Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [291]
The others, out of the same fear, preferred to kill him. They might be losing the map—they would have centuries to continue the search for it—but they were preserving the vigor of their base, slobbering desire.
I remembered a story Amparo told me. Before coming to Italy, she had spent some months in New York City, living in a neighborhood of the kind where even on quiet days you could shoot a TV series featuring the homicide squad. She used to come home alone at two in the morning. When I asked if she wasn’t afraid of sexual maniacs, she told me her method. When a sexual maniac approached, threatening, she would take his arm and say, “Come on, let’s do it.” And he would go away, bewildered.
If you’re a sexual maniac, you don’t want sex; you want the excitement of its theft, you want the victim’s resistance and despair. If sex is handed to you on a platter, here it is, go to it, naturally you’re not interested, otherwise what sort of sexual maniac would you be?
* * *
We had awakened their lust, offering them a secret that couldn’t have been emptier, because not only did we know it ourselves, but, even better, we knew that it was false.
The plane was flying over Mont Blanc, and the passengers all rushed to the same side so as not to miss the view of that blunt bubo that had grown there thanks to a fluke in the telluric currents. If what I was thinking was correct, then the currents didn’t exist any more than the Provins message existed. But the story of the deciphering of the Plan, as we had reconstructed it, that was History.
My memory went back to Belbo’s last file. But if existence is so empty and fragile that it can be endured only by the illusion of a search for its secret, then—as Amparo said that evening in the tenda, after her defeat—there’s no redemption; we are all slaves, give us a master, that’s what we deserve...
No. Lia taught me there is more, and I have the proof: his name is Giulio, and at this moment he is playing in a valley, pulling a goat’s tail. No, because Belbo twice said no.
The first no he said to Abulafia, and to those who would try to steal its secret. “Do you have the password?” was the question. And the answer, the key to knowledge, was “No.” Not only does the magic word not exist, but we do not know that it does not exist. Those who admit their ignorance, therefore, can learn something, at least what I was able to learn.
The second no he said on Saturday night, when he refused the salvation held out to him. He could have invented a map, or used one of the maps I had shown him. In any event, with the Pendulum hung as it was, incorrectly, that bunch of lunatics would never have found the X marking the Umbilicus Mundi, and even if they did, it would have been several more decades before they realized this wasn’t the one. But Belbo refused to bow, he preferred to die.
It wasn’t that he refused to bow to the lust for power; he refused to bow to nonmeaning. He somehow knew that, fragile as our existence may be, however ineffectual our interrogation of the world, there is nevertheless something that has more meaning than the rest.
What had Belbo sensed, perhaps only at that moment, which allowed him to contradict his last, desperate file, and not surrender his destiny to someone who guaranteed him a mere Plan? What had he understood—at last—that allowed him to sacrifice his life, as if he had learned everything there was to learn without realizing it, and as if compared