The Christmas at Monte Cerignone was a lavish celebration. For four decades, Umberto Eco gathered with a small circle of friends at his country house in the Marche region to celebrate life. Eco would recite Dante, dress as a friar, and even try his hand at tap dancing as if he were Fred Astaire. His dance partner on that final night of the year, his Ginger Rogers, was always the Argentine semiologist Lucrecia Escudero—the pupil who escaped the Videla dictatorship to attend his Bologna seminar. This woman, little known to the world—who, like Eco’s other colleagues and students, had been forbidden to speak of him until ten years after his death (February 19, 2016)—has revealed his story through another, Mayte Aparisi, who has just published Umberto Eco (declassified) (JDB Books, 2016), a portrait of the author of The Pendulum of Foucault focused on his teaching work, but above all on his more human side: the loyal friend, the inexhaustible conversationalist, and the attentive teacher.
We spoke with Mayte Aparisi about how Umberto Eco discovered disco music in New York, about the pursuit of perfection, and about the value of friendship and loyalty.
—There is a crucial figure to understand this book about Umberto Eco: Lucrecia Escudero.
—Lucrecia escapes the dictatorship thanks to Eco accepting her as a student.
I realized then that I could reconstruct those forty years of relationship, the forty most important years of Umberto Eco through one of his students.
She had been on the dictatorship lists. She was twenty-four and had completed her degree with an impressive résumé. Lucrecia became the rector’s right hand. That person began to be harassed, pursued, and scrutinized. Some of her friends had to flee from paramilitaries. She knew how it worked: if her name appeared in the phonebooks of those people, she would become subversive and suspicious. Her grandfather was a prominent businessman, whose principal partner was in Milan, and it was he who told her she should leave the country and do so legally. At that moment, she happened to meet someone who was a close friend of Umberto Eco. The possibility of studying in Italy with him arose. She obtained the address of the Bologna Center for Art Studies and sent a letter. Lucrecia says it was a miracle: at that time mail didn’t work in Argentina or in Italy, and it did in both countries; she received Umberto Eco’s reply along with his General Treatise of Semiotics. It’s a poetic and beautiful story. She ended up connected with the Italian writer in a paternal way; he protected her from the first moment. It made me realize that I could reconstruct those forty years of relationship—the forty most important years of Umberto Eco—through one of his disciples. Lucrecia also opened the doors to Patrizia Magli, who was Eco’s first support when his Bologna seminar began in 1975.
—He has mentioned Patrizia Magli, who was a godmother to Lucrecia.
—Exactly. All of them were older than Lucrecia, who at the time was about twenty-six, while they were nearing forty. Patrizia welcomed Lucrecia—who had initially arrived in Milan, at the home of her grandfather’s partner—into her house. From that moment, Lucrecia entered Umberto Eco’s heart, into his inner circle alongside Patrizia Magli and Paolo Fabbri.
Lucrecia Escudero and Umberto Eco in Mexico
—The novelist Umberto Eco has overshadowed the rest of his facets. In your book we discover the professor, intense and with great charisma.
—Yes. Moreover, at that moment there was something of a duel between those two figures who were close: Eco and Fabbri. Eco’s female students told me that he beguiled them, keeping a certain distance, drawing them into his sphere in a very kind way. Paolo was more seductive; he played with his own appearance and had a different demeanor. In the end, the one who inspired tenderness and generated devotion was Umberto Eco. Between the two semiologists there was a very strong friendship, though there was also some envy over Paolo’s jealousies. They were two charismatic professors in a time when the relationship with students was very intimate.
—We’ve mentioned Bologna. Another setting for the book. There they lived a few difficult years with the Red Brigades’ attacks, the kidnapping of Aldo Moro…
It was a very tough period. In one chapter I recount that they had to move classes to Monte Cerignone because the universities were closed. The semioticians decided to continue teaching and they took their students to Umberto Eco’s summer residence. It was there that, months later, he began to write The Name of the Rose. His study was then filled with boxes of index cards, containing all the information he had gathered. He would say he was a medievalist in hibernation; the medieval world occupied his mind. As soon as the plot was clear and he knew how to poison the monk, he sat down to write the book. His colleagues in semiotics thought he was crazy. They asked, “What is a semiologist doing writing a novel?” And he replied, “Because I have the need to poison a monk.”
There were years of New Year’s Eve parties and celebrations that Lucrecia attended. And there was also a curious figure—a desk-mate from Eco’s school who is still alive and who recently took part in the international online marathon called Eco Eco Eco – A World-Wide Talk for Umberto. This man delivered a speech about his childhood friend. He never missed any of the Christmas convocations Eco organized. He was a musician, played the accordion; the Snoopy of the gang. Umberto Eco always maintained a loyal circle of friends who stood by him and accompanied him on his travels. Eco could seem distant in his lectures, but he was very warm and close with his friends.
New York was another stage of his life, and there he also spent time with his friends. He was teaching at Harvard. Eco had a neighbor in Monte Cerignone, a metal-industry entrepreneur who was doing very well and who organized a trip for his clients to New York. On that very plane were several of those friends and pupils. There are several funny anecdotes, such as those of Paolo Fabbri and Rosenberg’s chicken, which I recount in the book. They all went to Studio 54 at a moment when disco music was just beginning. Umberto Eco did not miss the onset of disco.
—After the publication of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco becomes a rock star, as we see in the Mexico presentation that you recount in your work.
What Lucrecia didn’t know was what would come next: people hanging from windows to gain a view of the talk. Eco’s fame from The Name of the Rose had become international. There, a moment of conversation arises between Lucrecia and Umberto. She asks him when he realized he was such an important figure. He answers that it occurred when he found his name in a crossword puzzle: “a relevant writer of the twentieth century,” three letters long.
—The relationship between Lucrecia and Umberto continued through the years. And at the end of the 1980s, when he was Lucrecia’s thesis adviser, she discovers a man who wears a mask of perfection, a man who shouts at her as she brings the first draft and proclaims, “I am the Coca-Cola.” Everything he did had to meet his standard of perfection, and so did everything that happened to those under his protection.
—Umberto Eco was demanding. She handed in her thesis draft, and he returned that tome on the Falklands War full of notes. Then he tells her: “I am the Coca-Cola.” In everything he put his stamp on, it had to be perfect. And he said it with that booming center-court voice of a mall Santa.
[An image here: la-ultima-foto-de-umberto-eco.jpeg]
—A little before Eco’s death, Lucrecia took “the last photo.”
—A photo in which he does not look at the camera. Lucrecia did not realize at that moment that Umberto was dying.
—Finish. Were you afraid of writing about Umberto Eco?
—Very much. If I could face this challenge, it was because I had already written my first work of fiction, The Noises of the Night, in which the same method was used: rescuing oral memory. On that occasion there were three women, four generations spanning a hundred years in Argentina. My question was: “How do I tell the story of Umberto Eco without simply telling the story of Umberto Eco?” Because I would be speaking of Lucrecia, and at the same time I needed to do it in a fluid, accessible, and broadly engaging way. This is not a book for semioticians or intellectuals. I want to bring the figure of Umberto Eco closer to everyday people.