The Horseman on the Roof (4 page)

“Intelligence that functions on concrete impulses and on planes altogether detached from the effective sphere. Would probably go on functioning even in my corpse. Problem of immortality of the soul—perhaps merely a question of an intelligence so automatically efficient that it continues to function even in the corpse. In that case, not universal, but the prerogative of certain individuals, perhaps of certain races, who would thus have immortality of the soul as their privilege.” He was preparing little phials of laudanum, morphine in the form of opium extract, ammonium acetate, and ether, each with its own dropper; a hypodermic syringe for chlorohydrate of morphine; and a small bottle of oil of turpentine.

Just as he corked the bottle with a firm and accurate thumb, in the little village where Angelo had earlier eaten melon the man shaking under the eiderdown bolted out of bed like a steel spring and rolled to the feet of the woman who was gasping for air. He stayed sprawling on the brick floor; the black skin of his face, pulled violently back in a terrible grip, made his teeth and his eyes stick out. The woman bent over him. She told herself that it was probably a serious illness, catching. She hastily munched a clove of garlic. She ran to fetch the neighbors. The sun still filled up the street with pure plaster, with no shade at all.

Nor was there any movement in the east, toward which Angelo turned from time to time. He climbed knolls covered with gray chestnut trees, descended into gray ravines where the horse's feet raised flakes of ash, followed the twists in valleys whose walls were quicklime, scaled little hills to the slow pace of his sleeping horse, crossed over their white-hot crests, skirted woods of chestnut and oak where the air was like fire. Each time he reached the top of a hill, he looked to the east to see if there were not some sign of twilight. The sky in the east was the same gray as overhead. He could look anywhere in the sky without being dazzled by the sun; the sun was not a blinding ball; it was a blinding dust spread over everything. The whole sky was dazzling. The east was dazzling. He looked northward, trying to find, on the slope of the big mountain, signs of the little mountain village of Banon, toward which he had set out. The mountain remained a uniform gray, almost as blinding as the gray of the sky, and it was impossible to distinguish there the least detail. Angelo had resumed his military soul. He was marching on Banon through this oily summer, as if on some important objective under volleys of fire. He had slight indigestion. Heavy pains, sometimes stabbing like fire, flung handfuls of plaster whiter than the sky into his eyes. He thought the woman who breathed with such difficulty had been right in warning him to beware of the melons and tomatoes. But if he had seen any melons by the wayside, he would have got down from his horse and eaten more of them. He kept telling himself: “It's the air. This greasy air isn't natural. There's something in it besides the sun; perhaps a multitude of minuscule flies that you swallow as you breathe and that give you cramps.” He was gradually coming to the top of a slope higher than all the hills he had so far scaled. It was, in its cloak of misty heat, one of the main spurs of the mountain, which was now visible from a great distance.

It was visible as well from Carpentras. It was visible to the Jewish doctor at his laboratory window, to which he had crossed drawn by the smell of rotting melon now beginning to fill the street. In the dazzle of the light and beyond the roofs of the town he could make out, ten or twelve leagues to the east, the spurs of the mountain and the somewhat higher eminence, looking from there like a grove of trees denting the long gray slope. He wondered if the infection could reach those heights; if he wouldn't have done better to send Rachel off by the Blovac
diligence.
Had it not been for the dazzling sky and the gray dust fogging the horizon, he could have seen from his laboratory window, above the stench of rotting melon peel filling street and town, the small height just to the right of the eminence Angelo had now reached, together with the village where the man shivering under the eiderdowns had finally shot out like a spring and plunged to his wife's feet, and was, at that precise moment, being contemplated by four or five neighbors, all munching garlic and chanting: “He is dead, he is dead,” at a safe distance from his bared white teeth and protruding eyes. The Jewish doctor was telling himself that perhaps there was no ground for being so sure of his intelligence. Those heights seemed to him better than Bourdeaux as a protection for Rachel and little Judith. He was now not at all sure of the privilege of immortality of the soul. He no longer took a simple pride in the thought that Rachel would manage to find a cabriolet at Vaison. She was certainly incapable of imagining that he might have been wrong in sending them to Bourdeaux. But he could not warn them now; he had to stay here and do his duty. He cursed intelligence. He realized that what he ought to be cursing, in all logic, was false intelligence. He spat on false intelligence. He was in despair at not having true intelligence. He spat on himself. He spat on Rachel and Judith for being incapable of protecting Rachel and Judith for him. He spat on that race tormented by an inscrutable God.

While he was cursing, he noticed that the east was becoming troubled and that there was going to be an evening and a night. It surprised him, as if night were about to rise from the east for the first time. “All my thinking is fallacious,” he told himself. “I even overlooked a simple thing like this. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Rachel and Judith will be quite all right at Bourdeaux, in any case no worse than anywhere else, and certainly better than here. For the rest, let's stick to the well-tried remedies. No more explorations of the intelligence.” He went back to his phials, put some of them on the table in his room, and others into his bag. He whistled a little tune. He also listened for the sounds of footsteps in the street and on the stairs, at every moment expecting his doorbell to ring. Meanwhile, in the village that he could see from his window on the distant flank of the mountain spur, the women had gone to find the priest. The priest came as a good neighbor should, his cassock unbuttoned. “Night is coming,” he said; “let's hope it will be less hot. Poor Alcide!” “He's already quite black,” said a woman. “So he is,” said the priest. “It's most extraordinary.” He took a look at the corpse, which was a horrible sight, but found comfort in the approach of evening. “Just to have a little rest,” he murmured, “to be able to breathe.” The idea of being able to breathe enabled him to triumph over the appalling grimace of that mouth, unveiling to the gums its stumped and rotten teeth.

Evening was still only a hint of pale blue in the east. Enough, even so, to dull the pattern of tiny crescent moons that the foliage of the plane trees in the rue Lafayette cast upon the pavement by the navy medical inspector's wicker chair. He thought the cause must be a cloud. He let out a groan that drew the attention of the customers sitting near him at the terrace of the Duc d'Aumale. “And now rain,” he said aloud, “God damn it!” But he had respect for his uniform. He counted the saucers. “It'd take more,” he thought, “than seven absinthes, even in quick succession, to stop me seeing that it's only the approach of evening.” And he said, very calmly, out loud: “It's evening, but I've seen others.” He meant that he had decided to approach the Admiral again. “All that I need,” he told himself, “is to be able to pronounce ‘Dangerous effluvia on board the
Melpomène'
correctly. The rest is up to him. I'm not going to get involved in ‘premonitory' and ‘prodromic.' I'll tell him what I think. If he balks, it's quite simple; I tell him: ‘I say yes and you say no; we've got a way to find out who's right: an autopsy!'”

He called the waiter and asked the time. It was after half-past six. The medical inspector rose, squaring his shoulders against absinthe and Admiral, against all that had brought him to this terrace of the Duc d'Aumale. He set off down the narrower streets. He had on his side only the evening—a little bluer now—and that priceless idea of an autopsy, perhaps put into his head by the evening and all the hope it brought, just by the attenuation of the light. A magnificent proof—“undeniable” was the word he used—that hadn't occurred to him under the stunning heat of the full day, specially in that dazzling light that blinded, stifled, made one's temples throb and made one relive swift, tragic flashes of one's life, as when one dives deep into green water. It was as hot as ever; he still had to keep stepping over runnels from sinks and the yellowish seepings from public privies, but this relenting light allowed him to regain control of himself; “like an acrobat” he told himself.

“Quite so, Admiral,” he said to himself, “but I know my trade. I've carved up Chinese, Hindu, Javanese, and Guatemalans.” (This last was not true, he had only seen active service in Eastern waters. He had never been to Guatemala, but the word appealed to a small overdose of absinthe that he was working off by means of great resounding words.) “What makes me sick,” he said to himself, “is being obliged to argue; having to explain matters when, in my fellow from the
Melpomène,
everything is explained clearly, positively, and beyond argument. What one needs to do, in cases like the present, is to take the wind out of their sails straight off, so that all they can say is: ‘Hm! Very well, do what has to be done.' Bring them the whole thing on a platter, all cut out and prepared ahead of time for the mathematical demonstration of the connections, highly disrespectful toward rank and society, between the distant exhalation of great rivers and the snuffing-out of, say, a hundred thousand human lives. Easier to explain with proofs at one's fingertips.

“Look: the viscous appearance of the pleura—see? And the contracted left ventricle; and the right ventricle full of a blackish coagulum; and the cyanosis of the esophagus, and the detached epithelium, and the intestines swollen with matter that I might liken, sir, in order to facilitate your comprehension of science, to rice-water or whey. Let's open him up, Admiral whose siesta must not be disturbed, let's open up the six feet of the
Melpomène's
quartermaster; dead at noon, Admiral, while you were sipping your coffee and your couch was being prepared: dead at noon, blown up by the Indus Delta and the air pump of the Upper Ganges Valley. Intestines the color of pink hydrangeas; glands isolated, protruding as large as grains of millet or even hempseed; the
plaques de Ryer
gritty; tumefaction of the follicles, what we call psoriasis; vascular repletion of the spleen; greenish soup in the ileocæcal valvule; and the liver marbled: all this in the six feet of the
Melpomène's
quartermaster, stuffed like a stinkball. I'm just a junior officer, Admiral, but I can assure you that we have here a bomb capable of blowing up this country in five seconds like a bloody grenade.”

He heard a little bell; it was extreme unction being brought to some dying person. He saluted the cross like any good sailor.

At the Admiral's headquarters, the midshipman was more polite. This young officer was, in fact, plainly worried. His features were drawn and, when he laid his hand on the doorknob, the medical inspector noticed that his fingers were wrinkled and slightly bluish. “Aha!” he thought, “another one!” The midshipman opened the door and announced: “Medical Inspector Reynaut.”

At exactly the moment when the medical inspector was entering the Admiral's office, in the hamlet of La Valette the priest touched the young lady's arm: “There's no use staying any longer, Madame la Marquise,” he said; “these women will see to everything; I've notified Abdon about the coffin.” The young lady sprinkled the corpse with holy water and went away with the priest. It was evening. But not noticeably so. There was still this sickening heat.

“I feel,” she said, “that it's my fault; I sent that woman to buy melons for me in the worst of the heat. She must have had sunstroke on all those stone steps: the glare from them was deadly; I felt it when I ran down them. I am responsible for her death, Monsieur le Curé.”

“I don't think so,” said the priest. “I can reassure Madame la Marquise on that score,” he added, “at the cost of frightening her on another; but I know how cruel the torments of conscience are. The other torments will certainly be easier to bear for an intrepid soul, such as I know Madame la Marquise possesses. Three other people died this afternoon, and in the same way,” he said: “Barbe, Génestan's widow; Valli Joseph; and Honnorat Bruno. They were reported to me almost all at once, and I went to see them. To be quite frank, that is why I was so bold as to advise Madame la Marquise to return to the château.” She shivered from head to foot.

“Let's run,” said the priest, alarmed, “that will get your blood going again.”

*   *   *

It was the moment when Angelo, having reached the summit of the slope, saw at last in the east the indications of evening. From where he stood he looked out over more than five hundred square leagues, from the Alps to the hills of the seacoast. Except for the peaks engraved high up in the sky and the far-distant blackish cliffs to the south, the whole country was still covered with the viscosities and mists of heat. But already the light was less violent, and in spite of the pains scourging his stomach every now and then, and an itch that inflamed his loins and waist, Angelo paused for an instant to make quite sure of the evening. It had come. It was gray and slightly yellowish, like stable straw.

Angelo spurred his horse into a trot. He was soon in a small valley, which after three bends set him on the threshold of a little plain, at the end of which, stuck on to the mountainside, he made out an ashen hill town half hidden among boulders and dwarf forests of gray oaks.

He reached Banon toward eight o'clock, ordered two liters of Burgundy, a pound of brown sugar, a fistful of pepper, and the punch bowl. It was a well-to-do mountain inn, used to the eccentricities of people who live in solitude. They watched Angelo tranquilly as, in his shirtsleeves, he made his mixture and soaked in it half a round loaf that he had cut into cubes. All the time he was mulling the wine, brown sugar, pepper, and bread in the punch bowl, Angelo held back a raging desire to drink, and his mouth was full of saliva. He gulped down his half loaf and the sugared and peppered wine in huge spoonfuls. His colic was abating. He ate and drank at the same time. It was excellent, in spite of the still excessive heat, which was cracking the high beams of the dining-room. Night had now come; it was grilling and clearly would bring no coolness. But it had at least brought deliverance from that obsessive light, so vivid that at times Angelo still felt its white dazzle in his eyes. He ordered two more bottles of Burgundy and drank them both, smoking a little cigar. He felt better. Still, he had to cling to the banister rail to get up to his room. But that was because of the four bottles of wine. He lay down across the bed, ostensibly to contemplate at his ease the handful of enormous stars filling the window frame. He fell asleep in this position without even removing his boots.