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

doorways, cracked andworn and leprous. The people here haven't moved for hundreds ofyears. Men with yellow cloaks. A square inhabited exclusively bytaxidermists. They appear only at night. They know the movableslab, the manhole through which you penetrate the MundusSubterraneus. In full view.

The Union deRecouvrement des Cotisation de Securite so-ciale et D'allocationsfamiliales de la Patellerie, number 75, apartment 1. A newdoor¡Xrich people must live there¡Xbut right next to it is an olddoor, peeling, like a door on Via Sincero Renato. Then, at number3, a door recently restored. Hylics alternating with pneumatics.The Masters and their slaves. Then planks nailed across what musthave been an arch. It's obvious; there was an occultist bookshophere and now it's gone. A whole block has been emptied. Evacuatedovernight. Like Aglie. They know someone knows; they are beginningto cover their tracks.

At the corner of rue deBirague, I see the line of arcades, infinite, without a livingsoul. I want darkness, not these yellow street lamps. I could cryout, but no one would hear me. Behind all the closed windows,through which not a thread of light escapes, the taxidermists intheir yellow smocks will snicker.

But no; between thearcades and the garden in the center are parked cars, and anoccasional shadow passes. A big Belgian shepherd crosses my path. Ablack dog alone in the night. Where is Faust? Did he send thefaithful Wagner out for a piss?

Wagner. That's the wordthat was churning in my mind without surfacing. Dr. Wagner: he'sthe one I need. He will be able to tell me that I'm raving, thatI've given flesh to ghosts, that none of it's true, Belbo's alive,and the Tres don't exist. What a relief it would be to learn thatI'm sick.

I abandon the square,almost running. I'm followed by a car. But maybe it's only lookingfor a parking place. I trip on a plastic garbage bag. The carparks. It didn't want me. I'm on rue Saint-Antoine. I look for ataxi. As if invoked, one passes.

I say to the driver:"Sept, Avenue Elisee-Reclus."

116

Je voudrais etre latour, pendre a la Tour Eiffel.

¡XBlaiseCendrars

I didn't know where 7,Avenue Elisee-Reclus was, and I didn't dare ask the driver, becauseanyone who takes a taxi at that hour either is heading for his ownhome or is a murderer at the very least. The man was grumbling thatthe center of the city was still full of those damn students, busesparked everywhere, it was a scandal,'if he was in charge, they'dall be lined up against a wall, and the best thing was to go thelong way round. He practically circled Paris, leaving me finally atnumber 7 of a lonely street. There was no Dr. Wagner at thataddress. Was it seventeen, then? Or twenty-seven? I walked, lookedat two or three houses, then came to my senses. Even if I found thehouse, was I thinking of dragging Dr. Wagner out of bed at thistime of night to tell him my story? I had ended up here for thesame reason that I had roamed from Porte Saint-Martin to Place desVosges: I was fleeing. I didn't need a psychoanalyst, I needed astrait-jacket. Or the cure of sleep. Or Lia. To have her hold myhead, press it between her breast and armpit, and whispersoothingly to me.

Was it Dr. Wagner Iwanted or Avenue Elisee-Reclus? Because¡Xnow I remembered¡XI hadcome across that name in the course of my reading for the Plan.Elisee Reclus was someone in the last century who wrote a bookabout the earth, the underground, volcanoes; under the pretext ofacademic geography he stuck his nose into the Mundus Subterraneus.One of Them, in other words. I ran from Them, yet kept finding Themaround me. Little by little, in the space of a few hundred years,They had occupied all of Paris. And the rest of theworld.

I should go back to thehotel. Would I find another taxi? This was probably anout-of-the-way suburb. I headed in the direction where the nightsky was brighter, more open. The Seine?

When I reached thecorner, I saw it.

On my left. I shouldhave known it would be there, in ambush, because in this city thestreet names wrote unmistakable messages; they gave you warnings.It was my own fault that I hadn't been paying attention.

There it was, foul metalspider, the symbol and instrument of their power. I should haverun, but I felt drawn to that web, craning my neck, then lookingdownward, because from where I stood the thing could not beencompassed in one glance. I was swallowed by it, slashed by itsthousand edges, bombarded by metal curtains that fell on everyside. With the slightest move it could have crushed me with one ofthose Meccano paws.

La Tour. I was at theone place in the city where you don't see it in the distance, inprofile, benevolent above the ocean of roofs, light-hearted as aDufy painting. It was on top of me, it sailed at me. I couldglimpse the tip, but I moved inward, between its legs, and saw itshaunches, underside, genitalia, sensed the vertiginous intestinethat climbed to join the esophagus of that polytechnical giraffe'sneck. Perforated, it yet had the power to douse the light aroundit, and as I moved, it offered me, from different perspectives,different cavernous niches that framed sudden zooms intodarkness.

To its right, in thenortheast, still low on the horizon, a sickle moon. At times, theTower framed it; and to me it looked like an optical illusion, thefluorescence of one of those skewed screens the Tower's structureformed; but if I walked on a little, the screens assumed new forms,the moon vanished, tangled in the metal ribs; the spider crushedit, digested it, and it went into another dimension.

Tesseract.Four-dimensional cube. Through an arch I saw a flashing light¡Xno,two, one red, one white¡Xsurely a plane looking for Roissy or Orly.The next moment¡XI had moved, or the plane, or the Tower¡Xthelights hid behind a rib; I waited for them to reappear in the nextframe, but they were gone for good. The Tower had a hundredwindows, all mobile, and each gave onto a different segment ofspace-time. Its ribs didn't form Euclidean curves, they ripped thevery fabric of the cosmos, they overturned realities, they leafedthrough pages of parallel worlds.

Who was