Bianca explains to Simon that the Communist Party is very strong in Italy: it has 500,000 members and, unlike in France, it did not hand over its weapons in ’44, hence the phenomenal number of German P38s in circulation in the country. And Bologna the Red is a bit like the Italian Communist Party’s shop window, with its Communist mayor who works for Amendola, the current administration’s representative. “The right wing,” says Bianca, wrinkling her nose in contempt. “That historic compromise bullshit, that’s him.” Bayard sees Simon hanging on her every word, and raises his glass of red toward him: “So, lefty, you like Bologna, eh? Isn’t this better than your dump in Vincennes?” Bianca repeats, eyes shining: “Vincennes … Deleuze!” Bayard asks the waiter, Stefano, if he knows Umberto Eco.
Just then, a hippie in sandals enters, walks straight over to the bearded guy, and taps him on the shoulder. The bearded guy turns around. The hippie solemnly unzips his trousers and pisses on him. The bearded guy reels back, horrified, and everyone starts yelling. There is general confusion, and the hippie is ushered toward the exit by the boss’s son. People crowd around the bearded guy, who moans: “Ma io non parlo mai di politica!” The hippie, before leaving, shouts at him: “Appunto!”
Stefano comes back behind the counter and points out the bearded man to Bayard: “That’s Umberto.”
The man with the bag leaves, forgetting it on the floor by the bar, but thankfully the other customers catch him and hand it back. The man, embarrassed, apologizes strangely, says thank you, then disappears into the night.
Bayard approaches the bearded man, who is symbolically wiping his trousers, because the piss has already soaked into the cloth, and takes out his card: “Monsieur Eco? French police.” Eco becomes agitated: “Police? Ma, you should have arrested the hippie, then!” Then, considering the clientele of left-wing students that fill the Drogheria, he decides not to pursue this line of attack. Bayard explains why he is here: Barthes asked a young man to contact him if anything happened, but the young man died, with Eco’s name on his lips. Eco seems sincerely surprised. “I knew Roland well, but we weren’t close friends. It’s a terrible tragedy, of course, ma it was an accident, no?”
Bayard realizes he is going to have to be patient again, so he finishes his drink, lights a cigarette, looks at the man in gloves waving his arms around as he talks about materialismo storico. Enzo is hitting on the young student while playing with her hair, Simon and Bianca are toasting “desiring autonomy,” and Bayard says: “Think about it. There must be a reason why Barthes expressly asked him to contact you.”
He then listens to Eco failing to answer his question: “Roland’s great semiological lesson that has stayed with me is pointing to any event in the universe and explaining that it signifies something. He always repeated that the semiologist, walking in the street, detects meaning where others see events. He knew that we say something in the way that we dress, hold our glass, walk … You, for example, I can tell that you fought in the Algerian War and…”
“All right! I know how it works,” grumbles Bayard.
“Ah? Bene. And, at the same time, what he loved in literature is that one is not obliged to settle on a particular meaning, ma one can play with the meaning. Capisce? It’s geniale. That’s why he was so fond of Japan: at last, a world where he didn’t know any of the codes. No possibility of cheating, but no ideological or political issues, just aesthetic ones, or maybe anthropological. But perhaps not even anthropological. The pleasure of interpretation, pure, open, free of referents. He said to me: ‘Above all, Umberto, we must kill the referent!’ Ha ha! Ma attenzione, that doesn’t mean that the signified does not exist, eh! The signified is in everything. [He takes a swig of white wine.] Everything. But that does not mean either that there is an infinity of interpretations. It’s the Kabbalists who think like that! There are two currents: the Kabbalists, who think the Torah can be interpreted in every possible way to produce new things, and Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine knew that the text of the Bible was a foresta infinita di sensi—‘infinita sensuum silva,’ as Saint Jerome said—but that it could always be submitted to a rule of falsification, in order to exclude what the context made it impossible to read, no matter what hermeneutic violence it was subjected to. You see? It is impossible to say if one interpretation is valid, or if it is the best one, but it is possible to say if the text refuses an interpretation incompatible with its own contextuality. In other words, you can’t just say whatever you want about it. Insomma, Barthes was an Augustinian, not a Kabbalist.”
And while Eco drones on at him, in the hubbub of conversations and the clinking of glasses, amid the bottles arranged on the shelves, while the students’ young, supple, firm bodies exude their belief in the future, Bayard watches the man in gloves haranguing his listeners about some unknown subject. And he wonders why a man would wear gloves in eighty-five-degree heat.
The professor to whom Eco was telling jokes cuts in, in accentless French: “The problem, and you know this, Umberto, is that Barthes did not study signs, in the Saussurian sense, but symbols, at a push, and mostly clues. Interpreting a clue is not unique to semiology, it is the vocation of all science: physics, chemistry, anthropology, geography, economics, philology … Barthes was not a semiologist, Umberto, he didn’t understand what semiology was, because he didn’t understand the specificity of the sign, which, unlike the clue (which is merely a fortuitous trace picked up by a receiver), must be deliberately sent by a sender. Fair enough, he was quite an inspired generalist, but at the end of the day he was just an old-fashioned critic, exactly like Picard and the others he was fighting against.”
“Ma no, you’re wrong, Georges. The interpretation of clues is not all science, but the semiological moment of all science and the essence of semiology itself. Roland’s Mythologies were brilliant semiological analyses because daily life is subject to a continual bombardment of messages that do not always manifest a direct intentionality but, due to their ideological finality, mostly tend to be presented under an apparent ‘naturalness’ of the real.”
“Oh, really? I don’t see why you insist on labeling as semiology what is ultimately just a general epistemiology.”
“Ma, that’s exactly it. Semiology offers instruments to recognize what science does, which is, first and foremost, learning to see the world as a collection of signifying events.”
“In that case, you might as well come out and say that semiology is the mother of all sciences!”
Umberto spreads out his hands, palms open, and a broad smile splits his beard: “Ecco!”
There is the pop, pop, pop of bottles being uncorked. Simon gallantly lights Bianca’s cigarette. Enzo tries to kiss his young student, who shies away, laughing. Stefano fills everyone’s glasses.
Bayard sees the man in gloves put down his glass without finishing it and disappear into the street. The store is arranged in such a way, with a closed counter denying access to the whole back half of the room, that Bayard deduces there is no customer toilet. So, by the look of things, the man in gloves does not want to do what the hippie did, and has gone outside to piss. Bayard has a few seconds to come to a decision. He grabs a coffee spoon from the counter and walks after him.
He has not gone very far: there is no lack of dark alleyways in this part of town. He is facing the wall, in the midst of relieving himself, when Bayard grabs him by the hair, yanks him backward, and pins him to the ground, yelling into his face: “You keep your gloves on to piss? What’s up, don’t like getting your hands dirty?” The man is of average build, but he is too stupefied to fight back or even cry out, so he simply stares wide-eyed in terror at his assailant. Bayard immobilizes him by pressing his knee into the man’s chest and grabs his hands. Feeling something soft under the leather of the left-hand glove, he tears it off and discovers two missing phalanges, on the pinkie and ring fingers.
“So … you like cutting wood, too, huh?”
He crushes his head against the damp cobblestones.
“Where is the meeting?”