everything had gone according to plan. Well, almost everything.
Outside his town dwelling, Edgardo Ugo had caused an art work to be (re-)recreated, the high concept behind which he recounted to anyone who would listen-which necessarily included all his graduate students-at every possible opportunity. The house to the left of his stood slightly proud of the general alignment in the street, leaving a dark corner just beside Ugo’s front door where drunks and homeless people were wont to urinate. A man as influential as Ugo could certainly have persuaded the city authorities to bar it off with a metal grid, as was normally done in the case of such illegal facilities, but he had instead come up with a typically witty and post-post- cultural solution.
Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 ready-made Fountain, consisting of a mass-produced glazed ceramic urinal rotated on its horizontal axis, had long been an icon of the modernist movement. Ugo’s stroke of genius had been to subject this signifier itself to a further stage of semiotic transformation (invoking the process of ‘unlimited semiosis’ and Lacan’s ‘sliding signified’) by having it reproduced in the finest white Carrara marble and finished to the intense, glossy sheen associated with the sculptures of Antonio Canova-or, for that matter, mass-produced glazed ceramic ware. As with Duchamp’s ‘original’, the finished piece had been mounted at ninety degrees to the vertical, in the filthy corner where derelicts went to pee furtively. But thanks to them this object functioned as a literal fountain, the urine pouring out through the aperture for the mains inlet pipe on to the miscreant’s trousers and shoes.
When Rodolfo had fired the pistol, while Ugo had his back turned to unlock his front door, this sculpture had been his intended target. The gesture was intended to be purely symbolic, a way of saying, ‘Fuck you and your clever jokes and everything you stand for!’ Instead, the bullet had deflected off the polished marble and must have ended up somewhere in Ugo’s body. The victim had screamed and fallen over, while Rodolfo had taken to his heels. But now the time for running away was over.
A nurse came into the waiting area and approached him.
‘Professor Ugo will see you now.’
Head bowed like a man on his way to the gallows, Rodolfo followed her down a long corridor. The nurse knocked lightly at one of the doors.
‘Signor Mattioli is here.’
‘Va bene,’ said a familiar voice within.
The nurse withdrew.
‘Ah, Rodolfo,’ the voice said languidly. ‘How very good of you to visit me. You of all people.’
The room was in almost total darkness. After the bright lights in the waiting area and corridor, Rodolfo could discern nothing.
‘On the contrary, professore, it’s very good of you to receive me,’ he replied haltingly. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, only…Well, I’ve come in a hopeless but necessary attempt to apologise for…’
The answer was a soft laugh from the figure on the bed that Rodolfo could now just identify as such.
‘That’s all nonsense,’ Ugo said.
Meaning, who cares about your apologies when I’m going to have you arrested the moment you leave, thought Rodolfo.
‘Sit down, sit down!’ Ugo went on. ‘There’s some sort of chair over there in the corner, I believe. I’ve been ordered by the powers that be to lie on my right side, so I can’t turn to look at you, but we can still talk.’
Rodolfo found the chair and seated himself.
‘Giacometti,’ said the voice from the bed.
‘Alberto?’ queried Rodolfo, utterly at a loss.
‘What do you know about him?’
Rodolfo scanned his memory.
‘Italian Swiss, a sculptor and painter, born around 1900. Died some time in the 1960s, I think. Famous for his etiolated figures which express, according to some commentators, the pain of life.’
Ugo’s laugh came again, louder and longer this time.
‘ Bravo! You were always my best student, Rodolfo, although of course I never told you that. Unless perhaps I did, by barring you from the class.’
‘I want to apologise for that too. Absolutely and without any reservations. I think I must have gone slightly mad recently, but you see…’
He broke off.
‘Yes?’ queried Ugo.
Rodolfo hesitated a long time before replying.
‘I think I’m in love, professore,’ he heard himself say.
‘Ah. In that case I won’t detain you long. Anyway, what you may not know about Giacometti is that during his years in Paris he was run down by a bus while crossing the street. A friend he was with reported later that the artist’s first words after the accident were, “Finally something has happened to me!” I’ve always thought it a good story, although I never really understood what Giacometti meant by that comment. But now I do, perhaps because something has finally happened to me.’
He fell into a silence which Rodolfo did not attempt to break.
‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book,’ Ugo said at last. ‘For years, I mean. Cornell, early 1980s. Wonderful campus, magnificent library. Some reference text in English. I’ve never been able to remember which.’
‘The Anglo-American Cyclopedia,’ Rodolfo replied without thinking.
After a moment, Ugo laughed heartily, then moaned.
‘Ow! Yes, yes, very good. Borges’ Uqbar. But this wasn’t the forty-sixth volume of anything. Much earlier in the alphabetical series of voci. It was entitled, in gold-blocked letters on the spine, “BACK to BOLOGNA”, those being the headings of the first and last articles in that particular volume.’
‘A completely random phrase.’
‘Utterly. You may remember the fuss that Zingarelli ran into when the eleventh edition of their dictionary featured masturbazione as the headword in bold type on one page. Anyway, most of the volumes of the work I saw on the stacks at Cornell were entitled with quite meaningless phrases. “HOW to HUG”, for example. Ridiculous.’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’
Ugo’s smile, if not visible, was audible.
‘Well, you may of course be better informed than I. At all events, this experience made me realise two things. One was the obvious fact that I was homesick, my research project was stalled, and the only way that I could salvage something from it was by going back to Bologna.’
‘Which you did?’
‘I came home, yes. And, as it turned out, wrote the book that really launched my career. What I didn’t write was the second thing suggested to me by that reference work in the library at Cornell, namely Back to Boulogne, a mystery in which the detective solves nothing. For my protagonist I had in mind a certain Inspecteur Nez, playing on the French word for nose, as in “has a nose for” but also “led by the nose”. In short, at once a deconstruction of the realistic, plot-driven novel and an hommage to Georges Simenon, the master of Robbe-Grillet and hence in a sense of us all. Any amount of atmosphere and sense of place, in other words, but no solution, just a strong final curtain line.’
Rodolfo stole a glance at his watch.
‘Why not scrap the sense of place too?’ he murmured.
The patient was silent for a moment.
‘Like a late Shakespearian romance, you mean?’
‘Why not?’
‘Located in a notional site named Illyria or Bohemia or…’
‘Ruritania.’
‘That’s been done.’
‘Surely the whole point is that everything’s been done.’
Professor Ugo was silent for some time. When he spoke again, it was in a distinctly crisper tone.
‘Possibly. At any rate, the reason I gave the nurse permission to admit you, Mattioli, was that I wanted to announce a decision that I’ve come to regarding what has happened.’
Rodolfo sighed. Here it comes, he thought.
