Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum eco foucault (highly illogical behavior txt) 📖

to hell, do I remember! And the bayonet attack on SaintCrispin's Eve? Yessir! That sort of thing. Then, the one without anarm, the other without a leg, on the same impulse they took a stepforward and embraced. Mongo said then, ¡¥You see, Cavalier, it'sthis way, Major: we were informed that you collect taxes for theFascist government that toadies to the invaders."You see,Commander,' Uncle Carlo said, ¡¥it's this way: I have a family andreceive a salary from the government, and the government is what itis; I didn't choose it, and what would you have done in myplace?"My dear Major,' Mongo replied, ¡¥in your place, I'd havedone what you did, but try at least to collect the taxes slowly;take your time.' Til see what I can do,' Uncle Carlo said. ¡¥I havenothing against you men; you, too, are sons of Italy and valiantfighters.' They understood each other, because they both thought ofFatherland with a capital F. Mongo ordered his men to give themajor a' bicycle, and Uncle Carlo went home. Adelino Canepa didn'tshow his face for several months.

"There, I don't know ifthis qualifies as spiritual knighthood, but I'm certain there arebonds that endure above factions and parties."

50

For I am the first andthe last. I am the honored and the hated. I am the saint and theprostitute.

¡XFragment of NagHammadi 6, 2

Lorenza Pellegrinientered. Belbo looked up at the ceiling and ordered a finalmartini. There was tension in the air, and I got up to leave, butLorenza stopped me. "No. All of you come with me. Tonight's theopening of Riccardo's show; he's inaugurating a new style! He'sgreat! You know him, Jacopo."

I knew who Riccardo was;he was always hanging around Pilade's. But at that moment I didn'tunderstand why Belbo's eyes were fixed so intensely on the ceiling.Having read the files, I realize now that Riccardo was the man withthe scar, the man with whom Belbo had lacked the courage to start afight.

The gallery wasn't farfrom Pilade's, Lorenza insisted. They had organized a realparty¡Xor, rather, an orgy. Diotallevi became nervous at this andimmediately said he had to go home. I hesitated, but it was obviousLorenza wanted me along, and this, too, made Belbo suffer, since hesaw the possibility of a tete-a-tete slipping farther and fartheraway. But I couldn't refuse; so we set out.

I didn't care that muchfor Riccardo. In the early sixties he turned out very boringpaintings, small canvases in blacks and grays, very geometric,slightly optical, the sort of stuff that made your eyes swim. Theybore titles like Composition 15, Parallax 17, Euclid X. But in 1968he started showing in squats, he changed his palette; now therewere only violent blacks and whites, no grays, the strokes werebolder, and the titles were like Ce n'est qu'un debut, Molotov, AHundred Flowers. When I got back to Milan, I saw a show of his in aclub where Dr. Wagner was worshiped. Riccardo had eliminated black,was working in white only, the contrasts provided by the textureand relief of the paint on porous Fabriano paper, so that thepictures¡Xas he explained¡Xwould reveal different figures indifferent lightings. Their titles were In Praise of Ambiguity,A/Travers, fa, Berggasse, and Denegation 15.

That evening, as soon aswe entered the new gallery, I saw that Riccardo's poetics hadundergone a profound change. The show was entitled MegaleApophasis. Riccardo had turned figurative with a dazzling palette.He played with quotations, and, since I don't believe he knew howto draw, I guess he worked by projecting onto the canvas the slideof a famous painting. His choices hovered between theturn-of-the-century pompiers and the early-twentieth-centurySymbolists. Over the projected image he worked with a pointillisttechnique, using infinitesimal gradations of color, covering thewhole spectrum dot by dot, so that he always began from ablindingly bright nucleus and ended at absolute black, or viceversa, depending on the mystical or cosmological concept he wantedto express. There were mountains that shot rays of light, whichwere broken up into a fine powder of pale spheres, and there wereconcentric skies with hints of angels with transparent wings,something like the Paradise of Dore". The titles were Beatrix,Mystica Rosa, Dante Gabriels 33, Fedeli d'Amore, Atanor, Homunculus666. This is the source of Lorenza's passion for homunculi, I saidto myself. The largest picture was entitled Sophia, and it showed arain of black angels, which faded at the ground and created a whitecreature caressed by great livid hands, the creature a copy of theone you see held up against the sky in Guernica. The juxtapositionwas dubious, and, seen close up, the execution proved crude, but ata distance of two or three meters the effect was quitelyrical.

"I'm a realist of theold school," Belbo whispered to me. "I understand only Mondrian.What does a nongeometric picture say?"

"He was geometricbefore," I said.

"That wasn't geometry,that was bathroom tiles."

Meanwhile, Lorenzarushed to embrace Riccardo. He and Belbo exchanged a nod ofgreeting. There was a crowd; the gallery was trying to look like aNew York loft, all white, with heating or water pipes exposed onthe ceiling. God knows what it had cost them to backdate the placelike that. In one corner, a sound system was deafening thosepresent with Asian music¡X sitar music, if I recall rightly, thekind where you can't pick out a tune. Everybody walked absentlypast the pictures to crowd around the tables at the end and grabpaper cups. We had arrived well into the evening: the air was thickwith smoke, some girls from time to time hinted at dance movementsin the center of the room, but everybody was still busy conversing,busy consuming the plentiful buffet. I sat on a sofa, and at myfeet lay a great glass bowl half-filled with fruit salad. I wasabout to take a little, because I hadn't had any supper, but then Isaw in it a footprint, which had crushed the little cubes of fruitin the center, reducing them to a homogeneous pave. This was notthat surprising, because the floor was now spattered in many placeswith white wine, and some of the guests were alreadystaggering.

Belbo had captured apaper cup and was proceeding lazily, without any apparent goal,occasionally slapping someone on the shoulder. He was trying tofind Lorenza.

But few people