The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 7

existence for them. They had known one another since childhood, though not for the whole of their lives. Matthieu was eight when his mother, concerned about his resolutely solitary and contemplative character, decided that he needed a friend to enjoy his summer vacations in the village. So she took him by the hand, having sprinkled him with eau de cologne, and led him along to see the Pintus family, whose youngest son was the same age as him. Their vast house was ornamented with various excrescences made of cinder blocks which they had left unplastered and it looked like an organism that had never stopped growing in erratic fashion, as if driven by some vital and primeval force, electric cables decorated with dangling light sockets ran along the facades, the courtyard was piled high with chimney pots, wheelbarrows, tiles, dogs asleep in the sun, bags of cement and a considerable number of unidentified objects biding their time in the expectation of finally proving their usefulness one day. Gavina Pintus was mending a jacket, and her body, rendered shapeless by eleven pregnancies that had fulfilled their term, spilled out of a frail deck-chair, Libero sat on a wall behind her, watching three of his brothers totally smeared in grease busying themselves around a venerable motor car whose engine had been stripped down. When he saw Matthieu approaching, resisting the vigorous tugging of his mother by making himself increasingly heavy at the end of her arm, Libero stared at him attentively, unmoving and unsmiling, and Matthieu made himself so heavy that Claudie Antonetti was compelled to come to a halt, and after several seconds, he dissolved into tears so utterly that she had no option but to take him home to blow his nose and lecture him. He ended up taking refuge in the arms of his big sister, Aurélie, who once again performed her role as proxy mother with a wholly childish gravity. At the end of the afternoon Libero came and knocked at their door and Matthieu agreed to go with him into the village and allow himself to be led into a jumble of secret pathways, springs, fantastical insects and alleyways that little by little fitted together into a coherent space and formed a world that rapidly ceased to terrify him and became his obsession. The more the years passed the more the end of the summer vacations gave rise to painful scenes, to an extent that Claudie sometimes regretted having thrust her son along the road to a social integration whose consequences she had not foreseen. Matthieu now lived only for the start of the summer and when in his thirteenth year he grasped that his parents, like utterly selfish monsters, were not for a moment planning to abandon their work in Paris so as to allow him to settle permanently in the village, he badgered them to at least send him there during the Christmas breaks. Matthieu’s response to their refusal was a quite disgraceful series of hysterical fits and bouts of fasting too brief to damage his health but sufficiently long and dramatic to exasperate his parents. Gloomily Jacques and Claudie Antonetti observed to one another that they had bred an appalling little brat, but this depressing observation was no help at all in resolving their problem. Jacques and Claudie were first cousins. After his wife had died in childbirth, Marcel Antonetti, Jacques’s father, had proclaimed that he was incapable of looking after an infant and had turned for help, as he had done all his life, to his sister, Jeanne-Marie, who, without pausing for thought, had immediately taken Jacques in, to bring him up with her daughter, Claudie. Thus they had grown up together and the discovery that they were lovers, soon followed by the public announcement of their intention to marry was, not surprisingly, greeted with stunned indignation by the entire family. But so stubborn were they that in the end the marriage took place, in the presence of a meager gathering, for whom this ceremony in no way represented the touching triumph of love but rather that of vice and incest. The birth of Aurélie, who was, against all expectation, a perfectly healthy baby, went some way to pacify family tensions and Matthieu’s arrival took place in an apparent atmosphere of perfect normality. But it quickly became apparent that Marcel, being incapable of venting his anger on his son or his daughter-in-law, had transferred his hostility onto his grandchildren, and although he finally, in spite of himself, came to be fond of Aurélie, to the point of occasionally indulging in displays of senile adulation, he continued to persecute Matthieu with malevolence, even hatred, however incongruous such a sentiment may seem, as if the little boy had himself arranged the abominable union from which he had sprung. Every summer Claudie would intercept the hostile looks he darted at her son, each time Matthieu went up to him to kiss him he made gestures of recoil too obvious for them to have been instinctive, and he never missed an opportunity to make cutting observations to him about the way he sat at table or his propensity for dirtiness or stupidity, and Jacques would lower his eyes in a pained manner while Claudie restrained herself twenty times a day from abusing this old man for whom she no longer had the least affection. When Matthieu began spending time with Libero, Marcel’s conduct had been a disgrace, through clenched teeth he would mutter,

“So now he’s besotted with a Sardinian, well, that doesn’t surprise me,”

and Claudie held her tongue,

“But you’d think he could refrain from bringing him back here to the house,”

and she had held her tongue, for years she had held her tongue. But a few weeks later Matthieu had sent a card to his grandfather for his birthday.

“Happy birthday, with love from your grandson, Matthieu,” a harmless, ritual card, to which Marcel had sent a two-line reply:

“My boy, at the age of nearly thirteen, please spare