Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (58 page)

List No. 5

6 undershirts

6 shorts

6
handkerchiefs

has always puzzled
scholars, principally because of the total absence of
socks.

¡XWoody Alien, "The
Metterling List," Getting Even, New York, Random House, 1966, p.
8

It was during those
days, no more than a month ago, that Lia decided a vacation would
do me good. "You look tired," she said. Maybe the Plan had worn me
out. For that matter, the baby, as its grandparents said, needed
clean air. Some friends lent us a house in the
mountains.

We didn't leave at once.
There were things to attend to in Milan, and Lia said that nothing
was more restful than taking a little vacation in the city when you
knew you'd soon be going off on your real vacation.

Now, for the first time,
I talked to Lia about the Plan. Until then she had been too busy
with the baby. She knew vaguely that Belbo, Diotallevi, and I were
working on some puzzle, and that it occupied whole days and nights,
but I hadn't said anything to her about it, not since the day she
preached me that sermon about the psychosis of resemblances. Maybe
I was ashamed.

I described the whole
Plan to her, down to the smallest details, and told her about
Diotallevi's illness, feeling guilty, as if I had done something
wrong. I tried to present the Plan for what it was: a display of
bravura.

Lia said: "Pow, I don't
like your story."

"It isn't
beautiful?"

"The sirens were
beautiful, too. Listen, what do you know about your
unconscious?''

"Nothing. I'm not even
sure I have one."

"There. Imagine that a
Viennese prankster, to amuse his friends, invented the whole
business of the id and Oedipus, and made up dreams he had never
dreamed and little Hanses he had never met... And what happened?
Millions of people were out there, all ready and waiting to become
neurotic in earnest. And thousands more ready to make money
treating them."

"Lia, you're
paranoid."

"Me? You!"

"Maybe we're both
paranoid, but you have to grant me this: we started with the Ingolf
document. It's natural, when one comes across a message of the
Templars, to want to decipher it. Maybe we exaggerated a little, to
make fun of the decipherers of messages, but there was a message to
begin with."

"All you know is what
that Ardenti told you, and from your own description he's an
out-and-out fraud. Anyway, I'd like to see this message for
myself.''

Nothing easier; I had it
in my files.

Lia took the paper,
looked at it front and back, wrinkled her nose, brushed the hair
from her eyes to see the first, the coded, part better. She said:
"Is that all?"

"Isn't it enough for
you?"

"More than enough. Give
me two days to think about it." When Lia asks for two days to think
about something, she's determined to show me I'm stupid. I always
accuse her of this, and she answers: "If I know you're stupid, that
means I love you even if you're stupid. You should feel
reassured."

For two days we didn't
mention the subject again. Anyway, she was almost always out of the
house. In the evening I watched her huddled in a corner, making
notes, tearing up one sheet of paper after another.

When we got to the
mountains, the baby scratched around all day in the grass, Lia
fixed supper, and ordered me to eat, because I was thin as a rail.
After supper, she asked me to fix her a double whiskey with lots of
ice and only a splash of soda. She lit a cigarette, which she does
only at important moments, told me to sit down, and then
explained.

"Listen carefully, Pow,
because I'm going to demonstrate toyou that the simplest
explanation is always the best. Colonel Ardenti told you Ingolf
found a message in Provins. I don't doubt that at all. Yes, Ingolf
went down into the well and really did find a case with this text
in it," and she tapped the French lines with her finger. "We are
not told that he found a case studded with diamonds. All the
colonel said was that according to Ingolf's notes the case was
sold. And why not? It was an antique; he may have made a little
cash, but we are not told that he lived off the proceeds for the
rest of his life. He must have had a small inheritance from his
father."

"And why should the case
be ordinary?"

"Because the message is
ordinary. It's a laundry list. Come on, let's read it
again."

a la... Saint
Jean

36 p charrete de
fein

6"...entiers avec
saiel

p... les blancs
mantiax

r...s... chevaliers de
Pruins pour la... j. nc

6foiz 6 en 6
places

chascune foiz 20 a...120
a...

iceste est
I'ordonation

al donjon li
premiers

it li secunz joste iceus
qui... pans

it al refuge

it a Nostre Dame d I
¡¥altre part d I ¡¥iau

it a I ¡¥ostel des
popelicans

it a la
pierre

3 foiz 6 avant la
feste... la Grant Pute.

"A laundry
list?"

"For God's sake, didn't
it ever occur to you to consult a tourist guide, a brief history of
Provins? You discover immediately that the Grange-aux-Dimes, where
the message was found, was a gathering place for merchants. Provins
was a center for fairs in Champagne. And the Grange is on rue
St.-Jean. In Provins they bought and sold everything, but lengths
of cloth were particularly popular, draps¡Xor dras, as they wrote
it then¡Xand every length was marked by a guarantee, a kind of
seal. The second most important product of Provins was roses, red
roses that the Crusaders had brought from Syria. They were so
famous that when Edmund of Lancaster married Blanche d'Artois and
took the title Comte de Champagne, he added the red rose of Provins
to his coat of arms. Hence, too, the war of the roses, because the
House of York had a white rose as its symbol."

"Who told you all
this?"

"A little book of two
hundred pages published by the Tourist Bureau of Provins. I found
it at the French Center. But that's not all. In Provins there's a
fort known as the Donjon, which speaks for itself, and there is a
Porte-aux-Pains, an Eglise du Refuge, various churches dedicated to
Our Lady of this and that, a rue de la Pierre-Ronde, where there
was a pierre de cens, a stone on which the count's subjects set the
coins of their tithes. And then a rue des Blancs-Manteaux and a
street called de la Grand-Pute-Muce, for reasons not hard to guess.
It was a street of brothels."

"And what about the
popelicans?"

"In Provins there had
been some Cathars, who later were duly burned, and the grand
inquisitor himself was a converted Cathar, Robert le Bougre. So it
is hardly strange that a street or an area should be called the
place of the Cathars even if the Cathars weren't there
anymore."

"Still, in
1344..."

"But who said this
document dates from 1344? Your colonel read ¡¥36 years after the
hay wain,' but in those days a p made in a certain way, with a
tail, meant post, but a p without the tail meant pro. The author of
this text is an ordinary merchant who made some notes on business
transacted at the Grange, or, rather, on the rue St.-Jean¡Xnot on
the night of Saint Jean¡Xand he recorded a price of thirty-six
sous, or crowns, or whatever denomination it was for one or each
wagon of hay.''

"And the hundred and
twenty years?"

"Who said anything about
years? Ingolf found something he transcribed as ¡¥120 a'...What is
an ¡¥a'? I checked a list of the abbreviations used in those days
and found that for denier or dinarium odd signs were used; one
looks like a delta, another looks like a theta, a circle broken on
the left. If you write it carelessly and in haste, as a busy
merchant might, a fanatic like Colonel Ardenti could take it for an
a, having already read somewhere the story of the one hundred and
twenty years. You know where better than I. He could have read it
in any history of the Rosicrucians. The point is, he wanted to find
something resembling ¡¥post 120 annos patebo.' And then what does
he do? He finds ¡¥it' repeated several times and he reads it as
iterum. But the abbreviation for iterum was itm, whereas ¡¥it'
means item, which means likewise, and is in fact used for
repetitious lists. Our merchant is calculating how much he's going
to make on the orders he's received, and he's listing the
deliveries he has to make. He has to deliver some bouquets of roses
of Provins, and that's the meaning of ¡¥r...s...chevaliers de
Pruins.' And where the colonel read ¡¥vainjance' (because he had
the kadosch knights on his mind), you should read ¡¥jonchee.' The
roses were used to make either hats or floral carpets on feast
days. So here is how your Provins message should read:

"In Rue Saint
Jean:

36 sous for wagons of
hay.

Six new lengths of cloth
with seal

to rue des
Blancs-Manteaux.

Crusaders' roses to make
a jonchee:

six bunches of six in
the six following places,

each 20 deniers, making
120 deniers in all.

Here is the
order:

the first to the
Fort

item the second to those
in Porte-aux-Pains

item to the Church of
the Refuge

item to the Church
ofNotre Dame, across the river

item to the old building
of the Cathars

item to rue de la
Pierre-Ronde.

And three bunches of six
before the feast, in the whores' street.

"Because they, too, poor
things, maybe wanted to celebrate the feast day by making
themselves nice little hats of roses." "My God," I said. "I think
you're right." "Of course I'm right. It's a laundry list, I tell
you." , "Wait a minute. This may very well be a laundry list, but
the first message really is in code, and it talks about thirty-six
invisibles."

"True. The French text I
polished off in an hour, but the other one kept me busy for two
days. I had to examine Trithemius, at both the Ambrosiana and the
Trivulziana, and you know what the librarians there are like:
before they let you put your hands on an old book, they look at you
as if you were planning to eat it. But the first message, too, is a
simple matter. You should have discovered this yourself. To begin
with, are you sure that ¡¥Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes'
is in the same French as our merchant's? Yes; this expression was
used in a seventeenth-century pamphlet, when the Rosicrucians
appeared in Paris. But then you reasoned the way your Diabolicals
do: If the message is encoded according to the method of
Trithemius, it means that Trithemius copied from the Templars, and
since it quotes a sentence that was current in Rosicrucian circles,
it means that the plan attributed to the Rosicrucians was none
other than the plan of the Templars. Try reversing the argument, as
any sensible person would: Since the message is written in
Tri-themius's code, it was written after Trithemius, and since it
quotes an expression that circulated among the seventeenth-century
Rosicrucians, it was written after the seventeenth century. So, at
this point, what is the simplest hypothesis? Ingolf finds the
Provins message. Since, like the colonel, he's an enthusiast of
hermetic messages, he sees thirty-six and one hundred and twenty
and thinks immediately of the Rosicrucians. And since he's also an
enthusiast of cryptography, he amuses himself by putting the
Provins message into code, as an exercise. So he translates his
fine Rosicrucian sentence using a Trithemius
cryptosystem."

"An ingenious
explanation. But it's no more valid than the colonel's."

"So far, no. But suppose
you make one conjecture, then a second and a third, and they all
support one another. Already you're more confident that you're on
the right track, aren't you? I began with the suspicion that the
words used by Ingolf were not the ones taken from Trithemius.
They're in the same cabalistic Assyro-Babylonian style, but they're
not the same. Yet, if Ingolf had wanted words beginning with the
letters that interested him, in Trithemius he could have found as
many as he liked. Why didn't he use those words?" "Well, why didn't
he?"

"Maybe he needed
specific letters also in the second, third, and fourth positions.
Maybe our ingenious Ingolf wanted a multicoded message; maybe he
wanted to be smarter than Trithemius. Trithemius suggests forty
major cryptosystems: in one, only the initial letters count; in
another, the first and third letters; in another, every other
initial letter, and so on, until, with a little I effort, you can
invent a hundred more systems on your own. As I for the ten minor
cry ptosy stems, the colonel considered only the first wheel, which
is the easiest. But the following ones work on the principle of the
second wheel. Here's a copy of it for you. Imagine that the inner
circle is mobile and you can turn it so that the letter A coincides
with any letter of the outer circle. You will have one system where
A is written as X, another where A is U, and so on... With
twenty-two letters on each circle, you can produce not ten but
twenty-one cryptosystems. The twenty-second is no good, because
there A is A..."