The Horseman on the Roof (13 page)

At length Angelo saw ahead of him the opening to an avenue of plane trees; this signified a village. He moved up under the trees at a walk. He was expecting to find the usual barriers and had already noted a side road into which, if anybody tried to stop him, he could plunge at a gallop. But there were no barriers, and despite the already advanced hour, the village, its doors and shutters closed, appeared quite deserted. He continued to approach at a walk.

When he reached the street, Angelo was affected unpleasantly by being flanked by houses to right and left. The solitude had soothed him. It had not cost him any effort to face the terrible plaster sun, but these house-fronts, behind which he pictured dark rooms and heaven knows what explanation for this solitude and silence, worried him.

At the crossroads made by a small square containing the church, he saw a small black and white shape lying in a triangle of shade, at the corner of a house. It was a little choirboy in cassock and surplice. By his side lay the tall cross carried at funerals and the holy-water stoup and sprinkler.

Angelo dismounted and went up to him. The child was sleeping. He was perfectly well and fast asleep, as though in his bed.

Angelo put his hands under his arms and raised him, to wake him up. At first the child's head lolled from side to side, then he sneezed and opened his eyes. But on seeing Angelo's face bent over him, he gave a violent twist like a startled cat, seized the cross and stoup, and took to his heels. His little bare feet twinkled high under his cassock. He vanished up a side alley. He had thrown down on the pavement a small coin he had been clasping in his hand.

Angelo left the village without seeing another living soul.

The road ran fairly close to the dry bed of the Durance, winding along a range of hills. It entered little valleys, emerged again, passed through olive orchards and willow clumps, threaded avenues of Italian poplars, crossed streams. Everything was motionless in boiling plaster. On either side of the road the horse's trot set files of stiff trees with cardboard foliage turning like the rigid spokes of a wheel. Now and then small white farms, their eyes shut, their noses in the dust, slobbering a little straw, would appear between two mulberry trees.

In the general immobility Angelo noticed, along the slope of the hills, a red blob moving. It was a petticoated peasant woman descending at a run. He saw her jumping wildly down the dry stone walls of the terraces on which the people of the region grow artichokes. She was making a beeline through hedges and bushes. She was heading for an area where there were large pine woods but no dwellings.

Much later, after the road had taken several turnings, Angelo again saw the red blob far away among the hills. It was still moving rapidly.

The horse began to show signs of fatigue. Angelo alighted and, leading the beast by the bridle, approached a clump of willows. He was entering the gray shade of the trees when he was halted by the appearance of a large dog, which had got up and was watching him with eyes like coals. Silently it opened a huge and bloody maw; its two long fangs were festooned with black gobbets.

Angelo retreated backward, step by step. The horse danced behind him. A stench of carrion rose out of the bushes. The dog stood still, holding its ground. Angelo remounted and made off at a jog trot.

He was already far away when he thought of his pistols. “I'm not worthy of the little Frenchman,” he told himself. And he fell asleep.

He was aroused by a swerve of his horse. After having walked on for a while, it too must have fallen asleep in the shade of a birch tree. It had been awakened by a scorching ray of sunlight breaking through the leaves to fall on its muzzle.

It must have been nearly midday. Angelo was hungry and, above all, thirsty. He had been foolish to smoke three of his little cigars. His mouth was plastered with thick, sour saliva. It was highly dangerous to eat fruit or indeed anything in the houses or inns. Besides, there was neither house nor inn in sight. Nor should one consider drinking from the fountains or springs. Angelo dismounted again, and leaned back against the birch tree, after tethering the horse in the shade of a thick bramble bush. And he lit a fourth cigar.

The heat plunged down in terrible, heavy, long, stifling torrents. Brushing his forehead as he pushed back his hair, Angelo noticed that his sweat was cold. His ears began to buzz, faintly yet so continuously that it made him drunk and giddy. Suddenly Angelo's stomach turned and he vomited. He looked closely at what he had just vomited. It was a mouthful of mucus. He went on smoking.

He straightened up without any previous decision to do so. He was strangely divided into two parts: one that kept watch in his sleep, and one that acted outside him, like a dog on a leash. He untethered the horse, led it to the road, mounted, and dug sharply with his knees. The horse began to trot.

He was just passing a small, shut house, when the door opened and he heard someone call: “Sir, sir, come quick!” It was a woman with a masculine face, but made beautiful by terror. She was reaching out her hands toward him. He jumped to the ground and followed her into the house.

In the unexpected darkness he could make out nothing but a sort of whitish form writhing with aggressive violence. He rushed toward it at the same time as the woman, before realizing that it was a man struggling on a bed whose sheets and counterpane had been sent flying across the room. He tried to hold the body down, but was hurled back as though by the irresistible release of a steel spring. Besides, his foot had also slipped in some sticky fluid at the foot of the bed. He steadied himself on a slightly drier part of the floor and began to wrestle in earnest, aided by the woman, who had slipped into the space on the other side and was clinging with all her strength to the sick man's shoulders and calling him Joseph. At last, under their combined efforts, the body fell back upon the bed with a crack like dry wood. Angelo, who was leaning with all his weight on the wretched man's arms, felt under his palms the disordered seething of the muscles and even of the bones, twisting in a mad fury. But the face, so excessively thin that it was no more than a skull with a covering of skin, began to pale, while the heavy lips, covered with hard bristles, drew back over blackened and decayed teeth which, against this blue, appeared almost white. At the back of their deep sockets the eyes, surrounded by wrinkled skin, wavered like the shimmering scales on the tiny heads of tortoises. Mechanically Angelo began to massage the thighs and hips of this body. Its skin was very harsh. A convulsion even more violent than the rest tore the sick man from the woman's hands and flung him against Angelo. He felt the teeth strike his cheek. He had just noticed that the skin he was rubbing was encrusted with ancient filth. The man died; that is to say, the flickering in his eyes went out. His limbs continued to be swept in every direction by the tumult of the muscles and bones, which seemed to be in revolt and to want to break through the skin, like rats in a sack. Angelo wiped his cheek on a bit of dirty printed calico that served as a bed curtain.

The room, which gave flush onto the fields and was also used as a kitchen, contained a big table covered with vegetables with soil still clinging to them, and another, smaller, round one evidently used as a dining-table. In the corner behind the door Angelo saw an old man, all freshly shaved and suggesting an elderly actor. He was seated in an armchair and doubtless had some sort of paralysis of the legs, for there were two leather-handled sticks laid across his thighs. He was smiling. His lips, thin as wire, gleamed faintly with saliva. His gaze roved from Angelo to four or five pipes set before him on the edge of the round table, near a pigskin pouch filled with tobacco.

“Since Joseph fell ill he has taken his pipe and is quite happy,” said the woman. She wiped her hands on her apron.

“It's this one,” said the old man.

He stroked the pipe with obvious signs of the keenest joy. It was a clay pipe representing a Turk's head. It was mounted on a rather long reed stem, embellished with red woolen tassels.

“Wouldn't you like a little cigar?” said Angelo.

“No,” said the old man, “I smoke this.”

He began to fill the pipe with deft thumb-strokes and a great exercise of fingers. He laughed broadly, his toothless mouth wide open, and when he took the first puffs a thin thread of saliva fell onto his waistcoat.

Angelo sat down near the old man. He thought of nothing, not even of smoking. The smell of the clay pipe was revolting. Suddenly he remembered the horse.

“I expect he's skedaddled,” he said to himself.

He went out. The horse was perfectly quiet. It was asleep on its feet, and from time to time, as it slept, it licked at the grass, so white that it seemed to be covered with flour.

Angelo spent more than two hours sitting on the ground, his back leaning against the trunk of a lilac. He felt at complete peace, and even in a way happy. He could see the woman coming and going in the garden. She must have felt an instinctive need to recommence immediately her habitual motions of housekeeping. Angelo's presence must also have helped her considerably, for she took her time pulling up carrots, fat turnips, and a few small plants of celery. She also gathered some sprigs of parsley, wiping the leaves on a corner of her apron, for they were covered with dust. Finally she fetched a pail and drew some water from an obviously unhealthy well.

These activities, this woman's movements, were in the true sense an enchantment to Angelo. A feeling ran through all his limbs as if he were being tickled with the tips of feathers and his brain were made of fresh down. Finally, he became aware that for some time his mouth had been spread in a fatuous grin; he stopped grinning and, seizing advantage of the woman's having gone in to poke her fire, mounted and took to the road.

Toward evening he passed by a lamenting village. The houses stood in a group four or five hundred yards from the road and a little below it. From his horse Angelo could see them huddling like a fox against the gravel of the Durance. There came from them a moaning, a dirge that must have been made up of a great many voices to be so sustained and to rise at the end to so high a pitch.

Angelo reached Manosque at nightfall.

CHAPTER SIX

Here there were serious barricades.

The road had been blocked with a dust cart, barrels, and a wagon with its wheels in the air.

A fat fellow with a shotgun-sling across his coat came out from the fortification.

“Halt!” he said. “No one's allowed through. We don't want anyone here, d'you hear? No one! All resistance is useless.”

These last words cheered Angelo considerably, and he continued to advance. There was still enough daylight for him to be able to follow, on the pale face framed in cottony side whiskers, the spread of a nameless terror. The man retreated precipitately into his stronghold.

Four or five dumfounded faces at once appeared over the top of the barricade.

“Where are you going?”—“Don't come any nearer!” cried uneasy voices. “What are you coming here for?”

“I heard reports about your beauty,” said Angelo gravely, repressing a strong urge to laugh, “and I've come to see for myself.”

This reply seemed to frighten them even more than the actual presence of the horseman.

“They're grocers, and the one in the coat is a footman,” thought Angelo.

“Look here, you're a good fellow, I'm sure,” said a fat gray face with quivering cheeks.

“I'm the wickedest fellow on earth,” said Angelo, “as all who've had to do with me have soon found out. Roll back those barrels, and move out of the way, so I can get by. If not, I'll jump them, and you'd better look out.”

At the same time he made his horse prance. It was tired and did not put much fire into it. But these pirouettes and a little whinny of pain—for Angelo, full of his game, was jerking hard at the bit—carried confusion into the fortress.

The heads vanished. A gun was leveled.

“Now they're wetting their pants,” said Angelo to himself. “Let's give them some help.”

He fired a pistol into the air. It made a great noise. Then he rode quietly off to one side, along a slope, and under some almond trees.

Ten minutes later he was in the gardens, under the town walls.

“Old man, you're free,” said Angelo to the horse.

He took off its saddle and bridle, and sent the barebacked animal off with a friendly slap on the rump. He hid the harness in the bushes. Climbing over the reed fences he walked through cabbage patches. He crossed a small, evil-smelling stream. Ascending along the walls of a big tannery, he came out into a boulevard, under some lime trees. The street lamps were lit.

His skin was stiff as a board with sweat and sunburn. He went to wash at a fountain. Hardly had he plunged his hands into the water of the basin when he felt himself brutally gripped by the shoulders and pulled back, while mighty arms hugged him mercilessly.

“Here's another one,” shouted a voice close to his ear. He fought, trying to kick, and received a hail of fists on his face and body. His legs were seized; he was pinned to the ground and held tight. He heard voices:

“He came from behind the tannery.”—“Search him.”—“He's got pistols.”—“Take his packets of poison off him.”—“He must have thrown them in the basin.”—“Empty the basin.”—“One of his pistols has been fired, it smells of powder.”

Finally someone said: “Beat his head in,” and he saw feet raised. But everyone began to talk at once and mill around him, while there came the sound of dull blows striking the plug of the basin to smash it open.

The nearest street lamp was still too far off for him to be able to make out what sort of people he was up against. It seemed to him that they were workmen. There were some leather aprons.

“Here, get up,” someone told him, kicking him heavily in the ribs. At the same time he was lifted up and set on his feet with such violence that his head bounced against his shoulder.