Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (65 page)

But Kelley did not
speak. He was trying to detach himself from the medium, who now
yelled as if his bowels were being torn. The medium struggled to
take back what he had produced, clawing the air. "Kelley, earless
Kelley, don't cheat again," Madame Olcott cried. Kelley, unable to
separate himself from the medium, was now trying to smother him,
turning into a kind of chewing gum, from which the last Fox brother
was unable to extricate himself. Theo, too, sank to his knees,
choking, entangled in the parasite blob that was devouring him; he
rolled and writhed as if enveloped in flame. The thing that had
been Kelley covered him like a shroud, then melted, liquefied,
leaving Theo on the floor, the drained, gutted mummy of a child
embalmed by Salon. At that same moment, the four dancers stopped as
one, flailed their arms¡Xdrowning men, sinking like stones-then
crouched, whined like puppies, and covered their heads with their
hands.

Aglie had returned to
the ambulatory. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the little
handkerchief that adorned his breast pocket, took two deep breaths,
and put a white pill in his mouth. Then he called for
silence.

"Brother knights. You
have seen the cheap tricks this woman inflicts on us. Let us regain
our composure and return to my proposal. Give me one hour with the
prisoner in private."

Madame Olcott,
oblivious, bent over her mediums, was stricken with an almost human
grief. But Pierre, who had followed everything and was still seated
on the throne, resumed control of the situation. "Non," he said.
"There is only one means: le sacrifice humain! Give to me the
prisoner."

Galvanized by his
energy, the giants of Avalon grabbed Belbo, who had watched the
scene in a daze, and thrust him before Pierre, who, with the
agility of an acrobat, jumped up, put the chair on the table, and
pushed both giants to the center of the choir. He grabbed the wire
of the Pendulum as it went by and stopped the sphere, staggering
under the recoil. It took barely an instant. As if the thing had
been prearranged¡Xand perhaps, during the confusion, some signals
had been exchanged¡Xthe giants climbed up on the table and hoisted
Belbo onto the chair. One giant wrapped the wire of the Pendulum
twice around Bel-bo's neck, and the other held the sphere, then set
it at the edge of the table.

Bramanti rushed to this
makeshift gallows, flashing with majesty in his scarlet cloak, and
chanted: "Exorcizo igitur te per Pentagrammaton, et in nomine
Tetragrammaton, per Alfa et Omega qui sunt in spiritu Azoth.
Saddai, Adonai, Jotchavah, Eieazereie! Michael, Gabriel, Raphael,
Anael. Fluat Udor per spiritum Eloim! Maneat Terra per Adam
lot-Cavah! Per Samael Zebaoth et in nomine Eloim Gibor, veni
Adramelech! Vade retro Lilith!"

Belbo stood straight on
the chair, the wire around his neck. The giants no longer had to
restrain him. If he took one step in any direction, he would fall
from that shaky perch, and the noose, tightening, would strangle
him.

"Fools!" Aglie shouted.
"How will we put it back on its axis now?" He was concerned for the
safety of the Pendulum.

Bramanti smiled. "Do not
worry, Count. We are not mixing your dyes here. This is the
Pendulum, as They conceived it. It will know where to go. And to
convince a Force to act, there is nothing better than a human
sacrifice."

Until that moment, Belbo
had trembled. But now I saw him relax. He looked at the audience, I
will not say with confidence, but with curiosity. I believe that,
hearing the argument between the two adversaries, seeing before him
the contorted bodies of the mediums, the dervishes still jerking
and moaning to the side, the rumpled vestments of the dignitaries,
Belbo recovered his most genuine gift: his sense of the
ridiculous.

I believe that at that
moment he decided not to allow himself to be frightened anymore.
Perhaps his elevated position gave him a sense of superiority, as
if he were watching, from a stage, that gathering of lunatics
locked in a Grand Guignol feud, and at the sides, almost to the
entrance, the little monsters, now uninterested in the action,
nudging each other and giggling, like Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio
Bo.

He only turned an
anxious eye toward Lorenza, as the giants again grasped her arms.
Jolted, she came to her senses. She began crying.

Perhaps Belbo was
reluctant to let her witness his emotion, or perhaps he decided
instead that this was the only way he could show his contempt for
that crowd, but he held himself erect, head high, chest bared,
hands bound behind his back, like a man who had never known
fear.

Calmed by Belbo's calm,
resigned to the interruption of the Pendulum, but still eager to
know the secret after a lifetime's search (or many lifetimes), and
also in order to regain control over his followers, Aglie addressed
him again: "Come, Belbo, make up your mind. As you can see, you are
in a situation that, to say the least, is awkward. Stop this
playacting."

Belbo didn't answer. He
looked away, as if politely to avoid overhearing a conversation he
had chanced upon.

Aglie insisted,
conciliatory, paternal: "I understand your irritation, your
reserve. How it must revolt you to confide an intimate and precious
secret to a rabble that has just offered such an unedifying
spectacle! Very well, you may confide your secret to me alone,
whispering it in my ear. Now I will have you taken down, and I know
you will tell me a word, a single word."

Belbo said: "You think
so?"

Then Aglie changed his
tone. I saw him imperious as never before, sacerdotal, hieratic. He
spoke as if he had on one of the Egyptian vestments worn by his
colleagues. But the note was false; he seemed to be parodying those
whom he had always treated with indulgent commiseration. At the
same time, he spoke with the full assumption of his authority. For
some purpose of his own¡Xbecause this couldn't have been
unintentional¡Xhe was introducing an element of melodrama. If he
was acting, he acted well: Belbo seemed unaware of any deception,
listening to Aglie as if he had expected nothing else from
him.

"Now you will speak,"
Aglie said. "You will speak, and you will join this great game. If
you remain silent, you are lost. If you speak, you will share in
the victory. For truly I say this to you: this night you and I and
all of us are in Hod, the Sefirah of splendor, majesty, and glory;
Hod, which governs ritual and ceremonial magic; Hod, the moment
when the curtain of eternity is parted. I have dreamed of this
moment for centuries. You will speak, and you will join the only
ones who will be entitled, after your revelation, to declare
themselves Masters of the World. Humble yourself, and you will be
exalted. You will speak because I order you to speak, and my words
efficiunt quod figurant!"

And Belbo, now
invincible, said, "Ma gavte la nata..."

Aglie, even if he was
expecting a refusal, blanched at the insult.

"What did he say?"
Pierre asked, hysterical.

"He will not speak,"
Aglie roughly translated. He lifted his arms in a gesture of
surrender, of obedience, and said to Bra-manti: " He is
yours.''

And Pierre said,
transported: "Assez, assez, le sacrifice hu-main, le sacrifice
humain!"

"Yes, let him die. We'll
find the answer anyway," cried Madame Olcott, equally carried away,
as she now returned to the scene, rushing toward Belbo.

At the same time,
Lorenza moved. She freed herself from the giants' grasp and stood
before Belbo, at the foot of the gallows, her arms opened wide, as
if to stop an invading army. In tears, she exclaimed: "Are you all
crazy? You can't do this!"

Aglie, who was
withdrawing, stood rooted to the spot for a moment, then ran to
her, to restrain her.

What happened next took
only seconds. Madame Olcott's knot of hair came undone; all rancor
and flames, like a Medusa, she bared her talons, scratched at
Aglie's face, shoved him aside with the force of the momentum of
her leap. Aglie fell back, stumbled over a leg of the brazier, spun
around like a dervish, and banged his head against a machine; he
sank to the ground, his face covered with blood. Pierre, meanwhile,
flung himself on Lorenza, drawing the dagger from the sheath on his
chest as he moved, but he blocked my view, so I didn't see what
happened. Then I saw Lorenza slumped at Belbo's feet, her face
waxen, and Pierre, holding up the red blade, shouted: "Enfin, le
sacrifice humain!" Turning toward the nave, he said in a loud
voice: "I'a Cthulhu! I'a S'ha-t'n!"

In a body, the horde in
the nave moved forward: some fell and were swept aside; others,
pushing, threatened to topple Cug-not's car. I heard¡XI must have
heard it, I can't have imagined such a grotesque detail¡Xthe voice
of Garamond saying: "Gentlemen, please! Manners!..." Bramanti, in
ecstasy, was kneeling by Lorenza's body, declaiming: "Asar, Asar!
Who is clutching me by the throat? Who is pinning me to the ground?
Who is stabbing my heart? I am unworthy to cross the threshold of
the house of Maat!"

Perhaps no one intended
it, perhaps the sacrifice of Lorenza was to have sufficed, but the
acolytes were now pressing inside the magic circle, which was made
accessible by the immobility of the Pendulum, and someone¡XArdenti,
I think¡Xwas hurled by the others against the table, which
literally disappeared from beneath Belbo's feet. It skidded away,
and, thanks to the same push, the Pendulum began a rapid, violent
swing, taking its victim with it. The wire, pulled by the weight of
the sphere, tightened around the neck of my poor friend, yanked him
into the air, and he swung above and with the Pendulum, swung
toward the eastern extremity of the choir, then returned, I hoped
without life, in my direction.

Trampling one another,
the crowd drew back, retreated to the edges of the semicircle, to
allow room for the wonder. The man in charge of the oscillation,
intoxicated by the rebirth of the Pendulum, supplied pushes
directly on the hanged man's body. The axis of motion made a
diagonal from my eyes to one of the windows, no doubt the window
with the colorless spot through which, in a few hours, the first
ray of the rising sun would fall. Therefore, I did not see Belbo
swing in front of me, but this, I believe, was the pattern he drew
in space...

His head seemed a second
sphere, trapped in the loops of the wire that stretched from the
center of the keystone; and when the metal sphere tilted to the
right, Belbo's head tilted to the left, and vice versa. For most of
the long swing, the two spheres tended in opposite directions, one
on either side of the wire, so what cleaved the air was no longer a
single line, but a kind of triangular structure. And, while Belbo's
head followed the pull of the wire, his body¡Xat first in its final
spasms, then with the disarticulated agility of a wooden
marionette, arm here, leg there¡Xdescribed other arcs in the void,
arcs independent of the head, the wire, and the sphere beneath. I
had the thought that if someone were to photograph the scene using
Muybridge's system¡Xfixing on the plate every moment as a
succession of positions, recording the two extreme points the head
reached in each period, the two rest points of the sphere, the
points of intersection of the wire with time, independent of both
head and sphere, and the intermediary points marked by the plane of
oscillation of the trunk and legs¡XBelbo hanged from the Pendulum
would have drawn, in space, the tree of the Sefirot, summing up in
his final moment the vicissitude of all universes, fixing forever
in his motion the ten stages of the mortal exhalation and
defecation of the divine in the world.

Then, as the Mandrake in
tails continued to encourage that funereal swing, Belbo's body,
through a grisly addition and cancellation of vectors, a migration
of energies, suddenly became immobile, and the wire and the sphere
moved, but only from his body down; the rest¡Xwhich connected Belbo
with the vault-now remained perpendicular. Thus Belbo had escaped
the error of the world and its movements, had now become, himself,
the point of suspension, the Fixed Pin, the Place from which the
vault of the world is hung, while beneath his feet the wire and the
sphere went on swinging, from pole to pole, without peace, the
earth slipping away under them, showing always a new continent. The
sphere could not point out, nor would it ever know, the location of
the World's Navel.

As the pack of
Diabolicals, dazed for a moment in the face of this portent, began
to yowl again, I told myself that the story was now finished. If
Hod is the Sefirah of glory, Belbo had had glory. A single fearless
act had reconciled him with the Absolute.

The ideal pendulum
consists of a very thin wire, which will not hinder flexion and
torsion, of length L, with the weight attached to its bary-center.
For a sphere, the barycenter is the center; for the human body, it
is a point 0.65 of the height, measured from the feet. If the
hanged man is 1.70m tall, his barycenter is located 1.10m from his
feet, and the length L includes this distance. In other words, if
the distance from the man's head to neck is 0.60m, the barycenter
is 1.70 - 1.10 = 0.60m from his head, and 0.60 - 0.30 = 0.30m from
his neck.

As for a double
pendulum, one with two weights attached to the same wire...If you
shift A, A oscillates; then after a while it stops and B will
oscillate. If the paired weights are different or if their lengths
are different, the energy passes from one to the other, but the
periods of these oscillations will not be equal... This
eccentricity of movement also occurs if, instead of beginning to
make A oscillate freely by setting it in motion, you apply a force
to the system already in motion. That is to say, if the wind blows
in gusts onjhe hanged man in asynchronous fashion, after a while,
the hanged man will become motionless and his gallows will
oscillate as if its fulcrum were the hanged man.

¡XFrom a private letter
of Mario Salvador!, Columbia University, 1984

Having nothing more to
learn in that place, I took advantage of the melee to reach the
statue of Gramme.

The pedestal was still
open. I entered, went down a narrow ladder, and found myself on a
small landing illuminated by a light bulb, where a spiral stone
staircase began. At the end of this, I came to a dim passage with a
higher, vaulted ceiling. At first I didn't realize where I was, and
couldn't identify the source of the rippling sound I heard. Then my
eyes adjusted: I was in a sewer, with a handrail that kept me from
falling into the water but not from inhaling an awesome stink, half
chemical, half organic. At least something in our story was true:
the sewers of Paris, of Colbert, Fantomas, Caus.

I followed the biggest
conduit, deciding against the darker ones that branched off, and
hoped that some sign would tell me where to end my subterranean
flight. In any case, I was escaping, far from the Conservatoire,
and compared to that kingdom of darkness the Paris sewers were
relief, freedom, clean air, light.

I carried with me a
single image, the hieroglyph traced in the choir by Belbo's corpse.
What was that symbol? To what other symbol did it correspond? I
couldn't figure it out. I know now it was a law of physics, but
this knowledge only makes the phenomenon more symbolic. Here, now,
in Belbo's country house, among his many notes, I found a letter
from someone who, replying to a question of his, told him how a
pendulum works, and how it would behave if a second weight were
hung elsewhere along the length of its wire. So Belbo¡XGod knows
for how long¡Xhad been thinking of the Pendulum as both a Sinai and
a Calvary. He hadn't died as the victim of a Plan of recent
manufacture; he had prepared his death much earlier, in his
imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he,
was planning the reality of that death.

Somehow, losing, Belbo
had won. Or does he who devotes himself to this single way of
winning then lose all? He loses all if he does not understand that
the victory is a different victory. But on that Saturday evening I
hadn't yet discovered this.

I went along the tunnel,
mindless, like Postel, perhaps lost in the same darkness, and
suddenly I saw the sign. A brighter lamp, attached to the wall,
showed me another ladder, temporary, leading to a wooden trapdoor.
I tried it, and I found myself in a basement filled with empty
bottles, then a corridor with two toilets, a little man on one
door, a little woman on the other. I was in the world of the
living.

I stopped, breathless.
Only then did I remember Lorenza. Now I was crying. But she was
slipping away, leaving my bloodstream, as if she had never existed.
I couldn't even see her face. In that world of the dead, she was
the most dead.

At the end of the
corridor I came to another stairway, a door. I entered a smoky,
evil-smelling place, a tavern, a bistro, an Oriental bar, black
waiters, sweating customers, greasy skewers, and mugs of beer. I
appeared, like an ordinary customer who had gone to urinate and
returned. Nobody noticed me. Perhaps the man at the cash desk,
seeing me arrive from the back, gave me an almost imperceptible
signal, narrowing his eyes as if to say: Yes, I understand, go
ahead, I haven't seen a thing.