Longevity

The villages in France have all become Oradour-sur-Glane. Oradour-sur-Glane, the martyred village. The Waffen SS troops arrive and surround the town. The troops gather everyone in the main square. They separate the men, women, and children, and execute the men with machine guns in isolated shops, attics, garages. In the streets and houses, the troops kill at random, leaving no witnesses. They sack and then burn. The women and children are locked up in churches with explosives. The troops then methodically eliminate the cadavers with fire and a mass grave, stripping them of their identities. The terror mounts when the dead are beyond recognition; all that remains are the burnt floorboards from the massacre. And the SS’s morbid vice, right before it’s over and the celebrations begin. Today, all of the towns in France are Oradour-sur-Glane the day after forced confinement. We wake as usual, as we have for more than a year on the secluded hilltop that rises three hundred and ten-odd metres above the river—head muddled, mezcal with worm and seventy per cent alcohol, face puffed up, mouth sputtering—and we stretch out in the isolation of our home. Through the white shutters of my window, I see thousands of particles planing, some above the lifeless nests in the treetops, others moving toward the highest of the towers and the Roman bridge. Some make it as far as my balcony. They’re the certificates we’ve needed to go out since the start of the pandemic: first to stock up on provisions, to walk in the vicinity of our house, or to go to the doctor. Then to go out onto the balcony or into the shared courtyard; later, with the death toll on the rise, a new certificate had to be printed, in order to stick our heads, arms, or legs out a window or beyond a railing. It was believed that in windy, rocky, and cordoned regions such as this one, droplets from an infected person who cried, sang, or coughed could direct their fetidness toward others who at the same moment were sunbathing, yawning, gathering grapes in the vineyard. More time passed and then we couldn’t even stick out a finger, because a finger, if it had been sucked on, became dangerous too. Some neighbours decided to board up the entrances to their houses, so as not to see the day or observe the cycle of light. Other neighbours boarded up their entire homes, even their chimneys, to prevent squads from entering and contaminating them. In the cities, they say there are streets for those who cough, streets for those who sneeze, and those who do both cross from one to the other. In the cities, they decided to dig graves for people who break the law by leaving their houses without authorization, or exceeding the time allotted or the proportion of space permitted. The people there walk at an extremely slow pace, the ambulance drivers were trained by ex-combatants in Kosovo. Torment, though legal, hasn’t been widely employed, it’s not been necessary; no one’s put up a fight. This morning, I saw the papers floating and understood that it had all come to an end. It was around noon when the president made the announcement and I saw the first of the boards on the windows and doors come down and it was the first of the burnt smell, the blows of an axe, the dust. I decided to go out; I had trouble walking, as though after a long period of rehabilitation, as though I were a hemiplegic after a ski accident or I’d just come out of Lady Di’s tunnel. I went down the short flight of cement steps, bowlegged like an equestrian. I saw wooden planks scattered along the path, and houses with holes in them. The town had lost its drunks after closing the taverns and confiscating the wine. I crossed the stream and saw that the ducks, the capybaras, and the foxes were all stained and disguised by the colour of death, their limbs cold, not breathing, their coats stuck to the tarred road and rough earth. The conscience is the only weapon and the only wound. I walked through the town, climbed the hillside. Behind a roundabout I saw rusted bicycles, power cables, the tramline, machine guns, and on the other side of the village a bell and a church under the open sky as though they were a Hellenic ruin. The last drone fell through the air like a meteor. Santa Claus was still hanging by his neck in a shed; outside, transparent bags full of plants, wet clothes drying on lines but no one to wear them. Some of the clothes were for children but I didn’t see any standing. There were things the size children had been, tricycles, shoes, but not the actual models. The town was the eruption of Vesuvius in miniature. Fornication and adultery caused the coronavirus, errare humanum perseverare diabolicum, said the black spray paint on the rocks. Slowly, the people who remained began to appear. They came out to applaud as though a plane were landing or doctors were saving lives, but whose? Slowly, I saw one, two, three, tens of elderly people emerge from cisterns, alleyways, cellars, aqueducts. No children, no adults. They began to long for tempestuous passions in their bones and one man said to the others: We’ll repay them for what they’ve done to us with our hearts, now we can repay them for the isolation by reigniting the same fire that fuelled the Nazi troops. The elderly who’d left their houses improvised a market where they deployed the mementos from their days as combatants: a sabre, a bayonet, a cask. This is a steppe of ruins, said another, but no one thought to ask about the very young, no one seemed to have had children who’d had children in turn. An elderly man hummed Mozart, He lives in the freedom and majesty of his music, as I did, while in isolation, Mozart lives, yelled an elderly man who’d once fed the ducks that now floated belly-up, To live, yelled the woman from the bakery, We’ve been given a chance to live, yelled an older couple hidden in a hollow, who after years in a cell found the hiding place quite comfortable. And they all began to sing Don Giovanni. “This is the end of the evildoer and for the wicked, death is always on a par with life.” And the village was transformed into an opera and all locked arms in dance.