The Sermon on the Fall of Rome Page 4

  Early in July when Matthieu and Libero arrived in the village from Paris with their degrees under their belts, Bernard Gratas had not yet embarked on the outward transformation that would soon be symptomatic of a more substantial and irreversible inner turmoil. Standing there behind the counter, sober and upright, a cloth in his hand, close beside his wife, who watched over the till, he appeared immune to any conceivable form of turmoil, something Libero summed up in a single concise observation:

  “Well, he looks like a total asshole.”

  But neither he nor Matthieu had plans to embark on any bond of friendship with Gratas and were too happy to be on vacation to take any more interest in the matter. They began going out every evening. They met girls. They took them for midnight bathes and sometimes brought them up to the village. They went down again with them at dawn and combined this with drinking coffee at the harbor. The cruise liners unloaded their monstrous cargoes of human flesh. Everywhere there were people, shorts, flip-flops, and cries of wonder to be heard, as well as inane remarks. Everywhere there was life, too much life. And they watched this swarming life with an unutterable sense of superiority and relief, as if it were not of the same species as their own, because they were at home on the island, even if they, too, had to go back in September. Matthieu had never known anything else apart from these perpetual comings and goings but it was the first time Libero had returned after such a long absence. His parents had migrated there from the Barbaggia district of Sardinia in the 1960s like so many others, but he himself had never set foot there. He only knew it from his mother’s recollections, a wretched land, old women with veils carefully knotted below their lower lips, men with leather gaiters, whose limbs, ribcages and skulls had been measured by generations of Italian criminologists, carefully noting the imperfections in the bone structure so as to decode its secret language and identify within it the undoubted traces of a natural propensity for crime and savagery. A vanished land. A land that no longer concerned him. Libero was the youngest of eleven brothers and sisters, of whom Sauveur, the eldest, was nearly twenty-five years his senior. Libero had never known the hatred and insults that awaited the Sardinian immigrants here, the poorly paid work, the contempt, the half-drunk driver of the school bus who used to hit children when they passed by close to him, remarking,

  “There’s nothing but Sardinians and Arabs in this country these days!”

  and who would dart murderous looks at them in his rearview mirror.

  Times change, the terrorized children who used to lie low at the back of the bus, their heads huddled into their shoulders, had grown into men and the driver had died without anyone thinking of paying his grave the tribute of spitting on it. Libero felt at home. He had not only a complete but a quite brilliant school career behind him and after his baccalaureate exams all his applications for admission to a senior preparatory class at the university had been accepted and his mother had almost suffocated with happiness, even though she had not the least idea what a senior preparatory class was, as well as suffocating Libero for good measure by hugging him to her enormous bosom, now swollen with emotion and pride. Libero had chosen to go to Bastia and for two years every Monday morning one or other of his brothers and sisters would get up in the middle of the night to drive him to Porto-Vecchio where he caught the bus. In Paris Matthieu had asked his parents to let him join the course at Bastia as well. They would have agreed but his exam results were not such that he could contemplate this, as he himself had to concede. So he enrolled at Paris IV University to read philosophy, the only subject in which he had done reasonably well, and resigned himself to traveling by subway every morning to the hideous complex at the Porte de Clignancourt. His conviction that he was a temporary recluse in a foreign world that only existed in parenthesis did not help him to make friends. He felt as if he were rubbing shoulders with ghosts with whom he had nothing in common and whom, what is more, he considered to be insufferably arrogant, as if the fact of studying philosophy conferred on them the privilege of understanding the meaning of a world in which the ordinary run of mortals were simply content to survive. Despite this, he formed a bond with one of his fellow students, Judith Haller, with whom he worked from time to time, and with whom he went to the movies occasionally, or to have a drink in the evening. She was extremely intelligent and ebullient and the fact that she was not particularly good looking would not have been enough to put Matthieu off, but he found it impossible, at least here in Paris, to fall in love with anyone at all, because he was not destined to remain there and did not want to lie to anyone. And thus it was that, in the name of a future as insubstantial as mist, he deprived himself of the present, as so often happens with men, if the truth be told. One evening they were drinking and talking until late in a bar on the Place de la Bastille and Matthieu let the time for the last subway slip by. Judith offered to put him up and he walked home with her, after sending a text to his mother. Judith lived in a wretched chambre de bonne on the sixth floor of a block of apartments in the twelfth arrondissement. She left the light off, put on some soft music and lay down on the bed, in T-shirt and pants, facing the window. When Matthieu lay down beside her, fully dressed, she turned to him without saying a word, he could see her eyes shining in the darkness, it seemed to him as if she were smiling a trembling smile and he could hear her deep, heavy breathing and was moved by it, he knew that all he needed to do was to reach out his hand and caress her for something to happen, but he could not, it was as if he had already abandoned and betrayed her, he was paralyzed with guilt and did not stir, simply facing her and looking into her eyes until her smile vanished and they both fell asleep. He cared for her as he would for a future possibility in his life. Sometimes, when they were drinking coffee together, he imagined lifting his hand to stroke her cheek, he could sometimes almost picture this notional hand traveling up unhurriedly through the transparent air and brushing against a lock of Judith’s hair before alighting on her face, whose warmth he felt in the hollow of his palm, as she gently let it happen, suddenly so solemn and silent, and he was aware, so strongly that his real heart began thumping, that he was not going to leap across the abyss that lay between him and this possible world, because, in attaining it, he would also destroy it. It was a world that could only endure in this fashion, halfway between being and nothingness, and Matthieu carefully held it there, in a complex mesh of unfulfilled acts, desire, revulsion and flesh not to be touched, without knowing that, years later, the collapse of the world he was soon going to choose to bring into existence would restore him to Judith, as to a lost home, and that he would then reproach himself for having been so cruelly mistaken about where his destiny lay. But for the moment Judith was not his destiny and he did not want her to become it, she remained simply an inoffensive and gentle pretext for dreaming, thanks to whom the barely perceptible passage of time that so stifled him, dragging him along so slowly, occasionally became swifter and lighter, and when two years had passed and the question came up of where Libero would now enroll for his studies, Matthieu was grateful to Judith, as if she had enabled him to escape from the viscous clutches of a time that never ended, which, but for her, would have held him captive. Matthieu hoped that Libero would come to Paris to continue his studies, he had such high hopes of this that he did not for a moment imagine things turning out differently, given that reality must inevitably, at least from time to time, correspond to what he hoped for. So he was seriously put out to learn that Libero was going to study literature at Corte, not from choice, but because the Pintus family did not have the means to send him to the mainland. Matthieu now had no further doubt that a malign and perverse divinity governed events here on earth in a way that was transforming his life into a long series of misfortunes and undeserved disappointments and he would doubtless have gone on believing this for a long time if an initiative of his mother’s had not led him to question this disturbing hypothesis. Claudie had come to sit beside him as he brooded there gloomily, in the middle of the living room, s
o that nobody should escape the spectacle of his misery, studying him with an amused compassion he had been on the brink of taking offense at. But he did not have time. First she smiled at him.

  “We’re going to invite Libero to come and stay here with us. In Aurélie’s room. What do you think about that?”

  That summer, just as he had done at the age of eight, he went with her to see the Pintus family. Gavina Pintus was still sitting on her deckchair, surrounded by fresh piles of rubble. She invited them inside to drink coffee and they sat there around the vast table that Matthieu now knew so well. Libero had joined them. Claudie spoke and Matthieu heard his mother speaking in the language he did not understand although he knew it was his own, she took Gavina Pintus’s hand. The latter shook her head in refusal and Claudie leaned toward her and went on talking without Matthieu being able to do anything other than guess at what she was saying,

  “You took my son in, as if he were your own, now it’s our turn. No one’s offering you charity. It’s our turn,”

  and she went on talking with tireless force of conviction until Matthieu understood, on seeing Libero’s face light up into a smile, that she had obtained what she had come for.

  At first there was a festive air about Bernard Gratas’s way of the cross. Matthieu and Libero were back in Paris at work on their dissertations when he began organizing poker games every week in the back room at the bar. It is highly unlikely that Bernard Gratas would have taken such an initiative on his own. It had doubtless been suggested to him by someone who needed to remain anonymous but had plainly grasped that here was a sucker whose dearest and most urgent desire was to be fleeced. These games met with great success once word got around in the area that Gratas was a player as terrible as he was rash, and one, what’s more, who believed that poker was a game of chance and that one’s luck always turned in the end. He started to smoke cigarillos, but this did not help him at all, any more than the dark glasses that he now wore by day as well as by night. He lost money like a lord, with a style that extended to offering rounds of drinks to his executioners. One day, without any advance warning, his wife and children and the old woman disappeared. When Marie-Angèle heard the news she called on him to offer her sympathy and found him at the bar in a state of remarkable elation. He confirmed that his wife had left, taking all the furniture with her. He was sleeping on a mattress, which she had grudgingly agreed to leave behind for him. Marie-Angèle was about to make a few suitable remarks when he observed roundly that it was the best thing that had ever happened to him, he was finally rid of a scold and three brats who were as thick as they were ungrateful, not to mention the old woman who, before declining into senility and incontinence, had made his life a misery by doling out generous helpings of spite, being quite unbelievably wicked, so wicked that he suspected her of secretly relishing the fact that she was now senile and was thus assured of being a real pain in the ass to the end of her days without anyone being able to reproach her for it, and he had no doubt at all that she would live to be a hundred, she was as tough as old boots, he had spent years dreaming about an accident in the home or euthanasia, without ever saying a word, stoically enduring a life he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, but that was all over and now it was time to live, he had no intention of missing out on this, he would be able to express his true personality at last, the one he’d always kept hidden deep inside him, out of weariness, out of disgust, out of cowardice, but he was through with knuckling under, he was being reborn, and he told Marie-Angèle that it was thanks to her that he now felt at home there, surrounded by dear friends, his wife could snuff it for all he cared, that was no concern of his now, he’d won the right to be selfish, won it the hard way, and never, ever, had he felt so happy, for now he was truly happy, he kept on repeating, with evident and almost pathological sincerity, fixing on Marie-Angèle a look so overcome with gratitude that she was afraid he might hurl himself at her and hug her in his arms, which he was obviously restraining himself from doing, contenting himself with saying thank you but without being able to admit that he was above all grateful to her for having given birth to Virginie, with whom he had for the past few weeks been having the affair that had finally made a happy man of him. And never has happiness been more ostentatious. Bernard Gratas was forever laughing loudly at the slightest provocation, he was bursting with energy, constantly rushing back and forth between the counter and the main bar area without ever showing the least sign of fatigue or drunkenness, even though he had now started drinking like a fish, he heaped totally misplaced marks of affection on his customers and lost money with visible delight, there was something profoundly disturbing about the spectacle of his euphoria, it was as if it could only be the symptom of an appalling psychic sickness, and it inspired fears that it might be contagious. The more attentive and friendly Bernard Gratas appeared, the more people turned away from him in distaste, without his seeming to be aware of it, so resolved was he now to live in a world ruled only by illusion. But, alas, it seems the rule of illusion can never be perfect, and even a man like Bernard Gratas must have vaguely sensed that none of all this was real, as he staggered beneath the weight of a certain knowledge that he could neither eradicate nor put into words, but could only run away from by parading his happiness with grotesque, desperate stubbornness, and he could not understand why he sometimes woke up in the night, his heart thumping with anguish because on that day in June, after he had asked Virginie to come and live with him, she had replied with a disdainful shrug of her shoulders that he was out of his mind and she never wanted to see him again, after which she went and sat on the terrace in the sun and ordered a cold drink from him, which he served without saying a word. The very thing he had striven to escape from had just caught up with him and broken him. Virginie threw him an irritated glance.

  “Don’t make that face. You look ridiculous.”

  He went on with his work normally for several days, as if carried along by an absurd momentum, and then one evening, at apéritif time, when the bar was full of customers, he burst into tears and paraded his unhappiness, just as he had done his happiness, with the same shameless candor, loudly evoking, between sobs, the perfection of Virginie’s naked body, and her sulky queen’s inscrutable fixed stare as he sweated away at coming in and out of her with all his might without ever managing to extract so much as a sigh from her, as if she were merely a witness to a scene she was following with keen attention, but which only concerned her vaguely, and he wept as he recalled how the more fervently he loved her, the more fixed and hard her gaze became from beneath those long eyelashes that betrayed not a flicker and he felt himself both humiliated and mesmerized by this look of hers that transformed him into a laboratory animal without his arousal growing any the less, quite the contrary, he said, sniffing noisily, he was more and more aroused, and in the bar the first murmurs of disapproval began to be heard, someone shouted at him to get a grip on himself, and then to shut his trap, but he could not be quiet, he was now out of reach of shame, his face glistening with tears and snot and, as he came out with specific, distasteful details, talking about the way Virginie, without taking her eyes off him, would press the palm of her hand against his back and draw her outstretched middle finger slowly down his spine, while fixing him now with a kind of sorrowful contempt that he recognized every time with terror, knowing that it would soon be impossible for him to stop himself coming and, as the appalled assembled company continued to follow the descent of this indecent middle finger, guessing all too well at its inexorable destination, and was already resigning itself to enduring the detailed description of a Bernard Gratas orgasm, Vincent Leandri went up to him, slapped him twice and dragged him outside by the arm. Bernard Gratas was now on his knees on the asphalt and no longer weeping. He looked at Vincent.