The Horseman on the Roof

by Jean Giono

  Angelo pulled off his boots and, especially, his breeches, which he had been wearing for more than a month.

  “Have you been sensible?” Giuseppe asked at last, in a solemn voice.

  “What d’you mean by sensible?” said Angelo.

  “Have you taken the precautions you should against falling ill?”

  “Yes,” said Angelo. “At any rate, I don’t drink the first thing I see.”

  “That’s at least something,” said Giuseppe. “But,” he added, “I could make you drink anything, if I wanted.”

  “How?” said Angelo.

  “I’d say you were afraid; then you’d drink!…”

  “Of course,” said Angelo.

  CHAPTER NINE

  All was well on the almond-tree hill. Everyone seemed to feel at home there. The women were strong women, the men decidedly hale and hearty. The women were massive, built for hard work: thick arms, throats, full, often even heavy, and baked to a tan by the sun; broad hips, solid legs, slow of gait, dragging crowds of children with each hand.

  “Come to think of it,” said Angelo to himself, “who was that sentinel who greeted me? And what was he guarding?”

  It did no good to search: there was no infirmary on the top of the cliff. It wasn’t a place for harmoniums either. But there was a markedly heroic atmosphere. Numerous workmen, with belts round their blouses and rifles slung over their shoulders, were moving about on every side. There were just as many old men as young; some with sharp girlish faces under peaked caps; others sporting long, wide, curling beards, red or black or even snow-white, and wearing felt hats or broad, swaggering berets. They were walking about with the air of gamekeepers on a private estate, or even like the owner, quietly dropping a word to right or left, here to have the garbage collected and taken to a trench, there to organize fatigues whose job it was to fetch water or wood for everyone.

  They even had a guardroom, a meeting-place in a grove of oaks, where one of them with no gun, only a naked saber hanging from his belt, issued orders. Angelo was much affected by the saber, which was a handsome and noble weapon.

  One day, this sort of militia made some of the encampments move. These were set up in a rather deep gully congested with rocks and undergrowth, forming the dry bed of a stream. A storm was threatening. Already thunder was rolling at the back of the hills. The sky had not changed color. It had remained chalk-white; it had barely lost that satin brilliance lent to it by the crushed sun. It wasn’t growing black merely where the thunder came from, under the approaching clouds; it was darkening uniformly all over and, had it not been for the hour and the sudden flashes of lightning, one might have supposed it was the onset of night. The guards in blouses made everybody decamp from the stream-bed. They were extremely obliging; they lent a hand; they carried pots and pans, kettles, infants, without letting go of their guns.

  Giuseppe had handed over to Angelo, with much ceremony, a letter from Italy. “I’ve had it in my coat pocket for at least two months,” he said. “It’s from your mother. Look at the envelope well and get ready to swear on your life that I’ve kept it with the utmost care. It’s not your mother I’m afraid of: it’s mine. I’m sure she’ll ask me, with her eyes of fire, if I didn’t stuff it in with the handkerchief I spit my tobacco into. Swear you’ll tell her. I am scared to death of my mother when she digs her nails into my arms. And when it has anything to do with the Duchess or you, she always digs her nails into my arm.”

  The letter was dated in June and ran: “My dearest child, have you found any chimeras? The sailor you sent to me told me you were foolhardy. That reassured me. Always be very foolhardy, my dear, it’s the only way of getting a little pleasure out of life in this factory age of ours. I had a long discussion about foolhardiness with your sailor. I like him very much. He watched for our Teresa at the side door as you told him to, but, as he mistrusted a tall lad of fifteen who has been playing hopscotch every day in the square from seven in the morning till eight in the evening ever since you’ve been in France, he smeared a poor dog’s muzzle with shaving-soap, and the hopscotch-player took to his heels shouting: “Mad dog!” The same evening General Bonetto suggested a dog hunt to me because of this dragon. So now I know exactly where the hopscotch-player comes from, and I gave the right sort of look to let the General know I know. Nothing is more fun than seeing the enemy shift his batteries. There’s a lot of rabies in Turin. All the young people who have unprepossessing faces and stand less than four and a half feet high are rabid. The same epidemic is ravaging the envious and those who have never known how to be generous to their tailor. The rest are well and full of plans. There are even some who are so crazy they want to adopt that English fashion, bad for organdy and tight breeches, of going picnicking in the country. They even say: as far as the Roman tombs. Which I find excessive, at any rate, as an ambition. But the roads are open to all. Let them go where they please. Good hikers wander away at every detour to see the landscape around the next bend, and that’s how they sometimes turn a simple walk into a military march. It would be all right if there were not fewer and fewer people able to rely on their hearts. It is a muscle people no longer make use of, except for your sailor, who in this respect seems to me a pretty remarkable gymnast. A negligible kindness of mine toward his mother quite overwhelmed him, and he went off and got into uncomfortably close quarters with the two over-decorated men responsible for your sudden journey. As a result, they became grievously ill the same day. A pity. I thought your sailor was a bit quick on the trigger. I gave him some very involved reasons for making another voyage. I was so mysterious that he was beside himself with joy. I like taking a long time to aim.

  “And now let’s talk of serious matters. I’m afraid you may not be doing enough crazy things. This doesn’t interfere with either gravity, or melancholy, or solitude—those three passions of your character. You can be grave and crazy, what’s to stop you? You can be anything you like and crazy into the bargain, but it’s essential to be crazy, my child. Look around you at the ever-increasing number of people who take themselves seriously. Apart from making themselves hopelessly absurd to minds like mine, they condemn themselves to a dangerously constipated life. It’s exactly as if, at one and the same time, they stuffed themselves with tripe, which is a laxative, and with Japanese medlars, which are binding. They swell, swell, then they burst, and that makes a bad smell for everybody. I couldn’t find a better image than that. Besides, I like it very much. One should even add three or four dialect words so as to make it even more foul than it is in Piedmontese. You who know my natural distaste for everything coarse will see from this search for the right image how great is the danger run by people who take themselves seriously before the judgment of original minds. Never become a bad smell for a whole kingdom, my child. Walk like a jasmine in the midst of them all.

  “And, incidentally, is God your friend? Are you making love? I ask for this every evening in my prayers. In any case there is here, besides me, a woman who’s mad about you. I mean our Teresa. To seduce one’s nurse is not so common as they claim. Anyhow I am paying her back in her own coin. I really have a sort of passion for her son. Tell him so when he hands you this letter. I love that shepherd-of-lions act he has such a taste for. I never could make out whether he was a tamer of wild beasts strutting in a cageful of sheep, or a pastor leading flocks of lions through the countryside. Whichever it is, in either case, he has eyes like Christopher Columbus. I am enchanted to see you two together. I was, the very first time I saw you both in Teresa’s arms. You were no bigger than puppies then. Everyone kept telling me that with her thin breasts she wouldn’t have enough. You were gluttons and kept butting her in the breasts, the way kids do nanny-goats. No one knew that Teresa is a she-wolf. I knew. When she had the two of you hanging from her neck and I drew near, she’d growl. I trusted her. I was sure that if her milk ran out she’d give you blood rather than wean you. Ah! you were a perfect Romulus and Remus.

  “Teresa is beginning to get use
d to the idea that Lavinia sleeps with her son. ‘As husband and wife should,’ I told her, and nearly had her nails in my eyes for it. She’d like to be everything. One can only hint at these things. I believe that, in this, Giuseppe takes after his mother: that that’s where he gets his Christopher Columbus eyes from. Do you still fight like dogs, you and he? If you do it with sabers, be careful with him. You know you’re more skillful than he is. The police commissioner told me so, apropos of Swartz, as soon as he had seen that thrust, as clean as a sword-cut (I was very proud), running straight through the swine’s heart. The annoying thing is that you sign your blows, he said: each of them has in it ten years of practice and three hundred years of hereditary nonchalance. If a man can sign his saber-blows like that, he has no excuse for killing his foster-brother. If you always keep your guard en huit, the one I used to call your ‘calabash,’ the most you risk, even allowing Giuseppe all the luck, is a hole in your right shoulder. You owe him that, after all, because (never forget) he is the she-wolf’s son and it’s just as necessary for him to keep his anger fed as for you to have your breakfast. I laugh to myself at the thought of what would happen if Giuseppe pierced your shoulder. I can hear his wails from here. It would hurt him much more than you.

  “I am off to La Brenta. Tell Lavinia I miss her. She’s the only one who ever knew how to arrange my petticoat under my riding-skirt. All the others, now, rummage around under my ribs for hours on end till they emerge half suffocated, and I have to sit in my saddle as though on a handful of nails. If the three of you had stayed here I shouldn’t have my behind in vinegar like this. Political assassinations and love affairs have, as you can see, unforeseeable consequences. Remember it is the same with revolutions. Everything in the end comes down to a petticoat rucking up under somebody’s buttocks.

  “Besides, if you hadn’t killed Baron Swartz, I wouldn’t have to go to La Brenta. I am going because a dog is never so strong as in its kennel. I’m taking the little priest. He’s getting more and more like a wedge for splitting wood. He now has a passion for perfumes. I find this most useful. No one suspects him. They all believe he is my cicisbeo, and you can imagine the care I take to give those who believe it satisfaction. So now I’m armed from head to foot. The Bonetto will arrive on Sunday, upon a formal invitation. He imagines you are behind every bush. Each time a branch cracks he jumps and puts his hand to his belt. It would make you die laughing.

  “I’m going to enjoy myself. Monsignor Grollo arrives on Monday. The minister who has such dirty hair will be there on Tuesday. I must tell you a mot of Carlotta’s: she calls him the minestrone. When one knows that he lived on soup all his life until he became His Excellency, the joke is quite a good one. Biondo and Fracassetti will come on Wednesday. I feel well able to tie those two in knots on the same day, even in my sleep. And on Thursday we shall all be on the steps to welcome Messer Giovanni-Maria Stratigopolo: il cavalier greco! It’s a plot, as you see. And aimed at your dear head. Admire my strategy. I begin with the most chicken-hearted. You know how depressing those long empty Sundays are among the chestnut forests. Bonetto will have to spend one in the company of the little priest and myself between these old, moaning, melancholy walls. I shall have a headache from two in the afternoon onward. There he is, stuck with the little priest. They will take coffee in the famous round room in the North Tower. Let us hope there’ll be a slight tramontana blowing. Our forebears wisely placed there a good number of squeaking shutters and rusty weathercocks (who will ever assess the part played by exasperation of the ear in Sardinian politics?). I put my trust in my little priest. There’s no one like him for distilling hell drop by drop, should he have any help from the surroundings. I shall join them again at nightfall, and, by the Madonna, if the General isn’t trembling when he goes to bed, I’m willing to lose my reputation. The next day there’ll be Grollo, but Bonetto will be in such a state that he’ll leave us a clear field. I know very well how to deal with Grollo when he’s alone. He’ll fall for it. The minestrone will arrive when the others have been fully besieged and indeed a breach opened. I can see you laughing at the thought of his being obliged to sustain the fire of my batteries all alone. Not a worthy adversary for me, in fact. No more than the next day’s couple, barely the dispatch of current business, as they say. That leaves only il Cavalier! But he will arrive on a battlefield already laid waste, and God will inspire me. Besides, I was forgetting: there will be Carlotta. She will be there two hours before him.

  “Do you think of Carlotta sometimes? She often throws herself furiously into my arms. Do you know, she is very handsome? Even I, a woman and your mother, am not altogether indifferent to pressing to me that firm throat, that full yet supple waist. She’s an impetuous creature, the kind I like. It was the devil’s own work to make her accept my way of fighting. She wanted simply to give them bad coffee. I told her: ‘Then all that would be left for us would be to roam the roads of France.’ ‘Why not?’ was her reply. If we don’t win the battle of La Brenta that might indeed be a solution. For the fun of the thing.

  “Your sailor will be leaving this evening for Genoa. He and this letter will be there the day after tomorrow; in twelve days they will both of them reach Marseille. All three, rather; he’s also taking the little bag. I first thought of sending you two drafts of a thousand francs drawn by Regacci brothers of Naples on the house of Charbonnel at Marseille, which is more solid than the Colossus of Rhodes. After thinking it over I prefer sending you liquid cash. I am sending you also a hundred Roman crowns, for the pleasure of feeling them. The minting is infinitely more beautiful than that of the French crowns. Change them gradually; they will give you a great deal of pleasure. You will also find fifty bajoccos folded in wine-filter paper. They’re a present from your Teresa. She has saved them up one by one out of heaven knows what. Had I refused them, I saw by the look in her eyes that she would have stabbed me in the night. And besides, she is right. One must pay for those one loves. The more one loves, the dearer one must pay. But there are some who would like to give the treasures of Golconda but only have at their disposal fifty bajoccos. As you are my son, I know you will never laugh at them.

  “The sailor is not staying at Marseille: he is going on to Venice; you know why. He will hand over the letter and bag to the rabbit-skin merchant. That means that, in twenty days at the most, the whole will be in Giuseppe’s hands. And if you are there you will be able to receive, on the spot, the little kiss I am placing here, on this cross. It is addressed to the left dimple of your upper lip. Before you had even opened your eyes you used to laugh when I kissed you there.”

  Angelo did not laugh as he pressed the cross on the paper to the left corner of his mouth.

  Angelo described his adventures with the little Frenchman.

  “You deserve to have your face bashed in,” Giuseppe told him. “What would the Duchess and my mother say if I let you die, and above all if you die in some absurd way? They would hold me responsible. That little Frenchman had a passion. He died for it. You had no business to get mixed up in it, or to keep gaping over it now. The bodies of those with cholera are full of dusts that fly in all directions. And nothing’s commoner than dying from some dust one has breathed in.

  “You’re too stupid. Your mother knew what she was doing when she bought you a colonel’s commission. There’s somebody who sees clearly! In normal times, you’d have made yourself a career. If you want to end up at sixty like Bonetto who’s afraid of everything, you must, in fact, begin by being afraid of nothing. For there’s a God of imbeciles; they end by believing in him; and then, beware of those last moments; there’s never a scapulary big enough. One trembles at them twenty years ahead. In the work we’ve begun you’ll have a thousand opportunities to show courage. But to do it for nothing is just being a freak. If you’d done that at Turin, even before a commissioner for oaths, I might understand. It could be useful. A sonnet could be written on it, or a pulpit sermon; it was merely a question of organization. And you had the benefit or
, more precisely, what we are doing had the benefit. Believe me, faith justifies everything, and good works are ineffectual.”

  Angelo told him how, on reaching Manosque, he had nearly been hanged. Giuseppe began to laugh.

  “Well, well! they didn’t do things by halves!”

  Angelo turned scarlet with anger. He remembered the demented voice of Michu, the hatred flaming in his eyes and the ardor with which he had communicated it to all those men who, cowards though they were and very frightened, would have ended by disemboweling him as they had disemboweled the poor devil whose torture he had seen from the rooftops.

  “Yes,” said Giuseppe, “Michu’s a fine fellow and he earns his wages. Certainly, if he’d got you hanged, he’d have done something that wasn’t in his instructions, but how could anybody imagine that you were going to turn up and that he’d happen just on you? If we had to weigh all the pros and cons, we would never get anywhere. There are always some chances we have to take: I confess this one sends cold shivers down my spine. But it would have been impossible for me to repudiate Michu. I could have ripped his belly open behind the first bush, but I wouldn’t have been able to alter the principle of the thing. Besides nothing could have brought you back and my knifing him would, in all fairness, have been morally questionable. I recognize, though, that it would have been impossible for me not to do it. And in a rage too. That’s love, but it’s not revolution. Bah! you’d have been well worth a little exception, and Michu’s no more than a soldier who can be replaced.”