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

¡¥68 was seen to its best advantage. Whenyou flee, head for alleys. No police force can guard them all, andeven the police are afraid to enter them in small numbers. If yourun into a few on their own, they're more frightened than you are,and both parties take off, in opposite directions. Anytime you'regoing to a mass rally in an area you don't know well, reconnoiterthe neighborhood the day before, and stand at the corner where thelittle streets start."

"Did you take a coursein Bolivia, or what?"

"Survival techniques arelearned only in childhood, unless as an adult you enlist in theGreen Berets. I had some bad experiences during the war, when thepartisans were active around ***," he said, naming a town betweenMonferrato and the Langhe. "We had been evacuated from the city in¡¥43, a great idea, exactly the time and place to savor everything:mass arrests, the SS, gunfire in the streets...One evening I wasgoing up the hill to get some fresh milk from a farm, and I heard asound up in the trees: frr, frr. I realized that some men on adistant hill were machine-gunning the railroad line in the valleybehind me. My instinct was to run, or just dive to the ground. Imade a mistake: I ran toward the valley, and suddenly I heard achack-chack-chack in the field around me. Some of the shots werefalling short of the railroad. That's when I learned that ifthey're shooting from a high hill down at a valley, then you shouldrun uphill. The higher you go, the higher the bullets will be overyour head. Once, my grandmother was caught in a shoot-out betweenFascists and partisans deployed on opposite sides of a cornfield.Wherever she ran, she risked stopping a bullet. So she just flungherself down in the middle of the field, right in the line of fire,and lay there for ten minutes, her face in the dirt, hoping thatneither side would advance very far. She was lucky. When you learnthese things as a child, they are hardwired in your nervoussystem."

"So you were in theResistance."

"As a spectator," hesaid. I sensed a slight embarrassment in his voice. "In 1943 I waseleven, and at the end of the war, barely thirteen. Too young totake part, but old enough to follow everything with¡Xhow shall Iput it?¡Xphotographic attention. What else could I do? I watched.And ran. Like today."

"You should write aboutit, instead of editing other people's books."

"It's all been told,Casaubon. If I had been twenty back then, in the fifties I'd havewritten a poetic memoir. Luckily I was born too late for that. Bythe time I was old enough to write, all I could do was read thebooks that were already written. On the other hand, I could alsohave ended up on that hill with a bullet in my head."

"From which side?" Iasked, then immediately regretted the question. "Sorry, I was justkidding."

"No you weren't. Sure,today I know, but what did I know then? You can be obsessed byremorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing¡Xyoucan always repent, atone¡Xbut because you never had the chance toprove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing. I wasa potential traitor. What truth does that entitle me now to teachto others?"

"Excuse me," I said,"but potentially you were also a Jack the Ripper. This isneurotic¡Xunless your remorse is based on somethingspecific."

"What does that mean?But, speaking of neurosis, this evening there's a dinner party forDr. Wagner. Let's take a taxi at Piazza della Scala. Coming,Sandra?"

"Dr. Wagner?" I asked,about to take my leave of them. "In person?"

"Yes. He's in Milan fora few days, and maybe I'll be able to persuade him to give us someof his unpublished essays for a little volume. It would be a realcoup."

So Belbo was in contactwith Dr. Wagner even then. I wonder if that was the evening Wagner(pronounced Vagnere) psychoanalyzed Belbo free of charge, withouteither of them knowing it. But perhaps this happenedlater.

In any case, that wasthe first time I heard Belbo talk about his childhood in ***.Strange, he talked about running away, investing it with a kind ofheroism, in the glorious light of memory, but the memory had comeback to him only after¡Xwith me as accomplice but also aswitness¡Xhe had unheroically, if wisely, run away again.

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After which, brotherEtienne de Provins, brought into the presence of the aforesaidofficials and asked by them to defend the order, said he did notwish to. If the masters wished to defend it, they could, but beforehis arrest, he had been in the order only nine months.

¡XDeposition, November27, 1309

In Abulafia I foundother tales of Belbo's running away. And I thought about them thatevening as I stood in the darkness in the periscope listening to asequence of rustling sounds, squeaks, creaks and telling myself notto panic, because that was how museums, libraries, and antiquepalaces talked to themselves at night. It is only old cupboardssettling, window frames reacting to the evening's humidity, plastercrumbling at a miserly millimeter-per-century rate, walls yawning.You can't run away, I told myself. You're here to learn whathappened to a man who, in a mad (or desperate) act of courage,tried once and for all to stop running away¡Xperhaps in order tohasten his encounter, so many times postponed, with thetruth.

FILENAME:Canal

Was it from a policecharge or, once again, from history that I ran away? Does it makeany difference? Did I go to the march because of a moral choice orto subject myself to yet another test of Opportunity? Granted, Iwas either too early or too late for all the great Opportunities,but that was the fault of my birth date. I would have liked to bein that field of bullets, shooting, even at the price of hittingGranny. But I was absent because of age, not because of cowardice.All right. And what about the march? Again I ran away for agenerational reason: it was not my conflict. But I could have takenthe risk even so, without enthusiasm, to prove that if I had beenin the field of bullets, I would have known how to choose. Does itmake sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convinceyourself that