(Simon takes a sip of champagne and smiles at an old lady, who bats her eyelashes.)
“Was it a duel with swords?”
“No, alla pistola.”
“In the case of a duel with pistols, I think the advice is valid.” Simon laughs. “For an oratory duel, the principles are a little different.”
“Come mai? Dare I, maestro, ask why?”
“Well … I, for example, like to strike at my opponent’s speech code. Which implies letting him come at you. I allow him to reveal himself, capisce? An oratory duel is more like a duel with swords. You reveal yourself, you close your guard, you derobe, you feint, you cut, you disengage, you parry, you riposte…”
“Uno spadaccino, si. Ma, is the pistol not migliore?”
Bayard elbows the young prodigy. Simon is aware that it is not wise, on the eve of a duel at this level, to obligingly provide anyone that asks with strategic instructions, but the reflex is too strong. He just can’t help teaching.
“In my opinion, there are two main approaches. The semiological and the rhetorical, you see?”
“Si, si … credo di si, ma … Could you explain un poco, maestro?”
“Well, it’s very simple. Semiology enables us to understand, analyze, decode; it’s defensive, it’s Borg. Rhetoric is designed to persuade, to convince, to conquer; it’s offensive, it’s McEnroe.”
“Ah si. Ma Borg, he wins, no?”
“Of course! You can win with either; they’re just different styles of play. With semiology, you decode your opponent’s rhetoric, you grasp his things, and you rub his nose in it. Semiology’s like Borg: it is enough to get the ball over the net one time more than your opponent. Rhetoric is aces, volleys, winners down the line, but semiology is returns, passing shots, topspin lobs.”
“And it’s migliore?”
“Well, no, not necessarily. But that’s my style. It’s what I know how to do, so that’s how I play. I’m not a brilliant lawyer or a preacher or a political orator or a messiah or a vacuum-cleaner salesman. I’m an academic, and my job is analyzing, decoding, criticizing, and interpreting. That’s my game. I’m Borg. I’m Vilas. I’m José Luis Clerc. Ahem.”
“Ma, your opponent, who’s that?”
“Well … McEnroe, Roscoe Tanner, Gerulaitis…”
“And Connors?”
“Ah yeah, Connors, shit.”
“Perchè shit? What’s so special about Connors?”
“He’s really good.”
It is difficult, just now, to assess how much irony there is in Simon’s last reply, because in February 1981 Connors has not beaten Borg in eight consecutive meetings, his last victory in a Grand Slam is almost three years back (U.S. Open 1978, against Borg), and people are starting to think he is finished. (They don’t know that he will win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open the following year.)
Whatever, Simon becomes serious again and asks: “I suppose he won his duel?”
“Casanova? Si, he hit the Pole in the stomach and quasi killed him, but he also took a bullet to the thumb, and almost had to have his left hand amputato.”
“Ah … really?”
“Si, the surgeon told Casanova that gangrene would set in. So Casanova asked if it was already there. And the surgeon said no, so Casanova, he said, ‘Va bene, let’s just wait and see when it’s there.’ And the surgeon, he said allora, they’ll have to cut the whole arm off. You know what Casanova said to that? ‘Ma, what would I do with an arm without my hand?’ Ha ha!”
“Ha ha. Uh … bene.”
Simon politely takes his leave and goes off to find a Bellini. Bayard stuffs himself with canapés and observes the guests as they watch his partner with curiosity, admiration, and even a little fear. Simon accepts a cigarette from a woman in a lamé dress. The way the evening is unfolding confirms what he came to establish: that the reputation he has acquired in a few Parisian sessions has definitely reached Venice.
He has come to care for his ethos, but he doesn’t want to get home too late. At no point has he attempted to find out if his adversary is in the room, while that person may have been observing him attentively the whole time, leaning on the precious wooden furniture, nervously stubbing out his cigarettes on the Brustolon statuettes.
As Bayard is being hit on by the woman in the lamé dress (who wants to know his role in the prodigy’s rise), Simon decides to go home alone. And no doubt overly absorbed by the dress’s plunging neckline, a little stunned, perhaps, by the beauty of the setting and by the intensive cultural tourism that Simon has inflicted on him since their arrival, Bayard pays no attention, or, at least, doesn’t object.
It is not especially late and Simon is slightly tipsy; the party continues in the streets of Venice, but there is something wrong. Sensing a presence: what does that mean? Intuition is a convenient concept for dispensing with explanations, like God. One does not “sense” anything at all. One sees, hears, calculates, and decodes. Intelligence-reflex. Simon keeps seeing the same mask, and another one, and another one. (But there are so many masks, and so many turns.) He hears footsteps behind him in the deserted backstreets. “Instinctively,” he takes a detour and inevitably he gets lost. He has the impression that the footsteps are growing closer. (Although that doesn’t take into account an extremely precise and complex psychic mechanism, impression is a more solid concept than intuition.) His meanderings bring him to Campo San Bartolomeo, at the foot of the Rialto, where street musicians are having some sort of contest, and he knows that he is not far from his hotel—a few hundred yards at most, as the crow flies—but the twists and turns of the Venetian backstreets render this figure meaningless, and with every attempt he comes up against the dark water of a secondary canal. Rio della Fava, Rio del Piombo, Rio di San Lio …
Those young people leaning on the stone well, drinking beer and nibbling cicchetti … Hasn’t he already passed this osteria?
This backstreet is narrowing, but that does not mean that there is no passage after the bend it must inevitably form. Or after the next bend.
Lap, glimmer, rio.
Shit, no bridge.
When Simon turns around, three Venetian masks bar his way. They don’t say a word, but their intentions are clear because each is armed with a blunt object that Simon mechanically notes: a cheap statuette of a winged lion as found in the stalls of the Rialto; an empty bottle of Limoncello held by its neck; and a long and heavy pair of glassblower’s tongs (it is far from obvious that this last one should be called a “blunt” object).
He recognizes the masks because, at the Ca’ Rezzonico, he examined Longhi’s paintings of Carnivaclass="underline" the capitano with the large aquiline nose, the plague doctor’s long white beak, and the larva, which serves as a mask for the bauta, with the tricorn and the black cape. But the man who wears this last mask is in jeans and sneakers, like the two others. Simon deduces from this that they are just some young thugs hired to beat him up. Their wish to remain unidentified makes him think that they do not want to kill him, so that’s something at least. Unless the masks are worn simply to hide their faces from potential witnesses.