The Horseman on the Roof (52 page)

“You're very rash,” said Angelo. “You don't know me. Suppose I'm a brigand. There are people at home who have good manners and even courage. They're all republicans besides. But there always comes a moment when they think of themselves. Then, look out! Now, I've been drinking and you give me an excuse for losing my temper. How can you imagine that I daren't? It's a childish story, that's all. My mother used to stand and make Lavinia burrow under her skirts. The little girl had to push her hand under my mother's stays and smooth out her petticoat. That's why she was hatched and brooded as though by a hen. It wasn't very terrible, and Lavinia was still performing her task just before she left with Giuseppe. And about that too there's a lot to be said. She didn't go off with Giuseppe for love. The women at home like love, it's true, but they'll get up in the middle of the night joyfully to take part in some secret and heroic deed, especially if it's clearly established that their only interest is in the adventure, or in the pleasure of brushing against, touching, some somber anxious man with great Brutus-like gestures, listening to his talk and serving him. We belong to a country where people like to have hobnobbed with the man being shot in the main square. Our political executions are morning spectacles much sought after, because everyone has a little bit of his heart involved in the ceremony.

“My mother does nothing unfeelingly. She's the Primavera. She constantly has her finger under my nose to make me raise my head and look up in the air.”

“You were right. I don't like your mother.”

“Because she's not here.”

“Perhaps: but above all because you are.”

“It would have been easy to give things a different turn, if I hadn't had that finger under my nose. Had I been prepared to look downward, I had a silver spoon in my mouth all right. Giuseppe reproaches me often enough on that account. But I don't believe revolutions are murders, or if they are, I give up. People know that. That's why I get shot at with red-hot bullets from both sides. I once killed a man. An informer. Is it an illusion for me to say that an informer's a man like anyone else? Reasons of expediency are always bad. Believing that there can be two weights and two measures is bad too. It would have been easy to settle his hash at some street corner. Put out the street lamps and skewer him. Just take one's hand out of one's pocket. With a couple of louis I'd have had as many petty assassins at my beck and call as there are men, or even women, in Turin. It would have been enough to wave my arm, as they say: then stay cosily in my bed while the thing was being done independently of me. That's what they call saving oneself. But it happens that there's another little difference between me and them. I'm a good orator only when talking to myself. If one must follow great examples, if that is the price of the liberty and happiness of the people, I should despise myself for not being the first to be guilty of it. One kills, perhaps, but one doesn't acquire a soul vicariously.”

“So you are one of those people who provide food for conversation and make such a stir by hiding in the forests on the other side of the Alps? But why talk of Brutus? Everyone more or less has killed a man. If modesty has any charm, therein lies its greatest. Will you believe me if I tell you that I was courted with a corpse devoured by the crows and foxes? Did I tell you my husband was sixty-eight? That usually makes people open their eyes. You never batted an eyelid. That's because you're indifferent to me, but—”

“I'm not indifferent to you at all. I've been making fires and polenta for you for ten days, and instead of going about my own business, I'm pushing on with you to Gap—”

“Where I shall, I hope, find my husband again. For I love him. That doesn't seem to move you very much either.”

“It's quite natural, since you married him.”

“One comes upon a certain gallantry often, in what you say. It's true, in spite of his great name and fortune, if I hadn't loved him I wouldn't have married him. Thank you. The fact remains, he is nearly forty-five years older than I. And that still doesn't astonish you?”

“No. What does astonish me is your way of harping on his age all the time.”

“It's one of my weaknesses. Would you like an Amazon? Perhaps I am one indeed, and precisely over this. It's not his age I harp on, it's his handsomeness. Marriages like mine are always suspected of having some sordid interest. Is it really a weakness to want to clear oneself of that at all costs?”

“Let's say, to reassure you, that as far as I'm concerned you're merely insulting me. I know how extravagant all my worries are: they make me look a simpleton. But you shouldn't be so sure. I recognize the worth of people very quickly. The idea that you could behave in a vulgar way would never enter my head.”

“With you I find myself constantly being abashed,” said the young woman. “And it's far from disagreeable. I've suddenly forgotten what I was going to tell you for the sake of what I'd like to say here and now, if you promise not to answer.”

“I promise.”

“No one has any but blind hopes. Be less candid. And now here's what I meant to tell you first. By dint of being a lonely little girl in a poor doctor's house at Rians, the day came when I was sixteen. From door to door the world had grown up around me. I sometimes used to go dancing under the limes. I had seen girls get married and even become pregnant. The young bourgeois of the place courted me, that is to say, they spun round before me like plums in boiling water.

“The country, as I told you, is rough and has no springtime. My father never had a carriage. We weren't so poor as all that, but the carriage would have been no use to him on the hill paths. He went his rounds on horseback. He bought me a mare so that I could accompany him. So I came to know the happiness of trotting and even galloping over those uplands. They're so vast that one can easily believe one is fleeing, and even getting away.

“One evening, after a storm, returning down the valley, at a bend of the stream which had suddenly swollen, we found a man who had been thrown from his horse and hurt. The water was half over him. Though unconscious, he was clutching the mud and gave the impression that death itself could not stop him from fighting. His chief injury was a pistol wound in the chest. Naturally, we took him home. I had been hardening myself with my terrors and still more, for several years, with my desires. That abandoned body which had to be saved, and which for that very reason let itself be taken in one's arms, that unconscious face which still wouldn't relax its frown, touched me more than anything else ever will. Back at home, my father laid the wounded man out on our kitchen table. He boiled some water, took off his coat, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The man's first movement, when he came round, was a menacing gesture. But he recovered his wits with amazing promptness; he understood at once why my father had that little, gleaming knife in his hand, and he gave a beautiful smile, spoke a few words of apology, and submitted courageously.

“I don't expect you will be either surprised or roused to indignation when I tell you that the bullet, once extracted, turned out to be from a musket. And more, from one of the regulation police muskets, my father said. The man's clothes, though soiled with mud and blood, were plainly of fine cloth and very well cut. That sprang to the eyes of peasants like us. Under his spotless silk shirt he wore an emblazoned cross, attached to his neck by a gold chain so supple, so delicately woven that I thought at first it was made of a woman's hair.

“To be brief, we installed him in a room on the first floor, where he remained in seclusion. I looked after him alone. He quickly regained his health. My father was quite astonished. ‘This man is at least sixty,' he said, ‘and he's picking up like a youngster.' I remembered then that I had seen his chest covered with thick gray hair, and that this had had to be cut with scissors to apply the dressing.

“He had been with us for about a month without anyone knowing. I was simply thrilled about this situation. In the early days his alert eyes kept watching my father. His look then was hard and even cruel. I knew that, most rashly and at the cost of painful effort, he had got up in spite of his dressing, and that he had a loaded pistol under his bolster. But he never mistrusted me. I could go into his room at any hour of the day or night; he never jumped. That meant he could recognize my step, even at its lightest, and that I had his confidence. I found happiness in a thousand tiny details of that nature. At length, after two weeks, he simply declared to my father that he offered him his apologies a second time. ‘And this time for good,' he added. He had the gift of putting much grace into few words.

“One evening when I was taking the air under the lime walk, I saw a stranger leaning against a tree, watching me. He was awkwardly clad in his Sunday best. I hurried indoors. I saw that the man had followed me and was approaching the house. I ran upstairs, two at a time, to our guest's room. ‘Don't worry,' he said, when I had described the man, ‘ask him in and bring him up here. I was expecting him.' And indeed, the man immediately took on the manner of a servant. When night had fallen, he went to fetch his mount from where he had concealed it and brought a trunk with clean clothes. He went away, no doubt with orders. Two weeks later, he returned openly and in livery. He brought with him an extremely handsome horse with an English saddle.

“We never knew how he had managed to let his servant know the first time. He kept it even from me, and if I now have some ideas on that subject they are purely and simply ideas. We were equally surprised, about then, at the stories running round Rians. Monsieur de Théus had apparently been our friend for a long time, and if he had honored us by visiting and staying with us, it was purely out of friendship.

“There remained, however, that ball from a regulation police musket, which nobody mentioned and which I kept in a little silk bag hung around my neck.

“Monsieur de Théus was soon able to stand and even to eat at our table. He treated me like a lady, with the greatest attention. I was enchanted and expected even better. He did not disappoint me.

“He begged for my company on the rides my father had prescribed for him. We went only once. We returned to where I had found him. But he insisted that I push on further into the scrub. We walked our horses for a good quarter of an hour along a narrow earth track.

“‘I've only seen this bit of country in a storm and a flash of lightning,' he told me, ‘but I'm looking for a tall ilex and I think that's it in front of us.' The solitude of that countryside is never paradisiacal; but on that day it was. He made me dismount. He pulled back the bushes of clematis that were choking the trunk of the ilex.

“‘Come and see,' he said. I went up to him. He put his arm around my waist. At the first glance I saw a musket beside some torn shreds of uniform. There was the fleshless corpse of a sort of soldier with red facings. Finally he showed me the man's skull: the forehead was blown in.

“‘That's my pistol shot,' he said. ‘I was blinded by the rain and the lightning when I took aim, and I already had his bullet in my chest. Must I tell you it's a gendarme or can you see it well enough? I shouldn't like you to believe that I can be shot down easily or without risk,' he added. This was said so tenderly that it was almost like cooing.

“When we had found this wounded man in the mud of the stream, I had not connected it with an event that had occurred a week before on the road from Saint-Maximin to Aix. Monsieur de Théus put all his grace into making me do so. He reminded me of the stage coach that had been attacked on the Pourrières slope and plundered of all the money it was transporting for the Treasury, in spite of its police escort.”

“Those attacks on coaches, especially the ones transporting your government's bullion, seem to be quite a local industry,” said Angelo. “When I was at Aix last year, I remember the thing happening three times in the space of six months, both on the road you mention, on the Avignon road, and on the one that goes up to the Alps.”

“So you've lived at Aix?”

“I spent two years there.”

“We were neighbors,” said the young woman. “La Valette, where I've lived since my marriage (it's our home), is only just three leagues to the east, in that part of Sainte-Victoire which turns pink at each sunset. We might have met. I often used to come to Aix, sometimes on quite social occasions.”

“In which I never took part. I lived rather like a savage. I only visited the fencing-masters and knew a few of the officers at the garrison (from a distance and simply as opponents). But I used to go for long rides in the woods, precisely in the part where the mountain turns pink in the evening. I may have been on your land. I said so to myself yesterday when you were talking about the Château de la Valette with our clarinet-player. I remember seeing, through the pines, the front of a big house that seemed to me to have a soul.”

“If it had a soul, it was ours. Don't think I'm just being silly. If you'd merely said it was beautiful, I'd have been less sure. All the big country houses around Aix are beautiful, but soul—that requires something more, and I think we have it. If you've seen the celebrated face of La Valette, that self-assured nobility which confirmed me in my feelings, you can't possibly have forgotten it.”

“I did in fact wonder what they could be like, the passionate creatures capable of living in such a place.”

“One of them is before you. Have you looked at her enough? Where did you live, in Aix?”

“Away from home: and that's saying everything. An exile, an outlaw, has to grow accustomed to possessing nothing of value but himself. I at least had the consolation of not having fled. How often have I blessed the folly that forced me to leave my country! A murder, even in legitimate self-defense—as was the case—would never have left me any peace in any surroundings. The man I killed was selling republicans to the Austrian government, and his victims were dying in prison. But there are never good reasons for cowardice; precisely because he was ignoble, it was essential for me not to be. I killed him in a duel. He had a fair chance. I've been reproached for risking my life. The defenders of the people haven't apparently the right to indulge in nobility. Really, I believe everyone was delighted; for me the choice lay between prison and flight. In the first you kick the bucket, usually from colic, which isn't very glorious; and flight means
squaring your shoulders
and becoming a rat. You see, I was above all embarrassing my friends. I left my home in full uniform and at a walk. As I was going up into the mountains, near Cezana, I heard galloping behind me. I dismounted and picked a little bunch of the daffodils with which the fields were covered. I was wearing my plumed helmet and gold-braided blue uniform, and all the trimmings. The
carabinieri
gave me a regular salute. I realized that my friends had reckoned poorly. We are ultimately a daffodil-loving people.