Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [51]
Belbo introduced us. “This is Sandra. You two know each other?”
“By sight. Hi.”
“You see, Casaubon,” Belbo said to me then, “you must never flee in a straight line. Napoleon HI, following the example of the Savoys in Turin, had Paris disemboweled, then turned it into the network of boulevards we all admire today. A masterpiece of intelligent city planning. Except that those broad, straight streets are also ideal for controlling angry crowds. Where possible, even the side streets were made broad and straight, like the Champs-Elysees. Where it wasn’t possible, in the little streets of the Latin Quarter, for example, that’s where May ‘68 was seen to its best advantage. When you flee, head for alleys. No police force can guard them all, and even the police are afraid to enter them in small numbers. If you run into a few on their own, they’re more frightened than you are, and both parties take off, in opposite directions. Anytime you’re going to a mass rally in an area you don’t know well, reconnoiter the neighborhood the day before, and stand at the corner where the little streets start.”
“Did you take a course in Bolivia, or what?”
“Survival techniques are learned only in childhood, unless as an adult you enlist in the Green Berets. I had some bad experiences during the war, when the partisans were active around ***,” he said, naming a town between Monferrato and the Langhe. “We had been evacuated from the city in ‘43, a great idea, exactly the time and place to savor everything: mass arrests, the SS, gunfire in the streets...One evening I was going up the hill to get some fresh milk from a farm, and I heard a sound up in the trees: frr, frr. I realized that some men on a distant hill were machine-gunning the railroad line in the valley behind me. My instinct was to run, or just dive to the ground. I made a mistake: I ran toward the valley, and suddenly I heard a chack-chack-chack in the field around me. Some of the shots were falling short of the railroad. That’s when I learned that if they’re shooting from a high hill down at a valley, then you should run uphill. The higher you go, the higher the bullets will be over your head. Once, my grandmother was caught in a shoot-out between Fascists and partisans deployed on opposite sides of a cornfield. Wherever she ran, she risked stopping a bullet. So she just flung herself down in the middle of the field, right in the line of fire, and lay there for ten minutes, her face in the dirt, hoping that neither side would advance very far. She was lucky. When you learn these things as a child, they are hardwired in your nervous system.”
“So you were in the Resistance.”
“As a spectator,” he said. I sensed a slight embarrassment in his voice. “In 1943 I was eleven, and at the end of the war, barely thirteen. Too young to take part, but old enough to follow everything with—how shall I put it?—photographic attention. What else could I do? I watched. And ran. Like today.”
“You should write about it, instead of editing other people’s books.”
“It’s all been told, Casaubon. If I had been twenty back then, in the fifties I’d have written a poetic memoir. Luckily I was born too late for that. By the time I was old enough to write, all I could do was read the books that were already written. On the other hand, I could also have ended up on that hill with a bullet in my head.”
“From which side?” I asked, then immediately regretted the question. “Sorry, I was just kidding.”
“No you weren’t. Sure, today I know, but what did I know then? You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing—you can always repent, atone—but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing. I was a potential traitor. What truth does that entitle me now to teach to others?”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but potentially you were also a Jack the Ripper. This is