The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 2

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“Are you surprised that the end of the world is upon us? You might rather be surprised that the world has grown so old. The world is like a man; he is born, he grows up, he ages and he dies . . . In old age a man is filled with complaints and in old age the world, too, is filled with troubles . . . Christ says to you, ‘The world is passing away, the world is old, the world is going under, the world is already gasping with the breathing of old age, but be not afraid, your youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s.’”

SAINT AUGUSTINE

Sermon 81, paragraph 8, December 419

“If Romans are not perishing

perhaps Rome has not perished”

So, to bear witness to the beginning—as well as the end—there was this photograph, taken in the summer of 1918, which Marcel Antonetti would vainly persist in studying throughout his life, seeking to decode the enigma of the absence within it. In it his five brothers and sisters can be seen, posed there with their mother. There is a milky whiteness all around them, with no sign either of ground or walls, and they seem to be floating like ghosts amid a strange mist that will soon swallow them up and make them disappear. She sits there, dressed in mourning, unmoving and ageless, a dark scarf over her head, her hands placed flat upon her knees, staring so intensely at a spot located far beyond the lens that it is as if she were indifferent to everything around her—the photographer and his equipment, the summer sunlight and her own children, her son, Jean-Baptiste, wearing a beret with a pompom, timidly nestling up to her, squeezed into a sailor suit that is too tight for him, her three older daughters, lined up behind her, all stiff in their Sunday best, their arms rigid beside their bodies, and, on her own in the foreground, the youngest, Jeanne-Marie, barefoot and in rags, her pale, sulky little face hidden behind the long untidy locks of her black hair. And each time he meets his mother’s gaze Marcel feels utterly convinced that it is directed at him, that she was already peering into limbo to seek out the eyes of the unborn son she does not yet know. For what Marcel contemplates, in this photograph taken in the course of a hot summer’s day in 1918 in the schoolyard where an itinerant photographer had hung a white sheet between two trestles, is first and foremost his own absence. All the people are there who will soon surround him with their care, perhaps their love, but the truth is that none of them is thinking about him, and none of them miss him. They have fetched out the best clothes they never wear from a wardrobe stuffed with mothballs and have had to comfort Jeanne-Marie, who is only four and does not yet own either a new dress or shoes, before all going up to the school together, glad, no doubt, for something to be happening at last that might rescue them for a while from the monotony and solitude of all their years of war. The schoolyard is crowded. All through the day in the scorching heat of the summer of 1918, the photographer took pictures of women and children, of cripples, old men and priests, all filing past his camera, all of them, too, seeking some relief, and Marcel’s mother, brother and sisters waited their turn patiently, from time to time drying Jeanne-Marie’s tears of shame over her ragged dress and bare feet. At the moment when the picture was being taken she refused to pose with the others and had to be allowed to remain standing there all alone, in the front row, hiding beneath her tousled hair. There they all are and Marcel is not there. And yet, through the magic of a mysterious symmetry, now that he has seen them all into their graves, one after the other, they only exist thanks to him and his stubbornly faithful gaze, he, of whom, as they held their breath at the moment when the photographer released the shutter of his camera, they were not even thinking, is now their unique and fragile bulwark against nothingness, and this is why he continues to remove the photograph from the drawer where he keeps it carefully, even though he loathes it, just as, in point of fact, he has always loathed it, because if one day he neglects to do this, nothing will be left of them, the photograph will turn once more into a lifeless pattern of black and gray patches, and Jeanne-Marie will forever cease to be a little girl aged four. Sometimes he looks at them with rage, is tempted to reproach them for their lack of foresight, their ingratitude, their indifference, but he catches his mother’s eye and fancies she can see him, right there in the limbo where unborn children are held captive, and is waiting for him, even if the truth is that Marcel is not, and never has been, the one her eyes are desperately searching for. For the one she is searching for, far beyond the lens, is the one who ought to be standing there beside her and whose absence is so glaring that one might think this photograph had only been taken in the summer of 1918 to make it tangible and preserve this record of it. Marcel’s father was captured in the Ardennes during the early fighting and from the start of the war