The Horseman on the Roof (54 page)

Angelo mentioned the little Frenchman.

“A relative immunity always leads to complacency,” said the man. “That's a weakness the gods have taken advantage of at all times, and the famous fly doesn't lag behind. My dear sir, death to the man who believes he is innocent: that's what the gods say. And it's just. One can always find the best reasons in the world for thinking oneself perspicacious when one succeeds in seizing the bull by the horns. That isn't enough. You cite the case of a country doctor, or myself, or the
vulgum pecus:
they all die, of course.…”

Angelo, who in his position had need of corpses, described how the little Frenchman had dazzled him with his unselfishness and devotion.

“Granted,” said the man; “in that case he was
too
good. There has to be a mean in everything. But give me simply someone who
forgets himself.
That's the word I was looking for: someone who isn't thinking of himself, and who therefore doesn't look for the moribund in heaps of corpses to give himself the pleasure of saving them, as you've just told me your little doctor did. Give me someone who forgets his liver, his spleen, and his gizzard.
He
doesn't die. At least, not of cholera. Of old age, no doubt; but of cholera, no.”

He added that the region was volcanic and consequently preserved from the noxious miasmas; that within a radius of seven or eight leagues (and his field of observation must be extended that far in order to mean anything in this unpopulated place) there had not been a single death from cholera since the start of the epidemic.

“We have here a substratum of lava from which warm and sulphurous emanations rise. In short, we live at minimum expense.” Upon which he freely admitted that Angelo's chloride was not really so stupid, and that chemistry might well replace philosophy and ethics in the towns.

He had practiced in Lyon, Grenoble, and even Paris. That was the origin of his melancholia, he remarked, his lips gilded with the most delicate of smiles. Melancholia, but not misanthropy, as they could plainly see. Moreover he treated it with the domes of Moscow. It was an extremely powerful method, and so stupid that it worked like a dose of iron easily assimilated by an organism grown anemic. “Do you realize that this is a highly important discovery?” Up to then there had been no cure for melancholia. Medicine was powerless.

“Now melancholia, though less theatrical (and its hypocrisy multiplies its poison tenfold) is claiming more victims than the cholera. Let's pass over the fact that it kills—that, of course, is a commonplace—and kills on a scale people never realize, because its victims don't display green bellies all along the streets but pop off with great decency and modesty in secret corners where they are held (perhaps rightly) to have died a natural death. But apart from these basic conclusions, melancholia turns a certain part of society into a company of living dead, a
cemetery above the ground,
if I may put it that way; it removes the appetite and the sense of taste, makes you impotent, puts out the lights and even the sun, and in addition produces what one might call a
delirium of uselessness,
which moreover tallies perfectly with all the aforementioned deficiencies; and, even if it is not directly contagious in the sense we unconsciously give that word, does at any rate drive its victims to
excesses of negation
that may easily infect, reduce to idleness, and consequently destroy an entire country. Not forgetting the great enterprises to which in the end melancholics of the sanguine type almost always devote themselves, which drag whole populations into carnage no more savory than that of the plague or cholera.”

His little trick with the domes of Moscow wasn't bad, if they would consider it carefully. He was now perfecting it. But did they know what he had turned to in the meantime? Victor Hugo—no more, no less.

And he brought down the palm of his hand on the open book beside him near the oil lamp.

Thereupon, by a natural transition, he turned to gaze at the window, clouded and streaming with water, which shook with the assaults of the wind, and declared that it was extraordinary weather.

Angelo's boots, shirt, and suit were dry. He went off to dress in a dark corner.

“The devil take modesty,” said the man, “stay here by the fire. You're well built, what risk do you run? D'you think Mademoiselle was created and brought into the world
per studiare la matematica?
All the young are North Poles, Swedenborgs, Cromwells! And what about the infectious warmth of banquets? What do you do about that? Be Greek, my young friend! Just look at his face and those big eyes.
‘It's Greece, my mother, where the sky is so kind'!”

Angelo would have given a sharp retort, but, to his stupefaction, it was all he could do to swallow his saliva, which was copious and salty. While speaking, the man in the riding-coat had crouched down beside the young woman; he pushed aside the ashes in the hearth, uncovered a cast-iron stewpan simmering there, and raised its lid. For one who had lived on polenta and tea for a week, that powerful smell of game and wine sauce was irresistible.

“Will you act as hostess, my dear? In the sideboard—it's all right, it's on the opposite side from where our mother's darling is pulling on his breeches—there's a clean cloth, plates, and all that we need. Please set the table. We will now do honor to this hare, the product of my ancestral skill. Now that for once I have guests, I'm going to allow myself one of those Belshazzar's feasts that are milestones in a man's life, especially in the life of a hardened, solitary, and let's admit it, aging bachelor.

“Woe to the prince who, drunk at festal board,

Mocks th'oppressed and the prophet of the Lord!

Ev'n as Belshazzar, blind to fate that lowers,

    
He sees not on the echoing walls

    
The words a flaming finger scrawls

In letters all of fire 'twixt knots of flowers.”

Angelo was glad to feel the stiffness of his velvet jacket on his back once again.

“To be booted and spurred,” he thought, “is perhaps the root of all power.” But the smell of cooking carried everything before it. He even forgot to wonder if it were wise for the young woman to eat in this strange house—and eat what was clearly a heavily spiced meal. He was prey to an irresistible temptation. “Can't be helped,” he told himself happily. The boots were no longer of much use.

He went to look after the mule. He rubbed it down with wads of straw. It was one of those times when the smell of stable dung did him good. He thought regretfully of his fine uniform. He would have enjoyed giving some orders.

The violence of the storm, which thundered in every echo, drew him to the stable door. It was a deluge such as he had never before seen.

The young woman came and joined him. They were both subdued and depressed, and gazed at each other sadly.

“Still,” she said, “I liked the polenta very much. You make it so well.”

She even added: “You put so much into making it.”

“Of course,” said Angelo, “it helped us out, but…”

“It's impossible to leave here,” said she.

“We mustn't offend the man; he's certainly very kind,” said Angelo.

They ate with very powerful appetite, and without avoiding anything, neither the bread, which, through prudence, they had not touched for a long time, nor the very plain wine that the man in the riding-coat served them generously.

Angelo noticed that the young woman devoured the food brutally and could not even restrain one or two little moans. She also kept closing her eyes.

In short, it was a depressing meal for both of them, but not for their host, who kept quoting Victor Hugo on the slightest pretext.

Angelo was happy to find his little cigars quite dry in their case.

“I've still got twenty-five. My handkerchiefs much have protected the box from the rain,” he thought with sudden but keen delight. “No pleasure is ever small.”

Still, now that he was no longer hungry, he could have wished he had not eaten. He blamed the young woman for having abandoned herself to these joys as supinely as he had. He was not prepared to forget the little moans of satisfied greed that she had instinctively uttered. He saw everything in its worst light. He spoke of what was on his mind.

“That fellow's phenomenal,” said the man. “He's absolutely determined one should take an interest in his cholera. I can talk to you about the cholera and plague
ad libitum.
But, believe me, it's better to sit and look at the spring flowers in the shape of this charming person.”

“This person will only stay charming if she doesn't die of cholera,” said Angelo primly.

“You have your own way of looking at things, young man, I don't deny. But its real value is a moot question, if an old doctor may say so. Experience enables me to state that we are incapable of discerning, in the nexus of events, that which will engender good or evil. I've seen inflammation of the lungs cured by a monstrous, revolting, cancriform anthrax.

“‘Lord, Thou hast filled the world with mystery.'

“Perfect discernment, definite, concrete, never failing while we are concerned with the senses. For the senses work in the immediate present. Hence, my humility. Why must you keep worrying yourself with
future diplomacy
in which a sow may not be able to find her piglets, and wondering whether Mademoiselle will remain charming, just because she is so now. In short, what exactly do you want of me?”

“It's very simple,” said Angelo. “You're a doctor, you must know some remedy. Perhaps you even have one or two in a cupboard? We are on the road, with no resource but our desire to live. And that, I fear, isn't enough in these times. I believe that calomel, or even paregoric elixir—”

“Fudge! Calomel, paregoric elixir! What is—”

“But,” said the young woman, “in this nexus of events, which, if I understood rightly, seemed to concern me, and the obscurity of which you so pertinently emphasized, if I may put a word in, it's to ask that I may live to be a hundred, like everybody else.”

“A profound error, a profound error,” said the man … “but your interruption has already saved me from two or three rude words I had on the tip of my tongue: far be it from me to speak them here, my children!

“Fair, simple foreheads bent to hear my sigh,

Sweet mouths, enamel teeth forever asking ‘Why?'

Let's cheer ourselves up with this rum, which, mark my words, is worth all the calomels in the world.”

“Yes,” said Angelo, very seriously, “alcohol is excellent.”

“Everything is excellent,” said the man. “If I get started on the cholera you'll be astonished. You've seen it advance through the countryside and it's given you quite a lot to hide (you'll manage that easily because you're young); but to see the cholera invade a human body—that's a spectacle which induces frankness. All the same, to have even an approximate knowledge of these sumptuous Panathenæa one must first familiarize oneself with the terrain in which these festivities take place. The liver, the spleen, and the gizzard, of which I was speaking just now; it takes no time to say their names, but what are they? Above all, what are they before they're spread out on the marble for autopsy? Once they get there, they're not much use; just little bouquets, subjects of chitchat; they help mold public opinion, and satisfy convention. But at this moment, for you and me for example, and for that immense quantity (don't forget) of men and women fully alive and destined to go on living—what are they? I'm not going to give you a lecture; it's not a question of anatomy. It's a question of penetrating to where passions, errors, sublimity, and fear are concocted. An adult liver, just where it belongs in an upright, healthy lady or gentleman, is a beautiful thing! We don't need Claude Bernard in such a case. He only tells us that the liver produces sugar. Are we better seamen for knowing that the sea produces salt? If we want some idea of the human adventure, it isn't Claude Bernard we need here, it's Lapérouse, Dumont d'Urville or, better still, the real collectors of trophies! Columbus, Magellan, Marco Polo. I've cut up the human liver, lots of them, with my little knife. I've settled my glasses on my nose and said: ‘Let's have a look,' like anyone else. I've seen—what? That it could be either clogged or putrid, inflamed or obstructed, that it sometimes adhered to the diaphragm. And a lot further that got me!”

He was ready to assert, then and there, that the liver is like an extraordinary ocean whose depths cannot be sounded, leading to Malabars, Americas, sumptuous navigations through expanses hung with double blue. He had naturally been treated as unscientific, even as a downright ass, by clinical gentlemen who, like anyone else, entertained their bad temper and indignation in their livers, without for a moment trying to see that, if this lack of logic was the product of sugar, it was in any case a sugar with which it was hard to sweeten one's coffee.

Certainly he would not advise anyone, given the objective paths that experimental science was bent on pursuing, to speak of monsters, Easter Islands, tempests, sea breezes, calms, wigwams, bougainvilleas, cassia, gold, thunderbolts, albatrosses, in a word, everything that is needed to change skies and dreams, in connection with the liver. Unless they were prepared, like him, to endure sarcasm and forge ahead.

“For give me a liver and a carcass, man's or woman's
ad libitum.
I stuff one into the other, and that's enough to set off, win or lose, all the vaudeville of the contemplative or social life. I'm murdering Fualdès
1
or Paul-Louis Courrier.
2
I'm selling Negroes into slavery, setting them free, making them into sausage meat or flags for consultative bodies. I'm inventing, I'm founding the Society of Jesus and making it work, loving, hating, caressing, and killing, not to mention giving my sister in marriage to the Zouave who assures the perpetuity of the human race.”