The Horseman on the Roof (49 page)

Obviously, the opera had closed its doors; everyone had a far stranger opera going on within himself. The clarinetist (after much darting around in that town rotting at the roots) had asked himself what on earth he was still doing there. In the end a brutal pain right in the stomach (what they call colic) had decided him. He had collapsed on his bed, weeping, groaning, crying out. Cries were also coming from the other side of the courtyard that his bedroom window faced. Finally he noticed that, by virtue of crying out, he was no longer in pain. On the other hand, people were still crying out on the other side of the courtyard, and even giving those raucous appeals, rather like the roaring of a lion cub, that cholera victims uttered in their death agony. That cured him altogether. He got up in fine form and with ten times his former strength. He realized that the cholera could be
invented;
that that was what he had been doing; that it was better to take to the roads and find something less frightening to invent. A bachelor has all sorts of rights.

The question of health certificates did not trouble him. He had never had any intention of going to cool his heels at the town hall with legal-minded fugitives who, most of the time, died while they were still waiting to be interviewed. He went out through the working-class streets, which, since people were dying like flies in them, were free as the air.

“Here's a point,” he said; “you spoke of murderers just now; there are never any murderers except in quiet places. One's never safer from being murdered than in a room where there's just been a murder. The warmer the corpse, the less the risk. One ought to look for victims behind whom to shelter.”

He had gone up through the pine woods by Saint-Henri-les-Aygalades, without meeting either gendarmes or sentries. In the narrow alleys between the houses and gardens, he had merely had to step over corpses. Many were also dying in the coaching inns at Septêmes. People were passing through like letters through the post; in every direction. No controls. Nobody around; only free people. If you want to die, die; if you want to go through, go through. He had had no trouble except at Aix, where he had had to turn off to the right by Palette, and as far as the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire. But it's a pretty road in summer. On foot, you can get through anywhere. In the dry hills the dead don't smell bad; don't really smell at all; or sometimes they smell of the thyme and savory in which they are lying, always in very noble postures because they have died facing a grand landscape. Sight of the free horizon, generally periwinkle-blue, gives the muscles a fluidity that makes them unclench after death. He had observed that, in the pine groves, where the scent of the resin joins with the sun to create an atmosphere like an oven, the corpses he encountered (one of them was a gamekeeper's) had above all the
mal du siècle:
a certain nonchalance of style and melancholy in their attitudes, a look of ennui, a sort of well-bred contempt. The woods above Palette, when you approach the rocky spurs of Sainte-Victoire, look out over a billowing of hills, a network of little plains, valleys, copses, vistas, and aqueducts as Roman as could be. You are forced to think of the geese of the Capitol, of the Cimbri wrapped in the Nordic mists like processionary caterpillars in their cotton nests. A man dying, especially of cholera and shaken by electric discharges of pain, no longer sees the present; he sees the past and the future through a magnifying glass for several long minutes. Time enough to compose on his face either a convulsion or a smile, according to his character.

He enjoyed talking as he walked. He had had no company for two months, or else only that inconsequential company with whom one must above all never speak one's mind. Death isn't everything; he was realizing that at this instant. It was a great pleasure at last to come upon two young people who had such style and had just vanquished a hamlet. Now he could chatter, provided he wasn't boring them.

Angelo protested. “I like this way of talking,” he said to himself. “Every sentence is a story. That's how it is where I come from; what does truth matter? Italy, mother of the arts, all you lack is liberty! He's like Felice Orsini, who is my age but wears a beard and looks old.”

“It's to Madame, above all, that I apologize,” said the man. “Ladies like us to gild the pill. I'm just an egoist; it's the only thing I am really good at. Actually I get frightened more often than hurt, so I can afford to joke a bit.”

“Don't worry about me,” said the young woman. “I'm even more of an egoist than you are. I make volumes of French history out of my own adventures, even when I'm dozing in an armchair. Judge from that whether I enjoy listening to you.”

The day had been so fine that night fell with infinite slowness. The glints of reddened light that lay along the rough grasses of the plateau moved only with reluctance and took a long time to disappear. They could be seen slowly preparing the delayed leap that would bear them off into the sky. They stretched out until they were like those strands of pale hair that certain spiders hang on the wind, and before disappearing, they wrapped themselves one last time round the naked branches of the trees from which, thread by thread and cautiously, they were picked off by still-burning shadows. The west was sighing with regret.

This man seemed to be at home on the road. He had filled a small clay pipe and started to smoke without slowing his pace. He cast long looks at the landscape and seemed to get something out of everything.

Angelo asked him if he had any idea of the direction to be followed to reach Gap.

“I've something better than an idea,” said he, “I have a map.”

They stopped for a couple of minutes to look at it. It was no longer light enough to make out the route in detail. At all events, they must go by Saint-Dizier, then Les Laures and eventually Savournon; after that, to judge by the remaining distance to be covered, they had only to ask for Gap.

“Besides,” said the man, “by then you'll already be in the mountains.”

The cholera fly, apparently, did not rise above a certain altitude. People took refuge on the heights when they could. That was what he himself was doing. He was not going to Gap, there were nearer mountains. He would try to find a village, the smallest possible: two or three houses at the most. There he would wait till it was all over before going down again. He could live on milk. He still had a few sous. He knew he could go without tobacco without becoming too bad-tempered. Anyhow, mountain people don't pay much heed to bad temper; they even consider it a sign of strength. One must always do one's best not to die.

He, too, must have had his troubles with the soldiers.

Not a great deal. It's never amusing to be arrested. They demand all sorts of papers. The first two or three times, one always wonders how one'll get out of it. One never has the right papers, of course. In the end, with practice, one slips away. He had, however, spent eight days in a quarantine in the Haut Var; for after passing around Sainte-Victoire, he had found himself with the Haut Var before him. He had thought that that region was essentially a desert, and that he would be able to walk through it undisturbed; but it proved quite the contrary. When in danger of sudden death, people always have a strong taste for desert places, and these were densely populated. Everyone had had the same idea as he, and the fly had had the same idea as everyone. He came to roads littered with dead. He counted seven lying across his track in less than a league. He took to paths, he walked over hills and fields. He got lost. He went to the outskirts of a small town and was picked up by the soldiers.

Soldiers are like everybody else. At heart, they hate death. This is only natural. But there's the uniform.

He said several things that made Angelo redden. “If he weren't so nonchalant (and yet such a good walker) I'd answer him,” he told himself. “But he doesn't think half the things he says. In reality, he's never stopped being frightened. That's where his irony derives from. For all his fear, he's covered almost a hundred leagues on foot, through all this filth which I've only been through, up to now, on horseback.” (He was forgetting, very generously, the roofs of Manosque and the nun.)

He had been locked up in the quarantine at Rians.

“When was this?” said the young woman.

“The first days of September.”

“You came to Rians by the Vauvenargues road?”

“I passed by Vauvenargues but I didn't come by a road. At a little place called Claps, where there were three houses and a fountain under an oak tree, I was disgusted by the sight I saw. There were four or five corpses there (I didn't count them) in most unpleasant attitudes. It was hot and they must have been lying there at least two days, paying no attention to either the sun or the foxes that had been busy on them. That's where I took to the woods.”

“I know Claps very well,” she said. “You went through the woods of La Gardiole.”

“I didn't bother about the name of the woods. I tried to get away as quickly as possible. The cover is fine. It's pines. I whistled a little tune and was glad to get lost: the main thing was to have a view that would take my mind off things.”

“Didn't you meet anyone who told you you were passing near the Château de la Valette?”

“I didn't meet anyone, and that's how I wanted it. I did in fact see a château. The house was shut up. There were cocks crowing a little farther on, around a big building that looked inhabited. I didn't take a close look at it. I can only tell you one thing: there wasn't a soul; just the cocks, that's all. But usually where there are cocks crowing there are people living.”

“There are sometimes dead people too,” thought Angelo. But he could not remember whether the cocks had been crowing in that totally devastated village where he had encountered the cholera for the first time.

“I left that place in July,” said the young woman. “It was I who closed the windows of the château. A servant died suddenly after eating some melon. You saw La Valette from the south; to the north there's a little hamlet hardly any bigger than Claps. The next day three people died there. I was alone. I went to take refuge with my aunts at Manosque, which is where we've come from, this gentleman and I.”

“You did well to leave,” said the man. “Both places. The best would be to leave them all. That's what's hard. It's why I'm walking now, and smoking my pipe.”

He described some of the horrors of the quarantine at Rians, which the sunlight he depicted tinged an unbearable red.

“We're in the habit of associating the sun with ideas of joy and health. When we see it in reality acting like an acid on flesh just like our own (and therefore sacred), under the simple pretext that this flesh is dead, we suddenly get a true idea of death, and one which it is most unpleasant to have. And new ideas about the sun, the golden color it gives to everything, which pleases us so. The blue sky is wonderfully beautiful. A blue face has a queer effect, I can tell you. Yet it's the same blue, or near enough. In any case, similar in every way to the blue that slumbers over the deep places of the sea. In a sandy place, a quarry where I went burrowing for shelter from a storm, I found dry corpses, not an ounce of rottenness; gilded from top to toe. This is very ugly.”

He had discovered a curious fact about egoism. “The egoist loves everybody. He's even a glutton. That's my own case, I confess; it's the case with everyone. Now, though, the egoist goes to the desert. Like the saints. But when one's alone, one finds oneself. One becomes a glutton for oneself. And then what happens?” Excesses and basenesses he would rather not mention.

They walked for some time in silence. Night had at length come, black and nearly starless. They saw some fluttering red lights ahead of them. The road began to descend. In a valley two huge braziers had been lit on a sort of apple-green carpet that must be a meadow. The flames illuminated the walls of a little town close by.

“There's Saint-Dizier,” said the man. “I was told they had private feuds that one mustn't stick one's nose into. But I see they've been having other feuds, even more private, with the fly.”

“I know those pyres,” said Angelo. “If they're still busy burning their dead, we haven't progressed a step since Manosque, where this smell of burnt fat has already put me off cutlets for the rest of my life.”

Gradually, indeed, a faint odor of burnt fat was replacing the plateau's sharp scent of stones and dry trees.

The young woman had placed her hands over her eyes.

“They're roasting rotten Christians,” said the man. “I confess it's almost a sight to gladden the heart, when one knows what bestiality people have sunk to, just because of fear. They must have a talent for it. Who'd have suspected that this little mountain village was actually Sodom and Gomorrah? Who but the fly? I have a feeling that it must be having a good laugh. If you daren't look at that sight, madame, I think you'd do better to put your eyes out. That would spare you the fatigue of holding your hands over your face. Once the cholera's over, there'll still be mirrors to face.”

Despite his love of liberty, Angelo was on the point of losing his temper. But he was sufficiently on the side of those who saw rottenness everywhere.

The young woman let fall her hands. She was hardly visible, save in the delicate and tenderly pink reflections of the distant flames. In their doubtless deceptive and in any case very confused light, she looked nonplussed, anxious, somehow caught in the act.

As they drew near, they saw in the darkness the bulk of the town. It was probably a market town: it had the pot-bellied ramparts of an important center. Though darker than the night, one could make out above its crown of roofs two massive belfries like the horns of a young bullock.

If they kept to the road, they would have to go through the town. Angelo refused.

“We didn't leave Manosque, where they'd already got past burning the dead,” he said, “to land once more in a place where they are still reduced to doing so.”