The Sermon on the Fall of Rome Read online

  THE SERMON ON THE FALL OF ROME

  “This is yet another of those European novels of ideas that reduce most current English-language fiction to pedestrian predictability by comparison . . . Ferrari pursues his story with the delicacy and skill of a musician reaching the final note.”

  EILEEN BATTERSBY, Irish Times

  “More admirable even than his previous works . . . The best novel of the year.”

  RAPHAËLLE LEYRIS, Le Monde

  “Focusing on Corsica, but taking in Paris, Algeria and French colonies in Africa, its portrayal of the many accommodations we make with ‘circumstance’ is both humorous and poignant.”

  CATRIONA GRAHAM, Guardian Readers’ Choice

  “Ferrari writes with power and perceptive humor.”

  DAVID PLATZER, Tablet

  “A beautiful meditation on the end of a world . . . as universal as a Greek tragedy.”

  ASTRID DE LARMINAT, Figaro

  “It rewards effort . . . No conclusions are reached . . . This is as it should be. Good novels pose questions to which there may be no satisfying answer.”

  ALLAN MASSIE, Scotsman

  “Overflowing with eroticism, sensuality, violence and blinding flashes of wisdom.”

  CLAIRE DEVARIEUX, Libération

  Also by Jérôme Ferrari in English translation

  Where I Left My Soul

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  First published in the French language as Le sermon sur la chute de Rome by Actes Sud, Arles, 2012

  Cover photograph © Dragan Todorovic / Trevillion Images

  Copyright © Actes Sud 2012

  English translation copyright © 2014 by Geoffrey Strachan

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

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  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-727-7

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  To my great-uncle, Antoine Vesperini

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Most of the action in Jérôme Ferrari’s novel takes place in twentieth-century France (Corsica and Paris) and Algeria. The city of Corte was once briefly the capital of independent Corsica and is the site of the university which reopened in 1981. The “maquis,” named after the low scrub that covers many hillsides in Corsica, was the term used for the resistance movement during the occupation in the Second World War. “Ribbedu,” as the author notes in a footnote, was the nickname of Dominique Luccini, head of the Communist maquis in the wild Alta Rocca region of Corsica.

  Several of the places in Algeria mentioned in the text, including Djemila, Tipasa and Annaba, are the sites of Roman remains. Annaba, one of the oldest cities in Algeria, was originally named Hippo. Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine) was bishop there from 396 A.D. to 430 A.D. In 430 A.D. the city fell to the Vandals. In the eighth century it was renamed Bled El-Anned (from which the modern name is derived). In 1832 the French took the city and renamed it Bône. In 1962 Algeria became independent from France.

  The book contains echoes of Algeria’s prehistory. The first viable state to flourish in what is now Algeria was the Berber kingdom of Numidia. In 206 B.C. the new king of eastern Numidia, Massinissa, made an alliance with Rome to defeat the neighboring state of Carthage. Believing himself to be betrothed to Sophonisba, the daughter of a Carthaginian general, Massinissa defeated Syphax, king of western Numidia, who was allied to Carthage. But Syphax had married Sophonisba, in his capital city of Cirta. Refusing to allow her to be taken to Rome to be displayed in a triumph, Massinissa poisoned her and then gave her a royal funeral.

  I am indebted to a number of people and, in particular, the author for assistance and advice in the preparation of this translation. My thanks are due notably to Dr. Thomas Anderson, Robert Caston, June Elks, Ben Faccini, Scott Grant, Willem Hackman, Wayne Holloway, Fr. Nicholas King SJ, Ann Mansbridge, Richard Sorabji, Simon Strachan, Susan Strachan and Roger Watts.

  G.S.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE ORIGINAL FRENCH EDITION

  All the chapter titles, with the exception of the last one, are taken from Augustine’s sermons. I have also quoted from the Psalms and Genesis, and have taken Shulamite’s “ashen hair” (here) from Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue,” which was itself borrowed from the Song of Songs.

  Without Daniel Istria’s help I should never have been able to picture what a fifth-century African cathedral might have looked like, nor how sermons were preached there.

  Jean-Alain Huser helped initiate me into the twin mysteries of French colonial administration and tropical diseases, the symptoms of which I have ventured to modify somewhat, according to criteria which I hesitate to qualify as aesthetic.

  My warm thanks are due to both of them.

  There are so many ways in which I am indebted to my great-uncle Antoine Vesperini that, rather than listing them all, it seemed to me simpler and more appropriate for me to dedicate this novel to him, for it could not have existed without him.

  J.F.

  Contents

  Cover

  The Sermon on the Fall of Rome

  Also by Jérôme Ferrari

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Translator’s Note

  Author’s Note to the Original French Edition

  Epigraph

  “If Romans are not perishing

  perhaps Rome has not perished”

  “Then do not feel reluctance, my brothers,

  toward the chastisements of God”

  “You, see yourself for what you are.

  For it is necessary for the fire to come”

  “What man makes man destroys”

  “Where will you go to outside of the world?”

  “For all God has made

  for you is a perishable world”

  The sermon on the fall of Rome

  About the Author

  THE SERMON ON THE FALL OF ROME

  “Are you surprised that the end of the world is upon us? You might rather be surprised that the world has grown so old. The world is like a man; he is born, he grows up, he ages and he dies . . . In old age a man is filled with complaints and in old age the world, too, is filled with troubles . . . Christ says to you, ‘The world is passing away, the world is old, the world is going under, the world is already gasping with the breathing of old age, but be not afraid, your youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s.’”

  SAINT AUGUSTINE

  Sermon 81, paragraph 8, December 419

  “If Romans are not peris
hing

  perhaps Rome has not perished”

  So, to bear witness to the beginning—as well as the end—there was this photograph, taken in the summer of 1918, which Marcel Antonetti would vainly persist in studying throughout his life, seeking to decode the enigma of the absence within it. In it his five brothers and sisters can be seen, posed there with their mother. There is a milky whiteness all around them, with no sign either of ground or walls, and they seem to be floating like ghosts amid a strange mist that will soon swallow them up and make them disappear. She sits there, dressed in mourning, unmoving and ageless, a dark scarf over her head, her hands placed flat upon her knees, staring so intensely at a spot located far beyond the lens that it is as if she were indifferent to everything around her—the photographer and his equipment, the summer sunlight and her own children, her son, Jean-Baptiste, wearing a beret with a pompom, timidly nestling up to her, squeezed into a sailor suit that is too tight for him, her three older daughters, lined up behind her, all stiff in their Sunday best, their arms rigid beside their bodies, and, on her own in the foreground, the youngest, Jeanne-Marie, barefoot and in rags, her pale, sulky little face hidden behind the long untidy locks of her black hair. And each time he meets his mother’s gaze Marcel feels utterly convinced that it is directed at him, that she was already peering into limbo to seek out the eyes of the unborn son she does not yet know. For what Marcel contemplates, in this photograph taken in the course of a hot summer’s day in 1918 in the schoolyard where an itinerant photographer had hung a white sheet between two trestles, is first and foremost his own absence. All the people are there who will soon surround him with their care, perhaps their love, but the truth is that none of them is thinking about him, and none of them miss him. They have fetched out the best clothes they never wear from a wardrobe stuffed with mothballs and have had to comfort Jeanne-Marie, who is only four and does not yet own either a new dress or shoes, before all going up to the school together, glad, no doubt, for something to be happening at last that might rescue them for a while from the monotony and solitude of all their years of war. The schoolyard is crowded. All through the day in the scorching heat of the summer of 1918, the photographer took pictures of women and children, of cripples, old men and priests, all filing past his camera, all of them, too, seeking some relief, and Marcel’s mother, brother and sisters waited their turn patiently, from time to time drying Jeanne-Marie’s tears of shame over her ragged dress and bare feet. At the moment when the picture was being taken she refused to pose with the others and had to be allowed to remain standing there all alone, in the front row, hiding beneath her tousled hair. There they all are and Marcel is not there. And yet, through the magic of a mysterious symmetry, now that he has seen them all into their graves, one after the other, they only exist thanks to him and his stubbornly faithful gaze, he, of whom, as they held their breath at the moment when the photographer released the shutter of his camera, they were not even thinking, is now their unique and fragile bulwark against nothingness, and this is why he continues to remove the photograph from the drawer where he keeps it carefully, even though he loathes it, just as, in point of fact, he has always loathed it, because if one day he neglects to do this, nothing will be left of them, the photograph will turn once more into a lifeless pattern of black and gray patches, and Jeanne-Marie will forever cease to be a little girl aged four. Sometimes he looks at them with rage, is tempted to reproach them for their lack of foresight, their ingratitude, their indifference, but he catches his mother’s eye and fancies she can see him, right there in the limbo where unborn children are held captive, and is waiting for him, even if the truth is that Marcel is not, and never has been, the one her eyes are desperately searching for. For the one she is searching for, far beyond the lens, is the one who ought to be standing there beside her and whose absence is so glaring that one might think this photograph had only been taken in the summer of 1918 to make it tangible and preserve this record of it. Marcel’s father was captured in the Ardennes during the early fighting and from the start of the war has been working in a salt mine in Lower Silesia. Once every two months he sends a letter which he gets one of his comrades to write and which the children study before conveying it out loud to their mother. Letters take so long to reach them that they are always afraid what they are hearing may be no more than the echo of a dead man’s voice, transmitted in unfamiliar handwriting. But he is not dead and he returns to the village in February 1919, so that Marcel may see the light of day. His eyelids and lashes are burned, his fingernails are as if eaten by acid and on his cracked lips can be seen the white traces of scarred layers of skin he will never be able to shed. Doubtless he looked at his children without recognizing them, but his wife had not changed, because she had never looked youthful or fresh, and he hugged her to him, although Marcel has never understood what could have drawn their two desiccated, broken bodies to one another, it could not have been desire, nor even animal instinct, perhaps it was simply because Marcel needed them to embrace in order to emerge from the limbo in whose depths he had been on the qui vive for so long, waiting to be born, and it was in response to his silent call that they had crawled on top of one another that night in the darkness of their bedroom, making no noise, so as not to alert Jean-Baptiste and Jeanne-Marie, who were pretending to be asleep, lying there with thumping hearts on their mattress in a corner of the room, witnessing the mystery of the creakings and hoarse sighs which, without finding a name for it, they understood, their minds reeling at the enormity of this mystery in which violence and intimacy were intermingled in such proximity to them, while their parents wore themselves ragged rubbing their bodies against one another, twisting and probing their own dry flesh, so as to bring back to life the ancient wellsprings made barren by sadness, mourning and salt, and draw out from the depths of their bellies what was left there of humors and mucus, albeit only a remnant of moisture, a little of the fluid that serves as the container for life, a single drop, and their efforts were so great that this unique drop did finally well up and condense within them, making life possible, even though they themselves were barely alive. Marcel has always imagined—has always feared—that he was not wanted, but simply imposed by some impenetrable cosmic necessity that allowed him to grow in his mother’s arid, hostile womb just at the season when a fetid wind was arising, carrying up the miasmas of a deadly influenza from the sea and the unhealthy plains before sweeping through the villages, hurling dozens of men who had survived the war into hastily dug graves, without anything being able to halt it, like that poisonous fly of ancient legend, the fly born from the putrefaction of an accursed skull, ready to emerge one morning from the void of its empty sockets, exhaling its deadly breath and feeding upon men’s lives, until it became so monstrously plump that its shadow plunged whole valleys into darkness and only the Archangel’s lance could finally dispatch it. But the Archangel had long ago returned to his celestial dwelling place and remained deaf to prayers and processions, turning aside from those who were dying, the weakest being the first to go, children, old men, pregnant women, yet Marcel’s mother remained upright, unshakeable and sad, and the wind blowing relentlessly all around her spared her home. It finally dropped several weeks before Marcel was born, giving way to a silence that descended on fields overgrown with brambles and weeds, on collapsed stone walls, on deserted shepherds’ huts and tombs. When they pried him from his mother’s womb, Marcel remained unmoving and silent for many seconds before briefly emitting a feeble cry and they had to get close to his lips to feel the warmth of a tiny breath that left no trace of condensation on mirrors. His parents had him baptized within the hour. They sat beside his cradle, gazing at him wistfully, as if they had already lost him, and that was the way they went on looking at him throughout his childhood. Each time he had a mild temperature, whenever he suffered from colic, at every coughing fit, they would watch over him like a dying child, greeting every recovery as a miracle, yet one they did not hope to see repeated, for nothing
is more quickly exhausted than the uncertain mercy of God. But Marcel went on recovering and he lived, all the more stubborn for being frail, as if in the dry darkness of his mother’s womb he had learned so well how to devote all his feeble resources to the exhausting task of surviving, that it had made him invulnerable. A demon prowled ceaselessly around him, and his parents dreaded its victory, but Marcel knew that it would not win, in vain did it hurl him, drained of strength, into the depths of his bed, wear him out with migraines and bouts of diarrhea, it was not going to win, it could even creep inside him to ignite the fires of an ulcer and cause him to vomit blood so violently that Marcel had to miss a whole year of school, it was not going to win, in the end Marcel would always recover, even if he could forever feel the presence of a hand lurking in his stomach, waiting to rip into its delicate walls with sharp fingers, for such was to be the life he had been granted, always under threat and always triumphant. He was thrifty with his strength, his affection, his wonder, when Jeanne-Marie came looking for him, exclaiming, Marcel, come quickly, there’s a man flying past the fountain, his heart did not start racing, nor did he bat an eyelid as he watched the first cyclist anyone had ever seen passing through the village, hurtling down the road at top speed, the sides of his jacket flapping behind him like an oystercatcher’s wings and it was without emotion that he watched his father rise at dawn to go and till fields that did not belong to him and tend animals that were not his, while on all sides there arose monuments to the dead on which, with haughty and decisive gestures, women of bronze who looked like his mother each thrust out before them the child they consented to sacrifice to the patrie, while next to them soldiers waving flags were collapsing open-mouthed, as if it were necessary now, having already paid the price in flesh and blood, to offer a vanished world the tribute of the iconography it insisted on, before departing forever, to make way, at last, for the new world. But nothing happened, one world had well and truly vanished but no new world arrived to take its place, and mankind, left in the lurch, lacking a world, soldiered on with the drama of procreation and death, Marcel’s older sisters got married one after the other and people consumed beignets as they sat under a lifeless, implacable sun, drinking vile wine and forcing themselves to smile, as if something were finally about to happen, as if the women, with their children, were about to bring the new world itself into being, but nothing did happen, time brought nothing more than the monotonous succession of seasons that were all alike, promising only the curse of their inevitability. Sky, mountains and sea congealed together in the bottomless chasm of the stares of livestock, as they endlessly dragged their meager carcasses along the sides of rivers, in dust or in mud, and the staring eyes reflected by candlelight in all the mirrors in the depths of the houses, were similar, the same chasms gouged out of faces of wax. Curled up in the depths of his bed, Marcel sensed a mortal anguish clutching at his heart whenever night fell, because he knew this fathomless, silent night was not the natural and temporary continuation of the day but something terrifying, a primal state into which the earth was relapsing after twelve hours of exhausting exertion and from which it would never again break free. Dawn heralded no more than yet another temporary reprieve and Marcel would set off for school, stopping on the way from time to time to vomit blood and vowing to say nothing about it to his mother who would have made him go to bed and would have prayed, kneeling at his bedside after applying hot compresses to his stomach, and he was determined from now on not to let his demon snatch him away from the only things that gave him joy, the schoolmaster’s lessons, the colored maps and the majesty of history, the inventors and men of science, the children saved from rabies, the princes and kings, everything that enabled him to believe that there was a world beyond the sea, a world throbbing with life, in which men still knew how to do something other than drag out their existence in suffering and disarray, a world that could inspire other desires than that of leaving it as quickly as possible, for he was sure that beyond the sea they would already, for years now, have been celebrating the arrival of a new world, the one Jean-Baptiste had gone off to join in 1926, lying about his age so that he could enlist, obliterate the sea and finally discover what a world might be like, in the company of those young men fleeing with him in their hundreds, whose resigned parents, despite the wrench of parting, could find no arguments to hold them back. At table, sitting next to Jeanne-Marie, Marcel ate with his eyes shut, so as to voyage with Jean-Baptiste on fabulous oceans alive with piratical junks, visit pagan cities that teemed with chanting, smoke and cries, and walk in perfumed jungles, peopled by wild animals and fearsome natives, who would view his brother with respect and terror, as if he were the invincible Archangel, the destroyer of scourges, once again devoted to men’s salvation, and during the catechism he would listen with sealed lips to the lies told by the evangelist, for he knew what an apocalypse was, he knew that at the end of the world the heavens did not open and there were neither horsemen nor trumpets nor number of the beast, no monster, but only silence, so much so that you might think nothing had happened. And indeed, nothing had happened, the years trickled away like sand, and still nothing happened and this nothing spread the power of its blind reign over everything, a deadly and fruitless reign, so that no one could any longer say when it had begun. For at the moment during the summer of 1918 when that photograph was taken, to ensure that something might be left to bear witness to the beginning and also the end, the world had already vanished, it had vanished without anyone noticing and it was, above all, its absence, the most enigmatic and the most daunting of all those absences captured that day on paper by the silver salts, that Marcel would spend his life contemplating, searching for traces of it in the milky whiteness with its faded edges, in the faces of his mother, his brother and his sisters, in Jeanne-Marie’s sulky pout, in the insignificance of their wretched human presences, as the ground gave way beneath their feet, giving them no choice but to float aimlessly like ghosts in an abstract and infinite space from which there was no escape, one from which even the love that bound them together could not save them, because in the absence of a world, love itself is powerless. It is true that we do not know what worlds are, nor what their existence depends on. Perhaps somewhere in the universe the mysterious law is written that presides over their origins, their growth and their ending. But this we do know: for a new world to arise, first an old world must die. And we also know that the interval that separates them can be infinitely brief or, on the other hand, so long that men have to spend dozens of years learning to live amid the desolation before discovering, inevitably, that they are incapable of doing so and that, in the final reckoning, they have not lived. Perhaps we can even identify the almost imperceptible signs that proclaim the recent disappearance of a world, not screaming shells above the gutted plains of the North, but the release of a shutter, scarcely disturbing the vibrant summer light, or the delicate, damaged hand of a young woman very gently closing a door in the middle of the night on what should not have been her life, or the square sail of a ship crossing the blue waters of the Mediterranean, in the open sea off Hippo, bringing the inconceivable news from Rome that men still exist but their world is no more.