The Horseman on the Roof (3 page)

There was a huge crop of melons in the towns and villages of this entire valley. The heat had ripened them. It was impossible to think of eating anything: bread, meat—the very idea turned the stomach. People ate melons. That took the place of drink: there were great tongues of scum hanging from the spouts of the fountains. People felt a furious longing to rinse their mouths. The dust swirling from the crumbled branches of certain trees, or rising from meadows as white as snow, where the hay dust that came from the snow-white fields was baked dry and crumbled under the weight of the air, tickled their throats and nostrils like plane-tree pollen. The little streets around the synagogue were strewn with the peel, seeds, and pith of melons. They ate raw tomatoes, too. It was the first day and, as time went on, this refuse quickly rotted. On the evening of this first day it began to rot, and the ensuing night was hotter than the day. So far, the peasants had brought into Carpentras more than fifty cartloads of big watermelons. By one in the afternoon, thirty of these carts returned empty to the melon fields just outside the walls. At the moment when, thirty leagues east of Carpentras, Angelo, half asleep, was letting his horse carry him as it pleased, through gorges sickening with heat and the smell of rotten eggs, the melon peel was beginning to litter the main street and even the approaches to the
sous-préfecture,
the library, the royal
gendarmerie,
and the Lion Hotel, the best hotel in town; fresh cartloads of melons were arriving; a doctor was taking some drops of paregoric elixir on a gram of sugar; and the
diligence
for Blovac, which was due to leave at two, did not harness its horses.

In the towns and villages, as in the open fields, the light from this heat was as mysterious as fog. It made the walls of the houses invisible from one side of the street to the other. The reflection from surfaces struck by the sun was so intense that the shade opposite was dazzling. Shapes were distorted in an air as viscous as sirup. The people walked as if they were drunk; their intoxication came not from their stomachs, in which the green flesh and water of the hastily chewed melons gurgled, but from this blurring of forms, which kept shifting doorways, windows, latches, portieres, raffia curtains, altering the height of pavements and the position of the cobbles. Added to which, everyone walked with half-closed eyes and, as with Angelo, under their lowered eyelids, dyed poppy-red by the sun, their desires came crowding, forming images of boiling water into which they stumbled.

So it came about that, in the first days, many victims passed unnoticed. Nobody bothered about them until, lacking the strength to reach their houses, they collapsed in the street. And not always even then. If they fell on their bellies, it could be supposed that they were asleep. Only if they rolled on the ground and ended up on their backs, did people see their black faces and become concerned. And not always even then, for the heat and the furious thirstiness made people self-centered. That is why, in actual fact, there were on this first day—precisely as Angelo was musing under his red eyelids about the carcasses of buzzards fallen into the branches of the tall oaks—by and large very few cases of sickness. A Jewish doctor, summoned by a rabbi who was chiefly worried about pollution, came to examine three corpses crumpled up just outside the little door of the synagogue (it was presumed that they had meant to go into the temple to be in the cool). There were only two alarms that afternoon in Carpentras, including the coachman of the Blovac
diligence.
In his case, moreover, it was difficult to distinguish the effects of absinthe from those of the heat (he was a very fat man of inordinate thirst and appetite and, after a meal at the inn—he was probably the only person to eat a midday meal in the whole town—during which he devoured a whole dish of tripe, he had drunk seven absinthes in place of coffee and liqueur).

At Orange, Avignon, Apt, Manosque, Arles, Tarascon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Aix, La Valette (though here the death of the kitchen-maid had created a long, ominous silence), Draguignan, and as far as the coast, hardly anybody yet (but only at the beginning of the afternoon, it is true; at the moment when Angelo in his sleep, shaken by the horse's gait, felt like vomiting), hardly anybody was moved to worry about a couple of deaths in each place and a few people taken more or less seriously ill, all attributed to those melons and tomatoes that were being eaten so ravenously everywhere. These sick were treated with paregoric elixir on lumps of sugar.

At Toulon, around two in the afternoon, a navy medical inspector insisted on seeing the Duke of T., the base commander. He was told to come back at seven in the evening. He acted in a very unmannerly way, and even raised his voice unsuitably in the antechamber. He was finally sent away by the midshipman orderly, who noticed that he looked haggard and seemed to have an irrepressible desire to talk, which he restrained by clapping his hand over his mouth. The midshipman said he was sorry. The doctor said: “Can't be helped,” and went off.

At Marseille there was only one question: that frightful smell of sewers. In a few hours the water in the Old Port had grown thick, dark, and the color of tar. The town was too crowded for people to notice the doctors, who began to make their rounds in cabriolets in the early afternoon. Some of them looked extremely serious. But that terrible stench of excrement gave everybody a sad and thoughtful look.

*   *   *

The road that Angelo's horse was following made straight for one of those rocks shaped like lateen sails, and began to zigzag up it toward a village concealed among the stones like a wasps' nest. Angelo felt the horse's change of gait; he woke up, and found that he was climbing among small terraced farms, held in place by little walls of white stones and bearing very mournful cypresses. The village was deserted; the walls of its narrow street were stifling; the glare of the light made one giddy. Angelo dismounted and led his horse into a sort of shelter created by a half-crumbled vault near the church. There was a violent smell of bird droppings; the ceiling of the vault was plastered with swallows' nests from which a brownish juice was oozing; but the shade, although gritty, brought peace to Angelo's burning neck, which felt almost bruised: he could not keep his hand off it. He had been there a good quarter of an hour when he saw, facing him on the other side of the street, an open door. Far back in the deep shadow, something—a bodice or a shirt—stirred feebly. He crossed the street to ask for some water. It was a woman, sluggish and sweating, and breathing with great difficulty.

She said there was no water left; the pigeons had fouled the cisterns; she doubted if it was even worth trying to water the horse. But the animal snorted in the trough, rinsed its nostrils, and blew spray at the sun.

The woman had some melons. Angelo ate three. He gave the rind to the horse. The woman had some tomatoes too, but she said that these would cause fever; they could only be eaten cooked. Angelo bit into a raw tomato, so violently that the juice spurted over his fine coat. He hardly cared. His thirst was beginning to abate a little. He also gave two or three tomatoes to the horse, which ate them greedily. The woman said that it was this kind of recklessness that had made her husband ill, and that he had run a high fever since yesterday. Angelo noticed a bed in one corner of the room, piled with a thick flowered rug and an eiderdown that barely allowed the sick man's head to protrude. The woman said that her man couldn't get warm. Which Angelo thought very odd and decidedly a bad sign. Also the man's face was purple. The woman said he had hardly any pain now, but that he had been convulsed with colic all morning and that this surely came from the tomatoes, for he had refused to listen to her and, like Angelo, had let himself go.

After resting nearly an hour in this room, into which in the end they had brought the horse too, Angelo set off again. The light and the heat were still waiting at the door. One could not imagine there would be an evening.

This was the moment when the navy medical inspector was saying: “Can't be helped!” and turning back to Toulon. It was also exactly the moment when, the Jewish doctor having rushed home, spoken to his wife, and made her pack a small bag for herself and their little twelve-year-old girl, that plump woman with her ox-eyes and eagle-nose was leaving Carpentras by the Vaison
diligence,
with instructions to push on without delay in a hired carriage as far as Dieulefit or even Bourdeaux. She turned her back on the town where her husband was staying and, laying a finger on her lips, silenced the little girl, who sat opposite her, wide-eyed and sweating. At that moment Angelo was seeing the barbaric splendor of the terrible summer in the high hills: oaks turned russet, chestnuts baked white, pastures thin and verdigris-colored, cypresses with the oil of funeral lamps gleaming in their foliage, mists of light whirling and evolving around him in a mirage, the tapestry, worn threadbare by the sun, in whose translucent web floated and quivered the ever-gray pattern of forests, villages, hills, mountain, horizon, fields, groves, and pastures, almost blotted out by air the color of sackcloth.

At this instant, when he was asking himself for the hundredth time whether evening would come—having turned a hundred times to the east, still imperturbably pure ocher—time had stopped in La Valette, where the kitchenmaid was rotting with extraordinary rapidity in front of the few inhabitants of the village and her young mistress; they had stayed out of respect for the dead girl, who was melting visibly and soaking the bed on which she had been laid out fully dressed. And while they stood fascinated by the swift work of decomposition, Angelo could see opening around him the region of chestnut woods pitted with rocks and villages of which he had caught sight, early in the morning, from the top of the first hill. But whereas in the morning, and seen from afar, that landscape had had a shape and comfortable colors, now under this incredibly violent light it decomposed into sirupy and quivering air. The trees were like smears of grease spreading their shapes and colors among the threads of a coarse-woven atmosphere; the forests were melting like lumps of fat. At the hour when, in front of the corpse, the young mistress was thinking: “Only a few hours ago I sent this girl down to buy me melons,” when Angelo was gazing eastward in the hope of seeing there at last the signs announcing this day's end, the navy medical inspector could stand it no longer. He went back up the rue Lamalgue, passed along the rue des Trois-Oliviers, crossed the Place Pavé-d'Amour, went down the rue Montauban, turned into the rue des Remparts, passed down the rue de la Miséricorde, where trickles of urine were ripening between white-hot cobblestones, descended the rue de l'Oratoire and the rue Larmedieu, across which, like a man blowing in his sleep, the harbor was exhaling the stench of its green stomach, mounted the rue Mûrier, where he was obliged to straddle the gutters from a public convenience, came out into the rue Lafayette with its plane trees, sat down at last at the terrace of the Duc d'Aumale, and ordered an absinthe. As soon as he had taken the first gulp, he told himself that he mustn't be more royalist than the king. It was time for a report: he had only to write it to be cleared of responsibility. Every year people said: “It's never been so hot.” Perhaps it was only simple dysentery. A body worn out by excesses.

“A premonitory symptom, a premonitory symptom: how can you be sure of anything in a body ruined by alcohol, tobacco, women, knocking about the world, salt provisions; what would you say it was premonitory of? All I could say was that in my opinion it was a
prodromic
symptom. The Admiral would have looked very pretty, hauled out of his siesta to be confronted with a purely prodromic symptom!
Collapsus.
Even
collapsus.
Ruined bodies in which a simple attack of dysentery may take—Asiatic forms. Far from the Ganges. India, where the heat breeds elephants and clouds of flies. The Indus Delta. Mud, 120 degrees, no shade. Water rotting like an organism. Really this town doesn't smell as bad as they say; less bad than it did six months ago. Unless it's a question of habit. Though I still smell the absinthe well enough! Maybe the stink of this town has got so bad it couldn't be worse. In which case the dysentery might pass all bounds too. Raspail! The service of humanity! Very pretty indeed, but I'm a naval doctor, and a naval doctor has superior officers. Pass the buck to the Admiral in a report that will clear me of all responsibility. Otherwise … if I were a civilian doctor … but I'm only a cog. All the same, this evening I'll go and get an appointment with the Admiral. I'd better do so: between now and then, one of the civilian doctors might very well … He wouldn't take many pains over a case of
collapsus.
Whale-blue storm in the dead end of the Gulf of Bengal. Dangerous effluvia on board the
Melpomène.
”

He ordered a second absinthe, asking if this time he couldn't have a little cold water with it. At the moment when the second absinthe was being brought to the medical inspector, at La Valette the young lady was saying to herself: “It seems a century ago!” The kitchenmaid's death had abolished time; the young lady was bemused by the blow that had abolished time for the kitchenmaid and destroyed all the roads of escape. At the same instant, more than forty leagues to the north, Angelo was penetrating ever more deeply into the high hills through gray forests of chestnut, gray heaths covered with gray centaury, under a gray sky. He felt like someone in boiling lead. The horse moved as if sound asleep. Meanwhile at Carpentras the Jewish doctor, having decided point-blank on the immediate burial of the three corpses found on the threshold of the synagogue, was going home. He had put the fear of God into the syndic. He was sure that this man would not talk, at least not for a day or two. Afterward? Well, afterward nothing on earth could stop people talking; the thing itself would talk loudly enough. The main thing was to keep the rumors down until one was sure. The reason being that one should never put any mass of people in a panic. There were plenty of other reasons too. He wondered if Rachel would find a cabriolet for hire at Vaison. He trusted Rachel; she would manage to find a cabriolet. He congratulated himself on having thought of Bourdeaux, which lies in an airy, windswept gorge, where the air keeps moving and does not linger. He was very proud of having had such presence of mind, almost instinctive.