The Horseman on the Roof (2 page)

The fountain stood in the grove by the roadside. Out of a fat spout, water (colored like eggplants) flowed noiselessly into a basin red with thick-growing mosses. A little stream ran off from the fountain to irrigate the fields. In the middle of the fields a long one-story building rose from the grass, austere and extremely clean, newly roughcast, with fresh-painted shutters, and even more silent than the fountain.

As his eyes became used to the shade, Angelo noticed, a few feet from him on the other side of the road, a monk sitting at the foot of a tree. He was thin and ageless, his face the same rusty color as his robe, and his eyes were burning.

“What a magnificent place,” said Angelo with a false air of ease, shifting his heels in his boots.

The monk did not reply. He stared with his luminous eyes at the horse, the saddlebag, and particularly the boots, until Angelo felt embarrassed and found it too cool under the trees. Leading his horse by the bridle, he walked out into the sun. By way of excuse he told himself: “Staying under there one might easily catch a chill. The water has done us good, and we can perfectly well cover another league or two before eating.” The man's head, thin as a wild beast's, had impressed him, especially the tendons of the neck, standing out like cords binding head to robe. “Besides, who knows what swarms of bees…!” he was thinking, when he saw, two or three hundred paces ahead, a house that was plainly an inn (there was even a sign) and, overhead, a huge flock of crows making northward.

“Good morning, soldier,” said the innkeeper. “I've got all you need for your horse, but you won't do so well, unless you can put up with my dinner.” And with a wink he lifted the lid of a saucepan in which stuffed quails lay simmering on a bed of onions and tomatoes. “The luck of the woods … Are you very fussy about your coat?” he added, glancing at Angelo's elegant summer riding-coat. “My chair coverings have been worn away by the fellows in skirts, and the straw will bite into that fine cloth of yours like acid.”

This shirtless man was wearing a red postillion-vest over his bare skin. The thick hair on his chest took the place of a cravat. But he put on an old helmet, in order to go out and dash two pails of water over the horse's legs.

“That's an old soldier,” said Angelo to himself. After the raging heat nothing could have put him more at his ease. “These French,” he went on, “will never get over Napoleon. But now that there's nobody to fight but weavers demanding the right to eat meat once a week, they go off and dream of Austerlitz in the sticks rather than sing ‘Long live Louis-Philippe' at the expense of the workers. This man with no shirt, given the right circumstances, would make himself King of Naples. That's the difference between the two sides of the Alps. We have no precedent, and that makes us timid.”

“Know what I'd do in your place?” said the man. “I'd unstrap my saddlebag and put it inside on a couple of chairs.”

“There are no robbers here,” said Angelo.

“What about me?” said the man. “Opportunity puts fat on the pig.”

“Trust me to keep your bacon lean,” said Angelo dryly.

“You're a joker too,” said the man. “I don't mind merchants of sudden death. Come and have a glass of
piquette,
” and he gave Angelo a hearty slap on the shoulder.

The promised
piquette
was a light red wine, but quite good. “The boys in skirts at the monastery trot their half mile through the woods to sip a half pint of this,” said the man.

“I thought,” said Angelo innocently, “they wouldn't drink anything but the water from their beautiful fountain by the roadside under the trees. Besides, are they permitted to come here and drink wine?”

“If you look at it that way,” said the man, “nothing's permitted. Is an ex-noncom of the 27th Light Infantry permitted to set up as an innkeeper on a road that only foxes use? Is that written in the Rights of Man? These people in skirts are good fellows. They ring their bells every now and then, and they have a parade with banners and trumpets on Rogation days, but their real work is farming. I can tell you they don't lie down on the job. And what farmer ever spits on red wine? Besides, their own commander said: ‘Drink, this is My Blood.' All I did was to send away my niece. She worried them. Because of her skirts, I guess. It's annoying, when you wear them through conviction, to see someone who wears them by necessity. Now I'm all alone in this hole; what does it matter if they wet their whistles from time to time? Everybody's happy; isn't that the main thing? Anyway,” he continued, “they do it like gentlemen. They don't come by the road. They make a big detour through the woods (which means something when you're thirsty), by way of penance and all that, which is their specialty, not mine. And they come in by the back—I always leave the stable door open—and that's a mortification too for anyone with a proud heart. All the same, who'd have told me that one day I'd be a bartender?”

Angelo enjoyed some deep reflection. He could see how, living alone in these silent woods, one couldn't help needing company and talking to the firstcomer. “With my love for the people,” he told himself, “I'm like this noncom by his road where only foxes pass. Love is absurd. ‘Devil take you!' people will say. ‘Truth lies in the bare shoulders of that woman who gave you coffee. They were beautiful, and their dimples smiled charmingly in spite of sunburn. What more do you want? Did you turn up your nose just now at the fountain, or even at the cool shade of that beech and those poplars? They too sparkled very charmingly.' But with the beech, the poplar, and the fountain one can be an egoist. Who will teach me to be an egoist? There's no denying that with his red waistcoat over his bare skin this man is perfectly at peace and he can discuss what he wants to with the firstcomer.” Angelo had been much affected by the silence of the woods.

“I don't have a dining-room,” the peaceful man said to him at last, “and usually I take my grub on that marble table over there. I think it'd be silly for us to feed at two separate tables. Especially as I'd have to be getting up all the time to serve you. Would you be put out if I laid the same table for us both? My manners are all right if you agree, but I'm alone, and…” (This word decided Angelo.) In the end he managed to get paid for what he drank of his own wine.

His manners were indeed all right: he had learned in camp to eat without dirtying his neckerchief of hair. “Inns like the one you have,” said Angelo, “are generally running with blood. In such places there's always an oven for roasting corpses and a well down which to throw the bones.”

“I've an oven but no well,” said the man. “Mind you,” he added, “the bones could be buried in the woods, where it would take the devil to spot anything.”

“In my present state of mind,” said Angelo, “I'd like nothing better than an adventure of that kind. Men are queer fish: it's superfluous to tell that to a noncom who has had the honor to belong to the 27th Light Infantry. But I'm up to my neck debating with myself problems of such difficulty that it would be a great relief to be attacked by some really determined cutthroats, out for my purse and with no chance of avoiding the galleys or even the guillotine except by desperately threatening my life. I think I'd take them on with real joy, even on that little narrow staircase I see over there—though it would make swordplay difficult. I'd even like being in a garret with a door that wouldn't shut and hearing the murderers coming upstairs in their stocking-feet, telling myself that I could only fire my pistol twice and would then have to settle things with the well-sharpened dagger that is always at my side.…” Then he made a very melancholy declaration. He was wholly serious. “This,” he said to himself, “is the only way to talk of love without having people make fun of you.”

“That's easy to say,” said the man, “but I don't think such moments are very amusing.”

But when Angelo persisted with a sort of sad ardor, he poured him out a glass of wine and spoke philosophically and with good sense about youth, which everybody goes through, thus proving that its dangers are not mortal.

“I'll settle down as a hermit,” thought Angelo. “Well, why not? A little orchard, some vines, maybe a robe—after all, it's a sensible costume. And very thin cords to fasten the robe to my head. That does at least look extremely impressive, and makes a perfect protection for a man who fears ridicule above all things. Perhaps that is a way of being free!”

When it came time to settle the bill, the man lost all philosophy and literally begged for a few pennies. He said no more about the 27th Light Infantry but made great use of the word “alone.” He was aware that at this word, every time, Angelo's eyes lost their sternness. He very easily got what he wanted, and put on his helmet for the pleasure of taking it off and holding it in his hand while he walked with Angelo to the mounting-block.

*   *   *

It was about one in the afternoon, and the heat was sharp, like phosphorus. “Keep out of the sun,” said the man (with what he thought was profound irony, since there was no shade anywhere).

It seemed to Angelo that each step of his horse was taking him into the oven of which he had just been speaking. The valley he followed was very narrow, and choked up with clumps of dwarf oaks; the rocky walls sloping down to it were at white heat. The light, crushed to a fine irritant dust, rubbed its sandpaper over the drowsy horse and rider, and over the little trees, which it gradually spirited away into worn air, whose coarse texture quivered, mingling smears of greasy yellow with dull ochers, with great slabs of chalk wherein it was impossible to recognize anything familiar. Down high anfractuous rocks flowed the odor of rotten eggs from nests deserted by the hawks. The slopes poured down into the valley the stale reek of everything that had died within the vast radius of these pale hills. Tree stumps and skins; ants' nests; little cages of ribs the size of a fist; skeletons of snakes like broken chains of silver; patches of slaughtered flies like handfuls of dried currants; dead hedgehogs whose bones looked like chestnuts in their burrs; vicious shreds of wild boars strewn over wide threshing-floors of agony; trees devoured from head to foot, stuffed with sawdust to the tips of their branches, which the thick air kept standing; carcasses of buzzards fallen into the boughs of oaks on which the sun beat down; or the sharp stink of the heated sap bursting out of the fissures along the hawthorn trunks.

All this barbarousness did not exist merely in Angelo's red sleep. There had never been such a summer in the hills. Moreover, that day, the same black heat began to break in sudden, brutal waves over the whole south: over the solitudes of the Var, where the little oaks began crackling, over the doomed farms of the plateaus, where the wells were at once besieged by flocks of pigeons, over Marseille, where the sewers began to smoke. At Aix, at noon, the siesta silence was so great that, on the boulevards, the fountains sounded as loud as at night. At Rians, by nine in the morning, there were two people sick: a carter who had an attack just as he entered town—he was carried into a wineshop, set in the shade, and bled, but had still not recovered the use of speech—and a young girl of twenty who, at about the same time, suddenly fouled herself standing by the fountain where she had just drunk; she tried to run to her home nearby but fell in a heap on her doorstep. At the hour when Angelo was dozing on his horse, they were saying that she was dead. At Draguignan the hills reflected the heat back into the bowl where the town lies; it was impossible to take a siesta: the tiny windows of the houses in ordinary times keep the rooms cool, but now it was so hot that people longed to hack them open with pickaxes to get a little air. Everyone went out into the fields; there are no springs, no fountains, so people ate melons and apricots, which were hot, almost cooked; they lay down on the grass on their bellies.

Melons were being eaten at La Valette also and, just when Angelo was passing under the rocks down which flowed the smell of rotten eggs, young Mme de Théus was running in glaring sunlight down the steps of the château to go to the village where, it seems, a kitchenmaid, who had gone there an hour before (just when that old scoundrel of an innkeeper was saying to Angelo: “Don't go out into the sun”), had suddenly become very ill. And now (while Angelo, with shut eyes, was still following that burning trail through the hills) the kitchenmaid was dead; people imagined it was an apoplectic fit, because her face was quite black. The young lady was sickened by the heat, the smell of the dead girl, the black face. She was obliged to go behind a bush to vomit.

There was much eating of melons in the Rhone Valley. This valley on its eastern side skirts the greenish country that Angelo was crossing. There, because of the river, there are quite tall groves of sycamores, of planes more than ninety feet high, of sumptuous beeches whose drooping foliage is very fair and fresh. This year there had been no winter. The pine caterpillar had devoured the needles of all the pine groves; it had stripped the
thuyas
and cypresses; it had even changed its feeding-habits so as to eat the leaves of the sycamores, planes, and beeches. From the heights of Carpentras, across hundreds of square leagues of tree skeletons, of leaves reduced to lace and cinders that the wind carried away, one could make out the ramparts of Avignon like the trunk of an ox picked white by ants. The heat reached there the same day, and its first blasts crumbled the sickliest trees.

At Orange station the passengers in a train from Lyon began to pound as hard as they could on their carriage doors to get someone to come and let them out. They were dying of thirst; many had vomited and were writhing with colic. The engine-driver came along with the keys, but after opening two of the doors he could not open the third: he went away and rested his forehead on a railing; after a time he fell against it. As he was carried off, he had the strength to say that they should uncouple the engine as soon as possible, since it might catch fire or explode. In any case, he said, they should at once turn the second lever to the left, as far as it would go. Meanwhile the passengers in the third compartment kept pounding with their fists against the locked door.