Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (69 page)

For this reason, Jacopo
stood fast, ignoring even the fall of the shell cases now rolling
at his feet; nor did he put his trumpet back at his side, but kept
it to his lips, fingers on the valves, rigid at attention, the
instrument aimed diagonally upward. He played on.

His long final note had
never broken off: inaudible to those present, it still issued from
the bell of the trumpet, like a light breath, a gust of air that he
kept sending into the mouthpiece, holding his tongue between barely
parted lips, without pressing them to the metal. The instrument,
not resting on his face, remained suspended by the tension alone in
his elbows and shoulders.

He continued holding
that virtual note, because he felt he was playing out a string that
kept the sun in place. The planet had been arrested in its course,
had become fixed in a noon that could last an eternity. And it all
depended on Jacopo, because if he broke that contact, dropped that
string, the sun would fly off like a balloon, and with it this day
and the event of this day, this action without transition, this
sequence without before and after, which was unfolding, motionless,
only because it was in his power to will it thus.

If he stopped, stopped
to attack a new note, a rent would have been heard, far louder than
the volleys that had deafened him, and the clocks would all resume
their tachycardial palpitation.

Jacopo wished with his
whole soul that this man beside him would not order Taps. I could
refuse, he said to himself, and stay like this forever.

He had entered that
trance state that overwhelms the diver when he tries not to
surface, wanting to prolong the inertia that allows him to glide
along the-ocean floor. Trying to express what he felt then, Belbo,
in the notebook I was now reading, resorted to broken, twisted,
unsyntactical sentences, mutilated by rows of dots. But it was
clear to me that in that moment¡Xthough he didn't come out and say
it¡Xin that moment he was possessing Cecilia.

The fact is that Jacopo
Belbo did not understand, not then and not later, when he was
writing of his unconscious self, that at that moment he was
celebrating once and for all his chemical wedding¡Xwith Cecilia,
with Lorenza, with Sophia, with the earth and with the sky. Alone
among mortals, he was bringing to a conclusion the Great
Work.

No one had yet told him
that the Grail is a chalice but also a spear, and his trumpet
raised like a chalice was at the same time a weapon, an instrument
of the sweetest dominion, which shot toward the sky and linked the
earth with the Mystic Pole. With the only Fixed Point in the
universe. With what he created, for that one instant, with his
breath.

Diotallevi had not yet
told him how you can dwell in Yesod, the Sefirah of foundation, the
sign of the superior bow drawn to send arrows to Malkhut, its
target. Yesod is the drop that springs from the arrow to produce
the tree and the fruit, it is the anima mundi, the moment in which
virile force, procreating, binds all the states of being
together.

Knowing how to spin this
Cingulum Veneris means knowing how to repair the error of the
Demiurge.

You spend a life seeking
the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the
moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It will
not return, but it was¡Xfull, dazzling, generous as every
revelation.

That day, Jacopo Belbo
stared into the eyes of Truth. The only truth that was to be
granted him. Because¡Xhe would learn¡X truth is brief (afterward,
it is all commentary). So he tried to arrest the rush of
time.

He didn't understand.
Not as a child. Not as an adolescent when he was writing about it.
Not as a man who decided to give up writing about it.

I understood it this
evening: the author has to die in order for the reader to become
aware of his truth.

The Pendulum, which
haunted Jacopo Belbo all his adult life, had been¡Xlike the lost
addresses of his dream¡Xthe symbol of that other moment, recorded
and then repressed, when he truly touched the ceiling of the world.
But that moment, in which he froze space and time, shooting his
Zeno's arrow, had been no symbol, no sign, symptom, allusion,
metaphor, or enigma: it was what it was. It did not stand for
anything else. At that moment there was no longer any deferment,
and the score was settled.

Jacopo Belbo didn't
understand that he had had his moment and that it would have to be
enough for him, for all his life. Not recognizing it, he spent the
rest of his days seeking something else, until he damned himself.
But perhaps he suspected this. Otherwise he wouldn't have returned
so often to the memory of the trumpet. But he remembered it as a
thing lost, not as a thing possessed.

I believe, I hope, I
pray that as he was dying, swaying with the Pendulum, Jacopo Belbo
finally understood this, and found peace.

Then Taps was ordered.
But Jacopo would have stopped in any case, because his breath was
failing. He broke the contact, then blared a single note, high,
with a decrescendo, tenderly, to prepare the world for the
melancholy that lay in store.

The commander said,
"Bravo, young fellow. Run along now. Handsome trumpet."

The provost slipped
away, the partisans made for a rear gateway where their vehicles
awaited them, the gravediggers went off after filling the graves.
Jacopo was the last to go. He couldn't bring himself to leave that
place of happiness.

In the yard below, the
pickup truck of the parish hall was gone.

Jacopo asked himself why
Don Tico had abandoned him like this. From a distance in time, the
most probable answer is that there had been a misunderstanding;
someone had told Don Tico that the partisans would bring the boy
back down. But Jacopo at that moment thought¡Xand not without
reason¡Xthat between Assembly and Taps too many centuries had
passed. The boys had waited until their hair turned white, until
death, until their dust scattered to form the haze that now was
turning the expanse of hills blue before his eyes.

He was alone. Behind
him, an empty cemetery. In his hands, the trumpet. Before him, the
hills fading, bluer and bluer, one behind the other, into an
infinity of humps. And, vindictive, over his head, the liberated
sun.

He decided to
cry.

But suddenly the hearse
appeared, with its Automedon decorated like a general of the
emperor, all cream and silver and black, the horses decked with
barbaric masks that left only their eyes visible, caparisoned like
coffins, the little twisted columns that supported the
Assyro-Greco-Egyptian tympanum all white and gold. The man with the
cocked hat stopped a moment by the solitary trumpeter, and Jacopo
asked: "Will you take me home?"

The man smiled. Jacopo
climbed up beside him on the box, and so it was on a hearse that he
began his return to the world of the living. That off-duty Charon,
taciturn, urged his funereal chargers down the slopes, as Jacopo
sat erect and hieratic, the trumpet clutched under his arm, his
visor shining, absorbed in his new, unhoped-for role.

They descended, and at
every curve a new view opened up, of vines blue with verdigris in
dazzling light, and after an incalculable time they arrived in ***.
They crossed the big square, all arcades, deserted as only
Monferrato squares can be deserted at two o'clock on a Sunday
afternoon. A schoolmate at the corner saw Jacopo on the hearse, the
trumpet under his arm, eyes fixed on infinity, and gave him an
admiring wave.

Jacopo went home,
wouldn't eat anything, wouldn't tell anything. He huddled on the
terrace and began playing the trumpet as if it had a mute, blowing
softly so as not to disturb the silence of the siesta.

His father joined him
and, guilelessly, with the serenity of one who knows the laws of
life, said: "In a month, if all goes as it should, we'll be going
home. You can't play the trumpet in the city. Our landlord would
evict us. So you'll have to forget that. If you really like music,
we'll have you take piano lessons." And then, seeing the boy with
moist eyes, he added: "Come now, silly. Don't you realize the bad
days are over?"

The next day, Jacopo
returned the trumpet to Don Tico Two weeks later, the family left
***, to rejoin the future.

"But that which seems to
me should be deplored is the fact that I see some senseless and
foolish idolaters who no more imitate the excellence of the cult of
Egypt, than the shadow approaches the nobility of the body, and who
seek Divinity, for which they have no reason whatsoever, in the
excrements of dead and inanimate things. These idolaters,
nevertheless, mock not only those of us who are divine and
sagacious worshipers but also those of us who are reputed to be
beasts. And what is worse, with this they triumph by seeing their
mad rites in so great repute..."

"Let not this trouble
you, oh Momus," said Isis, "because fate has ordained the
vicissitude of shadows and light." "But the evil," answered Momus,
"is that they hold for certain that they are in the
light."

¡XGiordano Bruno, The
Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Third Dialogue, Second Part,
translated by Arthur D. Imerti, Rutgers University Press, 1964, p.
236

I should be at peace. I
have understood. Don't some say that peace comes when you
understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that
peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood,
enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and triumph, the end of
effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the
parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it
perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of
the whys...

I should be at peace.
From the window of Uncle Carlo's study I look at the hill, and the
little slice of rising moon. The Bricco's broad hump, the more
tempered ridges of the hills in the background tell the story of
the slow and drowsy stirrings of Mother Earth, who stretches and
yawns, making and unmaking blue plains in the dread flash of a
hundred volcanoes. The Earth turned in her sleep and traded one
surface for another. Where ammonoids once fed, diamonds. Where
diamonds once grew, vineyards. The logic of the moraine, of the
landslip, of the avalanche. Dislodge one pebble, by chance, it
becomes restless, rolls down, in its descent leaves space (ah,
horror vacui!), another pebble falls on top of it, and there's
height. Surfaces. Surfaces upon surfaces. The wisdom of the Earth.
And of Lia.

Why doesn't
understanding give me peace? Why love Fate if Fate kills you just
as dead as Providence or the Plot of the Archons? Perhaps I haven't
understood, after all; perhaps I am missing one piece of the
puzzle, one space.

Where have I read that
at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely
encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the
power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how
it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest
wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late.
You understand everything when there is no longer anything to
understand.

Now I know what the Law
of the Kingdom is, of poor, desperate, tattered Malkhut, where
Wisdom has gone into exile, groping to recover its former lucidity.
The truth of Malkhut, the only truth that shines in the night of
the Sefirot, is that Wisdom is revealed naked in Malkhut, and its
mystery lies not in existence but in the leaving of existence.
Afterward, the Others begin again.

And, with the others,
the Diabolicals, seeking abysses where the secret of their madness
lies hidden.

Along the Bricco's
slopes are rows and rows of vines. I know them, I have seen similar
rows in my day. No doctrine of numbers can say if they are in
ascending or descending order. In the midst of the rows¡Xbut you
have to walk barefoot, with your heels callused, from
childhood¡Xthere are peach trees. Yellow peaches that grow only
between rows of vines. You can split a peach with the pressure of
your thumb; the pit comes out almost whole, as clean as if it had
been chemically treated, except for an occasional bit of pulp,
white, tiny, clinging there like a worm. When you eat the peach,
the velvet of the skin makes shudders run from your tongue to your
groin. Dinosaurs once grazed here. Then another surface covered
theirs. And yet, like Belbo when he played the trumpet, when I bit
into the peach I understood the Kingdom and was one with it. The
rest is only cleverness. Invent; invent the Plan, Casaubon. That's
what everyone has done, to explain the dinosaurs and the
peaches.

I have understood. And
the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my
peace, my triumph. But I am here, and They are looking for me,
thinking I possess the revelation They sordidly desire. It isn't
enough to have understood, if others refuse and continue to
interrogate. They are looking for me, They must have picked up my
trail in Paris, They know I am here now, They still want the Map.
And when I tell Them that there is no Map, They will want it all
the more. Belbo was right. Fuck you, fool! You want to kill me?
Kill me, then, but I won't tell you there's no Map. If you can't
figure it out for yourself, tough shit.

It hurts me to think I
won't see Lia again, and the baby, the Thing, Giulio, my
philosopher's stone. But stones survive on their own. Maybe even
now he is experiencing his Opportunity. He's found a ball, an ant,
a blade of grass, and in it he sees paradise and the abyss. He,
too, will know it too late. He will be good; never mind, let him
spend his day like this, alone.

Damn. It hurts all the
same. Patience. When I'm dead, it won't hurt.

It's very late. I left
Paris this morning, I left too many clues. They've had time to
guess where I am. In a little while, They'll be here. I would have
liked to write down everything I thought today. But if They were to
read it, They would only derive another dark theory and spend
another eternity trying to decipher the secret message hidden
behind my words. It's impossible, They would say; he can't only
have been making fun of us. No. Perhaps, without his realizing it,
Being was sending us a message through its oblivion.

It makes no difference
whether I write or not. They will look for other meanings, even in
my silence. That's how They are. Blind to revelation. Malkhut is
Malkhut, and that's that.

But try telling Them.
They of little faith.

So I might as well stay
here, wait, and look at the hill. It's so beautiful.