UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY Read Free Page B

client in his underpants, who then begs for mercy and pulls out a handful of coins.
    When I enter these whorehouses I do so with caution, because I know what might happen to me. If the client looks as though he's wealthy, the landlord makes a sign, a girl introduces herself and gradually persuades him to invite all the other girls to the table and to order the most expensive things (but they drink
anisette superfine
or
cassis fin
so as not to get drunk, colored water for which the client pays dearly). Or they get you to play cards, and of course they exchange signs, so you lose and have to buy dinner for everyone, including the landlord and his wife. And if you try to stop, they invite you to play not for money but so that for every hand you win a girl takes off a piece of clothing . . . And each item of lace that falls reveals that disgusting white flesh, those swollen breasts, those dark sweaty armpits that unnerve you . . .
    I've never been upstairs. Someone said that women are just a substitute for the solitary vice, except that you need more imagination. So I return home and dream about them at night— I'm certainly not made of iron — and then it is they who've led me on.
    I've read Doctor Tissot, and I know they harm you even from a distance. We do not know whether animal spirits and genital fluid are the same thing, but we know that these two have a certain similarity, and after long nocturnal pollutions, people lose energy and the body grows thinner, the face turns pallid, memory becomes blurred, eyesight misty, the voice hoarse; sleep is disturbed by restless dreams, the eyes ache and red blotches appear on the face. Some people spit out a limy matter, feel palpitations, choking, fainting, while others complain of constipation or increasingly foul-smelling emissions. In the end, blindness.
    Perhaps these are exaggerations. As a boy I had a pimply face, but that seems normal at such an age, or perhaps all boys indulge in such pleasures — some excessively, touching themselves day and night. Now I know how to pace myself. My dreams are disturbed only after I have spent an evening in a brasserie, and I don't get an erection every time I see a skirt in the street, as many do. Work keeps me from moral laxity.
     
    But why philosophize instead of piecing together events? Perhaps because I need to know not only what I did before yesterday, but also what I'm like inside — that is, assuming there is something inside me. They say that the soul is simply what a person does. But if I hate someone and I cultivate this grudge, then, by God, that means there is something inside! What does the philosopher say?
Odi ergo sum
. I hate therefore I am.
     
    A while ago the bell rang downstairs. I thought maybe it was someone fool enough to want to buy something, but the fellow told me that Tissot had sent him — why did I ever choose that password? He wanted a handwritten will, signed by a certain Bonnefoy in favor of someone called Guillot (which was certainly him). He had the writing paper that Bonnefoy uses, or used to use, and an example of his handwriting. I invited Guillot up to my office, chose a pen and the right ink and wrote out the document perfectly without making a draft. Guillot handed me a payment proportionate to the legacy, as if he knew my rates.
    So is this my trade? It's a marvelous thing creating a legal deed out of nothing, forging a letter that looks genuine, drafting a compromising confession, creating a document that will lead someone to ruin. The power of art . . . to be rewarded by a visit to the Café Anglais.
    My memory must be in my nose, yet I have the impression that centuries have passed since I last savored the aroma of that menu:
soufflés à la reine, filets de sole à la vénitienne, escalopes de turbot au gratin, selle de mouton purée bretonne . . . And as an entrée: poulet à la portugaise, or pâté chaud de cailles, or homard à la parisienne, or all of them, and as the plat de