Umberto Eco - The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana

That I am not quite all here is a matter of clinical record. What am I brooding on about? With me sharing my office with a beautiful girl, of course Paola would play the part of a jealous wife-that is just a game old married couples play. And Gianni? It was Gianni who spoke of the beautiful Sibilla, maybe he is the one who has fallen for her, maybe he drops by my office all the time with some tax excuse, then hangs around pretending to be enchanted by the squeaking pages. He is the one with the crush, I have nothing to do with it. It is Gianni, old enough to smell a little like a corpse himself, he is trying to steal away, has stolen away, the woman of my dreams. Here we go again: the woman of my dreams?

I thought I was going to be able to handle living with so many People I do not recognize, but this is the greatest hurdle yet, ever since those senile fantasies entered my head. What pains me is that I might cause her pain. So you see, then… No, it is natural for a man not to want to hurt his own adoptive daughter. Daughter? The other day I felt like a pedophile and now I discover I am incestuous?

And after all, my God, who said we ever slept together? Maybe it was just a kiss, a single kiss, or a platonic attraction, each understanding what the other felt but neither ever speaking of it. Round Table lovers, we slept for four years with a sword between us.

Oh, I also have a Stultifera Navis , though it does not look like a first edition and in any case is not a first-rate copy. And this De Proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus? Completely rubricated from top to bottom-too bad the binding is modern, antique style. We can talk business. "Sibilla, the Stultifera Navis isn’t a first edition, is it?"

"Unfortunately no, Monsieur Bodoni. Ours is the 1497 Olpe. The first is also Olpe, Basel, but from 1494, and in German, Das Narren Schyff. The first Latin edition, like ours, appears in ‘97, but in March, and ours, if you look at the colophon, is from August, and in between there were also April and June editions. But it isn’t so much the date, it’s the copy; as you can see, it’s not terribly appealing. I won’t say it’s a reading copy, but it’s nothing to ring the bells about."

"You know so much, Sibilla, what would I do without you?"

"You were the one who taught me. To get out of Warsaw I passed myself off as a grande savante , but if I hadn’t met you I’d be just as stupid as when I arrived."

Admiration, devotion. Is she trying to tell me something? I murmur, " Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères …" I anticipate her: "Nothing, nothing, a poem popped into my head. Sibilla, we should be clear about something. Perhaps as we go forward I’ll seem almost normal to you, but I’m not. Everything that happened to me before, and I mean everything, you understand, is like a blackboard that’s been sponged clean. I am immaculately black, if you’ll pardon the contradiction. You should understand that, and not despair, and… stand by me." Did I say the right thing? It felt perfect, it could be understood in two ways.

"Don’t worry, Monsieur Bodoni, I completely understand. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. I’ll wait…"

Are you really a slyboots? Are you saying that you are waiting for me to get back on my feet, as of course everyone is doing, or that you are waiting for me to remember a certain thing? And if the latter, what will you do, in the coming days, to remind me? Or do you want with all your heart for me to remember, but will not do anything, because you are not a slyboots but a woman in love, and you are holding your tongue to avoid upsetting me? Are you suffering, not letting it show because you are the marvelous creature you are, yet telling yourself that this is finally the right time for the two of us to come to our senses? You will sacrifice yourself, never doing anything to make me remember, not trying to touch my hand some evening as if in passing so that I might taste my madeleine-you who with the pride of all lovers know that although no one else can make me smell the scents that will be my Open Sesame, you could do so at will, simply by letting your hair brush my cheek as you lean over to hand me a form. Or by speaking again, as if casually, that banal phrase you spoke the first time, which we spent four years embroidering, quoting like a magic word whose meaning and power only we knew, we whom our secret set apart? Like: Et mon bureau? But that was Rimbaud.

Let us try at least to get one thing clear. "Sibilla, perhaps you’re calling me Monsieur Bodoni because it’s as if today I were meeting you for the first time, even though after working together we may have begun to use tu with each other, as often happens in such cases. What did you call me before?"

She blushed, emitting again that modulated, tender hiccup: Oui , oui , oui , in fact I called you Yambo. You tried to make me feel at ease from the start."

Her eyes glittered with happiness, as if a weight had been lifted from her heart. But using tu does not mean anything: even Gianni-Paola and I went to his office with him the other day-uses tu with his secretary.

"Well then!" I said cheerfully, "we’ll pick up exactly where we left off. You know that in general picking up where I left off may be helpful to me."

How did she take that? What did picking up where we left off mean to her?

Back home I spent a sleepless night, and Paola stroked my hair. I felt like an adulterer, yet I had done nothing. On the other hand, I was not troubled for Paola’s sake, but for my own. The best part of having loved, I told myself, is the memory of having loved. Some people live on a single memory. Eugénie Grandet, for example. But to think you have loved, yet not be able to recall it? Or worse still, you may have loved, you cannot remember it, and you suspect you have not loved. Or another possibility, which in my vanity I had not considered: Madly in love, I made an advance, and she put me in my place, kindly, gently, firmly. She stayed because I was a gentleman and behaved from that day on as if nothing had happened, in the end she enjoyed working there, or could not afford to lose a good job, maybe was flattered by my move; indeed, her feminine vanity, without her realizing it, had been touched, and although she has never admitted it even to herself, she is aware of having a certain power over me. An allumeuse. Or worse: This slyboots took me for a ton of money, made me do whatever she wanted-clearly I had left her in charge of everything, including the revenue and the deposits and maybe even the withdrawals, I sang cock-a-doodle-doo like Professor Rath, I was a broken man, I stopped going out… Maybe this lucky disaster will allow me to get out of it, every cloud has a silver lining. How wretched I am, how I sully everything I touch, she might be still a virgin and here I am making a whore of her. Whatever the case, even the mere suspicion, disavowed, makes things worse: If you cannot remember having loved, you will never know whether the one you loved was worthy of your love. That Vanna I met a few mornings ago, that was a clear case-a flirtation, a night or two, then perhaps a few days of disappointment and that was all. But here four years of my life are at stake. Yambo, could it be that you are falling in love with her today, when maybe nothing existed before, and are now rushing toward your ruin? All because you imagine you were damned then and want to rediscover your paradise? And to think that there are lunatics who drink to forget, or take drugs, Oh, if only I could forget it all, they say. I alone know the truth: Forgetting is dreadful. Are there drugs for remembering?

Maybe Sibilla…

Here I go again. If I spy you passing at such regal distance , with your hair loose and your whole bearing august , vertigo carries me off.