Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (26 page)

Aglie understood my
uneasiness and suggested we go to an all-night bar in
Cppacabana.

At the bar I didn't
speak. Aglie waited until I had started sipping my batida before he
broke the silence.

"Race¡Xor culture, if
you prefer¡Xis part of our unconscious mind. And in another part of
that unconscious dwell archetypes, figures identical for all men
and in all centuries. This evening, the atmosphere, the
surroundings lulled our vigilance. It happened to all of us; you
felt it yourself. Amparo discovered that the orixas, whom she has
destroyed in her heart, still live in her womb. You must not think
I consider this a positive thing. You have heard me speak
respectfully of the supernatural energies that vibrate around us in
this country. But I have no special fondness for the practices of
possession. An initiate is not the same as a mystic. Being an
initiate¡Xhaving an intuitive comprehension of what reason cannot
explain¡Xis a very deep process; it is a slow transformation of the
spirit and of the body, and it can lead to the exercise of superior
abilities, even to immortality. But it is secret, intimate; it does
not show itself externally; it is modest, lucid, detached. That is
why the Masters of the World, initiates, do not indulge in
mysticism. For them, a mystic is a slave, a site of the
manifestation of the numinous, through which site the signs of a
secret can be observed. The initiate encourages the mystic and uses
him as you might use a telephone, to establish long-distance
contact, or as a chemist might use litmus paper, to detect the
action of a particular substance. The mystic is useful, because he
is conspicuous. He broadcasts himself. Initiates, on the contrary,
are recognizable only to one another. It is they who control the
forces that mystics undergo. In this sense there is no difference
between the possession experienced by the cavalos and the ecstasies
of Saint Theresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross. Mysticism is
a degenerate form of contact with the divine, whereas initiation is
the fruit of long askesis of mind and heart. Mysticism is a
democratic, if not demagogic, phenomenon; initiation is
aristocratic."

"It is mental as opposed
to carnal?"

"In a sense. Your Amparo
was guarding her mind tenaciously, but she was not on guard against
her body. The lay person is weaker than we are."

It was late. Aglie
informed me that he was leaving Brazil. He gave me his Milan
address.

I went home and found
Amparo asleep. I lay down beside her in silence, in the dark, and
spent a sleepless night. It was as if there were an unknown being
next to me.

In the morning Amparo
told me that she was going to Petrdp-olis to visit a girlfriend. We
said good-bye awkwardly.

She left with a canvas
bag, a volume of political economy under her arm.

For two months she sent
me no word, and I made no attempt to seek her out. Then she wrote
me a brief, evasive letter, telling me she needed time to think. I
didn't answer.

I felt no passion, no
jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as
emotionless as an aluminum pot.

I stayed in Brazil for
another year, with the constant feeling that I was on the brink of
departure. I didn't see Aglie again, I didn't see any of Amparo's
friends. I spent long, long hours on the beach,
sunbathing.

I flew kites, which down
there are very beautiful.

Beydelus, Demeymes,
Adulex, Matucgayn, Atine, Ffex, Uquizuz, Ga-dix, Sol, Veni cito cum
tuis spiritibus.

¡XPicatrix, Sloane Ms.
1305, 152, verso

The Breaking of the
Vessels. Diotallevi was to talk to us often about the late cabalism
of Isaac Luria, in which the orderly articulation of the Sefirot
was lost. Creation, Luria held, was a process of divine inhalation
and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action of the
bellows.

"God's asthma," Belbo
glossed.

"You try creating from
nothing. It's something you do once in your life. God blows the
world as you would blow a glass bubble, and to do that He takes a
deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous hiss of the ten
Sefirot."

"A hiss of
light?"

"God hissed, and there
was light."

"Multimedia."

"But the lights of the
Sefirot must be gathered in vessels that can contain their splendor
without shattering. The vessels destined to receive Keter, Hokhmah,
and Binah withstood their magnificence, but for the lower Sefirot,
from Hesed to Yesod, light was exhaled too strongly in a single
burst, and the vessels broke. Fragments of light were spilled into
the universe, and gross matter was thus born."

The breaking of the
vessels was a catastrophe, Diotallevi said. What could be more
unbearable than an aborted world? There must have been some defect
in the cosmos from the beginning, and not even the most learned
rabbis had been able to explain it completely. Perhaps at the
moment God exhaled and was emptied, a few drops of oil lay in the
first receptacle, a material residue, the reshimu, thus
adulterating God's essence. Or perhaps the seashells^the qelippot,
the beginnings of ruin¡Xwere slyly waiting in ambush
somewhere.

"Slippery folk, those
qelippot," Belbo said. "Agents of the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu. And
then what happened?"

And then, Diotallevi
patiently explained, in the light of Severe Judgment, or
Gevurah¡Xalso known as Pachad, or Terror¡Xthe Sefirah in which,
according to Isaac the Blind, Evil first shows itself, the
seashells acquired a real existence.

"Then the seashells are
in our midst," Belbo said.

"Just look around you,"
Diotallevi said.

"But is there no way
out?"

"There's a way back in,
actually," Diotallevi said. "All emanates from God, in the
contraction of simsum. The problem is to bring about tikkun, the
restoration of Adam Qadmon. Then we will rebuild everything in the
balanced structure of the par-zufim, the faces¡Xor, rather,
forms¡Xthat will take the place of the Sefirot. The ascension of
the soul is like a cord of silk that enables devout intention,
groping in the darkness, to find the path to the light. And so the
world constantly strives, by combining the letters of the Torah, to
regain its natural form, to emerge from its horrible
confusion."

And this is what I am
doing now, in the middle of the night, in the unnatural calm of
these hills. The other evening in the periscope, however, I was
still mired in the slime of the seashells I felt afl around me, of
the slugs trapped in the crystal cases of the Conservatoire, among
the barometers and rusted clockworks, in deaf hibernation. I
thought then that if there had been a breaking of the vessels, the
first crack probably appeared that evening in Rio, during the rite,
but it was on my return to my native country that the shattering
occurred. It happened slowly, soundlessly, so that we all found
ourselves caught in the morass of gross matter, where noxious
vermin emerge by spontaneous generation.

When I returned from
Brazil, I hardly knew who I was anymore. I was approaching thirty.
At that age, my father was a father; he knew who he was and where
he lived.

I had been too far from
my country while prodigious things were happening. I had lived in a
world swollen with the incredible, where events in Italy wore a
halo of legend. Shortly before leaving the other hemisphere¡Xit was
near the end of my stay and I was treating myself to an airplane
ride over the forests of Amazonia¡XI picked up a local newspaper
during a stopover in Fortaleza. On the front page was a prominent
photograph of someone I recognized: I had seen him sipping white
wine at Pilade's for years. The caption read: "O homem que matou
Moro."

When I got back, I found
out that, of course, he wasn't the man who killed Moro. Handed a
loaded pistol, he would have shot himself in the ear when checking
to see if it worked. What had happened was simply that an
antiterrorist squad had burst in on him and found three pistols and
two packs of explosives hidden under the bed. He was lying on the
bed, since it was the only piece of furniture in that one-room
apartment, whose rent was shared by a group of survivors of ¡¥68
who used it as a place to satisfy the demands of the flesh. If its
sole decoration hadn't been a poster of Che, the place could have
been taken for any bachelor's pied-a-terre. But one of the tenants
belonged to an armed group, and the others had no idea that they
were financing the group's safe house. They all ended up in jail
for a year.

I understood very little
of what had happened in Italy over the past few years. The country
had been on the brink of great changes when I left¡Xleft guiltily,
feeling almost that I was running away at the moment of the
settling of scores. Before I left, I could tell a man's ideology
just by the tone of his voice. I was back and now could not figure
out who was on whose side. No one was talking about revolution; the
new thing was the unconscious. People who claimed to be leftists
quoted Nietzsche and Celine, while right-wing magazines hailed
revolution in the Third World.

I went back to Pilade's,
but I felt I was on foreign soil. The billiard table was still
there, and more or less the same painters, but the young fauna had
changed. I learned that some of the old customers had opened
schools of transcendental meditation or macrobiotic restaurants.
Apparently nobody had thought of a tenda de umbanda yet. Maybe I
was ahead of the times.

To appease the historic
hard core, Pilade still had one of those old-fashioned pinball
machines, the kind that now seemed copied from a Lichtenstein
painting and were bought up wholesale by antique dealers. Next to
it, however, the younger customers crowded around other machines,
machines with fluorescent screens on which stylized hawks or
kamikazes from Planet X hovered, or frogs jumped around grunting in
Japanese. Pilade's was an arcade of sinister flashing lights, and
couriers from the Red Brigades on recruiting missions may well have
been taking their turn at the Space Invaders screen. But they
couldn't play the pinball; you can't play pinball with a pistol
stuck in your belt.

I realized this one
night when I followed Belbo's gaze and saw Lorenza Pellegrini at
the machine. Or, rather, when I later read one of his files.
Lorenza isn't named, but it's obviously about her. She was the only
one who played pinball like that.

FILENAME:
Pinball

You don't play pinball
with just your hands, you play it with the groin too. The pinball
problem is not to stop the ball before it's swallowed by the mouth
at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a halfback. The
problem is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are more
numerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering,
confused, delirious, but still a free agent. And you achieve this
not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to the case,
the frame, but gently, so the machine won't catch on and say Tilt.
You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the hips that
makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this
side of an orgasm. And if the hips move according to nature, it's
the buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so
that when the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as in
homeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more the
drug dissolves in the water added gradually, until the drug has
almost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective and
potent it is. Thus from the groin an infinitesimal pulse is
transmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball moves
against nature, against inertia, against gravity, against the laws
of dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, who
wanted it disobedient. The ball is intoxicated with vis movendi,
remaining in play for memorable and immemorial lengths of time. But
a female groin is required, one that interposes no spongy body
between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no erectile
matter in between, only skin, nerves, padded bone sheathed in a
pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a
disinterested adaptability to the partner's response, a taste for
arousing desire without suffering the excess of one's own: the
Amazon must drive the pinball crazy and savor the thought that she
will then abandon it.

That, I believe, was
when Belbo fell in love with Lorenza Pellegrini: when he realized
that she could promise him an unattainable happiness. But I also
believe it was through her that he began to be aware of the erotic
nature of automated universes, the machine as metaphor of the
cosmic body, the mechanical game as talismanic evocation. He was
already hooked on Abu-lafia and perhaps had entered, even then,
into the spirit of Project Hermes. Certainly he had seen the
Pendulum. Somehow, Lorenza Pellegrini held out the promise of the
Pendulum.

I had trouble
readjusting to Pilade's. Little by little, but not every evening,
in the forest of alien faces, I was rediscovering familiar ones,
the faces of survivors, though they were blurred by my effort of
recognition. This one was a copywriter in an advertising agency;
this one, a tax consultant; and this one sold books on the
installment plan¡Xin the old days he peddled the works of Che, but
now he was offering herbals, Buddhism, astrology. They had gained a
little weight and some gray in their hair, but I felt that the
Scotch-on-the-rocks in their hands was the same one they had held
ten years ago. They were sipping slowly, one drop every six
months.

"What are you up to? Why
don't you come by and see us?" one of them asked me.

"Who's M*
nowadays?"

He looked at me as if
I'd been away for a century. "The Cultural Commission at City Hall,
of course."

I had skipped too many
beats.

I decided to invent a
job for myself. I knew a lot of things, unconnected things, but I
wanted to be able to connect them after a few hours at a library. I
once thought it was necessary to have a theory, and that my problem
was that I didn't. But nowadays all you needed was information;
everybody was greedy for information, especially if it was out of
date. I dropped in at the university, to see if I could fit in
somewhere. The lecture halls were quiet; the students glided along
the corridors like ghosts, lending one another badly made
bibliographies. I knew how to make a good bibliography.

One day, a doctoral
candidate, mistaking me for faculty (the teachers now were the same
age as the students, or vice versa), asked me what this Lord
Chandos they were talking about in an economics course on cyclical
crises had written. I told him Chandos was a character in
Hofmannsthal, not an economist.

That same evening I was
at a party with old friends and recognized a man who worked for a
publisher. He had joined the staff after the firm had switched from
novels by French collaborationists to Albanian political texts.
They were still publishing political books, but with government
backing. And they didn't reject an occasional good work in
philosophy¡Xprovided it was in the classical line, he
added.

"By the way," he said to
me then, "since you're a philosopher¡X"

"Thanks, but
unfortunately I'm not."

"Come on, in your day
you knew everything. I was just looking over the translation of a
book on the crisis of Marxism, and I came across a quotation from
Anselm of Canterbury. Who's he? I couldn't even find him in the
Dictionary of Authors.'" I told him it was Anselmo d'Aosta, and
that only the English, who had to be different from everybody else,
called him Anselm of Canterbury.

A sudden illumination: I
had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation
agency, be a kind of private eye of learning.

Instead of sticking my
nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around
bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I'd
sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a
Dixie cup, the whiskey I'd brought up from the corner store in a
paper bag. The phone rings and a man says: "Listen, I'm translating
this book and came across something or someone called Motakallimun.
What the hell is it?"

Give me two days, I tell
him. Then I go to the library, flip through some card catalogs,
give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a
clue.

That evening I invite an
instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple
of beers and he drops his guard, gives me the lowdown for nothing.
I call the client back. "All right, the Motakallimun were radical
Moslem theologians at the time of Avicenna. They said the world was
a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes
only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If
God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would fall to
pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you?
The job took me three days. Pay what you think is fair."