The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 34

Rock of Gibraltar and sailed out into the waters of the Atlantic, Marcel veered constantly between bliss and irritation. Leaning against the rail, she offered up her innocence to unknown winds and tasted the icy salt from the sea spray with the tip of her tongue, which made her laugh and shiver so violently that she suddenly took refuge in Marcel’s arms and he did not know whether he should upbraid her for making such a spectacle of herself or thank her for her childish enthusiasm, he would hesitate for a moment, embarrassed and awkward, but always ended up hugging her to him with all his might, without fear or disgust, for she had the warm and ethereal body of an angel from before the fall, miraculously arisen from a time that still knew nothing of the miasmas of sin and plagues. Through the portholes the distant coastlines were becoming wilder and wilder, great twisted trees leaned out over the waves at the mouths of immense rivers that traced long arabesques of mud across the green waters of the ocean, the heat became stifling and Marcel spent almost all his days in his cabin, in bed with his wife, he let her kneel over his face, bracing herself against the bulkhead with her hands, panting and laughing behind the curtain of her flowing hair, he let her study him and run her hands over him with a schoolgirl’s curiosity, frowning, touching every part of his body, as if to reassure herself that he was not a ghost who would soon vanish in the light, he let her settle down in her nakedness, immodestly sitting cross-legged at the end of the bunk and he crawled toward her to lay his head on her thighs and fall asleep for a moment, liberated from the whore in Marseille, for his young wife’s caresses had drawn from his veins the last drops of the poison that had infected him and he was no longer afraid of anything. Bodies were no longer reservoirs of pus and blood in the depths of which obscure, malevolent demons lurked and Marcel would have been perfectly happy if he had not been overcome by anxiety every time he had to appear at dinner with his wife, he was perpetually afraid that someone might ask her a simple question to which she would reply so foolishly that the whole table would be struck dumb or else she would not reply at all and open a mouth round with surprise before lowering her eyes and giggling and he was in agony every time she spoke to him in public, he was shamed that she addressed him in Corsican, that ridiculous dialect of whose wretched accent he could never manage to rid himself, and at the same time he was relieved, because nobody could understand what she was saying and he was simply waiting for the moment when he could close the cabin door upon their intimacy which alone put an end to his bitterness and torments. He took on his clerical duties in the offices of the central administration of a big African city which resembled an improbable collection of hovels and mud rather than any city he might have dreamed of, for the world persisted in thwarting his dreams at the very moment when they became real. The smells in the streets were so strong that even ripe fruit and flowers seemed to give off the noxious sweetness of putrefaction, he was constantly repressing feelings of nausea, as he strolled around in the dignity of his linen suit among men and animals over whom there hung the aromas of exotic and savage flesh, borne aloft by the crumpling of brightly colored fabrics. Proximity to the natives repelled him more every day, he had not come to bring them a civilization which he himself had known only from a distance and by hearsay in the voices of his masters, but to settle an ancient debt, the repayment of which had been so long deferred, he had come there to live the life that he deserved and which had continually eluded his grasp. He did not rest his hopes in God but in the statutes of the public service, the good news of which had just been promulgated to all the children of the French Republic, which would enable him, without having to pass through colonial service training school, to rise as high as he could in the hierarchy, to extricate himself at last from the limbo he had never entirely succeeded in leaving when he was born. He worked at preparing to take exams as well as at getting rid of the hideous stigmata of his past, his posture, his gait, his accent, in particular, and he forced himself to make his speech flat and clear, as if he had been raised on the estate of a manor in Touraine, he adopted the affectation of pronouncing his surname with a stress on the last syllable, he worked scrupulously at keeping his vowels open, but to his despair he had to accept that he must continue rolling his “r”s, for when he tried to pronounce an “r” at the back of his throat, all he ever produced was a pitiful choking sound, like the purring of a big cat or the hoarse croaking of a dying man. Jeanne-Marie wrote with the news that André Degorce was due to go to Indochina with a parachute regiment, she told him about her fears and her joy at the birth of a little girl, she gave him a detailed account of their parents’ decline and each of her letters was a reminder to him of the unpardonable sin of his origins, even though he now felt equally at ease in offices and at dinners for members of the administration, and attended these on his own, fearing that his wife’s presence might break the fragile charm that took him out of himself, while she waited for