The Horseman on the Roof (22 page)

“Nothing,” said Angelo.

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you afraid?”

“That depends on what.”

“Ah! So you're one of those who make their fear depend on something! And hell—are you afraid of that?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Well, isn't that enough? Will you help me, my child?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Blessed be the glory of the Lord in His Heaven! He couldn't desert me. Are you strong?”

“Less so than usual, because I haven't had enough to eat for several days, but I'm willing.”

“Don't boast. Why haven't you had enough to eat?”

“I'm lost in this town.”

“Everyone is lost in this town. Everyone is lost everywhere. So you think that eating will make you strong?”

“It seems likely.”

“It seems likely. That's fair enough. All right, come and eat.”

She gave him some goat's cheese. “These people live on nothing but goat's cheese,” said Angelo to himself.

She looked very tired. Weighty reflection made wrinkles at the top of her nose.

“Are you the messenger?” she asked.

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“I'm nothing, Mother. Don't ask.”

“Nothing? What pride!” she said.

Although sitting on a chair in that little white cell, made whiter still from the shelves laden with goats' cheeses and lit by a shaft of sunlight, she was panting as if she had been climbing a hill, and her lips blew small bubbles like the lips of certain old men when asleep.

“I shall mortify you,” she said. “Take that and put it on.”

It was a long white shirt like those worn by the corpse-carters.

“Wait till I get into my boots,” said Angelo.

“Hurry up, and take that bell.”

She was standing. She was waiting. She was leaning on a strong oak stick.

“Let's go. Come!”

She led the way down the length of the cloister. She opened a door.

“Go through,” she said.

They were in the street.

“Swing your bell and get a move on,” she said.

She added, almost tenderly: “My child!”

“I'm in the street,” thought Angelo. “I've left the roofs. That's over with!”

The reverberations of the bell raised torrents of flies. The heat was strongly sugared. The air greased the lips and nostrils like oil.

They passed from street to street. All was deserted. At certain places in the walls, gaping passages sent back echoes; at others the clang of the bell was muffled as though deep under water.

“Get a move on!” the nun kept saying. “Some elbow grease there! Ring! Ring!”

She moved rapidly, all together, like a boulder. Her jowls quivered in her wimple.

A window opened. A woman's voice called: “Madame!”

“Let me go first,” the nun told Angelo. “Stop your ringing.” On the threshold she asked: “Have you a handkerchief?”

“Yes,” said Angelo.

“Stuff it in the bell. One sound from it and I'll shake your teeth out.” And tenderly she added: “My child!”

She darted like a bird toward the staircase, and Angelo saw an enormous foot place itself on the first step.

Upstairs there was a kitchen and an alcove. Near the open window from which the call had come stood a woman and two children. From the alcove came a noise like a coffee mill. The woman pointed to the alcove. The nun drew the curtains. A man stretched out on the bed was grinding his teeth in a ceaseless chewing that drew back his lips. He was also shivering so that his maize mattress crackled.

“There, there,” said the nun. And she took the man in her arms. “There, there,” she said, “a little patience. Everybody gets there; it's on its way. We're here, we're here. Don't force yourself, it's coming by itself. Gently, gently. Everything in its own time.”

She stroked his hair with her hand.

“You
are
in a hurry, you
are
in a hurry,” she said, and she pressed her huge hand down on his knees to stop him from thrashing about in the wooden bed. “Just look what a hurry he's in! You'll get your chance. Don't worry. Keep calm. Everyone has his turn. It's coming. There, there, that's it. It's your turn. Pass, pass, pass.”

The man gave a twist and lay still.

“We ought to have massaged him,” said Angelo in a voice he didn't recognize.

The nun sat up and turned to him.

“What's this about massaging?” she said. “So you're a freethinker, eh? You'd like to forget the Gospel, eh? Ask that lady for a bit of soap, and a basin, and towels.”

She was rolling up her sleeves over her fat pink arms.

“Ask her,” she said, “speak to her, make her move, stop her from standing by that window. Make her light a fire and boil some water. Come on, let's get moving if you please.”

She was round and heavy and homely. She went over to the hearth and broke some wood across her knee. She had left the alcove open. The man was stiff on his bed.

The woman never stirred.

“Come on,” said the nun.

The woman took a step toward the hearth, near which the nun was kneeling. The woman pushed the children slowly away from her apron. She stroked their cheeks furtively with a gesture that seemed to come from outside time. She came and knelt by the hearth. The nun handed her the wisp of paper and the tinder.

“Light it,” she said, and stood up.

This nun was astonishing; she had an extraordinary way with her. Where she was, all became orderly. She came in and the walls held no more tragedies. The corpses were natural and, down to the tiniest detail, everything immediately fell into its proper place. She did not need to speak; it was enough for her to be present.

Innumerable times Angelo was thunderstruck by this. He never got used to it. He entered behind her (she always insisted on going first) into charnel houses where an almost ludicrous domesticity was mingled with the terrifying appearances of the curse that preceded time. The last grimaces of people dying in cotton nightcaps and long underpants were widening over lips distended by false teeth, and prophetic mouths; the wails of weeping women and men had recaptured the breathless cadences of Moses. The corpses continued to relieve themselves into shrouds now made out of any odds and ends, old window curtains, sofa covers, tablecloths and even, in wealthy houses, bath covers. Chamber pots full to the brim had been placed on the dining-room table, and people had gone on to fill dishes, washbasins, and even flowerpots, hastily emptied of their green plants—fern or dwarf palm tree—with that mossy, green and purple fluid that smelled terribly of the wrath of God. The survivors clung to their own lives with puppet gestures. The inward neighing that some could not even restrain, as they turned away from the one who to them had been dearest in the world to gaze toward the open sky of the window (though it was chalk, torrid, nauseating), was of a magnificent grandeur, uttered as it was in these bedrooms or on the thresholds of alcoves where they had always been, up to now, the good father, good husband, virtuous wife, obedient son and child of Mary. The eye of Cain in the peaceful face of a haberdasher, whose jowls bore whiskers down to the collar; the royal-blue breasts of some lovely young woman still warm, still kicking and shuddering more than an hour after her death, who had to be wrapped up like an eel; the muscles that broke, making the thighs resound like violin-bodies; the spurts of dysentery on the flowered wallpaper or among the cinders of the hearth, or into kitchen utensils, on quilts, on the polished floors, or even streaming full into the face of the loved one; the nakedness whose last details it was impossible to hide, what with the kicking, shuddering, tremors, convulsions, moans, cries, hands clenched on the sheets, settled permanently in the homes of the bourgeois and the peasants, who are still more prudish, under the eyes of the children (the children were very interested in all these phenomena and took their silence, their great astounded eyes, their iron rigidity with them everywhere): a new order (called for the moment disorder) was abruptly organizing life within new horizons. Very few were still able to believe in the virtues of the old cardinal points. They no longer kissed the children. Not to protect them; to protect themselves. Moreover the children all had a rigid bearing, monolithic, with wide eyes, and when they died, it was without a word or a groan and always far from their homes, burrowing into a dog kennel, or into a rabbit warren, or hutches, or curled up in the big baskets used for brooding turkeys.

Often the nun went hunting them. She would open the chicken runs and search. She would kick the sides of the kennels. The dog would put out a snarling head. She would seize it coolly by the collar. The child was generally at the back. She dragged it out without undue ceremony, but carried it off exactly as a mother should carry a child. The little corpses were like the corpses of the grownups, that is to say, absurdly indecent,
crying out the truth,
with their nails tearing at their bellies, their capital of filth. But in the nun's arms they became once more poor little children dead of a terrible colic.

At the moment when people were asking whether one should still believe in anything, if she arrived the walls became walls again, the rooms rooms, with all their stalactites of memories intact, their power to shelter intact. Death—oh! well, yes, but it instantly lost its diabolical side. It was no longer growing, threatening to break totally free; it no longer crossed any but reasonable frontiers; one could no longer permit oneself those spasms of selfishness in which, most of the time, the living reproduced, by a sort of Satanic mimicry, the agonized spasms of which they had been the spectators.

A few very simple gestures sufficed. The nun would have been much surprised had she been told that two thirds of her worth came from her physical appearance, her large pot belly, the pout of her large lips, her large head, her large hands, her large-woman's placidity, her large feet under which the floors always shook a bit. It was this bulk that authorized miracles. Had she been more agile she would have been able to make twenty gestures, among which the good one might have passed unnoticed; fat, clumsiness, weight allowed her to make only one. It was the good one. And there it was, as indisputable as the nose in one's face. People were obliged to believe in its virtue, for it was an old and ordinary gesture that they themselves had made a hundred thousand times, and of which the consequences were certain.

She would arrive and there would be sometimes one, sometimes two corpses stretched out in those appalling comic attitudes, the thighs wide apart, the hands dug into the belly, the head thrown back in that great white and purple laugh of the cholera-stricken. Sometimes, even, these corpses seemed to have bounded across the room and collapsed over the unlikeliest pieces of furniture. Hidden in corners or, preferably, in window recesses (the desire to flee), there would be a man or a woman transformed into a dog, groaning, coughing, barking, ready to fawn on the firstcomer; one or two children, inflexible as justice, with eyes like eggs; and she would come in. Often, when the sight was so horrible that it rasped the skin, this is what she would do; she would sit down, put the coffee mill between her thighs, and begin to grind coffee. Instantly, the man or woman stopped being a dog. With the children, it was at once more tricky and more easy: they would be immediately attracted by the nun's enormous bosom; then with a very simple gesture she would push her pectoral cross aside.

At other times (but always with exact and unerring science) there would be other solutions than coffee mills. She would enter one of those bourgeois houses where the kitchen is out of sight, where all the furniture is under dust sheets. These were always places where the corpses were extraordinarily pungent. Here, most of the time, the sick people had not had much care lavished on them. Generally no one had had the courage to keep them in bed; they had been left to get up and wander about; the tendency had been to flee from them. The chairs were overturned as if after a fight, the tables no longer stood directly under the chandelier, the music stand was smashed; people seemed to have been bombarding each other with waltz music; the dead man had streamed in all directions before collapsing over the piano.

The moment Angelo came through the door, he would say to himself: “And here, what is there to do?” Over the nun's shoulder he saw this bourgeois interior plowed up for a terrible sowing and the survivors huddled into a corner of the drawing-room, like little monkeys in the grip of the cold.

Immediately, the nun would pull the table back to its place, pick up the chairs, straighten the armchairs, collect the sheets of music. She would open the door into the bedroom. She would ask: “Where are the clean sheets?” These words were magical. They gave her the most lightning victories. No sooner spoken than the rattle of a key-ring would be heard from among the huddling monkeys. That sound itself had a virtue so powerful that a woman would emerge from the huddle and become immediately a woman and immediately mistress of the house. Some of these women whose faces were more particularly smothered in bedraggled hair would still totter a bit, and even, in their giddiness, hand her the keys. But the nun never took them. “Come and open the cupboard yourself,” she said. After that, they would tidy up the bed. It was only once the bed was made that they would deal with the corpse, and then thoroughly. But already the wheels of the house were turning once again, and already death could strike another diabolical blow in this family without destroying anything essential.

She was uneducated. She had been married young. Widowed young, she had entered the Presentines' convent, to do the heavy work. She scraped carrots, peeled potatoes, followed the lines with her finger when she read. She was not one of the leading spirits of the sisterhood. Indeed, she was only admitted to it as an exception and thanks to the protection of a benefactress. When the convent had moved to escape the contagion, her only instruction had been to look after some provisions that could not be taken away immediately.