The Horseman on the Roof (41 page)

“I admit,” he said, “that I can breathe easily here, and I don't have to fight. But what can I do with a beech after five minutes of its company? I tell myself that it's beautiful, I repeat this to myself two or three times, I take pleasure in its beauty; then I need to pass on to something else, something that concerns human beings. I can stay indefinitely in this wilderness—it doesn't frighten me, as you can see—but if I find a field scraped to the bone like that one just now, I have a feeling that I must do something about it. If only to say good-day to the man who came all this way to sweat among the stones.”

“And yet,” said she, “what can we imagine that's any better? To go where we want to go, in your case as far as Italy, since you have things to do there, along deserted roads; to my mind that would be perfect. Here there are no bad neighbors: no high towers, no deep river, no lord of the manor.”

The track was taking them through the black woods and the pale heaths, bringing them slowly to the great solitary beeches. They had plenty of time to watch these rise and spread out in all their barbaric architecture; their salt-white frames lifted high into the sky the heavy fleece of foliage, sometimes russet and sometimes blood-red.

Angelo noticed that all these woods had geometrical shapes and resembled battalions of the line, with grounded arms, drawn up in fours or sixteens, held in reserve on a field of battle. Sometimes an isolated fir tree, standing on a knoll in its heavy cavalry cloak, completed the illusion; or the murmur of a company that has been too long awaiting orders came from a grove whose edge they were passing.

He was impressed, against his will, by those trees, standing mustered for centuries in solitude.

“Does the freedom of one's country,” he asked himself, “count less than honor, for example, or all the trouble I've taken to keep alive?”

He saw here a countryside without cholera or revolution, but he found it sad.

At last, after an hour of silent and pensive riding, through a landscape of wide expanses, they saw in the middle of a denuded stretch a sort of pillar rising in isolation.

It was a wayside oratory surmounted by a small iron cross.

“Come,” said Angelo to himself, “I've been dreaming. Man is here. You'd better come down to earth. This proves it.”

“You must admit,” he said, “that if there are people on these heights they announce their presence a long way off. It was barely midday when we found the hut, and now dusk is on the point of falling.”

They quickened their pace but still had to cross a very long empty slope and pass through two wooded ravines before discovering a low house with its gray roofs flush with the ground. Even then it was only revealed to them by a thread of smoke rising from its chimney and a glow of yellow lamplight from its windowpanes.

Furthermore, it stood alone. There was no village.

They made straight for it at a jog trot, and were approaching its yard when the door opened. A man came out, carrying a bucket.

“Stop,” he shouted.

He put down the bucket and flung himself onto a huge dog that had just risen from a heap of straw and was getting ready to jump evilly at the horses' legs.

“We've had a close shave,” Angelo said to him with a smile.

“Closer than you think,” said the man. “He's a lion. And when he obeys me—which isn't always—it's time to cross yourself with your elbow. You can't imagine how fond he is of biting. And when he does, monsieur, it's too late.”

He was a small man, round as a ball, bursting with health. It was all he could do to hold back the dog by the collar: its enormous mouth hung open over jutting white fangs.

“Where are we?” said Angelo, maneuvering his balky horse between the young woman and the dog.

“Wait,” said the man, “I'll lock him up first.”

He dragged the dog toward a small stable.

“Look,” said the young woman under her breath.

The bucket was full to the brim with blood, covered with pink foam.

The man returned after shutting up the dog and carefully wedging a stake against the door, at which the animal flung itself, growling.

“What's this place called?” asked Angelo.

“It's not called,” said the man, “at any rate, I don't know. It's home.”

He motioned all around.

“This is Charouilles.”

He had little, short arms.

“Is there a village near here?”

“Here? Never has been. Down there in the valley, yes, but it's far from here and you have to know the way. Where are you from?”

“Montjay.”

“That's no direction,” said the man. “People never come from Montjay.”

His hands were red with blood, and there were even remnants of meat between his fingers.

“We've been killing the pig,” he said. “The little lady's horse doesn't like my pail of blood, I see. Wait, I'll put it out of sight. But you must have something on your mind? It'll be getting dark soon.”

“We had no ideas ten minutes ago,” said Angelo. “But we'd like to wait for daylight around here, if you don't mind.”

“Why should I mind?” said the man. “Come in. Truth to tell, it's a long ride down to the valley, and it goes through woods. Well, it was a funny idea, coming here from Montjay.”

The house, which seemed enormous from the outside, contained only one large room with an alcove; the rest was all sheepfolds and stables; sheep could be heard bleating, pigs grunting, and bits clinking.

The pig, split like a watermelon, was laid out on the cover of the salting-tub. Its head lay grinning in a basket beside it. By the hearth, whose huge fire was leaping at a caldron, a stout woman, whiter than the bacon fat she was cutting up with a long knife, was melting lumps of lard. The table was piled with sausage meat and red shreds. The dull smell of blood and of chopped meat, and the intense heat of the fire with the caldron of fat boiling on it, were heavy with oppressive images for anyone who had been breathing the air all day upon the heights.

“I'm going to vomit,” said the young woman.

Angelo took her outside, gave her a little alcohol to drink, was alarmed to see her pale and shivering, covered her with his cloak, and decided not to go and tend the horses as he had planned.

He pulled some straw from a stack and arranged the saddles and saddlebags so as to make a well-sheltered and comfortable bed.

“Lie down in that and rest,” he said.

He piled so many coverings on her that she was almost smothered. He raised her head with a bolster of straw. He was obliged to touch her hair, the bun at once firm and silky, and to support her neck.

“What small ears she has,” he thought.

He lit a fire, made some tea, brought it to her.

At last she got up; her color had returned.

“I nearly fainted,” she said. “How could you manage to stand the sight of so much raw meat and that pale woman cutting herself into pieces and boiling her own fat in the witches' caldron?”

He had the presence of mind not to confess that at that moment he had been thinking of the horses, which he was anxious to rub down.

“You frightened me,” he said. “When I saw you looking whiter than a sheet, I thought at once of the infection, which had gone out of my head all day.”

He talked for five minutes and with the greatest naturalness of the fright he had had and of the care she must take. He was sincere, besides.

Night had completely fallen. The house was watching them with its big red eye of an open door. Inside, the man could be seen circling with his long pointed knife around the pig, busy severing the hams.

They had set up their camp in the yard, facing the depths where the valley must lie. Protected by the angle of the sheepfolds and the main building, they did not feel the wind, which had begun to murmur like the sea over the whole mountain. They saw the sky split open and disclose a few stars: then a kind of lamp was lit above the clouds, and it brightened the fleecy fringes of the rent. The moon had risen.

They had built a fire for their tea between two stones, and the kettle was singing.

After another swallow of alcohol, the young woman was able to bring herself to eat two hard-boiled eggs, without bread. Angelo boiled the maize flour for a long time.

“This,” he said, “will make a very thick polenta, sweetened with brown sugar. It'll cool all night and stuff us well and truly tomorrow morning.”

He made some more tea and lit a small cigar.

Well below the mountains, in what must be the valley, they saw several lights twinkling, then the flames of what must have been a huge fire; from here it looked no bigger than a pea, but it throbbed.

The man came and sat down beside them. He had filled a pipe.

“You mustn't worry about my wife,” he said. “For ten years she hasn't uttered a word. I don't know why. But she's never done any harm. It'd be easy for her: we use the same bed, and I sleep. She's never budged. What are you drinking?”

“Tea.”

“What's that?”

“A sort of coffee.”

“Seems things are bad down in the valleys.”

“Why?”

“You must know better than I do.”

“If you mean the cholera, yes, it's doing some damage.”

“I've seen a little,” said the man. “I went down a month ago. It was turning a lot of people wrong side up. They were certainly taking it hard. I had sold some ewes to a valley fellow who died. Finding the heirs was a hard day's work. They'd been taken off to Vaumeilh to be camphorated.”

“Who'd taken them off?”

“The soldiers, of course!”

“There are soldiers down there?”

“No, but they come when they're needed. There's been four of them flattened out, one after the other. They've got nasty since then.…”

“What's the valley like?”

“A fine place. It's restful, you'll see if you go there.”

“Four soldiers flattened out? You mean, they killed them.”

“They sure did! It doesn't pay to poke your nose in where it's not wanted. Besides, they're liars. They've got colic like everyone else, so why should anybody go with them to Vaumeilh? That's what I think. I'm not from the valley, I'm from here. But what have the Vaumeilh people got, more than the valley people? They die just as much, camphor or not; and so do the soldiers. The law's the law, agreed, but show me where the cholera makes exceptions.”

Angelo asked him many questions about the soldiers. The man talked of them as of a disease even more terrible than the plague, but a disease whose injustice was clear and against which there were weapons. The name of Chauvac did not enter the conversation. It was the soldiers of Vaumeilh that were the trouble. Angelo concluded that there were soldiers everywhere.

He tried to find out about the duties of these troops and how they carried them out. He put these questions in military terms.

“You wouldn't be one of them, monsieur?” said the man, suddenly on his guard.

“Far from it,” said Angelo. “This lady and I gave them the slip and even gave three of them a dressing-down. Now we're doing all we can to get through them. That's why we traveled all day through the mountains, by unfrequented roads, and are now here. Would I be with this young lady if I were a soldier?”

“Who's to stop it?” said the man. “You don't know what you're talking about. They have their canteen women. And the whores take what they can get.”

The young lady protested, laughing, and assured him for her part that they were simply travelers with one pressing object—to cross this country as quickly as possible and reach home.

“I believe you,” said the man. “Your voice doesn't sound like those wine-drinking women, and by God! soldiers don't accept excuses, they make you drink. You talk like someone who wants to get home. Now
he
makes me uneasy, he speaks officer's lingo.”

“It's true,” said Angelo, “I'm Piedmontese and I was an officer in my own country. I'm going back there, but to serve the cause of liberty.”

He did not want to deny what he was. He told himself: “If the man's a complete idiot, if he can't see the difference between these dragoons, blindly carrying out orders whose principles one can't condemn, and me who am all love, I'll saddle the horses and off we go. The night be damned!”

He was very pleased to have thought of “love” to describe his feelings about human misery and liberty. He spoke with passion of the mean little rye-field.

“That's all very fine,” said the man. “So you passed by there. The field is mine, actually. I sowed it because there was a fight about who owned it. You're right; everything would be better if there weren't any laws.”

He was impressed by the little speech delivered with such fire. Angelo seemed to him a man of the world.

“What do you think,” he asked, “of people who won't settle up for the thirty lambs they bought from me? Dragging cholera into the account.”

Angelo described what the young woman and he had seen. He spoke of streets full of dead, deserted towns, people camping in the fields, corpses of dear ones thrown over hedges by night to avoid quarantine.

“I've had the cholerine, like everyone else,” said the man. “You take your trousers down two or three times instead of the one: and that's that. People do die of it sometimes, it seems. It's just the double rations of weather. Nothing to call the police about.”

He was obliged, however, to admit that certain things did seem queer, but it was not necessary to think that this came from little flies people swallowed as they breathed. His friend had told him that at La Motte, not five leagues from there, a dog had begun to talk; it had even recited the responses to the catechism for extreme unction. It was generally known that at Gantières, on the 22nd of July last, there had been a shower of toads. Those were facts. He knew a woman who had always been an upright family woman; she was ready to swear on the heads of her children that she herself had pulled out of the ear of her youngest, Julia by name, a little snake as thick as a finger and the length of a needleful of thread. A yellow one, stubborn as a mule, which she killed with her meat-chopper, and it distinctly uttered the words “Ave Maria” before dying. He himself, not five days ago, alone on the heath you've just crossed, was minding the sheep one morning when he saw, rising up from the direction of Vaumeilh, a cloud that he first took for smoke, then for soot, and which was, monsieur and madame, more than five hundred thousand crows.