The Seventh Function of Language

He feels someone moving his body. It is Anastasia, turning him onto his back and examining him. Simon sees her beautiful Slavic face against the dazzlingly blue Bologna sky. She asks him if he’s injured but he is incapable of responding because he has no idea and because the words remain trapped in his throat. Anastasia takes his head in her hands and tells him (her accent returning): “Look at me. There’s nothing wrrrong with you. Everrrything’s fine.” Simon manages to sit up.

The entire left-hand side of the station has been pulverized. All that remains of the waiting room is a heap of stones and beams. A long, formless groan rises from the bowels of the devastated building, its twisted skeleton visible where the roof has been blown away.

Simon glimpses Bianca’s body close to the flower bed. He crawls over to her and lifts up her head. She is groggy but alive. She coughs. She has a gash on her forehead and blood is streaming down her face. She whispers: “Cosa è successo?” In a reassuring reflex, her hand fumbles in the little handbag that still hangs from her shoulder and lies on her bloodstained dress. She takes out a cigarette and asks Simon: “Accendimela, per favore.”

And Bayard? Simon searches for him among the wounded, the terrified survivors, the policemen arriving in Fiats, and the medics jumping out of the first ambulances like parachutists. But in this confused ballet of hysterical marionettes, he can no longer recognize anyone.

And then, suddenly, he sees him, Bayard, the French cop, emerging from the rubble, covered in dust, looking massive and powerful and giving off a slow-burning, righteous anger, carrying an unconscious young man on his back. Amid the scene of warlike chaos, this ghostly apparition leaves a deep mark on Simon, who thinks of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables.

Bianca whispers: “Sono sicura che si tratta di Gladio…”

Simon spots a shape like a dead animal on the ground, and realizes it is a human leg.

“Between the desiring machines and the body without organs, an apparent conflict arises.”

Simon shakes his head. He contemplates the first bodies being evacuated on stretchers, alive and dead alike, all lying still with their arms hanging down and dragging along the ground.

“Each machine connection, each machine production, each machine noise has become unbearable to the body without organs.”

He turns to Anastasia and finally thinks to ask her the question that he imagines will answer many others: “Who do you work for?”

Anastasia spends a few seconds thinking about this, then replies, in a professional tone he has never heard her use before: “Not for the Bulgarians.”

And, despite the fact that she is a nurse, she slips away, without offering to help the paramedics or look after the wounded. She runs toward the ring road, crosses, and disappears under the arcades.

At that very moment, Bayard reaches Simon, as if the whole thing had been meticulously choreographed, like a play, thinks Simon, whose paranoia has not exactly been eased by the combination of the bomb and the joints.

Holding up the two tickets to Milan, Bayard says: “We’ll rent a car. I don’t think there’ll be any trains today.”

Simon borrows Bianca’s cigarette and lifts it to his own lips. Around him, everything is chaos. He closes his eyes and inhales the smoke. The presence of Bianca, stretched out on the pavement, reminds him of the dissecting table, the flayed men, Antonioni’s finger, and Deleuze. A smell of burning floats in the air.

“Beneath its organs, it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it.”

PART III

ITHACA

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