Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (important books to read .txt) 📗

of crime, enfolded in a polar-bear fur, her longblond hair flowing from beneath the bold busby; her eyes haughty,sarcastic. With the usual fraud, I direct her toward herdestruction.

Ah, irony oflanguage¡Xthis gift nature has given us to keep silent the secretsof our spirit! The Daughter of Enlightenment falls victim toDarkness. I hear her spewing horrible curses, impenitent, asLuciano twists the knife three times in her heart. Dejavu....

* * *

It is the turn of Nilus,who for a moment thought to possess both the tsarina and the map.Filthy lewd monk, you wanted the Antichrist? He stands before you,but you do not know him. I send him on, blind, amid a thousandmystical flatteries, to the evil trap awaiting him. Luciano ripsopen his breast with a wound in the form of a cross, and he sinksinto eternal sleep.

* * *

I must overcome theancestral distrust in the last, the Elder of Zion, who claims to beAhasuerus, the Wandering Jew, immortal like me. He is suspicious ashe smiles unctuously, his beard still steeped in the blood of thetender Christian creatures he habitually slaughters in the cemeteryof Prague. But I will be as clever as a Rachkovsky, cleverer. Ihint that the coffer contains not only a map but also uncutdiamonds. I know the fascination uncut diamonds have for thisdeicide race. He approaches his destiny, dragged by his greed, andit is his own God, cruel and vengeful, that he curses as he dies,pierced like Hiram, but it is difficult for him to curse even now,because his God's name cannot be uttered.

* * *

In my delusion, Ithought I had concluded the Great Work.

As if struck by a gustof wind, once again the door opens, and a figure appears, a lividface, numbed fingers devoutly held to the chest, a hooded gaze: hecannot conceal his identity, for he wears the black habit of hisblack Society. A son of Loyola!

"Cre'tineau!" I cry,misled.

He raises his hand in ahypocritical gesture of benediction. "I am not I am that I am," hesays to me with a smile that contains nothing human.

It is true: this hasalways been the Jesuits' method. Sometimes they deny their ownexistence, and sometimes they proclaim the power of their order tointimidate the uninitiated.

"We are always otherthan what you think, sons of Belial," that seducer of sovereignssays now. "But you, O Saint-Germain...."

"How do you know who Ireally am?" I ask, alarmed.

He sneers. "We met inother times, when you tried to pull me away from the deathbed ofPostel, when under the name of Abbe d'Herblay I led you to end oneof your incarnations in the heart of the Bastille. (Oh, how I stillfeel on my face the iron mask to which the Society, with Colbert'shelp, had sentenced me!) We met when I spied on your secret talkswith d'Holbach and Condorcet..."

"Rodin!" I exclaim,thunderstruck.

"Yes, Rodin, the secretgeneral of the Jesuits! Rodin, whom you will not trick into fallingthrough the trapdoor, as you did with the others. Know this, OSaint-Germain: there is no crime, no evil machination that we didnot invent before you, to the greater glory of that God of ours whojustifies the means! How many crowned heads have we made tumbleinto the night that has no morning, or into snares more subtle, toachieve dominion over the world! And now, when we are within sightof the goal, you would prevent us from laying our rapacious handson the secret that for five centuries has moved the history of theworld?"

Rodin, speaking in thisway, becomes fearsome. All the bloodthirsty ambition, all theexecrable sacrilege that had smoldered in the breasts of theRenaissance popes, now appears on the brow of this son of Loyola. Isee clearly: an insatiable thirst for power stirs his impure blood,a burning sweat soaks him, a nauseating vapor spreads aroundhim.

How to strike this lastenemy? To my aid comes an unexpected intuition...an intuition thatcan come only to one from whom the human soul, for centuries, haskept no inviolable secret place.

"Look at me," I say. "I,too, am a Tiger."

With one move I thrustyou into the middle of the room, I rip from you your T-shirt, Itear the belt of the skin-tight armor that conceals the charms ofyour amber belly. Now, in the pale lights of the moon that seepsthrough the half-open door, you stand erect, more beautiful thanthe serpent that seduced Adam, haughty and lascivious, virgin andprostitute, clad only in your carnal power, because a naked womanis an armed woman.

The Egyptian klaftdescends over your thick hair, so black it seems blue; your breastthrobs beneath the filmy muslin. The gold uraeus, arched andstubborn, with emerald eyes, flashes on your head its triple tongueof ruby. And oh, your tunic of black gauze with silver glints, yourgirdle embroidered in sinister rainbows, with black pearls! Yourswelling pubis shaved so that for your lovers you are sleek as astatue! Your nipples gently touched by the brush of your Malabarslave girl, who has dipped it into the same carmine that bloodiesyour lips, inviting as a wound!

Rodin is now panting.The long abstinences of a life spent in a dream of power have onlyprepared him all the more for enslavement to uncontrollable desire.Faced by this queen, beautiful and shameless, her eyes black as theDevil's, her rounded shoulders, scented hair, white and tenderskin, Rodin is seized by the possibility of unknown caresses,ineffable voluptuousness; his flesh yearns as a sylvan god yearnswhen gazing on a naked nymph mirrored in the water that has alreadydoomed Narcissus. Against the light I see him stiffen, as onepetrified by Medusa, sculpted by the desire of a repressed virilitynow at its sunset. The obsessive flame of lust surges through hisbody; he is like an arrow aimed at its target, a bow drawn to thebreaking point.

Suddenly he falls to thefloor and crawls before this apparition, his hand extended like aclaw to implore a sip of balm. , "Oh, how beautiful you are," hegroans, "with those little vixen teeth that gleam when you partyour red and swollen lips....your green emerald eyes that flash,then fade...Oh, demon of lust!"

He's not all that wrong,the wretch, as you now move your hips, sheathed in their bluedenim, and thrust forward your groin