The Horseman on the Roof (23 page)

She told Angelo how delightful the empty cloister had seemed to her. The two of them always returned to it at nightfall. They would make their rounds again toward two or three in the morning, the bad hours. Before setting out on this they had a good rest. They ate goat's cheese, gooseberry jam, and honey. They drank white wine. They sat on the stone seats of the cloister. They went to sleep there, sometimes all of a sudden without having time to lie down, especially the nun, who had a great faculty for sleep. She would fall asleep in the middle of a smile. She often smiled: first at the angels, then at the lonely passages of the cloister, lastly at Angelo. When she had time she used to say: “Lord, bless me.” But more often the phrase was rudely cut in two as if by the stroke of some scythe, and she would begin at once to snore. After a time she adopted the practice of asking for the Lord's blessing as soon as she sat down on the stone bench, while Angelo was bringing the bread, cheese, and wine. “And now, Lord, bless me,” she would say.

Angelo would smoke one of his little cigars. In the course of these patrols he made with his little bell, just ahead of the nun, he had passed that famous police station into which he had been pushed on the day of his arrival. It was now deserted, its doors stood open. He could see inside, at the back, the desk behind which the faille cravat had stood. Now no one stood behind the desk. “Here's a lamppost I was nearly hanged from,” he said to himself. In another street he saw a tobacco shop. The desire to smoke emboldened him to stop ringing his bell and say to the nun: “Wait for me.” He offered an écu and asked for some of his usual small cigars. The box was held out to him. “Help yourself,” he was told. His écu was refused. He realized it was because of his corpse-carter's shirt. He had missed smoking so badly and wanted it so much that he helped himself lavishly and filled his pockets. “This job has its perquisites,” he said to himself. He was also astonished at the calmness with which the nun waited for him in the street. She always insisted on going at a gallop and feverishly ringing the bell. All she said was: “What did you take?” He showed her the cigars. They continued with their round.

When he saw that the nun could smile, he considered the thing in its miraculous aspect. He was a little like the man who sees the first day succeed the first night. When he perceived that she often smiled for herself alone, then for him, he settled down in the sweetness of that smile, which was extremely childlike.

The nun never nursed the sick. “I take them over,” she said. “They are my clients, I am responsible for them. On the day of the Resurrection they will be clean.”

“And the Lord will say to you: ‘Well done, sergeant!'” replied Angelo.

She retorted: “If God says: ‘Well done!' poor idiot, what have you to say, you creature?”

“But some of them can be saved,” said Angelo; “at least, I think so.”

“And what is it I'm doing?” said she. “Of course they're being saved.”

“I mean,” he said, “brought back to life.”

“They've been dead a long time,” she said; “all this is only a formality.”

“But, Mother,” said Angelo, “I too am stuffed full of sins.”

“Hide yourself, hide yourself,” she said.

She covered her face with her huge hands. At length she looked at him between her fingers and, lowering her hands, said: “Give me a cigar.”

She had rapidly acquired a taste for smoking. She seemed ready-made for the pleasures of smoking. The very first time, she held her cigar not like a clumsy and rather scared woman, but like a man who knows what to expect and needs it. She even seemed to enjoy the first puff. Angelo had gladly given her the little cigar, but he knew they were very strong and watched in case she felt sick. She didn't bat an eyelid; her huge lips opened slowly to emit an already skillful jet of smoke. As the peak of her coif kept the smoke before her face, she screwed up her eyes; with her lion's nose and greedy mouth, she appeared through the blue mist like the embodiment of some very ancient wisdom.

She knew more than she said. She had not a very wide vocabulary. She had only that of the book she had read, following the lines with her finger. Nor did she talk much. She was so tired that she couldn't even bring herself to wash her hands. “Washing the dead is enough,” she said. In fact, her hands, which were not only enormous but very plump, had the washed-out and whitish skin of washerwomen's hands. A sort of faint white dirt remained in halos around her nails and in the hollows of her finger joints. The same fatigue made Angelo fidgety and talkative. He was always scratching at some spot on his breeches. Once he even washed his shirt in the well bucket. The nun never touched the filth that caked her robe. Her ample sleeves, which had trailed through countless messes, were stiff as leather. She would lay her hands flat on her knees. She would then settle like an enormous, squat, rectangular rock, like one of those enormous stones earmarked by the architect to serve as foundation stones. She smoked without touching the cigar, leaving it planted in her mouth for as long as it lasted. She would say peacefully to herself: “Alleluia, glory to Thee, Oh God! Praise to the heavenly host! Holy Trinity! God, Creator of the whole world, help me! Everlasting and true God!” Then immediately afterward there would be a long silence, during which she often fell asleep. Angelo, watching her, would come over and take from her mouth what was left of the cigar.

Once she also said: “Immaculate Virgin!” then, immediately afterward, “Let's go!”

She always went out on a sudden inspiration. He had to obey promptly. She never waited. She became furious and choked in her rage like a peacock. At those moments she used a sort of language made up of unrelated words, any old words strung one after the other, almost shouted; she would end up with wild cries that had in them something of a dirge and of a beast's roaring. Angelo was literally fascinated. He thought only of her.

A few days after he had come down from his rooftops, and when the first fierce impulse had passed, Angelo had asked the nun if she knew a certain Giuseppe. She might have. On her rounds? She went no rounds. Her order went no rounds. It was a convent for rich girls. Her job was in the kitchen. There was no more question of Giuseppe than of Peter or Paul. Who was this Giuseppe? An Italian refugee. More precisely, a Piedmontese. What did he do in the town? Oh! Nothing: he probably passed unnoticed. He was a shoemaker. He lived very simply, alone, speaking to nobody. He had quite enough to say to himself. The last time Angelo had seen him was more than a year ago, and at night. All Angelo could say was that he lived in a room in a very big house where there also lived, as in a barrack, some tanners and their families. A shoemaker, did he say? All the nun could tell him was that the sisterhood had its shoes resoled by a man called Jean, who was also an Italian. No, it wasn't he. And what was he doing, looking for Giuseppe? It was too long a story: among other things, this Giuseppe was in touch with Angelo's mother. What sort of touch? Oh! she came from Piedmont and … no relation to a shoemaker. My mother is young and very beautiful. She's a duchess? Ah! good. She corresponds with this Giuseppe because I am always
par orte,
on the road, in the hills and valleys. She writes to Giuseppe and sends him money for me; he acts as a sort of treasurer for me. Ah! yes. No, she didn't know who Giuseppe was. It was the first time she had heard of such a thing.

Angelo told himself that perhaps in going about the streets he would run into Giuseppe. But now the streets were deserted. Only from time to time he would meet a white-shirted man as he preceded the nun with his little bell.

He now thought only very seldom of Giuseppe. He hardly had any need of what Giuseppe could give him. “It's all right,” he told himself. Along the streets, in the bedrooms, in the charnel houses, he told himself: “It's all right.” He could no longer reflect about very much, or develop his ideas. He helped to wash the dead: he plunged his grass brush into the pails of hot water. For a long time now the sound of the grass rubbing over parchment skins had ceased to astonish him; he didn't even worry about saving lives; he knew that, all in all, one can get to be perfect at washing a corpse. He felt a self-satisfaction he had always sought and never attained. Even the Baron had not given him this spiritual contentment. As he delivered his thrust and felt it strike home, he had had a brief feeling of intense joy, but happiness had been far away.

He was on the right side of the cholera. “What pride!” he exclaimed suddenly one evening.

“Ah! son of a Pope,” said the nun softly, “you've found that out!” She covered her face with her huge hands, then asked for a cigar.

Those nocturnal patrols, at three in the morning, through a town desolated by the epidemic, were as gloomy as could be. Most of the street lamps were out; only a few were still kept going. Angelo carried a lantern. He rang his bell only at jerky intervals, between which there stretched a silence rendered still more silent by the twittering of the nightingales and the nun's heavy tread as she dragged her huge shoes over the cobbles. Night encouraged selfishness. People brought their dead down into the street and threw them on to the pavement. They were in a hurry to get rid of them. They even went so far as to leave them on other people's doorsteps. They parted from them in every possible way. For them the main thing was to drive them away as quickly and as completely as possible from their own homes, to which they quickly returned and hid. Sometimes, beyond the halo of the lantern, in the half-darkness, Angelo saw pale shapes fleeing, agile as the beasts that leap into the thickets of the woods. Doors shut slowly, creaking. Bolts were rammed home. Nobody called. The bell, which Angelo swung every now and then, rang in a pure void. Nobody wanted help. Night permitted everyone to look out for himself. They all did so in the same way. Nobody found a better one.

“Did they love one another?” said Angelo.

“Lord, no,” said the nun.

“In a town like this, though, there are surely people who loved one another?”

“No, no,” said the nun.

Often indeed, when Angelo clanged his bell, the bands of light framing certain shutters went out. The groaning and wailing ceased abruptly. He imagined hands clapped suddenly over mouths.

They washed abandoned corpses. They could not wash all that they found in the night: they lay in every corner. Some were sitting up: they had been deliberately arranged to look like persons resting. The others, thrown down anyhow, would be hidden under filth, even under dung. Some were curled up in the recesses of doorways, others stretched flat on their bellies in the middle of the street, or on their backs with their arms forming a cross. It was useless to knock on the doors outside which they found them. Nobody knew them. Neighborhoods were surreptitiously exchanging their corpses. Making their rounds, Angelo and the nun could hear the faint sounds of this furtive traffic. It might be a body borne by two men, one at the head, one grasping the legs like the handles of a wheelbarrow; a wife dragging her husband over the pavements; a man carrying his wife like a sack of wheat on his shoulder. They all crept through the dark. Children were sent to smash the street lamps with stones.

Angelo would swing his bell. “Come on,” he would mutter, “snap it up, snap it up, get the hell out of here, get the job done!” He would walk slowly, without haste, before the nun, who followed heavily as if on two church pillars. He had the right to be scornful.

They washed only the foulest. They carried them one by one to the side of a fountain. They undressed them. They scrubbed them with plenty of water. They laid them out neatly to be picked up when day came.

It was utterly useless. Massaging the dying was also utterly useless. The poor little Frenchman had saved no one. There was no remedy. At the beginning of the epidemic he had seen sick people die like flies though surrounded by every care; others who had hidden themselves to smother their colic sometimes emerged fresh as daisies. The choice was being made elsewhere.

“If I'm going to die,” said Angelo to himself, “I shall have time enough to be frightened when my moment comes. Just now, fear is out of place.”

When he was in some deserted square, in the dead of night, in this town so completely terrorized that the most ignoble cowardice appeared quite natural, alone with the nun, when four or five naked corpses were spread out within the circle of their lantern and they were washing these corpses, as he fetched water from the fountain, he would say to himself: “I can't be accused of affectation. No one sees me, and what I'm doing is quite useless. They'd rot just the same, foul or clean. I can't be accused of running after a medal. But what I'm doing classifies me. I know I'm worth more than all these people who had social rank, who were addressed as ‘sir' and now throw their loved ones on the dung-heap. The main thing isn't that others should know and even acknowledge that I'm worth more: the main thing is that I should know it. But I'm more exacting than they. I demand from myself unquestionable proof. And here at least is one.”

He had a taste for superiority and a terror of affectation. He was happy.

It is true that the sound of the hemp swab as it rubbed over these skins, stiff and resonant from the cholera, stretched over bodies with the flesh calcined inside, was rather hard for anyone with imagination to bear. It must also be admitted that the gasping flame of the lantern never ceased to drape the shadows. A romantic soul might find a certain exaltation in a struggle with these things, simple though they were.

There was very little ugliness in his pride. At any rate, barely what was necessary to make it human. “I left that loutish captain to look after the body of the poor little Frenchman,” he thought. “He certainly had it thrown into quicklime like a dog. The soldiers must have dragged it by the legs without ceremony. I see it as if I were there. And yet I had more than love for that man: I had admiration. It's true I was quite ready, body and soul, to bury him with my own hands, decently. And even to embrace him. No, that would have cost me nothing; on the contrary, I'd have done it gladly. I was chased away by gunfire.”