The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 38

slowly plunging into the abyss of his own loneliness with only his blood-soaked hands for company. Marcel went back to the village to bury his father, then his mother, and did not weep for them because death had always been their vocation and he was almost happy that they had at last been able to respond to a call they must have spent such long years pretending not to hear. He saw his older sisters again and did not recognize them, and also Jean-Baptiste and Jeanne-Marie and his son, whom he no longer dared to embrace and who, in any case, showed no inclination for this. He asked him if he was well and Jacques answered him yes and then he told him he lived far away from him but he loved him and Jacques once more answered yes, and they spoke no more until Marcel’s departure for Africa where his promotion to the post of Gouverneur de Cercle awaited him. He took leave of the doctor, the missionary and the gendarme who had been the insubstantial companions of so many pointless years and he left, accompanied by the African maid, and taking with him his wife’s remains which he had buried close to his new house. Six months later, without Marcel having noticed anything at all, the Empire ceased to exist. Is this how Empires die, without even a tremor being heard? Nothing has happened, the Empire no longer exists, and as he moves into his office in a Ministry in Paris, Marcel knows this is also true of his own life in which nothing will ever have happened. All the shining pathways have gone dark, one by one, and Lieutenant-colonel André Degorce, after his latest defeat, returns to his wife’s arms seeking the redemption he will never be granted as men come heavily down to earth in the new gravitational field of their fallen country. Time has dispensed with hope and continues to pass, unnoticed and empty, to the ever swifter rhythm of funerals that recall Marcel to the village, as if his only constant mission in this world were to see his nearest and dearest into the grave, one after the other, his wife now rests in Corsica, but she died so long ago that he is afraid all he has interred is a few pieces of dead wood covered in clay, and his older sisters die, one after the other, in the precise sequence established by the register of births in its wisdom. In Paris the taste of solitude gradually loses its savor, the cold mists have banished the insects that lay their eggs beneath the skin of translucent eyelids in the white light of the sun, and sealed up the jaws of the crocodiles, the epic struggles are over, he must make do now with pathetic enemies, flu, rheumatism, creeping old age, the drafts in the big apartment in the eighth arrondissement where Jacques has refused to come and live with him, unwilling to give a reason because he cannot admit that he harbors an unspeakable passion for the person he ought to regard as his sister. Jacques is fifteen, Claudie seventeen and Jeanne-Marie weeps hot tears as she relates how she came upon them shockingly naked and in one another’s arms in their childhood bedroom, she reproaches herself for her naivety, her culpable blindness, she knew how fond they were of one another, with a love she believed to be tender and fraternal, how much they hated to be separated, but she saw no harm in this, on the contrary, she was foolishly touched by it, while in fact she was nurturing two lewd creatures in her bosom, it is all her fault, she would rather not know how long this horror has been going on and the two of them are not even ashamed of their immorality, Claudie had stood up and confronted her, naked and glistening, fixing her with a defiant gaze that nothing could make her lower, neither reproofs, nor blows, Jacques was sent away to a Catholic boarding school and Claudie now refuses to speak to her parents, saying that she loathes them, and time does nothing to erode her incestuous resolve, a disgraceful secret correspondence is intercepted, for long years Claudie gives them no quarter, she inflicts her tears, her cries, her hysterical silence on them, Jacques runs away from the boarding school to which he is forcibly returned and compelled to undergo a pointless penitence until at length retired Général André Degorce, who is past caring about yet another defeat, once again hoists the flag of surrender and obliges everyone to accept the inevitable disgrace of this marriage, which is finally blessed by the arrival of Aurélie, after the hungry couple have devoted several years to feasting on one another’s flesh, for not even the most voracious egotism can escape the immutable cycle of birth and death. Marcel bows his head over Aurélie’s cradle, over that of Matthieu, then over the dark, open mouths of the graves that close upon Jean-Baptiste and upon Jeanne-Marie, still in the precise sequence established by the register of births in its wisdom, and then, upon the cold, blood-soaked hands of Général André Degorce, whose heart had already stopped beating long ago. Marcel is alone and when the time comes for him to retire, it confirms what he had probably always known, nothing has happened, those shining escape routes are secretly circular, their course turns in on itself inexorably and takes him back to the detested village of his childhood, and in his suitcase, laid on top of his suits of wool and linen, there is an old photograph, taken during the summer of 1918, in which what had been captured in the silver salts, alongside his mother, brother and sisters, was the enigmatic face of absence. Time is heavy now, almost at a standstill. At night Marcel trundles his old age from room to room in his empty house, in search of