UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY Read Online Free PDF Page B

waking up as Dalla Piccola, not only would I have found myself with no memory, but I wouldn't have been able to find the cassock at the foot of the bed. As Dalla Piccola, with no memory, I would have found a spare cassock in the corridor and would have had as much time as I needed to escape the same day to Auteuil, only to change my mind by the end of the day, steel myself and return to Paris later that evening, to the apartment at impasse Maubert, hanging the cassock on the hook in the bedroom, and waking up with no memory once again, but as Simonini, on the Wednesday, believing it was still Tuesday. Therefore, I reasoned, Dalla Piccola loses his memory on the 22nd of March and remains amnesiac the whole day, finding himself on the 23rd as an amnesiac Simonini. Nothing exceptional after what I had learned from — what's his name?—that doctor at the clinic in Vincennes.
    Except for one small problem. I reread my notes. If that was how things had happened, Simonini would have found in his bedroom, on the morning of the 23rd, not one cassock but two — the one he had left on the night of the 21st and the other he had left on the night of the 22nd. Yet there was only one.
    But no, what a fool I am. Dalla Piccola had returned from Auteuil to rue Maître-Albert on the evening of the 22nd, put down his cassock, then gone to the apartment in impasse Maubert and slept there, waking the following morning (the 23rd) as Simonini, to find only one cassock on the rack. It is true that, if events had taken that course, when I entered Dalla Piccola's apartment on the morning of the 23rd, I should have found the cassock that he'd left there on the evening of the 22nd, but he could have hung it back up in the corridor where he had found it. All I had to do was check.
    I went along the corridor, with lighted lamp, feeling a certain trepidation. If Dalla Piccola and I were not the same person, I told myself, I might have seen him appear at the other end of that passageway, he too perhaps carrying a lamp in front of him . . . Fortunately that didn't happen. And I found the cassock hanging at the far end of the corridor.
    And yet, and yet . . . if Dalla Piccola had returned from Auteuil and, on leaving the cassock, walked the whole length of the corridor to my apartment and happily gone to sleep in my bed, it was because at that point he knew who I was, and knew that he could sleep here just as well as in his own place, seeing that we were the same person. Dalla Piccola had therefore gone to bed knowing he was Simonini, whereas, the morning after, Simonini had woken not knowing he was Dalla Piccola. In other words, Dalla Piccola first loses his memory, then regains it, then goes to sleep and passes his loss of memory on to Simonini.
     
    Loss of memory . . . This phrase, meaning nonrecollection, opens a gap in the mist of time that I had quite forgotten. I remember talking about people with memory loss at Chez Magny, more than ten years ago, with Bourru and Burot, with Du Maurier and with the Austrian doctor.

 
    3
    CHEZ MAGNY
     
     
    25th March 1897, at dawn
    Chez Magny . . . As far as I can recall, it used to cost no more than ten francs a head at that restaurant in rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine, and the quality matched the price. I'm a lover of good food, I know, but you can't eat at Foyot every day. In years gone by, many used to go to Magny to catch a glimpse of famous writers like Gautier or Flaubert or, earlier still, that consumptive Polish pianist kept by a degenerate woman who went about in trousers. I looked in there one evening and left right away. Artists are insufferable, even from afar, always looking around to see whether we have recognized them.
    Then the "great men" stopped going to Magny, and moved on to Brébant-Vachette, in boulevard Poissonnière, where you ate better and paid more, but evidently
carmina dant panem — p
oetry does give you bread. And once Magny had been purged, so to speak, I started going occasionally,