The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 28
“So now, if I understand correctly, you not only risk being held up, you may also get killed or kill someone. Brilliant logic. Well done! You do realize, don’t you, that Vincent Leandri is a drunken idiot!”
But she had missed the point, Matthieu had no intention of killing anyone, any more than Libero, the whole thing must be seen as a deterrent, nothing more, and it had indeed taken him some time to grasp all the subtleties of the logic of deterrence, the first time he had to carry the cash box he’d arrived at the bar at about seven in the evening, the pistol slipped inside his pants, there was a big crowd of people and he’d edged behind the counter where he went through discreet contortions to put the pistol into a drawer without anyone noticing, which was not at all easy, given the number of fellows standing at the counter and the size of the pistol, and Libero had watched his antics for a moment and remarked,
“May I ask what the hell you’re doing?”
and Matthieu had replied in a whisper,
“O.K., I’m just stowing the piece in the drawer,”
and Libero had burst out laughing and Vincent Leandri had burst out laughing as well, and they’d been right to make fun of him because when you think about it what’s the point of having a gun if no one knows you’ve got one? The whole idea, in fact, is for everyone to know you’ve got one, so that the gunmen, even though they’re complete bastards, are going to think it’s better to go and do a holdup somewhere else, where they don’t have a gun, so now in the evening, when he was on duty, Matthieu would openly remove the pistol from his belt and lay it on the counter for a moment, for everyone to see, and then calmly put it in a drawer, from which he removed it when the bar closed, this was the deterrent, the armed robbers were, let’s say, the Cubans, and Libero and he were Kennedy, the method was tried and tested, but Aurélie still sighed and moaned, and would have done so even more if Matthieu had confessed to her that, deterrence or no, the first time he caught a bastard trying to rob his till he was determined to shoot him like a dog.
“And are you going to come back home with a gun?”
Matthieu shrugged.
“Of course not. I’m going to leave it at Libero’s place.”
He was not keen to have dinner with the family. His parents normally never came for Christmas. This was the first time. And they had insisted that Aurélie should join them too, which the man who was sharing less and less of her life had found very difficult to accept. Since the summer he had only spent a few days with her in October. Instead of going back to France as soon as she was able, she had preferred to accept an invitation from her Algerian colleagues to visit sites at Djemila and Tipasa, claiming that she did not want to offend them. These days she was giving more consideration and attention to people she hardly knew than to him, who had, after all, been sharing her life for several years, yet now he must be content with the small amount of time she granted him with wounding casualness, and, in addition, he had to tolerate her reducing their life together by these extra days she planned to spend at the village with her family, without her even suggesting that he should come with her, as if it went without saying that he wasn’t part of her family. And that evening, at table, she was not thinking of him, as she talked about the exceptional richness of a site left abandoned for many years, the trophies, a breastplate swathed in a long bronze mantle, the heads of gorgons that had disappeared from the pediments of marble fountains, the colonnades of the basilicas. She spoke about the kindness of her Algerian colleagues, whose names she was careful not to mispronounce, Meziane Karadja, Lydia Dahmani, Souad Bouziane, Massinissa Guermat, about their commitment, about the skill and faith with which, for children from primary schools, they conjured up a city filled with life, and, as the children gazed at this mass of mute stones, the yellow grass became covered in paving and mosaics, the old Numidian king rode by on his great melancholy horse, dreaming of Sophonisba’s lost kiss, and centuries later, at the end of the long, pagan night, the faithful, resuscitated, pressed close together against the chancels, as they waited to hear the voice of the bishop who loved them arising within the nave filled with light,
“Hear me, you who are dear to me,”
but Matthieu heard no such voice, he was looking at his watch and thinking about the warmth of Izaskun’s arms, as well as those of Agnès, all those things he had no desire to share with anyone, and when the dessert was placed on the table he declared that he wasn’t hungry and was going to leave. But his father said,
“Don’t go, please. Stay a little longer, it won’t take long,”
and Matthieu remained sitting there, drank a coffee, helped to clear the table and when his grandfather and mother had gone to bed, stood up as well, but his father repeated,
“Don’t go, please. I need to talk to you and your sister. Sit down,”
and he began talking to them very calmly and