The Horseman on the Roof (18 page)

He hastily climbed back to the gallery. As he set foot on the ladder a little stifled mew called to him. He stuffed the sacks that had served him as slippers into the basket and took the cat under his arm.

On the roofs the heat was like a wall, into which one was immediately mortared with quicklime. He must get away from here as quickly as possible. People were bound to come to feed the chickens and collect the eggs. He would have to find some place to live up above. Out of the question to return to the old gallery. It was clearly contaminated. If one has to pick up embers with one's hands, well and good, but why play with the fire?

The simplest thing to do was to take shelter against the rotunda of the church. No risks there. The flying buttresses offered the shade; they formed a sort of arbor over a small flat space.

It was in fact a real arbor, with a flat space covered with zinc. Despite his pressing thirst, Angelo waited to reach it before drinking. He was worried about trapdoors and giddiness. Hampered by his boots, his sacking slippers, his esparto basket, which kept one of his hands employed, he was extremely clumsy. He was sweating and icy. He had to open a sealed wine-bottle by hitting its neck with the barrel of his pistol. But the wine was good, with a strong flavor of grape. When he had made a meal out of two cheeses and a good slab of lard, and finished the wine, Angelo began to view things with greater confidence. The sun was playing its terrible midafternoon game. The cat was washing itself, slowly passing its paw behind its ears. Where the buttresses leaned against the wall, there were swallows' nests containing black, homely birds that kept charmingly twisting their heads with their yellow eyes. Near Angelo, as he sat on the sacks, a white church window yielded a scent of incense through its lead joints.

Angelo now looked down upon the side of the town that he had been unable to see from his old gallery. It covered less ground than the other side. The dovetailing of the roofs came to an end against the battlements of a gate and the reddish masses of some great elms. In the other direction Angelo had an excellent view, below him, of the whole square in front of the church and, in enfilade, two streets that ran into it. The square was deserted except for four or five blackish heaps that he took at first for large slumbering dogs, since he saw them through the sparse foliage of some small plane trees. One of these dogs unrolled as if to stretch, and Angelo realized that it was a man convulsed in his death agony. Soon indeed the dying man stretched out, his face in the dust, and moved no more. Angelo could not find the least sign of life in the others. As his eyes became used to the dappled brightness under the trees, he made out other corpses. Some were stretched out on the pavement, others crouched in the recesses of doorways; still others, who had collapsed against the edge of the fountain, seemed to be bathing their hands in the water of the basin, and they were resting on its rim black faces that bit the stone. There were a good twenty of them. All around the square the houses were bolted, from their doors and ground-floor shutters to their roofs. One could hear distinctly, in the silence, the deep rumble of flies and the fountain spurting into its basin.

A funeral drum began to roll slowly but violently at the far end of one of those streets running into the square. It was the tumbrel rolling over the cobbles. A man dressed in a long white shirt was leading the horse by the bridle. Two more men in white walked by the wheels. They stopped in front of a house. The men in white came out again almost at once carrying a corpse, which they hoisted over the rails. They returned three times into this house. The third time they brought out the corpse of a huge woman, which gave them considerable trouble; finally she too went over the rails, revealing enormous white thighs.

In the square, the men picked up the dead. Then the tumbrel rolled its drum through the side streets for a long while, with halts and then more drum-rolls and halts. Suddenly Angelo realized that he no longer heard it. There remained only the exasperated buzzing of the flies and the sound of the fountain.

Long after the noise of flies had settled to a protracted lullabye, some footsteps passed below. It was a group of people arriving by one of the streets that Angelo could see in enfilade. There were about ten women in groups, preceded by one of those men in white shirts. The women were carrying pails, but they huddled so close together that the metal clanked as they moved, like a knight's armor. Angelo decided that they were the women from some part of town being taken to the water of a fountain thought to be safe. In any case, they ignored the fountain in the square, but as they were about to enter the street from which the tumbrel had come, they began to shriek and crowd together so frantically that they resembled a bunch of rats. They raised their arms in the air, pointing and yelling, and Angelo heard them shout: “The cloud! The cloud!” Others screamed: “The comet! The comet!” or “The horse! The horse!” Angelo looked in the direction they were pointing. There was nothing but the white sky and the infinite scattering of the monstrous chalk of the sun. Finally they scattered in all directions, still screaming, and the man ran after them calling: “Rose! Rose! Rose!”

Again Angelo heard from below the fountain and the flies, then the creak of a shutter. In the façade of a house on the square a shutter half opened, a head appeared and looked all around the sky. Then it withdrew with the rapidity of a tortoise's head, and the shutter again closed.

The fountain. The flies. The tinkling bell of a sporting dog. It made a tour of the square and spent a long time bounding in and out of the surrounding alleys.

Angelo was listening so intently for the slightest sound that he heard a tiny footstep. It was a little girl. She emerged from one of the streets. She walked slowly, peacefully, swinging her arms like an idle grownup. She disturbed neither the fountain nor the flies. She went by, sauntering in her little collared frock.

Some dogs passed. They raised their muzzles toward the houses, their noses twitching. Suddenly they cowered, as under the threat of a blow, and galloped off yelping. One of them sat down at the corner of the square and, after stretching out its neck four or five times as if to sniff the sky, began a long-drawn-out howling.

The heat spluttered on the tiles. The sun had no longer any body; it was rubbed like blinding clay over the whole sky; the hills were so white that there was now no horizon.

Blows rang out both in the square and just below Angelo. They resounded even in the window by his side. Someone was beating steadily on the door of the church. At length it stopped, and a voice cried three times: “Holy Virgin! Holy Virgin! Holy Virgin!” It was impossible to tell whether it was a man's voice or a woman's.

Angelo uncorked another bottle of wine. He told himself it would be wiser to eat that raw tomato catchup, it would refresh him more, but he had an idea that wisdom was no longer of much use. It was pointless to make oneself miserable for the sake of wisdom. A little vacuum in the soul remains the best thing in critical moments, whatever they may say. Reason and logic are all right for normal times. In normal times, without question, they do wonders. When the horse runs away, it's quite another thing. What disgusted him most was that little girl in her collared frock and long embroidered pantaloons. She had swaggered along like a lady. And that, really, was enough to make one sick. If she had run, or cried out, or wept with her fists pressed into her eyes, there would have been nothing to prevent one taking that in along with everything else; but it was impossible to stomach those tranquil little steps and the slight haughtiness with which she strolled. She could have only just touched the pavement with the tips of her toes. And coming back to reason (for old tools fit quite naturally and easily into the callused hand accustomed to using them), isn't it absolutely reasonable to put one's trust in a vacuum in the soul? In which all is serene; especially the impossible, since in really critical moments, the impossible is exactly what one needs. Naturally, I don't call a duel with Baron Swartz a critical moment, really critical. That certainly demands reason, logic, and all kinds of prudence and self-control. But I'm as cold as ice by nature; no need to cool me down. It's absurd for anyone to doubt that. I don't even call the death of the little Frenchman a critical moment. I call these moments difficult moments. Difficult: like over-hot soup. No use appealing to the vacuum in the soul if one's merely burning one's gizzard. But if you hear someone pounding and kicking at a closed church door and crying: “Holy Virgin! Holy Virgin! Holy Virgin!” what'll you do with reason and logic when the first “Holy Virgin!” already fills your stomach beyond its capacity, and the second picks up your stomach the way a hand picks up a sack by the bottom and tips it over, and the third comes on top of the others with aloes, bitterness not to be borne, reasons for chucking everything?

Here on the rooftops I'm like a Battista Cannesqui (though it was in fact a grain-pit he was hiding in before they dragged him through the streets), or like a Nicola Piccinino on the roofs of Florence; a Simonetta Malatesti; a Neri de Gino Capponi.
4
There have been many adventures on the roofs of southern cities. Not to mention the Romeos, the Paolos of Rimini, and the garret windows through which they slipped in full armor, and they landed on the roofs in their iron shoes like kitchen pots falling off the hooks. Where is my beloved's bedroom? I am not the lark! Scraping the narrow corridors with their bulky battle-plate; busy preparing revolutions in cities or in women. All I do is filch some wine and goat's cheese.

And lucky at that. For I'm not in a difficult moment, oh! not at all; there's nothing difficult about it. I'm in a critical moment; that's not the same thing. There's absolutely no connection. All that can happen on the roofs of a town—the Gino Capponis, Malatestas, Bentivoglios, passing halberds or sabers through garret windows, with legs clad in steel, breasts of steel, arms of steel; or, for that matter, velvets and scents, depending on whether the aim is to incite revolt in the heart of the city or the heart of a bed—all this is a matter of law. But a little girl who takes a walk through everything down there like a reasonable person, or those blows struck at four o'clock in the afternoon on the door of a church and that “Holy Virgin! Holy Virgin! Holy Virgin!” (as if she were expected to lean out of the window and say: “Yes, what is it? I'm here”). What can you make of it? It's nothing you can settle in an ordinary way; it has no law, it does what it likes. And that's where there are really many more resources in a vacuum in the soul than in reason. What good is reason at these times? Except, in just such cases, to lose the little life that's left to us? Much good it does corpses if, before dying, they've reasoned well. That's a fine diploma to pin on their bellies right now. “He reasoned well.” “And that got him a long way,” cries the corpse in reply, rotting on the cobbles till it is hoisted over the rails onto the cart. They really seem to be saying, as they are tossed into the cart: “We made out well with our reasoning, didn't we?”

At this moment how many human beings are there, by the
force of things,
halfway between life and death? I mean beings, all of whose affections, all of whose love, have gone over to the other side. Human beings who have been left alone, while all that they loved, all that they hated has been carried off by the stream. They have nothing but their lonely selves on this side; if they love or hate at all, it's the dead. (For the time being, but that's the time that counts.) If they love or hate at this moment, they have to love or hate people who are dead. They've nothing left to love or hate on this side. They are forced to look in both directions. But mostly to the other side, to try to see again those who have borne off with them their love or their hate. Maybe that's what they call a comet. Perhaps they see them, rolled into balls and hurtling by, leaving behind them a glittering trail of love or hate that tends to suck them in behind it. Or else it's a horse: love's gallop through the gorges. And when I say “love” I mean also and especially hate, for it's a much stronger feeling because of its unquestionable sincerity. Thus there is some for everybody. Anybody can be sucked up in the hissing of a storm or carried off at a gallop. So they cling to tussocks; a little prancing walk to set the collared frock nicely ballooning (it was a Sunday frock, but who can still count on Sunday, even on one more Sunday? And one has to hurry to play the lady, for can anyone tell what tomorrow will bring?). He felt an irresistible desire to vomit, because of this unaccustomed bitterness. In normal times, a child of six is usually at her A B C's. She was still too young to knock at church doors as though at the door of a mill. This desire to vomit was also provoked, one may suppose, by the burning, sirupy air, which smelled of clay, sourness, and sugar. Angelo made a little cushion of the sacks; he lay down on the burning zinc and closed his eyes.

His eyes had been shut for an uncertain length of time when he felt himself being slapped by downy little paws, struck painfully around the temples, and claws raking through his hair as if someone were trying to plow it up.

He was covered with swallows, which were pecking at him.

He sprang up so violently that he nearly rolled off beyond the buttresses on to the steeply sloping roofs. Badly shaken, he slapped himself and ran his hands through his hair.

“They thought I was dead,” he said to himself. “Those cozy little creatures that were watching me with their lovely yellow eyes were trying to eat me.”

He recovered his spirits but suddenly wanted very much to smoke. He rummaged in his pockets and was very put out to find that he had not a single cigar left. “And I haven't smoked at all since I fired that ridiculous pistol shot in the air before the barricade. I really must be in a critical moment. I'd be sure to think of smoking at the moment of a charge, although the chance to test that kind of cool-headedness hasn't yet presented itself. But didn't I smoke a cigar while I was killing the Baron with all the etiquette I've been so blamed for? So, if I want to smoke, it's a good sign. My kingdom for a cigar!”