Back to Bologna

20

‘When I speak of mimicking mimesis, an exact parallel is to be found in contemporary cosmology, where there is much discussion about the problem of the apparent “fine-tuning” of our observable universe. Since any appeal to a divine author, with an independent existence hors du texte, is clearly out of the question, scientists have advanced and indeed largely accepted the so-called multiverse or “all possible worlds” theory. This postulates an infinite number of parallel universes exhausting every conceivable permutation of the physical constants. It is thus unsurprising that we happen to find ourselves in the statistically insignificant instance where those constants are such as to make human life possible. This is the only universe that we can experience, but in order to make sense of its apparently purposeful calibration we must-I repeat, must-presume the existence of all possible variants, since any other outcome is a nonsense a priori.

‘By analogy, each text necessarily implies the existence of an infinite number of other and in many cases contradictory texts. Over a century ago, Nietzsche proclaimed that “There is no such thing as facts, only interpretation”. In one or another parallel universe, Noam Chomsky’s notorious example of a grammatically correct yet semantically meaningless statement, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”, would sound as banal as “The cat sat on the mat”. Hence the inherent instability of any given interpretation, despite the competing claims of the various class, power and gender structures that it might appear to endorse.’

The lecture hall was a classic seventeenth-century aula resembling the theatres and opera houses of that period: chaste, intimate, and with perfect acoustics. Professor Edgardo Ugo’s conversational voice carried, without any effort or amplification, to the seat high in the back row where Rodolfo Mattioli sat. He knew that he would be invisible to Ugo from there, but he was in any case wearing Vincenzo’s scuffed leather jacket once again, this time to avoid recognition.

Professor Ego, as he was known to students and fellow academics alike, had now reached his peroration. Characteristically, this combined witty and learned references to Eugenio Montale, the video game Final Fantasy X-2, Roman Jakobson, the Schrodinger’s cat paradox, St Thomas Aquinas, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, transcendental number theory and the Baghdad blogger. He then accepted the plaudits of his audience with an equally characteristic gesture indicating that while he understood, as they of course did, that none of this was of any real importance, they also understood that nothing else was either. Or as Ugo liked to put it, adapting Oscar Wilde, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us no longer pretend to be looking at the stars’.

Rodolfo filed out with the rest of the auditors, several of whom glanced at him with embarrassment, and then looked away. The news of his expulsion from Ugo’s course had clearly got around the other students involved. He was now taboo. If only they knew, he thought, fingering the pistol pocketed in the leather jacket. The previous evening Rodolfo had extracted and carefully examined the weapon he had discovered concealed behind the books in his room. It was a very high-quality piece of hardware, of Soviet origin judging by the red star on the grip, and to all appearances brand-new, but a faint odour of cordite in the barrel and the fact that there were only seven cartridges in the magazine, which was designed to hold eight, suggested that it had been fired at least once.

Rodolfo was no novice when it came to guns. On his arduous ascent through the lower echelons of the post-war construction business in Puglia, his father had been obliged to learn how to maintain and use a variety of firearms. He had passed this knowledge on to Rodolfo as a father-son bonding exercise, taking the boy out into the wilds from their country property for target practice. He had graduated from cans and bottles to vermin and birds, and in hopes of pleasing his father had developed into quite an accomplished shooter.

Well, today he was going to put those long-neglected skills to the test. He walked down the corridor and staircases with the rest of the student throng, amusing himself abstractly with the thought that at any moment he could kill seven of them. That wasn’t going to happen, of course. Apart from anything else, the random, motiveless crime was so last century, one of the great cliches of modernism both artistically and politically. Someone like Vincenzo, who hadn’t realised that the only stars he could see were the flashes in his head as a result of collapsing in the gutter, might still get a kick out of that sort of thing, but not Rodolfo. His acte was not going to be gratuite so much as in omaggio. His gestural rhetoric would be flawless, and then he would catch the first southbound train, turn up on the family doorstep at dawn, admit his academic disgrace and humiliation and beg his father to give him a real job.

After his weekly lecture, Rodolfo knew, Edgardo Ugo left the building by a side door leading to the bicycle shed reserved for the faculty. There the professor retrieved his machine and cycled the short distance to his town house to relax and prepare for lunch. Rodolfo therefore posted himself at the gate leading from this area to the main street. He himself didn’t have a bicycle, but he had noted in the past that, in keeping with the traditions of his city, Ugo proceeded on two wheels at a civilised, leisurely pace barely faster than a brisk jog. What with the inevitable traffic delays, Rodolfo had no doubts about his ability to keep up with his quarry for the kilometre or so separating the university from Ugo’s bijou residence in Via dell’Inferno. And there, he thought to himself, remembering Vincenzo’s taunting remark, I’ll give the smug bastard something to interpret.