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Signora CaStafiore SingS tHe great JeWel Song. in CoMeS a magpie, who steals the jewels. The rest of the music is an awful cacophony. It’s the hold-up of the century: the voice has been embezzled, speech cheated, communication depreciated—things as precious as all the corundum and beryl of the golcondas. The fable is profound and without ostentation. What if philosophy were no longer where we’d normally look for it? While philosophy writhes in agony in the night of esoterism, the comic strip openly demonstrates the gaping wounds of our discourse; the pasty mouth, wax in the ears, broken channels, a great powerlessness in hearing or being heard, the loss of a koine beyond stereotypes and regional languages. Comics have produced their Treatise on Monadic Solitude : so know where to instruct yourself and what to ponder on. Shame on the learned, the profound, the theoretical, the unreadable, the crepuscular, the inaccessible —shame on all those who multiply and outbid our vital dramas into an intersubjective deafness. The Castafiore Emerald is the contemporary monadology .1 The treasure’s at the bottom of the chattering magpie’s nest, or the diva’s jewel box. They don’t know what to make of it. And they don’t stop making noise, so here are pictures for the blind, noise for the deaf. The adventure’s over. No more seekers for black gold, drug traffickers, counterfeiters, ethnologists in the laughs m i c Hel s er r es The Misappropriated Jewels, or A Close Shave for the Prima Donna 82 m i c He l s e rr e s land of the Incas, abominable snowman of the Himalayas, stolen scepter, or lunar voyage. Red Rackham’s treasure island, whose end Borges told in his History of lnfamy, is lost. Jules Verne and Stevenson disappear. Childhood’s over. Even in those days, the treasure was at home, hidden, awaiting the hero’s return from the trip round the world. It’s still there. The old sea-dog’s retired now, the hero’s finished his exploits, the professor tends his garden. Life at the hall. The world comes beating at its closure, just as the sea menaces the island to the rhythm of the tides. Closed: Moulinserre.2 The scene: Marlinspike. Again, the most important detail is the staircase. In Zola, the old setting between court and garden was the stage floor where the folk and the bourgeoisie blindly crossed paths. The drama took place at the dividing line. Marlinspike’s staircase has a symbolic function: it is the central route that everyone uses and has to use in order to leave, open the door, go into the village —and it has a broken step. Necessity forces accident. The channel’s blocked, communication’s interrupted. Putting it another way: every given or constructed means or technique of interaction with others is broken irreparably. Bolt the handyman never seems to arrive, but when at last he does, the accidents begin all over again. Interception. Jump to the last panel: the broken step, the captain sprawled among the debris, the space occupied by the flight of marble stairs. Surrounding the scene are three birds: the owl, the parrot, and the magpie that was watching over the country walk from high up in the first frame. The thieving , chattering magpie, the bird of the opera, opens and closes the movement. The three birds speak: hooting, chattering, imitating. Notice Bianca Castafiore’s profile (she’s never presented full-faced): an old barn owl, magpie, parrot? In his nightmare the sailor decides: the parakeet on stage, and himself naked in an audience of popinjays. Oh to be a cabin-boy again, clambering up the mainsails. Now the old owl sings La gazzaladra. Thus Signora Castafiore in three metamorphoses , three talking birds: Signora Castafiore, who alone doesn’t take a fall on the staircase, who speaks to everyone and listens to nothing, who has the treasure and hides it without insurance. Whence the principal characters of the farce: a magpie, a staircase, a parrot, personifications of language. Lost treasure, short change. Only the deaf professor, as oblivious to noise as he is to sense, will know how to change Bianca into what she should be: the white rose. The Diva sings, and loses the Jewels: a cyclone. She vocalizes: noise from the deep. She talks. She is metamorphosed into three birds, and transforms her interlocutors into different characters, makes them explode, dismembers them, kills them, annihilates them...

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