The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 36

she will never be aware of this, hopes her angelic stupidity will save her to the end, but he is deceived, for stupidity does not save us, not even from despair, and amid her fever she weeps, calls for her baby, caresses and kisses him, and throws her arms around Marcel’s neck, saying she doesn’t want to leave him, no, no, never, she wants to go on living, then she dozes off for a moment and wakes up in tears, she dreads the darkness, nothing can comfort her and Marcel holds her tightly in his arms without being able to wrest her away from the tide that sweeps her along irresistibly toward the darkness she dreads so much, she is worn out with shivering and tears, and allows herself to be swept away by the tide that eventually tosses her aside, motionless and cold, in a shroud of crumpled sheets. Her face is distorted by terror but it is that of a wax dummy in which Marcel does not recognize the laughing young woman whose innocence and lack of modesty he loved, and for a moment he is overwhelmed by the hope that some element of her, a fragile and delicate breath, like a blithe spirit, might have taken wing from the horror of this stiffened body to find refuge in a place of light, gentleness and peace, but he knows that this is not true, all that remains of her is a corpse whose contours are already collapsing and it is over this relic that Marcel then lets his tears flow. During the funeral he thinks about his family who know nothing yet of his bereavement, he would have liked his mother, well versed in the works of death, to have been at his side rather than the gendarme and the doctor, who sways there under the tropical rain, as the missionary’s disillusioned voice reels off one psalm after another over the waterlogged grave. When the stone is laid in place he remains alone for a while and then goes home to rejoin his son, who is suckling with eyes closed from the black breast of the African maid. He detests this baby as he detests this country, regarding them with an implacable hatred because they have conspired together to take his wife from him, when the doctor complains about the lack of antibiotics he refuses to listen to him for he needs scapegoats and has no interest in justice, any more than he is interested in logic, as the sudden fear overtakes him that this detested country might deprive him of the detested child, whom, in turn, he does not want to lose, even though he constantly reproaches him for being born rather than remaining in the limbo no one wanted him to abandon, and so the slightest gap left between the mosquito net curtains plunges Marcel into a mortal dread of discovering his son consumed by the monstrous insects that lurk in the stifling depths of the African night, where so many phosphorescent eyes glitter, so many things throng in a seething mass, hungry for Jacques’s tender flesh, poised to sink their venomous jaws into it, or deposit their eggs there, and, sensing that he will not know how to protect him, Marcel writes a long letter to Jeanne-Marie. My dear sister, I shall not be able to protect him from the appalling horrors of these climes with their swarms of creatures, I don’t want him to die like his mother and I don’t want him to grow up without her, please let Jacques find a mother, and gain a sister in your little Claudie, I am well aware of what I am asking you, but, I beg you, who else could I turn to, if not to you, who have never been sparing in your affection, and when Jeanne-Marie, much moved, agrees, he waits until he has leave and can go back to France and hand Jacques over to her. As he returns alone to Africa he weeps, from guilt, maybe from grief, he does not know, but in the depths of his soul he is aware of the huge and murky relief of having managed at one and the same time to save his son and to get rid of him. Once back in his purgatory, he resumed the long, monotonous peregrination of his life, making tours into the bush, passing through villages where dazed children, lined up in order of height, were waiting for him to attribute vague dates of birth to them, so as to revise the administrative records and he dispensed justice with the weary gestures of a fallen god, noting down in minute detail the inept disputes of which the plaintiffs gave him desperate accounts in various languages, including Fulani, Susu-Yalunka, Maninka and all the languages of poverty and barbarism whose accents he now found intolerable, although he forced himself to hear them out in order to hand down judgments whose fairness might restore the saving silence he longed for, and at the time of the cotton harvest he castigated the greed of the Belgian merchants who tampered with their scales, rejecting their proffered bribes with scorn, not because he cared about the interests of the African farmers, but because incorruptibility was the only blue blood he could lay claim to, he kept the records for the collection of the poll tax with inflexible rigor and at nightfall, sitting beside the doctor, he regretted that his ulcer did not allow him to get drunk with him, to escape the terrors of the night. Jeanne-Marie wrote to him that Jacques was growing up and often thought of him, she had had no news of André Degorce after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, but she felt confident, because God would not be cruel enough to rob her of a husband twice. The Empire was slowly falling apart and Jeanne-Marie wrote, the Vietminh have freed André, I’m so happy, Jacques thinks about you