The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  The silence that follows this speech feels as if it might last twenty-four hours.

  “And my daughter?”

  With an air of false modesty, Herzog waves this invitation away. “It would take too long to explain.”

  In fact, he was carried away by his momentum. He just thought a daughter seemed to fit the picture he had painted.

  “All right. Follow me.”

  “I beg your pardon? Follow you where? Am I under arrest?”

  “I’m requisitioning you. You strike me as being less stupid than the rest of these long-haired louts, and I need a translator for all this bullshit.”

  “But … I’m sorry, but that’s completely impossible! I have a class to prepare for tomorrow, and I have to work on my thesis, and there’s a book I have to take back to the library…”

  “Listen, you little jerk: you’re coming with me. Got it?”

  “Where?”

  “We’re going to interrogate the suspects.”

  “The suspects? But I thought it was an accident!”

  “I meant the witnesses. Let’s go.”

  The horde of young fans gathered around the man in boots chants “Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Down with dialectics!” On his way out, Bayard and his new assistant stand aside to let a group of Maoists pass; apparently they have decided to beat up the Spinozists.

  12

  Roland Barthes lived on Rue Servandoni, next to the Saint-Sulpice church, a stone’s throw from the Jardin du Luxembourg. I am going to park where I suppose Bayard parked his 504, outside the front door of number 11. I’ll spare you the now obligatory copy-and-paste of the Wikipedia page: the private mansion designed by such-and-such Italian architect for such-and-such Breton bishop, and so on.

  It’s a handsome building, nice white stone, impressive wrought-iron gate. Outside the gate, a Vinci employee is installing an entry keypad. (Vinci is not yet called Vinci and belongs to CGE, the Compagnie Générale d’Electricité, later known as Alcatel, but Simon Herzog can’t know anything about all this.) They have to cross the courtyard and take Staircase B, on the right, just after the concierge’s office. Herzog asks Bayard what they are looking for here. Bayard has no idea. They climb the stairs because there is no elevator.

  The decoration in the third-floor apartment is old-fashioned. There are wooden clocks, it’s very neatly kept, very clean, even the room that serves as an office—next to the bed is a transistor radio and a copy of Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb—but Barthes worked mostly in his attic room, on the seventh floor.

  In the sixth-floor apartment, the two men are welcomed by Barthes’s younger brother and his wife—an Arab, notes Bayard; pretty, notes Simon—who invites them in for tea. The younger brother explains that the apartments on the third and sixth floor are identical. For a while, Barthes, his mother, and his younger brother lived on the sixth floor, but when his mother fell ill she became too weak to climb all those stairs, so—as the third-floor apartment was available—Barthes bought it and moved in there with her. Roland Barthes had a wide social circle, he went out frequently, especially after their mother’s death, but the younger brother says he doesn’t know any of the people he hung around with. All he knows is that he often went to the Café de Flore, where he had work meetings and where he also met up with friends.

  The seventh floor is actually two adjoining attic rooms knocked into one to create a small studio apartment. There is a trestle table that acts as a desk, an iron-framed bed, a kitchenette with a box of Japanese tea on top of the refrigerator. There are books everywhere, empty coffee cups next to half-full ashtrays. It is older, dirtier, and messier, but it does have a piano, a turntable, some classical music records (Schumann, Schubert), and shoeboxes containing files, keys, gloves, maps, press cuttings.

  A trapdoor allows entry directly into the sixth-floor apartment without going out onto the landing.

  On the wall, Simon Herzog recognizes the strange photographs from Camera Lucida, Barthes’s latest book, which has just come out—among them, the yellowed snapshot of a little girl in a sunroom: his beloved mother.

  Bayard asks Herzog to take a look through the files and the library. Like any book lover entering someone’s home for the first time, even if they’ve not gone there for that reason, Herzog is already curiously examining the books in the library: Proust, Pascal, de Sade, more Chateaubriand, not many contemporary writers, apart from a few works by Sollers, Kristeva, and Robbe-Grillet, and various dictionaries, critical works, Todorov, Genette, and books about linguistics, Saussure, Austin, Searle … There is a sheet of paper in the typewriter on the desk. Simon Herzog reads the title: “We always fail to talk about what we love.” He quickly scans the text—it’s about Stendhal. Simon is moved by the thought of Barthes sitting at this desk, thinking about Stendhal, about love, about Italy, completely unaware that every hour spent typing this article was bringing him closer to the moment when he would be knocked over by a laundry van.

  Next to the typewriter is a copy of Jakobson’s Linguistics and Poetics; inside it, a bookmark that makes Simon Herzog think of a stopped watch found on a victim’s wrist: when Barthes was knocked over by the van, this is what was going through his mind. As it happens, he was rereading the chapter on the functions of language. Barthes’s bookmark was actually a sheet of paper folded in four. Simon Herzog unfolds the sheet: notes scrawled in small, dense handwriting, which he doesn’t even try to decipher. He folds the sheet up without reading it and carefully puts it back in the right place, so that when Barthes comes home he will be able to find his page.

  Close to the edge of the desk are a few opened letters, lots of unopened letters, other pages covered with scribbles in the same dense handwriting, a few copies of the Nouvel Observateur, newspaper articles, and photographs cut from magazines. Cigarette butts are piled up like firewood. Simon Herzog feels overwhelmed by sadness. While Bayard rummages around under the little iron bed, he bends to look through the window. Down on the street, he spots a black DS double-parked and he smiles at the symbolism. The DS was the emblem of Barthes’s Mythologies, and the most famous, the one he chose for the cover of his celebrated collection of articles. He hears a hammering sound from below: the Vinci employee is chiseling a notch in the stone that will house the metal keyboard. The sky has turned white. Above the rooftops, below the horizon, he can make out the trees of the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  Bayard tears him from his reverie by dropping a stack of magazines on the desk. He found them under the bed. They are not back issues of the Nouvel Obs. With a snarl of satisfaction, he says to Simon: “He liked cock, this intellectual!” Spread out before him, Simon Herzog sees magazine covers featuring young, muscular naked men, posing and staring out insolently at him. I’m not sure how widely known Barthes’s homosexuality was at the time. When he wrote his bestseller, A Lover’s Discourse, he took care never to characterize his love object in terms of gender, striving to use neutral formulations such as “the partner” or “the other” (both of which, for what it’s worth, are masculine words in French, meaning that the pronoun is always “he”). Unlike Foucault, whose homosexuality was very open, almost as a form of protest, I know that Barthes was very discreet, perhaps ashamed, in any case very preoccupied with keeping up appearances, until his mother’s death at least. Foucault wanted him to be more open, and despised him a little for his reserve, I think. But I don’t know if there were rumors in university circles or among the wider public, or whether everyone knew. Anyway, if Simon Herzog was aware of Barthes’s homosexuality, he hadn’t thought it necessary to inform Superintendent Bayard at this stage of the inquiry.

  Just as the sniggering policeman is opening the centerfold of a magazine named Gai Pied, the telephone rings. Bayard stops. He puts the magazine on the desk without bothering to close it, and freezes. He looks at Simon Herzog, who looks back at him, while the handsome youth in the photograph grips his cock and looks out at both of them and the telep
hone continues to ring. Bayard lets it ring a few more times and picks up the receiver without a word. Simon watches as he remains silent for several seconds. He also hears the silence on the other end of the line and instinctively stops breathing. When Bayard finally says “Hello” there is an audible click, followed by the “beep-beep” that indicates the call has been ended. Bayard hangs up, puzzled. Simon Herzog asks stupidly: “Wrong number?” In the street, through the open window, they hear a car engine start. Bayard takes the porn magazines and the two men leave the room. Simon Herzog thinks: “I should have closed the window. It’s going to rain.” Jacques Bayard thinks: “Fucking queer intellectual bastards…”

  They ring the bell at the concierge’s office to return the keys, but no one answers. The workman installing the keypad offers to give them back to the concierge when she returns, but Bayard prefers to go back upstairs and hand them to the younger brother.

  When he comes back down, Simon Herzog is smoking a cigarette with the workman, who’s taking a break. Out in the street, Bayard does not get back in the 504. “Where are we going?” Simon Herzog asks him. “To the Café de Flore,” replies Bayard. “Did you notice, the guy installing the keypad?” Simon says. “He had a Slav accent, didn’t he?” Bayard grumbles: “As long as he’s not driving a tank, I couldn’t care less.” As they cross Place Saint-Sulpice, the two men pass a blue Fuego and Bayard says, with the air of an expert: “That’s the new Renault. It’s only just gone on sale.” Simon Herzog thinks automatically that the workers who built this car wouldn’t be able to afford it even if ten of them got together. And, lost in his Marxist thoughts, doesn’t pay attention to the two Japanese men inside the car.

  13

  At the Flore, they see a man squinting through thick glasses, seated next to a little blonde. He looks sickly, and his froglike face is vaguely familiar to Bayard, but he is not the reason they are there. Bayard spots some men in their twenties and goes over to talk to them. Most are gigolos who pick up clients in the area. Do they know Barthes? Yes, all of them. Bayard interrogates them a bit while Simon Herzog observes Sartre out of the corner of his eye: he is definitely not in good shape; he keeps coughing as he smokes his cigarette. Françoise Sagan pats his back solicitously. The last one to have seen Barthes is a young Moroccan: the great critic was negotiating with a new guy, he doesn’t know his name, they left together the other day, he doesn’t know what they did or where they went or where he lives but he knows where they can find him tonight: at the Bains Diderot, a sauna at the Gare de Lyon. “A sauna?” Simon Herzog asks, surprised, when suddenly a scarf-wearing maniac appears and begins yelling at anyone who will listen: “Look at them! Look at their faces! They won’t look like that much longer! Seriously, I’m telling you: a bourgeois must reign or die! Drink! Drink your Fernet to the health of your company! Enjoy it while you can! Drink to your downfall! Long live Bokassa!” A few conversations come to an abrupt halt. The regulars observe this newcomer gloomily, and the tourists try to enjoy the show without really understanding what it’s about, but the waiters ignore it and continue serving. His arm sweeps the room in theatrical outrage and, addressing an imaginary opponent, the scarf-wearing prophet proclaims victoriously: “No need to run, comrade. The old world is ahead of you!”

  Bayard asks who this man is; the gigolo tells him it is Jean-Edern Hallier, some aristocratic writer who is always making a fuss and who reckons he will be a minister if Mitterrand wins next year. Bayard notes the inverted-V mouth, the shining blue eyes, the typical upper-class accent that verges on mispronunciation. He returns to his questioning: What is this new guy like? The young Moroccan describes him as an Arab with a southern accent, a small earring, and hair that falls over his face. Still shouting at the top of his voice, Jean-Edern haphazardly extols the virtues of ecology, euthanasia, independent radio stations, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Simon Herzog watches Sartre watching Jean-Edern. When the aristocrat notices that Sartre is there, he starts to tremble. Sartre stares at him contemplatively. Françoise Sagan whispers into his ear, like a simultaneous translator. Jean-Edern narrows his eyes, which makes him look even more weasel-like under his thick, frizzy hair, is silent for a few seconds, apparently thinking, and then starts shouting again: “Existentialism is a contagion! Long live the third sex! Long live the fourth! Don’t despair, La Coupole!” Bayard explains to Simon Herzog that he must come with him to the Bains Diderot to help him find this unknown gigolo. Jean-Edern Hallier goes over to stand in front of Sartre, holds his arm up in the air, hand flat, clicks his loafers together, and yells: “Heil Althusser!” Simon Herzog protests that his presence is not absolutely essential. Sartre coughs and lights another Gitane. Bayard says, on the contrary, a queer little intellectual will be very useful in locating the suspect. Jean-Edern starts singing obscene lyrics to the tune of “The Internationale.” Simon Herzog says it’s too late to buy a pair of swimming trunks. Bayard laughs and tells him there’s no need. Sartre unfolds Le Monde and starts doing the crossword. (As he is almost blind, it is Françoise Sagan who reads the clues to him.) Jean-Edern spots something in the street and rushes outside, yelling: “Modernity, I shit on you!” It is already seven o’clock, and night has fallen. Superintendent Bayard and Simon Herzog go back to the 504, parked outside Barthes’s apartment block. Bayard yanks three or four parking tickets from under the windshield wiper and they head off toward Place de la République, followed by a black DS and a blue Fuego.

  14

  Jacques Bayard and Simon Herzog walk through sauna steam, little white towels tied around their waists, amid sweaty figures who furtively brush against one another. The superintendent left his card in the changing room, so they are incognito. The aim of the game is not to scare off the gigolo with the earring, if they find him.

  In truth, they make a fairly credible couple: the old, beefy, hairy-chested guy, looking around inquisitively, and the skinny, young, clean-shaven one, who glances at his surroundings surreptitiously. Simon Herzog, looking like a frightened anthropologist, excites some lustful looks—the men who pass him stare for a long time, and circle back toward him—but Bayard gets a fair amount of attention too. Two or three young men shoot him flirtatious glances, and a fat man stares from a distance, fist balled around his penis: apparently the Lino Ventura look has its fans here. If Bayard is angry that this gaggle of queers can take him for one of them, he is professional enough to conceal it, merely adopting a faintly hostile expression intended to discourage approaches.

  The complex is divided into different spaces: the sauna itself, a Turkish bath, a swimming pool, back rooms in various configurations. The fauna is quite varied too: all ages, all sizes, all degrees of corpulence are here. But in terms of what the superintendent and his assistant are searching for, there is a problem: half of the men here are wearing an earring, and for the under-30s the figure reaches almost 100 percent, nearly all of whom are North Africans. Unfortunately, the description of the man’s hair is not much more useful: young men with bangs over their eyes are undetectable in here because it’s a natural reflex to slick back wet hair.

  And so to the final clue: the southern accent. But that requires, at some point, verbal contact.

  In the corner of the sauna, on a tiled bench, two youths are kissing and wanking each other off. Bayard leans over them discreetly to check whether either is wearing an earring. They both are. But if they were gigolos, would they really be wasting their time on each other? It’s possible. Bayard has never worked for the vice squad and is no specialist when it comes to this kind of behavior. He takes Simon on a tour of the premises. It’s difficult to see much: the steam forms a thick fog, and some men are hidden away in back rooms where they can be observed only through barred windows. They pass an apparently half-witted Arab who tries to touch everyone’s dicks, two Japanese men, two guys with mustaches and greasy hair, fat tattooed men, lascivious old men, velvet-eyed young men. The sauna’s clients wear their towels around their waists or over their shoulders; everyone in th
e pool is naked; some have hard-ons, others don’t. Here, too, all sizes and shapes are on display. Bayard tries to spot earring wearers and, when he’s found four or five, he points one out to Simon and orders him to go and talk to the man.