“No, but listen, I met a student at Columbia. I have a feeling he can go far, if I help him.”
“What do you mean by ‘far’?”
“I think I can make him a senator.”
“To what end?”
“Just because. He’s a black guy from Hawaii.”
“Hmm, I see. A suitable test for your new powers.”
“It’s not exactly a power.”
“I know.”
Lendl hits a forehand that speeds ten feet past Borg.
Simon remarks: “That doesn’t happen very often to Borg. He’s good, this Czech guy.”
He is delaying the moment when he will touch upon the real reason he wanted to talk with Slimane, even though the ex-gigolo knows exactly what he has in mind.
“I listened to it over and over on my Walkman, but it’s not enough just to learn it by heart, you know.”
“So it’s a method? A secret weapon?”
“It’s more like a key, or a path, than a method. It’s true that Jakobson called it the ‘performative function,’ but ‘performative’ is just an image.”
Slimane watches Borg play his two-handed backhand.
“It’s a technique, I guess.”
“In the Greek sense?”
Slimane smiles.
“A technè, sure, if you like. Praxis, poiesis … I learned all that stuff, you know.”
“And you feel unbeatable?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I am. I think I could be beaten.”
“Without the function?”
Slimane smiles.
“We’ll see. But I still have plenty to learn. And I have to train. Convincing a customs official or a secretary is one thing, winning elections is something else. I’ve still got a long way to go.”
Simon wonders how great Mitterrand’s mastery of the technique is, and whether the Socialist president could lose an election or if he’s destined to be reelected until his death.
In the meantime, Lendl fights against the Swedish machine and wins the fourth set. The spectators shiver: this is the first time in ages that Borg has been taken to the fifth set at Roland-Garros. In fact, he hadn’t lost a single set here since 1979 and his final against Victor Pecci. As for his last defeat in Paris, that goes all the way back to 1976, against Panatta.
Borg hits a double fault, offering Lendl a break point.
“I don’t know what’s more improbable,” says Simon. “A sixth victory for Borg … or him losing.”
Borg responds with an ace. Lendl shouts something in Czech.
Simon realizes that he wants Borg to win, and that in this desire there is probably a bit of superstition, a bit of conservatism, a fear of change, but it would also be a victory for plausibility: the undisputed world number one ahead of Connors and McEnroe, Borg crushed all his opponents to reach the final, whereas Lendl, fifth in the world, almost lost against José Luis Clerc in the semifinal and even against Andres Gomez in the second round. The order of things …
“Actually, have you heard from Foucault?”
“Yeah, we write to each other regularly. He’s putting me up while I’m in Paris. He’s still working on his history of sexuality.”
“And, uh, the seventh function … he’s not interested in that? At least, as a subject of study?”
“He abandoned linguistics a while ago, you know. Maybe he’ll come back to it one day. But in any case, he’s too tactful to bring it up.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t saying that about you.”
Borg breaks Lendl.
Simon and Slimane stop talking for a while to follow the match.
Slimane thinks about Hamed.
“And that bitch Kristeva?”
“She’s fine. You know what happened to Sollers?”
An evil grin lights up Slimane’s face.
The two men sense vaguely that one day they will go head to head for the position of Great Protagoras, but they are not going to admit that to each other today. Simon has carefully avoided mentioning Umberto Eco.
Lendl breaks back.
The outcome is increasingly uncertain.
“So what about your plans?”
Simon laughs grimly, holding up his stump.
“Well, it’s going to be difficult to win Roland-Garros.”
“I bet you could take the Trans-Siberian, though.”
Simon smiles at the allusion to Cendrars, another one-armed intellectual, and wonders when Slimane acquired this literary knowledge.
Lendl doesn’t want to lose, but Borg is so strong.
And yet.
The unthinkable happens.
Lendl breaks Borg again.
He serves for the match.
The young Czechoslovak trembles under the weight of expectation.
But he wins.
Borg the invincible is beaten. Lendl raises his arms to the sky.
Slimane applauds, along with the rest of the spectators.
When Simon sees Lendl lift the cup, he no longer knows what to think.
EPILOGUE
NAPLES
97
Simon stands outside the entrance of Galleria Umberto I, and from this position he can perceive its proud and happy union of glass and marble, but he remains on the threshold. The gallery is a landmark, not a destination. He stares at the map he has unfolded, puzzling over why Via Roma cannot be found. He has the feeling that his map is wrong.
He should be standing on Via Roma. Instead of which, he is on Via Toleda.
Behind him, on the opposite pavement, an old shoeshine guy watches him curiously.
Simon knows the shoeshine guy is waiting to see how he will manage to fold his map back up with only one hand.
The old man has a wooden crate, on which he has created a sort of makeshift rack on which customers can wedge their shoes. Simon notes the slope for the heel.
The two men look at each other.
Perplexity reigns on both sides of this Neapolitan street.
Simon does not know exactly where he is. He begins folding the map, slowly but dexterously, never taking his eyes off the old shoeshine guy.
But suddenly the old man points at a spot directly above Simon, who senses that something abnormal is happening because the man’s glum expression changes to one of stupefaction.
Simon looks up just in time to see the pediment above the gallery entrance, a bas-relief representing two cherubs flanking a coat of arms, or something like that, come loose from the fa?ade.
The shoeshine guy tries to yell something, a warning (“Statte accuorto!”) to prevent the tragedy, or at least to participate in it in some way, but no sound emerges from his toothless mouth.
But Simon has changed a lot. He is no longer a library rat about to be crushed by half a ton of white stone, but a one-handed man ranked quite high in the hierarchy of the Logos Club who has cheated death at least three times. Instead of stepping back, as our instinct would prompt us, he has the counterintuitive reflex of pressing his body against the building’s wall, so that the huge block of stone smashes the pavement next to his feet without injuring him.
The shoeshine guy cannot believe it. Simon looks down at the rubble, he looks over at the old man, he looks around him at the petrified pedestrians.
He points at the poor shoeshine guy, but it is not him, of course, he addresses when he declares, aggressively: “If you want to kill me, you’re going to have to try a bit harder than that!” Or maybe the novelist wanted to send him a message? In that case, he’ll have to express himself a bit more clearly, thinks Simon angrily.
98
“It’s last year’s earthquake; it made all the buildings fragile. They could collapse at any moment.”
Simon listens to Bianca explaining why he almost got his skull caved in by a huge chunk of marble.
“San Gennaro—Saint January—stopped the lava during an eruption of Vesuvius and he has been Naples’s protector ever since. Every year, the bishop takes a bit of his dried blood in a glass vial and he keeps turning it upside down until the blood becomes liquid. If the blood dissolves, Naples will be spared misfortune. And what happened last year, do you think?”
“The blood didn’t dissolve.”