The Horseman on the Roof

by Jean Giono

  Lavinia glanced covertly at Angelo.

  During the night there were four, five, six, seven, eight, nine deaths. The crows and the militiamen went round with lanterns. Giuseppe sighed on his bed, spoke to Lavinia in Piedmontese. He called to Angelo, who was sleeping six feet away from them. “Talk to me,” he said.

  In the morning the ravine was clear: there was no trace of agitation nor of death. Only, a few circles of trodden grass, marking where hearths had been, were deserted.

  One man more died that morning. He was carried away before the final cry. His wife and son did up their bundles and without a word followed the militiamen, who led them out of the ravine.

  That was the only death of the day. Toward evening, Angelo was smoking a little cigar when he heard a sound similar to that of a light wind among the leaves. It was the sound of conversation from group to group, starting up again.

  The night was peaceful. Several times, however, Giuseppe spoke to Lavinia in Piedmontese. She did not reply. He called to Angelo and said: “Talk to me.” Angelo talked to him for a long while about Piedmont, about the chestnut woods, and finally set himself to imagine all the beffas with which one could make a fool of Messer Giovanni-Maria Stratigopolo. Every time he stopped to recover his breath, Giuseppe would say: “And then, what else could one do to him?”

  The next day there was no death. A light breeze blew from the north, gay and lively. It was wonderful to hear the stout branches gently creaking. The militiamen who were keeping order around the fountain were obeyed at a gesture or a glance. Their ruddy, sensual faces now reflected a grave, almost spiritual confidence. This phenomenon astonished Angelo. Giuseppe took a walk around the encampment. He was greeted with considerable respect. Even Lavinia was greeted, although she was becoming more and more allegoric.

  “I greet thee, Goddess of Reason,” Angelo said to her.

  She gave a sibylline smile.

  Angelo led Giuseppe toward the edge of the wood, on the westward side.

  “It’s good,” he said, “that people should realize that you’re protecting me.”

  And he showed his teeth under his mustache.

  “Don’t laugh,” replied Giuseppe, “I’m quite aware that last night you talked about Stratigopolo simply to distract me. I won’t hide it; this disease disgusts me. You want me to tell you I’m frightened? Well, I will! My hide peels back like the hide of a skinned rabbit. D’you want to know what I really think? One isn’t required to be brave in cases like this. The danger’s too great. Seeming to be brave is enough; it gets you to the same place and at least it gets you there alive; this, in spite of that little laugh of yours which I don’t like, is the most important thing. Look at it any way you wish: death is total defeat. People must be able to use others. That’s natural and everybody understands it, even those you use as mattresses to block up your windows. Men stop bullets better than wool. Everyone has that much common sense in his blood. That’s why I’m closer to the people than you are. You appear mad. You don’t inspire their confidence. They can’t believe in virtues they can’t imagine. Just make an experiment. Tell them you had to hold my hand all night like a child, or show them you don’t take me seriously, and you see if they don’t smash your face in.”

  Below them opened the wild valley down which, two days before, the first exile had been driven. It was filled with enormous blue beeches. There was no village to be seen, but everywhere blue woods.

  Angelo said nothing.

  “Let’s go back to Italy,” he said at last, “and get killed.”

  “All right,” said Giuseppe. “How?”

  “I’ll put on my colonel’s uniform, you your hussar’s, and we’ll go back arm in arm to the barracks.”

  “And suppose they don’t kill us? All the quartermasters are Carbonari. There are twenty N.C.O.’s who are heads of vendite. Half an hour later, the officers are dead, and work has to be begun in the streets of Turin with a thousand conscripts shouting: ‘Long live Colonel Pardi!’ But they’ll shout it a good deal less the next day when there’s only five hundred of them left. And how could we enlist the factory workers? Nothing’s possible without them, and they won’t like your gold braid and the Castle of La Brenta. Not to mention the explanations to be given to all those who’ve already set out the laws of Italian liberty on paper or in their heads. Don’t forget there are lawyers and teachers.”

  “I’ll get arrested without uniform.”

  “But Bonetto, who wants to become Minister of War, or perhaps even of Justice, will shout your arrest from the housetops. That, I must admit, will cool off my quartermasters and noncoms, who think you’re an eagle; they will imagine that you’ve been made a fool of, or even that you’ve betrayed the cause and that the whole thing’s a transparent trick. But that doesn’t prevent you from becoming a color-bearer. There are none better than the agents provocateurs. Even if all our people believe you’ve betrayed us, the people whose job it is to look after public opinion will concoct a whole romance out of your imprisonment. That represents at least two hundred scuffles, if they take eight days to sentence you. At two deaths per clash, and we must reckon on that, there you’ll be with four hundred deaths on your conscience and perhaps our slavery prolonged by ten years. If they shoot you, there’ll be a pretty little firework display besides. Not to mention the intrigues of your mother, myself who’ll go around stabbing people in the streets, and our Carlotta who’ll test her claws right and left. Which represents a further two or three hundred dead, and that’s being moderate. If they lock you up for the rest of your days, then the blame’s on us, because we’ll have to leave you to die in prison, even (what am I saying? above all!) when Italy is free. Are you depressed? I admit our present situation isn’t calculated to raise the spirits.”

  “The cholera doesn’t worry me,” said Angelo. “That’s a way of dying that settles everything. I can’t be happy neglecting my duty.”

  “I forbid you to die,” said Giuseppe, “especially in that way. As for duty, why worry about everybody’s duty? I thought you had more pride. Make yourself a personal duty!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The cholera was now stalking like a lion over towns and woods. After a few days’ respite, the people in the ravine were again attacked by the contagion. The dead were pitilessly taken away, even shortly before they were really dead. The survivors of each family affected, those who had tended the victims, were driven away.

  “Where are you sending them?” asked Angelo.

  “Down where we came from: under the almond trees.”

  Angelo went back down. He returned sickened. He said that it was a charnel house where there were still a few living people, reduced to skeletons, reeling over the corpses left unburied among flocks of carrion birds. He spoke of it stiffly.

  Giuseppe’s first retort was that they were not downwind and that those corpses were not dangerous. But immediately after he corrected himself and said:

  “You must get away from here.”

  “So must you,” said Angelo.

  Unexpectedly, Giuseppe raised few objections.

  “You are too important in the fight for liberty,” Angelo told him. “You must be saved. Your death would serve no purpose. I’ve made myself a personal duty, as you advised me. It is, in the first place, to preserve the troops intact before the fight.”

  He even gave him other reasons, still more specious and very neatly put.

  “Here, you are frightened,” he said, “and yet I know your courage. In fact, sometimes I’ve experienced it. So there must be peremptory reasons for your fear, and these peremptory reasons are simply that you’re afraid of a pointless death.”

  He talked at great length about this.

  “It’s the honest truth,” said Giuseppe when he had done: “that is my nature exactly. But these workmen whom I’ve armed are used to have me command them; they now might force me to.”

  “Anyway,” said Angelo, “I don’t matter to them; they’ve made that quite clear
: they consider me a crow. Without your protection, I’d have been sent back down there long ago by your command. If I disappear, they’ll hardly notice it, or they’ll think I’ve gone off to die in some corner. I’ll go ahead and buy some horses. Does that village of yours on the other side of the valley really exist?”

  “I think so, but I’ll find out.”

  “Better still,” said Angelo, “I’ll go first. I’ll leave you twenty louis so that you yourself can buy Lavinia’s horse and your own. We mustn’t attract attention, and if I bought three horses the birds would be singing my name and description.”

  “We ought,” said Giuseppe, “to have an extra horse too; then we could take provisions.”

  “And I’ll go and wait for you a bit farther on.”

  “We’ll start three or four days after you,” said Giuseppe, “long enough for me to answer any questions about you, if there are any, and to put some rice, beans, flour, and bacon in a sack. But where shall we go?”

  “Let’s get nearer to Italy,” said Angelo. “Is the plague there too? We have no idea. Anyhow, let’s get up into the mountains.”

  “Listen,” Giuseppe now said; “I’ve been turning all this over in my mind for a long time. The shortest route goes up the Durance Valley, but it’s certainly patrolled and blocked at every village by barriers where one has to show a pass. What you’ve told me about your adventures in getting here proves it, if proof were needed. Naturally I’ll make out all the passes you and I could want. I took the rubber stamp from the mayor’s office. But even with the best of luck we’ll get bundled into prison fifty times—if we survive the first forty-nine. And when I say prison I mean quarantine. You’ve already made my teeth chatter with them. But there’s another route that has tremendous advantages. We go deep into Vaucluse if we start westward from here. And from there we go on to the Drôme. That’s as wild a country as one could wish. And in it there’s a valley that’s even wilder, which goes up into the mountains. I’ll show you.”

  He made a map on a piece of paper. He knew the main roads and even the small tracks.

  “Put that in your pocket,” he said. “And wait for us at this spot where I’m putting a cross. I know the way you ride! Even if they sell you an old nag, it’s only three days from here. It’s neither a town, nor a village, nor even a crossroads. It’s a roadside chapel in a spot that gives you the creeps. It’s called Lower Sainte-Colombe. Upper Sainte-Colombe is a mountain all made of green rocks, overhanging, enough to make your teeth chatter.”

  Angelo found a horse at a farm a league away. The people had no business sense. There was only an old granny left and a woman of about fifty, presumably her daughter-in-law. But the well-polished gold pieces produced by Angelo delighted them.

  “You’re not counting it,” said Giuseppe when Angelo gave him some money. “Do you even know how much there is in the little bag your mother sent?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be so casual about it. There’s enough to keep a family for three years. Minus ten very pretty gold pieces. They’re the ones I pinched for the cause; the ones ostentatiously delivered by post to the good Michu, who made you so welcome when you arrived here. You had paid to get yourself hanged.”

  “Now I understand why the police had seen the louis.”

  “You won’t understand altogether till you realize that they had been most opportunely advised of this delivery by an anonymous letter, beautifully written, without a single spelling mistake and including two or three of those adverbs that come automatically to the pen of an old town-councillor, even when his boss makes him work under cover.”

  “You’ve learned traitors’ ways?”

  “There’s a bourgeois expression for you,” said Giuseppe. “I love liberty. I love the idea. I’ll throw myself in the fire for it, and even get myself killed. In love, who considers a friend? And anyway, they’re Frenchmen.”

  Angelo went to spend the night at the farm, to be near his horse. He distrusted the farmer’s wife and her taste for pretty gold pieces. Giuseppe carried the bundle in which the velvet jacket and the winter cloak were rolled up.

  “We’re at the end of September,” he said; “you’ll soon be needing it. As for me, I’ll take some cloth, and Lavinia will sew me something in her spare time. I don’t need a well-cut coat like you, but take a peep at what I’ve put in the bundle.”

  It was a fine little Garde Nationale saber, so placed that by sliding a hand under the cloak’s facings you found its hilt; one pull, and you had a naked weapon ready.

  “Of course, I’ve loaded your pistols, but I know you prefer cold steel, especially the kind you can flourish. Well, there you are. You never know what to expect on the roads, especially in these times.”

  Angelo was very grateful to him for the saber. More so than for the good half-hour he spent on his knees examining his boots by the light of his tinder.

  “They’re all correct and would pass a royal inspection, but two looks are better than one. Anyhow, in ten days at the outside we shall see each other and be together again.”

  Once more they brought out the map on which was drawn the route and their meeting-place. Giuseppe explained everything afresh, gave supplementary details, exacted promises, and wept.

  “Above all don’t go near these two little towns I’ve marked here. Cut across the fields. If I lose you now I shall blow my brains out.”

  “I promise nothing,” said Angelo: “I even think I shall make straight for the first one and go right in if there’s anyone left there. I’ve a terrible longing for some of these little cigars, and I’ve only three left. But directly I’ve bought a hundred, then, I swear to you, I’ll take to the fields.”

  They kissed each other, shivering. Angelo trembled with joy as he hugged his friend, his brother, in his arms, and he felt that he too was going to cry.

  “There, run along,” he said, “you’ve still a few days to spend in your kingdom, and as you say, they’re French; tell them they must love one another; what can that cost you?”

  For a half-louis Angelo procured a peasant saddle worth a good three francs, to which he strapped his baggage. The pistols were in his pockets. The saber fitted nicely inside the cloak.

  It was a fine morning with a north wind. He entered the blue forest. For a good half-league he wandered in the most angelic rapture, listening to the wind in the beeches and rejoicing in the incomparable conflict of golden lances with which the sun pierced the wood. His horse was not too cloddish, and it too took great pleasure in the smells and the play of light.

  They reached an old track all covered with centaury and enormous burdocks. Before them the valley descended beneath the darkness of the trees. They had been walking down it for half an hour, stiffened a little by the shade and the silence, when Angelo saw, lying across the path, a red-striped petticoat which he at once recognized as that of the woman who had been the first to be driven out of the high ravine. There indeed she was, already devoured by animals and covered with huge slugs finishing off what was left.

  At the end of the woods, the farmlands spread hawk’s wings on either side of a stream that had flooded the fields after the recent rains. Here, as elsewhere, neither hay nor grain had been scythed. The crops, left standing, flattened by storms, choked with corn-flowers, thistles, and brambles, were ravaged by clouds of birds. The entire horizon was shut in by hills, above which appeared the violet or even purple spurs of mountains, no doubt covered with box.

  In spite of the sun the wind was cold. Angelo decided to put on the famous velvet jacket and make himself respectable: to shave, for one thing. In spite of the keen air he would gladly have bathed in the stream whose overflowing sent clear water with silver reflections trundling over a thick bed of grass. But he had to be careful. Who could tell what it might be infested with upstream? The villages thought nothing of throwing bandages, excrement, carrion, and even corpses into the watercourses. At a fair distance from the stream he found a large pool of rainwater that seemed he
althy.

  Lavinia had thought of everything, even of a little box of violet-scented brilliantine with which Angelo now smoothed his mustache. The bundle also contained a clean shirt and three very neatly darned handkerchiefs. Giuseppe, for his part, had thought of thirty rounds for the pistols. The saber, though homely in style and rather snub-nosed, had good balance and weight. It was a householder’s saber, but could be highly dangerous if used in anger.

  The jacket was damned well made. Angelo gradually used more refined language to himself as the velvet brought warmth into his arms. He recalled the workman who had taken his measurements. This man had certainly been a perfect representative of the barricades, with his sickle mustaches and his impersonal stare, standing at ease and guarding something or other of ineffable importance on the hillside. At Giuseppe’s request he had immediately leaned his gun against the trunk of an almond tree, hitched up his blouse, and taken a tape-measure out of his breast pocket: “With pleasure! If Monsieur would kindly write down his measurements himself in pencil. Monsieur has a handsome pair of shoulders. Forty-eight. If Monsieur would be so good as to bend his arm. Thank you very much. At your service.” He had then picked up his gun, corrected the sights, and resumed his impersonal military stare.