Kristeva asks for the latest on Louis. Sollers replies that the dogs are standing guard but that Bernard was able to see him. “In a total daze. Apparently, when they found him, he kept repeating: ‘I killed Hélène. What happens next?’ Can you imagine? What … happens … next? Extraordinary, isn’t it?” Sollers savors the anecdote greedily. Kristeva brings him back to more practical concerns. Sollers tries to reassure her: the chaos of the apartment means that if the copy wasn’t destroyed, it has at least been lost forever. At worst, it will end up in a cardboard box and some Chinese people will find it, two hundred years from now, with no idea what it is, and they’ll use it to light their opium pipe.
“Your father was wrong. No copy, next time.”
“There were no consequences, and there won’t be a next time.”
“There is always a next time, my squirrel.”
Kristeva thinks about Barthes. Sollers says: “I knew him better than anyone.”
Kristeva replies coldly: “But I killed him.”
Sollers quotes Empedocles: “The blood around the heart is men’s thought.” But as he is unable to last more than a few seconds without bringing the conversation back to himself, he grits his teeth and whispers: “His death will not be in vain. I will be what I will be.”
Then he takes up his monologue again, as if nothing happened: “Of course the message has no importance anymore … ah, ah, this little affair is far from clear, oh, oh … the public, by definition, has no memory it is blank it is virgin forest … You and I, we are like fish in air … What does it matter if Debord is wrong about me, even going so far as to compare me with Cocteau?… Who are we, to begin with, and in the end?”
Kristeva sighs. She leads him toward the chess players.
Sollers is like a child—his short-term memory lasts only three minutes—so he becomes absorbed in a game between an old man and a young man, both wearing baseball caps with logos featuring a team from New York. While the young guy launches an attack clearly designed to neuter his opponent’s ability to castle, the writer whispers into his wife’s ear: “Look at that old guy, he’s as cunning as a fox, ha ha. But if they look for me, they will find me, ha ha.”
They hear the poc-poc of tennis balls on nearby courts.
It is Kristeva’s turn to drag her husband by the sleeve because it is nearly time.
They walk through a forest of swings and arrive at a little puppet theater. They sit on wooden benches, surrounded by children.
The man who sits just behind them is badly dressed and has a mustache.
He pulls at his crumpled jacket.
He traps his umbrella between his legs.
He lights a cigarette.
He leans toward Kristeva and whispers something in her ear.
Sollers turns and exclaims joyfully: “Hello there, Sergei!” Kristeva corrects him curtly: “His name is Nikolai.” Sollers takes a cigarette from a blue tortoiseshell case and asks the Bulgarian for a light. The child sitting next to him watches curiously. Sollers sticks out his tongue. The curtain opens, and the puppet Guignol appears. “Hello, children!” “Hello, Guignol!” Nikolai explains to Kristeva, in Bulgarian, that he has been tailing Hamed’s friend. He searched his house (without making a mess, this time) and he is absolutely certain: there is no copy. But there is something odd: for some time now, he’s been spending his days at the library.
As Sollers does not speak Bulgarian, he watches the play while he waits for them. The conflict is between Guignol and two others: an unshaven burglar, and a gendarme who rolls his r’s like Sergei. The story revolves around a simple dispute that is the pretext for multiple action scenes involving violence perpetrated with a stick. Essentially, Guignol must recover the Marquise’s necklace, stolen by the thief. Sollers immediately suspects the Marquise of having given it to the thief of her own free will in exchange for sexual favors.
Kristeva asks what kind of books Slimane has been reading.
Guignol asks the children if the thief went thataway.
Nikolai replies that most of the books he saw Slimane consulting were about linguistics and philosophy, but that, in his opinion, the gigolo is not really sure what he is looking for.
The children cry out: “Yeeeeeesssss!”
Kristeva thinks the main point is that he is looking for something. When she tries to repeat this to Sollers, he cries out: “Yeeeesss!”
Nikolai specifies: mostly Anglophone authors. Chomsky, Austin, Searle, and also a Russian, Jakobson, two Germans, Bühler and Popper, and one Frenchman, Benveniste.
The list speaks for itself as far as Kristeva is concerned.
The thief asks the children to betray Guignol.
The children shout: “Nooooooo!” Sollers, facetiously, says “Yeeesss!” but his answer is drowned out by the children’s cries.
Nikolai becomes even more specific: Slimane only leafed through some of the books, but he read Austin with particular care.
Kristeva deduces from this that he is seeking to contact Searle.
The thief sneaks up behind Guignol, armed with a stick. The children try to warn Guignol: “Watch out! Watch out!” But each time Guignol turns around, the thief hides. Guignol asks the children if the thief is nearby. The children try to tell him, but he acts like he’s deaf, pretending not to understand, which makes them hysterical. They scream, and Sollers screams with them: “Behind you! Behind you!”
Guignol is hit by the stick. Anxious silence in the theater. He looks as if he’s been knocked out, but in fact he’s just pretending. Phew.
Kristeva thinks.
A cunning trick allows Guignol to knock out the thief. For good measure, he rains blows on him with the stick. (In the real world, thinks Nikolai, no one would survive head trauma like that.)
The gendarme arrests the thief and congratulates Guignol.
The children clap until their hands are sore. In the end, we don’t know if Guignol has handed over the necklace or kept it for himself.
Kristeva puts a hand on her husband’s shoulder and shouts into his ear: “I have to go to the USA.”
Guignol waves: “Goodbye, children!”
The children and Sollers: “Goodbye, Guignol!”
The gendarme: “Goodbye, childrrren!”
Sollers, turning around: “Bye, Sergei.”
Nikolai: “Goodbye, Monsieur Krrristeva.”
Kristeva to Sollers: “I’m going to Ithaca.”
53
Slimane also wakes up in a bed that is not his own, but other than him the bed is empty, containing only the outline of a body, as if drawn in chalk on the still-warm sheets. Rather than a bed, he is lying on a mattress placed on the floor in a dark, windowless, almost completely bare room. From the other side of the door, he can hear men’s voices mixed with the sound of classical music. He remembers exactly where he is and he knows that music. (It’s Mahler.) He opens the door and, without bothering to get dressed, goes into the living room.
It is a very long and narrow room, with a long bay window overlooking Paris (toward Boulogne and Saint-Cloud). We are on the ninth floor. Around a low table, Michel Foucault, wrapped in a black kimono, is explaining the mysteries of elephant sexuality to two young men in underpants, one of whom has his portrait reproduced in three photographs hung on a pillar next to the sofa.
Or more exactly, Slimane thinks he understands, how elephant sexuality was perceived and described in seventeenth-century France.