraneus. In full view.
The Union de Recouvrement des Cotisation de Securite so-ciale et D’allocations familiales de la Patellerie, number 75, apartment 1. A new door—rich people must live there—but right next to it is an old door, peeling, like a door on Via Sincero Renato. Then, at number 3, a door recently restored. Hylics alternating with pneumatics. The Masters and their slaves. Then planks nailed across what must have been an arch. It’s obvious; there was an occultist bookshop here and now it’s gone. A whole block has been emptied. Evacuated overnight. Like Aglie. They know someone knows; they are beginning to cover their tracks.
At the corner of rue de Birague, I see the line of arcades, infinite, without a living soul. I want darkness, not these yellow street lamps. I could cry out, but no one would hear me. Behind all the closed windows, through which not a thread of light escapes, the taxidermists in their yellow smocks will snicker.
But no; between the arcades and the garden in the center are parked cars, and an occasional shadow passes. A big Belgian shepherd crosses my path. A black dog alone in the night. Where is Faust? Did he send the faithful Wagner out for a piss?
Wagner. That’s the word that was churning in my mind without surfacing. Dr. Wagner: he’s the one I need. He will be able to tell me that I’m raving, that I’ve given flesh to ghosts, that none of it’s true, Belbo’s alive, and the Tres don’t exist. What a relief it would be to learn that I’m sick.
I abandon the square, almost running. I’m followed by a car. But maybe it’s only looking for a parking place. I trip on a plastic garbage bag. The car parks. It didn’t want me. I’m on rue Saint-Antoine. I look for a taxi. As if invoked, one passes.
I say to the driver: “Sept, Avenue Elisee-Reclus.”
116
Je voudrais etre la tour, pendre a la Tour Eiffel.
—Blaise Cendrars
I didn’t know where 7, Avenue Elisee-Reclus was, and I didn’t dare ask the driver, because anyone who takes a taxi at that hour either is heading for his own home or is a murderer at the very least. The man was grumbling that the center of the city was still full of those damn students, buses parked everywhere, it was a scandal,’if he was in charge, they’d all be lined up against a wall, and the best thing was to go the long way round. He practically circled Paris, leaving me finally at number 7 of a lonely street. There was no Dr. Wagner at that address. Was it seventeen, then? Or twenty-seven? I walked, looked at two or three houses, then came to my senses. Even if I found the house, was I thinking of dragging Dr. Wagner out of bed at this time of night to tell him my story? I had ended up here for the same reason that I had roamed from Porte Saint-Martin to Place des Vosges: I was fleeing. I didn’t need a psychoanalyst, I needed a strait-jacket. Or the cure of sleep. Or Lia. To have her hold my head, press it between her breast and armpit, and whisper soothingly to me.
Was it Dr. Wagner I wanted or Avenue Elisee-Reclus? Because—now I remembered—I had come across that name in the course of my reading for the Plan. Elisee Reclus was someone in the last century who wrote a book about the earth, the underground, volcanoes; under the pretext of academic geography he stuck his nose into the Mundus Subterraneus. One of Them, in other words. I ran from Them, yet kept finding Them around me. Little by little, in the space of a few hundred years, They had occupied all of Paris. And the rest of the world.
I should go back to the hotel. Would I find another taxi? This was probably an out-of-the-way suburb. I headed in the direction where the night sky was brighter, more open. The Seine?