The Horseman on the Roof (43 page)

“I've only got eight francs,” said Angelo. “You'll find the rest in my legacy, but hurry up.

“I've been counting,” he told the young woman as soon as they were alone. “There are twenty-four of them. The lieutenant out there has the dry cholera and won't live through the day; let's hope he brings luck to two or three of his men; that form of the plague spreads quickly in dirty bodies. This platoon is the worst disciplined I've ever seen. It has nothing to do but trap civilians, yet it smells of rotten leather as if it were on campaign. At the outside I shall have seven or eight on my hands this evening, including some who'll be scared silly, not of me but of sudden death. Now take a look at these corridors! I can maneuver so as never to have to face more than two at a time.”

“I forbid you to fight like this,” said the young woman gravely.

The cheeks of her thin, pointed face were pink with a certain confusion. Her lips were trembling. She was about to continue when a soft voice beside them said: “Why should he want to fight?”

It was a nun who had come up silently. Short and dumpy, she resembled a capable housewife with her long black sleeves rolled up to show dimpled, blood-red arms.

“He's a child, Mother,” said the young woman, making a quick curtsy.

Angelo was still marveling at that suddenly troubled face and those trembling lips.

“She is very beautiful,” he said to himself.

The place where that face had been on fire remained as a white spot in his memory.

Dupuis arrived with the baggage. It did not seem to have been touched.

Angelo drew the huge sergeant-major into a window recess.

“Here are ten francs,” he said, “and I'm going to give you something more precious than money. The officer who arrested us out there in the valley is dead by now. And I know why. You're clever enough to realize that civilians too sometimes know what's what. He's died of a very vicious sort of cholera they call dry cholera, which bowls them over like ninepins. Now, I have a remedy. I'm not asking you to take my word for it. Just wait till the patrol comes back. If I'm right, he won't be the only one to kick the bucket. In that case, come and see me, I'll give you something to protect you.”

To himself he said: “It's impossible for a cavalryman, who's had a taste of power and got such pleasure out of being in command just now on the road, full in the sun, not to be frightened of dying between four walls, especially such high ones. And I took him by the arm. That's the way to make him think.”

He was pleased to observe that he intrigued this apoplectic man, awkward in his humors, this bureaucrat of the horse, and had even driven out of him the desire to laugh.

Angelo was just beginning to find that this prison had a most agreeable complexion and allowed one to live royally, when he noticed that the nun was feeling, with signs of the most sordid satisfaction, the folds of a little cashmere shawl that the young woman wore knotted round her neck. He was shocked by this effrontery, this undisguised greed, and gently but firmly he pulled away the scullery-maid hand.

“You seem very sure of yourself,” said this peasant woman who had given herself to God, “but we've seen others and it's better we should be frank from the start. I've seen you put your hand in your pocket; you'll have to do it again. We are a little sisterhood who have accepted martyrdom. But not for your sweet sake. Here board and lodging are paid for cash down and in advance. The ways of the Lord are impenetrable. All men are mortal and many are dying these days. We can't afford to be left with food on our hands.
We have our poor.
Your bill for the moment is six francs, and you'd be wise to pay me at once if you want soup for your lunch. You will also sign for me, both of you, a paper so that, in case of death, we can dispose of your things, at our own risk. Your natural heirs might make trouble, and we shall no doubt be obliged to burn everything that belongs to you.”

Luckily Angelo found this speech immensely comic. He had the sense to feign great consternation and even slight cowardice. He paid with a certain studied munificence.

The nun led them to the end of the corridor, opened a grill, and made them pass through a vast, echoing, but dark hall, then other rooms lit by borrowed light. All this seemed designed for mortification and prayer. On the utter bareness of the walls the body of Christ, in wood, was crucified. In the shadowy corners tall upright chairs and stalls could also be seen. Finally, there was everywhere the glacial cold and the smell of worm-eaten wood characteristic of mountain convents.

As long as quarantine had been a town or village affair, run by local people who needed to devote themselves to something in order to keep sane, barns and outhouses had been used. Sometimes camps had even been set up under trees or in meadows. Everyone escaped: either by violence or by bribery. The guards made an income wandering around with old shotguns.

Then it was decided that the cholera must be blocked up. The patrols of bourgeois, artisans, and peasants were proving insufficient to police the roads. Travelers were tending more and more to impose their way of looking at things, pistol in hand. When the government took charge, it appealed to the authority of the prefects and their garrisons. The soldiers had their uniforms and an evident need to fire into the general confusion and twirl their sabers. They had been told that they must sacrifice themselves, which would not have been enough to give them a real interest in the business, but it was more amusing to dash about the roads than to stay in the barracks, where death was moreover very easy and very frequent. Fresh air always passes for a panacea; movement changed their outlook. It was, besides, extremely comforting to arrest people at odds of twenty to one, and to see that you caused fear, when you were frightened yourself.

The small towns possessing hospitals or leper houses crammed the travelers into them. Elsewhere church schools, convents, seminaries, sometimes even churches, were pressed into use. The Vaumeilh quarantine was installed in the château, a former commandery of the Templars bequeathed at the turn of the century by Baron Charles-Albert Bon de Vaumeilh to a small sisterhood of Presentines. It harbored eleven humble women from the farms round about, who had exchanged kitchens and annual childbirth for the rule of a master who wore no velvet breeches and left them in peace seven days out of seven.

After passing through more than twenty small arched doorways that bored their way through the thickness of the walls, then under high vaults that lost themselves in shadow, and close by steep stairways without handrails, cut in saw-tooth pattern in worn stone, leading to galleries, cells stuck under the roof like nests, balustrades beyond which shone the dusty rays of a yellow daylight, Angelo and the young woman were led to a grille through which the nun made them pass, closing it behind them.

They were in a stairwell that might have held a schooner in full sail.

“There you are in your new home,” said the little fat nun from the other side of the grille, before departing.

Angelo said: “One would only have to tear off her coif and a little of her hair, box her soundly on both ears, and then take her bunch of keys, to turn her straightaway into a properly submissive country servant who'd reply ‘Yes, madame, yes, monsieur,' to everything one said and might even prove devoted. But in that case, she'd be scared of everything, and just now of the cholera. Her teeth would be chattering. I don't think you should make mountains of these soldiers, either. They'll simply cave in before anyone who's got hold of the right end of the stick.”

“Don't worry,” she said, “I've been watching you examining the width of the doors, counting your paces and noting landmarks. They couldn't have picked a more exciting quarantine for you. You are bound to escape.”

“Of course,” said Angelo. “From now on, our hands are free. I don't intend to waste any time. I know what we're going to find here, and hell isn't very mannerly. I no longer need to take care of everybody.”

While he was hiding their baggage in a dark corner he said some bitter things about the “little Frenchman” and his hopeless efforts with the dying.

“The only thing that counts is to get you out of this. Have you a good place to carry your pistols?”

“The best place is in my hands.”

“They'll tire you out; besides you'll have to take along something to load them with. I've got mine in my pockets, but we ought to have a bag for the powder boxes, bullets, caps, your tea, the kettle, and some sugar. We don't know if we'll be able to get the horses back. At all events, when our escape's well under way, I'll tip the rest of the baggage out of a window, and if we've time we'll go and look for it. But here inside this seemingly vast place let's cling to our weapons. They're our viaticum.”

He made a sort of haversack out of the saddlebags and managed to fasten it on his back without much trouble. He took the little saber in his hand, and they began to mount the staircase, which seemed to lead toward bright light.

To judge from the size and shape of the building in which they found themselves, they must be in that big square tower they had seen from the road.

The shallow steps rose slowly in long flights turning at right angles. At a certain point there was, not exactly a second floor, but a sort of landing with a low door at either end. Both were bolted. Higher up, rays of sunlight coming through loopholes crisscrossed and, striking the walls, maintained a strong light. In the top of the tower wild pigeons were nesting; suddenly they all took to flight, making a torrential sound.

Immediately a door opened above them and three heads came and peered over the balustrade. One of them, belonging to a very dark man, bearded no doubt, withdrew hastily.

The Presentine nuns of Vaumeilh were all former farm girls or farmers' daughters. They knew how to keep chickens and rabbits, and how to shut doors. They had set up the quarantine in the part of the commandery originally designed to serve as a last bastion.

In the roof of the big tower there was a vast room running its whole width. The ceiling was simply the fabric of huge beams that supported the stone flooring of the defense platform. The light came from all sides through more than fifty openings pierced round the four walls, former arrow-slits roofed over in the Italian fashion and transformed roughly into windows by odd panes of glass.

It was in fact an ideal place for pickling suspects in healthy fresh air and full sunshine. There was also a fine view from it. One could take in the whole horizon of harsh, green-clad mountains, which carried roads in every direction. The wind, rough (even in good weather), of this rude countryside, which makes everything, even springtime, an arid duty, kept the windows ceaselessly rattling, lifted the straw strewn over the floor, and boomed like the sea against the walls.

The four wooden kegs of drinking-water had to be covered with cloaks to protect it from the dust. An attempt had also been made to shield the corner containing the buckets used as privies, by hanging up horse blankets and more especially shawls, old petticoats, and other women's clothing. In the embrasure of an open machicolation they built fires on the bare stones for private cooking: tea, coffee, and chocolate for those who still could afford them. Naturally, if one didn't afterward take the precaution of wetting the embers (usually with urine, since there was only one serving of drinking-water a day), the drafts would lift them and fling their ash all over the place.

Sickness was quite frequent.

“You see, it was quite right to stop you from roaming about,” said the nuns. “Round here there are some villages that haven't yet had a single death. You'd have brought them the infection.”

Which was a white lie, for the villages round about had been devastated like the other villages. And besides, their dead had died, after all, more comfortably than those in quarantine, sometimes with a doctor or at least with drugs to relieve them, at any rate in beds and often in dark alcoves that spared them the supplementary torture of the strong light, so painful to the retina of cholera victims.

More than twenty sick had already been lost. The survivors had had to be brutally subdued, especially the members of the afflicted families. Unlike what happened outside, the deaths led to displays of grief, doubtless sincere but always exceedingly noisy. Death did not come in the intimacy of the family, where to be oneself is possible and permissible; where, when the dirge is over, one must think of saving the furniture. Disaster struck its blow in broad daylight, in front of everybody, and they would all retreat and huddle at the other end of the room, like a flock of sheep who had seen the wolf enter. Because of the four very thick walls and the grille down below, known to be kept carefully shut, there was no hope of being able to use guile as elsewhere, as in the free world, as everywhere in times when death persists long in the same place. They were no longer losing their dear ones. They were reading the writing on the wall. They could not get away, so they wailed. Besides, that lent a certain decorum; appearances are a consolation for disappearances: in short, they now wept endlessly for themselves. After five minutes the indifferent were wailing as loudly as the afflicted; after five minutes there were no indifferent left.

“What the f— are you doing up there?” shouted the soldiers.

“What a shambles,” said the nuns, rather proud of not dying.

The little community had been immune up until now. Yet they worked on the dead coolly and unconcernedly. The soldiers would come up with a stretcher. They would be very sympathetic, say a few words of comfort, pat the women kindly on the shoulder, make jokes. Their lips would be as white as chalk under their mustaches. They were very clumsy with the corpses. They handled them rather stiffly, preferring to take them by the feet rather than the head, and swore when (as happened nearly every time) the body, relaxing its muscles knotted by pain and the death agony, twitched in their hands and emitted those fetid juices, white like rice and similar to curdled milk, for the last time.