The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 13
“We’re going to invite Libero to come and stay here with us. In Aurélie’s room. What do you think about that?”
That summer, just as he had done at the age of eight, he went with her to see the Pintus family. Gavina Pintus was still sitting on her deckchair, surrounded by fresh piles of rubble. She invited them inside to drink coffee and they sat there around the vast table that Matthieu now knew so well. Libero had joined them. Claudie spoke and Matthieu heard his mother speaking in the language he did not understand although he knew it was his own, she took Gavina Pintus’s hand. The latter shook her head in refusal and Claudie leaned toward her and went on talking without Matthieu being able to do anything other than guess at what she was saying,
“You took my son in, as if he were your own, now it’s our turn. No one’s offering you charity. It’s our turn,”
and she went on talking with tireless force of conviction until Matthieu understood, on seeing Libero’s face light up into a smile, that she had obtained what she had come for.
At first there was a festive air about Bernard Gratas’s way of the cross. Matthieu and Libero were back in Paris at work on their dissertations when he began organizing poker games every week in the back room at the bar. It is highly unlikely that Bernard Gratas would have taken such an initiative on his own. It had doubtless been suggested to him by someone who needed to remain anonymous but had plainly grasped that here was a sucker whose dearest and most urgent desire was to be fleeced. These games met with great success once word got around in the area that Gratas was a player as terrible as he was rash, and one, what’s more, who believed that poker was a game of chance and that one’s luck always turned in the end. He started to smoke cigarillos, but this did not help him at all, any more than the dark glasses that he now wore by day as well as by night. He lost money like a lord, with a style that extended to offering rounds of drinks to his executioners. One day, without any advance warning, his wife and children and the old woman disappeared. When Marie-Angèle heard the news she called on him to offer her sympathy and found him at the bar in a state of remarkable elation. He confirmed that his wife had left, taking all the furniture with her. He was sleeping on a mattress, which she had grudgingly agreed to leave behind for him. Marie-Angèle was about to make a few suitable remarks when he observed roundly that it was the best thing that had ever happened to him, he was finally rid of a scold and three brats who were as thick as they were ungrateful, not to mention the old woman who, before declining into senility and incontinence, had made his life a misery by doling out generous helpings of spite, being quite unbelievably wicked, so wicked that he suspected her of secretly relishing the fact that she was now senile and was thus assured of being a real pain in the ass to the end of her days without anyone being able to reproach her for it, and he had no doubt at all that she would live to be a hundred, she was as tough as old boots, he had spent years dreaming about an accident in the home or euthanasia, without ever saying a word, stoically enduring a life he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, but that was all over and now it was time to live, he had no intention of missing out on this, he would be able to express his true personality at last, the one he’d always kept hidden deep inside him, out of weariness, out of disgust, out of cowardice, but he was through with knuckling under, he was being reborn, and he told Marie-Angèle that it was thanks to her that he now felt at home there, surrounded by dear friends, his wife could snuff it for all he cared, that was no concern of his now, he’d won the right to be selfish, won it the hard way, and never, ever, had he felt so happy, for now he was truly happy, he kept on repeating, with evident and almost pathological sincerity, fixing on Marie-Angèle a look so overcome with gratitude that she was afraid he might hurl himself at her and hug her in his arms, which he was obviously restraining himself from doing, contenting himself with saying thank you but without being able to admit that he was above all grateful to her for having given birth to Virginie, with whom he had for the past few weeks been having the affair that had finally made a happy man of him. And never has happiness been more ostentatious. Bernard Gratas was forever laughing loudly at the slightest provocation, he was bursting with energy, constantly rushing back and forth between the counter and the main bar area without ever showing the least sign of fatigue or drunkenness, even though he had now started drinking like a fish, he heaped