The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 14

totally misplaced marks of affection on his customers and lost money with visible delight, there was something profoundly disturbing about the spectacle of his euphoria, it was as if it could only be the symptom of an appalling psychic sickness, and it inspired fears that it might be contagious. The more attentive and friendly Bernard Gratas appeared, the more people turned away from him in distaste, without his seeming to be aware of it, so resolved was he now to live in a world ruled only by illusion. But, alas, it seems the rule of illusion can never be perfect, and even a man like Bernard Gratas must have vaguely sensed that none of all this was real, as he staggered beneath the weight of a certain knowledge that he could neither eradicate nor put into words, but could only run away from by parading his happiness with grotesque, desperate stubbornness, and he could not understand why he sometimes woke up in the night, his heart thumping with anguish because on that day in June, after he had asked Virginie to come and live with him, she had replied with a disdainful shrug of her shoulders that he was out of his mind and she never wanted to see him again, after which she went and sat on the terrace in the sun and ordered a cold drink from him, which he served without saying a word. The very thing he had striven to escape from had just caught up with him and broken him. Virginie threw him an irritated glance.

“Don’t make that face. You look ridiculous.”

He went on with his work normally for several days, as if carried along by an absurd momentum, and then one evening, at apéritif time, when the bar was full of customers, he burst into tears and paraded his unhappiness, just as he had done his happiness, with the same shameless candor, loudly evoking, between sobs, the perfection of Virginie’s naked body, and her sulky queen’s inscrutable fixed stare as he sweated away at coming in and out of her with all his might without ever managing to extract so much as a sigh from her, as if she were merely a witness to a scene she was following with keen attention, but which only concerned her vaguely, and he wept as he recalled how the more fervently he loved her, the more fixed and hard her gaze became from beneath those long eyelashes that betrayed not a flicker and he felt himself both humiliated and mesmerized by this look of hers that transformed him into a laboratory animal without his arousal growing any the less, quite the contrary, he said, sniffing noisily, he was more and more aroused, and in the bar the first murmurs of disapproval began to be heard, someone shouted at him to get a grip on himself, and then to shut his trap, but he could not be quiet, he was now out of reach of shame, his face glistening with tears and snot and, as he came out with specific, distasteful details, talking about the way Virginie, without taking her eyes off him, would press the palm of her hand against his back and draw her outstretched middle finger slowly down his spine, while fixing him now with a kind of sorrowful contempt that he recognized every time with terror, knowing that it would soon be impossible for him to stop himself coming and, as the appalled assembled company continued to follow the descent of this indecent middle finger, guessing all too well at its inexorable destination, and was already resigning itself to enduring the detailed description of a Bernard Gratas orgasm, Vincent Leandri went up to him, slapped him twice and dragged him outside by the arm. Bernard Gratas was now on his knees on the asphalt and no longer weeping. He looked at Vincent.

“I’ve lost everything. I’ve screwed up my whole life.”

Vincent did not reply. He was trying to mobilize all his faculties for compassion, but still wanted to hit him. He offered him a handkerchief.

“You’ve slept with her as well. I know you have. How could she do this?”

Vincent squatted down beside him.

“If you thought you and Virginie were a couple, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you were. Stop boring the pants off everyone with your tale. Pull yourself together.”

Bernard Gratas shook his head.

“I’ve screwed up my whole life.”

In the end Libero found reasons of his own for loathing Paris which owed nothing to Matthieu. And thus it was that every evening and every morning, side by side in a crowded carriage on Line 4, both of them would be sunk in irremediable bitterness, although this had different significance for each of them. For Libero had at first believed he had gained admission to the very throbbing heart of learning, as an initiate who has triumphed in tests beyond the comprehension of common mortals, he could not set foot inside the great hall of the Sorbonne without feeling overcome by the apprehensive pride that signals the presence of the gods. For at his back came his illiterate mother, his brothers, who were tillers of the land and shepherds, and all his ancestors, prisoners of the pagan darkness of Barbaggia, all aquiver with joy in the depths of their graves. He had faith in the eternity of things eternal, in their steadfast nobility, which is inscribed upon the monumental pediment of a pure and lofty heaven. Then he lost his faith. He was taught ethics by an extraordinarily verbose and amiable young graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, who discussed texts with a nonchalance so brilliant it was nauseating, bombarding his students with decisive observations about absolute evil that would not have been disavowed by a village priest, albeit decked out with a generous helping of references and quotations, which did nothing to compensate for their conceptual emptiness or to conceal their