The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 16

She trusted them, she had known them since they were children and knew they had no intention of cheating her, but the fact was that she had to eat and she absolutely had to be paid in advance. By going and making his case to his brothers and sisters, Libero managed to put together two thousand euros. Matthieu announced his plan one evening in July at the family supper table. Claudie and Jacques laid down their spoons. His grandfather went on drinking his soup with meticulous care.

“Do you think we’re going to give you money so you can abandon your studies and manage a bar? Do you seriously think that?”

Matthieu attempted to make his case, offering arguments he judged to be irrefutable, but his mother cut him off brutally.

“Hold your tongue.”

She was pale with fury.

“Leave the table at once. I want you out of my sight.”

He felt humiliated but obeyed her without a word. He called his sister to angle for her support but could not get her to understand. Aurélie burst out laughing.

“What a load of nonsense. Did you really think Maman was going to jump for joy?”

Again Matthieu tried to defend himself. She would not listen.

“It’s time you grew up. You’re starting to be a bore.”

He went to see Libero to give him the bad news and they got gloomily drunk together. When Matthieu woke up, about noon the next day, with a bad headache, due as much to despair as to drink, his grandfather was seated at his bedside. Matthieu sat up painfully. Marcel was looking at him with unaccustomed benevolence.

“So you want to settle down here and look after the bar, do you, my boy?”

Matthieu assented with a vague nod of his head.

“Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll pay the fee and the rent for this year and I’ll pay it again next year. After that you’ll get nothing, nothing at all, not a cent. That, my boy, will give you two years to prove your worth.”

Matthieu flung his arms around his neck. The week that followed was apocalyptic. Claudie made a terrible scene. She accused Marcel of spite and sabotage in aggravating circumstances with malice aforethought, he was only helping his grandson because he hated him and wanted to see him ruin his life, purely for the satisfaction of proving he hadn’t been mistaken about him, and as for the other young idiot, who was over the moon about it, he understood nothing and was cheerfully hurling himself into the abyss, like the stupid little idiot that he was, and in vain Marcel protested his good faith, it did no good, she pilloried him, yelling that one way or another he would pay for his infamous conduct, and she said the same to Marie-Angèle, turning up at her house without warning and creating a scandal by asking her if it was to console herself for having given birth to a whore that she was setting out to lead other people’s children astray, but that did no good and in the end Claudie calmed down and halfway through July Matthieu and Libero took over the bar, having magnanimously engaged Gratas to do the dishes. Libero walked over to behind the counter. He examined the colorful row of bottles, the sinks, the cash register, and felt he belonged there. This was a valid currency. Everyone understood the point of it and had faith in it. That was what gave it its value and no other chimerical value system on earth, as in heaven, could be opposed to it. Libero no longer wanted to resist. And, while Matthieu was fulfilling his life’s dream by laying waste with savage joy to the lands of his past with fire and the sword, and instantly erasing the messages of support and regret that Judith persisted in sending him, be happy, when shall I see you again? don’t forget me, as if he could thus expel her from his dream, Libero had long since ceased dreaming. He admitted defeat and was now giving his assent, a sorrowful, total, desperate assent, to the world’s stupidity.

“You, see yourself for what you are.

For it is necessary for the fire to come”

The mountains hide the open sea, however, rearing up with all their inert mass against Marcel and his steadfast dreams. From the courtyard at the primary school in Sartène all he can make out is the headland at the end of the gulf that reaches deep into the land where the sea looks like a vast lake, peaceful and insignificant. He does not need to see the sea in order to dream, Marcel’s dreams are nourished neither by contemplation nor by metaphor but by struggle, waging an unceasing fight against the inertia of things that all resemble one another, as if, beneath the apparent diversity of their shapes, they were all made of the same heavy, viscous, malleable stuff, even the water in the rivers is murky and on the empty beaches the lapping of the waves gives off a sickly smell of marshland, one needs to struggle not to become inert oneself, allowing oneself to be slowly engulfed, as if by a quicksand, and still Marcel wages his unceasing battle against the forces unleashed within his own body, against the demon striving to pin him down on his bed, his mouth full of ulcers, his tongue eaten away by the flow of acidic juices, as if a gimlet had gouged out a well of exposed flesh within his chest and stomach, he fights against despair at being perpetually pinned to a bed moist with sweat and blood, against time wasted, he fights against his mother’s weary look, against his father’s silent resignation, as he waits for the moment when he will regain both his strength and the right to be there in the courtyard at the primary school in Sartène, his view blocked by the barrier of the