The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 3

has been working in a salt mine in Lower Silesia. Once every two months he sends a letter which he gets one of his comrades to write and which the children study before conveying it out loud to their mother. Letters take so long to reach them that they are always afraid what they are hearing may be no more than the echo of a dead man’s voice, transmitted in unfamiliar handwriting. But he is not dead and he returns to the village in February 1919, so that Marcel may see the light of day. His eyelids and lashes are burned, his fingernails are as if eaten by acid and on his cracked lips can be seen the white traces of scarred layers of skin he will never be able to shed. Doubtless he looked at his children without recognizing them, but his wife had not changed, because she had never looked youthful or fresh, and he hugged her to him, although Marcel has never understood what could have drawn their two desiccated, broken bodies to one another, it could not have been desire, nor even animal instinct, perhaps it was simply because Marcel needed them to embrace in order to emerge from the limbo in whose depths he had been on the qui vive for so long, waiting to be born, and it was in response to his silent call that they had crawled on top of one another that night in the darkness of their bedroom, making no noise, so as not to alert Jean-Baptiste and Jeanne-Marie, who were pretending to be asleep, lying there with thumping hearts on their mattress in a corner of the room, witnessing the mystery of the creakings and hoarse sighs which, without finding a name for it, they understood, their minds reeling at the enormity of this mystery in which violence and intimacy were intermingled in such proximity to them, while their parents wore themselves ragged rubbing their bodies against one another, twisting and probing their own dry flesh, so as to bring back to life the ancient wellsprings made barren by sadness, mourning and salt, and draw out from the depths of their bellies what was left there of humors and mucus, albeit only a remnant of moisture, a little of the fluid that serves as the container for life, a single drop, and their efforts were so great that this unique drop did finally well up and condense within them, making life possible, even though they themselves were barely alive. Marcel has always imagined—has always feared—that he was not wanted, but simply imposed by some impenetrable cosmic necessity that allowed him to grow in his mother’s arid, hostile womb just at the season when a fetid wind was arising, carrying up the miasmas of a deadly influenza from the sea and the unhealthy plains before sweeping through the villages, hurling dozens of men who had survived the war into hastily dug graves, without anything being able to halt it, like that poisonous fly of ancient legend, the fly born from the putrefaction of an accursed skull, ready to emerge one morning from the void of its empty sockets, exhaling its deadly breath and feeding upon men’s lives, until it became so monstrously plump that its shadow plunged whole valleys into darkness and only the Archangel’s lance could finally dispatch it. But the Archangel had long ago returned to his celestial dwelling place and remained deaf to prayers and processions, turning aside from those who were dying, the weakest being the first to go, children, old men, pregnant women, yet Marcel’s mother remained upright, unshakeable and sad, and the wind blowing relentlessly all around her spared her home. It finally dropped several weeks before Marcel was born, giving way to a silence that descended on fields overgrown with brambles and weeds, on collapsed stone walls, on deserted shepherds’ huts and tombs. When they pried him from his mother’s womb, Marcel remained unmoving and silent for many seconds before briefly emitting a feeble cry and they had to get close to his lips to feel the warmth of a tiny breath that left no trace of condensation on mirrors. His parents had him baptized within the hour. They sat beside his cradle, gazing at him wistfully, as if they had already lost him, and that was the way they went on looking at him throughout his childhood. Each time he had a mild temperature, whenever he suffered from colic, at every coughing fit, they would watch over him like a dying child, greeting every recovery as a miracle, yet one they did not hope to see repeated, for nothing is more quickly exhausted than the uncertain mercy of God. But Marcel went on recovering and he lived, all the more stubborn for being frail, as if in the dry darkness of his mother’s womb he had learned so well how to devote all his feeble resources to the exhausting task of surviving, that it had made him invulnerable. A demon prowled ceaselessly around him, and his parents dreaded its victory, but Marcel knew that it would not win, in vain did it hurl him, drained of strength, into the depths of his bed, wear him out with migraines and bouts of diarrhea, it was not going to win, it could even creep inside him to ignite the fires of an ulcer and cause him to vomit blood so violently that Marcel had to miss a whole year of school, it was not going to win, in the end Marcel would always recover, even if he could forever feel the presence of a hand lurking in his stomach, waiting to rip into its delicate walls with sharp fingers, for such was to be the life he had been granted, always under threat and always triumphant. He was thrifty with his strength, his affection, his wonder, when Jeanne-Marie came looking for him, exclaiming, Marcel, come quickly, there’s a man flying past the fountain, his