The Horseman on the Roof (16 page)

“Men are indeed wretched,” thought Angelo. “Everything beautiful happens without them. Cholera and catchwords are what they make. They foam with jealousy or die of boredom, which comes down to the same thing, if they're not allowed to interfere. And whenever they do interfere, there's a premium on hypocrisy and raving. One need only be up here or in the wilderness that I rode through the other day, to realize where the true battles lie, to become very particular about the victories one strives for. In short, to cease being
content with little.
As soon as you're alone, things lay hold of you by themselves and always force you to take the roads that are hardest to climb. And even if you
don't get there,
what fine views you have, and how reassuring everything is.”

Accustomed to obeying his youth without reserve, Angelo did not perceive that these thought lacked originality and were false besides. He was twenty-five, that is true, but at that age how many have already become calculating! He was one of those men who remain twenty-five for fifty years. His soul did not comprehend the full seriousness of society and how important it is to have one's place, or at any rate to belong to the party that distributes places. He always regarded liberty as believers regard the Virgin. The most sincere among the men he trusted saw it as a
relative thing,
which anyhow should always be consigned to the philosophers if one does not want to be caught napping. He did not realize that, of those who always had the word “liberty” on their lips, some were beginning to sport crosses.

His mother had bought him his colonel's commission. He had never understood that his position as natural son to the Duchess Ezzia Pardi conferred on him the
right to scorn,
as on all those who have the
obligation of being.
Did he even think of all the rungs to be climbed that the word “natural” implies, after having been adored throughout his childhood? That is why he had surprised his acquaintances when they saw him take military service seriously and even regularly attend the drilling of recruits. People guffawed, though behind his back; but at the first review he appeared on his black horse like a golden ear of corn. They could not keep their eyes off the arabesques, the braided clover-leaves escalading his tunic, and the sparkling helmet with its pheasant plumes, below which they saw the purest and gravest of faces. One can see that henceforth he was entitled to the pinpricks of his peers and the love of the sergeants.

“Do I err,” he continued, “in thinking that I'm bigger when I act alone?”

He was, at that moment, one of those
born leaders,
who are not rare, as people maintain, but on the contrary relatively common.

“But people will say to me, as they have said already: ‘your actions are full of fancy gestures (they didn't dare say fancy steps) that attract attention. And we don't need attention, we need to succeed, which is entirely different.' Whenever it's a question of liberty, they are right.”

The moment he thought of liberty, which he saw in the shape of a beautiful woman, young and pure, walking among lilies in a garden, he lost his critical sense. Liberty is the hobbyhorse of all beautiful children born to a country suffering alien rule, indeed tyranny.

“For those who accused me of irresponsibility when I killed Baron Swartz in a duel, while the orders were purely and simply to assassinate him, or to have him assassinated if doing it myself disgusted me (as they said later)—for those people, isn't the time I spent with the little Frenchman time wasted? Wouldn't they laugh at the sentimentality that made me keep watch over him after his death, and even want to be present at his burial, except for that lout of a captain? They certainly haven't the same reasons for pride as I have. Would they approve of the way I looked after that man yesterday afternoon? They'd say one should only have a single aim in view. Would they force me to
aim low?
”

The phrase delighted him. He repeated it several times. He found in it a justification. He was weak enough to seek one.

“Must I be insensitive like a stone or a submissive corpse?” he added. “If so, what good is liberty? Once I had it I'd be unable to enjoy it. It's quite essential, anyway, that once the goal is reached—in a word, liberty—obedience should cease; and how could it cease if liberty was then given only to obedient corpses? If, in the end, liberty has no one to turn to, shall we not have merely changed tyrants?”

But he believed in the sincerity of the men who were members of the same conspiracy as himself: of whom some were hiding in the foothills of the Abruzzi, and some had been shot (or even thumb-screwed, which he considered naïvely as an absolute proof of sincerity). He had several times gone to join them under the
green tent,
for important
vendite,
3
always boldly, sometimes even carelessly, in full uniform. He had been much reproached for his audacity, his uniform, and that recklessness he so loved. That recklessness, always instinctively deliberate, so to say, had often affected the police, and even deterred them, by its mystifying inappropriateness (which made the cops suspect an official trick), from making arrests already decided upon and easy to carry out. Even men who were bombastic talkers and visibly cherished dreams of glory spoke to him then with every sign of the most Jesuitical diplomacy. He saw them turn yellow, as if prey to a sudden liver attack.

“Aren't they victims of the error of sincerity?” he asked himself, giving free rein to his naïveté at this moment when peace, the night, and above all the feminine velvet of the wind, lent eloquence to his heart.

He had nevertheless had some experiences that his pride would not let him forget. It was always in such moments of abandon that he had been duped. Now, as soon as he perceived his state, he said to himself: “You're flinching!” And to regain control of himself he began to use cavalry language, with as many f—'s and b—'s as possible. He had learned, in such cases, the high therapeutic value of these simple words.

“Those b—'s,” he said to himself, “would even try to back me into a corner about my flight just now through the streets. ‘You acted like a rookie,' they'd tell me. ‘You should have given them a taste of your pistol, but not like a paladin or Roland at Roncevaux; like a master, like someone who holds the right of life and death over them and regards them, what's more, as scum. The important thing was to get them to join the ranks. Ours, of course. The chief revolutionary virtue is the art of making others damned well respect you. Stunned by the sight of a corpse or two, they would have been in your pocket, and they'd have let you talk. You'd have told them how we are all brothers. We shall be needing a lot of beadles to say “Amen,” even in France.'

“They're very good! For talk, one has to hand it to them! They have it down pat, as in a book. But you very rarely see them move from theory to practice themselves. How many of those little dark abortions, with priests' faces into the bargain, would be capable of being soldiers in the ranks they command?

“But it isn't given to everybody to command. That's their great phrase. If they
aim low
and see no farther than the end of their noses, they do really see the end of those noses. I'm sure they'd find this poison idea most appealing. The cholera is a windfall. It's a fine economy of means when one can take charge of ready-made terrors, drunken sprees to which God is treating the house. After all, aren't they right, if, in order to give liberty to the people, one must first become its master? Every little bit helps.”

*   *   *

By the middle of the night the wind had grown gentler. It had become very wily with its favors, despite some highly suspicious smells that it softly fanned up, or perhaps precisely because of these smells. The silence was so complete that Angelo could hear the ticking of the clock in the cage of the belfry a good twenty-five or thirty yards away. Alone, and at long intervals, there came the tired rustle of the great elms, in which the nightingales had fallen silent. Some latecoming stars had created on the angular, surflike sweep of the roofs, a special glimmer. Several street lamps had gone out.

“Become their master to give them liberty,” mused Angelo; “is that the only way? Is there no other goal for man except being king? As soon as passion has a free reign, everyone seeks to make himself king.”

For some time, with the toe of his boot, he had been playing with something soft that lay at his feet. He struck a light and saw that it was a pile of empty sacks. Here was something to make a bed with.

“It'd be the very devil,” he told himself, “if there were any danger of contagion from sacks that must have been exposed a long time to the sun. And anyhow, only the sickest will die.”

He thought of the young woman who lay shriveling in the door-opening thirty feet or so below him. What pity that she should have been one of the aforesaid “sickest.” Death had carved a goddess in blue stone out of a beautiful young woman who had evidently been opulent and milky, judging by her extraordinary head of hair. He wondered what the most abandoned bigots of liberty would have done in his place, seeing that he himself had needed all his romanticism not to cry out when the glints from the candle began to gasp among these golden tresses.

“And is it really a question of liberty?” he asked himself.

*   *   *

Angelo was awakened by a burning nausea. The white sun had just settled on his face, on his mouth. He stood up and vomited. It was merely bile. “At least I think so, it's green.” He felt very hungry and very thirsty.

It was a stifling morning, like chalk or boiling white oil.

The town's skin of tiles was beginning already to exude a sirupy air. Waves of treacly heat, clinging to the ridges, drowned every shape in iridescent fleeces. The incessant squeaking of thousands of swallows lashed the torrid stillness with a hail of pepper. Thick columns of flies were smoking like coal dust from the streets' crevasses. Their continuous murmur created a kind of audible solitude.

Day did, however, place things with more precision than the night. The now visible details composed a different reality. The rotunda of the church was octagonal and resembled a huge tent pitched on red sand. It was surrounded by flying buttresses upon which past rains had painted long streaks of green. The wavy pattern of the roofs was flattened out under the uniform white light; at most, a faint network of shadows marked the differences in level between one roof and another. What, in the bosom of the night, had appeared to be towers, were simply houses higher than the rest, with five or six yards of slitless and windowless wall showing above the level of the other roofs. In addition to the belfry with the iron cage which, slightly to the left, reared its square bulk with three arcaded stories, there was also, down below, another, smaller, flat-roofed belfry topped with a spike and, at the other end of the town, a lofty edifice crowned with an enormous wrought-iron bulb. For all that they were flattened beneath the light, the roofs kept up a play around the ridges, gutters, eaves, landmarks of streets, inner courtyards and gardens, which puffed up the gray foam of dust-laden foliage and threw out steps, landings, and projections to meet little stone walls of a dazzling whiteness, or to surround the rearing triangles of certain gables. But the swelling and thrumming of all this peeling marquetry, instead of being firmly indicated by shadows, showed only in infinite variations of blinding white and gray.

The gallery where Angelo stood faced north. He could see, in front of him, first the rows of rounded tiles, an intermingling of thousands of fans opening out in every direction; then the expanse of vague roofs diluted in the heat; finally, containing the town as though in a gray earthenware bowl, the ring of the hills grated by the sun.

There was an extraordinary smell of bird droppings, and sometimes a sort of explosion of a sickly-sweet stench.

Angelo, still half asleep, was trying instinctively to appease his hunger by swallowing thick saliva, when he was fully awakened by a cry so piercing that it seemed to leave a yellow streak before his eyes. The cry was repeated. It clearly came from a place on his right, about ten yards away, where the edge of the roof broke off at the side of what must be a square.

Angelo jumped over the ledge of the gallery and advanced over the roofs. It was difficult and risky to walk up here in boots, but by clasping a chimney Angelo was able to lean over the void.

At first he could see nothing but a cluster of people. They seemed to be pecking at something, like chickens around a bowl of grain. As they trampled and jumped, the cry spurted out again, sharper and paler than ever, from under their feet. It was a man, whom they were killing by stamping his head in with their heels. Many of these executioners were women. They were emitting a sort of dull growl that came from the throat and was closely allied with lust. They paid no attention to their flying petticoats nor to their hair streaming down over their faces.

At last the thing seemed to be finished, and they drew away from the victim. It no longer moved, but lay stretched out, the arms forming a cross; from the angles that its thighs and arms made with the body, one could see that its limbs were broken. A young woman, rather well dressed (indeed she appeared to have come from Mass, for she was carrying a book in her hand) but disheveled, went back to the corpse and planted her pointed heel in the poor wretch's head. The heel got caught between some bones; she lost her balance and fell, calling for help. They picked her up. She was weeping. They shouted insults at the corpse, with a great deal of laughter.

There were some twenty men and women there. They were moving toward the street, when the group they composed suddenly broke apart like a flock of birds when a stone is thrown. A man, from whom they had swerved away, was left alone. At first he looked dazed, then clutched his belly in both hands, then fell to the ground; he began to double up and pound the earth with his head and feet. The others were running, but, before disappearing into the street, one woman stopped, leaned against the wall, and started to vomit with amazing abundance; finally she collapsed, grinding her face into the stones.