The Horseman on the Roof

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Notes

Copyright

 

TO

THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND

Charles Bistési

AND

to Suzanne

CHAPTER ONE

Dawn found Angelo mute and yawning but awake. The brow of the hill had protected him from the slight dew that falls in these regions in summer. He rubbed his horse down with a handful of heather and rolled his saddlebag.

The birds were stirring in the valley into which he descended. It was not cool, even in the hollows still covered by the darkness of the night. The whole sky was lit by shafts of gray. At last the red sun, smothered in a thicket of dark clouds, emerged from the forests.

Despite the already stifling heat, Angelo longed for something hot to drink. As he descended into the middle valley separating the hills on which he had spent the night from another, higher and wilder range, two or three leagues ahead of him, where the first rays of the sun were burnishing the bronze of the tall oak woods, he saw a small farm building by the roadside and, in the field, a woman in a red skirt, picking up the washing that she had spread out in the evening dew.

He drew near. Her shoulders and arms were bare above a coarse linen bodice, which also displayed enormous, deeply sunburned breasts.

“Excuse me, madame,” he said, “but will you let me have a little coffee? I'll pay for it.”

She did not answer at once, and he realized that he had adopted too polite a manner. “That ‘I'll pay for it' is clumsy,” he thought.

“I can give you some coffee,” she said; “come in.” She was tall, but so nimble that she swung around slowly in one place, like a ship. “The door's over there,” she said, pointing to the end of the hedge.

In the kitchen there were only an old man and a great many flies. But on the low stove with its roaring fire, alongside a caldron of bran for the pigs, the coffeepot emitted such a good smell that Angelo found the soot-blackened room altogether charming. Even the pig-bran spoke a language of magnificence to his stomach, poorly satisfied by a supper of dry bread.

He drank a bowl of coffee. The woman planted herself in front of him, giving him a good view of her brawny shoulders, full of dimples, and even of the huge pink blossom of her breasts. She asked him if he was an official gentleman. “Careful!” thought Angelo. “She's regretting her coffee.”

“Oh no,” he said (taking care not to say “madame”), “I'm in business at Marseille; I'm going to see clients in the Drôme and I thought I'd get some fresh air on the way.”

The woman's face grew more kindly; especially when he asked the way to Banon. “You'd like an egg,” she said. She had already pushed the caldron of bran to one side and put the frying-pan on the fire.

He ate an egg and a piece of bacon with four slices of coarse, extremely white bread, which seemed to him as light as feathers. The woman was now bustling maternally around him. To his surprise he didn't mind the smell of her sweat at all, nor even the thick tufts of red hair in her armpits when she raised her arms to adjust her bun. She refused payment and even began to laugh when he insisted, roughly pushing his purse away. Angelo felt painfully awkward and ridiculous in her presence; he would have liked to be able to pay and depart with that dry, detached air which was his timidity's usual defense. He rapidly murmured his thanks and pocketed his purse.

The woman showed him his road rising on the other side of the valley into the oak woods. Angelo walked his horse for a while in silence along the little plain, through bright green fields. He was under a spell from the food, which had left a most pleasant taste in his mouth. At length he sighed and set his horse to trot.

The sun was high; it was very hot but there was no violence in the light. It was white and so diffused that it seemed to butter the earth with dense air. Angelo had been climbing for a long time through the oak forest. He was following a narrow road covered with a thick layer of dust, and each step of his horse raised a smoke that did not settle again. Through the ragged and withered undergrowth he could see, at each turning, how the signs of his passing remained upon all the windings of the road below him. The trees brought no coolness. Instead, the small hard oak leaves reflected the heat and light. The shade of the forest dazzled and stifled.

On these banks, burned to the bone, a few white thistles cracked as his horse went by, as though the metal earth all around were vibrating under the iron-shod hoofs. There was nothing but this little thorny noise, crackling with extreme clarity above the sound of the hoofs, dulled by the dust and a silence so total that the presence of the great mute trees became almost unreal. The saddle was scorching. The movement of the girths raised a lather of sweat. The animal sucked its bit and from time to time cleared its throat by shaking its head. The steady rising of the heat hummed like a boiler mercilessly stoked with coal. The trunks of the oaks cracked. Through the undergrowth, dry and bare like a church floor, flooded by the white light that had no sparkle, but a blinding powderiness, the horse's gait set long black rays slowly turning. The road, hoisting itself in stiffer coils up over ancient rocks covered with white lichens, sometimes headed straight into the sun: then, in the chalk sky, there opened a sort of abyss of unbelievable phosphorescence, and out of it came a breath of furnace and fever, sticky, the slime and fat of it visibly quivering. The huge trees dissolved within this dazzle; great stretches of forest engulfed in the light showed only as a vague foliage of cinders, shapeless forms, almost transparent and suddenly coated by the heat with a slow sway of shimmering viscosity. Then the road would turn westward, instantly shrunken to the dimensions of the mule track that it had become; it would be hemmed in by living, violent tree trunks supported by pillars of gold, with branches twisted by crackling twigs of gold, and still leaves all gilded like little mirrors set in thin gold threads that closely framed their every outline.

*   *   *

After a while, Angelo was surprised at seeing no life except that of the light. There should have been at least some lizards and even crows, who enjoy this burning chalky weather and keep watch from the tips of branches as they do in times of snow. Angelo remembered the summer maneuvers in the Garbia hills; he had never before seen this crystalline landscape, this effect of a glass globe over a clock, this mineralogical phantasmagoria (even the trees were faceted and full of prisms like rock crystal). He was stunned by the proximity of these inhuman caverns.

“I've hardly,” he thought, “left the bare shoulders of that woman who gave me coffee! And here is a complete world more remote from those bare shoulders than the moon or the phosphorescent caves of China, and quite capable, too, of killing me. Well,” he continued, “this is the world I live in. At Garbia I had my little staff and I had to keep my mind on the maneuvers if I didn't want a dressing-down from General San Giorgio with his beautiful mustaches and cowherd language. All that protected me from the world and saved me from seeing these groves of tetrahedra. Which is perhaps the last word on the subject of these sublime principles: simply to provide oneself with a small staff and a foul-mouthed general, through terror of realizing that one is encased under a domed glass clock-cover in which a slight touch of the light may kill one. There are warriors of Ariosto in the sun. That is why anybody who counts tries to fortify his importance with sublime principles.”

But still these baffling and tenuous trees, which must, he reckoned, weigh the least of them a hundred tons and yet hid and slid in the light with the agility of trout, continued to worry him. He was impatient to reach the top of the hill in the hope of catching a breath of wind.

There was none. It was a heath on which the light and heat pressed more heavily than ever. One could now see the whole of the chalk sky in its utter whiteness. The horizon was a distant stirring of faintly blue hills. The part of it toward which Angelo turned was filled by the gray bulk of a long mountain, very high though hummocky and rounded. The country in between bristled with tall rocks like lateen sails faintly tinged with green, with villages clinging like wasps' nests to their edges. The slopes, from which these rocks rose almost bare, were clothed with brown forests of oak and chestnut. At their feet, with capes and gulfs clearly distinguishable, ran little valleys, either yellow or even whiter than the sky. Everything was aquiver and distorted by intense light and oily heat. Clouds of dust, smoke, or mist, exhaled by the earth under the beating of the sun, were beginning to rise here and there, from stubble where the harvest had already been gathered, from little flame-colored hayfields, and even from the forests, where one could feel the heat frying the last fresh blade of grass.

The road would not make up its mind to go down again, and ran along the crest, which itself was very broad, almost a plateau, undulating and embedded to right and left in the gently sloping flanks of higher hills. At last it entered a forest of small white oaks barely eight or nine feet high, with a deep carpet of savory and thyme. The horse's hoofs kicked up a thick scent, which, in the motionless, heavy air, eventually became sickening. Here there were, however, some traces of human life. From time to time an old track covered with chalk-white summer grass branched off from the road and, twisting at once into the thick of the wood, concealed its course, but at least intended to lead somewhere. Finally, through the stocky trees, Angelo saw a sheepfold. Its walls were the color of bread, and it was roofed with
lauze
—enormous flat stones of great weight. Angelo turned into the lane. He thought he might find a little water there for his horse. The sheepfold, whose walls were buttressed like a church or a fort, had no windows; nor, since it had its back to the road, was any door visible. In spite of his rank having been “bought like two cents' worth of pepper” (as he used to say bitterly in fits of honesty), Angelo was a genuine soldier, and he had the instincts of the forager. He noticed that, as he drew near the sheepfold, it echoed to his horse's hoofs. “It's empty,” he thought, “and has been so for a long time.” Indeed, the long troughs of polished wood resting on stones were dry and white as a skeleton. But the wide-open doorway gave out a breath of coolness and a delicious smell of old sheep's-dung. As he moved toward it, however, Angelo heard a humming, almost a roar, coming from inside, and saw in the shadows a sort of heavy drapery moving. The horse understood, a second before he did, that the sheepfold was inhabited by swarms of wild bees: it turned about and made off at a sharp trot toward the wood. A bend in the lane brought him around to a distant view of the front of the building standing on a slight elevation above the short white oaks. The bees had come out in thick, floating ribbons. In the light they were black, like lumps of soot. They streamed from the broad doorway and from two oval windows above it, as though from the jaw and eye-sockets of some old skull left lying in the woods.

For a long time the need to find water kept growing more and more urgent. The track kept on along the parched crest. In his morning high spirits Angelo had forgotten to wind his watch. He reckoned he must have covered at least four leagues. He tried to tell the time from the sun, but there was no sun, only a blinding light coming from all parts of the sky at once. At last the track began to go down and suddenly, rounding a bend, Angelo felt on his shoulders a coolness that made him look up; he had just entered beneath the bright green foliage of a tall beech, and beside the beech stood four huge, glittering poplars. He wouldn't believe in them until he heard the rustling of their leaves, which, despite the absence of wind, trembled and made a sound like water. Behind these trees lay yet another stubblefield, not merely harvested but cleared of shocks and already showing some furrows that had been opened just that morning. As Angelo automatically reined in his horse, which was champing and straining at the bit, he observed that the field continued past a group of willows. And through these willows he saw three donkeys approaching, harnessed to a plow. His horse carried him at a brisk trot toward a grove of sycamores, poplars, and willows, and he hardly had time to notice that the plowman was wearing a robe.