When you hang out in bars, the drama of love isn’t the women you find but the women you leave.
Then comes the dinner with Dr. Wagner. At the lecture he had just given a heckler a definition of psychoanalysis. La psychanalyse? C’est qu’entre l’homme et la femme … chers amis … ça ne colle pas.
There was discussion: the couple, divorce as a legal fiction. Taken up by my own problems, I participated intensely. We allowed ourselves to be drawn into dialectical exchanges, speaking while Wagner was silent, forgetting there was an oracle in our presence. And it was with a pensive
and it was with a sly expression
and it was with melancholy detachment
and it was as if he entered our conversation playfully, off the subject, he said (I remember his exact words; they are carved on my mind): In professional life not once have I had a patient made neurotic by his own divorce. The cause of the trouble was always the divorce of the Other.
Dr. Wagner always said Other with a capital O. I gave a start, as if bitten by an asp.
the viscount started, as if bitten by an asp
a cold sweat beaded his brow
the baron peered at him through the lazy whorls of smoke from his thin Russian cigarette
Are you saying, I asked, that a person has a breakdown not because he is divorced but on account of the divorce, which may or may not happen, of the third party, that is, of the one who created the crisis for the couple of which he is a member?
Wagner looked at me with the puzzlement of a layman who encounters a mentally disturbed person for the first time. He asked me what I meant. To tell the truth, whatever I meant, I had expressed it badly. I tried to be more concrete. I took a spoon from the table and put it next to a fork. Here, this is me, Spoon, married to her, Fork. And here is another couple: she’s Fruit Knife, married to Steak Knife, alias Mackie Messer.
Now I, Spoon, believe I’m suffering because I have to leave Fork and I don’t want to; I love Fruit Knife, but it’s all right with me if she stays with Steak Knife. And now you’re telling me, Dr. Wagner, that the real reason I’m suffering is that Fruit Knife won’t leave Steak Knife. Is that it?
Wagner told someone else at the table that he had said nothing of the sort.
What do you mean, you didn’t say it? You said that not once had you come across anyone made neurotic by his own divorce, it was always the divorce of the Other.
That may be, I don’t remember, Wagner said then, bored.
If you did say it, did you mean what I understood you to mean?
Wagner was silent for a few moments.
While the others waited, not even swallowing, Wagner signaled for his wineglass to be filled. He looked carefully at the liquid against the light and finally spoke.
What you understood was what you wanted to understand.
Then he looked away, said it was hot, hummed an aria, moved a breadstick as if he were conducting an orchestra, yawned, concentrated on a cake with whipped cream, and finally, after another silence, asked to be taken back to his hotel.
The others looked at me as if I had ruined a symposium from which Words of Wisdom might have come.
The truth is that I had heard Truth speak.
I telephoned. You were at home, and with the Other. I spent a sleepless night. It was all clear: I couldn’t bear your being with him. Sandra had nothing to do with it.
Six dramatic months followed, in which I clung to you, breathed down your neck, trying to undermine your couplehood, telling you I wanted you for myself, convincing you that you hated the Other. You began quarreling with him, and he grew jealous, demanding; he never went out in the evening, and when he was traveling he called twice a day, in the middle of the night, and one night he slapped you. You asked me for money so you could run away.
I collected the little I had in the bank. You abandoned the conjugal bed, went off to the mountains with friends, no forwarding address. The Other telephoned me in despair, asked if I knew where you were; I didn’t know, but it looked as if I were lying, because you had told him you were leaving him for me.
When you returned, you announced, radiant, that you had written him a letter of farewell. I wondered then what would happen with me and Sandra, but you didn’t give me time to worry, you told me you had met this man with a scar on his cheek and a very gypsy apartment. You were going to live with him.
Don’t you love me anymore?
Of course I do, you’re the only man in my life, but after everything that’s happened I need to have this experience, don’t be childish, try to understand. After all, I left my husband for you. Let people follow their tempo.
Their tempo? You’re telling me you’re going off with another man.
You’re an intellectual and a leftist. Don’t act like a mafioso. I’ll see you soon.
I owe everything to Dr. Wagner.
Whoever reflects on four things, it were better he had never been born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, and that which is after.
—Talmud, Hagigah 2.1
I showed up at Garamond the morning they were installing Abulafia, as Belbo and Diotallevi were lost in a diatribe about the names of God, and Gudrun suspiciously watched the men who were introducing this new, disturbing presence among the increasingly dusty piles of manuscripts.
“Sit down, Casaubon. Here are the plans for our history of metals.” We were left alone, and Belbo showed me indexes, chapter outlines, suggested layouts. I was to read the texts and find illustrations. I mentioned several Milan libraries that seemed promising sources.
“That won’t be enough,” Belbo said. “You’ll have to visit other places, too. The science museum in Munich, for instance, has a splendid photographic archive. In Paris there’s the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. I’d go back there myself, if I had time.”
“Interesting?”
“Disturbing. The triumph of the machine, housed in a Gothic church…” He hesitated, realigned some papers on his desk. Then, as if afraid of giving too much importance to the statement, he said, “And there’s the Pendulum.”
“What pendulum?”
“The Pendulum. Foucault’s Pendulum.”
And he described it to me, just as I saw it two days ago, Saturday. Maybe I saw it the way I saw it because Belbo had prepared me for the sight. But at that time I must not have shown much enthusiasm, because Belbo looked at me as if I were a man who, seeing the Sistine Chapel, asks: Is this all?
“It may be the atmosphere—that it’s in a church—but, believe me, you feel a very strong sensation. The idea that everything else is in motion and up above is the only fixed point in the universe … For those who have no faith, it’s a way of finding God again, and without challenging their unbelief, because it is a null pole. It can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
“My generation ate even more disappointment.”
“Don’t brag. Anyway, you’re wrong. For you it was just a phase. You sang the ‘Carmagnole,’ and then you all met in the Vendee. For us it was different. First there was Fascism, and even if we were kids and saw it as an adventure story, our nation’s immortal destiny was a fixed point. The next fixed point was the Resistance, especially for people like me, who observed it from the outside and turned it into a rite of passage, the return of spring—like an equinox or a solstice; I always get them mixed up….
For some, the next thing was God; for some, the working class; and for many, both. Intellectuals felt good contemplating the handsome worker, healthy, strong, ready to remake the world. And now, as you’ve seen for yourself, workers exist, but not the working class. Perhaps it was killed in Hungary.
Then came your generation. For you personally, what happened was natural; it probably seemed like a holiday. But not for those my age. For us, it was a settling of scores, a time of remorse, repentance, regeneration. We had failed, and you were arriving with your enthusiasm, courage, self-criticism. Bringing hope to us, who by then were thirty-five or forty, hope and humiliation, but still hope. We had to be like you, even at the price of starting over from the beginning. We stopped wearing ties, we threw away our trench coats and bought secondhand duffle coats. Some quit their jobs rather than serve the Establishment….”
He lit a cigarette and pretended that he had only been pretending bitterness. An apology for letting himself go.
“And then you gave it all up. We, with our penitential pilgrimages to Buchenwald, refused to write advertising copy for Coca-Cola because we were antifascists. We were content to work for peanuts at Garamond, because at least books were for the people. But you, to avenge yourselves on the bourgeoisie you hadn’t managed to overthrow, sold them videocassettes and fanzines, brainwashed them with Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. You’ve made us buy, at a discount, your copies of the thoughts of Chairman Mao, and used the money to purchase fireworks for the celebration
