The Horseman on the Roof (31 page)

“I shall have to teach him a lesson,” thought Angelo. “And with my fists, what's more, since that's where he thinks he's strongest. He's very proud of those velvety eyes of his. I'll give them a color he can't be proud of.”

He was irritated by Giuseppe's common-sense tone, which seemed to form a part of a lecture on how to live.

“An exile isn't given the middle of the pavement anywhere,” continued Giuseppe. “What's more, I'm a shoemaker. That's not one of your trumpery professions. And don't forget I've been here barely six months. With my talent for choosing the right moment to say the things that impress cowards, I've had six or seven swells, who had the
préfet
in their pockets, strung up on lampposts. With the dueling system you'd hardly have managed to kill one of them! And even that's not certain! It would have brought the police to the spot. And that would have been that, and my colonel would have been taken with his legs in irons to the Alps. We're in a country where the bourgeois use their elbows if you tread on their toes. Now there's six or seven less of them. They've been taken care of without danger because I understood that for the moment people had other fish to fry without sticking their noses into the hysterical goings-on of twenty-odd blackguards. And, a great advantage, the swells didn't die with the honors of war. They can't be made much of. Even their families are seeing to it that nothing more should be said of them. As for the poison, does anyone know whether it isn't true after all?”

Angelo uncrossed his legs.

“The stitches I put into your boots haven't held,” said Giuseppe, unclasping his hands from behind his neck and even sitting up. “Take them off and give them to me. I had glazed the end to be able to polish it, and the hot wax must have eaten into the thread. I don't like seeing you with unstitched boots. Besides, I made them and I'm proud of them. You've a nice leg, but nobody else could have fitted you so closely and so well.”

He talked of the boots with passion. He gave details about the leather, the thread, the wax, the polish. Inexhaustibly. He had stood up. He even rolled his eyes and smiled, the better to describe a polishing-cream.

Angelo's costume was indeed very important to Giuseppe. He seemed, on this subject, to have some idea at the back of his head.

“I want you to look nice,” he told him, from the very first days. “You know that's my hobbyhorse, and I shall never regret anything so much as that splendid hussar's uniform you wore so well, especially the one the Duchess ordered for you in Milan. Your face is never so attractive as when it's under the helmet and supported by the gorget. Spurs suit you, too. As soon as you've gold on you, you freeze the blood. And that's what's wanted. One feels you're a lion.”

And he made several affectionate remarks.

“You ought to be thrashed,” he added, “for having wrapped that mountain boy in your fine riding-coat. Your mother and I spent more than a week thinking about that cloth. And the number of times my mother dug her nails into my arm while we were choosing it at that famous Gonzageschi's, who's such an expert on colors. It was a fat lot of good taking so much trouble to find you a cloth as blue-black as the night and of such fine quality that it draped like a curtain in the right places. D'you suppose your little cholera patient wouldn't have died just as well in his own togs? But Monsieur must always exceed orders. Above all, when it serves no purpose. You've reached me in a queer condition! And that beard, which you haven't shaved since I don't know when, makes you look ten years older. Worst of all, it gives you such a look that no one would dream of trusting you.”

He gave one of the stern but obliging guards in blouses a message, and a few days later he took Angelo to the other side of the almond-tree hill, onto a slope that looked down on a golden village like a boat lifted by a wave of rocks.

Here there had been a landslide long ago, and the soil, moistened by various small, deep springs that the collapse of the hill had brought to the surface, stretched out in fields that the burning white sun had failed to turn yellow. There were also some very thick, very tall groves of birches.

It was among these groves, as Angelo observed, that the guards had a sort of barrack or general encampment. One constantly came upon sentinels, and even guards, without weapons, their belts undone. They were peacefully smoking pipes. They all seemed to have great respect for Giuseppe: they saluted him, and one young workman guarding a sort of tent even presented arms to him, very clumsily but completely serious about it.

Giuseppe led Angelo into a copse of green oak trees where numerous bales were stacked under tarpaulins.

“Many tradesmen,” said he, “have died without heirs; or else the heirs too have gone west. There are a good many families the cholera has scraped to the bone. All these goods would be lost. We've collected them together. And look what good sorts the people are. They've most conscientiously stood guard over the lot, but they haven't touched a thing. You don't find prodigals among
them.
”

Helped by a workman with his belt properly buckled and his gun slung across his back like a dragoon's bandolier, they found several pieces of cloth, in particular a roll of drugget and a roll of velvet.

“I've an idea,” said Giuseppe. “I'm sure it's a good one and you'd never have thought of it. I can lay my hand on just the man we need. He's worked in Paris and can cut you a coat with almond tails better than Gonzageschi, whose word, after all, is only law in Turin. Have you any real idea what's in store for you? We don't know what the cholera's going to do. Perhaps, a month from now, we shall all be lying flat among the mallows. But here we mustn't envisage the worst. If only you're still alive and me too, or even if you're alive all by yourself, you'll soon have to edge your way into the Alps and get to where—you know what has to be done. Especially if your mother has won the battle of La Brenta. Which is almost certain, as she said in her letter. I told you that this workman I know would cut you a coat better than Gonzageschi, and it's true. He could also make you a riding-coat of the proper marble cut, better than anyone. But there are only bourgeois stuffs here, and for a tail coat or riding-coat we must have the very best. This is my idea.”

Giuseppe's eyes, which were very fine and velvety with long black lashes, were alight with a fire of passion.

“The peasants round here sometimes have very pretty velvet jackets,” he continued. “And they're ornamented with big brass buttons showing hunting-scenes, stags' heads, boars' heads, and even little love-scenes. If they're carefully polished with chamois leather, those buttons glitter like gold. That's the jacket you need. I'd better tell you right away that the people who wear these jackets are considered to have feathered their nests, and feathers are their chief attraction. Peasants don't have intelligent faces, except in our country. Here their faces are as flat as on coins. You, no matter what you wear, will have your lion look. What they with their slyness have devised to cover wool stockings will now form the clothing of valor: imagine the effect. Republicans have an unfortunate love for princes. Don't think they kill them for any better reason. They need them and they look for them everywhere. If they find one who's of their own skin, they're happy at last to die for him.”

“Don't forget that I fidget,” Angelo replied, “and that I will never sit for my portrait. Besides,
I
believe in principles.”

“A mere hint and you understand me,” said Giuseppe. “That's how I like you. And how well you said your little piece about principles! Keep up that tone. It's inimitable. You've just made me shiver with pleasure. It's not, anyhow, among people with flat-money faces that you should stand for valor, but among people whose smallest bootblack has the features of Cæsar himself. If you can talk to them of principles in the tone you used just now, anything is in the bag. Only it must be that exact tone and that conviction you put into it. Naïveté sometimes takes the place of genius in our line of country, but will you remain naïve? That's why you must have drugget breeches as well, rather close-fiting, because you're well-made. And a cloak; for who knows if you won't be obliged to cross the Alps in winter?”

This riding-cloak—it was a marvel, but even the sight of it was not to be borne in that heat—was carefully folded and scented with thyme and lavender by Lavinia. She even wrapped it in one of her petticoats and placed it at the bottom of a chest in the north corner of the hut, which the sun never reached. The velvet jacket and breeches were also put in the chest.

In spite of the advanced season, one could scarcely bear even linen next to the skin. Lavinia was naked under her
caraco
and skirt. She was a very beautiful girl already famous in Turin for her loveliness. At every
corso
someone would come and ask the Duchess for the loan of her to personify Diana, or Wisdom, or even the Archangel Michael. She had grown into the way of these allegories and never forgot them. Not even when crouching to blow on the fire under the soup.

The other women who lived on the hill kept their cotton stockings on for a long time, but the heat became so unbearable that they finally overlooked a great many conventions. They never reached the stage of a mere
caraco
and skirt, however. Some of them even persisted in retaining their whalebone collars. They were workmen's wives. They were all dressed like decent, humble, bourgeois women. Their hair was drawn back in an atrocious fashion and firmly knotted in tight buns. Sometimes they were to be found behind bushes, combing their long hair, then twisting it, braiding it, filling their mouths with pins, and then sticking the pins one by one into their buns. After this, they would get up, dust themselves, clean their combs, fold them in paper, stuff them into their bosoms; they would pat their hips, smooth their basquines, and jerk their rumps two or three times like hen-pheasants to set their bustles in place before getting back to their work, which was never simple and easy but here consisted in going a long way to fetch water, with a bucket in each hand, or chopping wood, or even massaging their husband or brother, son or daughter, down with an attack. They too had attacks themselves in this paraphernalia and sometimes died before anyone could cut the laces of their stays, which they defended still with both hands at the height of the pain.

Often Lavinia very softly sang tiny, lively songs, which she mimed with little movements of the head, smiles, and a fluttering of the eyelids. The song barely passed her teeth, but the miming and the broad wrinkle shaped like a tripod that then marked the top of her nose and gave her by its movements a braggadocio or saucy air, her great eyes that she would widen afterward in a most pathetic manner, her pouts, and in fact all these antics, some of which were very artful and even, now and then, highly depraved, created a sort of miniature Italy.

“Let's save this people,” Angelo would think, watching her and drawing close to listen. “It has all the virtues. This girl is the child of woodcutters and their wives born in woods belonging to my family, and she was brought to my mother when she was quite small, to serve as a plaything. She was lady's maid for more than ten years, for by the time she was eight my mother was making her burrow under her heavy riding-skirts to smooth out her petticoat; and she would willingly die for me. More even than for Giuseppe, although he carried her off with him when he left, taught her love, and, I hope, has married her. What loyalty! How beautiful she is, and how pure her heart!” (He didn't see certain positions of her lips, extremely voluptuous and even sometimes rather vulgar.) “She deserves the Republic. Nothing's too good for her. This is the task of my life. This shall be my happiness. And how it carries me away!”

At these moments, in this miniature Italy, Giuseppe enjoyed himself greatly. He was wholly absorbed in putting his mouth close to Lavinia's and accompanying her song in thirds or an octave lower (just a murmur, of course, for not far away people were dying or, at the very least, in trouble; this was a personal matter). At these times his features were unstrained and peaceful, composing a pattern different from that of his normal face. Angelo even found in it a great nobility, despite its striking resemblance to Teresa.

The weather changed. The white sky lowered until it touched the tops of the trees. It even engulfed the tops of the cypresses, which seemed to be cut off by scissors. During the summer this white sky had, in spite of everything, kept its veils pretty high in the air. One could still see a few gray winds circling beneath the plaster dome. Now it descended and established a sort of flat ceiling twelve or fifteen feet above the ground. The birds disappeared for most of the time, even the crows, which from now on led a mysterious life above the ceiling, sometimes seeping down from it like huge black raindrops.

Immediately the heat rose, as in an oven when its door has been shut. There was no longer the march of the sun, nor the revolving of the shadows. Day was simply a throbbing whose intensity rose steadily up to the blinding noon, then fell little by little to a static extinction during the night.

One phenomenon greatly disturbed everybody: voices no longer carried. However hard you tried to talk to someone, you were still talking confidentially to yourself. Your interlocutor stared at you in silence, and if he began to speak too, you only saw his mouth moving and there was still the silence, a rather chiding silence. If you shouted, the shout rang in your ears, but you were the only one who heard it. And this went on for several days.

The air was of course made of plaster, and the view very limited. To see a long distance, one was obliged to stoop, as though to look under a door.

Without any wind, two or three smells arrived, all of them extraordinary. The first was a violent smell of fish, as when one is near a net that has just been emptied onto the grass. Next it turned into the marsh smell of rotted rushes and hot mud. That smell, like the others, moreover, gave people hallucinations. The plaster air seemed to turn green. Next (or perhaps at the same time) there came a smell resembling (but on a vaster scale) emanations from an ill-kept dovecot, pigeon droppings whose acridity is so sharp. That smell too (given that one could see nothing around one except a blinding whiteness) caused the most disagreeable hallucinations, among them notably the idea of monstrous pigeons brooding and fouling the earth under stifling thicknesses of down. Finally, there must also be noted a smell of sweat, very salty and violent, which stung the eyes like the vapor of sheep's urine in enclosed sheep pens.