The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 25

nothing were happening, she explored his crotch with lightly cupped fingers. The first one to pay the price for this odd habit was Virgile Ordioni who was coming in with his arms piled high with charcuterie. He turned crimson, gave a short laugh and remained standing there in the room not quite knowing what to do next. Matthieu and Libero had at first thought of asking Annie to try to show herself less immediately effusive, but nobody complained, quite the contrary, the men of the village put in several appearances at the bar over the course of the day, they even came there at normally quiet times, the hunters cut short their drives and Virgile made it a point of honor to come down from the mountain every day, if only for a coffee, so it came about that Matthieu and Libero held their peace, not without inwardly singing the perceptive Annie’s praises, for in her immense wisdom she had penetrated the simplicity of the male psyche. Each evening, after closing the bar, they would set off on a recruiting campaign, touring the parties at campsites and on the beaches. They were looking for impecunious female students, doomed to the monotonous joys of sea bathing, who might be interested in seasonal work, and they were simply spoiled for choice. By the end of July they had found four waitresses. They also took on Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna, who had just passed his baccalaureate exams and was spending his summer vacations playing the guitar to his family, a committed audience but limited in size. He had no cause to regret turning professional, for not only was he a great hit with the clientele at the bar—whose aesthetic demands, it is true, were so easily satisfied that even the serenades bawled out by the likes of Virgile Ordioni when dead drunk were received with great acclaim—but from the very first evening his talent was rewarded by Annie who cornered him up against the billiard table after the bar had closed and kissed him on the mouth, while feeling him up vigorously, before granting him a night of such sheer licentiousness that it by far exceeded the most daring of his adolescent fantasies. The following morning she woke him by smothering him in compliments and kisses and lovingly prepared a lavish breakfast for him, bringing it to him in the very bed that had been the scene of his exploits, and watching him wolf it down with such a pure and glistening tear in her eye that it almost made her look maternal. Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna’s hitherto dreary and tranquil life was swept along on a torrent of sensual pleasure and sometimes, when he gave him his fee, Libero would remark to him with a laugh,

“With the summer I’ve laid on for you, you ought to be paying me.”

At the end of the season they all went out together to a fancy restaurant, with Annie, the waitresses, Pierre-Emmanuel and even Gratas, for what was to be a dinner of thanks and farewell, followed by a well lubricated evening in a nightclub. The following week the girls, apart from Annie, were due to go back to Mulhouse, Saint-Etienne and Saragossa, but Libero suggested that they should stay. He did not know if he could keep them on all through the winter but the summer season had been extremely lucrative and he could afford to experiment. What he did not admit to them, however, was that his generous proposal derived, in particular, from basely commercial considerations: he was counting on the force of attraction which the presence of four single young women might exert on a region ravaged by cold and sexual deprivation, to fill the bar even in the depths of winter. None of them refused. They were embarked on studies they disliked and knew would lead to nothing, or they had already abandoned them, and no longer dared to make plans, they lived in joyless cities and towns whose ugliness depressed them, and where there was no one really awaiting their return, they knew that this ugliness would soon start creeping into their own souls and taking hold of them and they were resigned to this, and it was very likely this naive aura of defeat, the magnetic pole of their vulnerability, that had drawn Libero and Matthieu unerringly toward each one of them, Agnès, who sat on the beach rolling and smoking cigarettes, well away from the dancers and the bar, Rym and Sarah, who were sharing a fizzy drink during the voting for a campsite beauty queen, and Izaskun, whom her boyfriend had dropped and dumped there, while they were on vacation, who could hardly speak any French, and who was waiting with her backpack in a dreary nightclub for the day to finally dawn. They did not care about having to share the apartment above the bar between five of them, they did not care about the mattresses on the floor and the promiscuity, for they had spent the happiest weeks of their lives at the village, where they had formed a bond they were not yet willing to break, an undeniable bond whose presence Matthieu, too, was aware of during the dinner that evening. For the first time in a long while he thought about Leibniz and took delight in the place he himself now occupied in the best of all possible worlds and he almost felt inclined to bow down before the goodness of God, the Lord of all the worlds, who sets every creature in its appointed place. But God deserved no praise here, for in this little world there was no demiurge other than Matthieu and Libero. The demiurge is not God the creator. He does not even know he is fabricating a world, what he makes, placing stone upon stone, is a man-made work, and soon his creation eludes his grasp and runs away with him and if he does not destroy it, it will destroy him.