The Sermon on the Fall of Rome Read online

  “I’ve lost everything. I’ve screwed up my whole life.”

  Vincent did not reply. He was trying to mobilize all his faculties for compassion, but still wanted to hit him. He offered him a handkerchief.

  “You’ve slept with her as well. I know you have. How could she do this?”

  Vincent squatted down beside him.

  “If you thought you and Virginie were a couple, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you were. Stop boring the pants off everyone with your tale. Pull yourself together.”

  Bernard Gratas shook his head.

  “I’ve screwed up my whole life.”

  In the end Libero found reasons of his own for loathing Paris which owed nothing to Matthieu. And thus it was that every evening and every morning, side by side in a crowded carriage on Line 4, both of them would be sunk in irremediable bitterness, although this had different significance for each of them. For Libero had at first believed he had gained admission to the very throbbing heart of learning, as an initiate who has triumphed in tests beyond the comprehension of common mortals, he could not set foot inside the great hall of the Sorbonne without feeling overcome by the apprehensive pride that signals the presence of the gods. For at his back came his illiterate mother, his brothers, who were tillers of the land and shepherds, and all his ancestors, prisoners of the pagan darkness of Barbaggia, all aquiver with joy in the depths of their graves. He had faith in the eternity of things eternal, in their steadfast nobility, which is inscribed upon the monumental pediment of a pure and lofty heaven. Then he lost his faith. He was taught ethics by an extraordinarily verbose and amiable young graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, who discussed texts with a nonchalance so brilliant it was nauseating, bombarding his students with decisive observations about absolute evil that would not have been disavowed by a village priest, albeit decked out with a generous helping of references and quotations, which did nothing to compensate for their conceptual emptiness or to conceal their absolute triviality. And, to crown it all, what this wallowing in moralism was simply designed to serve was an utterly cynical ambition, it was palpably obvious that for him the university was merely a necessary but insignificant stage on a road that would lead him to the crowning glory of appearing on television talk shows where, in the company of similar creatures, he would publicly debase the name of philosophy, before the delighted gaze of uncultured and gleeful presenters, for Libero was no longer in any doubt that the media and commerce had now taken the place of thought, and he was like a man who, after unbelievable striving, has just won a fortune in a currency that is no longer valid. It is true that the attitude of this Normalien was not typical of that of the other teachers, who fulfilled their task with an austere integrity that won them Libero’s respect. He had boundless admiration for the doctoral student who, every Thursday from six to eight p.m., dressed in beige corduroy pants and a bottle green jacket with gilded buttons that looked as if it had come from a Stasi surplus shop and bore witness to his indifference to material goods, would comment imperturbably on Book Gamma of the Metaphysics of Aristotle in front of a meager audience of persistent and attentive students of ancient Greek philosophy. But the atmosphere of devotion that prevailed in the dusty lecture room on Staircase C to which they had been relegated could not conceal the extent of their defeat, they were all losers, beings who had failed to adapt, and would soon be incomprehensible, the survivors of a sly apocalypse which had decimated the ranks of their fellow students and brought low the temples of the divinities they worshipped, the light of which had once shone around the world. For a long time Libero felt affection for his comrades in misfortune. They were honorable men. Their shared defeat was their badge of honor. It ought to be possible to act as if nothing had happened, to continue leading a life resolutely behind the times, completely devoted to the veneration of relics that have been profaned. Libero still believed the honorable nature of such a life was inscribed on the monumental pediment of a pure and lofty heaven and it mattered little that its existence was known to no one. One must turn aside from those moral and political questions that are corrupted by the poison of topicality, and take refuge in the arid deserts of metaphysics, in the company of authors who were never likely to be tarnished by media attention. He decided to do his dissertation on Augustine. Matthieu, whose steadfast friendship often took the form of sycophantic approval, chose Leibniz and lost himself without conviction in the giddy labyrinths of the divine intellect, in the shadow of the unimaginable pyramid of possible worlds in which his hand, multiplied to infinity, finally made contact with Judith’s cheek. Libero read the four sermons on the fall of Rome, feeling as if he were performing an act of supreme resistance and also read The City of God, but as the nights drew in the last of his optimism became dissolved in the mist and rain that bore down on the damp pavements. Everything was sad and dirty, nothing was written in heaven but promises of storms and drizzle and his band of resistance fighters now became as loathsome as the conquerors, they were not villains but clowns and failures, and he the first among them, who had been trained to produce dissertations and commentaries as useless as they were irreproachable, for the world might still have need of Augustine and Leibniz, but it had no use at all for the wretched authors of critical commentaries and Libero was now filled with contempt for himself and for his teachers, scholars and philistines alike, as well as for his fellow pupils, beginning with Judith Haller, whom he reproached Matthieu for continuing to see, on the grounds that when she was not being stupid she was being pedantic, nothing escaped the furious outbursts of his contempt, not even Augustine, whom he could no longer abide, now he was certain he had understood him better than ever before. He now saw him as nothing more than an uncivilized barbarian who rejoiced in the fall of the Empire because it marked the arrival of the world of mediocrities and triumphant slaves, of which he was a part, his sermons were dripping with vengeful and perverse relish, there was the ancient world of gods and poets disappearing before his eyes, swamped by Christianity with its repellent cohort of ascetics and martyrs, and there was Augustine concealing his glee beneath hypocritical accents of wisdom and compassion that smacked of village priests. Libero finished his dissertation as best he could in such a state of moral exhaustion that continuing his studies had become impossible. When he learned that Bernard Gratas had completed his descent into destitution with a fine flourish, he knew that a unique opportunity beckoned and told Matthieu that they absolutely must take on the management of the bar. Matthieu was quite naturally all in favor. When they reached the village, at the beginning of summer, Bernard Gratas had just informed Marie-Angèle that, because of undeserved but consistent losses at poker, he would be unable to pay the management fee and the fresh slaps Vincent Leandri dealt him made no difference. Marie-Angèle received the news stoically. Having abandoned all hope of improving the situation, she went so far as to consider that, rather than resuming charge of the bar herself, she might leave its management to Gratas until September, so that he could pay her at least a part of what he owed her. Libero and Matthieu came to see her and offered their services. She freely recognized that it would be hard for them to do worse than their predecessors. But where could they find the money? She trusted them, she had known them since they were children and knew they had no intention of cheating her, but the fact was that she had to eat and she absolutely had to be paid in advance. By going and making his case to his brothers and sisters, Libero managed to put together two thousand euros. Matthieu announced his plan one evening in July at the family supper table. Claudie and Jacques laid down their spoons. His grandfather went on drinking his soup with meticulous care.

  “Do you think we’re going to give you money so you can abandon your studies and manage a bar? Do you seriously think that?”

  Matthieu attempted to make his case, offering arguments he judged to be irrefutable, but his mother cut him off brutally.

  “Hold your tongue.”

  She was pale with fury.

  “Lea
ve the table at once. I want you out of my sight.”

  He felt humiliated but obeyed her without a word. He called his sister to angle for her support but could not get her to understand. Aurélie burst out laughing.

  “What a load of nonsense. Did you really think Maman was going to jump for joy?”

  Again Matthieu tried to defend himself. She would not listen.

  “It’s time you grew up. You’re starting to be a bore.”

  He went to see Libero to give him the bad news and they got gloomily drunk together. When Matthieu woke up, about noon the next day, with a bad headache, due as much to despair as to drink, his grandfather was seated at his bedside. Matthieu sat up painfully. Marcel was looking at him with unaccustomed benevolence.

  “So you want to settle down here and look after the bar, do you, my boy?”

  Matthieu assented with a vague nod of his head.

  “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll pay the fee and the rent for this year and I’ll pay it again next year. After that you’ll get nothing, nothing at all, not a cent. That, my boy, will give you two years to prove your worth.”

  Matthieu flung his arms around his neck. The week that followed was apocalyptic. Claudie made a terrible scene. She accused Marcel of spite and sabotage in aggravating circumstances with malice aforethought, he was only helping his grandson because he hated him and wanted to see him ruin his life, purely for the satisfaction of proving he hadn’t been mistaken about him, and as for the other young idiot, who was over the moon about it, he understood nothing and was cheerfully hurling himself into the abyss, like the stupid little idiot that he was, and in vain Marcel protested his good faith, it did no good, she pilloried him, yelling that one way or another he would pay for his infamous conduct, and she said the same to Marie-Angèle, turning up at her house without warning and creating a scandal by asking her if it was to console herself for having given birth to a whore that she was setting out to lead other people’s children astray, but that did no good and in the end Claudie calmed down and halfway through July Matthieu and Libero took over the bar, having magnanimously engaged Gratas to do the dishes. Libero walked over to behind the counter. He examined the colorful row of bottles, the sinks, the cash register, and felt he belonged there. This was a valid currency. Everyone understood the point of it and had faith in it. That was what gave it its value and no other chimerical value system on earth, as in heaven, could be opposed to it. Libero no longer wanted to resist. And, while Matthieu was fulfilling his life’s dream by laying waste with savage joy to the lands of his past with fire and the sword, and instantly erasing the messages of support and regret that Judith persisted in sending him, be happy, when shall I see you again? don’t forget me, as if he could thus expel her from his dream, Libero had long since ceased dreaming. He admitted defeat and was now giving his assent, a sorrowful, total, desperate assent, to the world’s stupidity.

  “You, see yourself for what you are.

  For it is necessary for the fire to come”

  The mountains hide the open sea, however, rearing up with all their inert mass against Marcel and his steadfast dreams. From the courtyard at the primary school in Sartène all he can make out is the headland at the end of the gulf that reaches deep into the land where the sea looks like a vast lake, peaceful and insignificant. He does not need to see the sea in order to dream, Marcel’s dreams are nourished neither by contemplation nor by metaphor but by struggle, waging an unceasing fight against the inertia of things that all resemble one another, as if, beneath the apparent diversity of their shapes, they were all made of the same heavy, viscous, malleable stuff, even the water in the rivers is murky and on the empty beaches the lapping of the waves gives off a sickly smell of marshland, one needs to struggle not to become inert oneself, allowing oneself to be slowly engulfed, as if by a quicksand, and still Marcel wages his unceasing battle against the forces unleashed within his own body, against the demon striving to pin him down on his bed, his mouth full of ulcers, his tongue eaten away by the flow of acidic juices, as if a gimlet had gouged out a well of exposed flesh within his chest and stomach, he fights against despair at being perpetually pinned to a bed moist with sweat and blood, against time wasted, he fights against his mother’s weary look, against his father’s silent resignation, as he waits for the moment when he will regain both his strength and the right to be there in the courtyard at the primary school in Sartène, his view blocked by the barrier of the mountains. He is the first and only one of his brothers and sisters to continue his studies into secondary school and neither the demons within his body nor the inertia of things will stop him continuing with them as far as the teacher training college and well beyond, for he has no desire to be a teacher, he has no desire to dish out useless lessons to poor, dirty children whose terrified gaze would drive him back to the disarray of his own childhood, he has no desire to leave his village only to bury himself in another desperately similar village, perched like a tumor on the soil of an island where nothing changes, for the truth is that nothing there does change, nor will it ever change. His brother, Jean-Baptiste, has been sending money from Indochina and has bought his parents a house large enough for all the members of the family to stay there in the summer without being obliged to sleep squeezed up against one another like livestock in a cowshed. Marcel has his own room, but the layers of peeling skin still cling to his father’s dry lips and his mother’s brow is still knitted by the deep, rectilinear furrow of mourning, they look neither younger nor older than fifteen years ago, just after the world ended, and when he studies his own figure in the mirror he has the feeling that he was born like this, thin and shaky, and that his childhood has set its cruel stamp on him from which nothing can free him. Jean-Baptiste kept changing in the photographs he used to send because he lived in a part of the world where the passage of time still left tangible traces, he would grow visibly fatter, then, just as brutally became thin, as if his body were being constantly upset by the powerful, anarchic ebb and flow of life itself, he would pose at attention with an impeccably trim uniform and hair, or else half undressed, with his kepi on the back of his head, with a background of unfamiliar vegetation, in the company of other soldiers and girls dressed in silk, his face was bloated by fat and plenty, or hollowed out by weariness, debauchery or fever, but always the same mocking, gleeful expression could be read there, he adopted the swagger of a pimp and Marcel no longer admired him, he envied him the way he so openly relished the wealth he did not deserve. Everything he saw of his brother had become intolerable to him, his evident taste for whores, his imposing build, his leanness and his fatness, the insolence of his attitude, even his generosity, for all that money could not have been saved out of the pay he received as a chief sergeant, and must certainly be derived from vile trafficking, in money, opium, or human flesh. When Jean-Baptiste came back to the village for Jeanne-Marie’s wedding he was still just as corpulent as on the day of his departure and his face was still lit up by the juvenile expression of the man he had become over there, in those inconceivable lands where the sea foam was translucent and shone in the sunlight like a spray of diamonds, he was surrounded by his wife and children, his sleeves and kepi were decorated with the golden anchor, the badge of the colonial army, but the toxic influence of his native land caused him to revert to what he had never ceased to be, a clumsy, uneducated peasant whom fate had catapulted into a world he did not merit, and neither the cases of champagne he had ordered for his young sister’s wedding nor his ludicrous plan for opening a hotel in Saigon when he left the service would make a whit of difference. They were all wretched peasants, born of a world that had long since ceased to exist, but which clung to the soles of their shoes like mud, the viscous and malleable stuff they themselves were formed of, which they carried with them everywhere they went, whether to Marseille or Saigon, and Marcel knows he is the only one who can really escape from it. The beignets were too dry and covered in a layer of hardened sugar, the tepid blandness of the champagn
e left a taste of ashes in the mouth and the men sweated under the summer sun, but Jeanne-Marie radiated a timid joy, and the veil of satin and white lace that emphasized the oval of her face gave her the grace of an antique maiden of Judaea. She danced, clinging with all her might to her husband’s shoulders while he wore a grave smile, as if he already knew he would not survive the new war that even now lay in wait for them all. For beyond the barrier of the mountains, beyond the sea, there is a world in turmoil and it is over there, far away from them, without them, that their lives and their future are once again being determined and that is how it has always been. But the hubbub of this world gets lost at sea, long before reaching them and the reverberations that come Marcel’s way are so distant and confused that he cannot bring himself to take them seriously and in the school courtyard at Sartène he shrugs his shoulders with contempt when his friend Sebastien Colonna tries to get him to share his enthusiasm for the ideas of Charles Maurras and talks about the dawn of a new age and the rebirth of the patrie, which, thanks to the Jews and Bolsheviks, has gone to rack and ruin, and Marcel says, What on earth are you talking about? You’ve never seen a Jew or a Bolshevik in your life! shrugging his shoulders with contempt because he does not see how anyone could get fired up like this over the foggy unreality of such abstract notions. What causes Marcel’s pulses to race is the concrete and exquisite thought of soon doing his military service, his level of education will allow him to become an officer, he can already picture the gilded line of his officer cadet’s stripe and when, in a moment of jocularity during the wedding, Jean-Baptiste, his mouth crammed with beignets, saluted him with mock solemnity before ruffling his hair with a laugh, as if he were a ten-year-old, Marcel could not restrain feelings of secret joy over this, which not even the declaration of war took the shine off. Jeanne-Marie came back and settled in the house in the village with Jean-Baptiste’s wife and children. They waited for daily letters from the Maginot Line that spoke of boredom, frustration and victory, Jeanne-Marie’s young husband wrote that he missed her, and that, as the nights grew cold, he was thinking about the warmth of her skin against his own, he was impatient for the Germans to attack so that he could defeat them and return to her, he wrote to say he swore he’d never leave her, no, never, when all this was merely a distant and glorious memory, he’d never leave her. Time passed and he wrote more things to her than he would ever have dared to say to her face, even in whispers, he spoke of her belly arched beneath his caresses, of her thighs, of her breasts, whose whiteness was to die for, and again of the imminent victory, as if the glory of his wife’s body were mingled and even confused with that of the country he was defending, every day he became more exalted, explicit and warlike, and Jeanne-Marie was thrilled by his letters and prayed to God to bring him home soon, with no fear of her wish not being granted. In March 1940 Marcel, having sworn to the army doctor that he had never had the slightest problems with his health, finally leaves his sister, his village and his parents to join a unit of officer cadets in an artillery regiment in Draguignan. Once across the sea, the demon of the ulcer seems to be disabled, deprived of its power to do harm, and for the first time in his life Marcel enjoys a vigor whose existence he had never suspected, he behaves like the diligent pupil he has always been and is deaf to all the rest, failing to hear the roar of the panzers, the smashed trees in the Ardennes forests, the clamor of the flight from Paris and the tears of humiliation, all dreams of victory swept aside by a tempest of defeat, he does not hear Philippe Pétain’s voice speaking of honor and armistice, and as the first letter written by Jean-Baptiste from a German stalag arrives at the village, as well as the telegram informing Jeanne-Marie that she is a widow at twenty-five, Marcel finally hears, without being able to believe it, the unit commander informing the men in his platoon that they will never be commissioned, that they have all been assigned to Maréchal Pétain’s Chantiers de Jeunesse program and grasps that all that he will be is a glorified boy scout singing the Maréchal’s praises and a burning acid rips through his stomach and chest, bringing him to his knees in the midst of his comrades, and in front of the unit commander who watches him vomiting blood into the dust. On leaving the hospital, after being discharged, he goes and settles in Marseille at the home of one of his older sisters and spends whole days lying on his bed, lulled by resentment and nausea, without being able to bring himself to go home to the village, to return to its unchanging embrace of anguish and mourning and he delays his departure, desperately clinging to this vast, dirty city, as if it were to be his salvation. He is convinced that life has run up an immense debt to him, which it can only settle if he remains here, for he knows that once he sets foot on his native soil, all accounts will be canceled, the insults and prejudice, the compensations, and existence will no longer owe him anything. He is waiting for something to happen and he wanders up and down the streets of this city whose vastness and dirtiness frighten him, he glances uneasily toward the harbor, trying to resist the poisonous seduction of homesickness and he stops up his ears, for he is afraid of hearing sweet and beloved voices from beyond the sea, calling on him to return to the limbo he came from. Sebastien Colonna has joined him and every day dozens of his compatriots arrive in Marseille, looking for work there. On the recommendation of an uncle of Sebastien’s, Marcel has been taken on at the Société Genérale bank. But the weeks were going by and still those debts had not been settled. So was this how life settled its debt? Was this how life compensated him for not being an officer, by forcing him to immerse himself in account books that made him choke with boredom, his only permitted respite from them being listening to Sebastien’s interminable harangues on the merits of national revolution, praising the wisdom of God, and the way He helped men to derive edifying and salutary lessons from the worst catastrophes, extolling sacrifice and resignation, for what France needed was brutal medicine to purge herself of the poison that infected her—was this how life did it? So wasn’t life hounding him, with its repeated contempt, straight into the arms of the whore he had decided to accost, both so as to satisfy his desire for knowledge and to seek solace? She had dark, compassionate eyes that shone with a deceptive gentleness that quickly vanished once she was alone with him, and no glimmer now lit up the look she focused on him as he performed his ablutions in a cracked and grimy bidet, she stared at him pitilessly and he trembled with shame, anticipating the bitterness of what he was about to learn and no longer hoping for solace. He climbed after her into sheets that smelled of mold where to the very end he had to tolerate the affront of her impassiveness. He felt the heat at the place where their bellies met and mingled like the cloacae of reptiles, he felt the clamminess of her breasts pressing against his chest, her legs against his own, intolerable images arose in Marcel’s mind, he was an animal, a great voracious, shuddering bird, plunged up to its neck into the entrails of a rotting carcass, for she maintained the obscene impassiveness of a carcass, her dead eyes staring at the ceiling, and in the places where their skins touched, at each point of contact, fluids were being exchanged, transparent lymph, intimate humors, as if, in a hideous metamorphosis, his body were going to retain the imprint of this woman’s body forever, although he would never see her again and did not know her name, and he got up abruptly to dress and leave. He emerged, panting, into the street, alien blood flowed in his veins, the sweat trickling down onto his eyelids no longer smelled the same and he spat on the ground because he did not recognize the taste of his own saliva. He spent weeks anxiously examining his body, every tiny pimple, every rash, feeling he was doomed to get skin infections, thrush, syphilis, gonorrhea, but whatever name were given to the illness that lay in wait for him, that would only be the outward form in which the malady that had him in its grip would declare itself, irremediably, and he pestered the doctors every week until the day arrived when the German army invaded the Free Zone and forced him to abandon his self-obsession. Sebastien Colonna was horrified, fulminating against the Allies’ recklessness and Hitler’s treachery in
not keeping his word, but his confidence in the paternal authority of the Maréchal was manifestly shaken, he was afraid he would be sent to do forced labor in a German factory and said to Marcel, We need to get away from here, we need to leave at once. But boats were no longer leaving the harbor. Sebastien learned from his uncle that a liner was due to leave for Bastia from Toulon in a few days’ time. Marcel and he went there by bus. They saw columns of black smoke arising above the sea, all that was left of the scuttled French fleet was a mass of sheet metal and steel obstructing the harbor, the screaming German Stukas were dive bombing the rare ships that were trying to escape by threading their way between mines and anti-submarine nets, and Sebastien burst into tears. When the dire straits he himself was in eventually struck him as being at least as worthy of interest as the honor of the French navy, he explained to Marcel that it was essential for them to cross into the Italian occupation zone if they wanted to give themselves a chance of getting back home. Marcel replied that he had no money left for further travel and was going to go back to his sister in Marseille but Sebastien said no, this was out of the question, he had some money and would not abandon him, and thus Marcel learned that friendship is a mystery. They managed to reach Nice and were back in their village a week later. Now Jeanne-Marie’s grief has begun to invade the house and hangs there like a fog that nothing will come and dispel. Everything is muted beneath a veil of silence so heavy that Marcel sometimes wakes up with a start, pining for the screaming bombs on Toulon harbor. He gets up to have a drink and finds his father standing in the kitchen, completely unmoving, with a fixed stare and Marcel asks him, Papa, what are you doing here? but receives no reply other than a tilt of the head, which plunges him back into the endless silence. He looks at his father in terror, as he stands there in his rough woolen nightshirt, with his burned eyelids and lashes and his white lips and, despite the panic overcoming him, he cannot look away, he summons up all his strength, edges past him, takes the jug to help himself to water and goes back to bed, vowing never to get up again during the nights that follow, even if he is being tortured by thirst, for he knows he will find his father standing on the same spot, lost to the world, petrified in a woeful stupor, which death itself will not put an end to. Marcel would like to extricate himself from this straitjacket of silence, he hears the great wind of rebellion blowing all around him and is waiting for its bloody squalls to rip the doors and windows off the house to let in fresh air. Sebastien Colonna recounts tales of parachute drops, assassinations with hand grenades, he tells how over in the Alta Rocca region, two Andreani cousins murdered an Italian before joining the maquis, and condemns these futile and criminal acts without realizing that Marcel does not share his disapproval and is already picturing himself taking up arms against the invader. In early February an unknown person began killing lone Italian soldiers, once a week, with relentless regularity. Their bodies would be found, lying in the mud, close to an overturned motorcycle, on mountain roads within a radius of a few miles from the village. They had been brought down by buckshot and sometimes finished off by having their throats cut with a knife, bled like pigs, some of them had been more or less undressed and all of them had been brutally stripped of their shoes. The shoes were nowhere to be found and it was this detail, innocuous in itself, that gave rise to respect and terror in people’s minds, as if the assassin were indulging in a ritual all the more frightening because it was incomprehensible and there were mutterings that this was nothing to do with the maquis, it was the work of a mysterious partisan, a messenger of certain death, a pitiless loner, like the legendary Archangel of the Lord of hosts. With the exception of Sebastien Colonna, whose contempt for Italians was counterbalanced by his admiration for Mussolini and his visceral and passionate penchant for authority, all the young men in the village wanted to join the resistance, so that they, too, might become fearsome killers in the cause of justice. They could no longer tolerate inaction. They met to discuss what they could do, they considered liquidating traitors and collaborators and someone even mentioned Sebastien’s name, but Marcel spoke warmly in his defense and reminded them that he had never harmed anybody. In the end they arranged a nocturnal rendezvous in the mountains with a combat unit and set off from the village at one o’clock in the morning, marching together through the chilly night, borne along by the enthusiasm of their youthful militancy, but when they had got past the school they heard the sound of feet marching in quick time, approaching from a few dozen yards up the hill, whereupon they fled down to the village again and scuttled back into their homes to watch out with thumping hearts for the passing of the Italian patrol, which they never saw because they had run away from the echo of their own footsteps flung back at them by the night’s icy silence. They were crushed by shame. They carefully avoided one another, so as not to have to face up to their dishonor. In the spring the mystery killer was no longer heard of and no one knew whether he had perished or had returned to his dwelling in heaven, there to await the Apocalypse. The mystery was only solved during the September uprising, which, for Marcel, amounted to a few comings and goings in the streets of the village, a useless rifle in his hand. Ange-Marie Ordioni came down from the shepherd’s hut high above the forest of Vaddi Mali where he lived with his wife, leading the primitive life of a Stone Age hunter. He was shod in Italian lace-up boots and wore a military jacket from which he had removed the stripes and epaulets. In the depths of winter his only pair of boots had begun to disintegrate, he was unable to mend them and had no money to buy himself new ones. It had seemed to him quite natural to help himself from the occupying forces, but it had taken him some time to find a pair that fitted him for, despite his caveman build, he had ridiculously small feet. One of the senior figures in the Front National yelled that he was an idiot and a madman and he ought to have him shot on the spot but Ange-Marie gave him a chilling look and remarked that he would do better to keep quiet. In the mountains you need good boots. The French forces arrived in the village, the auxiliary soldiers from North Africa laughed and drank, they sang in Arabic in the streets, Marcel stared in amazement at their shaven heads, the long pigtails of braided hair that hung down the backs of their necks, the Saracen curvature of their knives, and Sebastien said to him, Feast your eyes on what our liberators look like, Moors and Negroes, it’s always the same, to begin with the barbarians lend their services to the Empire, later on they hasten its downfall and destroy it. There’ll be nothing left of us. A few weeks later the two of them were vomiting side by side on board the Liberty Ship taking them to Algiers through the storms. Upsurges of sea water as dense as mud washed away their defilement and froze them to the marrow. In Maison-Carrée, close to Algiers, an officer sat at a desk, his nose buried in a dull register, and informed them of their respective postings with an indifferent air, and there was nothing to show that it was there, behind that desk, that reprieves and death sentences were being decided, for this was the irrevocable place of the parting of the ways, the place where, without appeal, the sheep were separated from the goats, the former to the left, the latter to the right, but nobody asked them to choose between the glory of dying in battle and a life of insignificance, and at the very moment when Sebastien Colonna learned the name of his infantry regiment, he was already embarking on his ineluctable trajectory toward the machine-gun bullets that had always been waiting for him at Monte Cassino. Marcel embraced him as a matter of course, not knowing that all he would ever see of him again was his name, carved in letters of gold by unknown hands on a monument to the dead, as if marble were less perishable than human flesh, and he boarded a train for Tunis. On arrival he learned that he was being sent back with his battery to Casablanca to be trained in operating American anti-aircraft guns and he gave up trying to understand the logic of military postings. The train set off toward the west, hugging the coastline on a long journey that lasted three weeks. He was stretched out beside his comrades in goods wagons with their floors covered in warm straw on which he spent the best part of his time
dozing, only rousing himself from his torpor to play cards or to watch the sad passing of plains and silent towns, not one of which lived up to the promise of his dreams, once more the sea lapped against lackluster shorelines and no trace remained of the marvelous tales that peopled the history books, neither the fire of Baal, nor Scipio’s African legions, there was not one Numidian knight besieging the walls of Cirta to restore Sophonisba’s kiss to Massinissa after she had been stolen from him, both the walls and the men who had laid siege to them had returned to dust and nothingness together, for marble and flesh are equally subject to decay, at Bône all that remained of the cathedral beneath whose vault Augustine had preached and where his last breath was drowned by the clamor of the Vandals, was a wasteland, covered in yellow plants and battered by the wind. He moved into his billet at Casablanca, firmly resolved to redeem himself from his indolence and become a proper soldier, but the Americans were not delivering the anti-aircraft guns and the wait soon became so unbearable that he almost went back to the brothel. He could not bring himself to believe that at this time, when the future of the world was at stake, he had once more been condemned to tedium, and the vastness of the Atlantic brought him no consolation. After a month he heard that they were looking for officers in the service corps and immediately put in an application. If they refused him the satisfaction of fighting, at least he could become what he had always wanted to be. He felt happy at last and remained so until the colonel summoned him to rebuke him for his shameful conduct in unbelievably violent terms, he foamed at the mouth, he banged his fist on his desk, you’re nothing but a little shit heap, Antonetti, a double-dyed coward, and Marcel, distraught, stammered in vain, but, you see, mon colonel, mon colonel, and the colonel bellowed, service corps officer? the service corps? repeating the words “service corps,” as if this were an unspeakable obscenity that soiled his mouth, so you’re scared of fighting, is that it? You’d rather sit there counting pounds of potatoes and pairs of socks? You bastard! You little bastard! And Marcel swore to him that he lived only for fighting but that he had always wanted to become an officer and this had seemed like an opportunity to be seized, but the colonel did not calm down, if you wanted to be an officer you should have come to see me, an artillery officer, sir! an honorable officer! I would have assigned you to a platoon, but the service corps? The service corps, God dammit? Not one of my men will end up in the service corps, do you understand! Now fuck off before I knock your block off! Marcel went out with his stomach on fire, all his hopes ruthlessly swept aside once more, and all he could do was continue to wait for the anti-aircraft guns, which still did not come, until in the end he was posted to the staff of a lieutenant in the service corps without the colonel or anyone else seeing anything at all paradoxical or scandalous in this. He arrived back in France with the lieutenant at the end of 1944 and they made their way slowly northwards several hundred miles behind the front line. Marcel took care of the paperwork and made vile coffee. He never heard the clash of arms. Just once, at Colmar, a few hundred yards from the vehicle he was driving, a stray shell landed, throwing up dust and rubble. Marcel stopped. He looked around him at the town in ruins which no shell could do more to destroy. For several minutes there was a pleasant buzzing in his ears. He turned to the lieutenant and asked him if he was alright and dusted off his sleeve with the flat of his hand, with a little frown, and this was his only feat of arms, the one thing that might help him to think the war had not held him completely at arm’s length. And now the war is over and he is back at the village in the bosom of his family. He lets himself be embraced by his father, who hugs him to himself along with Jean-Baptiste, relaxes his embrace and then draws them to himself again, as if unable to believe that neither of his sons has been taken from him. Jean-Baptiste is radiant and has grown terribly fat. He has spent the last three years of the war on a farm in Bavaria managed by four sisters, he winks whenever he talks about them, after first making sure his wife is not looking his way and Marcel is afraid he wants to get him on his own so he can come out with a flood of smutty confidences. He has no desire to hear these. He is twenty-six. He will never again see the courtyard of the primary school at Sartène, he is too old and, when he takes a look at his hands, he has the feeling that they will soon disintegrate like hands made of sand. In Paris, where she went to look for Jean-Baptiste, Jeanne-Marie has met a young man, much younger than herself, a resistance fighter back from deportation, and announces that she is going to marry him. She is already irremediably worn out by grief and knows it, but she behaves as if she still believed in the future. Marcel resents her making such vain and ludicrous efforts to appear full of life, it pains him to see his sister acting out this masquerade of forgetting, he refuses to pretend to be joyful and all the time she is busying herself with preparations for the wedding he resists her with a stubborn and contemptuous silence. But in the church, as she walks up the aisle to where André Degorce is waiting, slim and youthful in his Saint-Cyr military college uniform, she stops for a moment and turns to Marcel, giving him a childlike smile, and, as if in spite of himself, he can only smile back. This is no charade, she is neither demeaning herself in an act of renunciation nor making a mockery, because the boundless capacity for love that she carries within herself will always preserve her from such things. Marcel feels ashamed of his own sharpness and cynicism and, in that bright morning he feels shame all over again, shame at his own craven heart, his heart filled with darkness, and beside André he feels ashamed of having been such a paltry warrior, ashamed of his contemptible good fortune, ashamed, too, at not even being able to rejoice in it, he views André with jealous respect and is ashamed to be receiving him into this wretched village, all the wedding guests fill him with shame, the Colonna household, still in mourning, and the Susini family, who have allowed their half-wit daughter, pregnant with her umpteenth bastard child, to come with them and Ange-Marie Ordioni, crimson with pride, hugging to his bemedalled chest the big baby boy his wife has just given birth to amid the filth of their shepherd’s hut, he is ashamed of his own parents, of Jean-Baptiste’s obscene and superabundant vitality and of himself, bearing within his breast that craven heart filled with darkness. He watches his sister dancing in André’s arms. The children run around between the rickety tables. Ange-Marie Ordioni gets his son to suck a finger he had dipped in his glass of rosé. Marcel hears the laughter and the accordion playing out of tune, Jean-Baptiste’s stentorian voice. He sits in the sun beside his mother, who takes his hand and shakes her head sadly. She alone does not seem happy to see life resuming its course. For how, indeed, could life be resuming its course when it had not even begun?