His name was Simon, a fisherman, son and grandson of fishermen from Bethsaida. He himself was a fisherman at Capernaum. This French word that describes stowage and chaos was then a beautiful village. A particularly anthropomorphic god approached the boat, hailed the fisherman and decided to take away his name and to replace it with a patronymic of his own invention. He ordered him to leave the Lake of Gennesaret. He ordered him to abandon the cove. He ordered him to let go of the net. He named him Peter. The suddenness and the strangeness of this baptism began to blur, to perturb the acoustic system in which Simon had thus far been immersed. These new syllables, to the sounds of which he would now have to respond, the expulsion and the burial of the former syllables that had named him, the repression of emotions and the putting aside of the small fables that little by little during his childhood had come to be associated with these sounds, were sometimes betrayed by certain involuntary and unexpected behaviors. A dog barking, pottery breaking, the sea swelling, a thrush or a nightingale or a swallow singing, would suddenly make him break down in tears. According to Cneius Mammeius, Peter confided one day to Judas Iscariot that the one regret he harbored regarding his former trade was neither the boat, nor the cove, nor the water, nor the nets, nor the strong odor, nor the light that gets caught in the scales of the fish that die in a sort of jolt: Saint Peter confided that what he missed about the fish was the silence.
The silence of fish when they die. The silence during the day. The silence at twilight. The silence during night fishing. The silence at daybreak when the boat returns to the shore and night fades little by little in the sky together with the freshness, the stars, and the fear.
One night in early April, year 30 in Jerusalem. In the courtyard of High Priest Annas, Caiaphas’s father-in-law. It is cold. Servants and guards are seated together. They reach their hands out toward the fire. Peter sits down among them, himself bringing his hands toward the brazier, warming his shivering body. A woman approaches. She believes she recognizes his facial features in the glow emanating from the brazier. In the atrium (in atrio) day breaks in the late winter and the humid mist. A cock (gallus) crows all of a sudden. Peter is startled by the sound, which immediately exposes something that Jesus the Nazarene said to him — or at least something that Peter suddenly remembers him saying. He walks away from the fire, from the woman, from the guards, reaches the porch of the high priest’s courtyard, and, in the door on the porch, beneath the vault, he breaks into tears. They are bitter tears. Tears that Matthew the Evangelist calls bitter.
“I do not know what you are saying,” Peter says to the woman in the atrium. He repeats: Nescio quid dicis (I do not know what you are saying).
The woman pulls up her hood in the late freezing April night. She says: “Your words betray you.” Tua loquela manifestum te facit.
I do not know what the words say. This is where Peter is. I do not know what language manifests. Peter repeats. They are his tears. I repeat. This is my life. Nescio quid dicis. I do not know what you are saying. I do not know what I am saying.
I do not know what I am saying but it is manifest.
I do not know what you are saying but day breaks. I do not know what language makes manifest but for a second time the cock begins to raise the hoarse and dreadful song that manifests the day.
Nature barks daybreak in the form of a cock: latrans gallus.
Beneath the porch, in what remains of the night, flevit amare. He cries bitterly. Amare means to love. It also means bitterly. No one knows while speaking what he is saying.
Jorge Luis Borges used to quote a “verse that Boileau translated from Virgil”:
Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi.15
In truth, it is a verse by Horace. The verse is the one that precedes the carpe diem of Ode XI:
dum loquimur, fugerit invidia
aetas: carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.
(As we speak, time, jealous of all things in the world, has fled. Cut and hold the day in your hands like you would a flower. Never believe that tomorrow will come.) Borges evokes the river that is reflected in Heraclitus’s eyes as he crosses it. The eyes of man have changed less than the water that passes by. They are equally soiled. No one sees the river in which he bathed before he was. In Saint Luke, the scene of the denial is inevitably more Greek than the way it was treated by the other evangelists: a circle of guards and servants, all seated in the middle of the courtyard around the blaze. Peter tries to insert himself into the egalitarian ring that is reminiscent of scenes from the Iliad and tries to warm his body in the contiguous solidarity of the men rather than in the warmth rising from the brazier at daybreak, April, year 30, and death. But Saint Luke goes further: he brings together the scene of the denial and the scene of the tears. He piles one on top of the other like two sediments in the same geological layer or like a short circuit in an electrical installation: Kai parachrèma eti lalountos autou ephōnèsen alektōr. In Latin: Et continuo adhuc illo loquente cantavit gallus. In English: “And, in that instant, while he was still speaking, a cock crowed.”
Dum loquimur … The cock’s crow is a Venetian “paving stone,” an expavement16 at the heart of the acoustic experience of language, over which Peter stumbles as he does over his name. The harsh song that announces daybreak plunges him into another level of himself: the level of Jesus, the level of Peter, the level before Peter (the level of Simon), the level before Simon. “Not only your face, or your facial features, or your body betrays you,” said the servant, “but your language betrays you.” The Greek reads: Your lalia makes you visible. The Latin reads: Your loquela manifests you. Within the acoustic that betrays him, deeper than the very name he betrays (Jesus), deeper than the very name he betrayed (Simon), lies the small portion of the acoustic that language cultivates, which suddenly refers back to the immense bark of nature and to the narrower stretch of animal song from which human language took its small vessel of specific sounds. The cock’s crow is in a certain sense the bellowing, which became “tragic” and sedentary in the small Neolithic villages where language ceased to be a nomad and a hunter.