Then, contemptuously ignoring the tumult in the lecture hall, he stands up and leaves.
But while the audience starts to scatter, Bayard spots Slimane walking after the philosopher. “Herzog, look! Seems like the Arab has some questions about the perlocutionary function…” Simon mechanically notes the latent racism and anti-intellectualism. But it has to be said, behind the petit-bourgeois reactionary sarcasm of Bayard’s question, the cop does have a point: What exactly does Slimane want with Searle?
71
“‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”
[Dead Sea Scrolls, the second century B.C., the oldest occurrence of the performative function yet found in the Judeo-Christian world.]
72
Even as he presses the elevator button, Simon knows he is about to go up to heaven. The doors open at the floor for Romance Studies and Simon enters a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lit by dull, flickering neon lamps. The sun never sets on Cornell’s library, open twenty-four hours a day.
All the books Simon could desire are there, and all the others, too. He is like a kid in a candy store, and all he has to do if he wants to fill his pockets is complete a form. Simon’s fingertips brush the books’ spines as if he were caressing ears of wheat in a field that was about to become his property. This, he thinks, is true communism: what’s yours is mine, and vice versa.
At this hour of the night, however, the library is in all likelihood deserted.
Simon strides along the Structuralism aisle. Look—a book about Japan by Lévi-Strauss?
He stops at the Surrealism aisle and thrills at the sight of such wonders: Connaissance de la Mort by Roger Vitrac … Dark Spring by Unica Zürn … La Papesse du Diable, attributed to Desnos … rare books by Crevel in French and English … unpublished works by Annie Le Brun and Radovan Ivsic …
A creak. Simon freezes. The sound of footsteps. Instinctively—because he feels as if his presence in the middle of the night in a university library must be, if not illegal, at least, as the Americans say, inappropriate—he hides behind the volumes on sex on the Surrealist Studies bookshelf.
He sees Searle walk past Tzara’s collected letters.
He hears him talking to someone in an adjacent aisle. Simon delicately withdraws the folder containing twelve photocopied issues of Révolution Surréaliste to get a better view and, through the crack, recognizes Slimane’s slender figure.
Searle is whispering too quietly, but Simon distinctly hears Slimane tell him: “You’ve got twenty-four hours. After that, I sell to the highest bidder.” Then he puts his Walkman back on and returns toward the elevator.
But Searle does not walk back with him. He leafs distractedly through a few books. Who can say what he’s thinking? Simon has a feeling of déjà-vu, but he drives it from his mind.
Trying to put Révolution Surréaliste back in its place, Simon accidentally knocks a copy of Grand Jeu to the floor. Searle pricks up his ears, like a pointer. Simon decides to slip away as discreetly as possible, and silently zigzags through the bookshelves as he hears the philosopher of language behind him picking Grand Jeu off the floor. He imagines him sniffing the magazine. Hearing footsteps, he quickens his pace. He crosses the Psychoanalysis aisle and enters the Nouveau Roman aisle, but this is a dead end. He turns around and jumps when he sees Searle moving toward him, a paper knife in one hand, Grand Jeu in the other. Automatically, he grabs a book to defend himself (The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein: he’s not going to get far with that, he thinks, tossing it on the floor and grabbing another, The Flanders Road: yes, that’s better); Searle does not raise his arm in a Psycho fashion, but Simon feels certain that he is going to have to protect his vital organs from the blade, when he hears the doors of the elevator open.
Nestled in their cul-de-sac, Simon and Searle see a young woman in boots and a man with a bull-like body pass them in the direction of the photocopier. Searle puts the paper knife in his pocket, Simon lowers his Claude Simon, and, moved by the same sense of curiosity, the two men observe the couple through the complete works of Nathalie Sarraute. They hear the photocopier’s hum and see its blue light, but soon the bull-man wraps himself around the young woman as she leans against the machine. She lets loose an imperceptible sigh and, without looking at him, puts her hand on his crotch. (Simon thinks of Othello’s handkerchief.) Her skin is very white and her fingers are very long. The bull-man unbuttons her dress and it falls to her feet. She is not wearing any undergarments, and her body is like a Raphael painting: her breasts are heavy, her waist slender, her hips wide, her shoulders sturdy, and her pussy shaved. Her black, square-cut hair gives her triangular face the look of a Carthaginian princess. Searle and Simon stare wide-eyed as she kneels down to take the bull-man’s cock in her mouth. They want to see if the man’s cock is bull-sized too. Simon puts down The Flanders Road. The bull picks up and flips over the young woman and thrusts inside her as she rears back, pulling apart her buttocks with her own hands as he holds her in place by the scruff of her neck. He does what it is in a bull’s nature to do: he charges into her, first slowly and heavily, then with a growing ferocity, and they hear the photocopier banging against the wall until it is lifted from the floor and the girl emits a long yowl that echoes through the aisles of what they think is the deserted library.
Simon cannot tear his eyes from this Jupiterian coupling, and yet he must. But he has qualms about interrupting such a magnificent fucking session. With a violent effort of will, his sense of self-preservation forces him to knock all the Duras books from the shelf in front of him. They tumble to the floor with a noise that immobilizes everyone in the room. The carnal moans cease instantly. Simon looks Searle straight in the eye. He slowly walks around him, and the philosopher does not move a muscle. When he emerges into the central aisle, he turns toward the photocopier. The bull-man glares at him, prick in the air. The young woman carefully picks up her dress, while staring defiantly at Simon, and puts it over one leg, then the other, then turns her back to the bull-man so he can zip her up. Simon realizes that she never took her boots off. He flees down the emergency staircase.
Outside, on the campus lawn, he spots Kristeva’s young friends, who to judge from the empty bottles and chip bags strewn over the grass around them have not moved in the past three days. At their invitation, he sits down with them, helps himself to a beer, and gratefully accepts the joint they hand him. Simon knows that he is out of danger (if there ever was any danger—is he sure he saw that paper knife?) but the fear in his chest has not subsided. There is something else.
In Bologna, he had sex with Bianca in a seventeenth-century amphitheater and narrowly escaped death in the bombed train station. Here, he has almost been stabbed in a library at night by a linguistics philosopher and has witnessed a decidedly mythological doggy-style sex scene on a photocopier. He met Giscard in the élysée Palace, bumped into Foucault in a gay sauna, took part in a car chase that ended with an attempt on his life, saw a man kill another man with a poisoned umbrella, discovered a secret society where people had their fingers cut off if they lost a debate, and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a mysterious document. In the course of a few months he has lived through more extraordinary events than he expected to witness in his entire lifetime … Simon knows how to spot the novelistic when he sees it. He thinks again about Umberto Eco’s supernumeraries. He takes a drag on the joint.