The Horseman on the Roof

by Jean Giono

  “Look here,” said the man, “I won’t intrude on you. I know a husband and wife have things to say to one another that aren’t anybody else’s concern, especially in a situation like this. Give me a bowl of your tea and a little sugar, I’ll go and drink it in my corner and leave you in peace. But I don’t want any of that soup either. Take care not to mention dry cholera in here, or else look to your saber. I’ve already seen some ugly scenes. It’s no good trusting their opera hats, you know, monsieur. Underneath them there’s what I won’t name in front of Madame, but it doesn’t smell nice.”

  The sewing-machine salesman returned to his corner with his bowl of tea. He had also been given a slab of chocolate, a lump of brown sugar, and a handful of maize flour. Angelo showed him how to mix the sugar and the uncooked maize flour so as to get a sort of mash, rather unpleasant to chew but very nourishing, and preferable in any case to that more than doubtful soup. The soup, however, was having a great success. Someone even had to be posted to defend the caldrons from the attacks of respectable ladies and gentlemen. Even the young girl in the organdy dress (had she been arrested on leaving one of those costume parties that were all the rage these days? Had she, after the ball, wandered through the countryside in a fresh fit of terror? Had she fled blindly and finally run into the soldiers?)—even the girl in the organdy dress was demanding rather less soup and rather more bread. Yet she was quite pretty, almost a thoroughbred, with just a touch of hosier’s blood in the rather pronounced bridge of the nose. She was trying to push her way through the sturdy men and women who, standing firmly by their rights, were laying close siege to the caldrons. Not having very strong arms, she was using her body, as if in a dance, demanding bread in a shrill voice. Finally, a man who was backing out straightened up suddenly and sent her bowl flying out of her hands.

  It was the hour when the wind calms down. Outside there was that apricot light of the last warm days of autumn. The mountains had disappeared in the sunlight; in their place there were waves of sparkling and translucent mauve silk, weightless and almost shapeless, invisible except for the undulating line of their crests scarcely marked against the sky. The billowing yellow heaths, rising in hills to support the town and the castle, vanished under an iridescent fluttering like that which shimmers deep in overheated air; but here it was caused by real butterflies flitting low over the ground. It cost Angelo an effort to imagine that monstrous swarm. “There’s not a single flower,” he thought, “not a single tree with sweet sap in the whole countryside. Where will they find all the sugar they need?” His throat contracted and he hastily swallowed his saliva. Some crows crossed the sky, followed by a few pigeons, flying less fast but beating their wings violently in order to keep up with them. As the birds passed over the iridescent heaths, a whirlwind of insects rose, split into the sunshine like a blaze from a strange brazier, whose flame stretched out, blackened, became like a hanging cloud of soot, darted toward them and began to unfold in the sky a brilliant, black streamer, glittering like faille or paste jewelry, floating in the wake of the flock and flying after them. The crows were making for the blue smoke clouds that oozed from the insubstantial side of one of the mountains.

  The patrol entered the courtyard. Not four, but five horsemen had left their saddles empty. Five horses were led in by the bridle, five sheathed sabers, five musketoons each hanging from an empty saddlebow. As he set foot on the ground, one of the soldiers fell. He got up by himself.

  “I’m not afraid of death any longer,” said the young woman.

  “What are you afraid of instead?” said Angelo after a silence.

  “Of the caldron.”

  He smiled thinly.

  “We have our pistols,” he said.

  “I shan’t have the courage.”

  “If that’s courage, then I confess I shan’t either—but one can always take refuge somewhere; no need to jump into the water to avoid getting wet. If only you could bring down one of those filthy gluttons and see him begin to look human again in the process of dying a violent death, in blood instead of muck, that would restore you. It isn’t ourselves we ought to shoot, after all, but them. The sewing-machine salesman is looking out for himself. He’s been taking a commission up until now. We must look out for ourselves.”

  “You’d do it?”

  “I don’t know what I shall do. We’ve tea, sugar, and maize for five days. In five days we shall be far from here, but if we weren’t, we should be at the point where we’d have to choose between becoming like them or remaining as we are. Is that a good enough reason for you?”

  “You don’t need to give me reasons. I was thinking just now that if the sill of this window weren’t so high, one could just lean out rather too far, which is easy to do. Your own weight carries you along. When you get to the bottom, everything’s settled for good. I’m amazed they haven’t thought of it.”

  “Perhaps they have, but prefer the caldron. Perhaps some people have jumped, but they haven’t mentioned it to us because they think it’s an act of lunacy. They’re not frightened about catching it, so it doesn’t occupy their minds. They’re only terrified, they only talk, of those who’ve died properly (as they put it to themselves), wallowing in filthy straw. Which is what they’re doing already, in good health, without a scruple.”

  “I know that five days from now, I shan’t lean out of the window. I know that this evening I shall lie down in the straw without thinking of the window or the pistols, that my pistols are now worthless tools, which now have no more power to save me than a St. Christopher. I know that night is coming, as is only natural for it to do, that I shall make my bed as is natural for me, in this straw, filthy or not, that tomorrow I shall be like them, that I shall lead my life here, with what I can get, as it is natural and easy for me to do, until I die of cholera. You see? I’m no longer afraid of this death which makes one vomit.”

  “And what if you don’t die?… for you may escape it. Are you sure you’d forget what you’d been for a while, that you could believe again in yourself? They don’t have this trouble. They weren’t anything before. I can still see you, with your torch, in that lonely house, that rotting town, facing a man who must have been pretty terrifying as he rose up out of the shadows. Considering what I’d been through on the roofs, I didn’t look very sweet, did I? I remember that the flames of your candlestick were steady and stiff as the prongs of a pitchfork. And the hand that made me tea that evening knew how to do its job without trembling. And your big pistol was hidden under a shawl, near the stove where you were heating me the drink I needed. It must have taken some self-confidence to act like that. The woman whose hand did not tremble then had never been a coward, otherwise she’d have had some cowardly thought right away (it was then or never), and the flames would have quivered. There is somebody one can never deceive: oneself, because one always agrees with one’s acts. It’s not a trifling matter to eat at the caldron, or even to bed down in that straw. You’ll never be able to fool yourself and tell yourself stories later on, saying to yourself that you were forced to do it. Whatever happens, people like you will never be able to do that. And you’ll have to live with the thought that you yielded because you had agreed to accepting the caldron.

  “I don’t know who you are. I only know one thing about you: in exceptional circumstances, you stand up to them. That’s why I spoke to you by the barricade. With the others, I was alone against the soldiers; with you, I was no longer alone. When we had our first skirmish, I might easily have received a jab from behind; the dragoons weren’t joking. If I’d had to fear that, I’d have needed to wheel my horse round in a far from elegant manner to parry it. But I didn’t worry because I knew you were there (even though I had shouted to you to flee and save yourself); that allowed me the brio which is such fun. And, naturally, there you were, with your little hand aiming the big pistol at the poor corporal.”

  “But the next day I shot a crow because he was cooing like a dove.”

  “Well! is a crow that coos
like a dove a trifle? One should always shoot at things like that. I’d have done the same and my eyes would have been as big as yours. Just dying is a tiny thing. Do you know what is destroying your soul here? It’s this smell of dung and urine, all those skirts that stink like barrels of codfish. It’s not iron bars of walls that keep prisoners in prison: it’s the stink of their latrines, which they have to smell for months, then years, on end. With debased senses, what sort of a world can they have inside them? The most intransigent, the most nostalgic, end up by doing what I said just now: they slit one of their fellow prisoners’ bellies open to breathe the smell of blood, to see a red color once more, as people eat the moss off rafts to get a little meat between their teeth. Come, let’s lean out of this window, not to lose our balance but to get it back.”

  The sun had already lowered its light. The mountains were beginning to take on substance again. Angelo and the young woman were looking out over a part of the little town’s roofs and one whole side of the castle. They stayed there for over two hours, watching the sky deposit its lees and become a beautiful pearl-gray. The sun was at a season when it withdraws quickly; all the flat stone scales of the roofs with their piping of shadow passed from gray to a soft green. Some of the lower roofs were spotted with great patches of yellowed lichen. The wind that had come up gave this whole countryside a suggestion of ocean, an odor of the open sea. The butterflies sparkled like sand. The mingled crows and pigeons spurted up like spray from tall houses, towers, and belfry, at each pulse of the sea.

  Angelo passed those two hours in the most absolute serenity. He had avoided smoking one of his little cigars, in order not to rouse envy among those in the quarantine who had no tobacco. Before deciding on this, he had glanced once or twice over his shoulder to see if there were any smokers; there were none. After eating their soup, the people had lain down. Evidently the sewing-machine salesman was not generous every day. Angelo suffered from this privation for five minutes at the most. He counted the columns of smoke rising from the chimneys: there were seven. Seven fires in a town where, before the plague, at about four o’clock in the afternoon more than eight hundred must have been lit. He followed the activities of the soldiers in the courtyard. He saw one of them cleaning the glass of a saddlebow lantern: he supposed they were preparing a night patrol. Not long afterward this was confirmed by an order of which he caught a few words. He wondered what he would do if he were in the captain’s place. From time to time he shifted his weight from his right leg to his left. He looked for the position of the various roads. He saw two deserted ones leading toward the mountains. The part of the castle he could see was not encouraging. The tower descended sheer, without any footholds, to the soldiers’ courtyard. Beyond that, there was a wall forty or fifty feet high, and the roundway visible on top of it must, to judge from the distance of the roofs, be at least sixty feet above the town. He let his imagination play. A perfect peace stole over him. He thought of the nuns. He told himself that they must certainly be afraid of noise and blood. He knew how people behave when a pistol goes off suddenly under their nose in the middle of the night. Soldiers were a different matter. “But these ones aren’t warmed up. Arresting bourgeois puts men to sleep. Even at the beginning of a campaign a soldiers needs five or six days of adjustment before he can face a volley or even isolated bullets. It’s only in novels that people treat them like wasps.” Once the battle began, he knew he would have to do, as quickly as possible, all the harm he could. It is the first four killed that make the difference, provided one gets one’s sword swinging as soon as they go down. “I’ll give her all the time she wants to reload,” he said to himself, thinking of his little saber and the young woman.

  He glanced at her. She did not look very well. He asked her anxiously if she was feeling ill.

  “Only what’s natural,” she said; “I’m going to have to go to those vile latrines.”

  “No,” he said; “come.”

  He shouldered the saddlebags and put the saber back under his arm. They went down the great staircase, plunging into gloom, toward the grille. Angelo stopped on the little landing.

  “Would you go and look for the cases?” he said. “They’re down below in the corner, under the first flight of stairs. I’ll wait for you here.”

  He went and tried the doors giving on the landing. One of them was unshakable, firmly gripped in its frame. The other had some play. Its wood was less massive and fitted loosely. Angelo slipped his sword through the slit. The door was not locked. Where the latch was, the sword-blade had free passage, but above and below it was stopped by the bar of a bolt. He tried to slide this bolt back but had no success.

  “I suppose,” he said to himself, “it’s one of those bolts with handles that lower onto a mortise and that you have to raise to open the door.”

  He estimated the length of the bolt and the approximate position of this handle. He tried to cut into the door with the point of the saber. The wood was not very hard.

  “What are you doing?” asked the young lady.

  “Trying to make a hole here, just to pass the time.”

  He made one, in fact, half an inch deep. The wood was solid and flaked away in splinters. It was an ashwood panel about three inches thick, but it had lost substance with age.

  “Give me the powder box. Spread out the luggage and lie down. If anyone comes up or down, I shall say you’re ill. I shall talk brutally about dry cholera and they’ll leave us alone. Keep an eye on the staircase and give me warning.”

  He poured some powder into the hole he had made and set fire to it. The red flame went out at once, but a little blue glow clung on at the back of the hole, creeping round among the splinters, gnawing, finally leaving embers on which Angelo blew.

  At last, after considerable manipulation but no setbacks, he managed to push back the two bolts, and they entered a large, dark room.

  They shut the door behind them at once, slid back the bolts, and blocked up the holes, each the size of two écus, with strips of a black shawl.

  “That will take them in till tomorrow morning. Perhaps longer,” said Angelo. “I know them—they’ll look first in the corners where animals go to die. They have no idea what stout hearts we have inside us.”

  With the door shut, it was hard to form any definite notion of the place that they were in. The light seeped in parsimoniously through the stones blocking up a tall Gothic window.

  When their eyes got used to the darkness, they perceived around them a vast hall, entirely bare. The floor was springy, as though made of trampled earth that time and solitude had reduced to dust. On the wall at the far end a black spot seemed to be an opening. It was in fact a doorway with neither door nor hinges, simply a sort of tunnel cut through a wall over six feet thick and leading to a narrow spiral staircase, within which there seemed to be a sort of sleepy gray light.…

  They descended toward this light, step by step. Angelo was very happy and quite unconcerned about cholera. Step by step they drew nearer to a light that became gradually more golden. They emerged at length onto a gallery running almost level with the vault, around a vast deep hall lit by tall lancets and a rose-window of yellow glass. Here, too, there was nothing but stone: no furniture, no woodwork, and the floor down below also made simply of earth, as though out in the fields. In spite of the rose-window and stained glass, it had never been used as a church; there was no trace of an altar site.

  They went all round the gallery. They passed by a window, some of whose panels had fallen out of their leading. Outside they could see below them a large, barren garden entirely planted with gray thyme, divided by two paths that crossed in the middle.

  Angelo glanced at the young woman and smiled. She smiled back. He remembered to ask if she felt better. Didn’t she, for instance, feel a vague pain here? And with the tip of his finger he touched the pit of her stomach.

  She said she felt perfectly well, and apologized.

  “There’s nothing to apologize for,” he said. “You’re
not responsible if something starts to rot inside you and destroy you. I don’t believe in the flies. However small they’re said to be, I believe one would feel them as one breathed. I believe there’s a place in the stomach or the bowels that suddenly starts to go bad.”

  He described how he had massaged the little Frenchman throughout a whole night but all to no effect because he had started too late. You mustn’t wait till you’re astonished at yourself, like the lieutenant of the patrol. As soon as you feel a slight, sharp pricking in the side, you must cry for help. It’s worth while, going on living.

  “If you really have a pain in the place I’ve just indicated, you must show me your stomach at once. When it’s caught in time and you’re massaged, you’ve ninety-nine chances out of a hundred of surviving.”

  At the end of the gallery they discovered a little passage, narrow and very dark, which seemed to run through the thickness of the walls. They had difficulty in dragging their baggage along it. This passage was warm and smelt of dead stone. After turning sharp right they saw a ray of pale light ahead. It came through a narrow slit. Through this could be seen, facing them, the huge tower and the windows of the quarantine, against which the wind thundered.

  “We must be on the other side of the soldiers’ courtyard, unless those are not the windows we were leaning out of a little while ago.” It was impossible to look down through the slit; they could just make out the row of the quarantine’s windows, the crown of battlements, and the sky, bright blue and dappled with little clouds exactly like daisies, lit by a slanting sun.

  Farther on, the passage grew so narrow that Angelo was obliged to remove the bags he was carrying on his back. They had to step over rubble and even bend double to pass through places where it was half blocked.

  Again a ray of pale light pierced the darkness ahead. This slit, which, like the one before, seemed to be a watchman’s loophole, looked out this time onto open space. Again they saw the bright blue sky, dappled with pink, and had a glimpse of the mountains lit by the setting sun.