The Sermon on the Fall of Rome

by Jérôme Ferrari

  Two hours before dawn they were walking with Gavina Pintus on the way to Tenebrae on Holy Thursday night. They had stayed on their feet all night at the bar, so as not to have to wake up, they had cleaned their teeth in the sink behind the counter and were now chewing mint-flavored gum lest their breath, heavy with drink, might disturb the piety of this night of mourning. For Easter Monday they had planned to arrange a big picnic with music in front of the bar, and the next day they would leave. Libero would travel to Paris with Matthieu, they would go to see his father and combine this with taking several days’ vacation in Barcelona, where, without being niggardly over the cost, for they could afford it, they had booked a hotel, thus combining the useful with the agreeable and Jacques Antonetti would not be given the impression that they had come to take their leave of a dying man. So on that night of Holy Thursday they were walking along, arm in arm with Gavina Pintus, keeping as upright as possible, the damp wind froze them, the hold of the alcohol became less noticeable and behind them walked Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna, with the friends from the city of Corte, who had come over to sing in the mass before performing at the party on Easter Monday and they, too, were hastily trying to sober up as best they could. A sleepy congregation packed the church. The electric lights had been switched off. Light came only from the tall candles lit in front of the altar. The smell of incense reminded Matthieu of Izaskun’s skin. He crossed himself, stifling a sour hiccup. Pierre-Emmanuel and his friends found themselves a spot in the apse, the text of the Psalms in their hands. They cleared their throats and whispered in one another’s ears, shifting from one foot to the other. The priest proclaimed that, so that the world might be saved, darkness was about to descend upon the world, as it prepared to put its savior to death, who was now in tears in the garden of Gethsemane. The singers struck up the first psalm,

  In Salem also is His tabernacle and His dwelling in Zion,

  their voices filled the church and were marvelously clear. An expression of extreme relief appeared on Pierre-Emmanuel’s face, he closed his eyes to concentrate on his own singing and the priest stepped forward and snuffed out one of the candles. You could hear the noise of the rattles and the feet stamping on the wooden prayer stools to bear witness to the end of the world as it sank into darkness,

  The earth and all the inhabitants thereof are dissolved,

  and now Gavina Pintus looked up toward the cross with the eyes of a frightened little girl, and in the front row Virgile Ordioni was nervously twisting his cap in his hands, as if the whole village were really going to be swallowed up, there was confusion now between the grinding of the rattles and the noise of shaken foundations, the stones of the church shuddered until the cacophony came to an end and the singing rose up once more,

  That the bones which Thou hast broken may rejoice,

  and the priest snuffed out the candles one by one. Soon there was only a single flickering flame left, Gavina Pintus took her son’s hand as he repressed a sacrilegious yawn, Matthieu was hoping the end of the world would not be as tedious as this, he was cold and sleepy, while over there, in bedclothes so close at hand, Izaskun’s body radiated warmth to no avail and the priest raised his tall copper candlesnuffer and it was now completely dark.

  The horns of the righteous shall be exalted.

  The priest continued speaking in the darkness and said that Christians were not afraid of the darkness from the midst of which he was speaking at that moment, for they knew that it did not mean the triumph of nothingness, the light that had been extinguished was only the light of men and the darkness covered them so that in the end the divine light should appear, for the darkness was its cradle, as the sacrifice of the Lamb proclaimed the resurrection of the Son in the glory of the Father, the everlasting Word, the beginning of all things, and the darkness was not death, for it bore witness not only to the end but also to the luminous beginning, for it was, in truth, one and the same witness. The milky light of dawn crept in beneath the closed doors. After blessing them the priest released his flock, a significant number of whom hurried across to the bar to get over their emotion. Libero made cups of coffee and placed a bottle of whisky on the counter for those whose emotion might really have been too intense. Pierre-Emmanuel was worried about the quality of his performance and Libero assured him that it had been very good, even though, it had to be admitted, polyphonic music was, all in all, boring as hell and hard to take in large doses. Virgile Ordioni who, after drinking his coffee, was reaching out a timid hand toward the whisky, voiced his disagreement.

  “It was beautiful! Magnificent! Libero knows nothing about it.”

  Pierre-Emmanuel patted him on the back with a laugh.

  “And what about you? What do you know about it?”

  but Virgile was not vexed, he appeared to reflect for a moment, then said,

  “That’s true. I don’t know much about it. But it was beautiful, all the same,”

  and there ensued an animated discussion touching on polyphonic music, the various musical abilities of different people, rattles, candles and priests, a discussion crowned by the opportune appearance of another bottle of whisky, and so it was that when Izaskun and Sarah arrived at opening time, they had to kick everyone out into the rain that was just starting to fall. But on Easter Monday the day dawned on a radiant spring. Pierre-Emmanuel and the men from Corte set up their sound system in the open air and tuned their instruments. Matthieu drank some rosé in the sunlight as he watched Izaskun and raised his glass to her. She responded with a little gesture of her hand, the sketch of a kiss. She was his sister, his loving, incestuous sister. He watched one of the men from Corte whispering sweet nothings in her ear, she laughed, but he was not jealous, he did not care what she might do with this fellow, she was his sister, not his wife, and she would come back to him, no one could take anything away from him and he enjoyed a formidable feeling of superiority, as if he had been raised up to heights where no one could harm him anymore. He was amazed that his happiness was unshakeable to this degree and he drank his wine in the warmth of the spring sunshine. The next day he set off with Libero. They gave Bernard Gratas the keys to the bar, they kissed the girls and set off for Ajaccio, waving goodbye and calling out,

  “Be good! Don’t let the joint go under, whatever you do! See you next week!”

  On the road they talked about what they were going to do in Barcelona, they needed to unwind, they certainly deserved it, and they got to Campo dell’Oro airport an hour and a half early. They went into the bar and drank a beer, then another and their conversation slowly petered out. In the end they were completely silent. The passengers for the Paris flight were called to the departure lounge but there was still half an hour to go, there was no hurry and they ordered one last beer. Matthieu looked at the runways and his throat felt dry. His stomach was rumbling unpleasantly. He suddenly realized that for the best part of a year he had never traveled further than ten miles away from the village. Ajaccio was the end of the world. He had never stayed in the same place for so long before. The prospect of flying off to Paris now seemed daunting to him, to say nothing of Barcelona, so remote as to be quite unreal, a place of mists and legends, the earthly equivalent of the planet Mars. Matthieu was perfectly well aware that his fear was grotesque, but he was incapable of struggling against it. He looked at Libero who was staring at his glass with clenched teeth and he perceived that they shared the same fear. They were not gods, but merely demiurges, and it was the world they had created that now held them under the yoke of its tyrannical rule, an insistent voice announced that passengers Libero Pintus and Matthieu Antonetti were urgently awaited before the gates closed, and they knew that the world they had created would not let them depart, they sat there and the final call came, and when the plane had taken off they stood up in silence, picked up their bags and went back to the world they belonged to.

  “Where will you go to outside of the world?”

  It is a glittering dawn and its brutal light dazzles men’s memories and
their painful recollections are consigned to the ebb tide of the darkness as it fades, carrying them with it. High up in the dome of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Leningrad, Christ Pantocrator holds the warhead of an unexploded shell in his long, white hands and it hovers in the air like a dove’s feather. One must live and hasten to forget, one must allow the light to soften the outline of all the graves. Everywhere around the abbey at Monte Cassino the long tresses of the North African soldiers spring from the ground like exotic flowers softly caressed by a gentle summer breeze, along the beaches of Latvia the gray waves of the Baltic have polished the bones of children buried in the sand to fashion strange jewels of fossilized amber, over in the sun-drenched scrubland from whence Shulamith will never return to the king vainly calling her, the air is awash with the pollen of her ashen hair, the verdant earth is gorged on shreds of fabric and flesh, it is replete with corpses and rests on nothing other than the vault of their shattered shoulder blades, but this glittering dawn has arisen and in the brilliance of its light the forgotten corpses are now no more than fertile compost for the new world. How could Marcel have clung to the memory of the dead when, after that slow gestation period of war, the world was for the first time opening up the escape routes of its shining pathways for him? All the living were being summoned to the inspiring task of reconstruction and Marcel was among them, dizzy with the infinite number of possibilities, ready to set out on the road, his eyes bruised by the light, wholly focused upon a future that had finally erased death. The new world was recruiting its agents and sending them to take the necessary materials from the colonies for the building up of its hungry and glorious corpus, and from the mines, from the jungles and the high plateaus they were extracting all that its insatiable voracity demanded. Before setting off for French West Africa, where the rivers of the south once flowed, Marcel considered that his new status as a future civil administrator required that he should choose a wife. There were several marriageable girls in the village and Marcel asked his brother, who was at a loose end while waiting to be recalled to Indochina, to make discreet inquiries of their families, to know which of them might look favorably upon a proposal in due course. The next day Jean-Baptiste came to report on the success of his mission and broke it to him that an excess of zeal had unfortunately smashed all his efforts at discretion to smithereens. He had begun his search at the bar by chatting to the elder brother of a young woman from a good family. They had been hitting it off very well to the point of getting drunk together and falling into one another’s arms when Jean-Baptiste, acting on impulse, had formally asked him for his sister’s hand on behalf of Marcel, who now found himself in a situation all the more delicate because the girl’s brother, in his delight, had hurried off at once to his parents, with Jean-Baptiste beside him in a highly emotional state. It was out of the question to risk seriously offending these people by pleading a misunderstanding, the humiliation might have made them resort to violence and Marcel had to accept the young wife jointly bestowed on him by fate and his brother’s excessive sociability. She was seventeen and Marcel was consoled by her shy beauty until he realized, after they had exchanged a few words, that she was almost angelically stupid for she was lost in wonder at everything and directed a gaze at her new husband so overcome with admiration that, as the boat taking them to Africa passed beneath the Rock of Gibraltar and sailed out into the waters of the Atlantic, Marcel veered constantly between bliss and irritation. Leaning against the rail, she offered up her innocence to unknown winds and tasted the icy salt from the sea spray with the tip of her tongue, which made her laugh and shiver so violently that she suddenly took refuge in Marcel’s arms and he did not know whether he should upbraid her for making such a spectacle of herself or thank her for her childish enthusiasm, he would hesitate for a moment, embarrassed and awkward, but always ended up hugging her to him with all his might, without fear or disgust, for she had the warm and ethereal body of an angel from before the fall, miraculously arisen from a time that still knew nothing of the miasmas of sin and plagues. Through the portholes the distant coastlines were becoming wilder and wilder, great twisted trees leaned out over the waves at the mouths of immense rivers that traced long arabesques of mud across the green waters of the ocean, the heat became stifling and Marcel spent almost all his days in his cabin, in bed with his wife, he let her kneel over his face, bracing herself against the bulkhead with her hands, panting and laughing behind the curtain of her flowing hair, he let her study him and run her hands over him with a schoolgirl’s curiosity, frowning, touching every part of his body, as if to reassure herself that he was not a ghost who would soon vanish in the light, he let her settle down in her nakedness, immodestly sitting cross-legged at the end of the bunk and he crawled toward her to lay his head on her thighs and fall asleep for a moment, liberated from the whore in Marseille, for his young wife’s caresses had drawn from his veins the last drops of the poison that had infected him and he was no longer afraid of anything. Bodies were no longer reservoirs of pus and blood in the depths of which obscure, malevolent demons lurked and Marcel would have been perfectly happy if he had not been overcome by anxiety every time he had to appear at dinner with his wife, he was perpetually afraid that someone might ask her a simple question to which she would reply so foolishly that the whole table would be struck dumb or else she would not reply at all and open a mouth round with surprise before lowering her eyes and giggling and he was in agony every time she spoke to him in public, he was shamed that she addressed him in Corsican, that ridiculous dialect of whose wretched accent he could never manage to rid himself, and at the same time he was relieved, because nobody could understand what she was saying and he was simply waiting for the moment when he could close the cabin door upon their intimacy which alone put an end to his bitterness and torments. He took on his clerical duties in the offices of the central administration of a big African city which resembled an improbable collection of hovels and mud rather than any city he might have dreamed of, for the world persisted in thwarting his dreams at the very moment when they became real. The smells in the streets were so strong that even ripe fruit and flowers seemed to give off the noxious sweetness of putrefaction, he was constantly repressing feelings of nausea, as he strolled around in the dignity of his linen suit among men and animals over whom there hung the aromas of exotic and savage flesh, borne aloft by the crumpling of brightly colored fabrics. Proximity to the natives repelled him more every day, he had not come to bring them a civilization which he himself had known only from a distance and by hearsay in the voices of his masters, but to settle an ancient debt, the repayment of which had been so long deferred, he had come there to live the life that he deserved and which had continually eluded his grasp. He did not rest his hopes in God but in the statutes of the public service, the good news of which had just been promulgated to all the children of the French Republic, which would enable him, without having to pass through colonial service training school, to rise as high as he could in the hierarchy, to extricate himself at last from the limbo he had never entirely succeeded in leaving when he was born. He worked at preparing to take exams as well as at getting rid of the hideous stigmata of his past, his posture, his gait, his accent, in particular, and he forced himself to make his speech flat and clear, as if he had been raised on the estate of a manor in Touraine, he adopted the affectation of pronouncing his surname with a stress on the last syllable, he worked scrupulously at keeping his vowels open, but to his despair he had to accept that he must continue rolling his “r”s, for when he tried to pronounce an “r” at the back of his throat, all he ever produced was a pitiful choking sound, like the purring of a big cat or the hoarse croaking of a dying man. Jeanne-Marie wrote with the news that André Degorce was due to go to Indochina with a parachute regiment, she told him about her fears and her joy at the birth of a little girl, she gave him a detailed account of their parents’ decline and each of her letters was a reminder to him of the unpardonable sin of his origins, even though
he now felt equally at ease in offices and at dinners for members of the administration, and attended these on his own, fearing that his wife’s presence might break the fragile charm that took him out of himself, while she waited for him at home, safe within the blessed citadel of her innocence, happy and unchanged. She refused to learn anything at all, resolutely speaking Corsican and assisting their African maid with her household tasks, despite admonitions from Marcel, whom she silenced by overwhelming him with kisses and caresses, undressing him standing up, before pulling him over toward the bed where he toppled over with outstretched arms while she closed the mosquito netting around them. He looked at her, he blew gently on her moist breasts, he kissed her on the fold of her groin, her mouth, her nostril, her eyelids, and one day he was surprised by the roundness of the belly on which he lay at rest. She told him she had grown a little fat, her dresses were rather tight. She was eating too much, she knew, and blushing, he asked her when her last period had been, but she had no idea, she had not noticed, and he took her in his arms, took her and lifted her up, the whole of her, with her angelic stupidity, her laughter and the sound of the barbaric language that he no longer wanted to be his own, and allowed himself to be overcome by an absurd joy, an animal joy, of which it mattered little that he did not understand it, for it did not ask to be understood and did not even demand that a meaning should be found in it. She had been pregnant for six months when Marcel, after passing an internal examination, was promoted to be the administrator of an obscure “subdivision” on the outer periphery of a remote “circle,” which was not one of hell but simply one featured on the colonial land registry. He now held sway over an immense territory, whose humid lands were populated only by insects, Negroes, wild plants and big cats. The French flag dangled from the end of a pole like a sodden rag on the pediment of his residence, a little apart from a wretched village of huts built on the banks of a muddy river, beside which children used to guide long lines of blind old men at the end of a rope, who trooped along beneath a sky of the same milky white as their dead eyes. His neighbors were a gendarme, whose penchant for drink became a little more manifest with every passing day, a doctor who was already an alcoholic, and a missionary who conducted mass in Latin in front of women with bare breasts and attempted to engage the interest of a resistant audience by repeating the story of the God who had made himself into a man, before dying as a slave for the salvation of all of them. With these men Marcel strove to preserve from extinction the flame of civilization, of which they were the sole guardians, and dinners were served to them by “boys” dressed as head waiters, who set down gleaming dishes upon impeccably ironed white tablecloths and he allowed his wife, all rotund and smiling, to join them at table because, in the farce he knew he was playing out with his meager cast of walk-ons, social conventions, blunders and ridicule no longer had any meaning and he no longer wanted to deprive himself, in the name of such things, of the one person who was henceforth the unique source of his joy. Without her the bitterness of his social elevation would have been unbearable to him and he would have preferred a thousand times to be numbered tenth or twentieth in Rome, rather than thus being the governor of a desolate kingdom on the outskirts of the Empire, but no one would ever offer him such an alternative because Rome no longer existed, it had been destroyed a good long time before and all that now remained were the kingdoms, some more barbarous than others, which it was impossible to escape from, and a man in flight from his own poverty could hope for nothing more than to exercise futile authority over men more impoverished than himself, as Marcel was now doing, with all the pitiless fury of those who have known poverty and can no longer tolerate the nauseating spectacle of it, constantly exacting vengeance for it on the flesh of those who resemble him all too much. It may be that every world is the distorted reflection of all the others, a remote mirror in which excrement appears to shine like diamonds, or it may be that there is only one single world, from which it is impossible to escape, for the escape routes of its illusory pathways all meet together just here, beside the bed in which Marcel’s young wife lies dying, a week after giving birth to their son, Jacques. At first she complained of stomach pains and was overcome by a fever that could not be brought down. After several days, having run out of antibiotics, the doctor tried to concentrate the infection in a medically provoked abscess. He folded back the soaking wet sheet, leaned over the sick young woman and pulled her nightdress up from her legs, Marcel leaned over, too, catching the hot aroma of whisky on the doctor’s breath as he watched him pricking his wife’s thigh with shaking hands, injecting it with turpentine spirit, leaving no more than a tiny red dot on the skin, which Marcel could not take his eyes off for whole days and nights, watching for the moment when all the veins in his wife’s body would drain into it the poison that was killing her and he implored her to fight, as if she had the power, through the sole magic of will, to compel her exhausted body to save her, but the white skin of her thigh remained ominously healthy and supple, no abscess ever formed there and Marcel knows she is going to die, he knows it, and, as he kisses her burning brow, he hopes that at least she will never be aware of this, hopes her angelic stupidity will save her to the end, but he is deceived, for stupidity does not save us, not even from despair, and amid her fever she weeps, calls for her baby, caresses and kisses him, and throws her arms around Marcel’s neck, saying she doesn’t want to leave him, no, no, never, she wants to go on living, then she dozes off for a moment and wakes up in tears, she dreads the darkness, nothing can comfort her and Marcel holds her tightly in his arms without being able to wrest her away from the tide that sweeps her along irresistibly toward the darkness she dreads so much, she is worn out with shivering and tears, and allows herself to be swept away by the tide that eventually tosses her aside, motionless and cold, in a shroud of crumpled sheets. Her face is distorted by terror but it is that of a wax dummy in which Marcel does not recognize the laughing young woman whose innocence and lack of modesty he loved, and for a moment he is overwhelmed by the hope that some element of her, a fragile and delicate breath, like a blithe spirit, might have taken wing from the horror of this stiffened body to find refuge in a place of light, gentleness and peace, but he knows that this is not true, all that remains of her is a corpse whose contours are already collapsing and it is over this relic that Marcel then lets his tears flow. During the funeral he thinks about his family who know nothing yet of his bereavement, he would have liked his mother, well versed in the works of death, to have been at his side rather than the gendarme and the doctor, who sways there under the tropical rain, as the missionary’s disillusioned voice reels off one psalm after another over the waterlogged grave. When the stone is laid in place he remains alone for a while and then goes home to rejoin his son, who is suckling with eyes closed from the black breast of the African maid. He detests this baby as he detests this country, regarding them with an implacable hatred because they have conspired together to take his wife from him, when the doctor complains about the lack of antibiotics he refuses to listen to him for he needs scapegoats and has no interest in justice, any more than he is interested in logic, as the sudden fear overtakes him that this detested country might deprive him of the detested child, whom, in turn, he does not want to lose, even though he constantly reproaches him for being born rather than remaining in the limbo no one wanted him to abandon, and so the slightest gap left between the mosquito net curtains plunges Marcel into a mortal dread of discovering his son consumed by the monstrous insects that lurk in the stifling depths of the African night, where so many phosphorescent eyes glitter, so many things throng in a seething mass, hungry for Jacques’s tender flesh, poised to sink their venomous jaws into it, or deposit their eggs there, and, sensing that he will not know how to protect him, Marcel writes a long letter to Jeanne-Marie. My dear sister, I shall not be able to protect him from the appalling horrors of these climes with their swarms of creatures, I don’t want him to die like his mother and I don’t want him to grow u
p without her, please let Jacques find a mother, and gain a sister in your little Claudie, I am well aware of what I am asking you, but, I beg you, who else could I turn to, if not to you, who have never been sparing in your affection, and when Jeanne-Marie, much moved, agrees, he waits until he has leave and can go back to France and hand Jacques over to her. As he returns alone to Africa he weeps, from guilt, maybe from grief, he does not know, but in the depths of his soul he is aware of the huge and murky relief of having managed at one and the same time to save his son and to get rid of him. Once back in his purgatory, he resumed the long, monotonous peregrination of his life, making tours into the bush, passing through villages where dazed children, lined up in order of height, were waiting for him to attribute vague dates of birth to them, so as to revise the administrative records and he dispensed justice with the weary gestures of a fallen god, noting down in minute detail the inept disputes of which the plaintiffs gave him desperate accounts in various languages, including Fulani, Susu-Yalunka, Maninka and all the languages of poverty and barbarism whose accents he now found intolerable, although he forced himself to hear them out in order to hand down judgments whose fairness might restore the saving silence he longed for, and at the time of the cotton harvest he castigated the greed of the Belgian merchants who tampered with their scales, rejecting their proffered bribes with scorn, not because he cared about the interests of the African farmers, but because incorruptibility was the only blue blood he could lay claim to, he kept the records for the collection of the poll tax with inflexible rigor and at nightfall, sitting beside the doctor, he regretted that his ulcer did not allow him to get drunk with him, to escape the terrors of the night. Jeanne-Marie wrote to him that Jacques was growing up and often thought of him, she had had no news of André Degorce after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, but she felt confident, because God would not be cruel enough to rob her of a husband twice. The Empire was slowly falling apart and Jeanne-Marie wrote, the Vietminh have freed André, I’m so happy, Jacques thinks about you and sends you his love, he’s growing up so quickly, André will soon be going to Algeria, and Marcel envied his brother-in-law his adventurous life, which contrasted so grievously with the emptiness of his own, he did not perceive how the Empire was falling apart, he did not even hear the muted cracking sounds as its foundations were shaken, for he was entirely focused on the falling apart of his own body, which Africa was slowly infecting with its fertile decay, he gazed at the plants growing on his wife’s grave which he would cut down with furious blows of a machete and was convinced that he would soon be joining her, for the demon of his ulcer, sustained by extreme heat and humidity, tormented him more vigorously than ever, as if its demonic intuition enabled it to sense that outside, in the corrupt, clammy air there were countless allies lying in wait to assist it in the final stages of its gradual work of demolition and Marcel kept his eyes wide open at night, hearing the cries of the prey, hearing the bodies of drowsy creatures that had gone astray sliding over the sand as the crocodiles dragged them slowly toward their watery graves, he heard the sharp snap of jaws that threw up showers of mud and blood and, in the turmoil of his own body, he could feel the organs grinding into action, rubbing against one another, to embark on a slow rotation around the orbit of the demon, as, fixed as a black sun, it gave the signal of an upraised hand in the depths of his stomach, and flowers thrust up the tips of their buds in the sockets of his bronchial tubes, the filaments of their roots crept along his veins right to the tips of his fingers, while terrible wars were waged in the barbaric kingdom that his body had become, with their savage victory cries, their massacres of the defeated and a whole tribe of assassins, and Marcel would examine his vomit, his urine, his stools, terrified that he might find gilded clusters of grubs, spiders, crabs or snakes in them, and lived in the expectation of dying alone, transformed into rotting matter even before he died. He kept an intimate journal of his illness, scrupulously noting each symptom, every breathing difficulty, each mysterious rash on his elbow and groin, each bout of diarrhea and constipation, every worrying discoloration of his penis, every itch and thirst. He thought of his son, whom he would never see again, he thought of his young wife, of her thighs wrapped around his face, and now she seemed so alive that he felt passionate desire for her and then noted down delirium, priapism, necrophilia, morbid preoccupation, before silently approaching the African maid as she dusted the furniture in the dining room, lifting her dress and taking her without saying a word, his arms flapping like the wings of a great vulture hunched over an impassive corpse, and he could only stop when the shame of the orgasm flung him backward at the last moment, leaning against the wall, his pants around his ankles, his eyes closed in horror and his penis shaken by ignoble thrustings which the African maid brought to an end by wiping him like a child, with a cloth soaked in warm water, which she then proceeded to use to mop up the puddle of gray seminal fluid on the tiled floor. But he remained alive, for the powers that hounded him were those of life, not of death, a primitive and narrow life, one that begot flowers, parasites and vermin with equal indifference, a life oozing with organic secretions, and thought itself oozed from the human brain as if from a suppurating wound, there was no soul but only fluids governed by the law of a complex, fertile, insane mechanism, the jaundiced concretions of calcified bile, the crimson, gelatinous mass of blood clots in the arteries, sweat, remorse, sobbing and slobber. One night Marcel heard a noise on his veranda, the sound of chairs being overturned, erratic knocking at the door, and when he opened it he found the doctor leaning against the door frame, he was shaking with fever and said, help me, I beg you, I can’t see anymore, I’m blind, and when he raised his eyes toward Marcel there were worms gushing out from his eyelids and running down his cheeks like tears. Marcel put him in his own bed for the ten days that the treatment for the filariasis called for, he heard him groaning every time the sheets rubbed against the painful bruises on his legs and his distorted arms, he helped him to endure the appallingly perverse effects of the diethylcarbamazine, despite the horror inspired in him by this body bloated by a monstrous excess of life which threatened to explode at any moment, with its skin irritations, its lumps, the abscesses that the putrefaction of the vessels beneath the skin had caused to erupt, his eyes red and swollen, like those of a fetus. When the doctor had recovered Marcel was relieved to see him go. He told the African maid to disinfect the house from top to bottom so as to restore the clinical, sterilized universe his burgeoning anxieties called for, he washed his hands in spirit, scrubbed beneath his fingernails until they bled, continued noting symptoms, incipient tumors, septicemia, necroses, although the only ailment he was suffering from was an appalling loneliness, which he tried to overcome by writing letters daily to his brother-in-law in Algeria, needing to confide in him his certainty of his own imminent death and unbosom himself without restraint, so as to reestablish at least the semblance of a human relationship, even though the one and only confidant he had chosen for himself, and for whom he had a fanatical admiration, never made any reply for, deep down in cellars in Algeria, Capitaine André Degorce, reclusive and mute, was slowly plunging into the abyss of his own loneliness with only his blood-soaked hands for company. Marcel went back to the village to bury his father, then his mother, and did not weep for them because death had always been their vocation and he was almost happy that they had at last been able to respond to a call they must have spent such long years pretending not to hear. He saw his older sisters again and did not recognize them, and also Jean-Baptiste and Jeanne-Marie and his son, whom he no longer dared to embrace and who, in any case, showed no inclination for this. He asked him if he was well and Jacques answered him yes and then he told him he lived far away from him but he loved him and Jacques once more answered yes, and they spoke no more until Marcel’s departure for Africa where his promotion to the post of Gouverneur de Cercle awaited him. He took leave of the doctor, the missionary and the gendarme who had been the insubstantial companions of so many pointless ye
ars and he left, accompanied by the African maid, and taking with him his wife’s remains which he had buried close to his new house. Six months later, without Marcel having noticed anything at all, the Empire ceased to exist. Is this how Empires die, without even a tremor being heard? Nothing has happened, the Empire no longer exists, and as he moves into his office in a Ministry in Paris, Marcel knows this is also true of his own life in which nothing will ever have happened. All the shining pathways have gone dark, one by one, and Lieutenant-colonel André Degorce, after his latest defeat, returns to his wife’s arms seeking the redemption he will never be granted as men come heavily down to earth in the new gravitational field of their fallen country. Time has dispensed with hope and continues to pass, unnoticed and empty, to the ever swifter rhythm of funerals that recall Marcel to the village, as if his only constant mission in this world were to see his nearest and dearest into the grave, one after the other, his wife now rests in Corsica, but she died so long ago that he is afraid all he has interred is a few pieces of dead wood covered in clay, and his older sisters die, one after the other, in the precise sequence established by the register of births in its wisdom. In Paris the taste of solitude gradually loses its savor, the cold mists have banished the insects that lay their eggs beneath the skin of translucent eyelids in the white light of the sun, and sealed up the jaws of the crocodiles, the epic struggles are over, he must make do now with pathetic enemies, flu, rheumatism, creeping old age, the drafts in the big apartment in the eighth arrondissement where Jacques has refused to come and live with him, unwilling to give a reason because he cannot admit that he harbors an unspeakable passion for the person he ought to regard as his sister. Jacques is fifteen, Claudie seventeen and Jeanne-Marie weeps hot tears as she relates how she came upon them shockingly naked and in one another’s arms in their childhood bedroom, she reproaches herself for her naivety, her culpable blindness, she knew how fond they were of one another, with a love she believed to be tender and fraternal, how much they hated to be separated, but she saw no harm in this, on the contrary, she was foolishly touched by it, while in fact she was nurturing two lewd creatures in her bosom, it is all her fault, she would rather not know how long this horror has been going on and the two of them are not even ashamed of their immorality, Claudie had stood up and confronted her, naked and glistening, fixing her with a defiant gaze that nothing could make her lower, neither reproofs, nor blows, Jacques was sent away to a Catholic boarding school and Claudie now refuses to speak to her parents, saying that she loathes them, and time does nothing to erode her incestuous resolve, a disgraceful secret correspondence is intercepted, for long years Claudie gives them no quarter, she inflicts her tears, her cries, her hysterical silence on them, Jacques runs away from the boarding school to which he is forcibly returned and compelled to undergo a pointless penitence until at length retired Général André Degorce, who is past caring about yet another defeat, once again hoists the flag of surrender and obliges everyone to accept the inevitable disgrace of this marriage, which is finally blessed by the arrival of Aurélie, after the hungry couple have devoted several years to feasting on one another’s flesh, for not even the most voracious egotism can escape the immutable cycle of birth and death. Marcel bows his head over Aurélie’s cradle, over that of Matthieu, then over the dark, open mouths of the graves that close upon Jean-Baptiste and upon Jeanne-Marie, still in the precise sequence established by the register of births in its wisdom, and then, upon the cold, blood-soaked hands of Général André Degorce, whose heart had already stopped beating long ago. Marcel is alone and when the time comes for him to retire, it confirms what he had probably always known, nothing has happened, those shining escape routes are secretly circular, their course turns in on itself inexorably and takes him back to the detested village of his childhood, and in his suitcase, laid on top of his suits of wool and linen, there is an old photograph, taken during the summer of 1918, in which what had been captured in the silver salts, alongside his mother, brother and sisters, was the enigmatic face of absence. Time is heavy now, almost at a standstill. At night Marcel trundles his old age from room to room in his empty house, in search of the foolish and merry young wife over whose loss he cannot console himself, but all he finds is his father standing there waiting for him in the kitchen. No sound ever escapes his white lips and he peers at his youngest son through the lashes of his burned eyelids, peers at him as if to reproach him for so many missed encounters with worlds that no longer exist and Marcel subsides beneath the weight of this reproach, he knows that no one can restore his youth, nor does he want this, for there would be no point. Now that he has seen his nearest and dearest into the grave, one after the other, the demanding mission he has accomplished must fall to someone else, and he waits for his perpetually wavering and steadfast health to suffer defeat at last for, in the sequence established by the register of births, his turn has now come to walk alone to the grave.