The Horseman on the Roof (6 page)

“Aha!” he said to himself, “more birds!” At his approach, indeed, squalls of birds issued from the doors. “What the hell have people been up to in this stinking village? It looks as if they've all kicked the bucket. Is it a sort of vendetta, or what?” He talked in sergeant's language in order to put some fight into himself.

In the second house he came upon corpses that were not so fresh. They were not putrescent, however, but dry like mummies. The dogs' teeth and birds' beaks had ripped them into a bold fretwork, like bites and pecks in a side of bacon. Even so, they exhaled that sirupy smell which was the sign of recent corpses. They were blue, their eyes sunk deep in the sockets, and their faces, reduced to skin and bone, thrust out enormous noses, thin as knife blades. There were three women and two men collapsed like the others in a scatter of ashes, kitchen utensils, and overturned stools.

Many thoughts, red and black, whirled through Angelo's mind. He was quite terrified and frozen from head to foot; and he had, in addition, a perpetual and violent desire to vomit owing to the sugary smell and the grimaces of the dead. But these deaths were a mystery, and mystery is always resolutely Italian: that is why Angelo, in spite of his disgust and fear, leaned over the corpses and saw that their mouths were full of a matter resembling rice pudding.

“Could they all have been poisoned together?” he wondered. In this notion too there was something so familiar to Angelo, and capable of giving him so much courage, that he dared to step over the dead, to go and see what was happening in an alcove whose curtains were still drawn.

He found there a fourth body, naked, very thin, quite blue, curled up on the bed amid copious evacuations of milky curds. Some rats that were busy eating the shoulders and arms jumped aside when Angelo parted the curtains. He wanted to kill them with the spade, but he would have had to strike the corpse, too; besides, they were watching him with inflamed eyes, they were grinding their teeth, crouching on all fours as if to spring. Angelo was over-eager to enter into this tragedy, he was excessively angry with these animals; they were on the wrong side, like the birds and the dog. He couldn't think at all reasonably. He pulled off the sheets and with the spade killed the rats as they fell off the bed. But he was nearly bitten by two of the animals, which flung themselves at his boots. He put his foot on one and crushed it with his full weight; the other, terrified, ran across the room and raised a stench so horrible that Angelo had to get out of the house as fast as he could.

He was too wrought up to stay out of the other three houses that formed the center of the hamlet along the road. At his approach they disgorged thick flocks of birds and darting animals that Angelo took to be foxes. But they were merely cats, and made off across the fields. In each house he found the same spectacle of corpses, grimaces, blue flesh, milky excreta, and that abominable odor, sugary and putrid, smelling like the calyx of the fly-eating terebinth plant.

There were five or six houses more, set apart from the little group. A few steps toward them were enough to raise clouds of birds, which infested their doorways, windows, and yards.

It must have been about noon. The sun was beating straight down. The heat, as on the day before, was heavy and oily, the sky white; mists like dust or smoke were rising from chalky fields. There was not a breath of air, and the silence was impressive despite the sounds from the cattle sheds: bleating, neighing, kicks against the doors, scarcely any louder than the sound of a pan of fat on the fire in the great mortuary chamber of the valley.

“I'm a fine one,” thought Angelo. “I really ought to rush off somewhere as fast as I can with the news and get these dead buried before they start a first-rate plague. Especially if this air continues to cook them. And now I have no horse, and I don't know the country.”

To return to Banon would mean recrossing the whole mountain. On foot it would take all day. Besides, in spite of his anger and Italian appetite for mystery, emotion had deprived Angelo of his legs. He could feel them giving beneath him at each step. Revolving these considerations, he walked along the little road bordered with still poplars.

It was straight, and he had hardly gone a hundred paces when he saw a horseman approaching at a trot. Furthermore, he was leading by the bridle something that must be the runaway horse. Angelo in fact recognized his horse. The man rode like a sack of spoons. “Watch your step,” Angelo told himself: “don't lose face before a peasant who will certainly be dumfounded at the story you've got to tell him, but afterward will have everybody laughing at your drawn face.” That steadied his legs and he stood waiting, stiff as a post, preparing a short, extremely nonchalant sentence.

The horseman was a bony young man whose long arms and legs bounced with the horse's trotting. He was hatless, though wearing a respectable coat, and tieless; moreover the coat was all covered with hay dust and even with cruder filth, as if he had emerged from a henhouse. “I should have kept my spade,” thought Angelo. He stepped into the road and said sharply: “I see you're bringing me back my horse.”

“I hardly hoped to find its rider still on his legs,” said the young man. Pushing back the long hair that his ride had shaken down over his forehead, he revealed an intelligent face. His short curly beard failed to conceal a pair of fine lips, and his eyes were certainly not those of a peasant.

“He didn't throw me,” said Angelo very proudly and fatuously. “I dismounted when I saw the first corpse.” He had realized his fatuity, but counted on the word “corpse” to redress the balance. He had been disconcerted by the lips and by those eyes so clearly accustomed to irony.

“Then there are corpses here, too?” said the young man very calmly. Whereupon he made efforts to dismount, and finally succeeded, very clumsily, although his mount was a stout cart horse. “Did you touch them?” he said, staring fixedly at Angelo. “Are your legs cold? Have you been here long? You look queer.” He undid a satchel tied with cords to the strap that held down the folded blanket he was using for a saddle.

“I've just arrived,” said Angelo. “Perhaps I do look queer, but I shall be interested in how you look when you've seen what I've seen.”

“Oh!” said the young man, “probably I shall vomit just as you did. The main thing is that you shouldn't have touched the corpses.”

“I killed a dog and some rats that were eating them,” said Angelo. “I did it with a spade. These houses are full of dead people.”

“I thought you must have been throwing your weight about,” said the young man. “You're just the type. Do your legs feel cold?”

“I don't think so,” said Angelo. He was more and more disconcerted; his legs were not cold, but they once more seemed like cotton wool and very flimsy.

“Nobody ever thinks so,” said the young man, “until the moment when they know. Drink some of this, take a good swig at it.” He held out a flask that he had pulled out of his satchel. It was a rough liqueur, flavored with herbs and very raw-tasting. At the first gulp—and he had gone to it eagerly—Angelo lost his head and would have laid into the young man with his fists if he had not been gasping for breath. He had to be content with glaring ferociously through eyes filled with tears. Still, after several violent sneezes, he felt restored, and his legs felt solid beneath him.

“To get to the point,” he said, as soon as he could speak, “will you tell me what's going on?”

“What?” said the young man. “Don't you know? Where are you from? It's cholera,
morbus,
my friend. The finest shipment of Asiatic cholera we've ever had! Have another round,” he said, holding out the flask. “Trust me, I'm a doctor.” He waited till Angelo had sneezed and wept. “I'm going to have one myself, too, see?” He took a drink, but did not seem to be disturbed by it. “I'm used to it,” he said. “It's kept me going for three days. The sight of the villages down there ahead of us isn't exactly a bedtime story either.”

Angelo perceived that the young man was at the end of his tether and only kept on his feet by the force of things. It was his eyes that made him ironical. Angelo found this very likable. He had already forgotten the chill breath of the corpses. “That's the way to be!” he told himself.

“You say these houses are full of dead?” asked the young man. Angelo described how he had gone into three or four of them and what he had seen in each. He added that the others were full of birds and that there was no chance of finding anyone alive there.

“That's the end of the story for Les Omergues,” said the young man. “It was a decent little hamlet. I came here to treat some cases of inflammation of the lungs six months ago. I cured them too. I used to get some fine drinks right over there, believe me! I'll look the place over in a minute. You never know. Suppose there's still one who isn't completely moldy in some corner or other. It's my job. But what the hell are we doing in the middle of the road?” he added. “Don't you think we'd be better off under those trees?”

They went into the shelter of some mulberry trees. The shade was not cool, but they felt freed of a cruel weight on their necks. The grass crackled as they sat down.

“You're in a bad spot,” said the young man; “we may as well face facts. Leave your legs in the sun. What on earth were you doing in these parts?”

“I was heading toward the Château de Ser,” said Angelo.

“The Château de Ser is done for,” said the young man.

“Are they dead?” asked Angelo.

“Certainly,” said the young man. “And the others, who weren't much better, piled into a post-chaise and decamped. They won't get far. I wonder what
you'll
do?”

“Me?” said Angelo. “Well, I don't mean to decamp.” He was addressing the ironical eyes.

“Against this mess, my friend,” said the young man, “there are only two remedies: fire or flight. A very old system, but a good one. I hope you know that?”

“You look as if you knew it yourself,” said Angelo, “yet here you are.”

“My job,” said the young man. “Otherwise, take my word for it, I'd be off in an instant. Seems it hasn't started yet in the Drôme, and that's back yonder, five hours away by mountain trails; let's be sensible. How are those legs of yours?”

“All right,” said Angelo, “they're damned good legs, but I can guarantee they only go where I want them to.”

“That's up to you,” said the young man. “You're a better color now. Obviously, as soon as you're a better color you're the sort it's difficult to make understand where his interest lies.”

“Now it's you who look queer,” said Angelo, smiling. The ironical eyes appeared to understand his smile perfectly.

“Oh, that! I admit I'm a bit washed out,” said the young man. He leaned back against the trunk of the mulberry tree. “Would you mind passing me the drug, please?”

Thanks to the bitter-smelling alcohol in the little flask, and above all to the presence of the ironical eyes, Angelo's blood was back where it should be. He suddenly longed for a smoke. He must have a few cigars left, from those he had had the hostler buy him yesterday at Banon; there were just six when he opened his case.

“You want to smoke?” said the young man. “Well, that's a good sign. Here, give me one, just to see. I must say, for three days and nights I haven't given tobacco a thought; I can't guarantee it won't knock me out, you know.” But he puffed away with great contentment. “Odd bodies we have,” he said, when he was sure that the tobacco was doing him good. “I was a bit on edge just now when I ran into you.”

Angelo, too, was greatly enjoying his cigar. “His eyes are looking better,” he thought, “and they're now in harmony with those pretty little child's lips in that beard of his. Oh, I know all about that
last cartridge
irony! It must look lovely in the villages he's come from!”

The young doctor told him how the cholera had broken out at Sisteron, the town at the end of the little valley, where its stream joins the Durance. How the municipality and the
sous-préfet
had tried to organize things in the midst of the panic. How they had got the warning from a mounted gendarme who had come to tell them that there were jolly goings-on in the Jabron valley; how he himself had been given full powers; how he had arrived to find an unspeakable shambles. He had sent a shepherd-boy from Noyers with a note asking for ten soldiers from the garrison and some quicklime to bury the dead. “But who knows if the child will ever reach Sisteron? Maybe he's already passed out under a bush with my paper in his pocket.” In any case, here the situation was clear. There were six left at Noyers. He had packed them off up the mountain tracks with their bundles and some drugs. “No way in particular; there are farms up there where if they're lucky they'll escape. The rest? Well, it's just a question of digging ditches big enough. There was one still between life and death—at the algid stage, though—in the little hamlet of Montfroc, a league down below those rocks; he slipped through my fingers this morning. It wasn't long after I had sat down outside his door—sat down! Well, sat like a sack because I'd had about enough—that I saw your nag strolling by, and he let me catch him by the bridle without any objection. If he'd raised any he could have done as he pleased! It was all I could do to stand upright.”

He said that the worst problem was finding something to eat. Everything was so infected that one had to beware of swallowing anything, meat or scraps, loaves or cakes, to be found in the houses. It was safer to go hungry. Still one couldn't do this indefinitely.

“Tell me,” he said, “is it just me, or do you hear those noises too.” It was the noise from the cattle sheds. “That's one more thing,” said the young man; “those animals haven't eaten for three days. I'll go and let them out; it's no joke, to die of hunger between four walls. But have you any pistols? Lend them to me; I'll have to finish off the pigs. They're voracious beasts and they eat the dead.”