Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [55]
The two groups came within a few meters of each other, and stood in confrontation, snarling. Then the leaders stepped forward to confer. Yalta. They decided to divide their territories into zones and agreed to allow an occasional safe-conduct pass, like Christians and Moslems in the Holy Land. Solidarity between groups of knights had prevailed over the ineluctability of battle. Each side had proved itself. The opposing camps withdrew in harmony, still opponents, in opposite directions.
Now I tell myself that I didn’t rush into the attack because I found it laughable. But that’s not what I told myself then. Then, I felt like a coward, and that was that.
Today, even more cowardly, I tell myself that as it turned out I would have risked nothing had I charged with the others, and my life afterward would have been better. I missed Opportunity at the age of twelve. If you fail to have an erection the first time, you’re impotent for the rest of your life.
A month later, some random trespass brought the Alley and Canal gangs face to face in a field, and clods of earth began to fly. I don’t know whether it was because the outcome of the earlier conflict had reassured me or because I desired martyrdom, but one way or another, this time I stood in the front line. A clod, which concealed a stone, struck my lip and split it. I ran home crying, and my mother had to use the tweezers from her toilet case to pick pieces of earth out of the wound on the inside of my lip. In fact I was left with a lump next to the lower right canine, and even now, when I run my tongue over it, I feel a vibration, a shudder.
But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heed-lessness, not through courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.
* * *
After the day of the march I didn’t see Belbo again for about a year. I fell in love with Amparo and stopped going to Pi-lade’s—or, at least, the few times I did drop in with Amparo, Belbo wasn’t there. Amparo didn’t like the place anyway. In her moral and political severity—equaled only by her grace, her magnificent pride—she considered Pilade’s a clubhouse for liberal dandies, and liberal dandysme, as far as she was concerned, was a subtle thread in the fabric of the capitalist plot. For me this was a year of great commitment, seriousness, and enchantment. I worked joyfully but serenely on my thesis.
Then one day I ran into Belbo along the navigli, not far from the Garamond office. “Well, look who’s here,” he said cheerfully. “My favorite Templar! Listen, I’ve just been presented with a bottle of ineffably ancient nectar. Why don’t you come up to the office? I have paper cups and a free afternoon.”
“A zeugma,” I said.
“No. Bourbon. And bottled, I believe, before the fall of the Alamo.”
I followed him. We had just taken the first sip when Gudrun came in and said there was a gentleman to see Belbo. He slapped his forehead. He had forgotten the appointment. But chance has a taste for conspiracy, he said to me. From what he had gathered, this individual wanted to show him a book that concerned the Templars. “I’ll get rid of him quickly,” he said, “but you must lend me a hand with some keen objections.”
It had surely been chance. And so I was caught in the net.
17
And thus did the knights of the Temple vanish with their secret, in whose shadow breathed a lofty yearning for the earthly city. But the Abstract to which their efforts aspired lived on, unattainable, in unknown regions...and its inspiration, more than once in the course of time, has filled those spirits capable of receiving it.
—Victor Emile Michelet, Le secret de la Chevalerie, 1930, p. 2
He had a 1940s face. Judging by the old magazines I had found in the basement at home, everybody had a face like that in the forties. It must have been wartime hunger that