The Seventh Function of Language

The atmosphere is not particularly conducive to paranoia, however. People unwrap little cakes stuffed with bacon and pesto, or nibble on artichokes. Everyone smokes, of course. Simon does not spot the young conspirators in the little courtyard exchange a packet under the table. Bayard orders another glass of wine. Soon, one of the students at the back of the room walks over to offer them a glass of Prosecco and a slice of apple cake. His name is Enzo, he is extremely talkative, and he, too, speaks French. He invites them to join his friends, who are arguing joyfully about politics, to judge by the yells of “fascisti,” “communisti,” “coalizione,” “combinazione,” and “corruzione.” Simon asks about the meaning of pitchi, which keeps cropping up in their conversation. A short, olive-skinned brunette stops mid-sentence to explain to them in French that this is how “PC”—the initials of the Communist Party—is pronounced in Italian. She tells him that all the political parties are corrupt, even the Communists, who are notabili ready to play along with the bosses and cut deals with the Christian Democrats. Thankfully, the Red Brigades overturned the compromesso storico by kidnapping Aldo Moro. Fair enough, they killed him, but that’s the fault of the pope and that porco Andreotti, who refused to negotiate.

Luciano, who heard her talking to the Frenchmen, waves his arms and shouts over to her: “Ma, che dici! Le Brigate Rosse sono degli assassini! They killed him and they tossed him in the boot of the macchina, like un cane!”

The girl swivels to face him: “Il cane sei tu! They’re at war. They wanted to swap him for their comrades, political prisoners. They waited fifty-five days for the government to agree to talk with them, nearly two whole months! The government refused. Not a single prisoner, Andreotti said! Moro begged them: my friends, save me, I’m innocent, you must negoziare! And all his friends, they said: that’s not him, he’s been drugged, he’s been coerced, he’s changed! That’s not the Aldo I knew, they said, ’sti figli di putana!”

And she pretends to spit before downing the contents of her glass, then she turns back to Simon with a smile, while Luciano returns to his tarocchino, mumbling incomprehensibly.

Her name is Bianca. She has very dark eyes and very white teeth. She is Neapolitan. She is studying political science. She would like to be a journalist, but not for the bourgeois press. Simon nods and smiles idiotically. He gets a few brownie points when he says he’s working on his thesis at Vincennes. Bianca claps her hands: three years ago, a huge conference took place here, in Bologna, with the great French intellectuals, Guattari, Sartre, and that young guy in a white shirt, Lévy … She interviewed Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir for Lotta Continua. Sartre said, she recites from memory, one finger in the air: “I cannot accept that a young activist could be murdered in the streets of a city governed by the Communist Party.” And, fellow traveler that he was, he declared: “I am on the side of the young activist.” It was magnifico! She remembers that Guattari was welcomed like a rock star; in the streets, it was madness, you’d have thought he was John Lennon. One day, he took part in a protest march, he met Bernard-Henri Lévy, so he made him leave the procession, because the students were really excited and ’cause the philosopher in the camicia bianca, he was going to get beaten up. Bianca bursts out laughing and pours herself more Prosecco.

But Enzo, who is chatting with Bayard, gets involved in the conversation: “The Brigate Rosse? Ma, left-wing terrorists … they’re still terrorists, no?”

Bianca flares up again: “Ma che terroristi? Activists who use violence as a means of action, ecco!”

Enzo laughs bitterly: “Si, and Moro was a capitalist lacchè, io so. He was just a strumento in a suit and tie in the hands of Agnelli and the Americans. Ma, behind the tie, there was an uomo. Ah, if he hadn’t written those letters, to his wife, to his grandson … we’d only have seen the strumento, probably, and not the uomo. That’s why his friends panicked: they can say that he wrote those words under coercion, but everyone knows that’s not true: they weren’t dictated by a carceriere, they came from the bottom of the heart of a pover’uomo who was going to die. And you’re agreeing with his friends who abandoned him: you want to forget his letters so you can forget that your Red Brigade friends killed a vecchietto who loved his grandson. Va bene!”