The Horseman on the Roof (5 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Angelo awoke very late in the morning. He was astonished to find himself lying crosswise on the bed. His legs were stiff from wearing his boots all night long. His shoulders and loins ached, and at the least movement he felt as if he were putting his bones out of joint.

The horse was much worse off. Angelo had two bushels of oats poured into the manger. He sized up the hostler and entrusted the animal to him in a few words whose tenderness touched the simple man.

“You like horses,” said this man with magnificent eyes; “so do I. Give me a couple of sous and I'll pour a liter of wine over these oats. I promise not to drink any myself. Our air here is acid because we're on a mountain. People don't notice they're on it because the rise is so gentle. But the animals get out of breath, and there's nothing better than wine for setting up the lungs. If I were to give you a bit of advice, I'd say to let this black horse of yours rest all day.”

“That's what I meant to do,” said Angelo. “Indeed, I'm very tired myself and I'm quite sure you're right about this acid air of yours. I know, too, that wine in the oats does wonders. Here are two sous; no, four. It's very hot, and I don't want you to have your tongue hanging out while you're giving my horse his drink.
I'm
going back to bed.”

“Are you ill?” the man asked.

“No,” said Angelo. “Why?” He had noticed the fear that the hostler didn't even think to conceal.

“Because,” said the man, “this morning I heard something that was not very pretty. A man and a woman died last night, and our doctor sent a messenger to the
sous-préfet.
There may be danger.”

“Not with me, in any case,” said Angelo, “and here's proof. Go to your master and tell him to have a chicken roasted for me at once. I'll eat it in my room directly it's ready; let them bring me up at the same time two bottles of the wine I drank last night, and go and get me twenty cigars like this one, which I'm not going to give you because it's my last and I haven't yet had a smoke this morning.”

Angelo went up to his room and drew the shutters. He took off all his clothes, and stretched out on the bed. There was a knock: “It's me,” said the hostler, “I've brought your cigars.”

“Come in,” said Angelo.

“Well!” said the man, “this proves you're not feeling cold. The two last night kept shivering, they say. They had to be rubbed with turpentine. At the tobacconist's they say someone else has caught sick and is lying between life and death.”

“Forget about it,” said Angelo; “nobody ever dies except the sickest. Here, take this cigar and go drink your liter of wine. Don't forget to leave my horse his.”

“Don't worry about that,” said the man, “but take my advice and cover up your stomach. One should always keep one's stomach warm.”

“He's right,” thought Angelo. “I get on perfectly with mountain people. They have fine eyes and they know how to scare themselves.”

He ate his chicken, drank a whole bottle of wine, smoked three cigars, and fell asleep. He awoke at four, and peered through the chinks of the shutters. Outside there was the same great, sad light. He went down to the stable. The horse had got back its wind.

“The man I told you about is dead,” said the hostler.

“Don't worry about other people dying,” said Angelo.

“Three in one day is a lot,” said the man.

“It's nothing so long as it isn't you,” said Angelo.

“At this rate it won't take long,” said the man; “there's only six hundred of us here. You're leaving, aren't you?”

“Not tonight,” said Angelo, “but tomorrow. Do you know the Château de Ser?”

“Yes,” said the man, “it's on the other side of the mountain, beyond Noyers.”

“Is it far?”

“That depends which road. The good one goes a long way round. The other—and I must say, with an animal like yours I wouldn't hesitate—is not so good but it's much shorter. It begins just ahead of us, there, and instead of going all the way round to the Megron Gap, it climbs very gently through the beech woods and follows a little pass straight down into Les Omergues, a little hamlet of twenty families, on the other side of the main road. From Les Omergues to the Château de Ser is five leagues; take the main road to your right.”

“How far is it altogether?” said Angelo. “I don't want to start yesterday's fun all over again. It looks as if it's going to be hot again.”

“And yet you don't realize it here,” said the man. “It's hot enough to bake eggs. Take my advice; leave at four in the morning. Maybe you'll get a little air on the way up. You ought to reach the pass by ten; it's called the Redortiers Pass and overhangs Les Omergues, as I told you. From then on, at any rate from the moment you reach the main road, it's just a promenade. You can get to the château by midday.”

Angelo left at four in the morning. The beech woods of which the hostler had spoken were very handsome. They were scattered in small groves over thin fox-red pastures, rolling fields that spread out as far as the eye could see under lavender and stones. The track, soft to the horse's hoofs, wound among clumps of trees in which the slanting light of early morning opened deep gilded avenues, and a vision of enormous rooms with green vaults borne aloft on multitudinous white pillars. Around these high golden recesses the horizon slumbered under black and purple mists.

The horse moved briskly. Angelo reached Redortiers Pass toward nine. From there he could look down into the valley that he was to enter. On this side the mountain fell away steeply. At the bottom he could see square infertile fields divided by a stream, white and obviously dried up, and a main road bordered by poplars. He was almost directly overhead, some fifteen to eighteen hundred feet above the hamlet that the hostler had called Les Omergues. One thing seemed odd: the roofs of the houses were covered with birds. There were even flocks of crows on the ground, around the door sills. As he watched, these birds all flew off together and came floating upward, level with the pass where Angelo stood. There were not only crows, but also a host of little birds with brilliant plumage: red, yellow, and even, in great abundance, deep blue birds, which Angelo recognized as tits. The cloud of birds circled above the little village, then slowly settled again upon the rooftops.

Leaving the pass, the way became rough. Finally Angelo reached the fields at the bottom. Though it was still morning, the ground was already covered by a thick layer of scorching, oily air. Angelo felt again the nausea and suffocation of the day before. He wondered whether the stale, sweetish smell that he found here did not come from some plant cultivated locally. But there was nothing but centaury and thistles in the little stony fields. The silence was unbroken save for the twittering of thousands of birds; but as he neared the houses Angelo began to hear a dense chorus of asses braying, horses neighing, and sheep bleating. “Something's going on here,” thought Angelo. “This isn't natural. All these animals sound as if somebody were cutting their throats.” There was also that throng of birds, which, viewed now from a man's height, was rather frightening, especially since they did not fly away; most of the fat crows darkening the threshold of the house Angelo was approaching simply turned their heads toward him and watched him come with expressions of astonishment. The sugary smell grew stronger and stronger.

Angelo had never, as it happened, been on a battlefield. Those “killed” in the divisional maneuvers were simply fallen out and marked with a chalk cross on their coats. He had often asked himself: “What sort of figure would I cut in a war? I have courage enough to charge, but would I have courage enough to dig graves? You must be able not only to kill but to look coldly on the dead. Otherwise, you're ridiculous. And if you're ridiculous at your job, where else can you be elegant?”

Naturally he kept his seat when his horse suddenly shied as a huge clump of crows flew up to reveal a body lying across the track. But his eyes opened unnaturally wide, and his head was suddenly filled with the desolate landscape in the terrifying light; with this handful of empty houses gaping at the sun, through whose doors the birds went freely in and out. The horse was shivering between his knees. It was a woman's corpse, as could be seen from the long hair lying loose on the neck.

“Jump down!” Angelo told himself icily, but he gripped the horse between his legs with all his strength. At length the birds settled again on the back and in the hair of the woman. Angelo leaped down and ran at them, waving his arms. The crows watched him with an air of utter astonishment. They flew off heavily, and not until he was so close to them that they beat his legs, chest, and face with their wings. They stank like stale sirup. The horse, terrified by the beating wings, and even flailed by a drunken crow that blundered into its flank, turned and fled at a gallop across the fields, with stirrups flying. “That was clever of me,” thought Angelo; at the same time he looked down at the horrible face of the woman flat in the dust beside the toes of his boots.

Naturally, they had pecked out the eyes. “The old sergeants were right,” thought Angelo, “it's their favorite tidbit.” He clenched his teeth over a cold need to vomit. “So, trooper,” he went on, “that's washed you up.” He could hear his horse, which had reached the road and was galloping full tilt along it, but he would have despised himself had he run after his saddlebag. He remembered the sly winks of the old sergeants who had seen a fortnight's campaigning against Augereau. He leaned over the corpse. It was that of a young woman, to judge from the long black tresses of her bun, pulled loose by the crows. The rest of the face was horrible to see, with its pecked eye-sockets, its sunken flesh, its grimace of someone who has drunk vinegar. She smelled appallingly. Her skirts were soaked with a dark liquid that Angelo took for blood.

He ran toward the house; but on the threshold he was repulsed by a veritable torrent of birds that flew out and enveloped him in a rush of wings; their feathers struck him in the face. He was in a mad rage from understanding nothing and feeling afraid. He seized the handle of a spade leaning against the door and went in. He was immediately all but bowled over by a dog, which leaped at his stomach and would have bitten him badly had he not instinctively hurled it back with a blow from his knee. The animal was about to spring again when he hit it as hard as he could with the spade, seeing, as he did so, strange eyes coming toward him, at once tender and hypocritical, and a muzzle smeared with nameless gobbets. The dog fell, its head split open. Anger snarled in Angelo's ears, but at the same time it had lowered a troubled veil over his eyes, so that all he could see was the dog stretching out peacefully in its blood. Finally, he became aware that he was gripping the handle of his spade rather too tightly, and he could look around him at what was, luckily, an almost incredible sight.

There were three corpses, in which the dog and the birds had created considerable damage. Especially in that of a few-months-old child, lying squashed on the table like a large white cheese. The two others, probably those of an old woman and a fairly young man, were absurd, with their blue-painted clowns' heads, their disjointed limbs, their bellies bubbling over with guts, and with slashed and stiffened clothing. They were laid out on the ground amid a great confusion of pots and pans fallen from the dresser, of overturned chairs and scattered cinders. There was a sort of intolerable rhetoric in the way these two corpses grimaced and sought to embrace the earth with arms whose elbows and wrists bent the wrong way in their rotted joints.

Angelo was not so much moved as nauseated; his heart was pounding under his tongue, heavy as lead. At length he noticed a fat crow skulking in the old woman's black apron and proceeding with its meal. This so revolted him that he vomited and turned on his heels.

Outside, he tried to run, but he lurched and stumbled. The birds had once more covered the corpse of the young woman, and they did not bother to move. Angelo walked toward another house. He felt cold. His teeth were chattering. He struggled to hold himself very stiffly. He was walking on cotton wool, he could hear nothing but the buzzing in his ears, and the houses in the scorching sunshine looked to him quite unreal.

The sight of some mulberry trees, laden with leaves and still peacefully shading a little footpath, helped him back to his senses. He stopped in the shade, leaned against the trunk of one of these trees. He wiped his mustache on his sleeve. “I'm ready to fall flat on my back,” he thought. Puffs of smoke, growing colder and colder, filled his head. He tried to unblock his ears with the end of his little finger. Whenever the deafening buzz in his ears let up, he could hear, very far off and like the twittering of fat in a frying-pan, the concert of brays, neighs, and bleating. He felt ashamed, as though he had fainted on parade. Yet he was so used to talking severely to himself that he didn't lose consciousness, and it was of his full free will that he knelt, then lay down in the dust.

The blood returned to his head at once, and he could see clearly and hear with ears completely unblocked. He got to his feet: “Miserable wet hen!” he said to himself, “look what comes of your imagination and your habit of dreaming. When reality hits you, you take a quarter of an hour to get used to it. And all the while your blood treats you like a puppet. You go turning up your eyes because these people have elected to kill each other off like pigs! Unless, indeed, there's been some dirty work here, in which case you've got something to say about it! And try to say it on the right side!” He missed his saddlebag, which the horse had carried off. It had two pistols in its pockets, and he was anticipating a fight. But he went back bravely to fetch the spade, and carrying it on his shoulder, advanced toward the rest of the hamlet, whose few houses huddled together a hundred yards farther on.