The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 35

him at home, safe within the blessed citadel of her innocence, happy and unchanged. She refused to learn anything at all, resolutely speaking Corsican and assisting their African maid with her household tasks, despite admonitions from Marcel, whom she silenced by overwhelming him with kisses and caresses, undressing him standing up, before pulling him over toward the bed where he toppled over with outstretched arms while she closed the mosquito netting around them. He looked at her, he blew gently on her moist breasts, he kissed her on the fold of her groin, her mouth, her nostril, her eyelids, and one day he was surprised by the roundness of the belly on which he lay at rest. She told him she had grown a little fat, her dresses were rather tight. She was eating too much, she knew, and blushing, he asked her when her last period had been, but she had no idea, she had not noticed, and he took her in his arms, took her and lifted her up, the whole of her, with her angelic stupidity, her laughter and the sound of the barbaric language that he no longer wanted to be his own, and allowed himself to be overcome by an absurd joy, an animal joy, of which it mattered little that he did not understand it, for it did not ask to be understood and did not even demand that a meaning should be found in it. She had been pregnant for six months when Marcel, after passing an internal examination, was promoted to be the administrator of an obscure “subdivision” on the outer periphery of a remote “circle,” which was not one of hell but simply one featured on the colonial land registry. He now held sway over an immense territory, whose humid lands were populated only by insects, Negroes, wild plants and big cats. The French flag dangled from the end of a pole like a sodden rag on the pediment of his residence, a little apart from a wretched village of huts built on the banks of a muddy river, beside which children used to guide long lines of blind old men at the end of a rope, who trooped along beneath a sky of the same milky white as their dead eyes. His neighbors were a gendarme, whose penchant for drink became a little more manifest with every passing day, a doctor who was already an alcoholic, and a missionary who conducted mass in Latin in front of women with bare breasts and attempted to engage the interest of a resistant audience by repeating the story of the God who had made himself into a man, before dying as a slave for the salvation of all of them. With these men Marcel strove to preserve from extinction the flame of civilization, of which they were the sole guardians, and dinners were served to them by “boys” dressed as head waiters, who set down gleaming dishes upon impeccably ironed white tablecloths and he allowed his wife, all rotund and smiling, to join them at table because, in the farce he knew he was playing out with his meager cast of walk-ons, social conventions, blunders and ridicule no longer had any meaning and he no longer wanted to deprive himself, in the name of such things, of the one person who was henceforth the unique source of his joy. Without her the bitterness of his social elevation would have been unbearable to him and he would have preferred a thousand times to be numbered tenth or twentieth in Rome, rather than thus being the governor of a desolate kingdom on the outskirts of the Empire, but no one would ever offer him such an alternative because Rome no longer existed, it had been destroyed a good long time before and all that now remained were the kingdoms, some more barbarous than others, which it was impossible to escape from, and a man in flight from his own poverty could hope for nothing more than to exercise futile authority over men more impoverished than himself, as Marcel was now doing, with all the pitiless fury of those who have known poverty and can no longer tolerate the nauseating spectacle of it, constantly exacting vengeance for it on the flesh of those who resemble him all too much. It may be that every world is the distorted reflection of all the others, a remote mirror in which excrement appears to shine like diamonds, or it may be that there is only one single world, from which it is impossible to escape, for the escape routes of its illusory pathways all meet together just here, beside the bed in which Marcel’s young wife lies dying, a week after giving birth to their son, Jacques. At first she complained of stomach pains and was overcome by a fever that could not be brought down. After several days, having run out of antibiotics, the doctor tried to concentrate the infection in a medically provoked abscess. He folded back the soaking wet sheet, leaned over the sick young woman and pulled her nightdress up from her legs, Marcel leaned over, too, catching the hot aroma of whisky on the doctor’s breath as he watched him pricking his wife’s thigh with shaking hands, injecting it with turpentine spirit, leaving no more than a tiny red dot on the skin, which Marcel could not take his eyes off for whole days and nights, watching for the moment when all the veins in his wife’s body would drain into it the poison that was killing her and he implored her to fight, as if she had the power, through the sole magic of will, to compel her exhausted body to save her, but the white skin of her thigh remained ominously healthy and supple, no abscess ever formed there and Marcel knows she is going to die, he knows it, and, as he kisses her burning brow, he hopes that at least