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‘Let me through! I’m a doctor.’ ‘Don’t turn him over!’ ‘I’m a doctor. He’s still alive.’ ‘Someone should inform his family.’ ‘Poor guy …’ ‘I know him!’ ‘Was it suicide?’ ‘We have to find out his blood group.’ ‘He’s a customer of mine. He comes to my bar for a drink every morning.’ ‘He won’t be coming any more …’ ‘Is he drunk?’ ‘He smells of alcohol.’ ‘A glass of white, sitting at the bar. Same thing every morning, for years.’ ‘That doesn’t help us with his blood group …’
Jacques Bayard’s mission consists essentially in verifying whether Barthes drank too much at Mitterrand’s apartment or, better still, whether he took part in a sadomasochistic orgy involving dogs. The Socialist leader has been involved in so few scandals in recent years that one might almost imagine he was deliberately watching his step.
But Bayard has never heard of Fritz the Cat, the countercultural cartoon strip and film, in which black people are saxophone-playing crows and the hero is a cat in a turtleneck who, Kerouac-style, smokes joints and fucks anything that moves in Cadillacs, against a backdrop of urban riots and burning skips.
Like any book-lover entering someone’s home for the first time, even if they’ve not gone there for that reason, Herzog is already curiously examining the books in the library:
There is a sheet of paper in the typewriter on the desk. Simon Herzog reads the title: ‘We always fail to talk about what we love’.
There is nothing more uncomfortable for someone preparing to lie than being uncertain how much the person he is about to lie to knows.
‘It’s curious how a woman, when she ceases being a woman, can crush the man she has under her thumb … Yes, crush him.
And, of course, amongst this crowd of ghosts, there are the cats, who, as everywhere in Italy, are the city’s true inhabitants.
For Little Red Riding Hood, the real world is the one where wolves speak.
From what Kristeva can hear, they are calling them French suckers. Kristeva does not understand at first if this is a prepositional apposition (suckers who also happen to be French) or a genitive construction (they practise fellatio on French people)
‘The root of critical error is a naïve confusion of literature with life.’
The Italians are a great people, but like all great peoples they’re bandits …
He jumps in the gondola, along with the Japanese men. The gondolier does not seem overly surprised and welcomes them by singing to himself in Italian, but Bayard tells him: ‘Follow that vaporetto!’
