The Horseman on the Roof (19 page)

He continued to make fun of himself, but the attack of the swallows, so instinctively cruel, continued to prey on his mind.

He spent a very bad night. There were only faint puffs of wind, a torrid and stinking wind. He dreamed that he was sleeping beside one of his sergeants, who kept breathing into his face from a foul stomachful of leeks. He kept trying to push him away, but the other naturally grew to such an extent that his breath bent enormous Piedmontese chestnut trees.

He had another dream, in which there appeared a cock: it was clearly no ordinary cock. It had chalk-white plumage; although, looking at it closely, one could see glints of sulphur on its comb and crop. In any case, it was gigantic, and left only a tiny thumbnail strip of sky visible behind it. This creature rolled about in the atmosphere, spreading a foul stench. It spread its rump feathers, and its intention was plainly to brood on Angelo's face. Fortunately, the huge seed dish in the zinc lining of which Angelo lay, overturned, and the enormous rump with its white feathers spread in the sun was unable to sit down right on his face. Unfortunately, Angelo was stifled all the same, with his nostrils full of down. Fortunately, by pressing his face sideways close to the ground, he could still breathe, level with the soil, a little air, which, unfortunately, smelled of dung. Then Angelo began scratching the ground to dig himself a little hollow under his nose. But his fingers sank into excrement moulded into the shape of a little girl's face.

He woke up.

An appalling smell of cooking was drifting by in the night, under pink, flickering lights. Angelo went all around the rotunda. Three pyres had been lit in the hills to the north, and waves of greasy smoke were being flung back on to the town by the twitching of the wind.

Angelo rubbed his eyes with his fists for a long time. He returned to his place and sat down. He must have fought violently in his sleep; the basket was upset, and he couldn't find his boots. He rummaged once more for a cigar. The smell of the smoke filled his mouth with a nauseating clamminess.

He had many other dreams, though kept half awake by a constant desire to vomit. He saw, in particular, a comet; it was breathing out poison in glittering jets, like a pin wheel. He could hear the velvet drumming of the deadly rain it threw off; it streamed across the roofs, through the garret windows, flooding the lofts, flowing down the stairs, slipping under doors, invading the rooms where people, seated on chairs as adhesive as sticks of glue, began to scream and then to rot.

The first gleams of daylight brought him great relief. There, once more, was the white and already heavy dawn, but for all its hopeless color it put things back in place, in a familiar order.

Long before the sun rose, a little bell began to ring in the hills. In that direction, on a pine-crowned eminence, there was a hermitage that looked like a little bone. The light, still relatively clear, permitted a view of a track winding up to it through a forest of gray almond trees.

The small church window began to transmit, by the shaking of its panes in their round lead frames, the agitation going on in the depths of the church. The tall doors, pounded at in vain the day before, opened. Angelo saw some children in white, bearing banners, line up in the square. The doors of the houses began to pour out women in black like ants. Others came filing down the streets that he could see. In a short while, there must have been, all told, about fifty, including three waiting priests in golden carapaces. The procession moved off in silence. The bell tolled slowly for a long time. At length the white banners appeared under the gray almond trees, then the carapaces, still golden despite the distance, then the black ants. But while all these tiny insects were slowly climbing the knoll, the sun leaped up. It seized the sky and turned the world into a crumbling avalanche of plaster, chalk, and flour, which it began to knead with its long colorless rays. Everything disappeared in this dazzling storm of whiteness. There remained only the bell, which continued to toll in great hiccups; then it fell silent.

This day was marked by a terrible recrudescence of dying.

Toward the end of the morning, in that part of the town which Angelo overlooked, there were murmurs, then piercing cries, which first broke out in separate places, and then burst forth on all sides. The shutters of one of the houses in the square flew open with a clatter, and there appeared the head and gesticulating arms of a man. This man uttered no cry; he seemed merely to be trying to cram both fists one after the other into his mouth as if he had a fishbone in his throat. All the while he kept jigging from side to side of his open window like a puppet in a Punch and Judy show. Finally, he toppled back and disappeared. His window remained open. The innumerable swallows, which had resumed their twittering merry-go-round, began to approach. The cries were at first those of women, then there were some from men. These last were extremely tragic. It was as if they were blown on buffalo horns. Contrary to what one might have thought, it wasn't the dying who cried out so on every side, but the living. Several of these panic-stricken creatures crossed the square. They appeared to be seeking help, for some ran toward one another and even embraced, then pushed one another away and began to run again. One man fell and died quite quickly. The clatter of tumbrels became audible on all sides. It was ceaseless, and the clock struck noon, then one, two, three o'clock; it continued without stopping, rolling its drum over the cobbles of all the streets. A reddish smoke coming from the hills to the north soiled the sky.

A strange event took place under Angelo's very eyes. Some of the tumbrels passed through the square. Emerging from a street alongside the church they were just reaching the corner under Angelo's perch and so clearly in view that their whole load of corpses was visible. It was there that one of the tumbrels stopped; the man in white leading the horse had suddenly crumpled up. This man was writhing about on the ground, getting entangled in the sort of white blouse he wore, and his two companions were watching him from a distance, when one of these two companions himself crumpled up, uttering a single, but very piercing cry. The third was preparing to run away and was already tucking up his blouse, when he seemed to stumble over an obstacle that mowed his legs from under him, and spread flat, face to the ground, beside the other two. The horse flicked away the flies with its tail.

This planned attack of death, the lightning victory, the proximity of the field of battle right below his eyes, impressed Angelo deeply. He could not take his eyes off the three men in white. He still hoped that they would rise again, after a moment's rest, and go about their task. But they remained quietly stretched out, and apart from one who twitched his legs convulsively as if he were kicking, they did not stir.

The traffic of the other tumbrels continued in the streets and alleys round about. The cries of women, strident or moaning, the men's piercing calls for help, kept breaking out from one direction or another. They received no answer but the rolling of the tumbrels on the cobbles.

Finally, one of these, which had been jolting along the neighboring streets, arrived in the square. The men in white came up to their prone comrades and turned them over with their feet. They loaded them into the tumbrel and, taking the horse by the bridle, led it away.

A dense swarm of flies was buzzing over the place where the load of corpses had been standing full in the sun. Some juices had dripped from it that they didn't wish to lose.

“I mustn't stay here,” Angelo told himself. “It's a hotbed of the plague. The exhalations are rising. This square is a crossroads. And anyhow wasn't it already strewn with dead? I must get out. There must be, in this town, some quarters less hard hit, or else it's a matter of three or four days and there'll be no one left. Except me up here. And is even that likely?”

He started to wander over the roofs. He no longer paid the least attention to the gulfs that the inner courtyards suddenly opened up before him. He was busy with a different giddiness. He even went off calmly to recover his boots from the rather steep slope of a roof where he had rolled them in the night during his struggles in his dreams.

It didn't take long to go round the roofs over which he could walk. To the west, the square prevented him from going any farther. To the east, a fairly wide street barred his way; to the south, another street, not only wide but bordered with very steep roofs; to the north, a narrow street. He wondered if he wouldn't do better to go down firmly to the streets by some inside staircase. “And what then?” he asked himself. “Even admitting that the lunatics who chased me have now other fish to fry, which isn't certain, I shall be completely in the soup.” He had the impression that, below him, the town was one great putrescence. “The thing is simply to get out of this quarter somehow.”

He was sauntering over the roofs exactly as though on terra firma. He would have been greatly astonished had he been told he had exactly the same heedless, indifferent gait as the little girl in the collared frock. The belfry, the rotunda, the little walls, the undulation of the roofs around him were no more than the trees, groves, hedges, and hillocks of a new country; the gloomy openings of the inner courtyards were mere puddles to be skirted; the streets, streams at whose brink one had to stop.

It was not a farcical dream, it was a most bitter mystery with no way of escape. There was no getting around that, nothing to do but make the best of it and put off cunning for a later time when this new world should have started up a fresh set of instincts. When the boundaries between the real and the unreal disappear and one can pass freely from the one to the other, one's first feeling, unexpectedly, is that the prison has contracted.

He was gazing at a massed network of roofs and walls when he saw, framed in a garret window, a human face with the broad black smear of a wide-open mouth. Before grasping its reality, he heard a piercing cry. He quickly threw himself behind a big chimney.

He was two or three yards from the window and well concealed. He heard several anguished voices saying: “She's seen the plague, she's seen the plague!” The same voice that had cried out continued to moan: “He's there, he's coming, he's on us.” Feet stamped across a floor, then a man's voice asked rather more firmly: “Where? Where is he? Where did you see him?”

Through a chink between two bricks, Angelo could see the window. There emerged from it an outstretched arm and a finger pointing up into the sky. “Up there! Lord! A man with a great beard.” Then the cries began again, and Angelo heard the sound of galloping on stairs.

He waited a long while before emerging from behind his chimney. He slipped off behind some high roof ridges and gained the shelter of his flying buttresses.

Evening fell. He was more determined than ever to reach another block of roofs.

The alley to the north was really very narrow: three yards wide at the most; and at one place where the eaves jutted the gap seemed even narrower. With a plank, or better with a ladder slid across it, it would be easy to pass over. He remembered the ladder joining the gallery to the top floor in the house where he had taken the food. He took advantage of the remaining daylight to go and see if he could remove it without making any noise. It was not fixed, and when he tried to pull it toward him to see if it were not too heavy, it was so far from being so that he was able to drag it up to the floor of the gallery without a sound. Remained the question of whether it was long enough. It seemed to be. He carried it to the rotunda.

He slept very well, dreamlessly, after eating some tomato catchup and a little lard. He awoke at the precise moment when the night, still very dark, was slowly tearing itself apart in the east. He felt hale and hearty. He assembled his equipment.

Sliding the ladder across the void proved easier than he had expected, on account of the narrowness of the place he had picked and the lightness of the ladder. He realized, too, that this very first break of dawn was the ideal moment for crossing. The alley below him was still so dark that he couldn't see its abyss. The only difficulty was to cross it with the esparto basket, which still contained two bottles of catchup, the pot of lard, two pots of jam, the bottle of yellow liquid whose label he had been unable to read, the sausages, and two bottles of wine. As for the boots, he had again strung them round his neck, and that worked well; but the rest was more tricky, and he was determined to have both hands free. Finally, there was no way and time was passing. “I'll leave the basket on this side,” he told himself. “If I can't find anything to eat on the other side, which seems to me very unlikely, the worst that can happen is having to return to this side to eat. But I don't believe it. The most important thing is not to fall.”

He got down on all fours and went across without flinching. He drew the ladder after him and hid it behind the roof ridge. He lay down beside it and waited for sunrise. He noticed with astonishment that he was very glad of the heat of the tiles warming his back. He had gone through all the motions dictated by his resolution, but was ice-cold from head to foot.

“What's happened to the cat?” he wondered. He realized he hadn't seen it since yesterday morning. He thought as well that he might have put a sausage in his pocket before crossing. The truth was, food wasn't the main thing. On the other hand, he missed the cat badly until the sun was up.

In the moment of calm that he spent lying there on the warm tiles, he realized that since yesterday the noise of the tumbrels had been continuous. He had been too preoccupied by his plan to hear them. Now he heard their drumming anew.

His rooftop domain turned out to be much larger than the previous one. The streets bounding it were far removed from one another. It was a mass of houses so compact that it had had to be ventilated by various courtyards and even by inner gardens; some of these gardens even had trees. These courts and gardens were shut in on all sides: he could therefore go round them. They all belonged to well-to-do houses. Angelo kept a close lookout for signs of life inside these houses through the big windows giving on the gardens, but despite the clear glass panes through which he could see chairs and carpets, nothing was stirring behind them. At one moment he was close enough to a kitchen window to get a distinct view of the mantelpiece, cleared of all its pots. Those people were not dead; they had gone.