The Sermon on the Fall of Rome

by Jérôme Ferrari

  “Then do not feel reluctance, my brothers,

  toward the chastisements of God”

  In the middle of the night, taking good care to make no noise, although there was nobody to hear her, Hayet closed the door of the little apartment she had lived in for eight years above the bar where she worked as a barmaid, and disappeared. Around ten o’clock in the morning the hunters came back from the drive. The hounds on the trucks’ loading bays by the bar, still excited by the chase and the scent of blood, were jostling one another, frantically wagging their tails, moaning and barking hysterically, which the men, almost as happy and over-excited as they were, responded to with oaths and curses, and Virgile Ordioni’s vast frame was convulsed with suppressed laughter, while the others clapped him on the shoulder in congratulation, because he had single-handedly killed three of the five boars of the morning, and Virgile was blushing and laughing, while Vincent Leandri, who had pathetically missed a big male less than thirty yards off, was lamenting the fact that he was no longer good for anything and remarking that the only reason he persisted in coming on the drives was for the apéritif afterward, and then someone called out that the bar was closed. Hayet had always been as regular and reliable as the stars in their courses and Vincent at once imagined that some mishap had befallen her. He ran up to the apartment, knocked at the door, softly at first, and then hammering away, but still to no avail, and called out,

  “Hayet, Hayet, are you alright? Answer me, please,”

  and then announced that he was going to break the door down. Someone suggested to Vincent that he should calm down, Hayet could have gone out on an urgent errand even though it was very hard, virtually impossible, in fact, to imagine any kind of errand one might have in the village in early autumn especially on a Sunday morning and moreover an errand so urgent that it warranted closing the bar, but then you never knew, and Hayet would certainly be back, but she did not come back and Vincent kept saying that now he really was going to knock the door down, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to restrain him and in the end everyone agreed that the logical solution would be to go and inform Marie-Angèle Susini that, improbable as it might seem, her barmaid was missing. Marie-Angèle received them with incredulity and even suspected them of already being drunk and playing a cruel trick on her, but apart from Virgile, who was still laughing from time to time without knowing why, they all seemed worn out and weary, perfectly sober and vaguely uneasy and Vincent Leandri even seemed distraught, so much so that Marie-Angèle picked up the duplicate keys to the bar and the apartment and went with them, herself increasingly uneasy, and hurried upstairs to open Hayet’s apartment. It had been meticulously cleaned, there was no speck of dust, the crockery and taps were gleaming, the cupboards and drawers were empty, the sheets and pillowcases on the bed had been changed, nothing was left of Hayet, not so much as an earring fallen behind a piece of furniture, nor a stray bobby pin in a corner of the bathroom, not a scrap of paper, not even a hair, and Marie-Angèle was surprised to detect no scent other than that of cleaning products, as if no human being had lived there for years. Looking around at the dead apartment, she could not understand why Hayet had left like that, without a parting word, but she knew that she would never return and she would never see her again. She heard a voice saying,

  “We really ought to call the law,”

  but she shook her head sadly and no one insisted, because it was evident that the silent tragedy that had been played out here, at an unknown time in the night, concerned only one person, adrift in the depths of a lonely heart, to which human society could no longer render justice. They all went quiet for a while, then one of them ventured timidly,

  “Seeing as you’re here, Marie-Angèle, the bar, you know, you could open it, and then we could have our apéritif after all,”

  and Marie-Angèle nodded silently. A murmur of satisfaction ran through the group of huntsmen, Virgile began laughing very loudly and they moved toward the bar with the hounds baying and groaning in the sunlight and Vincent Leandri muttered,

  “What a bunch of drunken bastards you are,”

  before following them into the bar. Behind the counter Marie-Angèle once more went back to the routines that she knew so well and would have so much liked to have forgotten, busying herself deftly amid the glasses and ice buckets, mentally noting the orders for rounds of drinks belted out at an infernal pace by thunderous voices of increasing unsteadiness, registering each one as it came and without the slightest error, listening to the disjointed conversations, the same tales told a hundred times before with variations and improbable exaggerations, about how Virgile Ordioni always made a point of slicing fine strips of liver from the dead boar’s smoking entrails, and consuming them on the spot, all warm and raw, with the composure of a prehistoric man, despite the cries of disgust to which he would respond by invoking the memory of his poor father who had always taught him there was nothing better for the health, and now the same exclamations of disgust rang around the bar, with clenched fists pounding on the zinc-topped counter, all spattered with pastis, and there was more laughter and it was observed that Virgile was an animal but a damn good shot, and, all alone in a corner, Vincent Leandri stared at his glass, his eyes full of despair. The more time passed, the clearer it became to Marie-Angèle that she was not prepared to take up this work again, for it had become even more intolerable to her than she would have expected. For years she had relied on Hayet, gradually leaving all the management of the bar to her, in total confidence, as if she had been part of the family and Marie-Angèle felt cut to the quick to think that she could have left without even coming to kiss her goodbye or leaving a farewell message, just a few lines to prove to her that something had happened here, something that had mattered, but this, Marie-Angèle perceived, was precisely what Hayet could not do, for it was evident that she had wanted not only to vanish but also to wipe away all the years spent here, retaining from them only her beautiful hands, prematurely ruined, which she might have wanted to cut off and leave behind her if that had been possible, and the furiously obsessive way she had cleaned the apartment was simply the evidence of a fierce desire for erasure and of a belief that by an act of will one could obliterate from one’s own life all the years one wished one had never lived through, even if this meant erasing the very memory of those who have loved us. And as she poured yet another round of pastis into glasses so full that there was no longer any room for water in them, Marie-Angèle found herself hoping that Hayet, wherever she was and whatever destination she was headed for, might be feeling, if not happy, at least liberated and Marie-Angèle summoned up all the resources of her love to bless her and to let her departure be marred by no resentment. Thus it was that Hayet went on her way, untouched by blessings and resentment alike, not suspecting that her disappearance had already caused an upheaval in a world that was itself no longer in her thoughts, for Marie-Angèle now knew for certain she was never going to open up the bar again, she was never again going to inflict on herself the spectacle of the filthy yellowish soup crystallizing in dirty glasses, the smell of aniseed-flavored breath, and the shouts of the card players at their belote in the depths of interminable winters, the recollection of which filled her with nausea, as did that of the incessant arguments with their ritual but empty threats inevitably followed by tearful and, of course, undying, reconciliations. She knew she could not do it. Her daughter, Virginie, would have had to run the bar in her place until she could recruit a new barmaid, but this solution was impossible to contemplate from every point of view. Virginie had never done anything in her life remotely resembling work, she had always been a pioneer in the infinite fields of lethargy and listlessness, and seemed firmly resolved to pursue this vocation to the end, but even if she had been a workaholic her glum temperament and regal airs made her quite unsuited to the performance of a task that involved having regular contact with other human beings, albeit those as uncouth as the bar’s regular customers. Of course Marie-Angèle would be able t
o find another barmaid in the end, but she felt herself to be incapable of stepping into the role of patronne once more, she bridled at supervising the opening hours and doing the till every evening to check that the accounts were correct, she had no more appetite for acting out the whole performance of authority and vigilance which Hayet had for so long rendered totally superfluous and, in particular, she was loath to admit that Hayet might well, all things considered, be replaceable. She watched Virgile Ordioni staggering toward the bathrooms, and brooded stoically on the sad fate that awaited the impeccably disinfected toilet seat, not to mention the floor and walls, picturing herself spending the whole of Sunday afternoon, sponge in hand, cursing these savages, and decided to advertise for someone to manage the bar.

  That evening, having first given her son, Libero, detailed news of each of his brothers and sisters, and then of the numberless cohort of his nephews and nieces and after asking him, as she had done every night since he got there, if he was settling down alright in Paris, Gavina Pintus told him, just before hanging up, that the barmaid at the bar had mysteriously left the village. Libero passed this on to Matthieu Antonetti, who responded with an absentminded grunt, and they turned back to their work, instantly forgetting something that had nevertheless just marked the start of what would be a new existence for them. They had known one another since childhood, though not for the whole of their lives. Matthieu was eight when his mother, concerned about his resolutely solitary and contemplative character, decided that he needed a friend to enjoy his summer vacations in the village. So she took him by the hand, having sprinkled him with eau de cologne, and led him along to see the Pintus family, whose youngest son was the same age as him. Their vast house was ornamented with various excrescences made of cinder blocks which they had left unplastered and it looked like an organism that had never stopped growing in erratic fashion, as if driven by some vital and primeval force, electric cables decorated with dangling light sockets ran along the facades, the courtyard was piled high with chimney pots, wheelbarrows, tiles, dogs asleep in the sun, bags of cement and a considerable number of unidentified objects biding their time in the expectation of finally proving their usefulness one day. Gavina Pintus was mending a jacket, and her body, rendered shapeless by eleven pregnancies that had fulfilled their term, spilled out of a frail deck-chair, Libero sat on a wall behind her, watching three of his brothers totally smeared in grease busying themselves around a venerable motor car whose engine had been stripped down. When he saw Matthieu approaching, resisting the vigorous tugging of his mother by making himself increasingly heavy at the end of her arm, Libero stared at him attentively, unmoving and unsmiling, and Matthieu made himself so heavy that Claudie Antonetti was compelled to come to a halt, and after several seconds, he dissolved into tears so utterly that she had no option but to take him home to blow his nose and lecture him. He ended up taking refuge in the arms of his big sister, Aurélie, who once again performed her role as proxy mother with a wholly childish gravity. At the end of the afternoon Libero came and knocked at their door and Matthieu agreed to go with him into the village and allow himself to be led into a jumble of secret pathways, springs, fantastical insects and alleyways that little by little fitted together into a coherent space and formed a world that rapidly ceased to terrify him and became his obsession. The more the years passed the more the end of the summer vacations gave rise to painful scenes, to an extent that Claudie sometimes regretted having thrust her son along the road to a social integration whose consequences she had not foreseen. Matthieu now lived only for the start of the summer and when in his thirteenth year he grasped that his parents, like utterly selfish monsters, were not for a moment planning to abandon their work in Paris so as to allow him to settle permanently in the village, he badgered them to at least send him there during the Christmas breaks. Matthieu’s response to their refusal was a quite disgraceful series of hysterical fits and bouts of fasting too brief to damage his health but sufficiently long and dramatic to exasperate his parents. Gloomily Jacques and Claudie Antonetti observed to one another that they had bred an appalling little brat, but this depressing observation was no help at all in resolving their problem. Jacques and Claudie were first cousins. After his wife had died in childbirth, Marcel Antonetti, Jacques’s father, had proclaimed that he was incapable of looking after an infant and had turned for help, as he had done all his life, to his sister, Jeanne-Marie, who, without pausing for thought, had immediately taken Jacques in, to bring him up with her daughter, Claudie. Thus they had grown up together and the discovery that they were lovers, soon followed by the public announcement of their intention to marry was, not surprisingly, greeted with stunned indignation by the entire family. But so stubborn were they that in the end the marriage took place, in the presence of a meager gathering, for whom this ceremony in no way represented the touching triumph of love but rather that of vice and incest. The birth of Aurélie, who was, against all expectation, a perfectly healthy baby, went some way to pacify family tensions and Matthieu’s arrival took place in an apparent atmosphere of perfect normality. But it quickly became apparent that Marcel, being incapable of venting his anger on his son or his daughter-in-law, had transferred his hostility onto his grandchildren, and although he finally, in spite of himself, came to be fond of Aurélie, to the point of occasionally indulging in displays of senile adulation, he continued to persecute Matthieu with malevolence, even hatred, however incongruous such a sentiment may seem, as if the little boy had himself arranged the abominable union from which he had sprung. Every summer Claudie would intercept the hostile looks he darted at her son, each time Matthieu went up to him to kiss him he made gestures of recoil too obvious for them to have been instinctive, and he never missed an opportunity to make cutting observations to him about the way he sat at table or his propensity for dirtiness or stupidity, and Jacques would lower his eyes in a pained manner while Claudie restrained herself twenty times a day from abusing this old man for whom she no longer had the least affection. When Matthieu began spending time with Libero, Marcel’s conduct had been a disgrace, through clenched teeth he would mutter,