The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 33

going to do in Barcelona, they needed to unwind, they certainly deserved it, and they got to Campo dell’Oro airport an hour and a half early. They went into the bar and drank a beer, then another and their conversation slowly petered out. In the end they were completely silent. The passengers for the Paris flight were called to the departure lounge but there was still half an hour to go, there was no hurry and they ordered one last beer. Matthieu looked at the runways and his throat felt dry. His stomach was rumbling unpleasantly. He suddenly realized that for the best part of a year he had never traveled further than ten miles away from the village. Ajaccio was the end of the world. He had never stayed in the same place for so long before. The prospect of flying off to Paris now seemed daunting to him, to say nothing of Barcelona, so remote as to be quite unreal, a place of mists and legends, the earthly equivalent of the planet Mars. Matthieu was perfectly well aware that his fear was grotesque, but he was incapable of struggling against it. He looked at Libero who was staring at his glass with clenched teeth and he perceived that they shared the same fear. They were not gods, but merely demiurges, and it was the world they had created that now held them under the yoke of its tyrannical rule, an insistent voice announced that passengers Libero Pintus and Matthieu Antonetti were urgently awaited before the gates closed, and they knew that the world they had created would not let them depart, they sat there and the final call came, and when the plane had taken off they stood up in silence, picked up their bags and went back to the world they belonged to.

“Where will you go to outside of the world?”

It is a glittering dawn and its brutal light dazzles men’s memories and their painful recollections are consigned to the ebb tide of the darkness as it fades, carrying them with it. High up in the dome of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Leningrad, Christ Pantocrator holds the warhead of an unexploded shell in his long, white hands and it hovers in the air like a dove’s feather. One must live and hasten to forget, one must allow the light to soften the outline of all the graves. Everywhere around the abbey at Monte Cassino the long tresses of the North African soldiers spring from the ground like exotic flowers softly caressed by a gentle summer breeze, along the beaches of Latvia the gray waves of the Baltic have polished the bones of children buried in the sand to fashion strange jewels of fossilized amber, over in the sun-drenched scrubland from whence Shulamith will never return to the king vainly calling her, the air is awash with the pollen of her ashen hair, the verdant earth is gorged on shreds of fabric and flesh, it is replete with corpses and rests on nothing other than the vault of their shattered shoulder blades, but this glittering dawn has arisen and in the brilliance of its light the forgotten corpses are now no more than fertile compost for the new world. How could Marcel have clung to the memory of the dead when, after that slow gestation period of war, the world was for the first time opening up the escape routes of its shining pathways for him? All the living were being summoned to the inspiring task of reconstruction and Marcel was among them, dizzy with the infinite number of possibilities, ready to set out on the road, his eyes bruised by the light, wholly focused upon a future that had finally erased death. The new world was recruiting its agents and sending them to take the necessary materials from the colonies for the building up of its hungry and glorious corpus, and from the mines, from the jungles and the high plateaus they were extracting all that its insatiable voracity demanded. Before setting off for French West Africa, where the rivers of the south once flowed, Marcel considered that his new status as a future civil administrator required that he should choose a wife. There were several marriageable girls in the village and Marcel asked his brother, who was at a loose end while waiting to be recalled to Indochina, to make discreet inquiries of their families, to know which of them might look favorably upon a proposal in due course. The next day Jean-Baptiste came to report on the success of his mission and broke it to him that an excess of zeal had unfortunately smashed all his efforts at discretion to smithereens. He had begun his search at the bar by chatting to the elder brother of a young woman from a good family. They had been hitting it off very well to the point of getting drunk together and falling into one another’s arms when Jean-Baptiste, acting on impulse, had formally asked him for his sister’s hand on behalf of Marcel, who now found himself in a situation all the more delicate because the girl’s brother, in his delight, had hurried off at once to his parents, with Jean-Baptiste beside him in a highly emotional state. It was out of the question to risk seriously offending these people by pleading a misunderstanding, the humiliation might have made them resort to violence and Marcel had to accept the young wife jointly bestowed on him by fate and his brother’s excessive sociability. She was seventeen and Marcel was consoled by her shy beauty until he realized, after they had exchanged a few words, that she was almost angelically stupid for she was lost in wonder at everything and directed a gaze at her new husband so overcome with admiration that, as the boat taking them to Africa passed beneath the