The Horseman on the Roof

by Jean Giono

  “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. Meanwh
ile the passengers in the third compartment kept pounding with their fists against the locked door.

  There was a huge crop of melons in the towns and villages of this entire valley. The heat had ripened them. It was impossible to think of eating anything: bread, meat—the very idea turned the stomach. People ate melons. That took the place of drink: there were great tongues of scum hanging from the spouts of the fountains. People felt a furious longing to rinse their mouths. The dust swirling from the crumbled branches of certain trees, or rising from meadows as white as snow, where the hay dust that came from the snow-white fields was baked dry and crumbled under the weight of the air, tickled their throats and nostrils like plane-tree pollen. The little streets around the synagogue were strewn with the peel, seeds, and pith of melons. They ate raw tomatoes, too. It was the first day and, as time went on, this refuse quickly rotted. On the evening of this first day it began to rot, and the ensuing night was hotter than the day. So far, the peasants had brought into Carpentras more than fifty cartloads of big watermelons. By one in the afternoon, thirty of these carts returned empty to the melon fields just outside the walls. At the moment when, thirty leagues east of Carpentras, Angelo, half asleep, was letting his horse carry him as it pleased, through gorges sickening with heat and the smell of rotten eggs, the melon peel was beginning to litter the main street and even the approaches to the sous-préfecture, the library, the royal gendarmerie, and the Lion Hotel, the best hotel in town; fresh cartloads of melons were arriving; a doctor was taking some drops of paregoric elixir on a gram of sugar; and the diligence for Blovac, which was due to leave at two, did not harness its horses.

  In the towns and villages, as in the open fields, the light from this heat was as mysterious as fog. It made the walls of the houses invisible from one side of the street to the other. The reflection from surfaces struck by the sun was so intense that the shade opposite was dazzling. Shapes were distorted in an air as viscous as sirup. The people walked as if they were drunk; their intoxication came not from their stomachs, in which the green flesh and water of the hastily chewed melons gurgled, but from this blurring of forms, which kept shifting doorways, windows, latches, portieres, raffia curtains, altering the height of pavements and the position of the cobbles. Added to which, everyone walked with half-closed eyes and, as with Angelo, under their lowered eyelids, dyed poppy-red by the sun, their desires came crowding, forming images of boiling water into which they stumbled.

  So it came about that, in the first days, many victims passed unnoticed. Nobody bothered about them until, lacking the strength to reach their houses, they collapsed in the street. And not always even then. If they fell on their bellies, it could be supposed that they were asleep. Only if they rolled on the ground and ended up on their backs, did people see their black faces and become concerned. And not always even then, for the heat and the furious thirstiness made people self-centered. That is why, in actual fact, there were on this first day—precisely as Angelo was musing under his red eyelids about the carcasses of buzzards fallen into the branches of the tall oaks—by and large very few cases of sickness. A Jewish doctor, summoned by a rabbi who was chiefly worried about pollution, came to examine three corpses crumpled up just outside the little door of the synagogue (it was presumed that they had meant to go into the temple to be in the cool). There were only two alarms that afternoon in Carpentras, including the coachman of the Blovac diligence. In his case, moreover, it was difficult to distinguish the effects of absinthe from those of the heat (he was a very fat man of inordinate thirst and appetite and, after a meal at the inn—he was probably the only person to eat a midday meal in the whole town—during which he devoured a whole dish of tripe, he had drunk seven absinthes in place of coffee and liqueur).

  At Orange, Avignon, Apt, Manosque, Arles, Tarascon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Aix, La Valette (though here the death of the kitchen-maid had created a long, ominous silence), Draguignan, and as far as the coast, hardly anybody yet (but only at the beginning of the afternoon, it is true; at the moment when Angelo in his sleep, shaken by the horse’s gait, felt like vomiting), hardly anybody was moved to worry about a couple of deaths in each place and a few people taken more or less seriously ill, all attributed to those melons and tomatoes that were being eaten so ravenously everywhere. These sick were treated with paregoric elixir on lumps of sugar.

  At Toulon, around two in the afternoon, a navy medical inspector insisted on seeing the Duke of T., the base commander. He was told to come back at seven in the evening. He acted in a very unmannerly way, and even raised his voice unsuitably in the antechamber. He was finally sent away by the midshipman orderly, who noticed that he looked haggard and seemed to have an irrepressible desire to talk, which he restrained by clapping his hand over his mouth. The midshipman said he was sorry. The doctor said: “Can’t be helped,” and went off.

  At Marseille there was only one question: that frightful smell of sewers. In a few hours the water in the Old Port had grown thick, dark, and the color of tar. The town was too crowded for people to notice the doctors, who began to make their rounds in cabriolets in the early afternoon. Some of them looked extremely serious. But that terrible stench of excrement gave everybody a sad and thoughtful look.

  * * *

  The road that Angelo’s horse was following made straight for one of those rocks shaped like lateen sails, and began to zigzag up it toward a village concealed among the stones like a wasps’ nest. Angelo felt the horse’s change of gait; he woke up, and found that he was climbing among small terraced farms, held in place by little walls of white stones and bearing very mournful cypresses. The village was deserted; the walls of its narrow street were stifling; the glare of the light made one giddy. Angelo dismounted and led his horse into a sort of shelter created by a half-crumbled vault near the church. There was a violent smell of bird droppings; the ceiling of the vault was plastered with swallows’ nests from which a brownish juice was oozing; but the shade, although gritty, brought peace to Angelo’s burning neck, which felt almost bruised: he could not keep his hand off it. He had been there a good quarter of an hour when he saw, facing him on the other side of the street, an open door. Far back in the deep shadow, something—a bodice or a shirt—stirred feebly. He crossed the street to ask for some water. It was a woman, sluggish and sweating, and breathing with great difficulty.

  She said there was no water left; the pigeons had fouled the cisterns; she doubted if it was even worth trying to water the horse. But the animal snorted in the trough, rinsed its nostrils, and blew spray at the sun.

  The woman had some melons. Angelo ate three. He gave the rind to the horse. The woman had some tomatoes too, but she said that these would cause fever; they could only be eaten cooked. Angelo bit into a raw tomato, so violently that the juice spurted over his fine coat. He hardly cared. His thirst was beginning to abate a little. He also gave two or three tomatoes to the horse, which ate them greedily. The woman said that it was this kind of recklessness that had made her husband ill, and that he had run a high fever since yesterday. Angelo noticed a bed in one corner of the room, piled with a thick flowered rug and an eiderdown that barely allowed the sick man’s head to protrude. The woman said that her man couldn’t get warm. Which Angelo thought very odd and decidedly a bad sign. Also the man’s face was purple. The woman said he had hardly any pain now, but that he had been convulsed with colic all morning and that this surely came from the tomatoes, for he had refused to listen to her and, like Angelo, had let himself go.

  After resting nearly an hour in this room, into which in the end they had brought the horse too, Angelo set off again. The light and the heat were still waiting at the door. One could not imagine there would be an evening.

  This was the moment when the navy medical inspector was saying: “Can’t be helped!” and turning back to Toulon. It was also exactly the moment when, the Jewish doctor having rushed home, spoken to his wife, and made her pack a small bag for herself and their little twelve-year-old girl, th
at plump woman with her ox-eyes and eagle-nose was leaving Carpentras by the Vaison diligence, with instructions to push on without delay in a hired carriage as far as Dieulefit or even Bourdeaux. She turned her back on the town where her husband was staying and, laying a finger on her lips, silenced the little girl, who sat opposite her, wide-eyed and sweating. At that moment Angelo was seeing the barbaric splendor of the terrible summer in the high hills: oaks turned russet, chestnuts baked white, pastures thin and verdigris-colored, cypresses with the oil of funeral lamps gleaming in their foliage, mists of light whirling and evolving around him in a mirage, the tapestry, worn threadbare by the sun, in whose translucent web floated and quivered the ever-gray pattern of forests, villages, hills, mountain, horizon, fields, groves, and pastures, almost blotted out by air the color of sackcloth.

  At this instant, when he was asking himself for the hundredth time whether evening would come—having turned a hundred times to the east, still imperturbably pure ocher—time had stopped in La Valette, where the kitchenmaid was rotting with extraordinary rapidity in front of the few inhabitants of the village and her young mistress; they had stayed out of respect for the dead girl, who was melting visibly and soaking the bed on which she had been laid out fully dressed. And while they stood fascinated by the swift work of decomposition, Angelo could see opening around him the region of chestnut woods pitted with rocks and villages of which he had caught sight, early in the morning, from the top of the first hill. But whereas in the morning, and seen from afar, that landscape had had a shape and comfortable colors, now under this incredibly violent light it decomposed into sirupy and quivering air. The trees were like smears of grease spreading their shapes and colors among the threads of a coarse-woven atmosphere; the forests were melting like lumps of fat. At the hour when, in front of the corpse, the young mistress was thinking: “Only a few hours ago I sent this girl down to buy me melons,” when Angelo was gazing eastward in the hope of seeing there at last the signs announcing this day’s end, the navy medical inspector could stand it no longer. He went back up the rue Lamalgue, passed along the rue des Trois-Oliviers, crossed the Place Pavé-d’Amour, went down the rue Montauban, turned into the rue des Remparts, passed down the rue de la Miséricorde, where trickles of urine were ripening between white-hot cobblestones, descended the rue de l’Oratoire and the rue Larmedieu, across which, like a man blowing in his sleep, the harbor was exhaling the stench of its green stomach, mounted the rue Mûrier, where he was obliged to straddle the gutters from a public convenience, came out into the rue Lafayette with its plane trees, sat down at last at the terrace of the Duc d’Aumale, and ordered an absinthe. As soon as he had taken the first gulp, he told himself that he mustn’t be more royalist than the king. It was time for a report: he had only to write it to be cleared of responsibility. Every year people said: “It’s never been so hot.” Perhaps it was only simple dysentery. A body worn out by excesses.