The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 23

herself for the unkindness of this attitude, the ease with which love was suddenly changing into contempt, and regretted having a churlish heart. She had nothing against bar managers, sandwiches and waitresses, and would not have passed any judgment on Matthieu’s choices if she had believed them to be sincere and considered, but she had no time either for play-acting or denial and Matthieu was behaving as if he must cut himself off from his past, he spoke with a contrived accent that had never been his own, an accent all the more ludicrous because on occasion he would lose it halfway through a sentence before blushing and correcting himself, to pick up the thread of the grotesque drama of his assumed identity from which the slightest idea, the tiniest evidence of intellect were excluded as dangerous elements. And Libero himself, whom Aurélie had always regarded as a thoughtful and intelligent boy, seemed resolved to follow the same path, being content to respond with a vaguely interrogative onomatopoeic noise when she told him she was going to spend the following year between the University of Algiers and Annaba, where she would be taking part in excavations on the site of Hippo with a team of French and Algerian archaeologists, as if the Saint Augustine, to whose writings he had just devoted a year of his life, were not worth a further second of his attention. Aurélie had given up talking to them about anything that really mattered to her and every evening, when she had reached the limit of what she could endure by way of singing, laughter and nonsense, she would get up from the table and say to her grandfather,

“Shall we go for a little stroll?”

and, to make it clear,

“Just the two of us?”

in case it had occurred to anybody else to join them, and they would walk together along the road leading up toward the mountain, Marcel took his granddaughter’s arm, they left the sounds of merriment and the lights behind them, and sat down for a moment beside the fountain under the vast, starry August night sky. It was the first time Aurélie had been invited to join an international cooperative project and she was eager to start work. Her parents were concerned about her safety. The man who was sharing her life at that time was concerned about the durability of their relationship. Matthieu was concerned about nothing. Her grandfather viewed her as an enchantress, single-handedly capable of hoisting up vanished worlds from the abysses of dust and oblivion that had engulfed them and, in her moments of enthusiasm, when she had just embarked on her studies, that had been how she dreamed of herself. She had since become humbler and more serious. She knew that life cannot exist far from human eyes and strove to be one of those pairs of eyes that save life from extinction. But her churlish heart sometimes whispered to her that this was not true, all she brought into the light was dead things, she breathed no life into them, on the contrary, it was her own life that was slowly allowing itself to be invaded through and through by death, and Aurélie huddled close to her grandfather in the darkness. When the time came for her to leave she embraced him with all her might, then embraced all the rest of her family, trying to be even-handed in her affection. Matthieu said to her,

“Well, don’t you think it’s good, what we’ve managed to do?”

seeking her approval with such childish insistence that she could only answer him,

“Yes, it’s very good. I’m very happy for you,”

and gave him another kiss. She returned to Paris with the man who was sharing her life at that time and a few days later he went with her to Orly airport where once again, as the day dawned, and after a night of love which he had wanted to be intense and solemn, there were embraces and kisses which Aurélie gave and received as well as she could. The Air France plane was almost empty. Aurélie tried to read but could not manage to do so. She could not sleep either. The sky was cloudless. When the plane flew over the Balearic Islands Aurélie pressed her face against the window and stared at the sea until the African coast appeared. At Algiers the men from national security, armed with automatic rifles, were waiting on the pavement where the aircraft came to a standstill. She stepped down from the gangway trying not to look at them and climbed into a creaking bus that took her to the terminal. Indescribable chaos reigned at the border police controls. Three or four flights must have landed at the same time, including a Boeing 747 that had arrived from Montreal nine hours late, and the police were examining every passport offered to them with extreme care, losing themselves in protracted and melancholy contemplation of the visa before resigning themselves to awarding it a desultory impress from the liberating rubber stamp. When, after an hour, she reached the baggage reclaim point, she found all the luggage scattered here and there in the hall on a floor covered in cigarette stubs and was afraid she would not find hers. She had to show her stamped passport again, smile at impassive customs officers and pass through electronic gates before finding herself in the arrivals hall. Behind barriers a crowd of people were pressed together, watching the entrance. Aurélie’s heart was thumping nervously, she had never felt so lost and alone, she longed to go back home at once and when she read her name written in capital letters on a sheet of paper being waved by an unknown hand, she had such a violent sense of relief that she found it hard to keep herself from weeping.

Libero had had no intention of making the same mistakes as his hapless predecessors.