The Seventh Function of Language

97

Simon stands outside the entrance of Galleria Umberto I, and from this position he can perceive its proud and happy union of glass and marble, but he remains on the threshold. The gallery is a landmark, not a destination. He stares at the map he has unfolded, puzzling over why Via Roma cannot be found. He has the feeling that his map is wrong.

He should be standing on Via Roma. Instead of which, he is on Via Toleda.

Behind him, on the opposite pavement, an old shoeshine guy watches him curiously.

Simon knows the shoeshine guy is waiting to see how he will manage to fold his map back up with only one hand.

The old man has a wooden crate, on which he has created a sort of makeshift rack on which customers can wedge their shoes. Simon notes the slope for the heel.

The two men look at each other.

Perplexity reigns on both sides of this Neapolitan street.

Simon does not know exactly where he is. He begins folding the map, slowly but dexterously, never taking his eyes off the old shoeshine guy.

But suddenly the old man points at a spot directly above Simon, who senses that something abnormal is happening because the man’s glum expression changes to one of stupefaction.

Simon looks up just in time to see the pediment above the gallery entrance, a bas-relief representing two cherubs flanking a coat of arms, or something like that, come loose from the façade.

The shoeshine guy tries to yell something, a warning (“Statte accuorto!”) to prevent the tragedy, or at least to participate in it in some way, but no sound emerges from his toothless mouth.

But Simon has changed a lot. He is no longer a library rat about to be crushed by half a ton of white stone, but a one-handed man ranked quite high in the hierarchy of the Logos Club who has cheated death at least three times. Instead of stepping back, as our instinct would prompt us, he has the counterintuitive reflex of pressing his body against the building’s wall, so that the huge block of stone smashes the pavement next to his feet without injuring him.

The shoeshine guy cannot believe it. Simon looks down at the rubble, he looks over at the old man, he looks around him at the petrified pedestrians.

He points at the poor shoeshine guy, but it is not him, of course, he addresses when he declares, aggressively: “If you want to kill me, you’re going to have to try a bit harder than that!” Or maybe the novelist wanted to send him a message? In that case, he’ll have to express himself a bit more clearly, thinks Simon angrily.

98

“It’s last year’s earthquake; it made all the buildings fragile. They could collapse at any moment.”

Simon listens to Bianca explaining why he almost got his skull caved in by a huge chunk of marble.

“San Gennaro—Saint January—stopped the lava during an eruption of Vesuvius and he has been Naples’s protector ever since. Every year, the bishop takes a bit of his dried blood in a glass vial and he keeps turning it upside down until the blood becomes liquid. If the blood dissolves, Naples will be spared misfortune. And what happened last year, do you think?”

“The blood didn’t dissolve.”

“And then the Camorra embezzled millions that the European Commission gave the city because they’re in control of the reconstruction contracts. So of course, they didn’t do anything, or they did such shoddy work that it’s just as dangerous as before. There are accidents all the time. Neapolitans are used to them.”

Simon and Bianca are sipping coffee on the terrace of the Gambrinus, a very touristy literary café and pastry shop that Simon chose for this meeting. He nibbles a rum baba.

Bianca explains that the expression “See Naples and die” (vedi Napoli e poi muori; in Latin, videre Neapolim et Mori) is in fact a play on words: Mori is a small town near Naples.

She also tells him the history of the pizza: one day, Queen Margherita, married to the king of Italy, Umberto I, discovered this popular meal and made it famous throughout Italy. In tribute, a pizza was named after her, the one containing the colors of the national flag: green (basil), white (mozzarella), and red (tomato).

Up to now, she has not asked a single question about his hand.

A white Fiat double-parks near them.

Bianca becomes more and more animated. She starts talking politics. She tells Simon again about the hatred she feels for bourgeois people who hoard all the wealth and starve the people. “Can you believe it, Simon? Some of those bourgeois bastards spend hundreds of thousands of lire just to buy a handbag. A handbag, Simon!”

Two young men get out of the white Fiat and sit on the terrace. They are joined by a third, a biker who parks his Triumph on the pavement. Bianca can’t see them because they are behind her back. It is the scarf gang from Bologna.

If Simon is surprised to see them here, he doesn’t show it.

Bianca sobs with rage, thinking about the excesses of the Italian middle classes. She heaps insults on Reagan. She is suspicious of Mitterrand because, on that side of the Alps as on this one, the socialists are always traitors. Bettino Craxi is a piece of shit. They all deserve to die, and she would happily execute them herself given the chance. The world seems infinitely dark to her, thinks Simon, who cannot really claim she is wrong.

The three young men have ordered beers and lit cigarettes when another character arrives, already known to Simon: his Venice opponent, the man who mutilated him, flanked by two bodyguards.

Simon leans over his rum baba, hiding his face. The man shakes hands like a VIP, a local elected official or a high-ranking Camorra member (the distinction is often not very clear, here). He disappears inside the café.

Bianca spits on Forlani and his Pentapartito government. Simon worries that she is having a nervous breakdown. Attempting to calm her, he utters some soothing words—“come on, not everything’s that bad, think about Nicaragua…”—and moves his hand under the table to rest on her knee, but through the fabric of Bianca’s trouser leg he touches something hard that is not flesh.

Bianca, startled, abruptly pulls her leg beneath her chair. She immediately stops sobbing. She stares at Simon, defiant and imploring at the same time. There is rage, anger, and love in her tears.

Simon says nothing. So, that’s how it is: a happy ending. The one-handed man and the one-legged girl. And, as in all good stories, some guilt to drag around with him: if Bianca lost her leg at Bologna Central, it was his fault. If she had never met him, she would have two legs and would still be able to wear skirts.

But then again, they would also not form this touching handicapped couple. Will they marry and make lots of little Leftists?

Except that this is not the final scene that he had in mind.

Yes, while visiting Naples, he wanted to see Bianca, the young woman he fucked on a dissecting table in Bologna, but right now he has other plans.

Simon makes an imperceptible nod to one of the young men in scarves.

The three of them stand up, put their scarves over their mouths, and enter the café.

Simon and Bianca exchange a long look, communicating an infinity of messages, stories, and emotions, of the past, the present, and, already, the conditional past (the worst of all, the tense of regrets).

The sound of two gunshots. Screams and confusion.

The gang emerge, pushing Simon’s opponent forward. One of the three has his P38 wedged in the lower back of the important Camorra member. Another sweeps the terrace with his, threatening the shocked clientele.

As he passes Simon, the third gang member puts something on the table, which Simon covers with his napkin.

They shove the Camorra guy in the back of the Fiat and speed off.

There is panic in the café. Simon listens to the screams from inside and understands that the two bodyguards are injured. Each one has a bullet in his leg, as planned.

Simon says to the frightened-looking Bianca: “Come with me.”

He leads her over to the third man’s motorbike and hands her the napkin, inside which is a key. He says to Bianca: “Drive.”

Bianca protests: she’s ridden a scooter before, but never a bike as powerful as this one.

Lifting his right arm, Simon says, scowling: “Well, I can’t either.”

So Bianca straddles the Triumph, Simon kickstarts it and sits behind her, arms around her waist, and she twists the handle to accelerate, sending the bike flying forward. Bianca asks which direction she should take and Simon replies: “Pozzuoli.”

99

It is like a lunar landscape, somewhere between a spaghetti western and a science fiction film.

At the center of an immense crater coated with whitish clay, the three gang members surround the paunchy VIP, who is kneeling next to a boiling mud pit.

Around them, geysers of sulfur burst from the bowels of the earth. The air is thick with the stench of rotten eggs.

Simon’s first thought was to go to the Sibyl’s cave in Cumae, where no one would have come to find them, but he decided against that because it was too kitsch, too obviously symbolic, and he’s getting tired of symbols. Except it is not that easy to get away from them: as they tread the cracked earth, Bianca tells him that the Romans believed the Solfatara, this dormant volcano, to be the gates of Hell. Okay …

“Salve! What do we do with him, compagno?”

Bianca, who had not recognized the three men at the Gambrinus, asks wide-eyed:

“You hired the Red Brigades from Bologna?”

“I thought they weren’t necessarily the Red Brigades; isn’t that what you insisted to your friend Enzo?”

“No one hired us.”

“Non siamo dei mercenari.”

“No, it’s true, they did this for free. I convinced them.”

“To kidnap this guy?”

“Si tratta di un uomo politico corrotto di Napoli.”

“He hands out building permits from the mayor’s office. Thanks to the permits he sold the Camorra, hundreds of people died during the terremoto, crushed by the rotten buildings the Camorra had constructed.”

Simon approaches the man and rubs his stump against the man’s face. “Not only that, but he’s a bad loser.” The man shakes his head like an animal. “Strunz! Si mmuort!”

The three Red Brigades members suggest ransoming him in exchange for a revolutionary hostage. The French-speaker among them turns to Simon: “Ma, it’s not certain that anyone will want to pay for a pig like him, ha ha!” The three men laugh, and Bianca, too, though she wants him to die, even if she doesn’t say so.

An Aldo Moro–style uncertainty: Simon likes that. He wants vengeance, but he also likes the idea of leaving it to chance. He grabs the Camorra man’s chin in his left hand and squeezes it like a vise. “You understand the alternatives? Either your body is found in the boot of a Renault 4L or you can go home and continue being a bastard. But don’t you dare set foot in the Logos Club again.” He remembers their duel in Venice, the only one in which he ever truly felt in danger. “Anyway, how does a peasant like you end up so cultivated? You find time to go to the theater when you’re not too busy organizing crimes?” But he immediately regrets this question, loaded as it is with politically incorrect prejudices.

He releases the man’s chin, which immediately starts wagging. He speaks very rapidly in Italian. Simon asks Bianca: “What’s he on about?”

“He’s offering your friends lots of money to kill you.”

Simon laughs. He knows the kneeling man’s persuasive talents better than anyone, but he also knows that between a Mafia bureaucrat with Christian Democrat connections and Red Brigades members in their early twenties, there can be no possible dialogue. He could spend all day and all night talking without persuading them of anything.

His opponent must realize the same thing because, with a suppleness and speed one would never suspect in someone so corpulent, he leaps at the nearest brigade member and tries to wrestle his P38 from him. But the gang are young, fit men; the man is smashed over the head with the butt of a gun and crumples to the ground. The three brigade members aim their guns at him while yelling insults.

And so this is how the story will end. They’ll shoot him here and now for that stupid escape attempt, thinks Simon.

A gunshot goes off.

But it is one of the brigade members who collapses.

Silence falls again on the volcano.

Everyone breathes in the sulfurous vapors that saturate the air.

Nobody tries to hide, because Simon had the brilliant idea of bringing the man to this completely exposed place: in the middle of a volcanic crater more than two thousand feet in circumference. In other words, there is not a single tree, not a single bush behind which they can take shelter. Simon scans his surroundings for any potential hiding place and spots a well and a small building made of smoking stones (ancient steam rooms representing the gates of Purgatory and Hell), but they are out of reach.

Two men in suits advance toward them. One carries a pistol, the other a rifle. Simon thinks he recognizes a German Mauser. The two brigade members who are still alive raise their hands, because they know their P38s are useless at this distance. Bianca stares at the corpse, a bullet in the head.

The Camorra has sent a team to rescue the corrupt politician. The sistema does not let its creatures get stolen from it that easily. And Simon is confident that it is equally punctilious when it comes to avenging an attack on its interests, which means that in all likelihood he will be executed on the spot along with what remains of the gang. As for Bianca, she must suffer the same fate, as the “system” has never been easygoing when it comes to witnesses either.

He has the confirmation of this when the politician gets to his feet, puffing like a seal, and slaps him, first, followed by the two brigade members, and lastly Bianca. Thus their fates are sealed. The politician growls at the two henchmen: “Acceritele.”

Simon thinks of the Japanese men in Venice. So, won’t there be any deus ex machina to save him this time? In his last moments, Simon renews his dialogue with that transcendent authority he used to imagine: if he were trapped in a novel, what narrative economy would require him to die at the end? Simon goes over several narratological reasons, all of which he considers questionable. He thinks of what Bayard would say. “Remember Tony Curtis in The Vikings.” Hmm, yeah. He thinks of what Jacques would do: neutralize one of the armed men, then take out the second one using the first one’s gun, probably. But Bayard isn’t here, and Simon isn’t Bayard.

The Camorra henchman points the rifle at his chest.

Simon understands that he should expect nothing from any transcendent authority. He senses that the novelist, if he exists, is not his friend.

His executioner is not much older than the brigade members. But just as he is about to squeeze the trigger, Simon tells him: “I know you are a man of honor.” The man pauses and asks Bianca to translate for him. “Isse a ritto cà sìn’omm d’onore.”

No, there will be no miracle. But, novel or not, it will not be said that he just let it happen. Simon does not believe in salvation, he does not believe that he has a mission on earth, but he does believe that the future is unwritten and that, even if he is in the hands of a sadistic, capricious novelist, his destiny is not yet settled.

Not yet.

He must deal with this hypothetical novelist the way he deals with God: always act as if God did not exist because if God does exist, he is at best a bad novelist who merits neither respect nor obedience. It is never too late to try to change the course of the story. And it may well be that the imaginary novelist has not yet made his decision. It may well be that the ending of the story is in the hands of his character, and that that character is me.

I am Simon Herzog. I am the hero of my own story.

The Camorra henchman turns back to Simon, who tells him: “Your father fought the fascists. He was a partisan. He risked his life for justice and freedom.” The two men turn to Bianca, who translates into Neapolitan: “Pateto eta nu partiggiano cà a fatt’a Guerra ’a Mussolini e Hitler. A commattuto p’ ’a giustizia e ’a libbertà.”

The politician becomes impatient, but the assassin signals him to shut up. The politician orders the second henchman to execute Simon, but the one with the rifle says calmly: “Aspett’.” And apparently the one with the rifle is the boss. He wants to know how Simon knows his father.

As it happens, this was just an inspired guess: Simon recognized the model of rifle, a Mauser, the weapon used by elite German marksmen. (Simon has always been partial to Second World War stories.) He deduced from this that the young man had inherited it from his father and this offered two possible hypotheses: either his father had come into possession of the rifle by fighting for the Italian army alongside the Wehrmacht, or quite the opposite: he had fought against them as a partisan and taken the gun from the corpse of a German soldier. As the first hypothesis offered him no hope of being saved, he gambled on the second. But he is careful not to reveal his reasoning and, turning to Bianca, he says: “I also know you lost family members during the earthquake.” Bianca translates: “Isse sape ca è perzo à coccheruno int’o terremoto…”

The politician shouts: “Basta! Spara mò!”

But the Camorra member, o zi—“the uncle,” as the “system” calls the young men it gets to do its dirty work—listens attentively as Simon explains the role played by the man he has been ordered to protect in the tragedy of the terremoto that struck his family.

The politician protests: “Nun è over’!”

But the young “uncle” knows it is true.

Simon asks innocently: “This man killed members of your family. Does vengeance mean anything to you?”

Bianca: “Chisto a acciso e parienti tuoje. Nun te miette scuorno e ll’aiuta?”

How did Simon guess that the young “uncle” had lost his family in the terremoto? And how did he know that, one way or another, without having any proof to hand, the “uncle” would consider it plausible that the politician could be held responsible? In his critical paranoia, Simon does not want to reveal this. He does not want the novelist, if there really is a novelist, to understand how he did it. Let it not be said of him that anyone can read him like a book.

In any case, he is too busy taking care of his peroration: “People you loved were buried alive.”

Bianca no longer needs to translate. Simon no longer needs to speak.

The young man with the rifle turns to the politician, who is pale as the volcano’s clay.

He hits him in the face with the butt of his rifle and pushes him backward.

The corrupt politician, so paunchy and cultivated, overbalances and falls into the boiling mud pit. “La fangaia,” whispers Bianca, hypnotized.

While his body floats for a moment, emitting horrible noises, the politician is able, just before being swallowed by the volcano, to recognize Simon’s voice, as toneless as death, telling him: “See? It’s my tongue you should have cut off.”

And the geysers of sulfur continue to burst from the bowels of the earth, billowing toward the sky and poisoning the atmosphere.