They were surprised to note the following day that Annie, whose competence was in other respects irreproachable, seemed to have retained from her previous employment the curious custom of greeting each member of the male sex who crossed the threshold of the bar by stealthily but firmly stroking his balls. No one escaped this grope. She went up to the new arrival, all smiles, and gave him two smacking kisses on both cheeks, while with her left hand, as if nothing were happening, she explored his crotch with lightly cupped fingers. The first one to pay the price for this odd habit was Virgile Ordioni who was coming in with his arms piled high with charcuterie. He turned crimson, gave a short laugh and remained standing there in the room not quite knowing what to do next. Matthieu and Libero had at first thought of asking Annie to try to show herself less immediately effusive, but nobody complained, quite the contrary, the men of the village put in several appearances at the bar over the course of the day, they even came there at normally quiet times, the hunters cut short their drives and Virgile made it a point of honor to come down from the mountain every day, if only for a coffee, so it came about that Matthieu and Libero held their peace, not without inwardly singing the perceptive Annie’s praises, for in her immense wisdom she had penetrated the simplicity of the male psyche. Each evening, after closing the bar, they would set off on a recruiting campaign, touring the parties at campsites and on the beaches. They were looking for impecunious female students, doomed to the monotonous joys of sea bathing, who might be interested in seasonal work, and they were simply spoiled for choice. By the end of July they had found four waitresses. They also took on Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna, who had just passed his baccalaureate exams and was spending his summer vacations playing the guitar to his family, a committed audience but limited in size. He had no cause to regret turning professional, for not only was he a great hit with the clientele at the bar—whose aesthetic demands, it is true, were so easily satisfied that even the serenades bawled out by the likes of Virgile Ordioni when dead drunk were received with great acclaim—but from the very first evening his talent was rewarded by Annie who cornered him up against the billiard table after the bar had closed and kissed him on the mouth, while feeling him up vigorously, before granting him a night of such sheer licentiousness that it by far exceeded the most daring of his adolescent fantasies. The following morning she woke him by smothering him in compliments and kisses and lovingly prepared a lavish breakfast for him, bringing it to him in the very bed that had been the scene of his exploits, and watching him wolf it down with such a pure and glistening tear in her eye that it almost made her look maternal. Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna’s hitherto dreary and tranquil life was swept along on a torrent of sensual pleasure and sometimes, when he gave him his fee, Libero would remark to him with a laugh,
“With the summer I’ve laid on for you, you ought to be paying me.”
At the end of the season they all went out together to a fancy restaurant, with Annie, the waitresses, Pierre-Emmanuel and even Gratas, for what was to be a dinner of thanks and farewell, followed by a well lubricated evening in a nightclub. The following week the girls, apart from Annie, were due to go back to Mulhouse, Saint-Etienne and Saragossa, but Libero suggested that they should stay. He did not know if he could keep them on all through the winter but the summer season had been extremely lucrative and he could afford to experiment. What he did not admit to them, however, was that his generous proposal derived, in particular, from basely commercial considerations: he was counting on the force of attraction which the presence of four single young women might exert on a region ravaged by cold and sexual deprivation, to fill the bar even in the depths of winter. None of them refused. They were embarked on studies they disliked and knew would lead to nothing, or they had already abandoned them, and no longer dared to make plans, they lived in joyless cities and towns whose ugliness depressed them, and where there was no one really awaiting their return, they knew that this ugliness would soon start creeping into their own souls and taking hold of them and they were resigned to this, and it was very likely this naive aura of defeat, the magnetic pole of their vulnerability, that had drawn Libero and Matthieu unerringly toward each one of them, Agnès, who sat on the beach rolling and smoking cigarettes, well away from the dancers and the bar, Rym and Sarah, who were sharing a fizzy drink during the voting for a campsite beauty queen, and Izaskun, whom her boyfriend had dropped and dumped there, while they were on vacation, who could hardly speak any French, and who was waiting with her backpack in a dreary nightclub for the day to finally dawn. They did not care about having to share the apartment above the bar between five of them, they did not care about the mattresses on the floor and the promiscuity, for they had spent the happiest weeks of their lives at the village, where they had formed a bond they were not yet willing to break, an undeniable bond whose presence Matthieu, too, was aware of during the dinner that evening. For the first time in a long while he thought about Leibniz and took delight in the place he himself now occupied in the best of all possible worlds and he almost felt inclined to bow down before the goodness of God, the Lord of all the worlds, who sets every creature in its appointed place. But God deserved no praise here, for in this little world there was no demiurge other than Matthieu and Libero. The demiurge is not God the creator. He does not even know he is fabricating a world, what he makes, placing stone upon stone, is a man-made work, and soon his creation eludes his grasp and runs away with him and if he does not destroy it, it will destroy him.
Matthieu was delighted to be witnessing for the first time how winter slowly took hold, instead of coming upon it all at once when he got off the plane. Yet winter does not take hold slowly. It does arrive all at once. The sun is still hot in the cloudy summer sky. And then, one after the other, the shutters of the last few houses close, you no longer meet people in the streets of the village. Over two or three days a warm wind blows in from the sea at dusk and then the mist and the cold envelop the last living things. At night the hoarfrost makes the road glitter as if it were strewn with precious stones. That year, for the first time, the winter did not wholly take on the semblance of death. The tourists had gone but the bar did not empty. People came for an apéritif from all over the area, they took part in evening gatherings arranged on Fridays when Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna came back from his week at college, and listened to him singing as he eyed the girls sitting around the fireplace, Gratas busied himself grilling meat and Matthieu had nothing else to do apart from relishing his happiness while drinking spirits that burned in his veins. From time to time, when she had decided it was his turn, he slept with Virginie Susini. She never said anything. She simply came to the bar and settled down at an isolated table where she spent the evening playing patience. When the bar closed and Annie was cashing up she was still there and she stared at Matthieu without a word and followed him when he went home. On each occasion he took her to his room, he tried not to make a noise, so as not to wake up his grandfather. However, sleeping with Virginie was extremely challenging, you had to endure her silence, her fixed, penetrating stare, you had to endure the fact that none of this had any conceivable significance and that nothing justified the feeling he had of having been sullied, but that this was better than going home on his own. For the house frightened Matthieu now, as if at the same time it had been emptied both of the warmth of summer and of any trace of familiar humanity. The portraits of his great-grandparents, which he had always regarded as guardian deities watching over his youth, now took on a menacing aspect and it sometimes seemed to him as if they were not portraits that had been hung on the wall, but corpses, still preserved from decay by the cold, and from which nothing affectionate or tutelary emanated. At night he often heard creaking sounds and hoped they were imaginary, long and mournful, like sighs, as well as the wholly real sounds made by his grandfather wandering around in the darkness, moving from room to room and bumping into the furniture, and Matthieu covered his ears and buried his head under his pillow. If he got up it was even worse. H
e would switch on the light and find his grandfather in the living room, his brow pressed against the icy windowpane, holding a photograph in his hand that he was not even looking at, or standing there in the kitchen, his eyes focused on something invisible that seemed to fascinate him and fill him with horror and when Matthieu asked him,
“Alright? Wouldn’t you like to go back to bed?”
he would never reply but continued staring straight in front of him, the burden of a millennium of old age overwhelming his fragile shoulders, his jaw trembling, absorbed by this vision that kept him out of harm’s way, safe within its terrifying embrace. Matthieu would go back to bed without being able to sleep, and he was sometimes tempted to get into his car but where would he have gone at four o’clock in the morning in the depths of winter? There was nothing for it but to wait until the light of dawn filtered through the shutters to break the curse. The house would then become friendly and gently familiar again. Matthieu would fall asleep. Every day he delayed for as long as possible the moment when he left the bar and he tried at least to go home sufficiently drunk to get to sleep without difficulty. One evening he dared to ask the girls,
“Could I sleep with you tonight? Would you make room for me?”
and he added, lamely,
“I don’t want to sleep all alone,”
and the girls burst out laughing, even Izaskun, who had by now made enough progress in French to recognize a foolish remark when she heard one, and they all made fun of Matthieu, and said it was an amazingly original approach and very sweet and they believed him and Matthieu protested his good faith, joining in their laughter, until they said:
“Of course! Of course you can! We’ll make room for you.”
He followed them up to the apartment. There were sleeping bags and piles of bedding neatly laid against the walls. There was incense burning there, too. Annie had her own room, Rym and Sarah slept in the other bedroom and Matthieu went to lie down in the sitting room on the mattress shared by Agnès and Izaskun, which they had hidden behind a Japanese screen. They lay down beside him, still teasing him a little and then snuggled up to him. Izaskun murmured something in Spanish. He kissed them each on the forehead, one after the other, like two sisters, and they went to sleep. No threat now weighed upon Matthieu’s slumbers, no deadly shadow. When he awoke his head was resting against Izaskun’s breasts and one of his hands lay upon Agnès’s hip. He drank a coffee and went to his home to take a shower. But he never slept there anymore. The next night he slept with Rym and Sarah and divided the nights that followed between the mattress in the sitting room and the bedroom, and always slept the same chaste and tranquil sleep, as if the sacred sword of a knight lay there upon the sheet, between his body and the girls’ warm bodies, communicating something of its perpetual purity to them. This celestial harmony was only disrupted at the weekend, when Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna joined Annie and they had to endure their satanic frolics. Their staying power was beyond belief. They made a shocking amount of noise, Pierre-Emmanuel puffed and panted and sometimes erupted with incongruous laughter, Annie uttered yells and, to crown it all, she was appallingly loquacious, loudly proclaiming what she would like to do, what was to be done to her, and precisely what was just then being done to her, and the extent to which she had appreciated what had just been done to her, so thoroughly that it felt as if one were listening to the radio broadcast of a sporting event, an obscene and interminable sporting event with a commentary from a hysterical commentator. Matthieu and the girls could not sleep, Rym said:
“He’s unbelievable, that guy, I swear he should be timed with a stopwatch,”
and in fact Pierre-Emmanuel began to behave with the arrogance of a sporting celebrity, at the bar he would touch Annie’s bottom with assumed nonchalance every time it came within reach, relishing the looks of helpless adoration from the hoi polloi which he imagined to be focused on him, and winking condescendingly at Virgile Ordioni, who laughed nervously, swallowing his saliva, then he would pat Virgile on the back, as if he were a young boy to be gratified with a few fragments of fantasy, which must suffice for him, for that’s all he will ever get. It sometimes seemed to Matthieu and the girls that they were listening to a performance whose basic object was to satisfy the expectations of a demanding audience, and then they would begin to applaud and shout “bravo,” this caused Pierre-Emmanuel to emerge from the bedroom, sweating and furious, returning to it after looking daggers at them, which then caused them to collapse into fits of giggles, and when the fornicators, overcome with fatigue, allowed silence to reign once more, they went to sleep in their turn, the naked sword blade watching over the purity of their slumbers. But of course the sword was bound to be withdrawn from them eventually and, one night it was. Matthieu was lying on his side, facing Izaskun and once again she murmured something in Spanish and he saw eyes shining in the darkness and a smile that reminded him of Judith Haller, but this was now the world he had chosen for himself, the world he was building, placing stone upon stone, and nothing could make him guilty, he slowly reached out and touched Izaskun’s cheek, and she kissed his wrist, then his mouth and she pressed her belly against his and put one leg over his, so that he could come closer and embraced him with all her strength, Matthieu felt overcome with gratitude and beauty, immersed in the limpid depths of baptismal waters, holy waters, waters of everlasting purity, and when it was all over, he rolled onto his back, his eyes open, with Izaskun pressed against him and he saw that Agnès, leaning on her elbow, was looking at them. He turned to her and smiled and she leaned forward and kissed him for a long time, with the tip of her tongue she gathered up a drop of saliva from the corner of his mouth, then, lightly stroked his eyelids with her fingertips, as one piously closes the eyes of a dead person, until he fell asleep beneath her light caress.
“I’m leaving you to look after the bar now, Annie. Have you cashed up?”
Annie gave Matthieu the day’s takings and he put them in a little iron box. He opened a drawer and took out an enormous automatic pistol and slipped it into his belt with such a well-rehearsed gesture that it now seemed natural.
“Right. Let’s go.”
Aurélie stared at him in amazement.
“You have a gun now? Are you going completely crazy? What’s wrong with you? Have you got issues with your virility? And by the way, you look idiotic. Don’t you realize?”
Matthieu did not consider he looked idiotic at all, quite the reverse, but he made no comment on that and simply gave the explanation his sister demanded, faced with which she would have to concur. The bar was doing a roaring trade, it was siphoning off all the clientele from the villages in the area, as far as twenty or thirty miles away, it was incredible, Libero’s idea of asking the girls to stay had been a brilliant one for they were the ones who attracted all this custom, without them no one would be crazy enough to face the rain and black ice simply to come here to a village just like any other and drink pastis that tasted exactly the same as everywhere else, it went without saying, and Vincent Leandri had ventured to point out that thriving businesses run the risk of being held up at gunpoint, especially these days. Of course, human beings had always been thieves since the dawn of time and it’s possible to be a thief without being a complete bastard, but these days, and this is the point, people were no longer content just to be thieves, they were complete and utter bastards as well, capable of spending an evening drinking and laughing and kissing you goodbye when they left and coming back ten minutes later in a hood, sticking a gun in your face and robbing your till, then going home to sleep the sleep of the just, and even coming back again next day for the apéritif, just as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that they’d smashed you in the face a couple of times with a rifle butt the night before and smacked Annie twice in the face for good measure, just like that, out of pure villainy, and Vincent was not talking about a potential risk, but something inevitable, there were no ifs and buts about it, sooner or later it was bound to happen, as night follows day,
and that was how he’d advised them to buy a gun as soon as possible. Aurélie raised her eyes to heaven.
“So now, if I understand correctly, you not only risk being held up, you may also get killed or kill someone. Brilliant logic. Well done! You do realize, don’t you, that Vincent Leandri is a drunken idiot!”
But she had missed the point, Matthieu had no intention of killing anyone, any more than Libero, the whole thing must be seen as a deterrent, nothing more, and it had indeed taken him some time to grasp all the subtleties of the logic of deterrence, the first time he had to carry the cash box he’d arrived at the bar at about seven in the evening, the pistol slipped inside his pants, there was a big crowd of people and he’d edged behind the counter where he went through discreet contortions to put the pistol into a drawer without anyone noticing, which was not at all easy, given the number of fellows standing at the counter and the size of the pistol, and Libero had watched his antics for a moment and remarked,
“May I ask what the hell you’re doing?”
and Matthieu had replied in a whisper,
“O.K., I’m just stowing the piece in the drawer,”
and Libero had burst out laughing and Vincent Leandri had burst out laughing as well, and they’d been right to make fun of him because when you think about it what’s the point of having a gun if no one knows you’ve got one? The whole idea, in fact, is for everyone to know you’ve got one, so that the gunmen, even though they’re complete bastards, are going to think it’s better to go and do a holdup somewhere else, where they don’t have a gun, so now in the evening, when he was on duty, Matthieu would openly remove the pistol from his belt and lay it on the counter for a moment, for everyone to see, and then calmly put it in a drawer, from which he removed it when the bar closed, this was the deterrent, the armed robbers were, let’s say, the Cubans, and Libero and he were Kennedy, the method was tried and tested, but Aurélie still sighed and moaned, and would have done so even more if Matthieu had confessed to her that, deterrence or no, the first time he caught a bastard trying to rob his till he was determined to shoot him like a dog.
The Sermon on the Fall of Rome Page 7