The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 4

heart did not start racing, nor did he bat an eyelid as he watched the first cyclist anyone had ever seen passing through the village, hurtling down the road at top speed, the sides of his jacket flapping behind him like an oystercatcher’s wings and it was without emotion that he watched his father rise at dawn to go and till fields that did not belong to him and tend animals that were not his, while on all sides there arose monuments to the dead on which, with haughty and decisive gestures, women of bronze who looked like his mother each thrust out before them the child they consented to sacrifice to the patrie, while next to them soldiers waving flags were collapsing open-mouthed, as if it were necessary now, having already paid the price in flesh and blood, to offer a vanished world the tribute of the iconography it insisted on, before departing forever, to make way, at last, for the new world. But nothing happened, one world had well and truly vanished but no new world arrived to take its place, and mankind, left in the lurch, lacking a world, soldiered on with the drama of procreation and death, Marcel’s older sisters got married one after the other and people consumed beignets as they sat under a lifeless, implacable sun, drinking vile wine and forcing themselves to smile, as if something were finally about to happen, as if the women, with their children, were about to bring the new world itself into being, but nothing did happen, time brought nothing more than the monotonous succession of seasons that were all alike, promising only the curse of their inevitability. Sky, mountains and sea congealed together in the bottomless chasm of the stares of livestock, as they endlessly dragged their meager carcasses along the sides of rivers, in dust or in mud, and the staring eyes reflected by candlelight in all the mirrors in the depths of the houses, were similar, the same chasms gouged out of faces of wax. Curled up in the depths of his bed, Marcel sensed a mortal anguish clutching at his heart whenever night fell, because he knew this fathomless, silent night was not the natural and temporary continuation of the day but something terrifying, a primal state into which the earth was relapsing after twelve hours of exhausting exertion and from which it would never again break free. Dawn heralded no more than yet another temporary reprieve and Marcel would set off for school, stopping on the way from time to time to vomit blood and vowing to say nothing about it to his mother who would have made him go to bed and would have prayed, kneeling at his bedside after applying hot compresses to his stomach, and he was determined from now on not to let his demon snatch him away from the only things that gave him joy, the schoolmaster’s lessons, the colored maps and the majesty of history, the inventors and men of science, the children saved from rabies, the princes and kings, everything that enabled him to believe that there was a world beyond the sea, a world throbbing with life, in which men still knew how to do something other than drag out their existence in suffering and disarray, a world that could inspire other desires than that of leaving it as quickly as possible, for he was sure that beyond the sea they would already, for years now, have been celebrating the arrival of a new world, the one Jean-Baptiste had gone off to join in 1926, lying about his age so that he could enlist, obliterate the sea and finally discover what a world might be like, in the company of those young men fleeing with him in their hundreds, whose resigned parents, despite the wrench of parting, could find no arguments to hold them back. At table, sitting next to Jeanne-Marie, Marcel ate with his eyes shut, so as to voyage with Jean-Baptiste on fabulous oceans alive with piratical junks, visit pagan cities that teemed with chanting, smoke and cries, and walk in perfumed jungles, peopled by wild animals and fearsome natives, who would view his brother with respect and terror, as if he were the invincible Archangel, the destroyer of scourges, once again devoted to men’s salvation, and during the catechism he would listen with sealed lips to the lies told by the evangelist, for he knew what an apocalypse was, he knew that at the end of the world the heavens did not open and there were neither horsemen nor trumpets nor number of the beast, no monster, but only silence, so much so that you might think nothing had happened. And indeed, nothing had happened, the years trickled away like sand, and still nothing happened and this nothing spread the power of its blind reign over everything, a deadly and fruitless reign, so that no one could any longer say when it had begun. For at the moment during the summer of 1918 when that photograph was taken, to ensure that something might be left to bear witness to the beginning and also the end, the world had already vanished, it had vanished without anyone noticing and it was, above all, its absence, the most enigmatic and the most daunting of all those absences captured that day on paper by the silver salts, that Marcel would spend his life contemplating, searching for traces of it in the milky whiteness with its faded edges, in the faces of his mother, his brother and his sisters, in Jeanne-Marie’s sulky pout, in the insignificance of their wretched human presences, as the ground gave way beneath their feet, giving them no choice but to float aimlessly like ghosts in an abstract and infinite space from which there was no escape, one from which even the love that bound them together could not save them, because in the absence of a world, love itself is powerless. It