The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 26

Matthieu was delighted to be witnessing for the first time how winter slowly took hold, instead of coming upon it all at once when he got off the plane. Yet winter does not take hold slowly. It does arrive all at once. The sun is still hot in the cloudy summer sky. And then, one after the other, the shutters of the last few houses close, you no longer meet people in the streets of the village. Over two or three days a warm wind blows in from the sea at dusk and then the mist and the cold envelop the last living things. At night the hoarfrost makes the road glitter as if it were strewn with precious stones. That year, for the first time, the winter did not wholly take on the semblance of death. The tourists had gone but the bar did not empty. People came for an apéritif from all over the area, they took part in evening gatherings arranged on Fridays when Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna came back from his week at college, and listened to him singing as he eyed the girls sitting around the fireplace, Gratas busied himself grilling meat and Matthieu had nothing else to do apart from relishing his happiness while drinking spirits that burned in his veins. From time to time, when she had decided it was his turn, he slept with Virginie Susini. She never said anything. She simply came to the bar and settled down at an isolated table where she spent the evening playing patience. When the bar closed and Annie was cashing up she was still there and she stared at Matthieu without a word and followed him when he went home. On each occasion he took her to his room, he tried not to make a noise, so as not to wake up his grandfather. However, sleeping with Virginie was extremely challenging, you had to endure her silence, her fixed, penetrating stare, you had to endure the fact that none of this had any conceivable significance and that nothing justified the feeling he had of having been sullied, but that this was better than going home on his own. For the house frightened Matthieu now, as if at the same time it had been emptied both of the warmth of summer and of any trace of familiar humanity. The portraits of his great-grandparents, which he had always regarded as guardian deities watching over his youth, now took on a menacing aspect and it sometimes seemed to him as if they were not portraits that had been hung on the wall, but corpses, still preserved from decay by the cold, and from which nothing affectionate or tutelary emanated. At night he often heard creaking sounds and hoped they were imaginary, long and mournful, like sighs, as well as the wholly real sounds made by his grandfather wandering around in the darkness, moving from room to room and bumping into the furniture, and Matthieu covered his ears and buried his head under his pillow. If he got up it was even worse. He would switch on the light and find his grandfather in the living room, his brow pressed against the icy windowpane, holding a photograph in his hand that he was not even looking at, or standing there in the kitchen, his eyes focused on something invisible that seemed to fascinate him and fill him with horror and when Matthieu asked him,

“Alright? Wouldn’t you like to go back to bed?”

he would never reply but continued staring straight in front of him, the burden of a millennium of old age overwhelming his fragile shoulders, his jaw trembling, absorbed by this vision that kept him out of harm’s way, safe within its terrifying embrace. Matthieu would go back to bed without being able to sleep, and he was sometimes tempted to get into his car but where would he have gone at four o’clock in the morning in the depths of winter? There was nothing for it but to wait until the light of dawn filtered through the shutters to break the curse. The house would then become friendly and gently familiar again. Matthieu would fall asleep. Every day he delayed for as long as possible the moment when he left the bar and he tried at least to go home sufficiently drunk to get to sleep without difficulty. One evening he dared to ask the girls,

“Could I sleep with you tonight? Would you make room for me?”

and he added, lamely,

“I don’t want to sleep all alone,”

and the girls burst out laughing, even Izaskun, who had by now made enough progress in French to recognize a foolish remark when she heard one, and they all made fun of Matthieu, and said it was an amazingly original approach and very sweet and they believed him and Matthieu protested his good faith, joining in their laughter, until they said:

“Of course! Of course you can! We’ll make room for you.”

He followed them up to the apartment. There were sleeping bags and piles of bedding neatly laid against the walls. There was incense burning there, too. Annie had her own room, Rym and Sarah slept in the other bedroom and Matthieu went to lie down in the sitting room on the mattress shared by Agnès and Izaskun, which they had hidden behind a Japanese screen. They lay down beside him, still teasing him a little and then snuggled up to him. Izaskun murmured something in Spanish. He kissed them each on the forehead, one after the other, like two sisters, and they went to sleep. No threat now weighed upon Matthieu’s slumbers, no deadly shadow. When he awoke his head was resting against Izaskun’s breasts and one of his hands lay upon Agnès’s hip. He drank a coffee and went to his home to take a shower. But he never slept there anymore. The next night he slept with Rym and Sarah and divided