Umberto Eco - Numero Zero

No water in the tap this morning.

Gurgle, gurgle, two sounds like a babys burp, then nothing.

I knocked next door: everything was fine there. You must have closed the valve, she said. Me? I dont even know where it is. Havent been here long, you know, dont get home till late. Good heavens! But dont you turn off the water and gas when youre away for a week? Me, no. Thats pretty careless. Let me come in, Ill show you.

She opened the cupboard beneath the sink, moved something, and the water was on. See? Youd turned it off. Sorry, I wasnt thinking. Ah, you singles! Exit neighbor: now even she talks English.

Keep calm. There are no such things as poltergeists, only in films. And Im no sleepwalker, but even if I had sleepwalked, I wouldnt have known anything about the valve or Id have closed it when I couldnt sleep, because the shower leaks and Im always liable to spend the night wide-eyed listening to the dripping, like Chopin at Valldemossa. In fact, I often wake up, get out of bed, and shut the bathroom door so I dont hear that goddamn drip.

It couldnt have been an electrical contact (its a hand valve, it can only be worked by hand), or a mouse, which, even if there was a mouse, would hardly have had the strength to move such a contraption. Its an old-fashioned tap (everything in this apartment dates back at least fifty years) and rusty besides. So it needed a hand. Humanoid. And I dont have a chimney down which the Ourang-Outang of Rue Morgue could have climbed.

Lets think. Every effect has its cause, or so they say. We can rule out a miracle I cant see why God would worry about my shower, its hardly the Red Sea. So, a natural effect, a natural cause. Last night before going to bed, I took a sleeping pill with a glass of water. Obviously the water was still running then. This morning it wasnt. So, my dear Watson, the valve had been closed during the night and not by you. Someone was in my house, and he, they, were afraid I might have been disturbed, not by the noise they were making (they were silent as the grave) but by the drip, which might have irritated even them, and perhaps they wondered why I didnt stir. And, very craftily, they did what my neighbor would have done: they turned off the water.

And then? My books are in their usual disarray, half the worlds secret services could have gone through them page by page without my noticing. No point looking in the drawers and opening the cupboard in the corridor. If they wanted to make a discovery, theres only one thing to do these days: rummage through the computer. Perhaps theyd copied everything so as not to waste time and gone back home. And only now, opening and reopening each document, theyd have realized there was nothing in the computer that could possibly interest them.

What were they hoping to find? Its obvious I mean, I cant see any other explanation they were looking for something to do with the newspaper. Theyre not stupid, theyd have assumed I must have made notes about all the work we are doing in the newsroom and therefore that, if I knew anything about the Braggadocio business, Id have written it down somewhere. Now theyll have worked out the truth, that I keep everything on a diskette. Last night, of course, theyd also have been to the office and found no diskette of mine. So theyll be coming to the conclusion (but only now) that I keep it in my pocket. What idiots we are, theyll be saying, we should have checked his jacket. Idiots? Shits. If they were smart, they wouldnt have ended up doing such a scummy job.

Now theyll have another go, at least until they arrive at the stolen letter. Theyll arrange for me to be jostled in the street by fake pickpockets. So Id better get moving before they try again. Ill send the diskette to a poste restante address and decide later when to pick it up. What on earth am I thinking of, one man is already dead, and Simei has flown the nest. They dont even need to know if I know, and what I know. Theyll get rid of me just to be on the safe side, and thats the end of it. I can hardly go around telling the newspapers I knew nothing about the whole business, since just by saying it Id make it clear I knew what had happened.

How did I end up in this mess? I think its all the fault of Professor Di Samis and the fact that I know German.

What makes me think of Di Samis, a business of decades ago? Ive always blamed Di Samis for my failure to graduate, and its all because I never graduated that I ended up in this mess. And then Anna left me after two years of marriage because shed come to realize, in her words, that I was a compulsive loser God knows what I must have told her at the time to make myself look good.

I never graduated due to the fact that I know German. My grandmother came from South Tyrol and made me speak it when I was young. Right from my first year at university Id taken to translating books from German to pay for my studies. Just knowing German was a profession at the time. You could read and translate books that others didnt understand (books regarded as important then), and you were paid better than translators from French and even from English. Today I think the same is true of those who know Chinese or Russian. In any event, either you translate or you graduate; you cant do both. Translation means staying at home, in the warmth or the cold, working in your slippers and learning tons of things in the process. So why go to university lectures?

I decided on a whim to register for a German course. I wouldnt have to study much, I thought, since I already knew it all. The luminary at that time was Professor Di Samis, who had created what the students called his eagles nest in a dilapidated Baroque palace where you climbed a grand staircase to reach a large atrium. On one side was Di Samiss establishment, on the other the aula magna, as the professor pompously called it, a lecture hall with fifty or so seats.

You could enter his establishment only if you put on felt slippers. At the entrance there were enough for the assistants and two or three students. Those without slippers had to wait their turn outside. Everything was polished to a high gloss, even, I think, the books on the walls. And even the faces of the elderly assistants who had been waiting their chance for a teaching position from time immemorial.

The lecture hall had a lofty vaulted ceiling and Gothic windows (I never understood why, in a Baroque palace) with green stained glass. At the correct time, which is to say at fourteen minutes past the hour, Professor Di Samis emerged from the institute, followed at a distance of one meter by his oldest assistant and at two meters by the younger ones, those under fifty. The oldest assistant carried his books, the younger ones the tape recorder tape recorders at that time were still enormous, and looked like a Rolls-Royce.

Di Samis covered the ten meters that separated the institute from the hall as though they were twenty: he didnt follow a straight line but a curve (whether a parabola or an ellipse Im not sure), proclaiming loudly, Here we are, here we are! Then he entered the lecture hall and sat down on a kind of carved podium, waiting to begin with Call me Ishmael.

The green light from the stained-glass windows gave a cadaverous appearance to the face that smiled malevolently, as the assistants set up the tape recorder. Then he began: Contrary to what my valiant colleague Professor Bocardo has said recently... and so on for two hours.

That green light sent me into a watery slumber, to be seen also in the eyes of his assistants. I shared their suffering. At the end of the two hours, while we students swarmed out, Professor Di Samis had the tape rewound, stepped down from the podium, seated himself democratically in the front row with his assistants, and together they all listened again to the two-hour lecture, while the professor nodded with satisfaction at each passage he considered essential. It should be noted that the course was on the translation of the Bible in the German of Luther. What a phenomenon, my classmates would say with a forlorn expression.