The Seventh Function of Language
Page 36
“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.
ALSO BY LAURENT BINET
HHhH
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurent Binet was born in Paris, France, in 1972. His first novel, HHhH, was named a notable book of 2012 by The New York Times and received the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. He is a professor at the University of Paris III, where he lectures on French literature. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Sam Taylor has written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, Vogue, and Esquire, and has translated such works as Laurent Binet’s HHhH and the international bestseller The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, by Joël Dicker. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Part I: Paris
Part II: Bologna
Part III: Ithaca
Part IV: Venice
Part V: Paris
Epilogue: Naples
Also by Laurent Binet
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle
Translation copyright © 2017 by Sam Taylor
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2015 by Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, France, as La septième fonction du langage
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Binet, Laurent, author. | Taylor, Sam, 1970– translator.
Title: The seventh function of language / Laurent Binet; translated from the French by Sam Taylor.
Other titles: Septième fonction du langage. English
Description: First American edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016050811 | ISBN 9780374261566 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780374715083 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Barthes, Roland—Death and burial—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ2702.I57 S4713 2017 | DDC 843/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050811
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.