The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 17

mountains. He is the first and only one of his brothers and sisters to continue his studies into secondary school and neither the demons within his body nor the inertia of things will stop him continuing with them as far as the teacher training college and well beyond, for he has no desire to be a teacher, he has no desire to dish out useless lessons to poor, dirty children whose terrified gaze would drive him back to the disarray of his own childhood, he has no desire to leave his village only to bury himself in another desperately similar village, perched like a tumor on the soil of an island where nothing changes, for the truth is that nothing there does change, nor will it ever change. His brother, Jean-Baptiste, has been sending money from Indochina and has bought his parents a house large enough for all the members of the family to stay there in the summer without being obliged to sleep squeezed up against one another like livestock in a cowshed. Marcel has his own room, but the layers of peeling skin still cling to his father’s dry lips and his mother’s brow is still knitted by the deep, rectilinear furrow of mourning, they look neither younger nor older than fifteen years ago, just after the world ended, and when he studies his own figure in the mirror he has the feeling that he was born like this, thin and shaky, and that his childhood has set its cruel stamp on him from which nothing can free him. Jean-Baptiste kept changing in the photographs he used to send because he lived in a part of the world where the passage of time still left tangible traces, he would grow visibly fatter, then, just as brutally became thin, as if his body were being constantly upset by the powerful, anarchic ebb and flow of life itself, he would pose at attention with an impeccably trim uniform and hair, or else half undressed, with his kepi on the back of his head, with a background of unfamiliar vegetation, in the company of other soldiers and girls dressed in silk, his face was bloated by fat and plenty, or hollowed out by weariness, debauchery or fever, but always the same mocking, gleeful expression could be read there, he adopted the swagger of a pimp and Marcel no longer admired him, he envied him the way he so openly relished the wealth he did not deserve. Everything he saw of his brother had become intolerable to him, his evident taste for whores, his imposing build, his leanness and his fatness, the insolence of his attitude, even his generosity, for all that money could not have been saved out of the pay he received as a chief sergeant, and must certainly be derived from vile trafficking, in money, opium, or human flesh. When Jean-Baptiste came back to the village for Jeanne-Marie’s wedding he was still just as corpulent as on the day of his departure and his face was still lit up by the juvenile expression of the man he had become over there, in those inconceivable lands where the sea foam was translucent and shone in the sunlight like a spray of diamonds, he was surrounded by his wife and children, his sleeves and kepi were decorated with the golden anchor, the badge of the colonial army, but the toxic influence of his native land caused him to revert to what he had never ceased to be, a clumsy, uneducated peasant whom fate had catapulted into a world he did not merit, and neither the cases of champagne he had ordered for his young sister’s wedding nor his ludicrous plan for opening a hotel in Saigon when he left the service would make a whit of difference. They were all wretched peasants, born of a world that had long since ceased to exist, but which clung to the soles of their shoes like mud, the viscous and malleable stuff they themselves were formed of, which they carried with them everywhere they went, whether to Marseille or Saigon, and Marcel knows he is the only one who can really escape from it. The beignets were too dry and covered in a layer of hardened sugar, the tepid blandness of the champagne left a taste of ashes in the mouth and the men sweated under the summer sun, but Jeanne-Marie radiated a timid joy, and the veil of satin and white lace that emphasized the oval of her face gave her the grace of an antique maiden of Judaea. She danced, clinging with all her might to her husband’s shoulders while he wore a grave smile, as if he already knew he would not survive the new war that even now lay in wait for them all. For beyond the barrier of the mountains, beyond the sea, there is a world in turmoil and it is over there, far away from them, without them, that their lives and their future are once again being determined and that is how it has always been. But the hubbub of this world gets lost at sea, long before reaching them and the reverberations that come Marcel’s way are so distant and confused that he cannot bring himself to take them seriously and in the school courtyard at Sartène he shrugs his shoulders with contempt when his friend Sebastien Colonna tries to get him to share his enthusiasm for the ideas of Charles Maurras and talks about the dawn of a new age and the rebirth of the patrie, which, thanks to the Jews and Bolsheviks, has gone to rack and ruin, and Marcel says, What on earth are you talking about? You’ve never seen a Jew or a Bolshevik in your life! shrugging his shoulders with contempt because he does not see how anyone could get fired up like this over the foggy unreality of such abstract notions. What causes Marcel’s pulses to race is the