The Seventh Function of Language

80

“I am forty-four years old. That means I have outlived Alexander, dead at thirty-two, Mozart, dead at thirty-five, Jarry, thirty-four, Lautréamont, twenty-four, Lord Byron, thirty-six, Rimbaud, thirty-seven, and throughout the long life that remains to me, I will overtake all the great dead men, all the giants who dominated their eras, and so, if God spares me, I will pass Napoleon, Caesar, Georges Bataille, Raymond Roussel … But no!… I will die young … I can feel it … I won’t be around for long … I won’t end up like Roland … sixty-four years old … Pathetic … When it comes down to it, we did him a favor … No, no … I wouldn’t make a good retiree … Not that such a thing is even possible … I’d rather burn up … The flame that burns twice as bright…”

81

Sollers does not like the Lido, but he has fled the Carnival crowds and, in memory of Thomas Mann and Visconti, taken refuge at the Grand Hôtel des Bains, where Death in Venice’s highly languorous action takes place. He imagined he’d be able to meditate at his ease there, facing the Adriatic, but for now he is at the bar, hitting on the waitress as he knocks back a whiskey. At the far end of the empty room, a pianist plays Ravel halfheartedly. It should be pointed out that it is midafternoon in midwinter and, while there is no cholera outbreak, the weather is not particularly conducive for swimming.

“And what is your name, my dear child? No, don’t tell me! I am going to baptize you Margherita, like Lord Byron’s mistress. She was married to a baker, did you know that? La Fornarina … fiery temperament and marble thighs … She had your eyes, of course. They went horse-riding on the beach: madly romantic, don’t you think? A little kitsch perhaps, yes, you’re right … Would you like me to teach you to ride later?”

Sollers thinks of that passage in Childe Harold: “The spouseless Adriatic mourns her lord…” The doge can no longer marry the sea, the lion no longer inspires fear: it’s about castration, he thinks. “And the Bucentaur lies rotting unrestored, neglected garment of her widowhood!” But he immediately drives away these dark thoughts. He shakes his empty glass to order a second whiskey. “On the rocks.” The waitress smiles politely. “Prego.”

Sollers sighs cheerfully. “Ah, how I wish I could say, like Goethe: ‘I am perhaps known only to one man in Venice, and he won’t be meeting me anytime soon.’ But I’m very well known in my country, my dear child, that is my misfortune. Do you know France? I’ll take you. What a great writer he was, that Goethe. But what’s the matter? You’re blushing. Ah, Julia, there you are! Margherita, allow me to present my wife.”

Kristeva entered the bar discreetly, like a cat. “You’re exhausting yourself in vain, darling. This young woman doesn’t understand a quarter of what you’re saying. Isn’t that right, miss?”

The young woman smiles again. “Prego?”

Sollers puffs up his chest: “Well, what does it matter? When, like me, one inspires devotion at first sight, one does not need (thank God!) to be understood.”

Kristeva does not tell him about Bourdieu, whom he hates because the sociologist threatens his entire system of representation, with which he still manages to play the swaggering dandy. She doesn’t tell him either that he shouldn’t drink too much before this week’s meeting. For a long time, she has chosen to treat him simultaneously as a child and as an adult. She doesn’t bother explaining certain things to him, but expects him to raise himself to the level she believes she has a right to demand.

The pianist plays a particularly dissonant chord. A bad omen? But Sollers believes in his lucky star. Perhaps he will go for a swim? Kristeva notices that he has already put his sandals on.

82

Two hundred galleys, two dozen galliots (those half-galleys), and six gigantic galleasses (the B-52s of their age) speed across the Mediterranean in pursuit of the Turkish fleet.

Sebastiano Venier, the irascible captain of the Venetian fleet, rages to himself: among his Spanish, Genevan, Savoyard, Neapolitan, and papal allies he thinks he is the only one who wants this battle. But he is wrong.

While the Spanish crown, in the person of Philip II, is generally uninterested in the Mediterranean, fully occupied as it is by the conquest of the New World, young Don John of Austria, the hotheaded commander of the Holy League’s fleet, illegitimate son of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and hence half-brother to the king, is seeking in this war the honor that his bastardy denies him elsewhere.

Sebastiano Venier wants to preserve the vital interests of La Serenissima, but Don John of Austria, fighting for his own glory, is his best ally, and he doesn’t know it.

83

Sollers contemplates the portrait of Saint Anthony in the Gesuati church and thinks that he looks like him. (Does Sollers look like Saint Anthony or Saint Anthony look like Sollers? I don’t know which way around he considers it.) He lights a blessing candle to himself and goes out for a walk in the city’s Dorsoduro quarter, which he loves so much.

Outside the Accademia, he sees Simon Herzog and Superintendent Bayard in the line.

“Dear Superintendent, what a surprise to see you here! What brings you to Venice? Ah yes, I’ve heard about the exploits of your young protégé. I can’t wait to see the next round. Yes, yes, you see, no point in keeping secrets, is there? Is this your first time in Venice? And you’ll go to the museum for some culture, I suppose. Say hello to Giorgione’s Tempest from me; it’s the only painting there worth the hassle of all those Japanese tourists. Have you noticed how they snap at everything without even looking?”

Sollers points to two Japanese men in the line, and Simon makes an imperceptible gesture of surprise. He recognizes them from the Fuego that saved his life in Paris. They are indeed armed with the latest Minoltas and are photographing everything that moves.

“Forget the Piazza San Marco. Forget Harry’s Bar. Here, you are in the heart of the city; in other words, in the heart of the world: the Dorsoduro … Venice is a convenient scapegoat, don’t you think? Ha ha … Anyway, you must absolutely go to the Campo Santo Stefano; just cross the Grand Canal … You’ll see the statue of Niccolò Tommaseo there, a political writer, therefore not of interest, known to the Venetians as Cagalibri: the book-shitter. Because of the statue. It really looks like he’s shitting books. Ha. But above all you must see the Giudecca, on the other bank. You can admire the churches designed by the great Palladio, all in a row. You don’t know Palladio? A man who did not like things to be too easy … like you, perhaps? He was in charge of constructing an edifice opposite the Piazza San Marco. Can you imagine? What a challenge, as our American friends, who have never understood art, would say … they’ve never understood women either, for that matter, but that’s another story … Anyway, there you have it: rising up from the water, San Giorgio Maggiore. And, top of the list, the Redentore, a Neoclassical masterpiece: on one side, Byzantium and the flamboyant Gothic of the past; on the other, Ancient Greece resurrected eternally by the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. Go and see it, it’s only a hundred yards away! If you hurry, you’ll get there for the sunset…”

Then a cry rings out in the line. “Thief! Thief!” A tourist runs after a pickpocket. Instinctively, Sollers puts his hand in his inside jacket pocket.

But he pulls himself together instantly: “Ha, did you see? A Frenchman, obviously … The French are always easily taken in. Be careful, though. The Italians are a great people, but like all great peoples they’re bandits … I should leave you, I’ll be late for Mass…”

And Sollers walks away, his sandals slapping against the Venetian cobbles.

Simon says to Bayard: “Did you see?”

“Yes, I saw.”

“He has it on him.”

“Yes.”

“So why not take him now?”

“First we have to check it works. That’s why you’re here, remember.”

An undetectable smile of pride flickers on Simon’s face. Another round. He has forgotten the Japanese men behind him.

84

Two hundred galleys pass through the Straits of Corfu and head toward the Gulf of Corinth. Among them is La Marchesa, commanded by the Genovese Francesco San-Freda, carrying Captain Diego of Urbino and his dice-playing men, among them the son of a debt-ridden dentist also here to seek glory as well as riches, a Castilian hidalgo, an adventurer, a penniless sword-wielding nobleman: the young Miguel de Cervantes.

85

On the fringes of the Carnival, private parties proliferate in Venice’s palazzos, and the one currently being held in the Ca’ Rezzonico is among the most popular and the most private.

Drawn by the voices coming from the building, envious passersby and vaporetto passengers look up toward the ballroom, where they can glimpse or imagine the trompe-l’oeil artworks, the massive chandeliers in multicolored glass, and the magnificent eighteenth-century frescoes decorating the ceiling, but invitations are strictly by name only.

Logos Club parties are not exactly announced in the newspaper.

And yet the party does take place, in the heart of the Floating City. A hundred people rush in, their faces uncovered. (Evening wear is required, but this is not a masked ball.)

At first glance, there is nothing to distinguish this party from any other chic gathering. But listen closely and you will hear the difference. The conversations are of exordiums, perorations, propositions, altercations, refutations. (As Barthes said: “The passion for classification always appears byzantine for those who do not participate in it.”) Anacoluthon, catachresis, enthymeme, and metabole. (As Sollers would say: “But of course.”) “I do not believe Res and Verba should be translated simply by Things and Words. Res, says Quintilian, are quae significantur, and Verba: quae significant; in other words, in terms of discourse, the signified and the signifier.” Of course.

The guests also talk of past and future duels. Many are veterans with severed fingers or young guns of the debates, and most have memories of glorious or tragic campaigns, which they like to dwell on below Tiepolo’s paintings.

“I didn’t even know the author of the citation!”

“And then, he came out with a line by Guy Mollet! That killed me.”

“I was there for the legendary duel between Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Mendès France. I don’t even remember the subject now.”

“I was there for the one between Lecanuet and Emmanuel Berl. Surreal.”

“You French people are so dialectical…”

“So, I draw a subject … botany! I thought I was screwed, and then I remembered my grandfather in his allotment. Grandpa saved my finger!”

“And then he says: ‘We must stop seeing atheists everywhere. Spinoza was a great mystic.’ What an idiot!”

“Picasso contra Dalí. Categoría historia del arte, un clásico. Me gusta más Picasso pero escogí a Dalí.”

“And the guy starts talking about soccer. I don’t know a thing about it, but he won’t stop going on about the Reds and a cauldron…”

“Oh no, I haven’t been in a duel for two years. I’m back down to being a rhetorician. I don’t have the time or the energy anymore, with the kids, work…”

“I was ready to give up when suddenly, a miracle: he comes out with the biggest pile of crap, the worst thing he could have said…”

“C’è un solo dio ed il suo nome è Cicerone.”

“I went to Harry’s Bar (in memory of Hemingway, like everyone else). Fifteen thousand lire for a Bellini, seriously?”

“Heidegger, Heidegger … Sehe ich aus wie Heidegger?”

Suddenly, a frisson spreads across the room from the staircase. The crowds open to welcome a new arrival. Simon enters, accompanied by Bayard. The guests gather around, and at the same time they appear almost intimidated. So this is the young prodigy everyone is talking about, who has risen from nowhere to the rank of peripatetician incredibly quickly: four promotions in three consecutive sessions, in Paris, when progress like that usually takes years. And perhaps five, soon. He is wearing a charcoal Armani suit, a grayish pink shirt, and a black tie with violet pinstripes. As for Bayard, he didn’t think it was worth bothering to change out of his usual crumpled suit.

Around the prodigy, people grow bolder and soon they are pressing him to talk about his Parisian exploits: with what ease, by way of warming up, he first crushed a rhetorician on a subject of domestic politics (“In the end, is an election always won at the center?”) by citing Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?

How he brushed aside an orator on a fairly technical philosophy question (“Is legal violence still violence?”) by recourse to Saint-Just (“No one can reign innocently” and, above all: “A king must reign or die.”)

How he battled a pugnacious dialectician over a Shelley quotation (“He hath awaken’d from the dream of life”) by delicately manipulating Calderon and Shakespeare, but also, with exquisite refinement, Frankenstein.

With what elegance he dueled a peripatetician over a line by Leibniz (“Education can do anything: it can make bears dance”) by allowing himself the luxury of a demonstration founded almost entirely on quotations from de Sade.

Bayard lights a cigarette while looking through the window at the gondolas on the Grand Canal.

Simon answers his admirers with good grace. An old Venetian in a three-piece suit hands him a glass of champagne:

“Maestro, you know Casanova, naturalmente? In the account of his famous duel with the Polish count, he writes: ‘The first advice one gives someone who is taking part in a duel is to convince one’s adversary as quickly as possible of the impossibility of harming you.’ Cosa ne pensa?”

(Simon takes a sip of champagne and smiles at an old lady, who bats her eyelashes.)

“Was it a duel with swords?”

“No, alla pistola.”

“In the case of a duel with pistols, I think the advice is valid.” Simon laughs. “For an oratory duel, the principles are a little different.”

“Come mai? Dare I, maestro, ask why?”

“Well … I, for example, like to strike at my opponent’s speech code. Which implies letting him come at you. I allow him to reveal himself, capisce? An oratory duel is more like a duel with swords. You reveal yourself, you close your guard, you derobe, you feint, you cut, you disengage, you parry, you riposte…”

“Uno spadaccino, si. Ma, is the pistol not migliore?”

Bayard elbows the young prodigy. Simon is aware that it is not wise, on the eve of a duel at this level, to obligingly provide anyone that asks with strategic instructions, but the reflex is too strong. He just can’t help teaching.

“In my opinion, there are two main approaches. The semiological and the rhetorical, you see?”

“Si, si … credo di si, ma … Could you explain un poco, maestro?”

“Well, it’s very simple. Semiology enables us to understand, analyze, decode; it’s defensive, it’s Borg. Rhetoric is designed to persuade, to convince, to conquer; it’s offensive, it’s McEnroe.”

“Ah si. Ma Borg, he wins, no?”

“Of course! You can win with either; they’re just different styles of play. With semiology, you decode your opponent’s rhetoric, you grasp his things, and you rub his nose in it. Semiology’s like Borg: it is enough to get the ball over the net one time more than your opponent. Rhetoric is aces, volleys, winners down the line, but semiology is returns, passing shots, topspin lobs.”

“And it’s migliore?”

“Well, no, not necessarily. But that’s my style. It’s what I know how to do, so that’s how I play. I’m not a brilliant lawyer or a preacher or a political orator or a messiah or a vacuum-cleaner salesman. I’m an academic, and my job is analyzing, decoding, criticizing, and interpreting. That’s my game. I’m Borg. I’m Vilas. I’m José Luis Clerc. Ahem.”

“Ma, your opponent, who’s that?”

“Well … McEnroe, Roscoe Tanner, Gerulaitis…”

“And Connors?”

“Ah yeah, Connors, shit.”

“Perchè shit? What’s so special about Connors?”

“He’s really good.”

It is difficult, just now, to assess how much irony there is in Simon’s last reply, because in February 1981 Connors has not beaten Borg in eight consecutive meetings, his last victory in a Grand Slam is almost three years back (U.S. Open 1978, against Borg), and people are starting to think he is finished. (They don’t know that he will win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open the following year.)

Whatever, Simon becomes serious again and asks: “I suppose he won his duel?”

“Casanova? Si, he hit the Pole in the stomach and quasi killed him, but he also took a bullet to the thumb, and almost had to have his left hand amputato.”

“Ah … really?”

“Si, the surgeon told Casanova that gangrene would set in. So Casanova asked if it was already there. And the surgeon said no, so Casanova, he said, ‘Va bene, let’s just wait and see when it’s there.’ And the surgeon, he said allora, they’ll have to cut the whole arm off. You know what Casanova said to that? ‘Ma, what would I do with an arm without my hand?’ Ha ha!”

“Ha ha. Uh … bene.”

Simon politely takes his leave and goes off to find a Bellini. Bayard stuffs himself with canapés and observes the guests as they watch his partner with curiosity, admiration, and even a little fear. Simon accepts a cigarette from a woman in a lamé dress. The way the evening is unfolding confirms what he came to establish: that the reputation he has acquired in a few Parisian sessions has definitely reached Venice.

He has come to care for his ethos, but he doesn’t want to get home too late. At no point has he attempted to find out if his adversary is in the room, while that person may have been observing him attentively the whole time, leaning on the precious wooden furniture, nervously stubbing out his cigarettes on the Brustolon statuettes.

As Bayard is being hit on by the woman in the lamé dress (who wants to know his role in the prodigy’s rise), Simon decides to go home alone. And no doubt overly absorbed by the dress’s plunging neckline, a little stunned, perhaps, by the beauty of the setting and by the intensive cultural tourism that Simon has inflicted on him since their arrival, Bayard pays no attention, or, at least, doesn’t object.

It is not especially late and Simon is slightly tipsy; the party continues in the streets of Venice, but there is something wrong. Sensing a presence: what does that mean? Intuition is a convenient concept for dispensing with explanations, like God. One does not “sense” anything at all. One sees, hears, calculates, and decodes. Intelligence-reflex. Simon keeps seeing the same mask, and another one, and another one. (But there are so many masks, and so many turns.) He hears footsteps behind him in the deserted backstreets. “Instinctively,” he takes a detour and inevitably he gets lost. He has the impression that the footsteps are growing closer. (Although that doesn’t take into account an extremely precise and complex psychic mechanism, impression is a more solid concept than intuition.) His meanderings bring him to Campo San Bartolomeo, at the foot of the Rialto, where street musicians are having some sort of contest, and he knows that he is not far from his hotel—a few hundred yards at most, as the crow flies—but the twists and turns of the Venetian backstreets render this figure meaningless, and with every attempt he comes up against the dark water of a secondary canal. Rio della Fava, Rio del Piombo, Rio di San Lio …

Those young people leaning on the stone well, drinking beer and nibbling cicchetti … Hasn’t he already passed this osteria?

This backstreet is narrowing, but that does not mean that there is no passage after the bend it must inevitably form. Or after the next bend.

Lap, glimmer, rio.

Shit, no bridge.

When Simon turns around, three Venetian masks bar his way. They don’t say a word, but their intentions are clear because each is armed with a blunt object that Simon mechanically notes: a cheap statuette of a winged lion as found in the stalls of the Rialto; an empty bottle of Limoncello held by its neck; and a long and heavy pair of glassblower’s tongs (it is far from obvious that this last one should be called a “blunt” object).

He recognizes the masks because, at the Ca’ Rezzonico, he examined Longhi’s paintings of Carnival: the capitano with the large aquiline nose, the plague doctor’s long white beak, and the larva, which serves as a mask for the bauta, with the tricorn and the black cape. But the man who wears this last mask is in jeans and sneakers, like the two others. Simon deduces from this that they are just some young thugs hired to beat him up. Their wish to remain unidentified makes him think that they do not want to kill him, so that’s something at least. Unless the masks are worn simply to hide their faces from potential witnesses.

The plague doctor approaches silently, bottle in hand, and Simon, once again, as in Ithaca when the dog attacked Derrida, is fascinated by this bizarre, unreal pantomime. He hears bursts of laughter from customers at an osteria, very close by: he knows it is only a few yards away, but the uneven echoes of the street musicians and the ambient agitation of the Venetian night immediately persuade him that if he calls for help (he tries to remember how to say “Help” in Italian), no one will pay any attention.

While he retreats, Simon thinks: in the hypothesis where he is truly a character from a novel (a hypothesis strengthened by the situation, the masks, the picturesque blunt objects: a novel by an author unafraid of tackling clichés, he thinks), what would he really risk? A novel is not a dream: you can die in a novel. Then again, the central character is not normally killed. Except, perhaps, at the end of the story.

But if it was the end of the story, how would he know? How can he know what page of his life he is on? How can any of us know when we have reached our last page?

And what if he wasn’t the central character? Doesn’t everyone believe himself the hero of his own existence?

From a conceptual point of view, Simon is not sure he is sufficiently equipped to correctly grasp the problem of life and death from the perspective of novelistic ontology, so he decides to return, while there is still time—i.e., before the masked man moving toward him smashes him in the face with the empty bottle—to a more pragmatic approach.

Theoretically, his only way out is the rio behind him, but this is February, the water must be ice-cold, and he fears it would be too easy afterward for one of the thugs to grab a gondola oar (there are gondolas parked every ten yards) and—while he was floundering in the canal—to pummel him like a tuna, like in Aeschylus’s The Persians, like the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis.

Thought is faster than action, and he has time to think all this before the white beak finally lifts his bottle. But just as he is about to bring it down on Simon, the bottle falls from his hand. Or rather someone tears it from his hand. The white beak turns around and, where his two accomplices were, he sees two Japanese men in black suits. The bauta and the capitano are lying on the ground. The white beak stares dumbly, arms hanging, at a scene he cannot understand. He is duly hit over the head with his own bottle in a succession of precise, muted movements. His assailant’s expertise is such that the bottle does not break, and his suit barely picks up a wrinkle.

The three men on the ground groan softly. The three men standing do not make any sound at all.

If a novelist is presiding over his fate, Simon wonders why this author has chosen these two mysterious guardian angels to watch over him. The second Japanese man approaches, greets him with a discreet bow, and replies to the unasked question: “Any friend of Roland Barthes is a friend of ours.” Then they both vanish into the night like ninjas.

Simon considers this explanation to be rather minimal, but he realizes he will have to be content with it, so he heads back to the hotel, where he will finally be able to get some sleep.

86

In Rome, in Madrid, in Constantinople, and perhaps even in Venice, people are wondering. What is the aim of this formidable armada? What territories do the Christians want to retake or conquer? Do they want to retake Cyprus? Do they want to start a thirteenth crusade? But as yet no one knows that Famagusta has fallen, and the screams of the tortured Bragadin have not yet been heard. Only Don John of Austria and Sebastiano Venier have the intuition that the battle may represent an end in itself, and that what is at stake is the total destruction of the enemy army.

87

While they wait for the duel, Bayard continues to go for walks with Simon to clear his head. Their wanderings bring them to the foot of the equestrian statue of Colleone, and while Bayard admires the statue, fascinated by the strength of the bronze, by the dexterity of Verrocchio’s chisel, and by what he imagines of the life of the condottiere, a severe warrior, powerful and authoritarian, Simon enters the San Zanipolo basilica, where he sees Sollers praying before a mural fresco.

Simon is suspicious, and startled by the coincidence. But then again, Venice is a small city and there is really nothing so exceptional about bumping into the same person twice at a tourist site when you are a tourist yourself.

All the same, as he does not particularly want to talk to him, Simon pushes on discreetly into the nave, contemplates the tombs of the doges (and among them, that of Sebastiano Venier, the hero of the Battle of Lepanto), admires Bellini’s paintings, and, in the Chapel of the Rosary, those of Veronese.

When he is sure that Sollers has left, he approaches the fresco.

There is a sort of urn surrounded by two little winged lions and, above them, an engraving representing the torture of an elderly bald man with a long beard and prominent, sinewy muscles, who is being carved up.

Below, a plaque with Latin inscriptions that Simon deciphers with difficulty: Marcantonio Bragadin, governor of Cyprus, was horribly martyred by the Turks for having heroically defended a siege that lasted from September 1570 to July 1571 in the fortress of Famagusta. (And also for having shown his conqueror a lack of respect upon surrender, but the marble plaque does not say this. Apparently he arrogantly refused to free the customary hostage in exchange for the liberation of Christian commanders, and he showed no interest in the fate of Turkish prisoners that the pasha accused him of having let his men massacre.)

So anyway, they cut off his ears and his nose, and left him to become infected and start rotting for a week. Then, when he refused to convert (he still had enough strength to spit insults at his torturers), they weighed him down with sacks full of earth and rocks and dragged him from battery to battery, mocked and beaten by the Turkish soldiers.

And his torment did not end there: they hoisted him onto the yardarm of a galley so all the Christian slaves could behold the vision of their defeat and of the Turkish anger. And for an hour, the Turks yelled at him: “Behold! Can you see your squadron? Behold the great Christ! Can you see your rescuers on their way?”

Finally, he was tied naked to a column and flayed alive.

Then his corpse was stuffed and taken through the streets of the town on the back of an ox, before being sent to Constantinople.

But it is his skin inside the urn, a pathetic relic. How did it get here? The Latin inscription does not say.

Why was Sollers praying before this wall? Simon has no idea.

88

“I am not under orders to receive Venetian scum.”

Obviously, the Tuscan captain who says this to the chief admiral, Sebastiano Venier, gets into deep trouble; aware that he has gone too far and knowing the old Venetian’s reputation for severity, he resisted arrest and it all ended in mutiny, with the captain gravely injured then hanged as an example.

But he was under Spanish command, which implies that Venier did not have the right to decide his punishment and, above all, to summarily execute him. When Don John learns this, he seriously considers whether Venier should himself be hanged to teach him due respect for hierarchy, but the provveditore Barbarigo, second-in-command of the Venetian fleet, convinces him not to do anything that might compromise the entire operation.

The fleet continues on its way to the Gulf of Lepanto.

89

Tatko,

We have safely arrived in Venice and Philippe is going to compete.

The city is very lively because they are trying to revive the Carnival. There are people in masks and lots of things to see in the streets. And, contrary to what we were told, Venice does not stink. On the downside, there are armies of Japanese tourists, but that’s no different from Paris.

Philippe doesn’t seem too worried. You know him—he always has that unshakable optimism that sometimes verges on irresponsibility but, all in all, is a strength.

I know you don’t understand why your daughter let him take her place, but you must admit that in a situation like this—in other words, with a jury composed exclusively of men—a man will always have a better chance of winning than a woman of equal skill.

When I was very young, you taught me that a woman was not only a man’s equal, but was even superior to him, and I believed you. I still believe you, but we cannot ignore this sociological reality (I have been afraid of it for some time now) known as male domination.

It is said that in the whole history of the Logos Club, only four women have ever attained the rank of sophist: Catherine de Medici, Emilie du Châtelet, Marilyn Monroe, and Indira Gandhi (and we can still hope that she will become one again). That is not very many. And none, of course, has ever been the Great Protagoras.

But if Philippe wins the title, things will change for everyone: for him, as he’ll become one of the most influential men on the planet. For you, benefiting from his secret power, who will no longer have to fear Andropov or the Russians, and will be in a position to change the face of your country. (I would like to be able to say “our” country, but you wanted me to be French, and in that respect at least, my dear Papa, I exceeded your expectations.) And for your only daughter, who will gain another form of power and will reign supreme over French intellectual life.

Don’t judge Philippe too severely: recklessness is a form of courage and you know what he has agreed to risk. You always taught me to respect the journey from thought to act, even if the person making it treats it as a game. Without a tendency to melancholy, there is no psyche, and I know that Philippe lacks that, which perhaps makes him a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, as Shakespeare says, but that is probably what I like about him.

All my love, dear Papa,

Your loving daughter,

Julenka

PS: Did you receive the Jean Ferrat album I sent you?

90

“Ma si, it is a little approximate, vero.”

Simon and Bayard have just bumped into Umberto Eco on Piazza San Marco. It really does seem as if everyone has come to Venice. Simon’s paranoia now interprets any apparent coincidence as a sign that his entire life may be nothing but a fictional narrative; this muddles his analytical faculties and prevents him from thinking about the possible and likely reasons for Eco’s presence, here and now.

On the lagoon, a motley variety of boats maneuver in joyous disorder, to a soundtrack of colliding hulls, cannonades, and the roaring of extras.

“It’s a reconstruction of the Battle of Lepanto.” Eco has to shout to be heard over the noise of the cannonade and the cheers of the crowd.

For this second edition since its rebirth the year before, the Carnival is offering, among other colorful spectacles, a historical reconstruction: the Holy League, led by the Venetian fleet, alongside the Invincible Armada and the papal armies, affronting the Turks of Selim II, known as “Selim the Sot,” the son of Suleiman the Magnificent.

“Ma, you see that large vessel? It’s a replica of the Bucintoro, the ship on board which the doge, every year, on the Feast of the Ascension, would celebrate the sposalizio del mare, the marriage with the sea, by throwing a gold ring into the Adriatic. It was a ceremonial ship not at all intended to go to war. They took it out for official engagements, but it never left the lagoon and it has no business being here, because we are supposed to be in the Gulf of Lepanto on October 7, 1571.”

Simon is not really listening. He walks toward the dock, fascinated by this ballet of counterfeit galleys and painted skiffs. But when he is about to pass between the two columns that look like the uprights of an invisible door, Eco stops him: “Aspetta!”

Venetians never pass between the colonne di San Marco; they say it brings bad luck because it was here that the Republic would execute its prisoners before hanging their corpses by the feet.

At the top of the columns, Simon sees the winged lion of Venice and Saint Theodore flooring a crocodile. He mutters, “I’m not Venetian,” crosses the invisible threshold, and advances to the water’s edge.

And he sees. Not the slightly kitsch “son et lumière” show and the boats disguised as warships with their actors in their Sunday best. But the collision of armies: the six galleasses rising from the sea like floating fortresses, destroying everything around them; the two hundred galleys divided between the left wing, yellow banner, commanded by the Venetian provveditore-generale Agostino Barbarigo, who is shot in the eye with an arrow and dies at the start of the battle; the right wing, green banner, led by the timorous Genovese Gian Andrea Doria, transfixed by the agile maneuvers of the elusive Euldj Ali (Ali the convert, Ali the one-eyed, Ali the renegade, a Calabrian by birth who became the Bey of Algiers); in the center, blue banner, the high commander, Don John of Austria, for Spain, with Colonna, commander of the pope’s galleys, and seventy-five-year-old Sebastiano Venier, severe of face and white of beard, future doge of Venice, to whom John no longer says a word, at whom he never even glances since the incident with the Spanish captain. In the rearguard, in case things go badly, is the Marquis of Santa Cruz, white banner. Facing them, the Turkish fleet, commanded by Sufi Ali Pasha, kapudan pasha, with his janissaries and his corsairs.

And on board the galley La Marchesa, sick with fever, midshipman Miguel de Cervantes, who has been ordered to remain lying down in the hold but who wants to fight and begs his captain, because what will people say of him if he doesn’t take part in the greatest naval battle of all time?

So the captain agrees, and when the galleys ram into each other and collide, when the men fire their arquebuses at point-blank range and start to board the enemy ship, he fights like a dog, and in the fury of the sea and in the storm of war he chops up Turks like tuna but is shot in the chest and in the left hand. He continues to fight. Soon there will be no doubt that the Christians have won their victory—the head of the kapudan pasha is mounted on top of the mast on the admiral’s ship—but Miguel de Cervantes, the brave midshipman under the orders of his captain, Diego of Urbino, has lost the use of his left hand in the battle, or maybe the surgeons did a bad job.

Either way, from now on he will be known as the “one-armed man of Lepanto,” and some will mock his handicap. Incensed and wounded in body and soul, he will make this clarification in his preface to the second volume of Don Quixote: “As if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the future can hope to see.”

Amid the crowd of tourists and masks, Simon, too, feels feverish, and when he feels a tap on his shoulder, he half expects to see the doge, Alvise Mocenigo, burst into view along with the Council of Ten, who are out in force, and the three state inquisitors, to celebrate this dazzling victory of the Venetian lion and Christianity, but it is simply Umberto Eco, who smiles pleasantly and says to him: “There are some who went off in search of unicorns, but found only rhinoceroses.”

91

Bayard lines up outside La Fenice, the Venetian opera house, and when his turn comes and his name is found on the list, he feels that universal relief of getting past an official barrier (something he’d forgotten in his line of work), but the guard asks him in what capacity he is invited and Bayard explains that he is accompanying Simon Herzog, one of the competitors. But the guard insists: “In qualità di che?” And Bayard doesn’t know how to respond, so he says: “Uh, coach?”

The guard lets him in and he takes his place in a gold-painted theater box furnished with crimson chairs.

On the stage, a young woman confronts an old man over a quotation from Macbeth: “Let every man be master of his time.” The two opponents speak English and Bayard does not use the headphones providing simultaneous translation that are available to the audience, but he has the impression that the young woman is getting the upper hand. (“Time is on my side,” she says graciously. And she will indeed be declared the victor.)

The room is full. People have come from all over Europe to attend the great qualifying tournament: tribunes are challenged by duelists of lower ranks, the vast majority peripateticians, but also some dialecticians and even a few orators ready to risk three fingers in a single match to be granted the right to witness the meeting.

Everyone knows that the Great Protagoras has been challenged and that only tribunes, accompanied by a person of their choice, will be invited to the match (along with the sophists, naturally, who comprise the jury). The duel will take place tomorrow in a secret venue that will be communicated only to authorized persons at the end of tonight’s tournament. Officially, no one knows the identity of the challenger, but there are several rumors in circulation.

Flicking through his Michelin guide, Bayard discovers that La Fenice is a theater that has regularly been burned down and rebuilt since its opening. Hence, presumably, that name: Phoenix.

On the stage, a brilliant Russian stupidly loses a finger over a mistake in quotation: a Mark Twain phrase is attributed to Malraux, allowing his opponent, a wily Spaniard, to turn the tables on him. The audience goes “ooohh” at the moment of the tchack.

The door opens behind Bayard, making him jump. “Well, well, my dear superintendent. You look like you just saw Stendhal in person!” It’s Sollers, with his cigarette holder, come to pay a visit to his box. “Interesting event, isn’t it? The cream of Venetian society and, my word, everyone of any culture in Europe. There are even a few Americans, I’ve been told. I wonder if Hemingway was ever part of the Logos Club. He wrote a book that took place in Venice, you know? The story of an old colonel who masturbates a young woman in a gondola with his wounded hand. Not bad at all. You know Verdi created La Traviata here? But also Ernani, based on Victor Hugo’s play…” Sollers stares out at the stage, where a sturdy little Italian is battling a pipe-smoking Englishman, and he adds dreamily: “Hernani amputated of its H.” Then he withdraws, clicking his heels like an Austro-Hungarian officer, with a slight bow, and goes back to his own box, which Bayard tries to spot, in order to see if Kristeva is there.

Onstage, a presenter in a dinner jacket announces the next duel, “Signore, Signori…,” and Bayard puts on his headphones: “Duelists from every land … he comes to us from Paris … his victories speak for themselves … no friendly matches … four digital duels … four victories, all unanimous … enough for him to have made a name for himself … I ask you to welcome … the Decoder of Vincennes.”

Simon makes his entrance, dressed in a well-tailored Cerruti suit.

Along with the rest of the spectators, Bayard applauds nervously.

Simon smiles and waves to the audience, all his senses alert, while the subject is drawn.

“Classico e Barocco.” The Classical and the Baroque: an art history subject? Why not, since we’re in Venice?

Instantly, ideas rush through Simon’s head, but it is too early to sort through them. First he must concentrate on something else. During the handshake with his adversary, he keeps his hand in his for a few seconds and reads the following about the man who faces him:

• a southern Italian, to judge by his bronzed complexion;

• small in height, so a drive to dominate;

• energetic handshake: a man of contact;

• paunchy: eats lots of meals with sauces;

• looks at the crowd, not at his opponent: a politician’s reflex;

• not very well dressed for an Italian: a slightly worn and mismatched suit, the hems of his trouser legs a little too short, and yet his black shoes are polished: a cheapskate or a demagogue;

• a luxury watch on his wrist, a recent model, so not an heirloom, obviously too expensive for his standing: strong probability of passive corruption (which confirms the Mezzogiorno hypothesis);

• a wedding ring, plus a signet ring: a wife and a mistress who gave him the signet ring, which he probably wore before his marriage (otherwise he’d have to justify its appearance to his wife, whereas this way he could claim it was a family heirloom), so a long-term mistress, whom he didn’t want to marry but couldn’t resolve to leave.

Naturally, all these deductions are merely suppositions, and Simon cannot be sure that each one is correct. Simon thinks: “This isn’t a Sherlock Holmes story.” But when the clues point to a collection of converging presumptions, Simon decides to trust them.

His conclusion is that he is facing a politician, probably a Christian Democrat, a Napoli or Cagliari supporter, a man without strong convictions, a skilled social climber, but someone who is loath to make decisions.

So he decides at the start of the game to try something to destabilize him: he makes a show of giving up his right to go first, always granted to the lower-ranked player, and generously offers to leave the initiative to his honorable opponent, which in concrete terms means that he is leaving him to choose which of the two terms of the subject he wants to defend. After all, in tennis, one can choose to receive rather than serve.

His opponent is absolutely not obliged to accept. But Simon’s gamble is as follows: the Italian will not want his refusal to be taken the wrong way; he will not want people to see in it a sort of contempt, ill grace, rigidity, or, worst of all, fear.

The Italian must be a player, not a spoilsport. He cannot begin by refusing to pick up the gauntlet, even if the gauntlet that has been thrown down looks more like a baited hook. He accepts.

Based on that, Simon has no doubt about which position he will choose to defend. In Venice, any politician will praise the Baroque.

So that when the Italian begins to remind his audience of the origin of the word Barocco (which, in the form barroco, refers to an irregular pearl in Portuguese), Simon believes himself at least one step ahead.

To start with, the Italian is rather scholarly, rather sluggish, because Simon has unsettled him by handing him the initiative and also, perhaps, because he is not a specialist in art history. But he has not reached the rank of tribune by chance. Gradually, he pulls himself together and grows in confidence.

The Baroque is that aesthetic trend that sees the world as a theater and life as a dream, an illusion, a mirror of bright colors and broken lines. Circe and the Peacock: metamorphoses, ostentation. The Baroque prefers curves to straight lines. The Baroque likes asymmetry, trompe-l’oeil, extravagance.

Simon has put his headphones on, but he hears the Italian cite Montaigne in French in the line: “I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.”

The Baroque is elusive, it moves from country to country, from century to century, the sixteenth in Italy, the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, the first half of the seventeenth century in France, Scarron, Saint-Amant, second half of the seventeenth century, return to Italy, Bavaria, eighteenth century, Prague, St. Petersburg, South America, Rococo … There is no unity to the Baroque, no essence of fixed things, no permanence. The Baroque is movement. Bernini, Borromini. Tiepolo, Monteverdi.

The Italian lists generalities in good taste.

Then, suddenly, by who knows what mechanism, what path, what detour in the human mind, he finds his guiding principle, the one he can ride like a surfer on a wave of rhetoric and paradox: “Il Barocco è la Peste.”

The Baroque is the Plague.

The quintessence of the Baroque is to be found here, in Venice. In the bulbs of the San Marco basilica, in the arabesques of the façades, in the grotesque palaces that reach out toward the lagoon, and, of course, in the Carnival.

And why? The Italian knows his local history. From 1348 to 1632, the plague comes and goes and comes again, tirelessly delivering its message: Vanitas vanitatum. In 1462, 1485, the plague strikes and ravages the Republic. In 1506, omnia vanita, it returns. In 1576, it takes Titian. Life is a carnival. The doctors have masks with long white beaks.

The history of Venice is essentially a long dialogue with the plague.

The Serenissima’s response was Veronese (Christ Arresting the Plague), Tintoretto (St. Roch Curing the Plague), and, at the point of the Dogana, Baldassare Longhena’s church without a façade: the Salute, of which the German art critic Wittkower would say: “an absolute triumph in terms of sculptural form, baroque monumentality, and the richness of the light within it.”

In the audience, Sollers takes notes.

Octagonal, no façade, filled with emptiness.

The strange stone wheels of the Salute are like rolls of foam petrified by the Medusa. The perpetual movement is a response to the vanity of the world.

The Baroque is the Plague, and therefore it is Venice.

Pretty good, thinks Simon.

Swept along by his own momentum, the Italian goes on: what is the Classique? Where have we ever seen the “Classical”? Is Versailles Classical? The Classical is always postponed. We always name something as Classical after the event. People talk about it, but no one has ever seen it.

They wanted to transpose the political absolutism of Louis XIV’s reign into an aesthetic current based on order, unity, harmony, in opposition to the period of instability of the Fronde, which had preceded it.

Simon thinks that, all things considered, this southern peasant with his too-short trousers knows quite a bit about history, art, and art history.

He hears the simultaneous translation in his headphones: “But there are no classical authors … in the present … The label classical … is just a sort of medal … awarded by school textbooks.”

The Italian concludes: The Baroque is here. The Classical does not exist.

Prolonged applause.

Bayard nervously lights a cigarette.

Simon leans on his lectern.

He had a choice between preparing his speech while the other man was speaking or listening attentively so he could turn his words against him, and he preferred the second, more aggressive option.

“To say that classicism does not exist is to say that Venice does not exist.”

A war of annihilation, then. Like Lepanto.

By using the word classicism, he knows that he is committing an anachronism but he doesn’t care because “Baroque” and “Classical” are ideas forged in retrospect, inherently anachronistic, summoned to support unstable, debatable realities.

“And it is all the more curious that these words should be pronounced here, in La Fenice, this neoclassical pearl.”

Simon uses the word pearl deliberately. He already has his plan of attack.

“It also means wiping the Giudecca and San Giorgio from the map rather quickly.” He turns to his adversary. “Did Palladio never exist? Are his neoclassical churches just baroque dreams? My honorable opponent sees the Baroque everywhere, and that is his right, but…”

Without any discussion, then, the two adversaries have come to an agreement on the subject’s central problem: Venice. Is Venice baroque or classical? It is Venice that will decide the tie.

Simon turns to the audience again and declaims: “Order and beauty, luxury, peace and pleasure: Is there a more appropriate line to describe Venice? And is there a better definition of classicism?” And Barthes, to follow Baudelaire: “Classics. Culture (the more culture there is, the greater and more diverse the pleasure). Intelligence. Irony. Delicacy. Euphoria. Mastery. Safety: the art of living.” Simon: “Venice!”

The Classical exists and its home is here, in Venice. Step one.

Step two: Show that your opponent has not understood the subject.

“My honorable adversary must have misheard: it is not Baroque or Classical, but Baroque and Classical. Why oppose them? They are the yin and the yang that comprise Venice and the universe, like the Apollonian and the Dionysian, like the sublime and the grotesque, reason and passion, Racine and Shakespeare.” (Simon does not dwell on this last example, as Stendhal quite obviously preferred Shakespeare—as he does, for that matter.)

“It is not a question of playing Palladio against the bulbs of the San Marco basilica. Look. Palladio’s Redentore?” Simon peers toward the back of the theater as though visualizing the bank of the Giudecca. “On one side, Byzantium and the flamboyant Gothic of the past (if I may put it like that); on the other, Ancient Greece resurrected eternally by the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.” Nothing ever goes to waste for a duelist. Sollers smiles as he looks at Kristeva, who recognizes his words, and he makes smoke rings of contentment, tapping his fingers on the gilded wood of his box.

“Take Corneille’s Le Cid. A quasi-picaresque baroque tragicomedy when it was written, later reclassified (after much debate) as classical tragedy when genre fantasies went out of fashion. Order, unities, framework? Doesn’t matter. Two plays in one, and yet the same play: baroque one day, classical the next.”

Simon has other interesting examples—Lautréamont, for instance, champion of the darkest romanticism, who transforms into Isidore Ducasse, perverse defender of mutant classicism in his incredible Poésies—but he does not want to digress: “Two great rhetorical traditions: Atticism and Asianism. On one side, the West’s rigorous clarity, Boileau’s ‘Whatever is well conceived is clearly said’; on the other, the lyrical flights and ornaments, the abundance of tropes of the sensual, tangled East.”

Simon knows perfectly well that Atticism and Asianism are concepts without any concrete geographical foundation, at most transhistorical metaphors. But by this point he knows that the judges know he knows this, so he has no need to make it clear.

“And at the confluence of the two? Venice, the crossroads of the universe! Venice, amalgam of Sea and Earth, earth on sea, lines and curves, Heaven and Hell, the lion and the crocodile, San Marco and Casanova, sun and mist, movement and eternity!”

Simon takes one last pause before closing his peroration resoundingly: “Baroque and Classical? The proof: Venice.”

Prolonged applause.

The Italian wants to strike back without delay, but Simon has deprived him of his synthesis, so he is forced to play against his nature. He says, in French, which Simon admires but interprets as evidence of his annoyance: “But Venice is the sea! My opponent’s poor attempt at dialectics makes no difference. The liquid element is the barocco. The solid, the fixed, the rigid, is the classico. Venice è il mare!” So Simon remembers what he has learned during his stay here: the Bucentaur, the ring thrown into the sea, and Eco’s stories: “No, Venice is the husband of the sea; that is not the same thing.”

“The city of masks! Of mirrored glass! Of sparkling mosaics! The city sinking into the lagoon! Venice is made of water, sand, and mud!”

“And stone. Lots of marble.”

“The marble is baroque! It is striated with veins, full of internal layers, and it breaks all the time.”

“No, marble is classical. In France, we say gravé dans le marbre.”

“The Carnival! Casanova! Cagliostro!”

“Yes, in the collective unconscious Casanova is the king of baroque par excellence. But he is the last. We bury a bygone world in an apotheosis.”

“Ma, that is the identity of Venice: an eternal agony. The eighteenth century is Venice.”

Simon senses that he is losing ground, that he cannot maintain this paradox of solid, straight-lined Venice much longer, but he refuses to give up: “No, the Venice of strength, glory, dominance, is the Venice of the sixteenth century, before its disappearance, its decomposition. The Baroque that you defend is what is killing it.”

The Italian sees his chance and takes it: “But decomposition is Venice! Its identity is precisely its inevitable advancement toward death.”

“But Venice must have a future! The Baroque that you describe is the rope that supports the hanged man.”

“Another baroque image. First you argue, then you condemn, but everything brings you back to the Baroque. Which proves that it is the spirit of the Baroque that forms the grandeur of the city.”

In terms of purely logical demonstration, Simon senses that he has begun an argument where his opponent has the upper hand. But, thankfully, rhetoric is not all about logic, so he plays the pathos card: Venice must live.

“Perhaps the Baroque is that poison that kills her but renders her more beautiful in death.” (Avoid making concessions, Simon thinks.) “But take The Merchant of Venice: where does salvation come from? Women who live on an island: on earth!”

The Italian exclaims triumphantly: “Portia? Who disguises herself as a man? Ma, that’s totalmente barocco! It is even the triumph of the Baroque over the obtuse rationalism of Shylock, over law, behind which Shylock shelters to claim his pound of flesh. That inflexible interpretation of the letter of the law is the very expression, dare I say, of a proto-classical neurosis.”

Simon can feel that the audience appreciates the audacity of this phrase, but at the same time he can see that his adversary is rambling a bit about Shylock, and this is a good thing because he is beginning to be seriously perturbed by the theme under discussion: his doubts and paranoia about the solidity of his own existence are returning to haunt his mind when he needs all his concentration. He rushes to move his pawns toward Shakespeare (“life is a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage”: Why does this line from Macbeth come to him now? Where does it come from? Simon forces himself to push the question away for later consideration): “Portia is precisely that mélange of baroque madness and classical genius that enables her to defeat Shylock not, like the other characters, by recourse to feelings but with firm, unassailable legal arguments, with an exemplary rationality, founded on Shylock’s own demonstration, which she throws back at him: ‘A pound of that same merchant’s flesh is thine; the court awards it, and the law doth give it … [but] this bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.’ At this moment, Antonio is saved by a piece of legal trickery: a baroque gesture, admittedly, but a classical baroque.”

Simon can feel the public’s approval. The Italian knows he has lost the initiative again, so he strives to dismantle what he calls Simon’s “specious and pathetic convolutions” and, in doing so, makes a small mistake of his own. To denounce Simon’s dubious leaps of logic, he asks: “Ma, who decided that the law was a classical value?,” when it was he himself who had presupposed it in his previous argument. But Simon, too tired or too distracted, misses his opportunity to point out the contradiction and the Italian is able to go on: “Are we not reaching the limits of my opponent’s system?”

And he puts his boot on Simon’s neck: “What my honorable adversary is doing is very simple: he is forcing his analogies.”

So Simon is attacked where he normally excels—in the area of metadiscourse—and he feels that if he lets that happen, he risks being beaten at his own game, so he clings to his argument: “Your defense of Venice is booby-trapped. You had to reinvent it with an alliance, and that alliance is Portia: that cocktail of trickery and pragmatism. When Venice risks losing itself behind its masks, Portia brings from her island her baroque madness and her classical common sense.”

Simon is finding it harder and harder to concentrate; he thinks about the “prestiges” of the seventeenth century, of Cervantes fighting at Lepanto, of his course on James Bond at Vincennes, of the dissecting table at the anatomical theater in Bologna, of the cemetery in Ithaca and a thousand things at the same time, and he understands that he can only triumph if he overcomes, in a mise en abyme that he would savor in other circumstances, this baroque vertigo that is taking hold of him.

He decides to bring an end to the discussion of Shakespeare, which he thinks he has safely negotiated, and condense all his mental energy into changing the subject, to turn his adversary away from the metadiscursive approach he had begun, where, for the first time, Simon does not feel at ease.

“One word, again: Serenissima.”

With this, he obliges his opponent to react and by interrupting the rhetorical sequence that he was about to build, to wrestle the initiative away from him again. The Italian ripostes: “Repubblica e barocco!”

At this stage of the improvisation, Simon plays for time and says everything that comes to mind: “That depends. A thousand years of doges. Stable institutions. Firm authority. Churches everywhere: God is not baroque, as Einstein said. Napoleon, on the contrary [and Simon deliberately invokes the man who was the gravedigger of the Venetian Republic]: an absolute monarch, but he moved all the time. Very baroque, but also very classical, in his way.”

The Italian tries to respond, but Simon cuts in: “Ah, it’s true, I forgot: the Classical does not exist! In that case, what have we been talking about for the last half hour?” The audience stops breathing. His opponent reels slightly under the force of this uppercut.

Heads spinning from the effort and the nervous tension, the two men are now debating in a way that can only be described as anarchic. Behind them, the three judges, appreciating that they have each given the best of themselves, decide to put an end to the duel.

Simon suppresses a smile of relief and turns toward them. He realizes that these three judges must be sophists (because normally the jury is composed of members of higher ranks than the duelists). All three wear Venetian masks, like the men who attacked Simon, and he understands the advantage of organizing these meetings during Carnival: that way, one can preserve one’s anonymity with complete discretion.

The judges vote amid oppressive silence.

The first votes for Simon.

The second for his opponent.

So the verdict rests in the hands of the last judge. Simon stares at the sort of cutting board, stained red by the fingers of the previous competitors. He hears a murmur in the theater as the audience watches the third judge vote, and he dares not look up. For once, he is unable to interpret that murmur.

No one has picked up the machete lying on the table.

The third judge voted for him.

His opponent breaks down. He will not lose his finger, because Logos Club rules dictate that only the challenger risks his digital capital, but his rank was very important to him and he is clearly upset at the prospect of demotion.

The audience cheers as Simon is promoted to the rank of tribune. But above all, he is formally given an invitation for two people at the next day’s summit meeting. Simon verifies the time and the place, waves to the audience one last time, and joins Bayard in his box, while the theater begins to empty out.

In the box, Bayard reads the information on the invitation card and lights a cigarette, at least his twelfth of the evening. An Englishman pokes his head in to congratulate the victor: “Good game. That guy was tough.”

Simon looks at his hands, which are trembling slightly, and says: “I wonder if the sophists are much better.”

92

Behind Sollers is Paradise: Tintoretto’s gigantic canvas, which also, in its time, won a competition—to decorate the Chamber of the Great Council in the Doge’s Palace.

At the base of the picture is a huge platform where there are seated not three but ten members of the jury: the full complement of sophists.

In front of them, three-quarters turned to the audience, the Great Protagoras in person, and Sollers, leaning on a lectern.

The ten judges and the two duelists wear Venetian masks, but Simon and Bayard had no trouble recognizing Sollers. Besides, they already spotted Kristeva in the audience.

Unlike in La Fenice, the audience here is standing, gathered in this immense room designed in the fourteenth century to host more than a thousand nobles: 175 feet long, with a ceiling that makes viewers wonder how it is held up without a single column, inlaid with innumerable old master paintings.

The room’s effect on the audience is such that a sort of fearful hubbub can be heard. Everyone whispers respectfully under the gaze of Tintoretto and Veronese.

One of the judges stands up, formally announces the start of the meeting in Italian, and draws the subject from one of the urns in front of him.

“On forcène doucement.”

One fanatics gently?

The subject seems like it ought to be French, but when Bayard turns to Simon, his partner makes a gesture that suggests he has no clue either.

A wave of perplexity moves through the 175 feet of the room. The non-Francophone spectators check that their simultaneous translation machine is tuned to the right channel.

If Sollers had a second’s hesitation behind his mask, he doesn’t let it show. In any case, Kristeva, who is standing in the audience, does not bat an eyelid.

Sollers has five minutes to understand the subject, to problematize it, to come up with a thesis, and to back it up with coherent and—if possible—spectacular arguments.

In the meantime, Bayard asks the people around him: What is this incomprehensible subject?

A handsome, well-dressed old man with a silk pocket handkerchief that matches his scarf explains: “Ma, the Frenchman is challenging il Grande Protagoras. Surely he can’t expect ‘for or against the death penalty,’ vero?”

Bayard is willing to agree with this, but he asks why the subject is in French.

The old man replies: “An act of courtesy by the Grande Protagoras. I’ve heard he speaks every language on earth.”

“He isn’t French?”

“Ma no, è italiano, eh!”

Bayard watches the Great Protagoras calmly smoking his pipe while scribbling a few notes. His figure, his appearance, the shape of his jaw (because the mask covers only his eyes) … all of this is vaguely familiar.

When the five minutes are up, Sollers stands tall behind his lectern, eyes the audience, makes a little dance step punctuated by a complete rotation, as if he wanted to verify the presence of the Ten behind his back, bows more or less soberly to his opponent, and begins his speech, a speech he already knows will remain in the annals as the speech made by Sollers in his duel with the Great Protagoras.

“Forcène … forcène … Fort … Scène … Fors … Seine … Faure (Félix) … Cène. President Félix Faure died of a blow job and a heart attack, which caused him to enter history but exit the stage. As a prolegomenon … A little appetizer … An introduction (ha ha!)…”

Simon thinks that Sollers is attempting a boldly Lacanian approach.

Bayard observes Kristeva out of the corner of his eye. Her expression betrays nothing but absolute attentiveness.

“La force. Et la scène. La force sur scène. [Strength. And the stage. Strength onstage.] Rodrigue, basically. Forêt sur Seine. (Val-de-Marne. Apparently they still nail crows to the doors there.) To squeeze or not to squeeze the Commander’s peepee? That is the question.”

Bayard gives Simon a questioning look. He replies in a whisper that Sollers has apparently chosen an audacious tactic of replacing logical connections with analogical connections, or rather juxtapositions of ideas, even sequences of images, rather than pure reasoning.

Bayard tries to understand: “Is it baroque?”

Simon is surprised: “Er, yes, I suppose it is.”

Sollers goes on: “Fors scène: hors la scène. Obscène. [Save for the stage: offstage. Obscene.] It’s all there. The rest is of no interest, naturally. The thundering article on ‘Sollers the obscene’ by Marcelin Pleynet? Without hesitation. Well, well, what? Oh there, oh! Gently … From where … seed … From where does the seed come? From up above, of course! [He points to the ceiling and Veronese’s paintings.] Art is the seed of God. [He points to the wall behind him.] Tintoretto is his prophet … D’ailleurs, il tinte aux rets … [What’s more, he rings the net…] Blessed is the age when the bell and thread will once again replace the hammer and sickle … After all, are these not the two tools of the fisherman?”

Does Bayard detect a faint wrinkle of concern on Kristeva’s Slavic face?

“If the fish could put their heads above the water, they would perceive that their world is not the only world…”

Simon is beginning to find Sollers’s strategy extremely audacious.

Bayard whispers in his ear: “A bit too Hollywood, isn’t it?”

The old man with the pocket handkerchief mutters: “He’s got coglioni, this francese. At the same time, if he’s going to use them, it’s now or never.”

Bayard asks him to elaborate.

The old man replies: “Clearly, he has not understood the subject any more than we have, vero? So he is trying to flamber à l’esbroufe—to bullshit his way through it, no? It’s brave.”

Sollers rests an elbow on the lectern, which obliges him to lean down lopsidedly. Curiously, however, this unnatural pose makes him look relatively relaxed.

“Je suis venu j’ai vu j’ai vomu.” I came, I saw, I vomited.

Sollers’s speech accelerates, becomes more fluid, almost musical: “God is really close without mystery gently oiled gently hand of mysfère glove of hell…” Then he says something that Simon and even Bayard find surprising: “The belief in tickle-wickle on the organ enables the corpse to be maintained as the sole fundamental value.” After uttering these words, Sollers licks his lips lasciviously. Bayard can now observe clear signs of tension on Kristeva’s face.

Bayard lets himself be rocked by the rhythm, like a river carrying little logs that occasionally knock against a fragile boat.

“… the whole soul of Christ did it enjoy bliss in its passion it seems not for several reasons is it not impossible to suffer and to enjoy at the same time since pain and joy are opposites Aristotle notes it does not deep sadness prevent delectation however the opposite is true…”

Sollers is salivating more and more but he goes on: “I change form name revelation nickname I am the same I mutate sometimes palace sometimes hut pharaoh dove or sheep transfiguration transubstantiation ascension…”

Then he comes to his peroration—the audience can tell, even if they cannot follow it: “I will be what I will be that means take care of what I am as much as I am in I am don’t forget that I am what follows if I am tomorrow I will be what I am at the point where I would be…”

Bayard exclaims to Simon: “Is that it, the seventh function of language?”

Simon feels his paranoia rise again, thinking that a character like Sollers cannot really exist.

Sollers concludes, abruptly: “I am the opposite of the Nazi-Soviet.”

Universal stupefaction.

Even the Great Protagoras looks gobsmacked. He hums and haws, a little embarrassed. Then he takes the stand, because it’s his turn.

Simon and Bayard recognize Umberto Eco’s voice.

“I don’t know where to start, after that. My honorable opponent has, how to say it, fired on all cylinders, si?”

Eco turns to Sollers and politely bows, readjusting the nose of his mask.

“Perhaps I might make a little etymological remark, to begin with? You will no doubt have noted, dear audience, honorable members of the jury, that the verb forcener no longer exists in modern French, its only surviving trace being the substantive forcené, which signifies a mad individual who behaves violently.

“Now, this definition of forcené might lead us into error. Originally—if I may make a little orthographical remark—forcener was written with an s, not a c, because it came from the Latin sensus, ‘sense’ (‘animal quod sensu caret’): forsener, then, is literally to be out of one’s senses, in other words, to be mad, but to begin with there was no connotation of force.

“That said, this connotation must have appeared gradually, with the orthographic renovation that suggested a false etymology and, I would say, that from the sixteenth century onward this spelling was attested to in Middle French.

“Allora, the question that I would have discussed, if my honorable opponent had raised it, is this: Is ‘forcener doucement’ an oxymoron? Is this an association of two contradictory terms?

“No, if one considers the true etymology of forcener.

“Si, if one accepts the connotation of force in the false etymology.

“Si, but … are gentle and strong necessarily opposed? A force can be exercised gently, for example when you are taken by the current of a river, or when you gently squeeze a loved one’s hand…”

The singsong accent resonates through the large room, but everyone has grasped the violence of the attack: beneath his debonair appearance, Eco has calmly underlined the insufficiencies in Sollers’s speech by conjuring, alone, a discussion that his opponent was unable to even begin.

“But none of that tells us what it’s about, no?

“I will be more modest than my opponent, who attempted some very ambitious and, I think, pardon me, somewhat fanciful interpretations of this expression. For my part, I will simply try to explain it to you: he who ‘forcène doucement’ is the poet, ecco. It is the furor poeticus. I am not sure who uttered that phrase, but I would say it is a sixteenth-century French poet, a disciple of Jean Dorat, a member of the Pléiade, because one can clearly sense here the Neoplatonic influence.

“For Plato, you know, poetry is not an art, not a technique, but a divine inspiration. The poet is inhabited by the god, in a trancelike state: that is what Socrates explains to Ion in his famous dialogue. So the poet is mad, but it is a gentle madness, a creative madness, not a destructive madness.

“I do not know the author of this citation, but I think it is perhaps Ronsard or Du Bellay, both of them disciples of a school where, giustamente, ‘on forcène doucement.’

“Allora, we can discuss the question of divine inspiration, if you like? I don’t know, because I didn’t really understand what my honorable opponent wanted to discuss.”

Silence in the room. Sollers realizes that it is his turn to speak. He hesitates.

Simon mechanically analyzes Eco’s strategy, which can be summarized very simply: do the opposite of Sollers. This implies adopting an ultramodest ethos and a very sober and minimalist level of development. The refusal of all fanciful interpretations and a very literal explanation. By falling back on his proverbial erudition, Eco simply explained without making an argument, as if to underline the impossibility of discussion in the face of his opponent’s frenzied logorrhea. He uses rigor and humility to highlight his megalomaniacal adversary’s mental disorder.

Sollers starts to speak again, less confidently: “I talk about philosophy because the action of literature now is to show that the philosophical discourse can be integrated into the position of the literary subject, if only so that its experience be taken all the way to the transcendental horizon.”

But Eco does not reply.

Sollers, panic-stricken, blurts out: “Aragon wrote a thundering article about me! About my genius! And Elsa Triolet! I have their autographs!”

Embarrassed silence.

One of the ten sophists makes a gesture and two guards, stationed at the room’s entrance, seize the dazed Sollers, who rolls his eyes and yells: “Tickle-wickle! Ho ho ho! No no no!”

Bayard asks why there has not been a vote. The old man replies that in certain cases, unanimity is obvious.

The two guards lay the loser on the marble floor in front of the platform and one of the sophists advances, a large pair of pruning shears in his hands.

The guards strip Sollers from the waist down as he screams beneath Tintoretto’s Paradise. Some of the other sophists leave their seats to help control him. In the confusion, his mask comes off.

Only the first few rows of the audience see what happens at the foot of the platform but everyone, all the way to the back, knows.

The sophist with the doctor’s beak wedges Sollers’s balls between the two blades of the shears, firmly grips the handles, and presses them together. Snip.

Kristeva shudders.

Sollers makes an unidentifiable noise, a sort of throat-clack followed by a long caterwaul that ricochets off the paintings and reverberates throughout the room.

The sophist with the doctor’s beak picks up the two balls and drops them in a second urn, which Simon and Bayard now realize was put there for that very purpose.

Pale-faced, Simon asks his neighbor: “Isn’t the penalty normally a finger?”

The man replies that it is when one challenges a duelist of a rank just above yours, but Sollers wanted to cut corners. He had never participated in a single duel and he directly challenged the Great Protagoras. “In that case, the price is higher.”

While the attendants attempt to give first aid to Sollers, who squirms and makes horrible moaning noises, Kristeva takes the urn containing the testicles and leaves the room.

Bayard and Simon follow her.

She quickly crosses Piazza San Marco, cradling the urn in her arms. The night is still young and the square is packed with tourists, stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, actors in eighteenth-century costumes pretending to duel with swords. Simon and Bayard push their way through the crowds so as not to lose her. She rushes down narrow alleyways, crosses bridges, does not turn around once. A man dressed as Harlequin grabs her by the waist to kiss her, but she emits a piercing cry, escapes his clutches like a small wild animal, and runs away carrying her urn. Crosses the Rialto. Bayard and Simon are not certain that she knows where she is going. From far off, in the sky, they hear fireworks exploding. Kristeva trips on a step and almost drops the urn. Her breath hangs in the air. It’s cold, and she has left her coat at the Doge’s Palace.

All the same, she does make it somewhere: to the basilica Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, home, in her husband’s own words, to “the glorious heart of the Serenissima,” with Titian’s tomb and his red Assumption. At this time of night, the basilica is closed. But she doesn’t want to go inside.

It is chance that has brought her here.

She advances over the little bridge that straddles the Rio dei Frari and stops in the middle. She puts the urn on the stone ledge. Simon and Bayard are just behind her, but they dare not set foot on the bridge, nor climb the handful of steps to join her.

Kristeva listens to the murmur of the city, and her dark eyes stare down at the little waves formed by the nocturnal breeze. A fine rain wets her short hair.

From within her blouse, she takes a sheet of paper folded in four.

Bayard feels an urge to throw himself at her and tear the document from her hands, but Simon holds him back. She turns toward them and narrows her eyes, as though she has only just noticed their presence, as though she has only just learned of their existence, and glares at them with hatred, a cold look that petrifies Bayard, while she unfolds the page.

It is too dark to see what is written on it, but Simon thinks he can make out a few cramped letters. And there is definitely writing on both sides.

Slowly, calmly, Kristeva starts to rip it up.

As she does this, the increasingly small scraps fly off over the canal.

In the end, nothing remains but the black wind and the delicate sound of rain.

93

“But in your opinion, did she know or didn’t she?”

Bayard tries to understand.

Simon is perplexed.

It seems possible that Sollers failed to realize that the seventh function didn’t work. But Kristeva?

“Difficult to say. I’d have had to read the document.”

Why would she have betrayed her husband? And, from another perspective, why not use the function herself to compete?

Bayard says to Simon: “Maybe she was like us. Maybe she wanted to see if it worked before she tried it?”

Simon watches the crowd of tourists leaving Venice as if in slow motion. Bayard and he are waiting for the vaporetto with their little suitcases and, as Carnival is coming to an end, the line is long, with hordes of tourists heading to the train station and the airport. A vaporetto arrives, but it’s not the right one; they must wait a little longer.

Simon is pensive, and asks Bayard: “What is reality, for you?”

As Bayard obviously has no idea what he’s talking about, Simon tries to be more specific: “How do you know that you’re not in a novel? How do you know you are not living inside a work of fiction? How do you know that you’re real?”

Bayard looks at Simon with genuine curiosity and replies indulgently: “Are you stupid or what? Reality is what we live, that’s all.”

Their vaporetto arrives, and as it draws alongside, Bayard pats Simon’s shoulder: “Don’t ask yourself so many questions, son.”

The vessel is boarded in a disorderly scramble, the vaporetto guys herding the stupid tourists who climb on board so clumsily, with their bags and their children.

When it is Simon’s turn to get in the boat, the head-count man brings down a metal barrier just behind his back. Stuck on the dock, Bayard tries to protest, but the Italian replies indifferently: “Tutto esaurito.”

Bayard tells Simon to wait for him at the next stop. Simon waves goodbye, as a joke.

The vaporetto moves away. Bayard lights a cigarette. Behind him, he hears raised voices. He turns around and sees two Japanese men yelling at each other. Intrigued, he goes over to them. One of the Japanese men says to him, in French: “Your friend has just been abducted.”

It takes Bayard a second or two to process this information.

A second or two, no more, then he switches into cop mode and asks the only question a cop must ask: “Why?”

The second Japanese man says: “Because he won, the day before yesterday.”

The Italian he beat is a very powerful Neapolitan politician, and he did not take defeat well. Bayard knows about the assault after the party at the Ca’ Rezzonico. The Japanese men explain: the Neapolitan sent some henchmen to beat Simon up so he couldn’t compete, because he was afraid of him. Now that he has lost the duel, he wants vengeance.

Bayard watches the vanishing vaporetto. He quickly analyzes the situation, then looks around: he sees the bronze statue of a sort of general with a thick mustache, he sees the façade of the Hotel Danieli, he sees boats moored at the dock. He sees a gondolier on his gondola, waiting for the tourists.

He jumps in the gondola, along with the Japanese men. The gondolier does not seem overly surprised and welcomes them by singing to himself in Italian, but Bayard tells him:

“Follow that vaporetto!”

The gondolier pretends not to understand, so Bayard takes out a wad of lire and the gondolier starts to scull.

The vaporetto is a good three hundred yards ahead, and in 1981 there are no mobile phones.

The gondolier is surprised. It’s strange, he says: that vaporetto is not going the right way. It’s headed toward the island of Murano.

The vaporetto has been hijacked.

On board, Simon has not realized what is happening, since almost all the passengers are tourists with no idea where they should be going, and apart from two or three Italians who protest to the driver, no one notices that they are headed the wrong way. Besides, Italians complaining loudly is nothing new; the passengers simply think it is part of the local color. The vaporetto docks at Murano.

In the distance, Bayard’s gondola is attempting to catch up. Bayard and the Japanese men exhort the gondolier to go faster, and they yell Simon’s name to warn him, but they are too far away and Simon has no reason to pay them any attention.

But he does suddenly feel the point of a knife in his back and hears a voice behind him say: “Prego.” He understands that he must get off the boat. He obeys. The tourists, in a rush to catch their plane, do not see the knife, and the vaporetto is on its way again.

Simon stands on the dock. He feels almost certain that the men behind him are the same three who attacked him in masks the other night.

They enter one of the glassblowers’ workshops that open directly onto the docks. Inside, a craftsman is kneading a piece of molten glass just removed from the oven, and Simon watches, fascinated, as the bubble of glass is blown, stretched, modeled, taking shape with only a few touches of a plunger as a little rearing horse.

Next to the oven stands a balding, paunchy man in a mismatched suit. Simon recognizes him; his opponent from La Fenice.

“Benvenuto!”

Simon faces the Neapolitan, surrounded by the three thugs. The glassblower continues shaping his little horses unperturbed.

“Bravo! Bravo! I wanted to congratulate you personally before you leave. Palladio—that was well played. Easy, but well played. And Portia. It didn’t convince me, but it convinced the jury, vero? Ah, Shakespeare … I should have mentioned Visconti … Have you seen Senso? The story of a foreigner in Venice. It doesn’t end well.”

The Neapolitan approaches the glassblower, who is busy shaping the hoofs of a second little horse. He takes out a cigar, which he lights with the incandescent glass, then turns to Simon with an evil grin.

“Ma, I can’t let you leave without giving you something to remember me by. How do you say it? To each his due, yes?” One of the henchmen immobilizes Simon with an arm around his neck. Simon tries to free himself, but the second punches him in the chest, winding him, and the third grabs his right arm.

The three men push him forward and pull his arm over the glassblower’s workbench. The little glass horses fall and smash on the floor. The glassblower takes a step back but does not seem surprised. Their eyes meet, and Simon sees in this man’s expression that he knows exactly what is expected of him and he is in no position to refuse. Simon starts to panic. He struggles and yells, but his yelling is pure reflex, because he is certain that he cannot expect any help. He doesn’t know that reinforcements are on their way, that Bayard and the Japanese are arriving in a gondola and that they have promised the gondolier they will triple his fee if he gets them there in record time.

The glassblower asks: “Che dito?”

Bayard and the Japanese use their suitcases as oars to make the boat move faster and the gondolier puts his all into it because, without knowing what exactly is at stake, he has gathered that it is serious.

The Neapolitan asks Simon: “Which finger? Do you have a preference?”

Simon kicks like a horse, but the three men hold his arm firmly on the workbench. He no longer wonders if he is a character in a novel; his reactions are pure survival instinct, and he tries desperately to free himself, but in vain.

The gondola finally reaches land and Bayard throws all his lire at the gondolier and jumps onto the dock, along with the Japanese, but there is a whole line of glassblowers’ workshops and they have no idea where Simon was taken. So they rush into each of them randomly, calling out to the craftsmen and salesmen and tourists, but no one has seen Simon.

The Neapolitan takes a drag on his cigar and orders: “Tutta la mano.”

The glassblower changes his tongs for a bigger pair and seizes Simon’s wrist in the cast-iron jaws.

Bayard and the Japanese burst into a workshop, where they have to describe the young Frenchman to Italians who do not understand them because they are talking too fast, so Bayard leaves the workshop and goes into the one next door, but there, too, no one has seen the Frenchman. Bayard knows perfectly well that rushing around in a panic is no way to carry out an investigation but he has a policeman’s intuition of urgency, even though he is not aware of exactly what is happening, and he runs from one workshop to the next, and from one shop to the next.

But it’s too late: the glassblower again closes the cast-iron jaws around Simon’s wrist and crushes the flesh, the ligaments, and the bones, until the latter break with a sinister cracking noise and his right hand is detached from his arm in a fountain of blood.

The Neapolitan contemplates his mutilated adversary as he collapses, and seems to hesitate briefly.

Has he obtained sufficient compensation, yes or no?

He takes a drag on his cigar, blows a few smoke rings, and says: “Let’s go.”

Simon’s screaming alerts Bayard and the Japanese, who find him at last lying inanimate on the floor of the glassblower’s workshop, bleeding profusely, surrounded by little broken horses.

Bayard knows there is not a second to lose. He is searching for the hand but he can’t find it. He looks all over the floor, but there is nothing but fragments of little glass horses that crack under his soles. If nothing is done in the next few minutes, he realizes, Simon will bleed to death.

So one of the Japanese men takes a sort of spatula from the still-hot oven and presses it to the wound. The cauterized flesh emits a hideous whistling noise. The pain wakes Simon, who screams deliriously. The smell of burned flesh reaches the shop next door, intriguing the customers, oblivious to the drama unfolding in the glassblower’s workshop.

Bayard thinks that cauterizing the wound has made any kind of hand transplant impossible and that Simon will remain one-handed for the rest of his life, but the Japanese man who performed the operation, as if reading his thoughts, shows him the oven, so that he will have no regrets: inside, like a Rodin sculpture, the curled-up fingers crackle and glow at the end of the charred hand.