The Sermon on the Fall of Rome

by Jérôme Ferrari

  and he yelled that he knew Annie had had more customers but Annie replied,

  “No! That’s not true! It’s not true!”

  pouting stubbornly like a little girl, and he went up to her with clenched fists, describing each of the young people and reeling off a list of what they had drunk and telling her what they had paid, piling on the evidence relentlessly until all she could do was to burst into tears and beg for pardon. Libero said nothing. Matthieu thought, with relief, that the episode was finished, that Annie would get away with a proper lecture and the threat of punishment the next time she put a foot wrong, she would pay back the money and everything would begin again as it had been before, she said it herself,

  “I was out of order. I’ll pay it all back. I’ll never do it again, I swear it.”

  But Libero’s silence was not one of forgiveness and he had no intention of letting Annie repay her debt.

  “I don’t want you to pay it back. Keep what you’ve taken. I want you to go up to the apartment, right now, and pack your bag and get out. I don’t ever want to see you again. You’re out. Now.”

  Annie pleaded with him, she swore through her tears never to do it again, one after the other the customers got up and left the bar so as not to witness any more of the scene and Annie pleaded again, she’d been out of order but she’d also done good work, he couldn’t do this to her, where would she go? he didn’t realize, she was forty-three, he didn’t realize, he couldn’t kick her out like that, like a dog, and she repeated her age again, she was on her knees now, she reached out her hands to Libero who remained unmoving, eyeing her with a look of hatred, forty-three, he didn’t realize, she’d do everything he wanted, everything, and the more she wept the more Libero grew rigid beneath his protective shell of hatred, as if this woman before him on the ground were the incarnation in her quaking flesh of an absolute evil of which the world must be purged at all costs.

  “I shall come back in an hour’s time, and, in an hour’s time, you won’t be here.”

  When he had gone she got up unsteadily and Rym took her arm to help her climb up to the apartment. Matthieu did not dare look at her, a painful burden weighed on his chest, but he understood neither its nature nor its origin, he was waiting for night to fall and life to resume, without any further surprises, for he had once more become a little child who only finds reassurance in the perpetual repetition of what is the same, far away from ill-formed concepts whose unpleasant stirrings came to trouble his mind before bursting like bubbles on the surface of a swamp, he was waiting for the taste of the alcohol, for the constant tension that kept him sharp, his nerves on edge, alert for no purpose, and he was waiting for the moment of going to bed, Izaskun’s skin and Agnès’s eyes, despite the weariness, despite the acrid heaviness of breaths laden with champagne, gin and tobacco, the thick saliva that clung to stained teeth, sleep would come later, despite heavy eyelids, despite the strangeness of this impetus toward a body as exhausted as his own, which gave off the same toxins in damp sheets, and nothing would close his eyes in dreamless sleep before the unfolding of the nocturnal rite ordered by the law of this world, which was not the law of desire, for desire counted for nothing, any more than the weariness or the vulgarity of orgasm, and for each of them what mattered was to play their part in this choreography that validated their waking up in the morning, and kept them on their feet so late into the night. Thus are all worlds based upon ludicrous centers of gravity from which they secretly derive all their equilibrium and, as Rym took up her station behind the counter in Annie’s place, Matthieu rejoiced that the stability of this equilibrium had not, in the end, been threatened, he did not sense the subtle tremors in the earth, across which a network of fissures was opening up, as intricate as a spider’s web, he did not notice the timid reticence with which the girls now approached Libero, even though he was once more relaxed and smiling, everything was happening for the best, Pierre-Emmanuel did not appear to be alarmed at Annie’s disappearance, he had learned a Basque song to please Izaskun, and Matthieu did not notice the black looks he was darting at Libero over the top of his microphone, Izaskun confessed that she didn’t know a word of Basque, she’d grown up in Saragossa, she smiled, everything was happening for the best, Matthieu drank and noticed nothing, but how could he have noticed anything at all, he who had still not succeeded in believing that his father was dead? At two o’clock, Pierre-Emmanuel folded up his microphone stand, rolled up the cables and put away his guitar. Libero gave him his fee.

  “You could have told me about Annie, don’t you think?”

  Libero tensed as if from an electric shock.

  “Mind your own fucking business, you asshole! O.K.? Mind your own fucking business.”

  Pierre-Emmanuel stood there dumbfounded for a moment, put the money in his pocket and went to pick up his guitar.

  “That’s the last time you’ll speak to me like that.”

  “I’ll speak to you any way I like.”

  Pierre-Emmanuel left, head bowed, and the bar remained frozen in silence. Matthieu again felt that mysterious burden sliding down from his chest to his stomach and asked Libero what the matter was. Libero gave him a big smile and filled up their glasses.

  “That’s how it is with those assholes. If you’re nice to them they screw you. They’re too stupid. Niceness. Weakness. They don’t know the difference. It’s too hard for them. You have to use the language they understand. They understand that very well, believe me.”

  Matthieu nodded and went to sit outside with his drink. He gazed sadly at the darkness, reflecting for the first time that perhaps his eyes did not see the same things as those of his childhood friend. He took Judith’s letter from his pocket, reread it and, paying no attention to the time, took out his cell.

  After an interminable wait of three hours which had done nothing to appease her anger, Aurélie was seen by a member of the consular staff. The dig was finished, they had not found Augustine’s cathedral but there was so much still to do, one day they would find it and once again the marble of the apse where the bishop of Hippo had lain dying, surrounded by praying clerics, would gleam in the sunlight. Aurélie had invited Massinissa Guermat to come and spend a couple of weeks with her at the village and he had just told her he had been refused a visa. Outside the embassy walls covered in barbed wire stretched a line three hundred yards long in which men and women of all ages were stoically waiting their turn to be told that the sets of papers they had in their hands were not acceptable, for want of some item they had never been asked for. Aurélie went straight to the security door and asserted her status as a Frenchwoman to gain access but the receptionist had made her pay for the privilege by asking her to go and sit in an armchair where she had taken good care to forget all about her. The staff member was wearing a striped, short-sleeved shirt and a hideous tie and within a few minutes it became clear to Aurélie that she was not going to be given the explanation she had come for, no one was going to agree to reexamine Massinissa’s file, for their only concern here was to take a loathsome delight in wielding a power manifested only through arbitrary capriciousness, the power of the weak and pathetic, of whom this individual in his short-sleeved shirt was the perfect representative, with the smug, idiotic smile he directed at her from the impregnable citadel of his own stupidity. At the next desk an old woman in a hijab was clutching a little girl to her, and wilting beneath a deluge of contemptuous reproaches, her papers were a total shambles, they were filthy and illegible, good only for the garbage can, while Aurélie stubbornly pursued her fruitless struggle, employing the inoffensive weapon of reason, Massinissa was a doctor of archaeology, he held a post at Algiers University, did they think his situation was so unsatisfactory as to make him dream of abandoning it for the honor of working illegally on a building site in France? She herself was a university lecturer, did they think she spent her spare time setting up clandestine immigration networks? It was simply a matter of a few days of vacation, after which Massinissa would return t
o Algeria in a proper manner, this she would vouch for, but the individual in the short-sleeved shirt remained impassive and she longed to jab him in the arm with the pair of scissors that lay on the leather blotter on his desk. She left the consulate in a state of unspeakable rage, she wanted to write to the consul, to the ambassador, to the president, to say that she was ashamed to be French and the attitude of the staff she had had dealings with was a disgrace both to them and to the country they were supposed to represent, but she knew it would serve no purpose and she resolved to go to the village on her own, for a week, at least, before meeting up with Massinissa in Algiers in August. She needed to see her mother and, even more, her grandfather. She could not abandon him. However distressed she was by her father’s death, she was certain that Marcel was still more distressed by it, beyond what she herself could imagine, for it was in the normal order of things for children to bury their parents, but the appalling disruption of this order added outrage to grief, she wanted to go back to her evening walks with him, taking his arm, and she did so scrupulously, touched to feel him leaning on her, so fragile and so very old. After he had gone to bed, for want of other possible distractions, she went to have a drink at the bar. The young guitar player had made some progress, his vocal technique had improved but he still had a deplorable penchant for schmaltzy ballads, preferably Italian, which he sang with his eyes closed, as if to hold in check the massive surge of his emotion, before receiving the plaudits with the modest air of one who is confident that they are richly deserved. He strolled nonchalantly over to the counter, fully conscious of the female eyes upon him, and made open fun of Virgile Ordioni who laughed in his disarmed innocence, and Aurélie sometimes wanted to slap him as hard as she could, as if the poisonous atmosphere that now prevailed in the bar had contaminated her, too. For the atmosphere really had become poisonous, the scent of a storm hovered in the air, standing at the counter the men coarsely eyed up the tourists’ deep cleavages and sunburned thighs, unconcerned about the presence of husbands who were forced to accept endless rounds of drinks, not bought for them out of kindness but with the palpable intent of making them legless, Libero was constantly being obliged to intervene almost physically, with all the weight of his young authority, and Matthieu looked completely out of his depth. Aurélie almost felt sorry for her brother, he really seemed like a child and basically he was a child, exasperating and vulnerable, one who could only protect himself from the threat of nightmares by taking refuge in an unreal world of childish dreams, a world of sugar candy and invincible heroes. The day before she left Aurélie met Judith Haller, whom Matthieu had invited for the holidays and whom he favored with the sight of himself slipping the pistol into his belt when the bar closed, clearly interpreting the young woman’s look of consternation as an admiring and silent homage to his manliness. Happily inhabiting his role as the patron of a bar, he offered drinks to Aurélie and Judith, for whom more distress was in store, since it would be given to her that very evening to witness a spectacle particularly rich in decibels and gushing tear ducts. Judith was sipping her drink and chatting with Aurélie when a howl, like that of a wounded animal, made her jump. Out on the terrace, her head buried in her hands, Virginie Susini was rocking backward and forward yelling and sobbing and allowing no one to come near her. Apparently, in an incomprehensible recovery of his dignity, Bernard Gratas had just for the first time refused to be summoned to mate with her, and had furthermore grandly insisted that in the future he was not to be treated like a breeding boar and Virginie, who had at first remained impassive, had abruptly launched into a fit of hysterics worthy of the great hall at the Salpêtrière mental hospital from which nothing was lacking, no twitch, no muscular spasm, there was even an attentive and delighted audience, she moaned that she wanted to die, that she was already a lifeless corpse and called out Gratas’s Christian name, she howled that she needed him, news of the greatest significance, albeit highly unexpected, which gave the scene all its dramatic interest. Oh, she needed him, she desired him, why was he rejecting her? she was filthy, she was ugly, she wanted to die and when Gratas, surprised but moved, went up to her and touched her hand, she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth while still weeping, and he returned her kiss with such ardor that Libero had to ask them sharply to go and fornicate somewhere other than in front of his bar. The remaining customers exchanged coarse comments, Virginie was a madwoman and Gratas, it was now as clear as daylight, was a wimp of a Gaul, and everybody laughed, but Judith was not laughing. Aurélie tried to reassure her.

  “I don’t think it’s like this every night.”

  The next day Aurélie kissed her mother and grandfather goodbye, promising to come back and see him soon, she was sad to leave him, but she wanted to get some fresh air and to see Massinissa. She urged her brother to take good care of their grandfather and pay some attention to Judith, whom she abandoned to her uncertain fate, wishing her a good vacation.

  He could no longer remember why he had called her in the middle of the night to invite her to stay with him. Perhaps he had wanted to prove to himself that he was sufficiently remote from the world she represented for him no longer to have to fear it or run away from it, there were no longer two worlds, but just one now, a world that remained unified in its sovereign magnificence and it was the only world Matthieu belonged to. He was no longer afraid of Judith carrying him off with her or reviving within him the painful aftereffects of his former duality, he wanted to show himself to her as he was now, as he had always dreamed of himself being, but she could not see it. She spoke to him as if he had not changed, picking up the threads of old conversations whose sense was now lost on him, and it was like conversing with a ghost. She described in detail how her public teaching oral exams had gone, the sound of the little bell in the Descartes lecture theater, the familiar Sorbonne building immediately transformed into a sacrificial temple with its officiating priests and its victims, its cruelty, its martyrs and its unlikely miracles, she dreaded the German exam, she had prayed for a question on Schopenhauer and had almost fainted on reading the name of Frege on the paper she had drawn at random but grace had descended upon her, everything swiftly seemed to fall into place, as if the god of logic himself had been leaning over her shoulder, and Matthieu nodded automatically, even though he did not want to hear anything about Frege, or Schopenhauer or the Sorbonne, he was thinking about Izaskun, with whom he could no longer sleep because he had had to return to the family home during Judith’s visit, so as not to abandon her to the gloomy company of his mother and grandfather, although he was dying to do so, and he looked forward impatiently to the blessed moment when he would take her to the plane. Indeed, she did not seem very happy at the village, she was forever suggesting ridiculous plans for cultural excursions, she wanted to go to the beach, she said Virgile Ordioni frightened her and the drink gave her bad headaches. Matthieu tolerated these obvious manifestations of bad faith insofar as this enabled him to make Judith responsible for his own unhappiness. One night, apparently one like any other, Pierre-Emmanuel remained sitting in a corner of the main bar area for no obvious reason while the girls were cleaning the room, and when they had finished, Izaskun turned to him and they left together. A slow trickle of lava made its way into Matthieu’s entrails. He kept his eyes fixed on the door as if he hoped to see them returning and Judith put her hand on his arm.

  “Are you in love with that girl?”

  It was a stupid question, clumsy in its formulation, to which he could not offer an answer for it seemed to him that love and jealousy had nothing to do with the unbearable pain now consuming him. Izaskun was his sister, he reminded himself, his tender, incestuous sister, at the bar he never showed her any signs of affection, he had no need to mark his territory in public, as most men like to do, and no one observing them would have thought that there was anything whatever between them, and what was there between them, if not this intimacy of shared sleep and the performance of the rite that guaranteed the stab
ility of the world? In the name of what should he have felt jealous? And he reminded himself: what could be taken from him that would not in the end come back to him? But it had become impossible for him to feel superior and invincible, the foundations of the world had been shaken, the cracks were becoming chasms and the next day Izaskun spent the whole evening throwing moist glances Pierre-Emmanuel’s way, she broke off serving to go and kiss him and cling to him, despite remonstrations from Libero to which she responded by muttering obscene Iberian curses, and Matthieu simply had to admit to himself that he was well and truly dying of love and jealousy, even though he did not recognize his beloved sister in the amorous, purring pussycat now flaunting her fatuous passion night after night, and he knew perfectly well she would never come back to him, he could not prevent himself from thinking about Pierre-Emmanuel’s sexual exploits, he saw precise, intolerable images, he heard the cries that Izaskun had never uttered with him and he transferred all his hatred onto Judith, whose arrival had set the signal for the apocalypse. She was a foreign body which the world was rejecting with abrupt eruptions of chaotic violence. Plenitude and harmony were at an end. Disaster followed disaster. Judith and Matthieu were waiting for Libero to finish cashing up before going for a drink in a nightclub when Rym rushed into the bar in T-shirt and pants, looking completely panic-stricken, all her money had disappeared, a year’s worth of tips and savings which she used to keep in a little box hidden under her clothes, that nobody knew about apart from Sarah and now she couldn’t find it, she could no longer remember exactly when she’d last seen it, she talked about plans she could never bring to fruition, her young woman’s dreams, dreams no one had ever bothered to find out she might be cherishing, she wanted help, she wanted to search the apartment from top to bottom, without accusing anyone, although there must be a guilty party, of course, and she refused to listen to Libero who said it would probably be pointless, they must search, and search now, and they turned the apartment upside down, going through stuff belonging to Agnès and Izaskun, who took this questioning of their honesty particularly badly, they lifted up boxes of drink in the storeroom and under the counter, without finding anything and Rym kept shouting that they must go on looking. Libero tried to reason with her but she would not listen to him and in the end he lost his temper.