The Seventh Function of Language

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 plunging 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.