The Horseman on the Roof (53 page)

“That made it possible for me to live at Aix, in the house of a good woman who professed, I think, to keep house for a priest. It was a house with two doors, three if you count the one into the garden. But I preferred to use this garrison town to keep my wrist supple. My mother sent me money regularly through Marseille. I bought what I needed. I took a fencing-master and went to the school.

“I imagine you've kept your musket ball in its silk bag, so you won't laugh if I tell you that in my purse I have an old envelope containing some bits of dried grass, like tea: they're my little bunch of daffodils from Cezana. I like that.”

“So you didn't move in good society?”

“I moved in excellent society, particularly that of Alexandre Petit—they called him ‘Alexander the Little.' That was their nickname for a lanky old stick who handles a saber like a god. He and I taught each other a lot of things.”

“
Good
society would also have taught you some very curious and useful things, especially about the Gordian knot that strangles men of liberal sentiments. Often it's not a bad thing to entrust it to cool fingers; they dispatch more swiftly than the saber. There are some very pretty women in Aix.”

“I sometimes took part in fencing matches in front of them.”

“You must have been their darling.…”

“Yes, they made a fine tapestry. I like tapestries. I've often dreamed of being condemned to death by a potentate in a ceremonial chamber with walls tapestried from, say, the cantos of Ariosto. The assassins are behind the door and as I advance towards them I gaze at the woolen smile of Angelica or the tender eyes of a cross-stitch Bradamante. But the sentence of death is the essential thing.”

“We've drunk too much,” said the young woman. “Another five minutes and we shall be talking in verse. Don't you think we should try to sleep?”

They chose two rooms with facing doors.

Angelo used his drunken energy to make a square bed in his room as in barracks.

He woke up in the middle of the night. The rain was raging; he heard the rattling of the windows and the tumultuous stir of the woods. Thunder rolled in the distance. He remembered the young woman.

“We got into this house easily,” he thought, “and others may do the same. We're not the only ones on the roads, and in weather like this people take shelter anywhere. They might come ferreting in here. If she saw a man come into her room, especially one got up like the clarinetist, she'd be frightened.”

He unmade his square bed, dragged the mattress into the corridor without a sound, and lay down outside the young woman's door. Once sure he was properly across it, he fell asleep.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Angelo had the wit to remove his paraphernalia very early. When the young woman entered the room in which they had spent the evening, he had already made the tea and some polenta, this time salted.

They found the mule still in the stable. The animal was in a good temper. It was no longer raining, but the weather remained threatening and bent on every sort of caprice. The clouds were rolling up from the south in tremendous haste. The woods, stripped of many of their leaves, were almost transparent, as in winter. It was rather cold.

“Let's go,” said Angelo, “but let's get this clear first: you're to obey me. Put on my cloak and get onto the mule. In an hour's time you'll walk for a bit, and so on. Chilled sweat means instant cholera. Believe me. You must take care of yourself.”

The young woman seemed preoccupied and almost ashamed. She made no bones about wrapping herself in the big cloak and mounting the mule. Angelo took its bridle.

The track climbed up some rather steep slopes and finally emerged at the edge of the woods, onto a wide dark plateau over which the clouds were brushing closely. Here the wind blew in gusts through an icy mist. Only the clouds of spray chased by the squalls over the scrubland gave any life to these desert wastes.

Angelo turned up the collar of his velvet jacket. His thick clothes covered him well.

“Long live Giuseppe and Lavinia,” he thought; “they foresaw everything. That's true love.”

For a heart like his, smitten with liberty, these inhuman solitudes had a certain charm. Neither was he unaware that the fine rain was giving his handsome brown hair the heavy, tumbling look of acanthus leaves.

“How
satisfied
a cold character would be in my place,” he added, “but I have a crazy soul, I can't help it. I need Ariosto. There, yes, I'm at my ease.”

They walked for over three hours before reaching the end of a stony track that wound among box and juniper bushes, and a whole vegetation contorted by long subjection to the wind. The horizons, smothered by the low sky, revealed nothing but the ceaseless assault of the clouds. They went through several showers, rapid but dense and as if studded with splinters of ice. The young woman had covered her head with the big hood and let herself docilely ride along, without a word.

The track descended into a little valley, forded a stream swollen by the rain, turned a shoulder of gray rock, and suddenly entered a hamlet of about ten little gray houses hidden under dusty gray clouds. In spite of the smell of fires, the peacefully smoking chimneys, and the nice warm windows, Angelo urged on the mule. But at least there were evident signs of health here.

“We must go as far as we can,” said Angelo. “You're sensible to let yourself be carried quietly. Stay as you are, leave everything to me. Let's push on. There may already be a fall of snow at any moment on these heights. Let's hurry and cross them.”

The track took them along a ravine, and climbed through small potato-fields, almost bare but well cared for. Then it entered some thickets of Russian oaks, quite tall and well grown, still covered with their golden leaves, in which the wind and the rain made a considerable clatter. Gradually, sliding from side to side of the broadening ravine, it reached once more the region of box bushes, of wild scrub, and the raised desert overrun by the marble-dust of the rain.

The weather grew more and more alarming. The clouds dragged along flush with the bushes, in spite of the sharp cold. The thunder snarled several times on the left. The mule showed bad temper. The young woman suggested getting down.

“Stay where you are,” said Angelo. “This brute will walk; if I need to, I'll even make it run.”

He employed the method used by mountain artillerymen: with soldierly promptness, he got busy on one of the animal's ears, and it immediately stopped its acting up.

Heavy showers and squalls now came in uninterrupted succession. The whole sky was enveloped in black clouds. At length, with a quivering flash of lightning, even before the thunder crashed, dense and continuous rain began to fall.

Angelo was so busy goading the mule and running ahead to look for any kind of shelter, perhaps a big tree in this welter of water, that he only noticed the path was ascending when he stopped for lack of breath. Without realizing it, he passed some ruined houses, then afterward recollected that he had just caught a glimpse, through the rain, of a sort of vault. He turned the mule back and plunged with it under an archway. He had entered the remains of a cellar or vaulted barn. Outside, the flood was drowning the ruins of an old village.

Hampered though she was by the huge cloak, the young woman sprang down with agility.

“You're soaking,” she said, “and it's you who will catch that fatal chill you spoke of.”

“I'm going to make a fire,” said Angelo.

But there was no wood in this cellar, and besides, the rain was now so headlong that water was already seeping through the vault.

They had been there for some time, almost struck dumb by the violence of the storm, when they heard an odd noise. It was the noise made by the downpour on a large blue umbrella.

This apparatus, astonishing in its color and dimensions, seemed to be struggling all by itself against the squall, so completely did it conceal the man who was carrying it. And yet he was a big, jovial man, tightly belted into a peculiar-looking riding-coat.

“I've been waving to you for over five minutes, shouting at you and banging against my windows,” the man said to them with bluff cheerfulness. “You look like two chickens that have found a knife. Come into my house opposite. This is no moment for larking about. Come along.”

Through the density of the rain and clouds tearing through this high place, the village appeared to be in complete ruin; only the stumps of walls were left. The man in the riding-coat led them across a sort of square cluttered with bushes and grass; he maneuvered his enormous umbrella with a sailor's skill. He opened a stable door and they pushed the mule inside.

“We'll attend to him later,” he said. “Come in here.”

Angelo and the young woman saw, to their amazement, shelves full of books in the midst of an indescribable disorder of many other objects. It was very warm, and Angelo shivered.

“Mademoiselle can study this little engraving—it represents Moscow,” said the man, “(count the domes and the spans of the bridges, it's most instructive)—while this young man will please strip down in front of the fire and give himself a thorough rubdown. I detest pneumonia. For twenty years I've been saying velvet's idiotic stuff to wear, at least in these parts. As soon as it's wet it smells like a dog, and it takes the devil of a time to dry. Rub hard. Give me that towel.”

He took it away from Angelo and began to rub him really hard. He was a powerful and determined man. Angelo lost his breath and turned scarlet from head to foot in no time.

“Wrap yourself up in this blanket and sit down, not by the fire but in it. I want to see you roast. And drink this: it's rum, and not from the grocer's. Bottoms up. This young lady's clothes are dry as salt! How many domes and spans are there?”

“Thirty-two,” said the young woman.

“You're astonishing!” he said. “That's correct. She really did count them! Thirty-two. The joke is that there are thirty-three. See that little thing there? When I get bored, I count it in. You can't quite tell if it's a dome or an arch, pork or bacon, but it makes thirty-three and it's good to find something new at these moments.”

The room was lit by the great blaze in the fireplace. The tall window looking out over the ruins did not admit much light: its small panes were misted over on the outside by the clouds rushing past at ground level, and inside by a thick border of dust. The flames, leaping powerfully from enormous logs, lit up the huge clutter of furniture; it was sumptuous but badly worn, and every piece was weighed down with fat tomes and piles of papers, on top of which were precariously perched jugs, cans, bowls, basins, bottles, pans, ladles, pipes of all sizes, all shapes, and even drawers full of kitchen utensils. Shelves loaded with rows of books sagging like grain in the wind ran all along the walls. The round, square, and oval tables, the commodes collapsing under the weight of old papers and leaning to right and left, the chests, writing-desks, and stools set all over the place, with a sort of path winding between them, did nevertheless leave in front of the fire a fairly large space, in which stood two armchairs face to face and a pretty card table, as delicate as some beautiful little girl. The table bore an oil lamp and an open book. Everything except this table, lamp, book, and one of the armchairs, was powdered with white dust. Large heaps of cinders cluttered the fireplace and raised the fire a span above the heads of the firedogs.

There was no cooking to be seen in progress. Yet there was an exquisite smell of something being jugged or stewed; in any case, of a wine sauce simmering.

Angelo was deeply affected by this smell. “That does it,” he thought: “everything has changed.” He could well imagine how with a little stew at the right moment all the heroes and heroines of Ariosto could be brought down to earth and reality. “And,” he added stupidly, “one is confronting reality most of the time.” He also felt humiliated at squatting there naked in a blanket by the fire, and that
he had to do so if he wanted to stay alive.
After all, there was liberty, and this young woman to be taken to Gap. He spoke of the cholera.

“It's comical,” said the big man in the riding-coat. “We're having an epidemic of fear. Right now, if I were to call a yellow armband ‘cholera' and make a thousand people wear it, the thousand would die in a fortnight.”

Angelo, who could not reconcile himself either to nakedness or to the blanket (even though the attitude of the young woman crouching by him and warming her hands, and of the man in the riding-coat, who was filling a pipe, were exemplary), began a solemn discourse on chlorine and chloride, and how the towns were short of them. He thus expressed his thought completely, which was: “This situation I'm in, this blanket, these bare protruding feet, are most humiliating. I should dearly like to get some sort of clothes on.”

“It isn't chloride the towns are short of,” said the man, lighting his pipe. “They're short of everything; at all events, of everything necessary to resist a fly, especially when that fly doesn't exist, as is the case. Look here, my young friend, I know what I'm talking about,” he went on, wedging himself into the armchair adjoining the little card table. “I've practiced medicine for over forty years. I know perfectly well that the cholera isn't the outcome of pure imagination. But if it spreads so easily, if it has what we call this ‘epidemic violence,' that's because by the continual presence of death it enhances everybody's huge congenital egoism. People die, literally, of egoism. Please note what I say: it's the result of numerous clinical observations, extending the term to cover the streets and fields and the so-called good health that is enjoyed in them; I've spent much more time in streets and fields than at bedsides. When it's a matter of plague or cholera, the good don't die, young man! I know—you're going to tell me you've seen good people die. My answer is: ‘That's because they weren't very good.'”