The Seventh Function of Language

Bayard feels an urge to throw himself at her and tear the document from her hands, but Simon holds him back. She turns toward them and narrows her eyes, as though she has only just noticed their presence, as though she has only just learned of their existence, and glares at them with hatred, a cold look that petrifies Bayard, while she unfolds the page.

It is too dark to see what is written on it, but Simon thinks he can make out a few cramped letters. And there is definitely writing on both sides.

Slowly, calmly, Kristeva starts to rip it up.

As she does this, the increasingly small scraps fly off over the canal.

In the end, nothing remains but the black wind and the delicate sound of rain.

93

“But in your opinion, did she know or didn’t she?”

Bayard tries to understand.

Simon is perplexed.

It seems possible that Sollers failed to realize that the seventh function didn’t work. But Kristeva?

“Difficult to say. I’d have had to read the document.”

Why would she have betrayed her husband? And, from another perspective, why not use the function herself to compete?

Bayard says to Simon: “Maybe she was like us. Maybe she wanted to see if it worked before she tried it?”

Simon watches the crowd of tourists leaving Venice as if in slow motion. Bayard and he are waiting for the vaporetto with their little suitcases and, as Carnival is coming to an end, the line is long, with hordes of tourists heading to the train station and the airport. A vaporetto arrives, but it’s not the right one; they must wait a little longer.

Simon is pensive, and asks Bayard: “What is reality, for you?”

As Bayard obviously has no idea what he’s talking about, Simon tries to be more specific: “How do you know that you’re not in a novel? How do you know you are not living inside a work of fiction? How do you know that you’re real?”

Bayard looks at Simon with genuine curiosity and replies indulgently: “Are you stupid or what? Reality is what we live, that’s all.”

Their vaporetto arrives, and as it draws alongside, Bayard pats Simon’s shoulder: “Don’t ask yourself so many questions, son.”

The vessel is boarded in a disorderly scramble, the vaporetto guys herding the stupid tourists who climb on board so clumsily, with their bags and their children.

When it is Simon’s turn to get in the boat, the head-count man brings down a metal barrier just behind his back. Stuck on the dock, Bayard tries to protest, but the Italian replies indifferently: “Tutto esaurito.”

Bayard tells Simon to wait for him at the next stop. Simon waves goodbye, as a joke.

The vaporetto moves away. Bayard lights a cigarette. Behind him, he hears raised voices. He turns around and sees two Japanese men yelling at each other. Intrigued, he goes over to them. One of the Japanese men says to him, in French: “Your friend has just been abducted.”

It takes Bayard a second or two to process this information.

A second or two, no more, then he switches into cop mode and asks the only question a cop must ask: “Why?”

The second Japanese man says: “Because he won, the day before yesterday.”

The Italian he beat is a very powerful Neapolitan politician, and he did not take defeat well. Bayard knows about the assault after the party at the Ca’ Rezzonico. The Japanese men explain: the Neapolitan sent some henchmen to beat Simon up so he couldn’t compete, because he was afraid of him. Now that he has lost the duel, he wants vengeance.

Bayard watches the vanishing vaporetto. He quickly analyzes the situation, then looks around: he sees the bronze statue of a sort of general with a thick mustache, he sees the façade of the Hotel Danieli, he sees boats moored at the dock. He sees a gondolier on his gondola, waiting for the tourists.

He jumps in the gondola, along with the Japanese men. The gondolier does not seem overly surprised and welcomes them by singing to himself in Italian, but Bayard tells him:

“Follow that vaporetto!”

The gondolier pretends not to understand, so Bayard takes out a wad of lire and the gondolier starts to scull.

The vaporetto is a good three hundred yards ahead, and in 1981 there are no mobile phones.

The gondolier is surprised. It’s strange, he says: that vaporetto is not going the right way. It’s headed toward the island of Murano.

The vaporetto has been hijacked.

On board, Simon has not realized what is happening, since almost all the passengers are tourists with no idea where they should be going, and apart from two or three Italians who protest to the driver, no one notices that they are headed the wrong way. Besides, Italians complaining loudly is nothing new; the passengers simply think it is part of the local color. The vaporetto docks at Murano.

In the distance, Bayard’s gondola is attempting to catch up. Bayard and the Japanese men exhort the gondolier to go faster, and they yell Simon’s name to warn him, but they are too far away and Simon has no reason to pay them any attention.