The Horseman on the Roof (32 page)

In spite of all the imagining that these smells prompted, they were not frightening; or at least it was not of them that people were afraid. The plaster ceiling began rapidly to grow old; fragments of the plaster fell away, revealing above it a sort of gloomy loft. The day gradually darkened. At length, flashes began to flit across it, but they were abortive. This was no frank, clear lightning; it was a series of candle-flickers: a yellowish, bilious flame ricocheting indefinitely with a weak rattling noise, before going out without a thunderclap. It spread a strong smell of phosphorus.

In contrast, one day, and without anyone noticing the slightest flash, a sudden clap of thunder was heard, sharp as a hammer-blow. From then on, these hammer-blows, which seemed to be bashing something in, were heard unceasingly. The rain began as a mere fine warm muslin, lasting for several days. Then its streaks became visible. For two or three days more, without a break, it drew its streaks closer and closer together until it took all the color out of the trees. Finally it fell in slabs, in endless slabs so thick and heavy that the earth echoed dully to their thudding.

The camps were all thrown into confusion and plowed up by torrents. The huts fell in. At every moment families had to be helped as they waded about, trying to save their belongings. There was no shelter anywhere. The highest rocks of the hill were streaming with black water. The workmen of the militia in blouses and leather belts threw themselves into the general rescue work. They were to be seen everywhere. They busied themselves on every side with futile generosity. These men, always weighed down with guns, wet babies, and righteousness, began to get on Angelo's nerves.

“And yet,” he said to himself, “what have you to reproach them with? On the other hill over there, where there's no militia organized, who is troubling about rescue work? And how does one man alone in some wild corner save his family?”

The rain crumbled down in heavier and heavier slabs for about forty hours; without fury; with a sort of quiet peace. Finally there was a magnificent clap of thunder, that is to say, it made a fine red rent and was so resounding that it unblocked every ear. The sky opened. On every side of the rent, giddy, many-storied castles of cloud rose up and the sky appeared, as azure as one could wish. As the cloud castles drew apart and revealed more and more sky, the azure changed to gentian blue and a whole monstrance of sunbeams began to wheel at the farthest edges of the clouds.

The women took off their bustles. Being of cotton, instead of horsehair like those of ladies, they had become swollen with water. They also had to let fall their skirts, too ample, heavy and muddy. In their underskirts they looked very republican, except for their faces, which remained very ladylike under their hair, not a lock of which hung loose. They were ashamed of moving their legs with ease.

Four of five old men whom the rain had pierced to the bone died almost at once. They could not be got warm again in spite of great fires, which yielded more smoke than flame.

The valley below was unrecognizable. The fields had vanished under many feet of flowing water and foam. Nothing was left of the places where the infirmary tents had stood. On the flank of the other hill, right at the edge of the great torrent that had flooded the valley, a small group of black men was busy like a pinch of ants around some whitish debris. Above them, the olive orchards were deserted. A few little black men were also swarming higher up, at the edge of the pine woods.

All the water from the valley was gathering at the outskirts of the town and rushing through one of its gates. The clouds remained gray for some days, then turned blue.

Two children died. It was from a throat disease. The women began murmuring that there was going to be an epidemic of croup. It worried them badly. Their faces grew beautiful with their fierce eyes, and they kept their children hugged to their bosoms. But there were only a few mild and smothered complaints. The militiamen had managed to dry some wood. They had taken no rest, never taking off their wet blouses and trousers, and all their equipment. A few fires were got going, and those who were shivering were brought to them.

The men in blouses also crouched near the fires. They took their guns to pieces, dried the parts, greased them, assembled them again, tightening the screws with the points of their knives. There was a sort of arms inspection.

“Are you mixed up with this too?” Angelo asked Giuseppe.

“I'm mixed up with everything,” replied Giuseppe, with some pride.

The clouds became dark blue. They were piled along the edge of the horizon. At length they took on a violet, then a wine-red hue that attracted every eye. There was a slow movement going on among them: it caused the crumbling-away of the cloud banks beyond the hills, freeing more and more of the sky, in which there spread an azure of unimaginable purity. Finally, without any question of a sunset glow, there arrived, due south, a red cloud, exactly the red of a poppy.

The sun was dazzling. The least puddle of dirty water began to smoke. The days were torrid, the nights cold.

There was a case of lightning cholera. The victim was carried off in less than two hours. He was a militiaman. He was on guard duty. He first had what seemed to be a sudden lack of confidence in his gun. He put it down against a tree. Immediately afterward the stages followed each other in quick and terrible succession. His convulsions, then his agony, preceded by cyanosis and an appalling coldness of the flesh, cleared a space all around him. Even those trying to help him recoiled.

His face was a masterpiece of cholera symptoms. It was a
tableau vivant
depicting death and its sinuous approach. The attack had been so swift that for a moment the signs of a stupefied astonishment still lingered there, childlike, but death evidently faced him at once with so horrifying a display that his cheeks lost their flesh while one watched, his lips drew back over his teeth for an eternal laugh; finally he gave a cry that put everyone to flight.

Up until that moment the victims had never cried out. They had been worn threadbare before death; it came upon bodies ready for anything. From now on, it struck them like a bullet. Their blood decomposed in their arteries as quickly as the light decomposes in the sky when the sun has fallen below the horizon. They saw night coming and began to cry out.

From then on, the cry rang out day and night. All activity was extinguished. Nobody did anything any more: except wait. For the bullet struck to right, to left, as though fired by a sniper with his rifle propped. At one moment it was that man walking along the path, who bowled over like a hare; at another that woman blowing on her fire, who would fall with her face in the embers. There would be three, four, at the foot of a tree, a family; the father would cry out; the others would have to get up and run away. They would abandon him, for he was already dying, past anything anyone could do. The wife, the children, would run like partridges, would stop panting behind a bush. And sometimes the sniper would make a dead set against this covey. Almost before they recovered breath, the mother or one of the children would cry out, and again the skirts would flap in flight, leaving the new victim on the ground, who would thrash anew as his nerves distended.

One saw more and more gunless militiamen, their guns left lying on the grass or against a tree.

The faces of these dead had their eyes half closed under heavy, weighted lids; a faint color, but fixed like a stone, shone from between the lashes. The sickness, which devoured the flesh like lightning, left the color of the eye intact, visible through the opening. With some young women, of whom nothing remained but a pallid skin mottled underneath by patches of corrupted blood, there was little identifiable but long, curved eyelashes leaning over a blue pool, an emerald, a topaz of the purest water. The cheeks were violet and the lips black, tight-shut but always letting through the tip of a tongue, poppy-red, startling, nauseatingly obscene, clashing violently with the eye half open over its color; to which, when one was obliged to look at one of these faces, one returned, in spite of the contemptuous, proud, haughty quality of this still gaze, seemingly fixed on distant horizons, in a body lying in the mud and sometimes already verminous and rotted. For it was again very hot during the day.

Angelo tried to tend some of these stricken people. The workmen talked of the Raspail method and had great faith in camphor. But they regarded it more as a prophylactic and carried little bags of it hung round their necks like scapularies. Four or five brave and steady men joined Angelo. In the short time they had between the moment of attack and that of death, they tried to make the sick person drink infusions of sage. But as soon as the bullet had struck them, the dying passed into such a delirium that they twisted with convulsions like osiers. Strait jackets of a kind had to be made, into which they were laced. Each time, Angelo took the victim's head in his arms, to raise it while someone tried to force the neck of the bottle of infusion between the clenched teeth. Bleeding was also prescribed. But these bleedings, carried out with clumsily handled pocket knives on tranced bodies, were appalling butcheries. And besides, neither sage, knives, nor camphor were any help.

Yet Angelo continued to jump to his feet as soon as he heard a cry. (One day he ran in this way, only to find four or five children trying to launch a kite.) He had also got into the habit of watching those who suddenly raised a hand to their eyes, for the attack often began with a dazzling light; or those who stumbled as they walked, for sometimes it was a dizziness, a sort of drunkenness, that heralded death.

“I don't like this at all,” said Giuseppe. “With their mania for not staying where they are, people may come and die next to us. Really, they've no shame. Since it takes them all of a sudden, why don't they stay in their own places? They might easily fall on top of Lavinia or you or me. Or anyhow, soil our patch of grass. They've no business playing about with this disease.”

Giuseppe folded his arms over his chest. From time to time he also crossed the first and second fingers of his left hand and, with his interlaced fingers, touched his own, Lavinia's, and Angelo's temples.

“I don't like what you're doing, either,” he went on. “Let them die quietly, don't get mixed up with them. What are they to you? I'm your foster-brother and Lavinia's my wife, not to mention that she played with us as a child. And by meddling with people who mean nothing to you, you risk bringing us the plague and killing us all.”

In the end he could hardly contain his fear. Indeed he made no effort to conceal it, and said that it was natural.

He even spoke threateningly and so close that Angelo, tired of having his face breathed into, pushed him away rather violently.

They fought. Lavinia watched them with great interest. Some of Giuseppe's blows, had they not been promptly parried, would have been almost mortal. But Angelo made his nose bleed, and Giuseppe lay down, clawed at the grass and earth, foamed at the mouth, and wept with little childish sobs. Lavinia was very pleased, but she cajoled him; he kissed her hands. She made him sit up. Angelo was looking with horror at his bloody fists. They hastily embraced, all three of them.

So many were dying that people wondered whether it would not be better to return to the town. Several workmen from the tanneries argued that the oak bark macerating in their vats would be a better protection than the country air, and went off with their families. But the day after their departure a small boy came back and said that the others had all died as soon as they arrived. One woman also survived and got back to the hill that afternoon. She described how all the streets were covered with gravel and mud, following the recent heavy rains, which had driven torrents through the town, and how, at the very moment the men had begun to shovel this silt, they had fallen like flies, then the women and children after them, all in the space of a few hours and without leaving them even the time to go into their houses. She had lost her two sons, her husband, and her sister, and the little boy who had arrived before her was now also alone.

Things were no better on the hill opposite. All that could be seen there now was a few small groups, widely separated from one another and not stirring. In the valley between, the torrent had carried away the tents of the infirmaries and literally flayed the fields till the bones showed. It was filled with that dread poisoned silt, to judge from the mists steaming up from below. But an appalling thing was also happening in it. Ever since the start of the epidemic, a large number of the dead from the town had been buried there in enormous trenches. The dead had been covered and the trenches filled in with quicklime. These trenches were naturally bound to be simmering with the juices of the corpses, but now, soaked by the rain, they were boiling with great bubbles like filthy soup. One could hear them sizzling, see their steam, smell their stench.

“Let's go,” said Giuseppe; “we must get away from here. Let's move farther on, into the woods.”

But several militiamen came to see him and had a long conversation with him. They were old men of sixty to seventy; they had kept their guns. Almost every one had lost his entire family, and they were in the habit, quite recently acquired, of looking unblinkingly at people for a long time. A young man of about twenty accompanied them, likewise utterly cleaned out, having lost a young wife whom he had only married three months before.

Giuseppe made every possible and imaginable gesture of entreaty and talked most of the time with his left hand before his mouth. He went particularly for the young man, who seemed to have considerable influence over the others. This man kept looking at Lavinia and speaking in acid tones. Several times he used the word “duty.” Each time the elderly orphans approved.

“They're mad,” said Giuseppe, “they're forcing me to stay. But you wait. I told them a thing or two they won't forget.”

In fact, only one night went by. They came back the next day. The young man avoided looking at Lavinia. He said that they had had second thoughts, that in fact it was perhaps better to go a bit deeper into the woods. He added that he and the five or six with him were volunteering to stay and do what they could, maintain order, look after people a bit. Giuseppe congratulated them with great warmth and spoke of the people, of their qualities, of the example he was setting, of its unparalleled value “in the service of the idea.” He made a few gestures beyond the gestures of entreaty.