Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [288]
Wagner stood up very, very slowly. Without turning to me, he came around his desk and went to the window. He looked out, his hands folded behind his back, absorbed in thought.
In silence, for ten, fifteen minutes.
Then, still with his back to me, in a colorless voice, calm, reassuring: “Monsieur, vous etes fou.”
He did not move, and neither did I. After another five minutes, I realized that he wasn’t going to add anything. That was it. End of session.
I left without saying good-bye. The secretary gave me a bright smile, and I found myself once more in Avenue Elise”e-Reclus.
It was eleven. I picked up my things at the hotel and rushed to the airport. I had to wait two hours. In the meantime, I called Garamond Press, collect, because I didn’t have a cent left. Gud-run answered. She seemed more obtuse than usual, I had to shout three times for her to say Si, oui, yes, that she would accept the call.
She was crying: Diotallevi had died Saturday night at midnight.
“And nobody, not one of his friends was at the funeral this morning. The shame of it! Not even Signer Garamond! They say he’s out of the country. There was only me, Grazia, Luciano, and a gentleman all in black, with a beard, side curls, and a big hat: he looked like an undertaker. God knows where he came from. But where were you, Casaubon? And where was Belbo? What’s going on?”
I muttered something in the way of an explanation and hung up. My flight was called, and I boarded the plane.
YESOD
118
The conspiracy theory of society... comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?”
—Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge, 1969, iv, p. 123
The flight did me good. I not only left Paris behind, I left the underground, the ground itself, the terrestial crust. Sky and mountains still white with snow. Solitude at ten thousand meters, and that sense of intoxication always produced by flying, the pressurization, the passage through slight turbulence. It was only up here, I thought, that I was finally putting my feet on solid ground. Time to draw conclusions, to list points in my notebook, then close my eyes and think.
I decided to list, first of all, the incontestable facts.
There is no doubt that Diotallevi is dead. Gudrun told me so. Gudrun was never part of our story—she wouldn’t have understood it—so she is the only one left who tells the truth. Also, Garamond is not in Milan. He could be anywhere, of course, but the fact that he’s not there and hasn’t been there the past few days suggests he was indeed in Paris, where I saw him.
Similarly, Belbo is not there.
Now, let’s assume that what I saw Saturday night in Saint-Martin-des-Champs really happened. Perhaps not the way I saw it, befuddled as I was by the music and the incense; but something did happen. It’s like that time with Amparo. Afterward, she didn’t believe she had been possessed by Pomba Gira, but she knew that in the tenda de umbanda something had possessed her.
Finally, what Lia told me in the mountains is true. Her interpretation is completely convincing: the Provins message is a laundry list. There were never any Templars’ meetings at the Grange-aux-Dimes. There was no Plan and there was no message.
The laundry list, for us, had been a crossword puzzle with the squares empty and no definitions. The squares had to be filled in such a way that everything would fit. But perhaps that metaphor isn’t precise. In a crossword puzzle the words, intersecting, have to have letters in common. In our game we crossed not words but concepts, events, so the rules were different. Basically there were three rules.
Rule One: Concepts are connected by analogy. There is no way to decide at once whether an analogy is good or bad, because to some degree everything is connected to everything else. For example, potato crosses with apple, because both are vegetable and round in shape. From apple to snake, by Biblical association. From snake to doughnut, by formal likeness. From doughnut to life preserver, and from life