The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  Fabius waits, Barthes waits, everyone waits. Mitterrand is used to people waiting for him; he takes his time before continuing: “But not just rhetoric—rhetoric and a half. The rhetoric of the technocrat is already worn out. Yesterday it was precious. Now it’s ridiculous. Who said recently: ‘I am suffering with my balance of payments’?”

  Jack Lang comes back to sit down, and asks: “Wasn’t it Rocard?”

  Mitterrand lets his irritation show again: “No, it was Giscard.” He glares at the bespectacled young man who ruined his punch line, then goes on regardless: “One wants to palpate him like a doctor. Suffering with a headache? Suffering with heartburn, backache, stomachache? Everyone knows how those things feel. But suffering with his balance of payments? Where is that, between the sixth and seventh ribs? Some unknown gland? One of those little bones in the coccyx? Giscard isn’t over the line yet.”

  The guests no longer know if they should laugh or not. In doubt, they hold off.

  Mitterrand goes on, staring out the window: “He has common sense and he’s a reasonable technician. He knows and feels politics like no one else.”

  Barthes understands the compliment’s ambiguity: for someone like Mitterrand, it is obviously the highest praise, but—via a schizophrenia inherent in politics, making use of a very rich polysemy—the term “politics” also suggests something disparaging, even insulting, in his mouth.

  Mitterrand is unstoppable now: “But his generation is being wiped out along with economism. Margot, who dried his eyes, is starting to get bored.”

  Barthes wonders if Mitterrand might be drunk.

  Fabius, who seems increasingly amused, tells his boss: “Watch out. He’s still moving, and he knows how to aim straight. Remember his jibe: ‘You do not have a monopoly on the heart.’”

  The guests stop breathing.

  Unexpectedly, Mitterrand’s response is almost composed: “And I don’t claim to! My opinions concern the public man. I reserve judgment on the private man, whom I don’t know.” Having made this necessary concession and thus demonstrated his spirit of fair play, he is able to conclude: “But we were talking about technique, weren’t we? And it has become so important to him that he is no longer capable of the unexpected. The difficult moment in life—his, yours, mine, the life of anyone ambitious—is when you see the writing on the wall telling you that you are starting to repeat yourself.”

  Hearing this, Barthes plunges his nose into his glass. He feels nervous laughter welling up inside him, but he contains it by reciting this saying to himself: “Every man laughs for himself.”

  Reflexivity. Always reflexivity.

  PART II

  BOLOGNA

  47

  4:16 p.m.

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

  “Is that it? Where are we?”

  “Show me the map.”

  “But you’ve got it!”

  “No, I gave it back to you!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Luciano crumples to the floor, groaning.

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

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

  7:42 p.m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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