The Horseman on the Roof (15 page)

They looked him up and down, and one of the bakers was collected enough to notice Angelo's fine boots. He immediately set down his glass and went out. He could be heard running down the street.

Angelo had reached that moment when thirst, long endured, has at last been satisfied, and when it is much more important to catch one's breath and lick one's lips than to study the surroundings. He had not seen the man leave. He noticed, however, that the others were full of engaging hypocrisy and faint smiles that never went beyond their lips. He frowned, curtly asked how much he owed, and paid with a half écu that he was clever enough to set spinning on the table. In two strides he was outside, while from instinct, the others were looking at the coin.

He had been put too closely on his guard by those hypocritical glances and smiles not to leap immediately into a shadowy alley. Even so, a hand clutched at him as he passed, sliding down the length of his arm and tearing his shirt, while a voice thick with hate said: “It's the poisoner.”

Angelo started to run. “I mustn't allow myself to be taken for a fool by that fine police officer who obligingly took me through his kitchen garden,” he thought; “and he'd have the right to do so, if I got caught again. If only I had two rounds to fire instead of one, I'd treat myself to the luxury of putting one of these dogs underground, where he'd be some use to the soil.”

They were on his heels. Wearing light shoes and more at their ease despite the darkness on ground they knew well, they were running faster than he was. Several times, hands gripped Angelo's shirt and tore it still more. A kick he let fly in the dark landed fair and square in a belly.

The man whinnied like a horse and fell. Angelo managed to gain some ground, leap into a street to the right, then immediately into another that led down under an arch.

“Let's hope it's not a blind alley,” he said to himself, running as hard as he could. “Now it's a question of life or death. Very well, I'll kill some.” This thought soothed him and even gave him a certain gaiety. He stopped. Taking it by the middle he settled the discharged pistol into his right fist. “If I strike downward with the steel barrel as hard as I can, and have the luck to hit a face, I've got my man. Look here!” he went on. “Instead of running like a rabbit, I may even become the hunter. It all depends on my resolution. I can get enough cover from some doorway. If I bash in the heads of just one or two of them—and I owe them that—the others'll think again. And if they don't, at the last moment I'll burn my powder. After that, by God's grace … They'll have paid dearly.” He was as happy as a king.

He kept quiet. Soon he heard the sandals coming cautiously step by step down the street. His pursuers passed by him, within an arm's length. There were about ten of them. One of them said in a low voice: “Does the government pay for his boots?”—“Well, who do you think?” replied another.

“And that's the people,” thought Angelo. This arrested his arm. “How ugly that voice was,” he said to himself. “Low as it was, it couldn't conceal all the man's envy of my boots. Here are people ready to do anything for boots. Indeed, they think I am too. Does this make them sincere?” he added, after a moment.
2

He was no longer thinking at all about the danger he was in. The men in sandals had reached the end of the street and, hearing no further noise, put their heads together for a moment; then they called out and received answers from the side of the adjoining street. They talked louder and louder, and Angelo realized that they had arranged to guard the issues of every street in the quarter.

“He certainly stopped somewhere in this street,” said a voice in command. “You're not going to let yourselves be poisoned like dogs by a government that's out to kill the workers. Go back and make a closer search. That's what we must do.”

“Oh well, that's how it goes! I shall have to do some killing,” Angelo told himself. “Somewhere there is certainly somebody who is having a good laugh.”

He took the loaded pistol in his right hand and gripped the empty one in his left fist.

He braced himself in his recess. He felt his back pressing against boards, which gave way. It was a door loose on its latch.

Keeping an ear cocked for the sound of sandals returning up the street, Angelo tucked the pistol under his arm and tried the wooden handle. The door opened. He went in, reclosed the door, and stood still, holding his breath in the dark.

He listened for a long time to the sounds from the street; then, after the men had looked everywhere (he even heard, upon the leaf of the door behind which he stood, hands going back and forth, trying to decide if the recess were empty) they settled down to watch under the archway at the top of the street and stayed there, talking in loud voices.

Angelo listened to the house's sounds. They were those of an empty house. He lit his tinder-wick and blew on it to make a faint glow. As far as he could see, he was in the entrance passage of quite a well-to-do house. At last he made out, not very far from the door, a small
étagère
on which stood a candlestick with a candle and several phosphorus tapers. He lit the candle.

What he had taken for an entrance passage was a hall. A broad staircase led to the floors above. There was no furniture, no pictures, but the banisters and especially the way they were finished in strapwork promised fine things.

Angelo deliberately made a slight noise and even coughed. He stood in the middle of the hall, his candlestick in his hand, looking up the staircase to where the handsome banisters widened into a gallery on the first floor.

“I can't look exactly pretty in my shirtsleeves and all ragged,” he thought, “but in any case, the way I stand here holding my candle and making no attempt to hide, it'd be hard to take me for a brigand.” He even made so bold as to say out loud but without shouting and in the most friendly possible tone: “Is anybody there?”

Rats were scampering here and there; and there was also the sighing of the walls, the cracking of woodwork leading its woodwork life.

“Oh well, I'm going upstairs,” he said to himself.

He did not dare open a door to his left, near the little console on which he had found the candlestick. He was afraid of being seen to do so: “Then,” he thought, “they might really take me for a thief.”

He went up, holding his candle high, seeing tall doors loom up above the fine wrought-iron gallery. One of these doors was ajar. He said: “Monsieur, or madame, have no fear, I am a gentleman.” He got to the landing: nothing had stirred or replied. The half-open door stood neither more nor less open. He could now, however, see the bottom of the door, and he observed that it was held ajar by a ball of fur with very long hairs from which the flickering of his candle-flame drew glints of gold.

His shudder of fear lasted only a moment when he realized that it was a woman's hair. He heard the voice of the poor little Frenchman saying in his ear: “It's the finest outbreak of Asiatic cholera ever seen!”

“Ah! yes, of course,” said Angelo. “That's the story,” he added. But he went no nearer. He was upset by the beauty of the hair and by seeing it spread on the ground; by the abundance of these loosened tresses, which he now saw plainly with their lovely glints of gold; and even, showing through them, the glimmer of a bluish profile.

She was a very young woman, or a girl. She was still beautiful, snapping at the empty air with extremely white teeth. Emaciation and cyanosis had given her a face carved from onyx. She lay on the cushion of filth she had vomited. Her body had not rotted. She must have died very quickly, of raw cholera. Under her long nightdress, although it was of linen, he could see her black belly, her blue thighs and legs, drawn back like those of a grasshopper about to spring.

Angelo pushed open the door that the body held ajar. It led into a bedroom. He stepped over the corpse and entered. The disorder was that of death and hurry. The woman had just had time to leap out of bed, then she had fouled sheets and floor with her spurting dysentery in a straight line toward the door, where she had fallen. Everything else was undisturbed: a fine marble-topped chest bore its clock under a glass globe, two copper candleholders, a box encrusted with sea shells, some very haughty daguerreotypes, especially one of an old man in uniform wearing a frogged dolman, hand on hip and mustaches like a bull's horns; and one of a woman at a piano, thrusting into it long, imperious fingers like lances; she was dark-haired. Next to the daguerreotypes a glass cupel held hairpins, a shell flower, stay-laces. Behind the clock-case were a bottle of Eau-de-Cologne, a small bottle of balm cordial, a box of smelling-salts. On each side of the chest, a tall window, with small panes and old rep curtains. Outside, a garden: the dark mass of foliage could be seen moving against the stars. Three easy chairs: over the back of one of them a pair of long black stockings and an elastic garter. A pedestal table, a vase containing paper flowers, then the curtains of the alcove, the bed, a cupboard; near the cupboard a little door covered by tapestry. By the door, a chair; on the chair, underclothes, pantaloons, and embroidered petticoats.

Angelo opened the little door. Another room. But here the disorder told of a more violent struggle. No smell: from the threshold one could just detect the faint violet fragrance of the underlinen piled on the chair. Once inside, there was another smell: that of dirty wool sprayed with water, or rather sprayed with alcohol. The bed was ripped apart, tossed and trampled, the sheets torn, soiled with excrement, and curdled with whitish matter. On the floor, basins full of water, swabs of wet linen. The mattress had been abundantly soaked. It had dried since, but the covering was stained with huge patches like rust with wide greenish halos. There was no body. “One must look for the last one,” the poor little Frenchman used to say, “they go burrowing into places you'd never dream of.” But nothing: not even behind the bed. Angelo pushed another small half-open door: another room, a strong smell of turpentine, again those struggles among dirty linen and torn sheets, but nobody. He went all round. He walked on tiptoe. He held the candle high. He touched nothing. He craned his neck. He felt taut and hard as wire.

He returned to the first room, stepped over the corpse and out on to the landing. He went downstairs, blew out the candle. He was about to open the door. He heard talking in the road. He went upstairs again in the dark, guiding himself by the banisters. He did not light the candle till he reached the first floor.

In addition to the door where the woman with the beautiful hair was lying, there were two other doors. Angelo opened one of them. It led to a drawing-room. The piano was there. A large winged armchair across which was laid a crutch. A couch, a screen, a center table shaped like a four-leafed clover. Portraits, hard to make out, in heavy frames. One was that of a judge or something like a judge; another was of a man holding a saber between his legs. There was nothing in here. But yes! While an icy chill shot down his back, Angelo saw something jump off an armchair; it was a cushion! And coming toward him! No, it was a cat, a large gray cat arching its back and lifting a long, quivering tail. It came and rubbed against the legs of Angelo's boots. It was fat, neither scared nor wild. What had it eaten?… No, the window was half open. It evidently went out and foraged.

On the second floor, nothing: it took no time to see this. Three rooms, empty, or merely containing jars, bushels for measuring grain, a wicker tailor's dummy, baskets, sacks, an old violin-case open and unhinged, a trestle for picking olives, some pumpkins, some mattress springs, a music stand, a rat-trap, a demijohn of vinegar, some barrel hoops, an old straw hat, an old gun. But the staircase went on higher. Meanwhile it had become rustic: it smelled of grain and birds; it was even slightly strewn with straw. It ended against a true barn door, which, when pushed, opened with a horrible creaking onto a sparkle of stars.

It was what is called in these parts a “gallery,” that is to say, a sort of covered terrace on the roof.

A warm and extremely supple wind had arisen, which fanned the stars and made the foliage of the trees sway and rustle. A clanging, which it had also set going in the sky, made Angelo look up; in the night, not very far from him, he discovered the iron cage of a belfry, then the jutting confusion of roofs, some of whose tiles were polished so smooth that the mere twinkling of the stars made them gleam.

Angelo was glad to breathe in this wind smelling of hot tiles and swallows' nests. He snuffed out the candle and sat down on the edge of the terrace. The night was so overloaded with stars, and they blazed so brightly, that he could see distinctly the different roofs fitted together like plates in a suit of armor. The light was of black steel, but from time to time a spark kindled on the crest of a gable, on the varnished edge of a dovecot, or a weathercock, or an iron bell-cage. Short motionless waves of an extraordinary rigidity covered the whole site of the town with an angular and frozen surf-pattern. Pale pearl house-fronts, on whose surfaces the faintest of lights, like phosphorus, came to die, were inlaid with solid triangles of shadow, raised like pyramids or set horizontally like fields; slopes on which there danced a greenish light threw open, in every direction, rows of tiles like the ribs of a fan; rotundas filigreed with silver bulged with shadows where some large church emerged; towers and the black and gray interlocking of skewbacks and superimposed galleries rose up, bristling with the barbs of stars. Now and then the lamps in the squares and boulevards breathed up vapors of rust and ocher festooned with the frames and crowns of eaves; and the inky rents of the streets carved out each quarter.

The wind, which did not breathe but fell in one solid piece or rolled along slowly like a ball of cotton wool, set the whole expanse of roofs lapping, blew a sleepy booming through the hollows of the bells, brushed the muffled drums of the attics and convent roofs. The laden branches of the elms and sycamores groaned like masts in travail. On the distant hills one could hear rustle the fluttering and beating wings of the great woods. The swaying of the hanging street lamps cast red glows; and that heavy air, leaping like a cat across the heavy exhalation of the tiles, kneaded the colors under the night sky into a sort of bronzed tar.