The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 18

concrete and exquisite thought of soon doing his military service, his level of education will allow him to become an officer, he can already picture the gilded line of his officer cadet’s stripe and when, in a moment of jocularity during the wedding, Jean-Baptiste, his mouth crammed with beignets, saluted him with mock solemnity before ruffling his hair with a laugh, as if he were a ten-year-old, Marcel could not restrain feelings of secret joy over this, which not even the declaration of war took the shine off. Jeanne-Marie came back and settled in the house in the village with Jean-Baptiste’s wife and children. They waited for daily letters from the Maginot Line that spoke of boredom, frustration and victory, Jeanne-Marie’s young husband wrote that he missed her, and that, as the nights grew cold, he was thinking about the warmth of her skin against his own, he was impatient for the Germans to attack so that he could defeat them and return to her, he wrote to say he swore he’d never leave her, no, never, when all this was merely a distant and glorious memory, he’d never leave her. Time passed and he wrote more things to her than he would ever have dared to say to her face, even in whispers, he spoke of her belly arched beneath his caresses, of her thighs, of her breasts, whose whiteness was to die for, and again of the imminent victory, as if the glory of his wife’s body were mingled and even confused with that of the country he was defending, every day he became more exalted, explicit and warlike, and Jeanne-Marie was thrilled by his letters and prayed to God to bring him home soon, with no fear of her wish not being granted. In March 1940 Marcel, having sworn to the army doctor that he had never had the slightest problems with his health, finally leaves his sister, his village and his parents to join a unit of officer cadets in an artillery regiment in Draguignan. Once across the sea, the demon of the ulcer seems to be disabled, deprived of its power to do harm, and for the first time in his life Marcel enjoys a vigor whose existence he had never suspected, he behaves like the diligent pupil he has always been and is deaf to all the rest, failing to hear the roar of the panzers, the smashed trees in the Ardennes forests, the clamor of the flight from Paris and the tears of humiliation, all dreams of victory swept aside by a tempest of defeat, he does not hear Philippe Pétain’s voice speaking of honor and armistice, and as the first letter written by Jean-Baptiste from a German stalag arrives at the village, as well as the telegram informing Jeanne-Marie that she is a widow at twenty-five, Marcel finally hears, without being able to believe it, the unit commander informing the men in his platoon that they will never be commissioned, that they have all been assigned to Maréchal Pétain’s Chantiers de Jeunesse program and grasps that all that he will be is a glorified boy scout singing the Maréchal’s praises and a burning acid rips through his stomach and chest, bringing him to his knees in the midst of his comrades, and in front of the unit commander who watches him vomiting blood into the dust. On leaving the hospital, after being discharged, he goes and settles in Marseille at the home of one of his older sisters and spends whole days lying on his bed, lulled by resentment and nausea, without being able to bring himself to go home to the village, to return to its unchanging embrace of anguish and mourning and he delays his departure, desperately clinging to this vast, dirty city, as if it were to be his salvation. He is convinced that life has run up an immense debt to him, which it can only settle if he remains here, for he knows that once he sets foot on his native soil, all accounts will be canceled, the insults and prejudice, the compensations, and existence will no longer owe him anything. He is waiting for something to happen and he wanders up and down the streets of this city whose vastness and dirtiness frighten him, he glances uneasily toward the harbor, trying to resist the poisonous seduction of homesickness and he stops up his ears, for he is afraid of hearing sweet and beloved voices from beyond the sea, calling on him to return to the limbo he came from. Sebastien Colonna has joined him and every day dozens of his compatriots arrive in Marseille, looking for work there. On the recommendation of an uncle of Sebastien’s, Marcel has been taken on at the Société Genérale bank. But the weeks were going by and still those debts had not been settled. So was this how life settled its debt? Was this how life compensated him for not being an officer, by forcing him to immerse himself in account books that made him choke with boredom, his only permitted respite from them being listening to Sebastien’s interminable harangues on the merits of national revolution, praising the wisdom of God, and the way He helped men to derive edifying and salutary lessons from the worst catastrophes, extolling sacrifice and resignation, for what France needed was brutal medicine to purge herself of the poison that infected her—was this how life did it? So wasn’t life hounding him, with its repeated contempt, straight into the arms of the whore he had decided to accost, both so as to satisfy his desire for knowledge and to seek solace? She had dark, compassionate eyes that shone with a deceptive gentleness that quickly vanished once she was alone with him, and no glimmer now lit up the look she focused on him as he performed his ablutions in a cracked and grimy bidet, she stared at him pitilessly and he trembled with shame, anticipating