The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 29
“Oh, Papa. My God, Papa,”
although he could not be as ill as all that, since he was saying this himself, and Matthieu got up to help himself to whisky, he was vainly trying to concentrate on what his father was saying, but Izaskun’s hands were covering his ears, to prevent him from hearing and Agnès’s hands were brushing his eyelids, as one closes the eyes of a dead person, to prevent him from seeing, and despite all his efforts, he could neither see nor hear his father, Jacques Antonetti, explaining to his children as best he could that he might be going to die soon, because his words had no place in the best of all possible worlds, the happy-go-lucky, triumphal world and within it they could make no sense at all, they were simply a disagreeable noise, the troublesome stirrings of an underground river, whose remote power could present no threat to the order of this perfect world, in which there was only the bar, the imminent New Year, a friend who was like a brother, and sisters whose incestuous embraces exhaled the perfumes of mellow redemption, there was an endless prospect of tranquility and beauty, which nothing could disturb, so that when Jacques folded him in his arms and kissed him with emotion and said to him,
“Please don’t worry, everything will be fine,”
he could only answer in all honesty that he wasn’t worried, for he knew everything would be fine and his father replied,
“Yes,”
proud, perhaps, of this son whose great sensitivity had spared him the grievous burden of his distress, and he kissed Aurélie and went to bed. Matthieu remained there at the center of the living room, as if made vaguely uneasy by some element of uncertainty, he helped himself to another whisky, standing next to Aurélie who was holding back her tears, but he quickly remembered he could leave now and put down his glass. Aurélie looked up at him.
“You do realize?”
“Realize what?”
“Papa may die.”
“That’s not what I heard. Not at all.”
He reached the bar around midnight. Two fellows from Sartène were drinking a bottle of vodka at the counter, they were finding it hard to remain upright but were flirting crudely with Annie, who called them pigs and punished them from time to time with a little reproving caress on their balls, simpering the while and pocketing huge tips. Gratas was pushing a broom around in a corner. All alone at a table Virginie Susini was playing patience. Matthieu went and sat down facing her. She did not pause for a second and did not glance at him. A moment before Matthieu had not felt the need to open his heart to anyone at all but there she was and she might well have been the only person in the world one would not regret sharing confidences with, for it was likely she would not even hear them. He leaned toward her and suddenly said to her,
“Apparently my father may be going to die.”
Virginie tossed her head and set down the queen of diamonds beneath the king of clubs before murmuring,
“I know all about death. I was born a widow.”
Matthieu made a gesture of irritation. Crazy people wearied him. He wanted to see Izaskun. He regarded Virginie with a smug little pout.
“Well, I don’t suppose I’m the one you’re waiting for.”
Virginie picked up another card.
“No, you’re not. He’s the one I’m waiting for, but he doesn’t know yet,”
and she pointed a finger at Bernard Gratas, at which he stood there, petrified, broom in hand.
And now, watching through the window, she was waiting for the Balearic Islands to appear, offering her the promise of an imminent solace, that of a return to the sweetness of a native land, though not the one she had been born in, and her heart began beating faster until she caught sight of the gray strip of the African coastline and knew she was coming home at last. For it was in France now that she felt in exile, as if the fact of no longer breathing the same air day in day out as her compatriots had made their concerns incomprehensible to her and the remarks they made pointless, a mysterious, invisible frontier had been traced around her body, a transparent glass frontier she had neither the power nor the desire to cross. She had to make taxing efforts to follow the most mundane conversation and, despite such efforts, she still could not manage to do so, she had to keep asking people to repeat what they had just said, or else she gave up responding, and retreated behind the silence of her invisible frontier and the man who would soon no longer be sharing her life at all was constantly upset by this, he would reproach her, but she no longer even defended herself for she had given up the struggle against her own coldness, against the indifference and unfairness that had taken over in her churlish heart. It was only when she reached Algiers airport, and then the university premises, and even more at Annaba, that she became friends again with good nature. She cheerfully endured the interminable wait at the border police controls, the traffic jams and the landfills open to the sky, the water being cut off, the identity checks at road blocks, and, as for the Stalinesque ugliness of the great Hotel d’État in