The Horseman on the Roof (55 page)

He drew their attention to the following point: these examples were not selected at random. They were meant to show that what we had here was not the generator of raw deeds, but of all the combinations and embellishments: the barrel organ to drown the victim's cries; the adulterous woman full of nocturnal forests, shots and the reading of wills; in short, the whole comedy, including the one played, not in people's heads but, he had the honor to point out, in their beds.

All that remained for him was to coil up beside it a few yards of guts, not forgetting the rectum, which gives space and a lyrical quality, to set out kidneys, a spleen, and one or two intestinal accessories, and he would be able to provide the whole scale of the passions with all the flats and sharps necessary to the magnificent two-legged animal, the pre-eminent liar. Need he add that he did not attach any pejorative sense to the word “liar”? Far from it. He could be as objective as father or mother on occasion.

A parenthesis. He wished to bring out the cogency of his way of seeing things. Cholera is a disease with great depths; it does not spread by infection but by
proselytism.
Before going further, there was a most important point to consider. “Here you have a man (or woman) opened up from head to foot like an ox at a butcher shop and there, leaning over him (or her) with all his implements, the artist. He may know quite well what the man (or woman) died of. But “why,” in its deeper sense, is another matter. Another matter, which, to be brought into the open, would require knowledge of the “how”: how this man (or this woman) had lived. This man (or woman) has loved; hated; lied; suffered; and enjoyed the love, hatred, and lies of others. But no trace of all this at the autopsy. This man (or woman) has loved and I know nothing about it. Has hatred, and I don't know whom, or in what way. Has enjoyed and suffered: dust! Who can assure us that there is no connection, close or remote, between that greenish bile filling the bowels, and love? (When it is genuine, deep, everything it should be, and has lasted for ten or twenty years, even if directed at different objects, I grant you.) Who will certify that hatred and jealousy have no part in those livid purplish spots, those internal carbuncles I discover in the mucus glands of the intestines? Who will maintain that the blue thunderbolt of rapture, full of wild peacocks, has swooped down several thousand times on this organism without leaving any traces behind? Aren't they the ones I see? Close the parenthesis.

“No, mademoiselle, I have not mentioned the heart; a lady's handiwork. It is a lion we wear embroidered on our shirts. In the remains before me, there is nothing resembling it. In the place to which you point, I find a combined suction and forcing-pump that does its little job, and when it ceases one knows it. Leave St. Vincent de Paul and Co. in peace. In any case he's coming. He's coming up from the violet ocean. He's emerging from the deep, all shining with that strange sugar so dear to Claude Bernard. It's a variant of ‘
Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.
' I can synthesize for you the mercy of Augustus, more than you'll know what to do with, by means of a little gastric juice; and all Don Juan needs from me is one second of negligence as I measure out my ingredients. Free will is a chemistry manual.”

He had expected from them a burst of injured pride. None came, no, really none? “Note that your so-called humility is simply digestive sloth, by a good fire, after a lunch, in extraordinary weather (which is continuing, if I'm not mistaken; is getting more furious and beautiful).” And also—he would not conceal it from himself or from anyone—the obvious pleasure always to be had from listening to talk on this subject. “But in yourselves you are convinced you have nothing in common with these chemical compounds. You surreptitiously stroke the lion embroidered on your shirts. Besides, there's the flower of your breast underneath, and that, in both sexes, is very sensitive.”

Ah well! He would not hold it back from them any longer: “Cholera is not a disease,
it's a burst of pride.
” A burst of pride worthy of the great deeps, the vast spaces of which he had just spoken; equal to the strange possibilities of these spaces and abysses; a hypertrophy of embellishment (if the term may be used); a barrel organ worthy of an unbridled chemistry; the embroidered lion that leans on the flower of your breast and suddenly assumes substance and antediluvian dimensions. Everything ending, moreover, in ineluctable chemistry. But what lovely fireworks!

“Do you know what is the best anatomical table going? It's a map, a map of Tenderness with East Indies shown
to the life.
At one and the same moment it is noon in Paris, five in the morning in Ceylon, noon in Tahiti, and six in the evening at Lima. While a camel lies in its death throes in the dust of Karakorum, a shopgirl is drinking champagne in a café, a family of crocodiles is descending the Amazon, a herd of elephants is crossing the equator, a llama with a load of borate of soda is spitting in its driver's face on a path in the Andes, a whale is floating between Cape North and the Lofoten Islands, and it's the Feast of the Virgin in Bolivia. The terraqueous globe revolves, heavens knows why or how, in solitude and shadow.

“Another parenthesis; let's digress for a moment; let's look around to right and left. Have you ever closely examined a pin wheel? What is it? Quite simply cardboard, powder, strips of wood, and some wire. The cardboard will take twenty years, a hundred years, a thousand, to live its cardboard life. A sad thing, the life of cardboard! Whether it's blue, yellow, red, or green (colors don't bother me, I like them all) or gray, the life of cardboard isn't worth a fig. Now Champollion found cardboard in Egypt that had been living that life for three thousand years (it's still living it now in a glass case). The loves and joys of cardboard, the sufferings and woes of cardboard: can you imagine them? But set fire to the cardboard cartridge in the village square. What a sight! Everybody cries: ‘Ah! Ah!'

“
A burst of pride.
At that moment, nothing counts but the burst and the pride; everything explodes: family and fatherland. Tristan has set fire to himself, he literally bursts in his skin, and Juliet too, and Antony and Cleopatra, and the whole caboodle. Each for himself. I love you and you love me; it's very beautiful, but who will give me reasons for persisting in these compromises, these half measures and
little deaths
when, from the abysses of my liver, are emerging the best reasons in the world for
becoming.
”

An end to joking! They had paid him the honor, he believed, of asking him about cholera; he was now ready to reply.

“Enter, let us enter into these five or six cubic feet of flesh about to become cholera-stricken, flesh prey to the symptoms of that
cancer of pure reason,
flesh tired of the evasions imposed upon it by its gray matter, which with the aid of its mysteries suddenly starts to reason and to work overtime.

“What happened in the beginning? Nobody can tell us. No doubt, later on, a solitary wave, fifty to sixty feet high, seven to eight hundred miles long and advancing at the rate of two knots a second, has traversed the dead flat ocean. Before and after it, April rests blossoming on the waters. No boom, no foam; there are no breakers or ripples in these vast, fathomless expanses, which
nothing can surprise.
Just water moving over water, and no consciousness to perceive it.

“Up till now, everything's beginning, nothing has changed. Adolphe, Marie, or François are still at your side, loving you (or hating you). It's a matter of three seconds.”

He wanted, he said, to give a description, “even an approximate one, if, alas, I can't do more,” of how human consciousness finally felt when stripped of all its joys. Even the memory of them was effaced. He compared these joys to birds. The migrants first and foremost, those that delight the most diverse lands according to time and season, and especially the wonderful wild peacocks. Highflying peacocks, able to speed their fleeing arrowheads more swiftly than the grebe, the plover, the woodcock, the green duck, and the thrush.

“All this bird life, fleeing not toward the horizon but toward the zenith, fills and overflows the sky. There are so many that it is jammed with them, its high places are choked, it suffers pain.

“That is the moment when the cholera victim's face reflects that stupor said to be characteristic. His debilitated joys are terrified today by something other than their own weakness; by some unknown thing from which they flee far beyond true north and are lost to view. Heavens, Adolphe! or Marie, or François, what's wrong with you? What's wrong is that he's dying, to put it politely,
dying of pride.
Little he cares, from now on, for the flesh, or for the flesh of his flesh.
He is following his notion.

“Sometimes, though, a hand still clings to the apron, the lapel, of a friend, of a lover. But the sedentary birds: the passerines, the sparrows, tits, nightingales (think of the nightingales! What a lot of people enjoy them, especially during nights in May), all the feeders on filth, on decay, on worms and insects to be found everywhere just by hopping about—
all the sedentary joys knock off.
They find out in an instant how to organize themselves into high flying wedges. Fear gives wings and wit. The day darkens. The stupor is not enough: one has to stagger, fall on the spot: at table, in the street, in love, in hate, and attend to far more intimate, personal, and passionate things.”

He considered Angelo an all but perfect specimen of the most attentive and charming cavalier. “You have succeeded in interesting me and even, I may say, in charming me, if only by your struggle with your breeches, and not everybody could do that.” As for Mademoiselle, he had always been at the mercy of those little lance-point faces. But what was the formal end of all that? The pericardium suffused with sanguinolent fluid, the cellular tissue covered with a varicose network of veins filled with liquefied black blood, the abdomen distended, the bile black, the lungs white, the bronchial tubes red and foamy—these teach their brain more in one flash than a thousand years of philosophy. Now that is precisely the condition in which we shall find the insides of Adolphe, Marie, and François, emptied of birds. Or your own, if it takes your fancy.

“If that were all, the truth would be within reach of every purse, at the mercy of a miracle; but one can't burn just half a pin wheel, once the powder's been lit.”

Third parenthesis: Had they ever seen a volcanic eruption? Neither had he. But it was easy to imagine the moment when, daylight having been abolished by the ashes, smoke, and poison-clouds, a new light arises from the burning crater.

“Here we have the first glimmers of that light which, little by little, will reveal the other side of things. The cholera victim is no longer able to avert his gaze from it. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph themselves wouldn't wish to miss a scrap of it.”

Some details must be gone into. Had they any notion, even an elementary one, of human flesh? That wasn't surprising. Most people shared their ignorance. “It's all the more strange since everyone is continuously consuming human flesh, without even knowing what it is. Who has not seen the world change, darken or bloom, because some hand no longer touches yours, or because certain lips caress you? But they're exactly like you, they do it on faith. Not to mention one's own flesh, which one burns in shovelfuls, day in and day out, for a yes or a no.

“It's so small a matter that it's nothing.” He had only to recall how pettish they both looked out in the storm, when he caught sight of them under the ruined arch of that cellar, to be convinced that they were ready to sacrifice themselves each for the other. Come now, that leaped to the eye, and they needn't affect irony, especially Mademoiselle. “Admit you were afraid for him. People never frankly admit those things, and it's a pity, but it's a matter of habitual compromise, of half-tints, half-tones, flats and sharps.” The fact remained that they were quite simply ready to sacrifice themselves for a certain quantity of salt and water; for a plumber's job of pipes and bell-wires.

Nor would he go now into interminable considerations. This sufficed. The vanity of people and things was well known to all. Yet people continued to be surprised at the indifference shown by cholera victims to those around them and to the courage and devotion often spent upon them. “In most illnesses, the sick person takes an interest in those who are looking after him. Patients on the point of death have been seen shedding tears over their loved ones or asking for news of Aunt Eulalie. The cholera victim is not a patient:
he's an impatient.
He has just understood too many essential things. He's in a hurry to know more. That's all that interests him, and if you both caught the cholera you'd cease to mean anything to each other.
You'd have found something better.

“I regret to say this to you, in spite of the obvious signs of your deep attachment. And here we cannot avoid speaking of
jealous
care for the sick. The loved one is leaving you for a new passion, and one you know to be final. Even if he is still in your arms, he is shaking with shudders and spasms, groaning in an embrace from which you are shut out.

“That's why I told you a little while ago that your little Frenchman wasn't altogether good, or else he was too much so. I should have added that in any case he lacked elegance.
He wasn't facing reality.
He was clinging on. To everybody. What for? To end by following their example.

“But this, as always, is a matter of temperament. Let's return to our pipes, bell-wires, and other gewgaws.”

If all this had no feeling, it would be heaven. There'd be no curiosity, hence no pride; we should be truly eternal. “But lo and behold, vast balls of fire slop heavily out of the crater, incandescent clouds take the place of the sky. Your cholera victim is prodigiously interested. His one aim from now on is to know more.