Bifo proclaims loudly: “Onore agli arringatori.” The audience choruses: Honor to the duelists.
Luciano’s mother returns to sit down next to her son.
As at the end of a movie when the lights have not yet come back up, when the return to the real world is experienced as a slow, hazy awakening, when the images are still dancing behind our eyes, several minutes pass before the first spectators, stretching their numb legs, stand up and leave the room.
The anatomical theater empties slowly. Bifo and his fellow judges gather pages of notes into cardboard folders then retire ceremoniously. The session of the Logos Club dissolves into the night.
Bayard asks the man in gloves if Bifo is the Great Protagoras. He shakes his head like a child. Bifo is a tribune (level six), but not a sophist (level seven, the highest). The man in gloves thought it was Antonioni, who, it was said, used to be a sophist in the 1960s.
Sollers and BHL slip out discreetly. Bayard does not see them leave, because in the bottleneck near the door, they are hidden behind the man with the bag. He must make a decision. He decides to follow Antonioni. Turning back, he says out loud to Simon, in front of everyone: “Tomorrow, ten o’clock at the station. Don’t be late!”
3:22 a.m.
The amphitheater is almost empty. The crowd from the Drogheria has gone. Simon wants to leave last, just to be sure. He watches the man in gloves walk out. He watches Enzo and the young student leaving together. He notes with satisfaction that Bianca has not moved. He might even suppose that she is waiting for him. They are the last ones. They stand up, walk slowly toward the door. But just as they are about to exit the room, they stop. Gallienus, Hippocrates, and the others observe them. The flayed men are absolutely motionless. Desire, alcohol, the intoxication of being away from home, the warm welcome that French people so often receive when they travel abroad … all these things give Simon a boldness—albeit a very shy boldness!—that he knows he would never have had in Paris.
Simon takes Bianca’s hand.
Or maybe it’s the other way around?
Bianca takes Simon’s hand and they walk down the steps to the stage. She turns in a circle and the statues flash past her eyes like a ghostly slide show, like images-mouvements.
Does Simon realize at this precise moment that life is role-play, in which it is up to us to play our part as best we can, or does the spirit of Deleuze suddenly breathe life into his young, supple, slim body, with his smooth skin and short nails?
He puts his hands on Bianca’s shoulders and slips off her low-cut top. Suddenly inspired, he whispers into her ear, as if to himself: “I desire the landscape that is enveloped in this woman, a landscape I do not know but that I can feel, and until I have unfolded that landscape, I will not be happy…”
Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: “Let’s construct an assemblage.”
She gives him her mouth.
He tips her back and lays her on the dissecting table. She takes off her skirt, spreads her legs, and tells him: “Fuck me like a machine.” And while her breasts spill out, Simon begins to flow into her assemblage. His tongue-machine slides inside her like a coin in a slot, and Bianca’s mouth, which also has multiple uses, expels air like a bellows, a powerful, rhythmic breathing whose echo—“Si! Si!”—reverberates in the pulsing blood in Simon’s cock. Bianca moans, Simon gets hard, Simon licks Bianca, Bianca touches her breasts, the flayed men get hard, Gallienus starts to jerk off under his robe, and Hippocrates under his toga. “Si! Si!” Bianca grabs Simon’s dick, which is hot and hard as if it’s just come out of a forge, and connects it to her mouth-machine. Simon declaims as if to himself, quoting Artaud in an oddly detached voice: “The body under the skin is an overheated factory.” The Bianca factory automatically lubricates her devenir-sexe. Their mingled moans ring out through the deserted anatomical theater.
Well, not entirely deserted: the man in gloves has come back to check out the two youngsters. Simon sees him, crouching in a shadowy angle of the tiered seating. Bianca sees him while she is sucking Simon. The man in gloves sees Bianca’s dark eyes shine as they observe him, even as she goes down on Simon.
Outside, the Bologna night finally begins to cool. Bayard lights a cigarette while he waits for Antonioni, who is dignified but dazed, to decide to move. At this stage of the investigation, he isn’t sure whether the Logos Club is just a bunch of harmless lunatics or something more dangerous, implicated in the deaths of Barthes and the gigolo, connected to Giscard, the Bulgarians, and the Japanese. A church bell strikes four times. Antonioni starts to walk, followed by Monica Vitti, the two of them followed by Bayard. They silently traverse arcades lined with chic boutiques.
Arched on the dissecting table, Bianca whispers to Simon, loud enough for the man in gloves to hear: “Scopami come una macchina.” Simon stretches over her, fits his cock into the mouth of her vulva, which is, he notes with pleasure, producing a constant flow of fluid, and when he finally thrusts inside her, he feels like pure liquid in its free state, unimpeded, sliding on the voluptuous Neapolitan’s writhing body.
After going up to the top of Via Farini, outside the Basilica of Santo Stefano of the Seven Churches (constructed during the interminable Middle Ages), Antonioni sits on a stone post. He is holding his mutilated hand in his other hand, and his head hangs low. Standing at a distance under the arcades, Bayard can tell he is crying. Monica Vitti walks up to him. Nothing appears to indicate that Antonioni knows she is there, just behind him, but he knows, all the same, and Bayard knows that he knows. Monica Vitti raises her hand, but it remains suspended in the air, hesitant, immobile above the lowered head, like the sketch of a fragile and undeserved halo. Behind his column, Bayard lights a cigarette. Antonioni sniffs. Monica Vitti looks like a dream in stone.
Bianca struggles more and more under the weight of Simon’s body, which she grips convulsively, crying out: “La mia macchina miracolante!” as Simon’s dick pumps inside her like a piston. From his hiding place, the man in gloves hallucinates the hybridization of a locomotive and a wild horse. The anatomical theater swells with their union, a muffled, irregular growl testifying to the fact that desiring machines continually break down as they run, but run only when they are breaking down. “The product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and the machine parts are the fuel that makes it run.”
Bayard has had time to light another cigarette, and then another. Monica Vitti at last decides to put her hand on Antonioni’s head. The director is now sobbing openly. She strokes his hair with an ambiguous tenderness. Antonioni weeps and weeps. He can’t stop. She lowers her beautiful gray eyes to the director’s neck and Bayard is too far away to distinguish the expression on her face clearly. He tries to squint through the darkness but when he finally thinks he can see the compassion that his logical mind supposes, Monica Vitti turns her gaze away, lifting her eyes toward the massive edifice of the basilica. Perhaps she is already elsewhere. A cat’s yowling can be heard in the distance. Bayard decides it is time to go to bed.
On the dissecting table, Bianca is now the iron horse atop Simon, who lies on the marble slab, all his muscles tensed to give more depth to the Italian girl’s thrusts. “There is only one kind of production: the production of the real.” Bianca slides up and down Simon, faster and faster and harder, until they reach the point of impact, when the two desiring machines collide in an atomic explosion and become, finally, that body without organs: “For desiring machines are the fundamental category of the economy of desire; they produce a body without organs all by themselves, and make no distinction between agents and their own parts…” Deleuze’s phrases flash through the young man’s mind just as his body convulses, as Bianca’s bolts and breaks down, then collapses on top of him, exhausted, their sweat mingling.