The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  “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 plu
nging 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 show
ed 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.