The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 37

and sends you his love, he’s growing up so quickly, André will soon be going to Algeria, and Marcel envied his brother-in-law his adventurous life, which contrasted so grievously with the emptiness of his own, he did not perceive how the Empire was falling apart, he did not even hear the muted cracking sounds as its foundations were shaken, for he was entirely focused on the falling apart of his own body, which Africa was slowly infecting with its fertile decay, he gazed at the plants growing on his wife’s grave which he would cut down with furious blows of a machete and was convinced that he would soon be joining her, for the demon of his ulcer, sustained by extreme heat and humidity, tormented him more vigorously than ever, as if its demonic intuition enabled it to sense that outside, in the corrupt, clammy air there were countless allies lying in wait to assist it in the final stages of its gradual work of demolition and Marcel kept his eyes wide open at night, hearing the cries of the prey, hearing the bodies of drowsy creatures that had gone astray sliding over the sand as the crocodiles dragged them slowly toward their watery graves, he heard the sharp snap of jaws that threw up showers of mud and blood and, in the turmoil of his own body, he could feel the organs grinding into action, rubbing against one another, to embark on a slow rotation around the orbit of the demon, as, fixed as a black sun, it gave the signal of an upraised hand in the depths of his stomach, and flowers thrust up the tips of their buds in the sockets of his bronchial tubes, the filaments of their roots crept along his veins right to the tips of his fingers, while terrible wars were waged in the barbaric kingdom that his body had become, with their savage victory cries, their massacres of the defeated and a whole tribe of assassins, and Marcel would examine his vomit, his urine, his stools, terrified that he might find gilded clusters of grubs, spiders, crabs or snakes in them, and lived in the expectation of dying alone, transformed into rotting matter even before he died. He kept an intimate journal of his illness, scrupulously noting each symptom, every breathing difficulty, each mysterious rash on his elbow and groin, each bout of diarrhea and constipation, every worrying discoloration of his penis, every itch and thirst. He thought of his son, whom he would never see again, he thought of his young wife, of her thighs wrapped around his face, and now she seemed so alive that he felt passionate desire for her and then noted down delirium, priapism, necrophilia, morbid preoccupation, before silently approaching the African maid as she dusted the furniture in the dining room, lifting her dress and taking her without saying a word, his arms flapping like the wings of a great vulture hunched over an impassive corpse, and he could only stop when the shame of the orgasm flung him backward at the last moment, leaning against the wall, his pants around his ankles, his eyes closed in horror and his penis shaken by ignoble thrustings which the African maid brought to an end by wiping him like a child, with a cloth soaked in warm water, which she then proceeded to use to mop up the puddle of gray seminal fluid on the tiled floor. But he remained alive, for the powers that hounded him were those of life, not of death, a primitive and narrow life, one that begot flowers, parasites and vermin with equal indifference, a life oozing with organic secretions, and thought itself oozed from the human brain as if from a suppurating wound, there was no soul but only fluids governed by the law of a complex, fertile, insane mechanism, the jaundiced concretions of calcified bile, the crimson, gelatinous mass of blood clots in the arteries, sweat, remorse, sobbing and slobber. One night Marcel heard a noise on his veranda, the sound of chairs being overturned, erratic knocking at the door, and when he opened it he found the doctor leaning against the door frame, he was shaking with fever and said, help me, I beg you, I can’t see anymore, I’m blind, and when he raised his eyes toward Marcel there were worms gushing out from his eyelids and running down his cheeks like tears. Marcel put him in his own bed for the ten days that the treatment for the filariasis called for, he heard him groaning every time the sheets rubbed against the painful bruises on his legs and his distorted arms, he helped him to endure the appallingly perverse effects of the diethylcarbamazine, despite the horror inspired in him by this body bloated by a monstrous excess of life which threatened to explode at any moment, with its skin irritations, its lumps, the abscesses that the putrefaction of the vessels beneath the skin had caused to erupt, his eyes red and swollen, like those of a fetus. When the doctor had recovered Marcel was relieved to see him go. He told the African maid to disinfect the house from top to bottom so as to restore the clinical, sterilized universe his burgeoning anxieties called for, he washed his hands in spirit, scrubbed beneath his fingernails until they bled, continued noting symptoms, incipient tumors, septicemia, necroses, although the only ailment he was suffering from was an appalling loneliness, which he tried to overcome by writing letters daily to his brother-in-law in Algeria, needing to confide in him his certainty of his own imminent death and unbosom himself without restraint, so as to reestablish at least the semblance of a human relationship, even though the one and only confidant he had chosen for himself, and for whom he had a fanatical admiration, never made any reply for, deep down in cellars in Algeria, Capitaine André Degorce, reclusive and mute, was