The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 12

and after his baccalaureate exams all his applications for admission to a senior preparatory class at the university had been accepted and his mother had almost suffocated with happiness, even though she had not the least idea what a senior preparatory class was, as well as suffocating Libero for good measure by hugging him to her enormous bosom, now swollen with emotion and pride. Libero had chosen to go to Bastia and for two years every Monday morning one or other of his brothers and sisters would get up in the middle of the night to drive him to Porto-Vecchio where he caught the bus. In Paris Matthieu had asked his parents to let him join the course at Bastia as well. They would have agreed but his exam results were not such that he could contemplate this, as he himself had to concede. So he enrolled at Paris IV University to read philosophy, the only subject in which he had done reasonably well, and resigned himself to traveling by subway every morning to the hideous complex at the Porte de Clignancourt. His conviction that he was a temporary recluse in a foreign world that only existed in parenthesis did not help him to make friends. He felt as if he were rubbing shoulders with ghosts with whom he had nothing in common and whom, what is more, he considered to be insufferably arrogant, as if the fact of studying philosophy conferred on them the privilege of understanding the meaning of a world in which the ordinary run of mortals were simply content to survive. Despite this, he formed a bond with one of his fellow students, Judith Haller, with whom he worked from time to time, and with whom he went to the movies occasionally, or to have a drink in the evening. She was extremely intelligent and ebullient and the fact that she was not particularly good looking would not have been enough to put Matthieu off, but he found it impossible, at least here in Paris, to fall in love with anyone at all, because he was not destined to remain there and did not want to lie to anyone. And thus it was that, in the name of a future as insubstantial as mist, he deprived himself of the present, as so often happens with men, if the truth be told. One evening they were drinking and talking until late in a bar on the Place de la Bastille and Matthieu let the time for the last subway slip by. Judith offered to put him up and he walked home with her, after sending a text to his mother. Judith lived in a wretched chambre de bonne on the sixth floor of a block of apartments in the twelfth arrondissement. She left the light off, put on some soft music and lay down on the bed, in T-shirt and pants, facing the window. When Matthieu lay down beside her, fully dressed, she turned to him without saying a word, he could see her eyes shining in the darkness, it seemed to him as if she were smiling a trembling smile and he could hear her deep, heavy breathing and was moved by it, he knew that all he needed to do was to reach out his hand and caress her for something to happen, but he could not, it was as if he had already abandoned and betrayed her, he was paralyzed with guilt and did not stir, simply facing her and looking into her eyes until her smile vanished and they both fell asleep. He cared for her as he would for a future possibility in his life. Sometimes, when they were drinking coffee together, he imagined lifting his hand to stroke her cheek, he could sometimes almost picture this notional hand traveling up unhurriedly through the transparent air and brushing against a lock of Judith’s hair before alighting on her face, whose warmth he felt in the hollow of his palm, as she gently let it happen, suddenly so solemn and silent, and he was aware, so strongly that his real heart began thumping, that he was not going to leap across the abyss that lay between him and this possible world, because, in attaining it, he would also destroy it. It was a world that could only endure in this fashion, halfway between being and nothingness, and Matthieu carefully held it there, in a complex mesh of unfulfilled acts, desire, revulsion and flesh not to be touched, without knowing that, years later, the collapse of the world he was soon going to choose to bring into existence would restore him to Judith, as to a lost home, and that he would then reproach himself for having been so cruelly mistaken about where his destiny lay. But for the moment Judith was not his destiny and he did not want her to become it, she remained simply an inoffensive and gentle pretext for dreaming, thanks to whom the barely perceptible passage of time that so stifled him, dragging him along so slowly, occasionally became swifter and lighter, and when two years had passed and the question came up of where Libero would now enroll for his studies, Matthieu was grateful to Judith, as if she had enabled him to escape from the viscous clutches of a time that never ended, which, but for her, would have held him captive. Matthieu hoped that Libero would come to Paris to continue his studies, he had such high hopes of this that he did not for a moment imagine things turning out differently, given that reality must inevitably, at least from time to time, correspond to what he hoped for. So he was seriously put out to learn that Libero was going to study literature at Corte, not from choice, but because the Pintus family did not have the means to send him to the mainland. Matthieu now had no further doubt that a malign and perverse