The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 8
Claudie had intercepted this letter and picked up the telephone shaking with fury.
“You’re a stupid old bastard, Uncle Marcel, and no doubt you’ll die a stupid old bastard, but meanwhile I advise you never to write like that to my son again,”
and Marcel had begun vaguely whimpering down the phone until Claudie hung up on him, cursing the cruel injustice of a fate that had seen fit to deprive her of her own parents while taking good care to spare this intolerable old fart, who was forever complaining that he was at death’s door and called up in the middle of the night over the slightest cold or the most minor ailment, waxing endlessly eloquent about the cunning progress of the ulcer that should have killed him seventy years ago, whereas in fact he had an iron constitution, as if, having totally neglected his son as a child, he were particularly determined to ruin his life in adulthood, and Claudie dreamed of a delicious plan whereby she would catch the plane out there and go to the village to suffocate him with a cushion or, better still, throttle him with her bare hands, but she was forced to abandon her revenge fantasies, while noting that in the real world she could not possibly entrust her son to this man during the Christmas vacations, nor could she possibly tell him that he must stay in Paris because his paternal grandfather hated him. It was a telephone call to Gavina Pintus that resolved the problem: in a mixture of Corsican and her Barbaggia region Sardinian she declared that she would be delighted for Matthieu to stay with her any time he wanted. Claudie was tempted to refuse, if only to teach Matthieu that emotional blackmail never paid, all the more because she suspected him of being, via Libero, the originator of this most opportune invitation, but she soon accepted it when she realized that it was now she who was in a position to blackmail her son, and she never hesitated to do so, invoking the threat of a canceled vacation at every lapse on the school front or attempt at rebellion, and over the years she rejoiced to note that, in truth, as the daily spectacle of a courteous, industrious and obedient son confirmed, nothing paid so well as blackmail.
There were two worlds, there may have been an infinite number of others but for him there were just two. Two completely separate worlds, each with its own hierarchy, without shared frontiers, and the one he wanted to make his own was the one that was the most foreign to him. It was as if he had discovered that the essential part of himself was precisely the one that was the most foreign and he now needed to explore it and be reunited with it, because it had been torn away from him long before his birth and he had been condemned to live the life of a foreigner, without his even being aware of it, the life in which everything was familiar to him had become hateful, it was no life at all, it was a mechanical parody of the life he now wanted to forget, for example, by feeling the cold wind from the mountain lashing his face as he and Libero rode along on the back of a jolting 4x4 driven by Sauveur Pintus up the rutted road that led to his mountain hut. Matthieu was sixteen and now spent all his winter vacations at the village and moved around amid the intricacies of the Pintus tribe with the ease of a seasoned ethnologist. Libero’s older brother had invited them to come and spend the day with him and when they got there they found Virgile Ordioni busy castrating some young boars gathered together in a pen. He lured them with food while emitting variously modulated grunts which were considered attractive to porcine ears, and when one of them, spellbound by the charm of this music or, more prosaically, blinded by greed, incautiously came close, Virgile jumped on it, flung it to the ground like a sack of potatoes, caught it by the hind legs and turned it over before straddling its belly, the implacable vice of his massive thighs gripping the misguided animal, which now uttered appalling squeals, doubtless sensing that nothing good was coming its way and Virgile, knife in hand, sliced into the scrotum with a practiced action and plunged his fingers into the opening to extract a first testicle, and cut the cord, before dealing with the second in the same way and tossing them together into a large bowl that was half full. As soon as the operation was completed the liberated porker, displaying a stoicism that Matthieu found impressive, began feeding again, just as if nothing had happened, there among its heedless fellows, which all, one after the other, passed through Virgile’s expert hands. Matthieu and Libero watched the spectacle leaning on a fence. Sauveur emerged from the farm and came to join them.
“You’ve never seen the like of that before, have you, Matthieu?”
Matthieu shook his head and Sauveur gave a little laugh.
“He’s good, Virgile. He knows how it’s done. There’s no more to be said.”
But Matthieu was not thinking of saying anything at all, not least because the pen was now an arena for an interesting turn of events. Virgile, seated on a pig whose scrotum he had just cut open, let fly an oath and turned to Sauveur, who asked him what was up.
“There’s only one here. Just the one! The other one hasn’t come down!”
Sauveur shrugged his shoulders.
“That happens.”
But Virgile was not prepared to admit defeat. He cut off the single testicle and continued rummaging in the empty scrotum, shouting,
“I can feel it!