The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 45

temple with its officiating priests and its victims, its cruelty, its martyrs and its unlikely miracles, she dreaded the German exam, she had prayed for a question on Schopenhauer and had almost fainted on reading the name of Frege on the paper she had drawn at random but grace had descended upon her, everything swiftly seemed to fall into place, as if the god of logic himself had been leaning over her shoulder, and Matthieu nodded automatically, even though he did not want to hear anything about Frege, or Schopenhauer or the Sorbonne, he was thinking about Izaskun, with whom he could no longer sleep because he had had to return to the family home during Judith’s visit, so as not to abandon her to the gloomy company of his mother and grandfather, although he was dying to do so, and he looked forward impatiently to the blessed moment when he would take her to the plane. Indeed, she did not seem very happy at the village, she was forever suggesting ridiculous plans for cultural excursions, she wanted to go to the beach, she said Virgile Ordioni frightened her and the drink gave her bad headaches. Matthieu tolerated these obvious manifestations of bad faith insofar as this enabled him to make Judith responsible for his own unhappiness. One night, apparently one like any other, Pierre-Emmanuel remained sitting in a corner of the main bar area for no obvious reason while the girls were cleaning the room, and when they had finished, Izaskun turned to him and they left together. A slow trickle of lava made its way into Matthieu’s entrails. He kept his eyes fixed on the door as if he hoped to see them returning and Judith put her hand on his arm.

“Are you in love with that girl?”

It was a stupid question, clumsy in its formulation, to which he could not offer an answer for it seemed to him that love and jealousy had nothing to do with the unbearable pain now consuming him. Izaskun was his sister, he reminded himself, his tender, incestuous sister, at the bar he never showed her any signs of affection, he had no need to mark his territory in public, as most men like to do, and no one observing them would have thought that there was anything whatever between them, and what was there between them, if not this intimacy of shared sleep and the performance of the rite that guaranteed the stability of the world? In the name of what should he have felt jealous? And he reminded himself: what could be taken from him that would not in the end come back to him? But it had become impossible for him to feel superior and invincible, the foundations of the world had been shaken, the cracks were becoming chasms and the next day Izaskun spent the whole evening throwing moist glances Pierre-Emmanuel’s way, she broke off serving to go and kiss him and cling to him, despite remonstrations from Libero to which she responded by muttering obscene Iberian curses, and Matthieu simply had to admit to himself that he was well and truly dying of love and jealousy, even though he did not recognize his beloved sister in the amorous, purring pussycat now flaunting her fatuous passion night after night, and he knew perfectly well she would never come back to him, he could not prevent himself from thinking about Pierre-Emmanuel’s sexual exploits, he saw precise, intolerable images, he heard the cries that Izaskun had never uttered with him and he transferred all his hatred onto Judith, whose arrival had set the signal for the apocalypse. She was a foreign body which the world was rejecting with abrupt eruptions of chaotic violence. Plenitude and harmony were at an end. Disaster followed disaster. Judith and Matthieu were waiting for Libero to finish cashing up before going for a drink in a nightclub when Rym rushed into the bar in T-shirt and pants, looking completely panic-stricken, all her money had disappeared, a year’s worth of tips and savings which she used to keep in a little box hidden under her clothes, that nobody knew about apart from Sarah and now she couldn’t find it, she could no longer remember exactly when she’d last seen it, she talked about plans she could never bring to fruition, her young woman’s dreams, dreams no one had ever bothered to find out she might be cherishing, she wanted help, she wanted to search the apartment from top to bottom, without accusing anyone, although there must be a guilty party, of course, and she refused to listen to Libero who said it would probably be pointless, they must search, and search now, and they turned the apartment upside down, going through stuff belonging to Agnès and Izaskun, who took this questioning of their honesty particularly badly, they lifted up boxes of drink in the storeroom and under the counter, without finding anything and Rym kept shouting that they must go on looking. Libero tried to reason with her but she would not listen to him and in the end he lost his temper.

“For fuck’s sake! There are banks, aren’t there? You must be a halfwit to keep your cash here! It’s gone. You’ll never see it again. Get it? It could be anyone at all, one of those thieving bastards who come to rob us, it might even be me, if you like. But it makes no difference in any case, because you’ll never see that cash again. You’ll never see it.”

Rym bowed her head and fell silent. There was no longer any question of going down to a club. On the way home Judith stopped without warning and burst into tears.

“What’s the matter? Is it Rym?”

Judith shook her head.

“No. It’s you. I’m sorry. It really upsets me to see you like this.”

Matthieu took her sympathy as an insult, the worst, in fact, that had ever been addressed to him. He tried to remain calm.

“Look, I’ll