The Seventh Function of Language

4:16 p.m.

“Fuck me, it’s hot!” Simon Herzog and Jacques Bayard wander the jagged streets of Bologna, the Red City, seeking refuge under its intersecting arches in the hope of a second’s respite from the blazing sun that in the summer of 1980 is beating down once again on northern Italy. Spray-painted on a wall, they read: Vogliamo tutto! Prendiamoci la città! Three years earlier, in this exact spot, carabinieri killed a student, triggering genuine mass protests that the minister of the interior chose to put down by sending in the tanks: like Czechoslovakia in 1977, but in Italy. Today, everything’s calm: the armored cars have returned to their burrows, and the entire city seems to be having a siesta.

“Is that it? Where are we?”

“Show me the map.”

“But you’ve got it!”

“No, I gave it back to you!”

Via Guerrazzi, in the heart of the student quarter of the oldest university city on the continent. Simon Herzog and Jacques Bayard enter an old Bolognan palace, now the headquarters of the DAMS: Discipline Arte Musica e Spettacolo. From what they are able to decipher from the obscure headings on the noticeboard, it is here, each week, that Professor Eco gave his biannual course. But the professor is not there; a porter explains in perfect French that classes are over (“I knew it was stupid to go to a university during the summer!” says Simon to Bayard) but that he will in all probability be at a café: “He usually goes to the Drogheria Calzolari or the Osteria del Sole. Ma, the Drogheria closes earlier. So it depends how thirsty he is, il professore.”

The two men cross the sublime Piazza Maggiore, with its unfinished fourteenth-century basilica, half in white marble, half in ocher stone, and its fountain of Neptune surrounded by fat, obscene nereids who touch their breasts while straddling demonic-looking dolphins. They find the Osteria del Sole in a tiny alleyway, already packed with students. On the wall outside they read: Lavovare meno—lavovare tutti! Having a bit of Latin, Simon is able to decipher: “Work less—work for all.” Bayard thinks: “Lazy-ass whiners everywhere, workers nowhere.”

In the entrance hall is a huge poster of a sun drawn in the style of an alchemist’s sign. Here, you can drink wine pretty cheaply and bring your own food. Simon orders two glasses of Sangiovese while Bayard asks after Umberto Eco. Everyone seems to know him but, as they say: Non ora, non qui. The two Frenchmen decide to stay for a while anyway, sheltered from the oppressive heat, in case Eco turns up.

At the back of the L-shaped room a group of students is noisily celebrating a young woman’s birthday; her friends have given her a toaster, which she shows off gratefully. There are some old people, too, but Simon notices that they are all sitting at the bar, near the entrance, and he realizes that’s so they don’t have to make a trip to order a drink, because there is no waiter service in the café. Behind the bar, an old, severe-looking woman dressed in black, her gray hair tied neatly in a bun, directs operations. Simon guesses that she is the manager’s mother, so he scans the room and soon spots him: a tall, gangling man playing cards at a table. From the way he grumbles and his exaggerated air of unpleasantness, Simon guesses that he works here and, given that he is not actually working, since he’s playing cards (Simon doesn’t recognize the type of cards; it looks like some kind of tarot deck), that must be him, the boss. From time to time his mother calls out to him: “Luciano! Luciano!” He responds with grunts.

In the corner of the L is a door that leads to a small internal courtyard, which functions as a terrace; Simon and Bayard see some couples kissing there and three conspiratorial young men in scarves. Simon also detects a few foreigners, their non-Italianness betrayed in one way or another by their clothes, body language, or facial expressions. The events of the previous months have left him a little paranoid and he imagines he can see Bulgarians everywhere.

The atmosphere is not particularly conducive to paranoia, however. People unwrap little cakes stuffed with bacon and pesto, or nibble on artichokes. Everyone smokes, of course. Simon does not spot the young conspirators in the little courtyard exchange a packet under the table. Bayard orders another glass of wine. Soon, one of the students at the back of the room walks over to offer them a glass of Prosecco and a slice of apple cake. His name is Enzo, he is extremely talkative, and he, too, speaks French. He invites them to join his friends, who are arguing joyfully about politics, to judge by the yells of “fascisti,” “communisti,” “coalizione,” “combinazione,” and “corruzione.” Simon asks about the meaning of pitchi, which keeps cropping up in their conversation. A short, olive-skinned brunette stops mid-sentence to explain to them in French that this is how “PC”—the initials of the Communist Party—is pronounced in Italian. She tells him that all the political parties are corrupt, even the Communists, who are notabili ready to play along with the bosses and cut deals with the Christian Democrats. Thankfully, the Red Brigades overturned the compromesso storico by kidnapping Aldo Moro. Fair enough, they killed him, but that’s the fault of the pope and that porco Andreotti, who refused to negotiate.

Luciano, who heard her talking to the Frenchmen, waves his arms and shouts over to her: “Ma, che dici! Le Brigate Rosse sono degli assassini! They killed him and they tossed him in the boot of the macchina, like un cane!”

The girl swivels to face him: “Il cane sei tu! They’re at war. They wanted to swap him for their comrades, political prisoners. They waited fifty-five days for the government to agree to talk with them, nearly two whole months! The government refused. Not a single prisoner, Andreotti said! Moro begged them: my friends, save me, I’m innocent, you must negoziare! And all his friends, they said: that’s not him, he’s been drugged, he’s been coerced, he’s changed! That’s not the Aldo I knew, they said, ’sti figli di putana!”

And she pretends to spit before downing the contents of her glass, then she turns back to Simon with a smile, while Luciano returns to his tarocchino, mumbling incomprehensibly.

Her name is Bianca. She has very dark eyes and very white teeth. She is Neapolitan. She is studying political science. She would like to be a journalist, but not for the bourgeois press. Simon nods and smiles idiotically. He gets a few brownie points when he says he’s working on his thesis at Vincennes. Bianca claps her hands: three years ago, a huge conference took place here, in Bologna, with the great French intellectuals, Guattari, Sartre, and that young guy in a white shirt, Lévy … She interviewed Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir for Lotta Continua. Sartre said, she recites from memory, one finger in the air: “I cannot accept that a young activist could be murdered in the streets of a city governed by the Communist Party.” And, fellow traveler that he was, he declared: “I am on the side of the young activist.” It was magnifico! She remembers that Guattari was welcomed like a rock star; in the streets, it was madness, you’d have thought he was John Lennon. One day, he took part in a protest march, he met Bernard-Henri Lévy, so he made him leave the procession, because the students were really excited and ’cause the philosopher in the camicia bianca, he was going to get beaten up. Bianca bursts out laughing and pours herself more Prosecco.

But Enzo, who is chatting with Bayard, gets involved in the conversation: “The Brigate Rosse? Ma, left-wing terrorists … they’re still terrorists, no?”

Bianca flares up again: “Ma che terroristi? Activists who use violence as a means of action, ecco!”

Enzo laughs bitterly: “Si, and Moro was a capitalist lacchè, io so. He was just a strumento in a suit and tie in the hands of Agnelli and the Americans. Ma, behind the tie, there was an uomo. Ah, if he hadn’t written those letters, to his wife, to his grandson … we’d only have seen the strumento, probably, and not the uomo. That’s why his friends panicked: they can say that he wrote those words under coercion, but everyone knows that’s not true: they weren’t dictated by a carceriere, they came from the bottom of the heart of a pover’uomo who was going to die. And you’re agreeing with his friends who abandoned him: you want to forget his letters so you can forget that your Red Brigade friends killed a vecchietto who loved his grandson. Va bene!”

Bianca’s eyes are shining. After a diatribe like that, her only option is to go for broke, with added lyricism if possible, but not too much because she knows that all politicized lyricism tends to sound religious, so she says: “His grandson will get over it. He’ll go to the best schools, he’ll never go hungry, he’ll get an internship at UNESCO, at NATO, at the UN, in Rome, in Geneva, in New York! Have you ever been to Naples? Have you seen the Neapolitan children who live in houses that the government—the government run by Andreotti and your friend Moro—have allowed to collapse? How many women and children have been abandoned by the Christian Democrats’ corrupted policies?”

Enzo snorts as he fills Bianca’s glass: “So two wrongs make a right, giusto?”

At this instant, one of the three young men stands up and tosses his napkin on the floor. With the lower part of his face covered by his scarf, he walks up to the table of card players, waves a pistol at the bar owner, and shoots him in the leg.

Luciano crumples to the floor, groaning.

Bayard is not armed, and in the scramble that follows he cannot reach the young man, who walks out of the bar, escorted by his two friends, the smoking gun in his hand. And in the blink of an eye, the gang has disappeared. Inside, it is not exactly a scene of panic, even if the old woman behind the bar has rushed over to her son, screaming, but young and old alike are all yelling at the tops of their voices. Luciano pushes his mother away. Enzo shouts at Bianca, with venomous irony: “Brava, brava! Continua a difenderli i tuoi amici brigatisti? Bisognava punire Luciano, vero? Questo sporco capitalista proprietario di bar. È un vero covo di fascisti, giusto?” Bianca goes over to help Luciano, lying on the floor, and replies to Enzo, in Italian, that it almost certainly wasn’t the Red Brigades, that there are hundreds of far-left or far-right factions who practice gambizzazione with shots from a P38. Luciano tells his mother: “Basta, mamma!” The poor woman lets loose a long sob of anguish. Bianca does not see why the Red Brigades would have attacked Luciano. While she tries to stanch the bleeding with a dishcloth, Enzo points out that her being unsure whether to attribute this attack to the far left or far right indicates a slight problem. Someone says they should call the police, but Luciano groans categorically: niente polizia. Bayard leans down over the wound: the bullet hole is above the knee, in the thigh, and the amount of blood loss suggests that it missed the femoral artery. Bianca replies to Enzo, in French, so that Simon realizes she is also speaking to him: “You know perfectly well that’s how it is—the strategy of tension. It’s been like that since the Piazza Fontana.” Simon asks what she’s talking about. Enzo replies that in Milan, in ’69, a bomb in a bank on the Piazza Fontana killed fifteen people. Bianca adds that during the investigation, the police killed an anarcho-syndicalist by throwing him through the police station window. “They said it was the anarchists, but afterward we realized it was the far right, working with the state, who planted the bomb in order to accuse the far left and justify their fascist policies. That is the strategia della tensione. It’s been going on for ten years. Even the pope is involved.” Enzo confirms: “Yeah, that’s true. A Pole!” Bayard asks: “And these, er, kneecappings, do they happen a lot?” Bianca thinks while she improvises a tourniquet with her belt. “No, not really. Probably not even once a week.”

And so, as Luciano does not seem to be at death’s door, the customers disperse into the night, and Simon and Bayard head toward the Drogheria Calzolari, guided by Enzo and Bianca, who have no desire to go home.

7:42 p.m.

The two Frenchmen move through the streets of Bologna as in a dream. The city is a theater of shadows, furtive silhouettes dancing a strange ballet to a mysterious choreography: students appear suddenly and disappear again behind pillars; junkies and prostitutes loiter under vaulted porches; carabinieri run silently in the background. Simon looks up. Two handsome medieval towers stand over the gate that used to open on the road to byzantine Ravenna, but the second tower leans like the one in Pisa, only more steeply. This is the Severed Tower, the Torre Mezza, placed when it was taller and more menacing by Dante in the last ring of Hell: “As when one sees the tower called Garisenda from underneath its leaning side, and then a cloud passes over and it seems to lean the more.” The star of the Red Brigades decorates the red brick walls. In the distance police whistles can be heard, and partisans chanting. A beggar accosts Bayard to ask him for a cigarette and tells him that there must be a revolution, but Bayard doesn’t understand and walks obstinately on, even though the succession of arches, street after street of them, seems endless to him. Daedalus and Icarus in the country of Italian communism, thinks Simon, seeing the electoral posters stuck to the stone walls and wooden beams. And, of course, among this crowd of ghosts there are the cats, who, as everywhere in Italy, are the city’s true inhabitants.

The window of the Drogheria Calzolari shines in the greasy night. Inside, professors and students drink wine and nibble antipasti. The boss says he’s about to close, but the lively atmosphere suggests the opposite. Enzo and Bianca order a bottle of Manaresi.

A bearded man is telling a funny story; everyone laughs, except for one man in gloves and another holding a bag; Enzo translates for the two Frenchmen: “There’s this uomo, he goes home, at night, he’s completely drunk, but on the way, he meets a nun, with her robe and her hood. So he throws himself at her, and he beats her up. And once he’s given her a good kicking, he picks her up and says: ‘Ma, Batman, I thought you were tougher than that!’” Enzo laughs, and so does Simon. Bayard hesitates.

The bearded guy is talking with a young woman in glasses and a man that Bayard immediately identifies as a professor because he looks like a student, but older. When the bearded guy finishes his glass, he pours himself another from the bottle on the counter, but does not fill the young woman’s and the professor’s empty glasses. Bayard reads the label: Villa Antinori. He asks the waiter if it’s any good. It’s a white from Tuscany, no, it’s not very good, replies the waiter in excellent French. His name is Stefano and he is studying political science. “Here, everyone’s a student and everyone’s political!” he tells Bayard, and adds a toast: “Alla sinistra!” Bayard clinks glasses with him and repeats: “Alla sinistra!” The bar owner looks worried and says: “Piano col vino, Stefano!” Stefano laughs and tells Bayard: “Pay no attention to him, he’s my father.”

The man in gloves demands the release of the philosopher Toni Negri and denounces Gladio, that far-right organization funded by the CIA. “Negri complice delle Brigate Rosse, è altrettanto assurdo che Trotski complice di Stalin!”

Bianca is outraged: “Gli stalinisti stanno a Bologna!”

Enzo goes up to a young woman and tries to guess what she’s studying. He gets it right first time. (Political science.)

Bianca explains to Simon that the Communist Party is very strong in Italy: it has 500,000 members and, unlike in France, it did not hand over its weapons in ’44, hence the phenomenal number of German P38s in circulation in the country. And Bologna the Red is a bit like the Italian Communist Party’s shop window, with its Communist mayor who works for Amendola, the current administration’s representative. “The right wing,” says Bianca, wrinkling her nose in contempt. “That historic compromise bullshit, that’s him.” Bayard sees Simon hanging on her every word, and raises his glass of red toward him: “So, lefty, you like Bologna, eh? Isn’t this better than your dump in Vincennes?” Bianca repeats, eyes shining: “Vincennes … Deleuze!” Bayard asks the waiter, Stefano, if he knows Umberto Eco.

Just then, a hippie in sandals enters, walks straight over to the bearded guy, and taps him on the shoulder. The bearded guy turns around. The hippie solemnly unzips his trousers and pisses on him. The bearded guy reels back, horrified, and everyone starts yelling. There is general confusion, and the hippie is ushered toward the exit by the boss’s son. People crowd around the bearded guy, who moans: “Ma io non parlo mai di politica!” The hippie, before leaving, shouts at him: “Appunto!”

Stefano comes back behind the counter and points out the bearded man to Bayard: “That’s Umberto.”

The man with the bag leaves, forgetting it on the floor by the bar, but thankfully the other customers catch him and hand it back. The man, embarrassed, apologizes strangely, says thank you, then disappears into the night.

Bayard approaches the bearded man, who is symbolically wiping his trousers, because the piss has already soaked into the cloth, and takes out his card: “Monsieur Eco? French police.” Eco becomes agitated: “Police? Ma, you should have arrested the hippie, then!” Then, considering the clientele of left-wing students that fill the Drogheria, he decides not to pursue this line of attack. Bayard explains why he is here: Barthes asked a young man to contact him if anything happened, but the young man died, with Eco’s name on his lips. Eco seems sincerely surprised. “I knew Roland well, but we weren’t close friends. It’s a terrible tragedy, of course, ma it was an accident, no?”

Bayard realizes he is going to have to be patient again, so he finishes his drink, lights a cigarette, looks at the man in gloves waving his arms around as he talks about materialismo storico. Enzo is hitting on the young student while playing with her hair, Simon and Bianca are toasting “desiring autonomy,” and Bayard says: “Think about it. There must be a reason why Barthes expressly asked him to contact you.”

He then listens to Eco failing to answer his question: “Roland’s great semiological lesson that has stayed with me is pointing to any event in the universe and explaining that it signifies something. He always repeated that the semiologist, walking in the street, detects meaning where others see events. He knew that we say something in the way that we dress, hold our glass, walk … You, for example, I can tell that you fought in the Algerian War and…”

“All right! I know how it works,” grumbles Bayard.

“Ah? Bene. And, at the same time, what he loved in literature is that one is not obliged to settle on a particular meaning, ma one can play with the meaning. Capisce? It’s geniale. That’s why he was so fond of Japan: at last, a world where he didn’t know any of the codes. No possibility of cheating, but no ideological or political issues, just aesthetic ones, or maybe anthropological. But perhaps not even anthropological. The pleasure of interpretation, pure, open, free of referents. He said to me: ‘Above all, Umberto, we must kill the referent!’ Ha ha! Ma attenzione, that doesn’t mean that the signified does not exist, eh! The signified is in everything. [He takes a swig of white wine.] Everything. But that does not mean either that there is an infinity of interpretations. It’s the Kabbalists who think like that! There are two currents: the Kabbalists, who think the Torah can be interpreted in every possible way to produce new things, and Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine knew that the text of the Bible was a foresta infinita di sensi—‘infinita sensuum silva,’ as Saint Jerome said—but that it could always be submitted to a rule of falsification, in order to exclude what the context made it impossible to read, no matter what hermeneutic violence it was subjected to. You see? It is impossible to say if one interpretation is valid, or if it is the best one, but it is possible to say if the text refuses an interpretation incompatible with its own contextuality. In other words, you can’t just say whatever you want about it. Insomma, Barthes was an Augustinian, not a Kabbalist.”

And while Eco drones on at him, in the hubbub of conversations and the clinking of glasses, amid the bottles arranged on the shelves, while the students’ young, supple, firm bodies exude their belief in the future, Bayard watches the man in gloves haranguing his listeners about some unknown subject. And he wonders why a man would wear gloves in eighty-five-degree heat.

The professor to whom Eco was telling jokes cuts in, in accentless French: “The problem, and you know this, Umberto, is that Barthes did not study signs, in the Saussurian sense, but symbols, at a push, and mostly clues. Interpreting a clue is not unique to semiology, it is the vocation of all science: physics, chemistry, anthropology, geography, economics, philology … Barthes was not a semiologist, Umberto, he didn’t understand what semiology was, because he didn’t understand the specificity of the sign, which, unlike the clue (which is merely a fortuitous trace picked up by a receiver), must be deliberately sent by a sender. Fair enough, he was quite an inspired generalist, but at the end of the day he was just an old-fashioned critic, exactly like Picard and the others he was fighting against.”

“Ma no, you’re wrong, Georges. The interpretation of clues is not all science, but the semiological moment of all science and the essence of semiology itself. Roland’s Mythologies were brilliant semiological analyses because daily life is subject to a continual bombardment of messages that do not always manifest a direct intentionality but, due to their ideological finality, mostly tend to be presented under an apparent ‘naturalness’ of the real.”

“Oh, really? I don’t see why you insist on labeling as semiology what is ultimately just a general epistemiology.”

“Ma, that’s exactly it. Semiology offers instruments to recognize what science does, which is, first and foremost, learning to see the world as a collection of signifying events.”

“In that case, you might as well come out and say that semiology is the mother of all sciences!”

Umberto spreads out his hands, palms open, and a broad smile splits his beard: “Ecco!”

There is the pop, pop, pop of bottles being uncorked. Simon gallantly lights Bianca’s cigarette. Enzo tries to kiss his young student, who shies away, laughing. Stefano fills everyone’s glasses.

Bayard sees the man in gloves put down his glass without finishing it and disappear into the street. The store is arranged in such a way, with a closed counter denying access to the whole back half of the room, that Bayard deduces there is no customer toilet. So, by the look of things, the man in gloves does not want to do what the hippie did, and has gone outside to piss. Bayard has a few seconds to come to a decision. He grabs a coffee spoon from the counter and walks after him.

He has not gone very far: there is no lack of dark alleyways in this part of town. He is facing the wall, in the midst of relieving himself, when Bayard grabs him by the hair, yanks him backward, and pins him to the ground, yelling into his face: “You keep your gloves on to piss? What’s up, don’t like getting your hands dirty?” The man is of average build, but he is too stupefied to fight back or even cry out, so he simply stares wide-eyed in terror at his assailant. Bayard immobilizes him by pressing his knee into the man’s chest and grabs his hands. Feeling something soft under the leather of the left-hand glove, he tears it off and discovers two missing phalanges, on the pinkie and ring fingers.

“So … you like cutting wood, too, huh?”

He crushes his head against the damp cobblestones.

“Where is the meeting?”

The man makes some incomprehensible gurgling noises, so Bayard lessens the pressure and hears: “Non lo so! Non lo so!”

Perhaps infected by the climate of violence that permeates the city, Bayard does not seem in the mood to show much patience. He takes the little spoon from his jacket pocket and wedges it deeply under the man’s eye. The man starts to screech like a frightened bird. Behind him, he hears Simon running up and shouting: “Jacques! Jacques! What are you doing?” Simon pulls at his shoulders, but Bayard is much too strong to be moved. “Jacques! Fucking hell! What’s wrong with you?”

The cop digs the spoon into the eye socket.

He does not repeat his question.

He wants to cause distress and despair at maximum intensity, at maximum speed, taking advantage of the element of surprise. His aim is efficiency, as it was in Algeria. Less than a minute ago, the man in gloves thought he was going to have a nice, relaxed evening and now some French guy has appeared out of nowhere and is trying to enucleate him while he pisses all over himself.

When he feels the terrorized man is ready to do anything to save his eye and his life, Bayard finally consents to make his question more specific.

“The Logos Club, you little shit! Where is it?” And the man with the missing fingers stammers: “Archiginnasio! Archiginnasio!” Bayard does not understand. “Archi what?” And behind him, he hears a voice that is not Simon’s: “The Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio is the headquarters of the old university, behind the Piazza Maggiore. It was built by Antonio Morandi, known as Il Terribilia, perché…”

Bayard, without turning around, recognizes the voice of Eco, who demands: “Ma, perché are you torturing this pover’uomo?”

Bayard explains: “There is a meeting of the Logos Club tonight, here in Bologna.” The man in gloves emits a hoarse wheezing sound.

Simon asks: “But how do you know that?”

“Our services obtained this information.”

“‘Our’ services? The Renseignements Généraux, you mean?”

Simon thinks about Bianca, who has stayed behind in the Drogheria, and would like to make it clear to everyone within earshot that he does not work for the French secret services but, to spare himself the bother of putting his growing identity crisis into words, he remains silent. He also realizes that they did not come to Bologna simply to interrogate Eco. And he notes that Eco does not ask what the Logos Club is, so he decides to ask the question himself: “What do you know about the Logos Club, Monsieur Eco?”

Eco strokes his beard, clears his throat, lights a cigarette.

“The Athenian city was founded on three pillars: the gymnasium, the theater, and the school of rhetoric. The trace of this tripartition remains today in a society obsessed with spectacle that promotes three categories of individuals to the rank of celebrity: athletes, actors (or singers: the ancient theater made no distinction between the two), and politicians. Of these three, the third, up to now, has always been dominant (even if, with Ronald Reagan, we see that some overlap is possible), because it involves the mastery of man’s most powerful weapon: language.

“From antiquity until the present day, the mastery of language has always been at the root of all politics, even during the feudal period, which might look as though it was dominated by the laws of physical force and military superiority. Machiavelli explains to the Prince that one governs not by force but by fear, and they are not the same thing: fear is the product of speech about force. Allora, whoever has mastery of speech, through its capacity to provoke fear and love, is virtually the master of the world, eh!

“It was on the basis of this supposition, and also to counter Christianity’s growing influence, that a sect of heretics founded the Logi Consilium in the third century A.D.

“Thereafter, the Logi Consilium spread through Italy, then through France, where it took the name the Logos Club in the eighteenth century, during the revolution.

“It developed as a highly compartmentalized secret society, structured like a pyramid, with its leaders—a body of ten members known as the sophists—presided over by a Protagoras Magnus, practicing their rhetorical talents, which they used essentially in the service of their political ambitions. Certain popes—Clement the Sixth, Pius the Second—are suspected of having been leaders of the organization. It has also been said that Shakespeare, Las Casas, Roberto Bellarmino (the inquisitor who led the trial of Galileo, sapete?), La Boétie, Castiglione, Bossuet, Cardinal de Retz, Christina of Sweden, Casanova, Diderot, Beaumarchais, de Sade, Danton, Talleyrand, Baudelaire, Zola, Rasputin, Jaurès, Mussolini, Gandhi, Churchill, and Malaparte were all members of the Logos Club.”

Simon remarks that this list is not restricted to politicians.

Eco explains: “In fact, there are two main currents within the Logos Club: the immanentistes, who consider the pleasure of the oratory duel an end in itself, and the fonctionnalistes, who believe rhetoric is a means to an end. Functionalism itself can be divided into two subcurrents: the Machiavellians and the Ciceronians. Officially, the former seek simply to persuade, and the latter to convince—the latter thus have more moral motivations—but in reality, the distinction is blurred because the goal for both factions is to acquire or conserve power, so…”

Bayard asks him: “And you?”

Eco: “Me? I’m Italian, allora…”

Simon: “Like Machiavelli. But also like Cicero.”

Eco laughs: “Si, vero. Anyway, I would be more of an immanentist, I think.”

Bayard asks the man in gloves for the password. He has recovered from his fright a little and protests: “Ma, it’s a secret!”

Behind Bayard, Enzo, Bianca, Stefano, and half the wine merchant’s clientele, drawn by the noise, have come to see what is going on. All of them listened to Umberto Eco’s little lecture.

Simon asks: “Is it an important meeting?” The man in gloves replies that tonight the standard will be extremely high because there is a rumor that a sophist may attend, maybe even the Great Protagoras himself. Bayard asks Eco to accompany them, but Eco refuses: “I know those meetings. I went to the Logos Club when I was young, you know! I even went up onstage and, as you can see, I didn’t lose a finger.” He proudly shows them his hands. The man in gloves represses a grimace of bitterness. “But I didn’t have time for my research, so I stopped going to meetings. I lost my rank a long time ago. I would be curious to see how good today’s duelists are, ma I am going back to Milan tomorrow. I have a train at eleven a.m. and I have to finish preparing a lecture on the ekphrasis of Quattrocento bas-reliefs.”

Bayard cannot force him, but in the least threatening tone he can manage, he says: “We still have questions to ask you, Monsieur Eco. About the seventh function of language.”

Eco looks at Bayard. He looks at Simon, Bianca, the man in gloves, Enzo and his new friend, his French colleague, Stefano and his father, who has also come out, and his gaze scans all the other customers who have crowded into the alleyway.

“Va bene. Meet me at the station tomorrow. Ten o’clock in the second-class waiting room.”

Then he goes back to the store to buy some tomatoes and cans of tuna and finally disappears into the night with his little plastic bag and his professor’s satchel.

Simon says: “We’re going to need a translator.”

Bayard: “Fingerless here can do it.”

Simon: “He’s not looking his best. I’m afraid he won’t do a very good job.”

Bayard: “All right, then, you can bring your girlfriend.”

Enzo: “I want to come too!”

The Drogheria customers: “We want to come too!”

The man in gloves, still lying on the ground, waves his mutilated hand: “Ma, it’s a private function! I can’t get everyone in.”

Bayard gives him a slap. “What? That’s not very Communist! Come on, let’s go.”

And in the hot Bologna night a little troop sets off toward the old university. From a distance, the procession looks a bit like a Fellini film, but it’s hard to tell whether it’s La Dolce Vita or La Strada.

12:07 a.m.

Outside the entrance of the Archiginnasio is a small crowd and a bouncer who looks like all bouncers except that he wears Gucci sunglasses, a Prada watch, a Versace suit, and an Armani tie.

The man in gloves speaks to the bouncer, flanked by Simon and Bayard. He says: “Siamo qui per il Logos Club. Il codice è fifty cents.”

The bouncer, suspicious, asks: “Quanti siete?”

The man in gloves turns around and counts: “Uh … Dodici.”

The bouncer suppresses a smirk and says that won’t be possible.

So Enzo moves forward and says: “Ascolta amico, alcuni di noi sono venuti da lontano per la riunione di stasera. Alcuni di noi sono venuti dalla Francia, capisci?”

The bouncer doesn’t bat an eyelid. He does not seem overly impressed by the notion of a French branch of the Logos Club.

“Rischi di provocare un incidente diplomatico. Tra di noi ci sono persone di rango elevato.”

The bouncer gives the group the once-over and says all he sees is a bunch of losers. He says: “Basta!”

Enzo does not give up: “Sei cattolico?” The bouncer lifts up his sunglasses. “Dovresti sapere che l’abito non fa il Monaco. Che diresti tu di qualcuno che per ignoranza chiudesse la sua porta al Messia? Como lo giudicheresti?” How would he judge the man who, in ignorance, closed the door to Christ?

The bouncer pulls a face. Enzo can tell he’s on the fence. The man spends several seconds considering the matter, thinks about the rumor of the Great Protagoras arriving incognito, then, finally, points to the twelve of them: “Va bene. Voi dodici, venite.”

The group enters the palace and climbs a stone staircase decorated with coats of arms. The man in gloves leads them to the Teatro Anatomico. Simon asks him why the code word fifty cents? He explains that, in Latin, the initials of the Logos Club signify 50 and 100. Like that, it’s easy to remember.

They enter a magnificent room constructed entirely in wood, designed as a circular amphitheater, decorated with wooden statues of famous anatomists and doctors, with a white marble slab at its center where corpses used to be dissected. At the back of the room, two statues of flayed men, both in wood, support a tray holding a statue of a woman in a thick dress that Bayard supposes to be an allegory of medicine but who if she had her eyes blindfolded could also be justice incarnate.

The tiered seating is already mostly full; the judges preside beneath the flayed men; a vague murmur of conversation fills the room as the spectators continue to arrive. Bianca, excited, tugs at Simon’s sleeve: “Look! It’s Antonioni! Have you seen L’Avventura? It is so magnifico! Oh, he came with Monica Vitti! Che bella! And look over there, that man on the jury, the one in the middle? That’s ‘Bifo,’ the head of Radio Alice, an independent station that’s really popular in Bologna. It was his programs that sparked the civil war, three years ago, and he’s the one who introduced us to Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault. And look there! That’s Paolo Fabbri and Omar Calabrese, two of Eco’s colleagues, they’re semioticians like him, and they’re really famous too. And there! Verdiglione. Another semiotician, but he’s a psychoanalyst too. And there! That’s Romano Prodi, a former minister of industry, ditchi of course. What’s he doing here? Does he still believe in the historic compromise, quel buffone?”

Bayard says to Simon: “And there, look.” He points out Luciano, sitting on the benches with his old mother, chin resting on a crutch, smoking a cigarette. And, at the other end of the room, the three young guys in scarves who shot at him. All of them are acting as if nothing happened. The young guys don’t seem too worried. What a strange country, thinks Bayard.

It is gone midnight. The session begins: a voice rings out. It’s Bifo who speaks first, the man from Radio Alice who set Bologna ablaze in ’77. He quotes a Petrarch canzone that Machiavelli used in the conclusion of The Prince: “Vertú contra furore / prenderà l’arme, et fia ’l combatter corto: / ché l’antico valore / ne gli italici cor’ non è ancor morto.”

Virtue against fury shall advance the fight,

And it i’ th’ combat soon shall put to flight:

For the old Roman valor is not dead,

Nor in th’ Italians’ breasts extinguished.

Bianca’s eyes flame blackly. The man in gloves sticks out his chest, fists on hips. Enzo puts his arm around the waist of the young student he picked up at the Drogheria. Stefano whistles enthusiastically. The melody of a patriotic anthem rises inside the circular amphitheater. Bayard is searching the dark recesses for someone, but he doesn’t know who. Simon does not notice the man with the bag from the Drogheria amid the audience because he is absorbed by Bianca’s copper skin and the sight of her quivering breasts afforded by her low neckline.

Bifo draws the first subject, a line by Gramsci that Bianca translates for them:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

Simon thinks about this phrase. Bayard scans the room indifferently. He observes Luciano with his crutch and his mother. He observes Antonioni and Monica Vitti. He does not see Sollers and BHL hidden in a nook. In his head, Simon problematizes: “precisely” what? His mind syllogizes: we are in crisis. We are blocked. The Giscards govern the world. Enzo kisses his student on the mouth. What to do?

The two candidates stand either side of the dissecting table, below the audience, as at the center of an arena. Standing, it is easier for them to turn around and address the whole room.

Surrounded by all the wood of the anatomical theater, the marble table glows supernaturally white.

Behind Bifo, framing the pulpit (a real pulpit, as in a church) that is usually reserved for the professor, the flayed men stand watch, guardians of an imaginary door.

The first candidate—a young man with an Apulian accent, open-shirted, big silver belt buckle—begins.

If the dominant class has lost consentement—in other words if it is no longer dirigeante but merely dominante and the only power it holds is of coercition—this signifies precisely that the great masses are detached from traditional ideologies, that they no longer believe in what they believed before …

Bifo looks around the room. His gaze lingers for a moment on Bianca.

And it is precisely this interregnum that encourages the birth of what Gramsci calls a great variety of morbid symptoms.

Bayard watches Bifo watching Bianca. In the shadows, Sollers points out Bayard to BHL. In order to pass incognito, BHL is wearing a black shirt.

The young duelist rotates slowly, declaiming to the whole room. We know exactly what morbid phenomenon Gramsci was alluding to. Don’t we? It is the same one that menaces us today. He leaves a pause. He shouts: “Fascismo!”

By leading his audience to conjure the idea before he pronounces the word, it is as if, at this instant, he delivers the thought of all his listeners telepathically, creating a sort of collective mental communion by the power of suggestion. The idea of fascism crosses the room like a silent wave. The young duelist has at least achieved one essential objective: setting the agenda of the debate. And, into the bargain, dramatizing it as intensely as possible: the fascist danger, the still fertile womb, etc.

The man with the bag holds it tight against his knees.

Sollers’s cigarette, thrust into his ivory cigarette holder, shines in the darkness.

And yet there is a difference between the situation today and Gramsci’s era. Today we no longer live under the threat of fascism. Fascism is already established in the heart of the government. It writhes there like larvae. Fascism is no longer the catastrophic consequence of a state in crisis and a dominant class that has lost control of the masses. It is no longer the sanction of the ruling class but its insidious recourse, its extension, designed to contain the advance of progressive forces. This is no longer a fascism supported openly but a slinking, shadowy, ashamed fascism, a fascism not of soldiers but shifty politicians, not a party of youth but a fascism of old people, a fascism of secret, dubious sects made up of aging spies in the pay of racist bosses who want to preserve the status quo but who are suffocating Italy inside a deadly cocoon. It is the cousin who makes embarrassing jokes during dinner but who we still invite to family meals. It is no longer Mussolini, it is the Freemasons of Propaganda Due.

There are boos from the audience. The young Apulian need only wrap up now: Incapable of imposing itself completely, but sufficiently established in every echelon of the state machinery to prevent any change in government (he wisely says nothing about the historic compromise), fascism in its larval form is no longer the menace hovering over a never-ending crisis, but is the very condition of that crisis’s permanence. The crisis that has mired Italy for years will be resolved only when fascism is eradicated from the state. And for that, he says, raising his fist, “la lotta continua!”

Applause.

Although his opponent will offer a strong defense of the négrienne idea that the crisis is no longer a passing or possibly cyclical moment, the product of a dysfunctional or exhausted system, but the necessary engine of a mutant, polymorphic capitalism obliged to keep moving forward in order to regenerate, to find new markets and keep the workforce under pressure, citing as evidence the election of Thatcher and the imminent election of Reagan, he will be defeated by two votes to one. In the audience’s opinion, the two duelists will have put on a high-quality show, justifying their rank of dialectician (the fourth of the seven levels). But the young Apulian will certainly have drawn some advantage from speaking against fascism.

It’s the same thing for the next duel: “Cattolicesimo e marxismo.” (A great Italian classic.)

The first duelist talks about Saint Francis of Assisi, about mendicant orders, about Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, about worker priests, about liberation theology in South America, about Christ driving the money changers from the temple, and concludes by making Jesus the first authentic Marxist-Leninist.

Uproar in the amphitheater. Bianca applauds noisily. The scarf gang lights a joint. Stefano uncorks a bottle that he brought with him just in case.

The second duelist can talk all he likes about the opium of the people, about Franco and the Spanish Civil War, about Pius XII and Hitler, about the collusion between the Vatican and the Mafia, about the Inquisition, about the Counter-Reformation, about the Crusades as a perfect example of an imperialist war, about the trials of Jan Hus, Bruno, and Galileo. But it’s hopeless. The audience is impassioned. Everyone gets to their feet and starts singing “Bella Ciao,” even though this has no connection with anything. With the crowd fully behind him, the first duelist wins by three votes to zero, but I wonder if Bifo was entirely convinced. Bianca sings her heart out. Simon watches her in profile as she sings, fascinated by the supple, mobile features of her radiant face. (He thinks she looks like Claudia Cardinale.) Enzo and the student sing. Luciano and his mother sing. Antonioni and Monica Vitti sing. Sollers sings. Bayard and BHL try to figure out the words.

The next duel pits a young woman against an older man; the question is about soccer and the class struggle; Bianca explains to Simon that the country has been rocked by “Totonero,” a match-fixing scandal involving the players of Juventus, Lazio, Perugia … and also Bologna.

Once more, against all expectations, it is the young woman who wins by defending the idea that the players are proletarians like other workers and that the club bosses are stealing their hard work.

Bianca explains to Simon that the national team’s young striker, Paolo Rossi, was suspended for three years following the match-fixing scandal, meaning that he will not be able to play in the World Cup in Spain. Tough shit for him, says Bianca, he refused a transfer to Napoli. Simon asks why. Bianca sighs. Napoli is too poor; it can’t compete with the biggest clubs. No great player will ever go to Napoli.

Strange country, thinks Simon.

The night wears on, and the time is come for the digital duel. The silence of the statues—Gallienus, Hippocrates, the Italian anatomists, the flayed men, and the woman on the tray—contrasts with the agitation of the living. People smoke, drink, chat, eat picnics.

Bifo summons the duelists. A dialectician is challenging a peripatetician.

A man takes his place next to the dissecting table. It’s Antonioni. Simon observes Monica Vitti, wrapped up in a delicately patterned gauze scarf, as she stares lovingly at the great director.

And facing him, stiff-backed and severe with her immaculate bun, Luciano’s mother walks down the steps to the dissecting table.

Simon and Bayard look at each other. They look at Enzo and Bianca: they also seem surprised.

Bifo draws the subject: “Gli intellettuali e il potere.” Intellectuals and power.

It is the prerogative of the lower-ranked player to begin—the dialectician.

In order for the subject to be discussed, it is up to the first duelist to problematize it. In this case, that’s easy to work out: Are intellectuals the enemies or the allies of those in power? It’s simply a question of choosing. For or against? Antonioni decides to criticize the caste to which he belongs, the caste that fills the amphitheater. Intellectuals as accomplices with those in power. Così sia.

Intellectuals: functionaries of the superstructures that participate in the construction of the hegemony. So, Gramsci again: all men are intellectuals, true, but not all men serve the function of intellectuals in society, which consists in working for the spontaneous consent of the masses. Whether “organic” or “traditional,” the intellectual always belongs to an “economic-corporative” logic. Organic or traditional, he is always in the service of those in power, present, past, or future.

The salvation of the intellectual, according to Gramsci? Becoming one with the Party. Antonioni laughs sardonically. But the Communist Party itself is so corrupt! How could it provide redemption for anyone these days? Compromesso storico, sto cazzo! Compromise leads to compromised principles.

The subversive intellectual? Ma fammi il piacere! He recites a phrase from another man’s film: “Think about what Suetonius did for the Caesars! You start with the ambition to denounce something and you end up an accomplice.”

Theatrical bow.

Prolonged applause.

It’s the old lady’s turn to speak.

“Io so.”

She, too, begins with a quotation, but she chooses Pasolini. His now-legendary “J’accuse,” published in the Corriere della Sera in 1974.

“I know the names of those responsible for the massacre of Milan in 1969. I know the names of those responsible for the massacres of Brescia and Bologna in 1974. I know the names of important people who, with the aid of the CIA, Greek colonels, and the Mafia, launched an anti-Communist crusade, then tried to pretend they were anti-fascists. I know the names of those who, between two Masses, gave instructions and assured the protection of old generals, young neo-fascists, and ordinary criminals. I know the names of the serious and important people behind comic characters or behind drab characters. I know the names of serious and important people behind the tragic young people who have offered themselves as hired killers. I know all these names and I know all the crimes—the attacks on institutions and massacres—of which they are guilty.”

The old woman growls and her trembling voice rings out in the Archiginnasio.

“I know. But I have no proof. Not even any clues. I know because I am an intellectual, a writer, who strives to follow everything that happens, to read everything that is written on this subject, to imagine all that is unknown or shrouded in silence; who puts together disparate facts, gathering the fragmentary, disordered pieces of an entire, coherent political situation, who restores logic where randomness, madness, and mystery seem to reign.”

Less than a year after that article, Pasolini was found murdered, beaten to death on a beach in Ostia.

Gramsci dead in prison. Negri imprisoned. The world changes because intellectuals and those in power are at war with one another. The powerful win almost every battle, and the intellectuals pay with their lives or their freedom for having stood up to the powerful, and they bite the dust. But not always. And when an intellectual triumphs over the powerful, even posthumously, then the world changes. A man earns the name of intellectual when he gives voice to the voiceless.

Antonioni, whose physical integrity is at stake, does not let her finish. He cites Foucault, who says we must “put an end to spokespeople.” Spokespeople do not speak for the others, but in their place.

So the old woman responds straight away, insulting Foucault as senza coglioni: didn’t he refuse to intervene, here, in the parricide scandal that shook the whole country three years ago, just after publishing his book on the parricide of Pierre Rivière? What is the point of an intellectual if he doesn’t intervene in a matter that corresponds precisely to his field of expertise?

In the shadows, Sollers and BHL chuckle, although BHL wonders what Sollers’s field of expertise might be.

In response, Antonioni says that Foucault, more than anyone else, has exposed the vanity of this posture, this way the intellectual has of (he quotes Foucault again) “giving a bit of seriousness to minor, unimportant disputes.” Foucault defines himself as a researcher, not an intellectual. He belongs to the long-term goals of research, not to the agitation of polemic. He said: “Aren’t intellectuals hoping to give themselves greater importance through ideological struggle than they actually have?”

The old woman gasps. She spells it out: Every intellectual, if he correctly carries out the work of heuristic study for which he is qualified and that ought to be his vocation, even if he is in the service of those in power, works against the powerful because, as Lenin said (she turns around theatrically, her gaze sweeping the entire audience), the truth is always revolutionary. “La verità è sempre rivoluzionaria!”

Take Machiavelli. He wrote The Prince for Lorenzo de Medici: he could hardly have been more of a courtesan. And yet … this work, often regarded as the height of political cynicism, is a definitive Marxist manifesto: “Because the aims of the people are more honest than those of the nobles, the nobles wishing to oppress the people, and the people wishing not to be oppressed.” In reality, he did not write The Prince for the Duke of Florence, because it has been published everywhere. By publishing The Prince, he reveals truths that would have remained hidden and reserved exclusively for the purposes of the powerful: so—it’s a subversive act, a revolutionary act. He delivers the secrets of the Prince to the people. The arcana of political pragmatism stripped of fallacious divine or moral justifications. A decisive act in the liberation of humankind, as all acts of deconsecration are. Through his will to reveal, explain, expose, the intellectual makes war on the sacred. In this, he is always a liberator.

Antonioni knows his classics. Machiavelli, he replies, had so little concept of the proletariat that he couldn’t even consider its condition, its needs, its aspirations. Hence he also wrote: “And when neither their property nor their honor is taken from them, the majority of men live content.” In his gilded cage, he was incapable of imagining that the overwhelming majority of humankind was (and still is) absolutely lacking in property and honor, and could therefore not have them taken from them …

The old woman says that this is the very beauty of the true intellectual: he does not need to want to be revolutionary in order to be revolutionary. He does not need to love or even know the people in order to serve them. He is naturally, necessarily Communist.

Antonioni snorts contemptuously that she will have to explain that to Heidegger.

The old woman says that he would do better to reread Malaparte.

Antonioni talks about the concept of cattivo maestro, the bad master.

The old woman says that if there is a need to make clear with an adjective that the maestro is bad, that is because the maestro is essentially good.

It is clear there will be no knockout in this bout, so Bifo whistles to signal the end of the duel.

The two adversaries stare at each other. Their features are hardened, their jaws tensed, they are sweating, but the old woman’s bun is still immaculate.

The audience is divided, indecisive.

Bifo’s two fellow judges vote, one for Antonioni, the other for Luciano’s mother.

Everyone waits for Bifo’s decision. Bianca squeezes Simon’s hand in hers. Sollers salivates slightly.

Bifo votes for the old woman.

Monica Vitti turns pale.

Sollers smiles.

Antonioni does not flinch.

He places his hand on the dissecting table. One of the judges gets to his feet: a tall and very thin man, armed with a small, blue-bladed hatchet.

When the hatchet chops off Antonioni’s finger, the echo of the severed bone mingles with that of the blade hitting marble and the director’s scream.

Monica Vitti bandages his hand with her gauze scarf while the judge respectfully picks up the finger and hands it to the actress.

Bifo proclaims loudly: “Onore agli arringatori.” The audience choruses: Honor to the duelists.

Luciano’s mother returns to sit down next to her son.

As at the end of a movie when the lights have not yet come back up, when the return to the real world is experienced as a slow, hazy awakening, when the images are still dancing behind our eyes, several minutes pass before the first spectators, stretching their numb legs, stand up and leave the room.

The anatomical theater empties slowly. Bifo and his fellow judges gather pages of notes into cardboard folders then retire ceremoniously. The session of the Logos Club dissolves into the night.

Bayard asks the man in gloves if Bifo is the Great Protagoras. He shakes his head like a child. Bifo is a tribune (level six), but not a sophist (level seven, the highest). The man in gloves thought it was Antonioni, who, it was said, used to be a sophist in the 1960s.

Sollers and BHL slip out discreetly. Bayard does not see them leave, because in the bottleneck near the door, they are hidden behind the man with the bag. He must make a decision. He decides to follow Antonioni. Turning back, he says out loud to Simon, in front of everyone: “Tomorrow, ten o’clock at the station. Don’t be late!”

3:22 a.m.

The amphitheater is almost empty. The crowd from the Drogheria has gone. Simon wants to leave last, just to be sure. He watches the man in gloves walk out. He watches Enzo and the young student leaving together. He notes with satisfaction that Bianca has not moved. He might even suppose that she is waiting for him. They are the last ones. They stand up, walk slowly toward the door. But just as they are about to exit the room, they stop. Gallienus, Hippocrates, and the others observe them. The flayed men are absolutely motionless. Desire, alcohol, the intoxication of being away from home, the warm welcome that French people so often receive when they travel abroad … all these things give Simon a boldness—albeit a very shy boldness!—that he knows he would never have had in Paris.

Simon takes Bianca’s hand.

Or maybe it’s the other way around?

Bianca takes Simon’s hand and they walk down the steps to the stage. She turns in a circle and the statues flash past her eyes like a ghostly slide show, like images-mouvements.

Does Simon realize at this precise moment that life is role-play, in which it is up to us to play our part as best we can, or does the spirit of Deleuze suddenly breathe life into his young, supple, slim body, with his smooth skin and short nails?

He puts his hands on Bianca’s shoulders and slips off her low-cut top. Suddenly inspired, he whispers into her ear, as if to himself: “I desire the landscape that is enveloped in this woman, a landscape I do not know but that I can feel, and until I have unfolded that landscape, I will not be happy…”

Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: “Let’s construct an assemblage.”

She gives him her mouth.

He tips her back and lays her on the dissecting table. She takes off her skirt, spreads her legs, and tells him: “Fuck me like a machine.” And while her breasts spill out, Simon begins to flow into her assemblage. His tongue-machine slides inside her like a coin in a slot, and Bianca’s mouth, which also has multiple uses, expels air like a bellows, a powerful, rhythmic breathing whose echo—“Si! Si!”—reverberates in the pulsing blood in Simon’s cock. Bianca moans, Simon gets hard, Simon licks Bianca, Bianca touches her breasts, the flayed men get hard, Gallienus starts to jerk off under his robe, and Hippocrates under his toga. “Si! Si!” Bianca grabs Simon’s dick, which is hot and hard as if it’s just come out of a forge, and connects it to her mouth-machine. Simon declaims as if to himself, quoting Artaud in an oddly detached voice: “The body under the skin is an overheated factory.” The Bianca factory automatically lubricates her devenir-sexe. Their mingled moans ring out through the deserted anatomical theater.

Well, not entirely deserted: the man in gloves has come back to check out the two youngsters. Simon sees him, crouching in a shadowy angle of the tiered seating. Bianca sees him while she is sucking Simon. The man in gloves sees Bianca’s dark eyes shine as they observe him, even as she goes down on Simon.

Outside, the Bologna night finally begins to cool. Bayard lights a cigarette while he waits for Antonioni, who is dignified but dazed, to decide to move. At this stage of the investigation, he isn’t sure whether the Logos Club is just a bunch of harmless lunatics or something more dangerous, implicated in the deaths of Barthes and the gigolo, connected to Giscard, the Bulgarians, and the Japanese. A church bell strikes four times. Antonioni starts to walk, followed by Monica Vitti, the two of them followed by Bayard. They silently traverse arcades lined with chic boutiques.

Arched on the dissecting table, Bianca whispers to Simon, loud enough for the man in gloves to hear: “Scopami come una macchina.” Simon stretches over her, fits his cock into the mouth of her vulva, which is, he notes with pleasure, producing a constant flow of fluid, and when he finally thrusts inside her, he feels like pure liquid in its free state, unimpeded, sliding on the voluptuous Neapolitan’s writhing body.

After going up to the top of Via Farini, outside the Basilica of Santo Stefano of the Seven Churches (constructed during the interminable Middle Ages), Antonioni sits on a stone post. He is holding his mutilated hand in his other hand, and his head hangs low. Standing at a distance under the arcades, Bayard can tell he is crying. Monica Vitti walks up to him. Nothing appears to indicate that Antonioni knows she is there, just behind him, but he knows, all the same, and Bayard knows that he knows. Monica Vitti raises her hand, but it remains suspended in the air, hesitant, immobile above the lowered head, like the sketch of a fragile and undeserved halo. Behind his column, Bayard lights a cigarette. Antonioni sniffs. Monica Vitti looks like a dream in stone.

Bianca struggles more and more under the weight of Simon’s body, which she grips convulsively, crying out: “La mia macchina miracolante!” as Simon’s dick pumps inside her like a piston. From his hiding place, the man in gloves hallucinates the hybridization of a locomotive and a wild horse. The anatomical theater swells with their union, a muffled, irregular growl testifying to the fact that desiring machines continually break down as they run, but run only when they are breaking down. “The product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and the machine parts are the fuel that makes it run.”

Bayard has had time to light another cigarette, and then another. Monica Vitti at last decides to put her hand on Antonioni’s head. The director is now sobbing openly. She strokes his hair with an ambiguous tenderness. Antonioni weeps and weeps. He can’t stop. She lowers her beautiful gray eyes to the director’s neck and Bayard is too far away to distinguish the expression on her face clearly. He tries to squint through the darkness but when he finally thinks he can see the compassion that his logical mind supposes, Monica Vitti turns her gaze away, lifting her eyes toward the massive edifice of the basilica. Perhaps she is already elsewhere. A cat’s yowling can be heard in the distance. Bayard decides it is time to go to bed.

On the dissecting table, Bianca is now the iron horse atop Simon, who lies on the marble slab, all his muscles tensed to give more depth to the Italian girl’s thrusts. “There is only one kind of production: the production of the real.” Bianca slides up and down Simon, faster and faster and harder, until they reach the point of impact, when the two desiring machines collide in an atomic explosion and become, finally, that body without organs: “For desiring machines are the fundamental category of the economy of desire; they produce a body without organs all by themselves, and make no distinction between agents and their own parts…” Deleuze’s phrases flash through the young man’s mind just as his body convulses, as Bianca’s bolts and breaks down, then collapses on top of him, exhausted, their sweat mingling.

The bodies relax, shaken by aftershocks.

“Thus fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy.”

The man in gloves has not yet managed to leave. He, too, is exhausted, but it is not a pleasant form of exhaustion. His ghost fingers hurt him.

“The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel.”

Bianca explains the Deleuzian schizo to Simon as she rolls a joint. Outside, the first notes of birdsong can be heard. The conversation goes on until morning. “No, the masses were not deceived; they wanted fascism at that moment, in those circumstances…” The man in gloves ends up falling asleep in a row between seats.

8:42 a.m.

The two young people at last leave their wooden friends and go out into the already hot air of the Piazza Maggiore. They skirt the fountain of Neptune, his demonic dolphins, his obscene nymphs. Simon is giddy with fatigue, alcohol, pleasure, and cannabis. Less than twenty-four hours after his arrival in Italy, he thinks to himself that it is not going too badly so far. Bianca accompanies him to the station. Together, they walk up Via dell’Independenza, the city center’s main artery, past the still drowsy stores. Dogs sniff at trash cans. People come out, suitcases in hand: it is the start of a holiday, and everyone is going to the train station.

Everyone is going to the train station. It is 9:00 a.m., August 2, 1980. The July people are coming home, the August people preparing to leave.

Bianca rolls a joint. Simon thinks he should change his shirt. He stops outside an Armani shop and wonders if he could claim that on expenses.

At the end of the long avenue is the massive Porta Galliera, in appearance half byzantine house, half medieval arch, which Simon would like to pass under, though he doesn’t really know why, and then, as it’s not yet time for the meeting at the train station, he leads Bianca toward some stone steps by a park, they stop in front of a strange fountain embedded in the wall of the staircase, and they take turns smoking the joint as they contemplate the sculpture of a naked woman grappling with a horse, an octopus, and some other sea creatures that they are unable to identify. Simon feels lightly stoned. He smiles at the statue, thinking about Stendhal, which leads him to Barthes: “We always fail to talk about what we love…”

Bologna Central swarms with vacationers in shorts and bawling brats. Simon lets himself be guided by Bianca, who leads him to the waiting room, where they find Eco and Bayard, who has brought his little suitcase from the hotel where they checked in but in Simon’s case didn’t sleep. A small child, running after his little brother, charges into Simon, almost knocking him off balance. He hears Eco explaining to Bayard: “That is tantamount to saying that Little Red Riding Hood is not in a position to conceive of a universe where the Yalta Conference took place or where Reagan will succeed Carter.”

Despite the look Bayard shoots him, which he decodes as a cry for help, Simon does not dare interrupt the great academic, so he looks around and thinks he spots Enzo in the crowd, with his family. Eco says to Bayard: “So anyway, for Little Red Riding Hood, judging a possible world where wolves don’t speak, the ‘actual’ world would be hers, the one where wolves do speak.” Simon feels a vague rising anxiety, which he puts down to the joint. He thinks he sees Stefano with a young woman, moving off toward the tracks. “We can read the events described in The Divine Comedy as ‘credible’ in comparison with the medieval encyclopedia and legendary in comparison with ours.” Simon feels as if Eco’s words are ricocheting inside his head. He thinks he sees Luciano and his mother carrying a large bag overflowing with provisions. To reassure himself, he checks that Bianca is standing next to him. He has a vision of a German tourist, very blond, with a Tyrolean-style hat, a large camera on a strap around her neck, leather shorts, and knee-length socks, walking behind her. In the hubbub of Italian voices echoing under the roof of the station, Simon strains to isolate Eco’s French phrases: “On the other hand, if, reading a historical novel, we find a King Runcibald of France, the comparison with the world zero of the historical encyclopedia makes us feel uneasy in a way that presages the readjustment of cooperative attention: obviously, this is not a historical novel, but a fantasy novel.”

Just as Simon finally decides to greet the two men, he thinks he might be able to deceive the Italian semiologist, but he sees that Bayard has immediately understood that he is—as he realized himself, standing by the statue—lightly stoned.

Eco addresses him as if he had been there since the start of the conversation: “When reading a novel, what does it signify to recognize that what is happening is ‘truer’ than what happens in real life?” Simon thinks that in a novel, Bayard would bite his lip or shrug.

Then Eco finally stops talking and, for a second, no one breaks the silence.

Simon thinks he sees Bayard biting his lip.

He thinks he sees the man in gloves walking behind him.

“What do you know about the seventh function of language?” In a haze, Simon doesn’t realize at first that it’s not Bayard who asks this, but Eco. Bayard turns toward him. Simon notices that he is still holding hands with Bianca. Eco gazes at the girl with lightly lustful eyes. (Everything seems light.) Simon tries to pull himself together: “We have good reason to believe that Barthes and three other people were killed because of a document relating to the seventh function of language.” Simon hears his own voice but feels as if Bayard is speaking.

Eco listens with interest to the story of a lost manuscript for which people are being killed. He sees a man walk past holding a bouquet of roses. His mind wanders for a second, and a vision of a poisoned monk flashes through it.

In the middle of the crowd, Simon thinks he recognizes the man with the bag from the night before. The man sits in the waiting room and slides the bag under his seat. It looks full to bursting.

It is 10:00 a.m.

Simon does not want to insult Eco by reminding him that there are only six functions of language in Jakobson’s theory; Eco knows this perfectly well but, according to him, it is not entirely correct.

Simon concedes that there is a mention of a “magic or incantatory function,” but reminds Eco that it was not considered serious enough to be kept in Jakobson’s classification.

Eco does not claim that the “magic” function exists, strictly speaking, and yet one can probably find something inspired by it in works that followed Jakobson’s.

Austin, an English philosopher, did indeed theorize the existence of another function of language, which he called “performative,” and which could be summarized in the formula “When saying is doing.”

It consists in the capacity that certain pronouncements have to produce (Eco says “realize”) what they pronounce through the very fact of their pronouncement. For example, when the minister says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or when the monarch declares, “Arise, Sir So-and-so,” or when the judge says, “I sentence you…,” or when the president of the National Assembly says, “I declare the assembly open,” or simply when you say to someone, “I promise…,” it is the very fact of pronouncing these phrases that makes what they pronounce come into being.

In one way, this is the principle of the magical formula, Jakobson’s “magic function.”

A clock on the wall shows 10:02.

Bayard lets Simon take charge of the conversation.

Simon knows Austin’s theories, but does not see anything in them worth killing people for.

Eco says that Austin’s theory is not limited to those few cases but is extended to more complex linguistic situations, when a pronouncement is not intended merely to affirm something but seeks to provoke an action—which is either produced or not by the simple fact that this pronouncement is made. For example, if someone says to you “it’s hot in here,” it can be a simple observation about the temperature, but generally you would understand that he’s counting on the effect of his remark being that you will open the window. Likewise, when someone asks, “Do you have the time?,” he expects not a simple yes/no answer but that you should tell him what time it is.

According to Austin, speaking is a locutionary act since it consists in saying something but can also be an illocutionary or perlocutionary act, which surpasses the purely verbal exchange because it does something, in the sense that it produces actions. The use of language enables us to remark something, but also to perform something.

Bayard has no idea where Eco is going with this, and Simon is not too sure either.

The man with the bag has left, but Simon thinks he can glimpse the bag under the seat. (But was it that big before?) Simon thinks the man must have forgotten it again; there are some pretty absentminded people around. He looks for him in the crowd but doesn’t see him.

The wall clock shows 10:05.

Eco continues: “Now, let us imagine that the performative function is not limited to these few cases. Let us imagine a function of language that enables someone, in a much more extensive fashion, to convince anyone else to do anything at all in any situation.”

10:06.

“Whoever had the knowledge and the mastery of such a function would be virtually the master of the world. His power would be limitless. He could win every election, whip up crowds, provoke revolutions, seduce any woman, sell any kind of product imaginable, build empires, swindle the entire world, obtain anything he wanted in any circumstances.”

10:07.

Bayard and Simon are beginning to understand.

Bianca says: “He could dethrone the Great Protagoras and take control of the Logos Club.”

Eco replies, with an easygoing smile: “Eh, penso di si.”

Simon says: “But since Jakobson didn’t talk about that function of language…”

Eco: “Maybe he did, in fin dei conti? Maybe there is an unpublished version of Essays in General Linguistics in which this function is detailed?”

10:08.

Bayard thinks out loud: “And Barthes found himself in possession of this document?”

Simon: “And someone killed him to steal it?”

Bayard: “Not only for that. To prevent him from using it.”

Eco: “If the seventh function exists and it really is a kind of performative function, it would lose a large part of its power were it known by everyone. Knowledge of a manipulative mechanism doesn’t necessarily protect us from it—look at advertising, public relations: most people know how they work, what methods they use—but, all the same, it does weaken it…”

Bayard: “And whoever stole it wants it for his own exclusive use.”

Bianca: “Well, one thing’s for sure: Antonioni didn’t steal it.”

Simon realizes that he has been staring at the black bag forgotten under the seat for the past five minutes. It looks enormous. He has the impression that it has tripled in volume. It must weigh ninety pounds now. Either that or he’s still really high.

Eco: “If someone wanted to appropriate the seventh function for himself alone, he would have to ensure that no copies existed.”

Bayard: “There was a copy at Barthes’s apartment…”

Simon: “And Hamed was a walking copy; he carried it around inside him.” He has the impression that the gold-colored buckle on the bag is an eye, staring at him as if he were Cain in the tomb.

Eco: “But it’s also probable that the thief himself would make a copy and hide it somewhere.”

Bianca: “If this document is really so valuable, he can’t take the risk of losing it…”

Simon: “And he has to take the risk of making a copy and entrusting it to someone…” He thinks he sees a curl of smoke float out of the bag.

Eco: “My friends, I’m going to have to leave you! My train leaves in five minutes.”

Bayard looks at the clock. It is 10:12 a.m. “I thought your train was at eleven?”

“Yes, but in the end I decided to take the one before. This way, I’ll be in Milano earlier!”

Bayard asks: “Where can we find this Austin?”

Eco: “He’s dead. Ma, he had a student who has continued to work on all those questions of the performative, the illocutionary, the perlocutionary, and so on … He’s an American philosopher, his name is John Searle.”

Bayard: “And where can we find this John Searle?”

Eco: “Ma … in America!”

10:14. The great semiologist goes off to catch his train.

Bayard looks at the departures board.

10:17. Umberto Eco’s train leaves Bologna Central. Bayard lights a cigarette.

10:18. Bayard tells Simon that they are going to catch the eleven o’clock train to Milan, from where they must fly to Paris. Simon and Bianca say goodbye. Bayard goes to buy the tickets.

10:19. Simon and Bianca smooch in the middle of the crowded waiting room. The kiss goes on for a while and, like boys often do, Simon keeps his eyes open while he kisses Bianca. A woman’s voice announces the arrival of the Ancona-Basel train.

10:21. While he is kissing Bianca, Simon glimpses a young blonde. She is maybe thirty feet away. She turns around and smiles at him. He jumps.

It’s Anastasia.

Simon thinks the grass must really have been powerful stuff or maybe he’s just tired, but no: that figure, that smile, that hair … it really is Anastasia. The nurse from the hospital in Paris, here, in Bologna. Before Simon can emerge from his stupor and call her name, she walks out of the station. He says to Bianca, “Wait here for me!” and he runs after the nurse, just to be sure.

Thankfully, Bianca does not obey him but follows him instead. This is what will save her life.

10:23. Anastasia has already crossed the traffic circle outside the station but she stops and turns around again, as if she is waiting for Simon.

10:24. At the station exit, Simon looks around for her and spots her at the edge of the old town’s ring road, so he walks quickly across the flower beds in the middle of the traffic circle. Bianca follows him, about ten feet behind.

10:25. The train station explodes.

10:25 a.m.

Simon is thrown to the ground. His head hits the grass. The rumble of an earthquake spreads above him in a series of waves. Lying in the grass, breathless, covered in dust, stung by a dense rain of debris, deafened by the noise of the explosion, disoriented, Simon experiences the collapse of the building behind him as in a dream where you are falling endlessly or when you are drunk and the earth sways beneath your feet. It seems that the flower bed is a flying saucer whirling all over the place. When the background finally starts to slow down, he tries to come back down to earth. He looks around for Anastasia, but his field of vision is obstructed by an advertising billboard (for Fanta) and he can’t move his head. But his hearing gradually returns and he hears voices screaming in Italian and, in the distance, the first sirens.

He feels someone moving his body. It is Anastasia, turning him onto his back and examining him. Simon sees her beautiful Slavic face against the dazzlingly blue Bologna sky. She asks him if he’s injured but he is incapable of responding because he has no idea and because the words remain trapped in his throat. Anastasia takes his head in her hands and tells him (her accent returning): “Look at me. There’s nothing wrrrong with you. Everrrything’s fine.” Simon manages to sit up.

The entire left-hand side of the station has been pulverized. All that remains of the waiting room is a heap of stones and beams. A long, formless groan rises from the bowels of the devastated building, its twisted skeleton visible where the roof has been blown away.

Simon glimpses Bianca’s body close to the flower bed. He crawls over to her and lifts up her head. She is groggy but alive. She coughs. She has a gash on her forehead and blood is streaming down her face. She whispers: “Cosa è successo?” In a reassuring reflex, her hand fumbles in the little handbag that still hangs from her shoulder and lies on her bloodstained dress. She takes out a cigarette and asks Simon: “Accendimela, per favore.”

And Bayard? Simon searches for him among the wounded, the terrified survivors, the policemen arriving in Fiats, and the medics jumping out of the first ambulances like parachutists. But in this confused ballet of hysterical marionettes, he can no longer recognize anyone.

And then, suddenly, he sees him, Bayard, the French cop, emerging from the rubble, covered in dust, looking massive and powerful and giving off a slow-burning, righteous anger, carrying an unconscious young man on his back. Amid the scene of warlike chaos, this ghostly apparition leaves a deep mark on Simon, who thinks of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables.

Bianca whispers: “Sono sicura che si tratta di Gladio…”

Simon spots a shape like a dead animal on the ground, and realizes it is a human leg.

“Between the desiring machines and the body without organs, an apparent conflict arises.”

Simon shakes his head. He contemplates the first bodies being evacuated on stretchers, alive and dead alike, all lying still with their arms hanging down and dragging along the ground.

“Each machine connection, each machine production, each machine noise has become unbearable to the body without organs.”

He turns to Anastasia and finally thinks to ask her the question that he imagines will answer many others: “Who do you work for?”

Anastasia spends a few seconds thinking about this, then replies, in a professional tone he has never heard her use before: “Not for the Bulgarians.”

And, despite the fact that she is a nurse, she slips away, without offering to help the paramedics or look after the wounded. She runs toward the ring road, crosses, and disappears under the arcades.

At that very moment, Bayard reaches Simon, as if the whole thing had been meticulously choreographed, like a play, thinks Simon, whose paranoia has not exactly been eased by the combination of the bomb and the joints.

Holding up the two tickets to Milan, Bayard says: “We’ll rent a car. I don’t think there’ll be any trains today.”

Simon borrows Bianca’s cigarette and lifts it to his own lips. Around him, everything is chaos. He closes his eyes and inhales the smoke. The presence of Bianca, stretched out on the pavement, reminds him of the dissecting table, the flayed men, Antonioni’s finger, and Deleuze. A smell of burning floats in the air.

“Beneath its organs, it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it.”