The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 11

between twelve and eighteen, and came with a bedridden grandmother, who had dementia, and whose senility greatly reassured Marie-Angèle. She needed stability and the Gratas family were stability incarnate. When she explained to them that, having suffered painful inconveniences on the subject of which she had no wish to elaborate, she preferred to be paid in advance, Bernard Gratas made out a check to her on the spot, which miraculously proved to be funded, and Marie-Angèle handed over the keys for the bar and the apartment to them, restraining herself as she did so from flinging her arms around them. The grandmother was settled in beside the fireplace and the Gratas family reopened the bar, now appropriately renamed the Bar des Chasseurs, which, while it lacked originality, was redolent of the best type of traditionalism, and the bruised regulars resumed their old habits, coffee in the morning, games of cards at the apéritif hour and animated debates during the sweet summer nights. Marie-Angèle was delighted, while blaming herself for not having realized long before what her mistake had been. She should not at any price have entrusted her bar to compatriots, if she had given it a moment’s thought, she would at once have looked for a manager from the mainland, the success of the Gratas couple confirmed this to her in a striking manner, simple, hard-working people, whose firm grasp of reality compensated substantially for their manifest lack of imagination, that was what she had needed all along and she had no doubt that they would end up fitting in completely, even if for the moment the villagers, with their somewhat rough-hewn concept of hospitality, never referred to them as anything other than “the Gauls” and only spoke to them to order drinks, everything would turn out for the best, and, as it happened, the more the summer continued, the more the atmosphere became, if not friendly, at least relaxed, and Bernard Gratas was now invited to join games of belote, and Vincent Leandri even decided to shake him by the hand, and soon other customers at the bar followed suit, and only a little more time was needed for the lasting harmony Marie-Angèle dreamed of to settle in. She paid no attention to some signs that should have made her uneasy. Gratas was no longer content simply to serve rounds of drinks, more and more often he would accept a drink himself, to give pleasure to all concerned, and he also began leaving first two, and soon three, buttons of his shirt undone, now favoring a tight-fitting cut, a gold bracelet mysteriously made its appearance around his wrist and, to crown it all, toward the end of the summer he made two acquisitions, a jacket of aged leather and a pair of beard clippers, which, to an alerted eye, of course, could presage only the worst.

Early in July when Matthieu and Libero arrived in the village from Paris with their degrees under their belts, Bernard Gratas had not yet embarked on the outward transformation that would soon be symptomatic of a more substantial and irreversible inner turmoil. Standing there behind the counter, sober and upright, a cloth in his hand, close beside his wife, who watched over the till, he appeared immune to any conceivable form of turmoil, something Libero summed up in a single concise observation:

“Well, he looks like a total asshole.”

But neither he nor Matthieu had plans to embark on any bond of friendship with Gratas and were too happy to be on vacation to take any more interest in the matter. They began going out every evening. They met girls. They took them for midnight bathes and sometimes brought them up to the village. They went down again with them at dawn and combined this with drinking coffee at the harbor. The cruise liners unloaded their monstrous cargoes of human flesh. Everywhere there were people, shorts, flip-flops, and cries of wonder to be heard, as well as inane remarks. Everywhere there was life, too much life. And they watched this swarming life with an unutterable sense of superiority and relief, as if it were not of the same species as their own, because they were at home on the island, even if they, too, had to go back in September. Matthieu had never known anything else apart from these perpetual comings and goings but it was the first time Libero had returned after such a long absence. His parents had migrated there from the Barbaggia district of Sardinia in the 1960s like so many others, but he himself had never set foot there. He only knew it from his mother’s recollections, a wretched land, old women with veils carefully knotted below their lower lips, men with leather gaiters, whose limbs, ribcages and skulls had been measured by generations of Italian criminologists, carefully noting the imperfections in the bone structure so as to decode its secret language and identify within it the undoubted traces of a natural propensity for crime and savagery. A vanished land. A land that no longer concerned him. Libero was the youngest of eleven brothers and sisters, of whom Sauveur, the eldest, was nearly twenty-five years his senior. Libero had never known the hatred and insults that awaited the Sardinian immigrants here, the poorly paid work, the contempt, the half-drunk driver of the school bus who used to hit children when they passed by close to him, remarking,

“There’s nothing but Sardinians and Arabs in this country these days!”

and who would dart murderous looks at them in his rearview mirror.

Times change, the terrorized children who used to lie low at the back of the bus, their heads huddled into their shoulders, had grown into men and the driver had died without anyone thinking of paying his grave the tribute of spitting on it. Libero felt at home. He had not only a complete but a quite brilliant school career behind him