The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 5

is true that we do not know what worlds are, nor what their existence depends on. Perhaps somewhere in the universe the mysterious law is written that presides over their origins, their growth and their ending. But this we do know: for a new world to arise, first an old world must die. And we also know that the interval that separates them can be infinitely brief or, on the other hand, so long that men have to spend dozens of years learning to live amid the desolation before discovering, inevitably, that they are incapable of doing so and that, in the final reckoning, they have not lived. Perhaps we can even identify the almost imperceptible signs that proclaim the recent disappearance of a world, not screaming shells above the gutted plains of the North, but the release of a shutter, scarcely disturbing the vibrant summer light, or the delicate, damaged hand of a young woman very gently closing a door in the middle of the night on what should not have been her life, or the square sail of a ship crossing the blue waters of the Mediterranean, in the open sea off Hippo, bringing the inconceivable news from Rome that men still exist but their world is no more.

“Then do not feel reluctance, my brothers,

toward the chastisements of God”

In the middle of the night, taking good care to make no noise, although there was nobody to hear her, Hayet closed the door of the little apartment she had lived in for eight years above the bar where she worked as a barmaid, and disappeared. Around ten o’clock in the morning the hunters came back from the drive. The hounds on the trucks’ loading bays by the bar, still excited by the chase and the scent of blood, were jostling one another, frantically wagging their tails, moaning and barking hysterically, which the men, almost as happy and over-excited as they were, responded to with oaths and curses, and Virgile Ordioni’s vast frame was convulsed with suppressed laughter, while the others clapped him on the shoulder in congratulation, because he had single-handedly killed three of the five boars of the morning, and Virgile was blushing and laughing, while Vincent Leandri, who had pathetically missed a big male less than thirty yards off, was lamenting the fact that he was no longer good for anything and remarking that the only reason he persisted in coming on the drives was for the apéritif afterward, and then someone called out that the bar was closed. Hayet had always been as regular and reliable as the stars in their courses and Vincent at once imagined that some mishap had befallen her. He ran up to the apartment, knocked at the door, softly at first, and then hammering away, but still to no avail, and called out,

“Hayet, Hayet, are you alright? Answer me, please,”

and then announced that he was going to break the door down. Someone suggested to Vincent that he should calm down, Hayet could have gone out on an urgent errand even though it was very hard, virtually impossible, in fact, to imagine any kind of errand one might have in the village in early autumn especially on a Sunday morning and moreover an errand so urgent that it warranted closing the bar, but then you never knew, and Hayet would certainly be back, but she did not come back and Vincent kept saying that now he really was going to knock the door down, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to restrain him and in the end everyone agreed that the logical solution would be to go and inform Marie-Angèle Susini that, improbable as it might seem, her barmaid was missing. Marie-Angèle received them with incredulity and even suspected them of already being drunk and playing a cruel trick on her, but apart from Virgile, who was still laughing from time to time without knowing why, they all seemed worn out and weary, perfectly sober and vaguely uneasy and Vincent Leandri even seemed distraught, so much so that Marie-Angèle picked up the duplicate keys to the bar and the apartment and went with them, herself increasingly uneasy, and hurried upstairs to open Hayet’s apartment. It had been meticulously cleaned, there was no speck of dust, the crockery and taps were gleaming, the cupboards and drawers were empty, the sheets and pillowcases on the bed had been changed, nothing was left of Hayet, not so much as an earring fallen behind a piece of furniture, nor a stray bobby pin in a corner of the bathroom, not a scrap of paper, not even a hair, and Marie-Angèle was surprised to detect no scent other than that of cleaning products, as if no human being had lived there for years. Looking around at the dead apartment, she could not understand why Hayet had left like that, without a parting word, but she knew that she would never return and she would never see her again. She heard a voice saying,

“We really ought to call the law,”

but she shook her head sadly and no one insisted, because it was evident that the silent tragedy that had been played out here, at an unknown time in the night, concerned only one person, adrift in the depths of a lonely heart, to which human society could no longer render justice. They all went quiet for a while, then one of them ventured timidly,

“Seeing as you’re here, Marie-Angèle, the bar, you know, you could open it, and then we could have our apéritif after all,”

and Marie-Angèle nodded silently. A murmur of satisfaction ran through the group of huntsmen, Virgile began laughing very loudly and they moved toward the bar with the hounds baying and groaning in the sunlight and Vincent Leandri muttered,

“What a bunch of drunken bastards you are,”

before following them into the bar. Behind the counter Marie-Angèle once more went