The Horseman on the Roof

by Jean Giono

  “It’s the gentleman Giuseppe’s been expecting so impatiently,” he said.

  “Have you had anything to drink?” the woman immediately asked Angelo, resting her hands on her hips with relief.

  “Not a drop for two days,” replied Angelo. “My mouth’s like tin.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said the woman. “These days a tin mouth means a tin belly. That’s what worried Giuseppe. All day long he kept repeating: ‘You’ll see, he’ll drink. He won’t be able to stop himself. He’ll die on me from drinking!”

  “I haven’t died from drinking,” said Angelo, “I drank wine when I could. When I couldn’t, I went without.”

  “I shan’t give you wine: we haven’t any. But water, boiled twice over. And just half a cup. D’you know what we must do? I keep telling them all the time,” she said, pointing at her husband and daughters, “but they laugh at me: we must get used to making saliva and only drinking that. These days a person who drinks his saliva doesn’t die.”

  “He doesn’t die, but he cracks apart with thirst,” said Féraud.

  “I tell you what, I’m going to give him half a cup. Now that Giuseppe is going to see his gentleman, it’s no time to kill him off under his nose, that’s for sure!”

  This family was very united, and soon the daughters, who had finished making the bed on the pine needles, approached their father and stroked his beard. Between the two of them hanging on his shoulders, he purred. The mother appeared to run things with a firm hand, but in reality she was easily discomposed by caresses, in which she visibly delighted.

  She managed none the less to give Angelo his promised half-cupful of boiled water.

  Finally, they asked him to stay and share the evening meal. It wasn’t much, but at least there was a potato stew and some mutton cutlets. There was, it seemed, under the oaks a hundred yards or so to the left, a butcher who was slaughtering. Angelo learned many other things besides.

  They seemed to hold Giuseppe in great esteem. Esteem was indeed rather too weak a word. Giuseppe, it seemed, was a boy of the same age as Angelo, within a few months. He was his foster-brother. And Féraud was a steady man with a white beard, and dreamy eyes, it is true. Angelo wondered several times if it were really his Giuseppe whom they meant.

  “A thin fellow, like a dry stick.”

  “That’s him.”

  “One lip thin.”

  “The upper one. Like a razor.”

  “The other thick.”

  “The lower one. A girl’s lip.”

  “Well, thick, anyhow.”

  Angelo found it hard to imagine how they could say Giuseppe’s lower lip was girlish. Giuseppe had been his orderly. The King of Sardinia’s army may have been only the King of Sardinia’s army, but it was still thousands of men living together. It only needed a fortnight for a lip to be no longer judged by appearances.

  The daughters laid great emphasis on his black curly hair.

  “It’s like parsley,” they said.

  The day the general had had those parsley locks sheared off, Giuseppe had served the soup holding his galley-slave’s head high.

  “He’s turned you into an egg,” Angelo said to him.

  “Your mother’s too fancy,” retorted Giuseppe. “But I’m the one who suffers; you’re a colonel.”

  Angelo had kicked the soup tureen out of his hands. The two of them had hacked the mess room to pieces with their swords as they fought. But as soon as they saw each other’s blood they had fallen into each other’s arms. At the next day’s parade, Giuseppe gravely sported a head with all his colonel’s hair glued on to it. Angelo, without a helmet and shaved like a convict, pranced before the ranks smiling with happiness.

  It had been a good game. Giuseppe’s specialty was games of every sort, including bloody ones. Wasn’t the esteem—or more—in which Féraud with his white beard (and dreamy eyes, it is true) held him, perhaps the result of some game? And not just any game, since Féraud had asked so precisely if it hadn’t something to do with Italy?

  Angelo was treated like a fighting cock. The daughters even seemed embarrassed at not giving him his share of the family caresses. As they took the dish round, two or three times they laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’ll soon be dark,” said Féraud; “are you set on finding Giuseppe this evening?”

  “As soon as possible,” said Angelo.

  “I understand. Well, you must go a slightly longer way round than the one I showed you just now, but it’s safer. I know you’re not afraid of passing the infirmaries; all the same it’s best to be careful at night, and I’d rather keep you away from them. It’s not ghosts I’m thinking of. It’s because people go and leave their sick all around there on the sly, owing to the quarantine that’s imposed on the relatives who’ve looked after them. Suppose, as you were passing, you fell in with a patrol and they suddenly flashed their lanterns on you (they get a bonus every time they catch someone), you’d be inside for forty days. And just now a lot can happen in forty days. Do you know what I’d do? Just spend the night under that oak, ten yards off. You won’t bother us. I’ll lend you a blanket that you can spread on the dry leaves. Tomorrow you’ll have daylight.”

  “That may be what I ought to do,” replied Angelo, “but I shan’t do it. I’ll go now. I’ll manage. They can flash their lanterns, they won’t get me.

  “Anyway,” he added, to see what had been the basis of Giuseppe’s game (if there had been one), “I’m homesick,” and he talked about Italy for a full ten minutes.

  But Féraud’s eyes remained dreamy. His white beard seemed to clothe him entirely with innocence.

  Although night had fallen, Angelo found the cypresses easily. The baker who had chosen to make his home at the foot of the tree was preparing another ovenful. From there, following Féraud’s fresh instructions, he was to take the road at right angles (which he did) and cross the flank of the hill, along terraces placed like avenues one above the other. The directions were clear: never to go down, but to keep straight on around the hillside until he reached a deep ravine, which he would have to climb through in order to reach the other side, and to keep skirting the bottomlands where the infirmaries lay. In this way (Féraud had traced the whole route for Angelo with his fingertip in the expiring twilight) one could reach the almond-tree hill beside a rocky cliff, which one circled around until one met a fairly wide track, almost a cart track, cutting across it and leading on to the tableland where Giuseppe was.

  Fires were being lit everywhere. Close by stood tall braziers whose flames writhed and twisted. They chattered like peasant women dancing clogs on a wooden floor. Further on, through the foliage of the olives, pines, and oaks, red lights were dancing violently. A medley of voices and shouting rose up all around along with the crackling of the braziers. Even on the most distant crests, which just now in the daylight had seemed deserted, fires were being lighted, against which the silhouette of a tree, of a rock, stood out. In the groves where the infirmaries had been set up, people were attaching lanterns to the branches of trees to make the work of the patrols easier. In every thicket, under every bush, behind every mass of foliage, shone red grids, plates of incandescence, phosphorescent birds like huge purple hens, vermilion cockerels. In the swaying and palpitation—the furious fanning of these flames, the leaping of all those golden calves, the assaults of all the sharp flakes of fire—the night crumbled away on every side. An inaudible avalanche of boulders, violet, purple, or red like embers, pitched in the sky, covering it with rosy dust, splitting it with indigo crevasses. The reflections struck the empty town below, revealing the top of a belfry, the opening of a street, the porch and battlements of a main gate, the chessboard of a roof, the silk of a wall, the socket of a window, the brow of a convent, the frill of eaves, chimneys rising from outspread roofs like stumps in a field. Two leagues beyond the town, the fires hidden under the forests of the Durance glowed on the ground between the tree trunks like embers in a grille, all down the river. In the
shadows of the valley, on the crisscross of roads and footpaths, small points of light were moving: they were the lanterns of the patrols, the stretcher-bearers’ lamps, the torches of the corpse-carters at work. The thyme, savory, sage, and hyssop of the moors, the very earth and stones on which all these fires were kindled, the sap of the trees heated by the flames, the sweat of the smoked leaves, gave off a thick scent of balm and resin. It seemed as if the whole earth were an oven for baking bread.

  The ravine that Féraud had mentioned was steep and appeared very deep. As Angelo paused on the brink a small black shape brushed against him and an old woman’s voice: “It’s this way. There’s the path; follow me.”

  “Ho!” thought Angelo, “have they already enlisted ghosts?”

  He heard a patter of feet on the pebbles; he plunged down behind it.

  “Be careful,” the voice went on.

  A bony hand seized his hand.

  “Thank you, madame,” he said.

  But he was icy cold from head to foot.

  As step by step he followed the hand guiding him down an extremely slippery slope, he reassured himself with memories of the Carbonari. It was by such rugged paths that one reached their camps in the Apennines.

  “You’re at the bottom,” said the voice.

  And the hand let him go.

  He was indeed on level ground but in thick darkness. He did not dare move. He heard someone walking; the bushes scratched against cloth; there was whispering. He was incapable of a rational thought. He gripped his pistol and asked, very stiffly:

  “Who goes there? Who are you?” (He just barely kept from shouting.) “Advance and be recognized.”

  He was on his guard and felt behind him with his hand for something to put his back against, in order to make an honorable stand.

  “We’re the women from up above, going to the ora pro nobis,” came the reply.

  “What have I been seeing in these flames and smoke?” he asked himself. “An episode from Ariosto; and it’s just some people going to pray not to die.”

  He found a path without any trouble, and followed the ghosts, some of whom now were bending pipes, mouths, and red beards over the sparks of their tinderboxes.

  “My eyes always look at things through a magnifying glass,” Angelo told himself. “Everything I see is magnified at least ten times, and naturally I do ten times too much. Just because the night is painted in all the colors of the inferno, there’s no reason to imagine I’m going to see the swift mountain leopard arrive, and the she-wolf and Virgil and ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ It’s nothing but the reflections from the fires these people have lit because they’re afraid of the night. It’s quite plain to a simple man. But I’m not simple: I’m double, triple, even centuple.

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve wanted to kill flies with a cannon. It’s the hundred-thousandth. It happens to me every day and all day. I always expect the worst and carry on as if it were the worst. Well! Get into the habit of realizing that ordinary things happen too. Don’t be all the time throwing in the reserves. As soon as you have to do with anything or anyone, you go wild. You invent giants and monsters at every turn in the road. The first wretch that comes along, as soon as he crosses your path, becomes an Atlas. This is pride. Those who objected to your duel with the Baron were right. A simple little stab would have done the job and, admit it now, done the job much better. He was only a small police spy. It was purely and simply a matter of getting rid of him. A question of garbage disposal. To rid the world of him. Why add fancy steps to a clean-up operation?

  “You’re incurable: your eye glued to the magnifying glass, your mouth to the megaphone. Why say now that we had to ‘rid the world of him’? The world! What a big world! It was Turin we had to rid of him. Turin isn’t the world. And the Baron was no trouble to the Chinese. He didn’t even trouble Turin. He merely troubled our little group of patriots.

  “You’ll never manage, let alone to behave, even to speak like everyone else,” he pursued, with genuine sorrow. “There they are again, the big words, the big ideas, the majestic enterprises. Won’t you ever use down-to-earth, carpet-slipper words? Off you go with your word ‘patriot’! So we’re patriots! Are you more of a patriot here in this gully than the master mason stirring his mortar in a suburb of Turin or Genoa, even if he’s only building a hunting-lodge or a barber shop? More of a patriot than the Lombard shepherd who passes his time planting acorns with the end of his crook while he guards his sheep on the lonely heights? The saddlers in the Via del Perseo may be stitching leather that will do more for the glory of their country, something surer and more permanent, than all your flag-waving.… And by what right do you speak of your country if you don’t know that any farm laborer and all the basso continuo of humble lives are building it more solidly, furrow by furrow and task by task, than all your Carbonari in their fever bushes and forests?

  “You never put yourself where you belong. You’re always putting yourself in some place that you invent. And God knows you invent lofty ones! Men aren’t worth much. Agreed? Well, you’re a man. Still agreed? The whole thing’s there.

  “Granted, you’re not a coward. You’re even the opposite. For what you are, one would need to invent a word that would outshine ‘brave’ the way ‘cowardly’ does ‘nervous.’ When you took out your pistol just now, it wasn’t from fear of the night or even because of that dry hand which was guiding you down the slope (you had goose flesh and it was plainly some old granny’s hand); it was because you will never admit that you may simply be dealing with a simple ravine and extremely simple people who don’t give a damn about you and are simply going to pray not to die.”

  Having spoken to himself in this way, Angelo felt sharp, clear, and ready for any folly. For some time now he had been hearing grunts that suggested some pigsty or a huge troop of crows. But he realized that this time he had bid too low and that they were the sounds of a harmonium. Indeed, the music was very beautiful and had an extraordinarily chivalrous quality. Soon he heard also the rhythmic murmur of a multitude of voices all pronouncing the same words together.

  The track was now lit by the red and wavering light of a few braziers still hidden by a shoulder of rock. Flames now and then leaped over the crest like purple grasshoppers.

  After a detour, Angelo found himself at the approach to a sort of amphitheater surrounded by tall oaks, where a religious meeting was in progress. About a hundred men and women kneeling in the grass were giving the responses to a litany. The priest chanting it was standing a few paces in front of the farther trees and between two big fires so stoutly fed that the flames stood up straight like scarlet columns.

  A woman, who at first sight seemed old though she was dressed in white, was playing the portable organ. She was not playing a concert piece; she was just accompanying the priest’s words and the responses in an uninterrupted flow, or, to be more precise, with music like the endless unrolling of a chain connecting earth and heaven.

  Angelo thought at once of the angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder.

  The glare of the fires, which lit the vaults, flying buttresses, and ribs of the branches, the green frescoes of foliage, built a natural temple over the worshippers.

  “And here’s what simple folk come to,” said Angelo. “The nun and I may have washed with our own hands and prepared for Judgment Day the father, mother, brother, sister, husband, or wife of one of these men or women here, simply begging all the saints to pray for them. They are right. This way is much easier. It can’t help being the solution. We ought to have something like this in politics. If it doesn’t exist already, we must invent one.”

  After a benediction and a sign of the cross the priest withdrew from between his two braziers and went to sit under an oak at the edge of the shadow, while the faithful too sat down on the grass. The organist raised her arms and arranged her bun. She continued to make the pedals hum.

  She was a young woman. She seemed nearsighted. She gazed at the ass
embly, plainly without seeing it. She seemed affected only by the silence, in which nothing but the crackle of the braziers could be heard. She wiped her forehead and resumed playing.

  Freed from religious trappings, the music affected Angelo violently. Even the priest, back there in the shadow and the flickering firelight, was now only a sort of gilded insect. Every face was turned toward the organist. Angelo noticed some handsome profiles. They belonged to various grave men whose sunburn was reddened still more by the light, and to certain women who looked like Junos and Minervas. What with these faces, the great fires, and the depth of the woods, the music created a world without politics, where the cholera was no more than an exercise in style. Finally, with nothing by way of warning that the end of this world was drawing near, the young woman raised her hands and, after letting the instrument sigh away, closed the lid over the keyboard.

  Angelo perceived that he had not followed Féraud’s directions. At the spot where he had descended into the ravine, he should have gone up the slope on the other side, straight ahead. He had followed the shades, he had kept along the ravine, descending. It was no good counting on finding the place again in the dark. The simplest thing was now to follow straight down the path. Patrols, quarantines, lanterns would be seen approaching. These famous patrols were unlikely to rake the plain with too fine a comb. There should be ways of passing between the teeth.

  He had not walked half an hour when he found himself facing an orchard whose every tree carried at least one lantern. Sometimes they bore two or three, especially along the roadside. It was an orchard where an infirmary had been set up. Indeed, one could see, far back under the trees, the white patch of the tents, some of them lit up inside and looking like huge phosphorescent caterpillars. He heard continuous groans, conversations, and all at once some sharp cries, while the tent from which these came began to rock its lantern like a boat caught by a squall in the night.

  He had noticed a very rough, thick hedge that ran between some willows. He went toward it. Fortunately he was walking in a field where his steps made no sound, and he took the precaution of concealing himself behind a willow trunk before taking refuge in the hedge. He heard someone at the foot of the hedge calling in a whisper a name that he couldn’t catch. A voice replied from up in the willow, which stood in the hedge itself.