Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [292]
There was still something, a link missing in the chain. I had all of Belbo’s feats before me now, from life to death, except one.
On arrival, as I was looking for my passport, I found in one of my pockets the key to this house. I had taken it last Thursday, along with the key to Belbo’s apartment. I remembered that day when Belbo showed us the old cupboard that contained, he said, his opera omnia or, rather, his juvenilia. Perhaps Belbo had written something there that couldn’t be found in Abulafia, perhaps it was buried somewhere in ***.
There was nothing reasonable about this conjecture of mine. All the more reason to consider it good. At this point.
I collected my car, and I came here.
I didn’t find the old relative of the Canepas, the caretaker, or whatever she was. Maybe she, too, had died in the meantime. There was no one. I went through the various rooms. A strong smell of mildew. I considered lighting the bedwarmer in one of the bedrooms, but it made no sense to warm the bed in June. Once the windows were opened, the warm evening air would enter.
After sunset, there was no moon. As in Paris, Saturday night. The moon rose late, I saw less of it now than in Paris, as it slowly climbed above the lower hills, in a dip between the Bricco and another yellowish hump, perhaps already harvested.
I arrived around six in the evening. It was still light. But I had brought nothing with me to eat. Roaming the house, I found a salami in the kitchen, hanging from a beam. My supper was salami and fresh water: going on ten o’clock, I think. Now I’m thirsty. I’ve brought a big pitcher of water to Uncle Carlo’s study and drink a glass every ten minutes. Then I go down, refill the pitcher, and start again.
It must be at least three in the morning. I have the light off and can hardly read my watch. I look out the window. On the flanks of the hills, what seem to be fireflies, shooting stars: the headlights of occasional cars going down into the valley or climbing toward the villages on the hilltops. When Belbo was a boy, this sight did not exist. There were no cars then, no roads. At night there was the curfew.
As soon as I arrived, I opened the cupboard of juvenilia. Shelves and shelves of paper, from elementary-school exercises to bundles of adolescent poems and prose. Everyone has written poems in adolescence; true poets destroy them, bad poets publish them. Belbo, too cynical to save them, too weak to chuck them out, stuck them in Uncle Carlo’s cupboard.
I read for hours. And for hours, up to this moment, I meditated on the last text, which I found just when I was about to give up.
I don’t know when Belbo wrote it. There are pages where different handwritings, insertions, are interwoven, or else it’s the same hand in different years. As if he wrote it very early, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, then put it away, then went back to it at twenty, again at thirty, and maybe later. Until he gave up the idea of writing altogether—only to begin again with Abu-lafia, but not having the heart to recover these lines and subject them to electronic humiliation.
Reading them, I followed a familiar story: the events of *** between 1943 and 1945, Uncle Carlo, the partisans, the parish hall, Cecilia, the trumpet. These were the obsessive themes of the romantic Belbo, disappointed, grieving, drunk. The literature of memory: he knew himself that it was the last refuge of scoundrels.
But I’m no literary critic. I’m Sam Spade again, looking for the final clue.
And so I found the Key Text. It must represent the last chapter of the story of Belbo in ***. For, after it, nothing more could have happened.
119
The garland of the trumpet was set afire, and then I saw the aperture of the dome open and a splendid arrow of fire shoot down through the tube of the trumpet and enter the lifeless body. The aperture then was closed again, and the trumpet, too, was put away.
—Johann