XIX
everything is harder once you reach man’s estate the sensation of being a poor guy the approach of old age the accumulation of sins the body lets go of us white traces at your temples veins more prominent your sex shrinks ears stretch illness lies in wait, alopecia Lebihan’s fungi or the cancer of my father laid low by Apollo and Machaon’s knife can do nothing for it, the arrow was too well embedded, too deep, despite many operations the sickness returned, spread, my father began to dissolve, dissolve then dry out, he seemed increasingly taller, drawn out, his immense pale face was furrowed with bony crevices, his arms were emaciated, the man who had always been so low-key was almost completely silent, my mother spoke for him, she said your father this, your father that, in his presence, she was his Pythia, she interpreted his signs, your father is happy to see you, she said when I visited, he misses you, and the paternal body in its armchair said nothing, when I went over to him to ask him how he was my mother replied today he’s very well, and little by little everyone lost the habit of addressing him directly, we consulted his oracle, my father remained sitting for hours on end reading Saint Augustine or the Gospels and it was strange that a scientist, an engineer, a specialist in the most invisible kind of matter found a place for God at the heart of his waves, he was settling his account with the beyond no doubt, preparing his passport for Hades great eater of warriors, we were all convinced he was going to get better, get better or drag his illness out for years, but the Moirae had decided otherwise, and Zeus himself could do nothing, so after a visit to my parents I went back to my place stopping by the bistro below to drink a few shots before climbing up to pick up a book too, any book, to pass the time, the Zone documents or whatever the bookstore on the Place des Abbesses palmed off on me, trashy novels literature essays everything came through there, ever since Stéphanie left in place of her skin I had to caress thousands of pages in solitude, enough to make you mad, like Rudolf Hess in his interminable prison, my father was fading away my mother was holding up and playing ever more difficult pieces four hours a day furiously, Chopin Liszt Scriabin Shostakovich nothing resisted her, the Boulevard was grey and more somber than ever, the sword of Maréchal Mortier was rusting now under the directorship of Jean-Claude Cousseran, diplomat specialist in the Zone, from Jerusalem to Ankara not excluding Damascus, pleasant cultivated and intelligent, not much liked among the experts of intrigue and shadow plays, all that was too high up for me, from my office I saw nothing but Lebihan who wheezed from meeting to meeting waiting for his discharge, the reforms and transformations of flow charts, the budget given to such-or-such agency to the detriment of some other, in other words everything that makes up an excessively opaque administration, about which no one really knows exactly how it functions, not even us: by magic the reports files missions weekly or special bulletins still reached their destinations, the propaganda and various manipulations ended up getting the better of Cousseran and his team, overthrown by staunch Chirac supporters, Cousseran left for Cairo as ambassador, he must still be there, by the shores of the Nile, a stone’s throw from the zoo, watching the monkeys gamboling from his big varnished desk while he absentmindedly initials his insignificant documents on a magnificent green leather blotter — I down my Sans Souci to his health, it’s very pretty this beer bottle with the white boat on a blue background, we must be nearing Orvieto, the landscape is undulating gently in the moonlight, the Chianti has made the Americans very jolly, they keep chuckling, Sans Souci is bottled for Moretti Inc. in Udine says the label, Udine capital of Friuli beautiful Venetian city where Franz Stangl was billeted at the end of the war, in charge of the fight against the partisans once the camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were destroyed, closed for lack of customers, mission accomplished: Globocnik, Wirth, Stangl and the happy band of the Aktion Reinhardt had eliminated two million Jews from the General Gouvernement of Poland, with carbon monoxide gas, according to the method tested by Wirth the savage in Bełżec, and all these sinister technicians of destruction were sent in early 1944 to the