The Horseman on the Roof (24 page)

But he added: “Well, you should have stood up to the guns.” He went so far as to say: “You should have been humble enough for them not to want to fire guns at you. You preferred to be arrogant with the captain. Wouldn't the sign of a really superior spirit have been not to reply to his insults? Not to give in? You don't give in to other people. But is that enough? It's to yourself that you mustn't give in. You gave in to the immediate pleasure of giving an insolent man an insolent retort. That's not strength. That's a weakness, because look at you now, filled with remorse at having failed to perform a duty that was dear to you or, to be frank, a deed which would give you self-esteem. In reality the poor little Frenchman doesn't give a damn for you and your clean hands. Quicklime for quicklime, the soldier's hand did the job perfectly. What would have interested the Frenchman would have been to cure at least one. How conscientiously he looked for the last ones! But am I using the right word? For him, now dead, and for me, still alive, is it really a matter of conscience? Was conscience the motive when he rode his nag up that valley of Jehoshaphat? He was certainly the very image of conscience, alive all alone amid the corpses and seeking to save. But was he there to do his duty, or to satisfy himself? Did he have to force himself or did he enjoy it? Wasn't his way of seeking out those whom he called
the last ones
even behind the beds, the way of hunting-dogs? And if he had managed to save one, would his satisfaction have come simply from seeing life restored, or from feeling himself capable of restoring life? Wasn't he quite simply trying to earn a medal from himself on grounds of nobility? We're all bastards in the same boat. Isn't that why I admired him—I mean, envied him? Wasn't I looking for a medal myself when I stayed with him? First-class men always want to put their backsides on two chairs at the same time. Could there be such a thing as devotion without a desire to please oneself? An irresistible desire? That's what makes a saint. A cowardly hero is an angel. But what merit does a brave hero have? He acted to please himself. He satisfies himself. It's human beings, male and female, of whom the priests (and they know) say: they find satisfaction in themselves. Is there ever a disinterested devotion? And even,” he added, “if it exists, isn't the total absence of self-interest then the sign of the purest pride?

“Let's be thoroughly frank,” he told himself. “This fight for liberty, and even for the liberty of the people, which I have undertaken, for whose sake I've killed (with my usual attitudinizing, it's true), for whose sake I've sacrificed an elevated position (bought with good money by my mother, it's true), did I undertake it really because I think it is just? Yes and no. Yes, because it is very difficult to be frank with oneself. No, because one must make an effort to be frank and it is useless to lie to oneself (useless but convenient and usual). Good. Let's grant that I believe my cause is just. All the daily pleasure of the fight, all the advantages of pride and position that this fight brings me, let's forget them, let's push all that aside. This fight is just and it's for its justice that I took it on. Its justice—its justice pure and simple, or else the esteem I feel for myself at the moment of taking up the fight for justice? There's no denying that a just cause, if I devote myself to it, serves my pride. But I serve others. In addition only. So you see, the word ‘people' can be removed from the discussion without loss. I could even put anything I liked in place of the word ‘liberty,' on the one condition that I replace the word ‘liberty' by an equivalent. I mean, by a word that has the same general value, equally noble and
equally vague.
What about ‘the fight,' then? Yes, that word can stay. The fight. That is to say, a trial of strength. In which I hope to be the stronger. At bottom, it all comes back to: ‘Long live me!'”

He would wash the dead and say to himself: “Haven't we, the nun and I, the merit of extreme honesty in performing this completely useless act, which none the less demands so much courage? Useless, let's get it clear, useless to everyone but very useful to our pride. Here we are, alone in the night with this disgusting work, which does, however, give us a high opinion of ourselves. We're deceiving nobody. We need to do something that will class us. We couldn't do anything more clear-cut. It's impossible to work for one's self-esteem with less affectation.”

They were really very lonely beside their fountain. The town stirred only as a dying man stirs. It was struggling in the peculiar selfishness of its death agony. Under the walls there were dull murmurs as of muscles relaxing, lungs emptying, bellies opening, jaws chattering. One could no longer ask anything of this social body. It was dying. It had enough to do, enough to think about, just dying.

The lantern only lit a small space, just the four or five spread-out and stripped bodies around which Angelo and the nun were busy for their own sakes. Beyond them, the muffled murmurs, the sound—like the rubbing of hands—of the elms and sycamores in which the wind and the birds were stirring.

The nun's chief care was to prepare the bodies for the Resurrection. She wanted them clean and decent for that occasion. “When they stand up with their thighs plastered with shit,” she said, “what will the Lord think of me? He'll say to me: ‘You were there and you knew; why didn't you clean them?' I'm a housekeeper; I'm doing my job.”

She was very taken aback one night when, after throwing some buckets of water over a corpse, it opened its eyes, then sat up and asked why it was being treated in this way.

It was a man still in the prime of life. He had fainted in a fit of cholera and been taken for dead. His relatives had put him out in the street. The cold water had brought him round. He asked why he was naked, why he was there. He would have died of fright before the huge nun, who didn't know what to do, if Angelo hadn't immediately started to talk to him with great affection, and even to wipe him and then wrap him in a sheet.

“Where is your house?” Angelo asked him.

“I don't know,” he said. “What is this place? And you? Who are you?”

“I'm here to help you. You're in the Place des Observantins. Do you live near here?”

“No, indeed. I wonder how I got here. Who brought me here? I live in the rue d'Aubette.”

“We must take him home,” said Angelo.

“He's tricked us,” said the nun.

“It's not his fault, don't talk so loud. They thought he was dead and got rid of him. But he's alive and, I think, even saved.”

“He's a swine,” she said. “He's alive and I washed his backside.”

“No, no,” said Angelo, “he's alive and it's wonderful. You take one arm and I'll take the other. I'm sure he can walk. Let's take him home.”

He lived at the far end of the rue d'Aubette, and it was quite a task to get him there. He was beginning to realize that he had been taken for dead, that he had been mixed up with the dead. He was trembling like a leaf and his teeth chattered in spite of the stifling heat. He kept tripping over his shroud at every step. All the time he kept leaping like a goat, and Angelo and the nun had to pinion him with both arms. All his nerves in revolt were trying to rid themselves of fear. He kept throwing back his head and neighing like a horse.

“So you pulled a fine trick on me,” the nun kept saying, and she kept shaking him as roughly as a policeman.

At last he sighted his house and tried to run for it; but Angelo held him back.

“Wait,” he said. “Stay here. I'll go in and let them know. You can't turn up suddenly like this; you know how bad shocks can be. Who is in there? Your wife?”

“My wife is dead. It's my daughter.”

Angelo went up and knocked at the door, under which light could be seen. There was no answer. He opened it and went in. It was a kitchen. In spite of the stifling heat, a fire was lit in the stove. A woman of about thirty, wrapped in shawls, was huddling close to the fire. She was shuddering all over; only her enormous eyes were motionless.

“Your father,” said Angelo.

“No,” she said.

“You took him down into the street?”

“No,” she said.

“We found him.”

“No,” she said.

“He's down below. We've brought him back. He is alive.”

“No,” she said.

“What a fuss about nothing,” said the nun from the doorway. “It's as simple as day. Just you watch!”

She had dropped the man's arm. He followed her in, let fall his shroud, and sat down quite naked on a chair. The daughter huddled into her shawls, pulled them up over her face, just leaving her eyes visible. The nun removed, one by one, the pins holding her coif. She held them between her lips while she took it off. Her head was round and shaved. Then she shut the door and strode over to the coffee-grinder, rolling up her sleeves.

On leaving the house they returned to their labors. There were still three other corpses by the fountain. These were impeccable. They washed them and prepared them very nicely.

One morning Angelo and the nun were as usual in an arcade of the cloister, lying on the flagstones, more dazed with fatigue than asleep, when a sharp little step, tapped out clearly with the heels, set the vaults ringing. It was another nun, this one thin and young. She was dressed cleanly and very elegantly. Her coif was brilliantly starched, and her huge pectoral cross was of gold. All that could be seen of her face was a sharp nose and a pointed chin.

Immediately the huge nun became subdued. She clasped her hands and, with lowered head, listened to a long, low-voiced homily. Then she followed the thin nun, who had turned quickly on her little heels and was making for the door.

Angelo had followed the performance with eyes half closed in the stupor of his fatigue. Immediately after, he fell asleep. When the burning of the white sun on his face woke him up, it was late. He half thought he had been dreaming, but the fat nun was not there. He looked for her. He gave up and went out.

He did not have his bell, and he no longer knew what to do. His head and heart were perfectly empty. Finally, after some time, he was struck by the silence of the streets. All the shops were shut, all the houses barricaded. Certain doors, certain shutters were even nailed fast with crossed planks. He passed through a good part of the town without meeting even a cat or hearing any sound but that of a slight breeze which caused echoes in the passages.

In a little street near the center, however, Angelo did find a draper's shop open. Through the window he even saw a well-dressed man sitting on a bench, measuring cloth. He went in. The shop smelled of good-quality velvet and had other comforting odors.

“What do you want?” said the man.

He was tiny. He was playing with the trinkets on his watch chain.

“What has happened?” asked Angelo.

The little man was amazed at the question, but kept his poise and said: “Well, well, a visitor from the moon!”

At the same time he studied Angelo from head to foot.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Angelo murmured some sort of story. Of course he knew there was cholera, devil take it!

“If I want him to show me some consideration,” he told himself, “and, damn it, that's just what I do want, I simply must not tell this man, trim as a gamecock, that I've been washing dead bodies.”

He noticed also that the little man, otherwise dry in manner and even leaning slightly backward in his anxiety not to lose anything of his stature, twitched every time he heard the word “cholera.”

“Why do you keep talking of cholera?” the little man said at last. “It's just a simple contagion. Why not call it what it is, instead of looking for nonexistent trouble? This country would be healthy, only we are all more or less obliged to reckon with the land. A cartload of manure costs eight sous. You can't get away from it. No one's willing to pay those eight sous. During the night people dam up the streams, pile straw there, hold back filth of every kind, and so get manure cheap. There are even some who pay two sous for the right to set open crates over the outlets from the privies.

“This is a well-aired town. It's watered by eighty fountains. It's exposed to the northwest wind. But the price of manure's too high, and without manure, nothing doing! Talk about contagion, and I'm with you,” continued the little man, squinting at Angelo's still-magnificent boots. “But cholera, that requires thought. And I'd even,” he added, rising on his toes, then dropping back gently on to his heels, “I'd even say: beware! The point is, there'll always be need of manure. Note the fact. And the contagion will pass. Cholera, that's a big word, and words cause fear. Once let fear in, and you won't be able to move a step.”

Angelo stammered something about the dead.

“Seventeen hundred,” said the man, “out of a population of seven thousand, but you yourself look like a horseman in difficulties. Can I be of any help?”

Angelo was literally enchanted by the little man. “He waves his arms, he squeaks his boots, but he
never gets outside his skin,
” he said to himself. “He's still got a clean collar, a well-brushed waistcoat, and in his shop he's put everything tidy, even the shadows on his shelves. He's right: lying is a virtue. The man's an obstinate microbe, too. His hypocrisy is much more useful than my extravagance. It takes many more like him than like me to make a world in which, as he says, there'll always be need of manure. This is the very proof of his simplicity, of his all-of-a-piece solidity, which nothing can demolish, neither cholera nor war, perhaps not even our revolution. He may die but he won't despair. Still less will he despair
in advance.
And that, on the whole, is the way of a man of quality. To know everything or to know nothing amounts to the same thing.”

Meanwhile many other things were being explained to him; for example, that drastic measures had at last been taken.