Read Online The Paris Enigma by Pablo De Santis - Free Book Online

sank the men into a state of confused melancholy. Baldone, seeing that the others had abandoned their bellicose stances, put away his knife. The tips of his mustache, usually smoothly waxed, now drooped toward the floor. Some men went back to their armchairs, to their drinks, to the conversation they had abandoned; others decided to go off to bed. I was glad to know that they weren’t so different from me: we all dreamed of the same things.

3
    T he tower looked finished, The machinists, organized into groups of four, continued to replace the provisional rivets—cold-fitted—for the definitive ones, which were heated to red-hot and fitted with whacks from a drop hammer. Over the two years of the construction, there had been plenty of problems: some of them were minor, like the flaws in the protective railing, which was being replaced, and others were more serious, like the labor union disputes that threatened to halt the project, or the problems getting the elevators to go up along the diagonal. In his statements to the press, Alexandre Eiffel seemed more confident about dealing with the engineering problems than with his enemies: the tower had been attacked by politicians, intellectuals, artists, and members of esoteric sects. But one thing was sure: the taller it grew, the more the problems faded into the distance. Now that it was almost completed, the voices that opposed it no longer resounded with the fury that leads to action, but with nostalgia for a lost world. The same thing had happened with the union. It was more difficult to work at a thousand feet high than at a hundred and fifty or three hundred, because of the vertigo, and the freezing winds. But the laborers, so unruly close to the ground, became more obedient the higherthey climbed, as if they considered the tower a personal challenge and had reached a place of proud solitude that no longer tolerated the complaints of the herd. Like a good engineer, Eiffel knew that sometimes difficulties made things run more smoothly.
    In spite of the fact that the tower was almost finished, there was one enemy that had not given up harassing the builders with anonymous letters and minor attacks. Along with Turin and Prague, Paris was one of the points on the Hermetic triangle, and it was swarming with esoteric sects. All their members hated the tower. The organizing committee for the World’s Fair had been forced to hire Louis Darbon to look into the anonymous letters. Eiffel, the engineer, wasn’t in favor of this investigation. When one of his collaborators made fun of the fanatics, Eiffel defended them by saying, “They are the only ones, with their feverish minds, that have understood us. We are in a war of symbolism.”
    The tower was the entrance to the fair: once you passed through the tall door made of iron and empty space, you saw frenetic activity devoid of any hierarchy or central focus. That chaos made you understand the dictionary compiler’s desire to impose alphabetical order on the world’s infinite variety. Everything was being built at once: temples, pagodas, cathedrals. In the streets, carts dragged enormous wooden boxes, decorated with shipping and customs stamps, from which emerged the tops of African trees or the arms of disproportionately large statues. Displaced natives from Africa and the Americas were ordered to build their indigenous dwellings in the middle of the splendor of European pavilions and palaces. But it wasn’t easy to maintain these islands of virgin nature in the midst of all the hustle and bustle and amid the machines: when there wasn’t a hut on fire there was an igloo melting.
    The fair strove to re-create the world in a finite space in Paris, but this activity provoked a strange reaction, and the fair expanded throughout the city, infecting theaters and hotels, where glass cases were mounted and treasures were unearthed from basements that no one had been infor years. Even the cemeteries