The Horseman on the Roof

by Jean Giono

  To judge from the size and shape of the building in which they found themselves, they must be in that big square tower they had seen from the road.

  The shallow steps rose slowly in long flights turning at right angles. At a certain point there was, not exactly a second floor, but a sort of landing with a low door at either end. Both were bolted. Higher up, rays of sunlight coming through loopholes crisscrossed and, striking the walls, maintained a strong light. In the top of the tower wild pigeons were nesting; suddenly they all took to flight, making a torrential sound.

  Immediately a door opened above them and three heads came and peered over the balustrade. One of them, belonging to a very dark man, bearded no doubt, withdrew hastily.

  The Presentine nuns of Vaumeilh were all former farm girls or farmers’ daughters. They knew how to keep chickens and rabbits, and how to shut doors. They had set up the quarantine in the part of the commandery originally designed to serve as a last bastion.

  In the roof of the big tower there was a vast room running its whole width. The ceiling was simply the fabric of huge beams that supported the stone flooring of the defense platform. The light came from all sides through more than fifty openings pierced round the four walls, former arrow-slits roofed over in the Italian fashion and transformed roughly into windows by odd panes of glass.

  It was in fact an ideal place for pickling suspects in healthy fresh air and full sunshine. There was also a fine view from it. One could take in the whole horizon of harsh, green-clad mountains, which carried roads in every direction. The wind, rough (even in good weather), of this rude countryside, which makes everything, even springtime, an arid duty, kept the windows ceaselessly rattling, lifted the straw strewn over the floor, and boomed like the sea against the walls.

  The four wooden kegs of drinking-water had to be covered with cloaks to protect it from the dust. An attempt had also been made to shield the corner containing the buckets used as privies, by hanging up horse blankets and more especially shawls, old petticoats, and other women’s clothing. In the embrasure of an open machicolation they built fires on the bare stones for private cooking: tea, coffee, and chocolate for those who still could afford them. Naturally, if one didn’t afterward take the precaution of wetting the embers (usually with urine, since there was only one serving of drinking-water a day), the drafts would lift them and fling their ash all over the place.

  Sickness was quite frequent.

  “You see, it was quite right to stop you from roaming about,” said the nuns. “Round here there are some villages that haven’t yet had a single death. You’d have brought them the infection.”

  Which was a white lie, for the villages round about had been devastated like the other villages. And besides, their dead had died, after all, more comfortably than those in quarantine, sometimes with a doctor or at least with drugs to relieve them, at any rate in beds and often in dark alcoves that spared them the supplementary torture of the strong light, so painful to the retina of cholera victims.

  More than twenty sick had already been lost. The survivors had had to be brutally subdued, especially the members of the afflicted families. Unlike what happened outside, the deaths led to displays of grief, doubtless sincere but always exceedingly noisy. Death did not come in the intimacy of the family, where to be oneself is possible and permissible; where, when the dirge is over, one must think of saving the furniture. Disaster struck its blow in broad daylight, in front of everybody, and they would all retreat and huddle at the other end of the room, like a flock of sheep who had seen the wolf enter. Because of the four very thick walls and the grille down below, known to be kept carefully shut, there was no hope of being able to use guile as elsewhere, as in the free world, as everywhere in times when death persists long in the same place. They were no longer losing their dear ones. They were reading the writing on the wall. They could not get away, so they wailed. Besides, that lent a certain decorum; appearances are a consolation for disappearances: in short, they now wept endlessly for themselves. After five minutes the indifferent were wailing as loudly as the afflicted; after five minutes there were no indifferent left.

  “What the f— are you doing up there?” shouted the soldiers.

  “What a shambles,” said the nuns, rather proud of not dying.

  The little community had been immune up until now. Yet they worked on the dead coolly and unconcernedly. The soldiers would come up with a stretcher. They would be very sympathetic, say a few words of comfort, pat the women kindly on the shoulder, make jokes. Their lips would be as white as chalk under their mustaches. They were very clumsy with the corpses. They handled them rather stiffly, preferring to take them by the feet rather than the head, and swore when (as happened nearly every time) the body, relaxing its muscles knotted by pain and the death agony, twitched in their hands and emitted those fetid juices, white like rice and similar to curdled milk, for the last time.

  At first they had tried, after each death, to burn the befouled straw. But when burned in the embrasure of the machicolation, this straw, all damp with excrement, produced a thick smoke and an appalling stench, which infested the entire room in spite of its size and ventilation, poisoned the whole tower, staircase and all, and even seeped down the passages to the Presentines’ and the soldiers’ quarters. They contented themselves, after that, with piling this straw in one corner, where it dried. The necessities of a cloistered, communal life had moreover created legends designed to make that life possible and even endurable, since this was necessary. These legends were no sillier than others. For instance, it was evident here that the cholera was not transmitted by contact. If it were contagious, they said, we should all be dead by now. But we are not all dead (some added: “Knock on wood!”). Therefore it is not contagious. Therefore there is no need to burn the straw, which produces so nauseating and suffocating a smoke. And above all, it was not absolutely necessary to form a quarantine within the quarantine for those who had tended, or had to do with, the person who had died. At the time of the sickness, during the agony and death throes, people moved away to the other end of the room: it was never a very entertaining sight, but one need no longer move away for reasons of chicken-heartedness or cowardice, so hard to admit in company, but on the contrary out of tact, good breeding (that good breeding so indispensable, so dear to the mediocre)—all the sentiments on which the bourgeois way of life is based.

  To be locked up in quarantine (people blamed only themselves, accused themselves of having been clumsy or rash; they never went so far as to accuse the government that had called out its troops), confined to a straw litter, did not prevent one from being what one was. One still had a house of one’s own, with one’s name on the list of property holders; one still had possessions; was still a notary, a bailiff, a draper, a father of a family, a marriageable daughter, and even a liar, a hypocrite or jealous, or a celebrity in one’s market town, or a figure of fun. At liberty, one would have been able to take refuge in the woods, hunting-lodges, farms, country houses (and was in fact trying to do so when arrested by the soldiers). One would have saved one’s face. Here, one must continue to save it. It was essential to maintain one’s position. Which purpose was served by all the new folklore and, in the first place, by the dogma of non-contagion, which once accepted, oiled the wheels considerably. It even gave one courage, or at least an attitude that was a counterfeit of courage. Up to the moment when suddenly one had that astonished look which Angelo had seen on the face of the officer on patrol, and became absorbed in watching things just then starting to happen inside oneself. But then one was quick to lose consciousness and barely heard, if at all, the sound made by the rest of the company as they politely moved away from one.

  Newcomers to the quarantine under the roof of the tower would remain for a whole day, sometimes two, close by the door. They never mingled at once with the old hands, who had been there from ten to fifteen days. Everyone understood this (one realized that it was difficult to accept this change of existence: o
ne had been through that disgust, that recoil, oneself. To start life again on a fresh basis is not done on the spur of the moment). Nobody took offense. One let them find their feet. One swaggered a bit before them to encourage them to come forward, to incorporate themselves more easily, to make them lose that feeling of no hope short of escape. One took great pleasure in assimilating two, four, or ten more; one congratulated the soldiers. “The more the merrier,” one said. One was glad to have proof that one’s own was the common lot (it was most consoling). That one was not the only rash or clumsy person, that there were others, that the soldiers were very clever, letting no one escape, that in the end everyone was bundled into quarantine, that one wasn’t an exception. That is what people tried to impress upon the newcomers who stayed by the door, not daring to accept the situation and still convinced that being shut up in this vast room, rumbling with wind, light, and fear at the top of the tower of Vaumeilh, was altogether exceptional.

  Angelo and the young woman paused, likewise taken aback, at the threshold of the great room. The noise of the wind had an unchallengeable quality of pathos. The dazzling light, which pierced the quarantine from end to end, leaving nothing in shadow, burnished even the sickly yellow of the straw and drew gleams from both the fine cloth of the riding-coats and the filth that soiled them, from both the watered silk, the satin of certain dresses (one pale, fair-haired young girl even had an organdy skirt), and the filth that soiled them. All these crumpled garments, in which people slept, sprawled on the straw for siestas of private despair, or fetched water and cleaned the latrines, clad members of a society that still owned opera hats, ringlets, traveling-caps, and a false forthrightness of gesture.

  There were also four or five bewildered people near the door: a stout gray-haired woman of about fifty, dressed for a walk in a demi-crinoline of purple faille; a squat, sturdy peasant with his head sunk between his shoulders who crouched, curled up into a ball, in a brand-new russet velvet suit (put on for the first time, no doubt, for the journey that was ending so unexpectedly here); a young man-about-town with a waisted jacket, Cronstadt hat, knobbed cane; a group of three bourgeois, evidently bachelors, well-to-do in mustard-colored frock coats bordered with black, very “sporty” in appearance but with their arms dangling and their mouths open (“You’ve just come?” they said stupidly to Angelo. “As you see,” he replied); and a little girl between ten and twelve, well dressed, who seemed to belong to nobody, but at whom the stout woman kept casting stealthy glances.

  These were the passengers from a contraband coach, arrested the evening before: infallibly rich, for it cost a lot to bribe a coachman. But the coachman was not there: he must have escaped, or paid the soldiers a percentage, or simply betrayed his customers to spare himself the journey, and pocketed his money without earning it, perhaps even taken money from both sides.

  “Continua la commedia,” said Angelo to himself. “And not one of them thinks of making a fight or a bolt for it. If I bide my time, it’ll be easy.”

  “Don’t be upset,” he murmured to the young woman, “and take care not to think too deeply, as these are all doing, so far as their nature allows. It makes one look an idiot, as you can see, and then one is lost. You’ve more shrewdness and courage than all of them put together, but you have more heart and you’d get too depressed.”

  “I feel exactly the same,” answered the young woman, “but those are wise words: with all the wise words in the world, one can’t stop oneself shivering when it’s cold.”

  “We’ll get out of here, even if we have to climb down the walls like flies. That’s the only thought I’ll allow you,” said Angelo.

  “Beg pardon, monsieur,” (it was the short young man in the waisted jacket), “but what does one have to do to get one’s baggage?”

  “The same as everywhere else, monsieur.”

  “We have been here since yesterday evening and no one has bothered about us.”

  “Then you bother them.”

  One of the bourgeois asked him what was that weapon he was holding.

  “It’s my umbrella,” said Angelo.

  In fact, he tucked the little saber under his arm like an umbrella and led the young woman across the quarantine to a wide window, through which the wind blew freely, and from which everyone kept away.

  “In our bags,” he said, “I’ve got the tea, the sugar, the maize flour, the chocolate, your pistols, your powder, mine, your bullets and mine; my own loaded pistols are in my pocket. Our cloaks and your little case are down below, hidden under the stairs. We are resolute, and we’ll get out of here tonight. All you see here is a lot of dirty people, half dead with fear and putting on airs because, to them, revolt is in bad taste. It isn’t to me.”

  And he talked for more than five minutes about social revolution and liberty, but he had the wit to use short, simple sentences that contained at bottom a good deal of sense and were a hundred leagues away from the cholera. He had also in his favor his stiff little beard from three days’ traveling over hill and down dale. The window was filled with that landscape of mountains which is more exalting than the sea when seen from a height; over them it breathed a calm, warm wind, for it was close to noon.

  A most handsome man, looking like a horse dealer and smoothing his side whiskers with a tiny comb, approached Angelo.

  “I see you’re having quite a conversation,” said this man bluntly. His eyes were framed with attractive, malicious little wrinkles. “You’re new and you’re wondering how we live. It’s easy. All the new ones prefer to do their own cooking on little fires, which they light in that corner over there. If you want a bundle of faggots that I’ve cut myself out of a plank, I’m ready to sell it to you for six sous. If you smoke, I’ve trooper’s tobacco for sale. I have also at your disposal a small flask of eau de vie, always useful if the lady doesn’t feel well. In short, ask, and, if you’ve the wherewithal, it shall be given. For three sous I can also find you a man who’ll replace you when it’s your turn to fetch the water or empty the stink-buckets. It’ll be three sous for the lady too: by our laws she’s liable like everyone else.”

  “You are exactly the man I was looking for,” said Angelo. “If you hadn’t presented yourself I should have been put to a lot of trouble. I’ve already done some business with your friend Dupuis.…”

  “You know Dupuis? He’s an old rascal. He takes all my profit off me, but I’m a philanthropist and…”

  “Where money’s concerned,” said Angelo, lowering his voice, “we shall always understand each other. Hold out your hand between madame and me so they can’t see what I’m going to put in it, and here, to begin with, are twenty sous for the wood, the fatigues, and the pleasure of knowing you.”

  “As I always say, monsieur,” said the man, “people who are well brought up can get on anywhere. Now hold out your hand, I don’t want to be left behind you. Here’s a little tobacco. My apologies, it’s not very good; I’m obliged to keep it on me, in my trouser pocket, because here everything gets stolen, and the heat of a man’s thigh isn’t good for tobacco. Such as it is, though, one mustn’t spit on it, as you’ll see when you’ve been here a bit.”

  This personage gave them all the news of this singular spot, that is to say, news of the world. Vaumeilh had been bled white. Out of two thousand inhabitants, over six hundred had gone to their reward in the most complete anarchy of bedroom and cemetery ever seen. Upon these mountain-dwellers, austere through neglect, to whom fresh air was the chief justification of existence, isolated in a countryside that till then had been considered healthy, the presence of death imposed what one was forced to call deaths by conviction. This went back, moreover, to the first outbreak of the plague. Reason had resumed control. Before the establishment of quarantines almost all survivors had gone to camp in the woods, visible from here on the slope of a black mountain, where they had made a sort of Indian village. They were there still. They had trusted nothing but the winter, which in these parts freezes everything. If flies there were,
as some claimed, they could not live through it. In the town there remained only about a hundred resolute men and women, who were trading with the quarantine, competing with each other, and leading a gay life, as they would see that evening; they would hear them shouting.

  In the tower itself there were not, for the moment, too many deaths, but they had been through one bad stretch. This man had been there fifteen days.

  “I sell sewing-machines,” he said. “I was doing my best to get back to Valence on the quiet when I got caught stupidly by the roadside, where I’d fallen asleep under a tree.” He had been shut up here with six others, who had gone off to join the daisies, one after the other, in the following three days. “I was put in charge of the room because I’m the oldest inhabitant, because I’m tough and order is needed. I’ve kept a list. The soldiers have brought a hundred and twelve persons here. There are thirty-four of us today, counting the ones who arrived last night and yourselves. Anyhow, for the moment, instead of getting fewer, we’re increasing, and with people like yourselves. We ought to have more.”

  He considered this a fine day.

  Six men on fatigue had gone down to the grille to fetch the three caldrons of bread-and-cabbage soup prepared by the nuns, and were now bringing it in.

  “Wait,” said Angelo, “I’ve something serious to say to you, since you have a head on your shoulders. Look out of the window. Isn’t that the patrol coming back on the road down there? Look at the horses they’re bringing back riderless: four of them. And if I’m not mistaken that’s Dupuis who’s taken command of the column. When we were arrested this morning, the lieutenant was in the first throes of a fine attack of dry cholera. I have an impression he was only the first. We may expect them to get fewer still. Enjoy your meal. We two are going to get along on tea today, even though we’ve paid our share.”