The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 20

indulging in a ritual all the more frightening because it was incomprehensible and there were mutterings that this was nothing to do with the maquis, it was the work of a mysterious partisan, a messenger of certain death, a pitiless loner, like the legendary Archangel of the Lord of hosts. With the exception of Sebastien Colonna, whose contempt for Italians was counterbalanced by his admiration for Mussolini and his visceral and passionate penchant for authority, all the young men in the village wanted to join the resistance, so that they, too, might become fearsome killers in the cause of justice. They could no longer tolerate inaction. They met to discuss what they could do, they considered liquidating traitors and collaborators and someone even mentioned Sebastien’s name, but Marcel spoke warmly in his defense and reminded them that he had never harmed anybody. In the end they arranged a nocturnal rendezvous in the mountains with a combat unit and set off from the village at one o’clock in the morning, marching together through the chilly night, borne along by the enthusiasm of their youthful militancy, but when they had got past the school they heard the sound of feet marching in quick time, approaching from a few dozen yards up the hill, whereupon they fled down to the village again and scuttled back into their homes to watch out with thumping hearts for the passing of the Italian patrol, which they never saw because they had run away from the echo of their own footsteps flung back at them by the night’s icy silence. They were crushed by shame. They carefully avoided one another, so as not to have to face up to their dishonor. In the spring the mystery killer was no longer heard of and no one knew whether he had perished or had returned to his dwelling in heaven, there to await the Apocalypse. The mystery was only solved during the September uprising, which, for Marcel, amounted to a few comings and goings in the streets of the village, a useless rifle in his hand. Ange-Marie Ordioni came down from the shepherd’s hut high above the forest of Vaddi Mali where he lived with his wife, leading the primitive life of a Stone Age hunter. He was shod in Italian lace-up boots and wore a military jacket from which he had removed the stripes and epaulets. In the depths of winter his only pair of boots had begun to disintegrate, he was unable to mend them and had no money to buy himself new ones. It had seemed to him quite natural to help himself from the occupying forces, but it had taken him some time to find a pair that fitted him for, despite his caveman build, he had ridiculously small feet. One of the senior figures in the Front National yelled that he was an idiot and a madman and he ought to have him shot on the spot but Ange-Marie gave him a chilling look and remarked that he would do better to keep quiet. In the mountains you need good boots. The French forces arrived in the village, the auxiliary soldiers from North Africa laughed and drank, they sang in Arabic in the streets, Marcel stared in amazement at their shaven heads, the long pigtails of braided hair that hung down the backs of their necks, the Saracen curvature of their knives, and Sebastien said to him, Feast your eyes on what our liberators look like, Moors and Negroes, it’s always the same, to begin with the barbarians lend their services to the Empire, later on they hasten its downfall and destroy it. There’ll be nothing left of us. A few weeks later the two of them were vomiting side by side on board the Liberty Ship taking them to Algiers through the storms. Upsurges of sea water as dense as mud washed away their defilement and froze them to the marrow. In Maison-Carrée, close to Algiers, an officer sat at a desk, his nose buried in a dull register, and informed them of their respective postings with an indifferent air, and there was nothing to show that it was there, behind that desk, that reprieves and death sentences were being decided, for this was the irrevocable place of the parting of the ways, the place where, without appeal, the sheep were separated from the goats, the former to the left, the latter to the right, but nobody asked them to choose between the glory of dying in battle and a life of insignificance, and at the very moment when Sebastien Colonna learned the name of his infantry regiment, he was already embarking on his ineluctable trajectory toward the machine-gun bullets that had always been waiting for him at Monte Cassino. Marcel embraced him as a matter of course, not knowing that all he would ever see of him again was his name, carved in letters of gold by unknown hands on a monument to the dead, as if marble were less perishable than human flesh, and he boarded a train for Tunis. On arrival he learned that he was being sent back with his battery to Casablanca to be trained in operating American anti-aircraft guns and he gave up trying to understand the logic of military postings. The train set off toward the west, hugging the coastline on a long journey that lasted three weeks. He was stretched out beside his comrades in goods wagons with their floors covered in warm straw on which he spent the best part of his time dozing, only rousing himself from his torpor to play cards or to watch the sad passing of plains and silent towns, not one of which lived up to the promise of his dreams, once more the sea lapped against lackluster shorelines and no trace remained of the marvelous tales that peopled the history books, neither the fire of Baal, nor Scipio’s African legions, there was not one Numidian knight besieging the