“Bravo! Bravo! I wanted to congratulate you personally before you leave. Palladio—that was well played. Easy, but well played. And Portia. It didn’t convince me, but it convinced the jury, vero? Ah, Shakespeare … I should have mentioned Visconti … Have you seen Senso? The story of a foreigner in Venice. It doesn’t end well.”
The Neapolitan approaches the glassblower, who is busy shaping the hoofs of a second little horse. He takes out a cigar, which he lights with the incandescent glass, then turns to Simon with an evil grin.
“Ma, I can’t let you leave without giving you something to remember me by. How do you say it? To each his due, yes?” One of the henchmen immobilizes Simon with an arm around his neck. Simon tries to free himself, but the second punches him in the chest, winding him, and the third grabs his right arm.
The three men push him forward and pull his arm over the glassblower’s workbench. The little glass horses fall and smash on the floor. The glassblower takes a step back but does not seem surprised. Their eyes meet, and Simon sees in this man’s expression that he knows exactly what is expected of him and he is in no position to refuse. Simon starts to panic. He struggles and yells, but his yelling is pure reflex, because he is certain that he cannot expect any help. He doesn’t know that reinforcements are on their way, that Bayard and the Japanese are arriving in a gondola and that they have promised the gondolier they will triple his fee if he gets them there in record time.
The glassblower asks: “Che dito?”
Bayard and the Japanese use their suitcases as oars to make the boat move faster and the gondolier puts his all into it because, without knowing what exactly is at stake, he has gathered that it is serious.
The Neapolitan asks Simon: “Which finger? Do you have a preference?”
Simon kicks like a horse, but the three men hold his arm firmly on the workbench. He no longer wonders if he is a character in a novel; his reactions are pure survival instinct, and he tries desperately to free himself, but in vain.
The gondola finally reaches land and Bayard throws all his lire at the gondolier and jumps onto the dock, along with the Japanese, but there is a whole line of glassblowers’ workshops and they have no idea where Simon was taken. So they rush into each of them randomly, calling out to the craftsmen and salesmen and tourists, but no one has seen Simon.
The Neapolitan takes a drag on his cigar and orders: “Tutta la mano.”
The glassblower changes his tongs for a bigger pair and seizes Simon’s wrist in the cast-iron jaws.
Bayard and the Japanese burst into a workshop, where they have to describe the young Frenchman to Italians who do not understand them because they are talking too fast, so Bayard leaves the workshop and goes into the one next door, but there, too, no one has seen the Frenchman. Bayard knows perfectly well that rushing around in a panic is no way to carry out an investigation but he has a policeman’s intuition of urgency, even though he is not aware of exactly what is happening, and he runs from one workshop to the next, and from one shop to the next.
But it’s too late: the glassblower again closes the cast-iron jaws around Simon’s wrist and crushes the flesh, the ligaments, and the bones, until the latter break with a sinister cracking noise and his right hand is detached from his arm in a fountain of blood.
The Neapolitan contemplates his mutilated adversary as he collapses, and seems to hesitate briefly.
Has he obtained sufficient compensation, yes or no?
He takes a drag on his cigar, blows a few smoke rings, and says: “Let’s go.”
Simon’s screaming alerts Bayard and the Japanese, who find him at last lying inanimate on the floor of the glassblower’s workshop, bleeding profusely, surrounded by little broken horses.
Bayard knows there is not a second to lose. He is searching for the hand but he can’t find it. He looks all over the floor, but there is nothing but fragments of little glass horses that crack under his soles. If nothing is done in the next few minutes, he realizes, Simon will bleed to death.
So one of the Japanese men takes a sort of spatula from the still-hot oven and presses it to the wound. The cauterized flesh emits a hideous whistling noise. The pain wakes Simon, who screams deliriously. The smell of burned flesh reaches the shop next door, intriguing the customers, oblivious to the drama unfolding in the glassblower’s workshop.
Bayard thinks that cauterizing the wound has made any kind of hand transplant impossible and that Simon will remain one-handed for the rest of his life, but the Japanese man who performed the operation, as if reading his thoughts, shows him the oven, so that he will have no regrets: inside, like a Rodin sculpture, the curled-up fingers crackle and glow at the end of the charred hand.
PART V
PARIS
94
“I don’t believe it! That bitch Thatcher let Bobby Sands die!”
Simon hops about angrily as he watches Patrick Poivre d’Arvor announce, on the Channel 2 news, the death of the Irish activist after sixty-six days of hunger strike.
Bayard comes out of his kitchen and glances at the TV. He remarks: “Yeah, but you can’t really stop someone committing suicide, can you?”
Simon yells at him: “Can you hear yourself, you stupid pig? He was twenty-seven!”
Bayard tries to argue his point: “He belonged to a terrorist organization. The IRA kill people, don’t they?”
Simon almost chokes: “That’s exactly what Laval said about the Resistance! I wouldn’t have wanted a cop like you checking my papers in 1940!”
Bayard decides that it is better not to reply to this, so he pours his guest another glass of port, puts a bowl of cocktail sausages on the coffee table, and goes back into the kitchen.
PPDA talks about the assassination of a Spanish general and presents a report on Spaniards nostalgic for the Franco years, barely three months after the attempted coup d’état in the Madrid parliament.
Simon turns back to the magazine that he bought before coming here and which he began to read on the metro. It was the front-page headline that had made him curious: “Referendum: The Top 42 Intellectuals.” The magazine asked five hundred “cultural personalities” (Simon pulls a face) to name the three most important French intellectuals alive today. First comes Lévi-Strauss; second: Sartre; third: Foucault. After that, Lacan, Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Braudel …
Simon looks for Derrida in the rankings, forgetting that he is dead. (He imagines he would have been on the podium, though no one will ever know.)
BHL is tenth.
Michaux, Beckett, Aragon, Cioran, Ionesco, Duras …
Sollers, twenty-fourth. As there is a rundown of the votes and Sollers is also one of the voters, Simon notes that he voted for Kristeva while Kristeva voted for him. (Same reciprocal deal with BHL.)
Simon nabs a cocktail sausage and shouts at Bayard: “So, have you heard any news about Sollers?”
Bayard comes out of the kitchen, holding a dish toweclass="underline" “He’s out of the hospital. Kristeva stayed at his bedside throughout his convalescence. From what I’ve heard, he’s leading a normal life again. According to my information, he had his balls buried on an island cemetery in Venice. He says he’ll go back twice a year to pay tribute to them—once for each ball.”
Bayard hesitates before adding, gently, without looking at Simon: “He looks like he’s recovering quite well.”
Althusser, twenty-fifth: the murder of his wife hasn’t made much of a dent in his credibility, Simon thinks.
“Hey, that smells good, what is it?”
Bayard goes back into the kitchen: “Eat some olives while you’re waiting.”
PPDA (who voted for Aron, Gracq, and d’Ormesson) says: “In Washington, where they are celebrating the rise in the dollar: five francs forty…”