The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 19

the bitterness of what he was about to learn and no longer hoping for solace. He climbed after her into sheets that smelled of mold where to the very end he had to tolerate the affront of her impassiveness. He felt the heat at the place where their bellies met and mingled like the cloacae of reptiles, he felt the clamminess of her breasts pressing against his chest, her legs against his own, intolerable images arose in Marcel’s mind, he was an animal, a great voracious, shuddering bird, plunged up to its neck into the entrails of a rotting carcass, for she maintained the obscene impassiveness of a carcass, her dead eyes staring at the ceiling, and in the places where their skins touched, at each point of contact, fluids were being exchanged, transparent lymph, intimate humors, as if, in a hideous metamorphosis, his body were going to retain the imprint of this woman’s body forever, although he would never see her again and did not know her name, and he got up abruptly to dress and leave. He emerged, panting, into the street, alien blood flowed in his veins, the sweat trickling down onto his eyelids no longer smelled the same and he spat on the ground because he did not recognize the taste of his own saliva. He spent weeks anxiously examining his body, every tiny pimple, every rash, feeling he was doomed to get skin infections, thrush, syphilis, gonorrhea, but whatever name were given to the illness that lay in wait for him, that would only be the outward form in which the malady that had him in its grip would declare itself, irremediably, and he pestered the doctors every week until the day arrived when the German army invaded the Free Zone and forced him to abandon his self-obsession. Sebastien Colonna was horrified, fulminating against the Allies’ recklessness and Hitler’s treachery in not keeping his word, but his confidence in the paternal authority of the Maréchal was manifestly shaken, he was afraid he would be sent to do forced labor in a German factory and said to Marcel, We need to get away from here, we need to leave at once. But boats were no longer leaving the harbor. Sebastien learned from his uncle that a liner was due to leave for Bastia from Toulon in a few days’ time. Marcel and he went there by bus. They saw columns of black smoke arising above the sea, all that was left of the scuttled French fleet was a mass of sheet metal and steel obstructing the harbor, the screaming German Stukas were dive bombing the rare ships that were trying to escape by threading their way between mines and anti-submarine nets, and Sebastien burst into tears. When the dire straits he himself was in eventually struck him as being at least as worthy of interest as the honor of the French navy, he explained to Marcel that it was essential for them to cross into the Italian occupation zone if they wanted to give themselves a chance of getting back home. Marcel replied that he had no money left for further travel and was going to go back to his sister in Marseille but Sebastien said no, this was out of the question, he had some money and would not abandon him, and thus Marcel learned that friendship is a mystery. They managed to reach Nice and were back in their village a week later. Now Jeanne-Marie’s grief has begun to invade the house and hangs there like a fog that nothing will come and dispel. Everything is muted beneath a veil of silence so heavy that Marcel sometimes wakes up with a start, pining for the screaming bombs on Toulon harbor. He gets up to have a drink and finds his father standing in the kitchen, completely unmoving, with a fixed stare and Marcel asks him, Papa, what are you doing here? but receives no reply other than a tilt of the head, which plunges him back into the endless silence. He looks at his father in terror, as he stands there in his rough woolen nightshirt, with his burned eyelids and lashes and his white lips and, despite the panic overcoming him, he cannot look away, he summons up all his strength, edges past him, takes the jug to help himself to water and goes back to bed, vowing never to get up again during the nights that follow, even if he is being tortured by thirst, for he knows he will find his father standing on the same spot, lost to the world, petrified in a woeful stupor, which death itself will not put an end to. Marcel would like to extricate himself from this straitjacket of silence, he hears the great wind of rebellion blowing all around him and is waiting for its bloody squalls to rip the doors and windows off the house to let in fresh air. Sebastien Colonna recounts tales of parachute drops, assassinations with hand grenades, he tells how over in the Alta Rocca region, two Andreani cousins murdered an Italian before joining the maquis, and condemns these futile and criminal acts without realizing that Marcel does not share his disapproval and is already picturing himself taking up arms against the invader. In early February an unknown person began killing lone Italian soldiers, once a week, with relentless regularity. Their bodies would be found, lying in the mud, close to an overturned motorcycle, on mountain roads within a radius of a few miles from the village. They had been brought down by buckshot and sometimes finished off by having their throats cut with a knife, bled like pigs, some of them had been more or less undressed and all of them had been brutally stripped of their shoes. The shoes were nowhere to be found and it was this detail, innocuous in itself, that gave rise to respect and terror in people’s minds, as if the assassin were