The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 27

the nights that followed between the mattress in the sitting room and the bedroom, and always slept the same chaste and tranquil sleep, as if the sacred sword of a knight lay there upon the sheet, between his body and the girls’ warm bodies, communicating something of its perpetual purity to them. This celestial harmony was only disrupted at the weekend, when Pierre-Emmanuel Colonna joined Annie and they had to endure their satanic frolics. Their staying power was beyond belief. They made a shocking amount of noise, Pierre-Emmanuel puffed and panted and sometimes erupted with incongruous laughter, Annie uttered yells and, to crown it all, she was appallingly loquacious, loudly proclaiming what she would like to do, what was to be done to her, and precisely what was just then being done to her, and the extent to which she had appreciated what had just been done to her, so thoroughly that it felt as if one were listening to the radio broadcast of a sporting event, an obscene and interminable sporting event with a commentary from a hysterical commentator. Matthieu and the girls could not sleep, Rym said:

“He’s unbelievable, that guy, I swear he should be timed with a stopwatch,”

and in fact Pierre-Emmanuel began to behave with the arrogance of a sporting celebrity, at the bar he would touch Annie’s bottom with assumed nonchalance every time it came within reach, relishing the looks of helpless adoration from the hoi polloi which he imagined to be focused on him, and winking condescendingly at Virgile Ordioni, who laughed nervously, swallowing his saliva, then he would pat Virgile on the back, as if he were a young boy to be gratified with a few fragments of fantasy, which must suffice for him, for that’s all he will ever get. It sometimes seemed to Matthieu and the girls that they were listening to a performance whose basic object was to satisfy the expectations of a demanding audience, and then they would begin to applaud and shout “bravo,” this caused Pierre-Emmanuel to emerge from the bedroom, sweating and furious, returning to it after looking daggers at them, which then caused them to collapse into fits of giggles, and when the fornicators, overcome with fatigue, allowed silence to reign once more, they went to sleep in their turn, the naked sword blade watching over the purity of their slumbers. But of course the sword was bound to be withdrawn from them eventually and, one night it was. Matthieu was lying on his side, facing Izaskun and once again she murmured something in Spanish and he saw eyes shining in the darkness and a smile that reminded him of Judith Haller, but this was now the world he had chosen for himself, the world he was building, placing stone upon stone, and nothing could make him guilty, he slowly reached out and touched Izaskun’s cheek, and she kissed his wrist, then his mouth and she pressed her belly against his and put one leg over his, so that he could come closer and embraced him with all her strength, Matthieu felt overcome with gratitude and beauty, immersed in the limpid depths of baptismal waters, holy waters, waters of everlasting purity, and when it was all over, he rolled onto his back, his eyes open, with Izaskun pressed against him and he saw that Agnès, leaning on her elbow, was looking at them. He turned to her and smiled and she leaned forward and kissed him for a long time, with the tip of her tongue she gathered up a drop of saliva from the corner of his mouth, then, lightly stroked his eyelids with her fingertips, as one piously closes the eyes of a dead person, until he fell asleep beneath her light caress.

“I’m leaving you to look after the bar now, Annie. Have you cashed up?”

Annie gave Matthieu the day’s takings and he put them in a little iron box. He opened a drawer and took out an enormous automatic pistol and slipped it into his belt with such a well-rehearsed gesture that it now seemed natural.

“Right. Let’s go.”

Aurélie stared at him in amazement.

“You have a gun now? Are you going completely crazy? What’s wrong with you? Have you got issues with your virility? And by the way, you look idiotic. Don’t you realize?”

Matthieu did not consider he looked idiotic at all, quite the reverse, but he made no comment on that and simply gave the explanation his sister demanded, faced with which she would have to concur. The bar was doing a roaring trade, it was siphoning off all the clientele from the villages in the area, as far as twenty or thirty miles away, it was incredible, Libero’s idea of asking the girls to stay had been a brilliant one for they were the ones who attracted all this custom, without them no one would be crazy enough to face the rain and black ice simply to come here to a village just like any other and drink pastis that tasted exactly the same as everywhere else, it went without saying, and Vincent Leandri had ventured to point out that thriving businesses run the risk of being held up at gunpoint, especially these days. Of course, human beings had always been thieves since the dawn of time and it’s possible to be a thief without being a complete bastard, but these days, and this is the point, people were no longer content just to be thieves, they were complete and utter bastards as well, capable of spending an evening drinking and laughing and kissing you goodbye when they left and coming back ten minutes later in a hood, sticking a gun in your face and robbing your till, then going home to sleep the sleep of the just, and even coming back again next day for the apéritif, just as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that they’d smashed you