The Sermon on the Fall of Rome Read online

  “For fuck’s sake! There are banks, aren’t there? You must be a halfwit to keep your cash here! It’s gone. You’ll never see it again. Get it? It could be anyone at all, one of those thieving bastards who come to rob us, it might even be me, if you like. But it makes no difference in any case, because you’ll never see that cash again. You’ll never see it.”

  Rym bowed her head and fell silent. There was no longer any question of going down to a club. On the way home Judith stopped without warning and burst into tears.

  “What’s the matter? Is it Rym?”

  Judith shook her head.

  “No. It’s you. I’m sorry. It really upsets me to see you like this.”

  Matthieu took her sympathy as an insult, the worst, in fact, that had ever been addressed to him. He tried to remain calm.

  “Look, I’ll take you to the airport. Tomorrow.”

  Judith dried her tears.

  “Do.”

  He was certain he would never see her again. He did not know that he would soon understand how much those wounding words overflowed with love, for nobody had loved him, nor ever would love him, like Judith, and several weeks later, in the night of pillage and blood that would reduce the world to ashes, it was of Judith that he would think and it would be to her that he would turn, again regardless of the time, immediately after calling Aurélie. The world was not suffering from the presence of foreign bodies but from its own inner decay, the sickness of ancient empires, and so Judith’s departure solved nothing. After a few days Rym handed in her notice and no one thought of keeping her on. She had become sullen and bitter, since the night of the search she had been on very bad terms with Agnès and Izaskun and she could no longer bear the thought of possibly rubbing shoulders with the person who had robbed her of her future. Gratas was charged with replacing her at the till but it was not easy for him to concentrate on his work with Virginie constantly coming to toy with him, so they now had to reckon with the presence of two couples on heat whose combined efforts disturbed the smooth running of the business. Libero wore himself out with a whole range of reactions, from entreaties to threats, but in vain. Pierre-Emmanuel delighted in infuriating him, he would give orders to Izaskun who obeyed them with servile haste, as if he were the boss, he would summon her to the microphone and thrust the full length of his tongue into her mouth, as well as giving her buttocks an energetic massage, and Libero was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

  “That little bastard! I’ll end up smashing his head in.”

  Pierre-Emmanuel had perfected his little game developed in the days of Annie, which took the form of provoking the frustration of the luckless by presenting them with the spectacle of his own sexual fulfillment. Virgile Ordioni was his favorite victim. He showered him with intimate confidences, he asked him with mock ingenuousness what he would like to do with a woman if he could manage to find himself alone with one, offering for Virgile’s consideration a spectrum of practices, each more salacious than the last, from among which he was supposed to indicate what his preference was, Virgile laughed, choking on his own saliva, he went purple and Libero again tried to intervene.

  “Why don’t you leave him alone?”

  and Pierre-Emmanuel protested his good faith and friendship, patting Virgile on the shoulder, who hastened to support him.

  “Oh, let him be! He’s a good guy, he is.”

  Pierre-Emmanuel was not a good guy, Libero knew very well, but he did not want to be so cruel as to open Virgile’s eyes to his tormentor’s true nature and went back to the counter, hissing between his teeth,

  “Little bastard,”

  bearing the bitter cross of his resentment until closing time. He would go down to the town with Matthieu, who delayed for as long as he could the moment of going back to his childhood bedroom, the exile to which Izaskun’s inconstancy had condemned him, they would do the rounds of the clubs, sometimes sleeping with tourists on the beach or in parking lots, and went back to the village at dawn, drunk as lords, their foreheads pressed against the windshield of their car, as it zigzagged along the edge of the precipice. Toward the end of August Vincent Leandri invited them out to a restaurant and they left Gratas in charge of the bar. The town was beginning to empty of its tourists, a pleasant breeze was blowing over the harbor, life seemed sweet and they were enjoying the relief of spending a whole evening well away from the bar. They were not worrying about what might be going on there and if Gratas and Pierre-Emmanuel were to decide to hold an orgy on the billiard table, they could screw themselves silly as far as they were concerned and good luck to them. They ate lobster and drank white wine and Vincent suggested they go for a drink at the bar owned by the friend who had introduced them to Annie. To get away from the village only to end up in a strip club did not seem like a tremendously appropriate idea but they wanted to oblige Vincent. The friend once again welcomed them with open arms and immediately treated them to a bottle of champagne. In one corner of the room bathed in scarlet light the girls were chatting as they waited for customers. A great fat oaf came in and settled at the other end of the counter, where a girl came and joined him. Snatches of their conversation reached Matthieu, the fat oaf was trying to impress, uttering idiotic remarks and coming out with appalling jokes to which the girl responded with laughter so forced that it sounded almost insulting and Matthieu recognized Rym’s voice. It was her indeed, in a black dress and high-heeled shoes, her face disfigured by makeup. Matthieu pointed her out to Libero and they were about to get up from their stools to go and greet her when she stopped them in their tracks by focusing a fixed stare on them before slowly turning away and starting to laugh again as if nothing had happened. They did not stir. The champagne was growing warm in their glasses. The fat oaf ordered a bottle and went to get comfortable in a private alcove. Rym prepared a tray, an ice bucket and two glasses, and went to join him there. She gave Matthieu and Libero one last look before drawing shut a pair of thick red curtains.

  “Let’s go.”

  In the car Vincent tried to be reassuring, that’s how life was, there was not much to be done about it and still less to be said, girls like that didn’t generally make it to Buckingham Palace, very rarely, in fact, and though one could deplore it, that’s how it was, nobody was to blame. Life. Libero’s jaw was clenched.

  “They’re all going to end up like that. All of them.”

  He turned to Matthieu.

  “We did that.”

  Matthieu was afraid he was right. The demiurge is not God. That is why there is no one to absolve him for the sins of the world.

  That time was gone: he could no longer go to her in the night, walking softly along the empty corridors at the Hotel d’État; she no longer waited for him to come with a pounding heart. The moments they now spent together were heavy with the weight of other people’s stares. From time to time they went to spend the day at Tipasa, to get away from Algiers. They stopped for a meal at Bou-Haroun, the purplish fish innards on the stones of the quayside were boiling in the sun and the slightest breeze drove a miasma of decay toward the restaurant terraces, but they went on eating and refilled their glasses with red wine served in Coca-Cola bottles. In the afternoon they would walk around the site together, occasionally stepping on a used contraceptive left behind by a couple who, like them, had no bedroom as a haven for their embraces, but they did not seek to emulate these al fresco raptures, for something that might have passed for a blissful act of transgression by lovers became here nothing more than the mark of sordid necessity. The month of August had just ended, a month of scorching heat, fish innards and humidity, a month without love. Aurélie understood that there was only one place where she could live out her relationship with Massinissa in freedom and that place was neither France nor Algeria, it was located in time, not space, and did not lie within the limits of this world. It was a part of the fifth century that lived on in the collapsed stones of Hippo, where Augustine’s shade still celebrated the secret weddings of those who were dear to him
and could not achieve union anywhere else. Aurélie was sad, she had never been one whose passions were swiftly aroused, sentimentality appalled her, but she would dearly have loved to know where this affair might lead her. She was ready to accept all setbacks, provided they were to herself and she found it particularly painful to have to give in to the harsh reality of facts that corresponded to no one’s intention. For she had no other choice but to give in. Once more the frontier of a transparent glass wall arose around her which she still had not the power either to pass through or to break down, although this might now be her dearest wish. Massinissa would take her out to eat kebabs with him in the Draria district, they would sit down in the family room of a working-class restaurant, where the service was much too fast and efficient and the meal did not last more than a quarter of an hour, which they tried to prolong by drinking their mint tea as slowly as possible, and Massinissa would pay, and they would drive around in Algiers, at the road blocks the police checked their papers, looked them up and down with a mocking air and he drove her back to the hotel where he could not follow her. She wanted to give him a treat and invited him to the Chinese restaurant at the Hotel El Djazaïr. It was an appalling evening. Aurélie decided not to send back the third bottle of corked Médéa. Massinissa, petrified at first, was now darting furious looks at the waiter as he set down their chicken spring rolls in front of them, wearing a most unpleasant, enigmatic grin, Massinissa was convinced he was mocking him, and only addressing him as “Monsieur” with such emphasis to make him feel that, despite the presence of the Frenchwoman, he was a mere peasant. He was getting angrier and angrier,

  “You don’t know these bastards and their contempt. That flunkey, he’s so damned pleased with himself,”

  he did not touch the food on his plate and in the end Aurélie called for the bill, which she paid with her credit card. The waiter presented her with the voucher for her to sign, while grinning at Massinissa who grabbed hold of his waistcoat discreetly and said something to him in Arabic. The waiter’s grin vanished. They went back to their car. Massinissa went on brooding bitterly.

  “I couldn’t afford to take you to a restaurant like that. Entrées costing five hundred dinars. And those are not places for me, in any case.”

  Aurélie understood him. She squeezed up against him in the car. She managed to persuade him to let her pay for a room for him in the same hotel as herself, so that they could spend a night together, they would pretend not to know one another, he would come to her room silently, as at Annaba, but she could clearly see that he felt deeply ashamed of his situation as a kept man and felt this shame affecting his desire at the very moment when he took her in his arms. After two days Massinissa returned to his parents’ home. That was how it was. The dig was finished, they had slowly returned to their respective worlds and they were reaching out to one another across an abyss that nothing could bridge. It is an illusion to believe that one can choose one’s native land. Aurélie had no links with this country, apart from the blood her grandfather, André Degorce, had caused to flow there and the elusive remains of an old bishop, dead many centuries before. She brought the date of her departure forward and packed her bags without saying anything to Massinissa. What could she have said to him? How do you walk away from a person with whom you have no quarrel, whom you wish you did not have to walk away from? What could they have done other than exchange foolish remarks? And she was afraid that if she saw him again her desire to remain with him might persuade her to postpone her departure pointlessly. She did not leave him a letter. She did not want to leave him anything other than her absence, because it was by her absence that she would always haunt Massinissa, just as a kiss from a vanished princess forever haunted the Numidian king who bore his name. She called her mother to say she would be in Paris that evening. At the airport she did not allow herself the least gloom as she went through the departure routines. She looked at the Balearic Islands through the window and when she saw the coast of Provence she dried her reddened eyes. Claudie had prepared a meal for her.

  “Are you alright, Aurélie? You look tired.”

  She replied that everything was fine, kissed her mother and went to sleep in her childhood room. At four o’clock in the morning the ringing of her cell phone brought her out of a dream in which a strange wind was blowing across her body and slowly burying her beneath the sand and she knew she ought to seek shelter but did not want to withdraw from the warm caress of this wind, a caress so gentle that she was still thinking about it as she picked up the telephone. She heard gasps, sobs, choking and then Matthieu’s voice.

  “Aurélie! Aurélie!”

  He kept saying her name over and over again and could not stop weeping.

  There were no barbarian hordes. Not a single Vandal or Visigoth horseman. It was just that Libero no longer wanted to run the bar. He would wait till the end of the summer season or until mid-autumn, he would find work for the girls, a proper job, and then he would help his brother, Sauveur, and Virgile Ordioni on the farm, or he would go back to his studies, he didn’t know, but he no longer wanted to run the bar. He didn’t like what it had become. Matthieu felt as if he had been betrayed. What was he to do? Libero shrugged his shoulders.

  “Can you see yourself spending a lifetime here? The procession of girls trooping through, always the same stupid girls. The little bastards like Colonna. The drunks. The hangovers. It’s a crap job. A job that turns you into an idiot. You can’t live off human idiocy. I thought you could, but you can’t because you end up even more idiotic than the rest. Honestly, Matthieu, can you see yourself staying here? in five years’ time? Ten years?”

  But Matthieu could see himself staying there perfectly well. In fact he was utterly incapable of imagining a different future. It was true the summer season had been difficult, but they were over the worst now. They couldn’t just walk away like that, after all, it was good what they’d done for the village, everything had been so dead before, they’d brought life back to it, people came now, they were happy, they couldn’t chuck it all in just because of one rather difficult season.

  “The people you’re talking about are suckers who come here and spend all their cash to get laid by girls they’re never going to get laid by anyway, and who are too stupid to go straight to the whores. Sometimes I think I prefer things here when it’s dead. And anyway I’m tired. And I want to be able to look myself in the eye in the mirror.”

  What was all this nonsense about not being able to look himself in the eye in a mirror? Was the wretched state of things in the world their fault? They were neither crooks nor pimps and, even if they closed the bar, lots of girls would still be going on the game. If Rym had finally found her vocation as a whore what could they do about it? Wasn’t this a tendency they all had anyway, like Izaskun?

  “Don’t talk shit, Matthieu. Not you.”

  It was the last Saturday evening in August. Pierre-Emmanuel’s friends from Corte had come to take part in a big late night concert. They set up the sound system on the terrace, the customers took their seats and Virgile Ordioni unloaded the charcuterie from his van. At half past midnight the musicians put down their instruments and left the stage to applause. They positioned themselves at the counter beside Virgile, who was drinking eau de vie in a corner while waiting for Libero to have a little time to come and keep him company. Pierre-Emmanuel patted Virgile on the shoulder.

  “Well, well, what a pleasure to see you! Bernard, a drink for me, and a drink for my friend Virgile!”

  Libero was out on the terrace chatting with a family of Italians. From time to time he glanced inside the bar. When Izaskun passed close by Pierre-Emmanuel he caught her by the waist and kissed her on the neck. She gave a shrill little cry. Libero went inside.

  “Izaskun, get on with your work, damn it. Bernard, you go and deal with the sandwiches on the terrace. I’m taking over from you.”

  Libero sat down on the stool behind the till and leaned over toward Pierre-Emmanuel.

  “
I’ve told you a hundred times. Let her get on with her work and wait till closing time before you get off. That’s not too difficult to understand, is it?”

  Pierre-Emmanuel put his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

  “Ah! It’s so hard when you’re in love! Have you ever been in love, Virgile? Tell us about it.”

  And now all the men from Corte insisted on hearing about Virgile Ordioni’s love life, he laughed and said there wasn’t much to tell, but they refused to believe him, it wasn’t true, they were sure Virgile was a great lady-killer, go on, tell, Virgile, no need to be shy, he was among friends, how did he snare his women? Did he sweet talk them? On the dance floor maybe? Oh yes! Poetry! He wrote poetry for them, that was it, wasn’t it? Come on, they wanted to know, they’d be happy with one conquest, just one, for instance, why didn’t he tell them about the very latest woman to succumb to his charms, just one conquest, that wasn’t too much to ask, was it? he could tell his friends everything, but perhaps he was shy, he needed a more congenial setting for spilling the beans, all he had to do was to come down to a club with them, and then he could tell them all over a good bottle, no? He would tell them all, wouldn’t he? how he’d seduced her, what he’d done to her in bed, whether she’d yelled out, but the only snag was that they wouldn’t let him into a club looking like that, not with his great mountain boots, at any rate, no way, and in his work clothes too, that wouldn’t do at all, there were rules, it was no joke, and then, in any case, all things considered, it’d be a mistake to take a lady-killer like Virgile into a club, he’d help himself to all the available women in no time at all and there wouldn’t be a single one left for anyone else! After all, you have to leave some for the others! It was only fair. You mustn’t be selfish, you’ve got to think about people who’ve come a long way, all the way from Corte, it wasn’t very good manners not to give them a chance, they’d never come there again, no, so after all it wouldn’t be a very good idea to take him to a club, and Virgile was still laughing and saying he’d be glad to tell them, if only he had something to tell. Libero heaved a sigh.