The Seventh Function of Language

Nestled in their cul-de-sac, Simon and Searle see a young woman in boots and a man with a bull-like body pass them in the direction of the photocopier. Searle puts the paper knife in his pocket, Simon lowers his Claude Simon, and, moved by the same sense of curiosity, the two men observe the couple through the complete works of Nathalie Sarraute. They hear the photocopier’s hum and see its blue light, but soon the bull-man wraps himself around the young woman as she leans against the machine. She lets loose an imperceptible sigh and, without looking at him, puts her hand on his crotch. (Simon thinks of Othello’s handkerchief.) Her skin is very white and her fingers are very long. The bull-man unbuttons her dress and it falls to her feet. She is not wearing any undergarments, and her body is like a Raphael painting: her breasts are heavy, her waist slender, her hips wide, her shoulders sturdy, and her pussy shaved. Her black, square-cut hair gives her triangular face the look of a Carthaginian princess. Searle and Simon stare wide-eyed as she kneels down to take the bull-man’s cock in her mouth. They want to see if the man’s cock is bull-sized too. Simon puts down The Flanders Road. The bull picks up and flips over the young woman and thrusts inside her as she rears back, pulling apart her buttocks with her own hands as he holds her in place by the scruff of her neck. He does what it is in a bull’s nature to do: he charges into her, first slowly and heavily, then with a growing ferocity, and they hear the photocopier banging against the wall until it is lifted from the floor and the girl emits a long yowl that echoes through the aisles of what they think is the deserted library.

Simon cannot tear his eyes from this Jupiterian coupling, and yet he must. But he has qualms about interrupting such a magnificent fucking session. With a violent effort of will, his sense of self-preservation forces him to knock all the Duras books from the shelf in front of him. They tumble to the floor with a noise that immobilizes everyone in the room. The carnal moans cease instantly. Simon looks Searle straight in the eye. He slowly walks around him, and the philosopher does not move a muscle. When he emerges into the central aisle, he turns toward the photocopier. The bull-man glares at him, prick in the air. The young woman carefully picks up her dress, while staring defiantly at Simon, and puts it over one leg, then the other, then turns her back to the bull-man so he can zip her up. Simon realizes that she never took her boots off. He flees down the emergency staircase.

Outside, on the campus lawn, he spots Kristeva’s young friends, who to judge from the empty bottles and chip bags strewn over the grass around them have not moved in the past three days. At their invitation, he sits down with them, helps himself to a beer, and gratefully accepts the joint they hand him. Simon knows that he is out of danger (if there ever was any danger—is he sure he saw that paper knife?) but the fear in his chest has not subsided. There is something else.

In Bologna, he had sex with Bianca in a seventeenth-century amphitheater and narrowly escaped death in the bombed train station. Here, he has almost been stabbed in a library at night by a linguistics philosopher and has witnessed a decidedly mythological doggy-style sex scene on a photocopier. He met Giscard in the Élysée Palace, bumped into Foucault in a gay sauna, took part in a car chase that ended with an attempt on his life, saw a man kill another man with a poisoned umbrella, discovered a secret society where people had their fingers cut off if they lost a debate, and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a mysterious document. In the course of a few months he has lived through more extraordinary events than he expected to witness in his entire lifetime … Simon knows how to spot the novelistic when he sees it. He thinks again about Umberto Eco’s supernumeraries. He takes a drag on the joint.

“What’s up, man?”