The Horseman on the Roof

by Jean Giono

  “The devil! I’ve hardly got the strength left to puff at your cheap stogy,” he said when they were stretched on the dry grass, under the mulberry tree to which they had tied their horses.

  “Go to sleep,” said Angelo.

  “D’you think it’s as easy as that?” said the young man. “I may never be able to sleep again in my life without a nurse holding my hand.” To his stupefaction Angelo saw that the young man’s eyes were filled with tears. He did not, of course, dare give him his hand to hold or even go on looking at him. The afternoon was drawing to an end. Great layers of dusty mist covered the mountain and filled up the distances into which the road plunged. There was total silence.

  “A fit of depression,” said the young man. “It’s my empty stomach, pay no attention.”

  When the night came, Angelo lit a small fire in case the soldiers should arrive.

  Up till about midnight the young man did not speak another word, although he remained with his eyes wide open. From time to time Angelo put wood on the fire and cocked an ear in the direction of the road. All at once there was a queer sound, as though from an animal entangled in the bush five or six paces off. Angelo thought it might be an escaped pig, and loaded his pistol. But the thing gave a little moan, which was not that of a pig. For the length of a shiver Angelo felt the extremely disagreeable closeness of those houses full of dead lying in the shadows. He was clutching his pistol like a perfect fool when he saw a small boy advance into the firelight.

  He might have been ten or eleven and seemed quite indifferent to everything. He even had his hands ostentatiously stuck into his pockets. The young man made him drink some of the drug and the little boy began to talk in patois. He stood sturdily planted on legs set well apart, and several times took his hands out of his pockets, to stuff them back again after hitching up his trousers. He seemed placid and sure of himself; even when he was looking at the thick night beyond the fire.

  “Can you understand what he’s saying?” asked the young man.

  “Not altogether,” said Angelo. “I think it’s about his father and mother.”

  “He says they died yesterday evening. But I gather his sister was still more or less alive when he left. They’re woodcutters who live in huts an hour from here. I think I’d better go up there. He claims one can get there on horseback. You’d better stay here, to keep up the fire and wait for the soldiers.” Angelo muttered that the soldiers could perfectly well manage by themselves, if they were worthy of the name. And he swung into his saddle. “You’re a damned conceited fellow,” said the young man.

  “Come here, you,” he said to the child, “climb up on this horse, you can show us the way.

  “Hi, you there!” he shouted suddenly to Angelo, who had started off ahead. “Get down and come back here. This little idiot’s sick as a dog.”

  As he approached the horse, the child had begun to tremble from head to foot. “Shove some wood on the fire,” said the young man, “and heat some big flat stones.” He took off his coat and spread it on the ground.

  “Will you keep that on your back, you fool!” said Angelo. He unbuckled his kit and threw his big raincloak and his bedding onto the grass.

  “It’ll be ruined,” said the young man.

  “You deserve one on the jaw for that,” said Angelo. “Use these things and keep your thoughts to yourself.”

  The child had fallen on his side without removing his hands from his pockets. He had convulsions, and they could hear his teeth chattering. They made a bed with Angelo’s things and laid the child on it.

  “Damned fool of a kid with his hands in his pockets,” said the young man. “Look at him! To show the world, eh? Where do they get it from? What a clever kid! Wouldn’t you have said, when he arrived…? What kept him on his feet? Pride, eh? You didn’t want to be yellow, eh? Little bastard!” He undressed him. “Give me some hot stones. Take the bottle of eau de vie. Rub him. Harder! Don’t be afraid of hurting him. His skin’ll grow back.”

  Under Angelo’s hands the body was ice-cold and hard. It was clouding over with purple marblings. The boy began to vomit and to let out a foaming diarrhea that spurted from beneath him as if Angelo were squeezing a leather bottle. “Stop,” said the young man, “he’s now got eight grains of calomel in his tummy. We shall see.”

  They flanked him on both sides with about ten big stones, burning hot and wrapped in Angelo’s shirts, and covered him over completely with the folds of the huge raincloak, which they had padded with the rest of the linen.

  The child retched for a moment, then vomited a huge mouthful of rice pudding. “I’ll give him another four grains and damn the risk,” said the young man. “If you can, go on rubbing him, but don’t uncover him; put your hands underneath.”

  “I don’t know what it is,” said Angelo after a while, “but it’s all wet.”

  “Dysentery,” said the young man. “I’ll burn your hands. Get on with it. Now that we’ve begun.”

  “It’s not that,” said Angelo, “I’d give ten years of my life—”

  “No sentimentality,” said the young man.

  The child’s face, grown waxen and minute, was lost in the thick cloth folds of the cloak. They opened the cloak to renew the hot stones. They had to change the linen; it was copiously fouled. Angelo was amazed at the child’s sudden thinness. The whole cage of his ribs was visible, sticking to the skin of his chest; his thighbones, shins, and kneecaps stood out starkly in his blue flesh. “Take the powder out of your pistol,” said the young man, “soak it in the eau de vie and make me some poultices with handkerchiefs, or you can tear up this shirt; I’m going to try blistering on his back and over the heart. He isn’t doing well. His breathing’s too damned short. My impression is, he’s sinking damned fast.”

  On account of his ceaseless massaging of that visibly thinning and bluing body, Angelo was covered with sweat. The blistering had no effect. The patches of cyanosis were growing darker and darker. “What do you expect?” said the young man. “I’m sent to hunt tigers with butterfly nets. Gunpowder isn’t a therapeutic! They wouldn’t give me remedies. They were too scared to part with anything. Thought the earth was going to vanish from under their feet. We haven’t begun yet. He could be saved. If only I had some belladonna … I told them: ‘What do you expect me to damn well do with your ether? It’s not disinfecting I’m after, to hell with that! It’s not to save my life, it’s to help others in time.’ They don’t realize that anyone wants to save lives. Oh, to hell with the dirty cowards! They were in too much of a funk to kick me out, but if I’d laid a hand on their box of tricks they’d have bitten me. And now we’re in for it, trying to get this blood going with our thumbs.” He too was massaging all the time, back, arms, shoulders, hips, and chest. Every few minutes he renewed the wall of hot stones and the stomach wrapping—a flannel waistcoat that Angelo kept warming at the fire. The vomiting and diarrhea had ceased, but the breathing was increasingly short and spasmodic. At length, the child’s face, hitherto vacant and indifferent, was kneaded by convulsive grimaces.

  “Hold on, old man, hold on,” said the young doctor, “you shall have it, you shall have my morphine. Hold on.” He rummaged in his satchel. He was trembling so much with haste that Angelo came and held open the sides of the satchel, which kept shutting over his hands. But he fixed the needle firmly into its syringe, drew out with great care every drop in a little phial, down to the last one, and gave the child an injection in the thigh. “Don’t rub him any more,” he said, “cover him up.” He slipped his arm under the child’s head and supported it. Gradually the indifference returned to the face. Angelo remained lying over the child’s body without daring to move. He felt instinctively that in covering him in this way he might impart to him that blessed warmth.

  “There you are,” said the young man, sitting up. “I shan’t save one.”

  “It isn’t your fault,” said Angelo.

  “Ah! flowers of that kind,” said the young man.…

 
* * *

  Day had come. The heavy draperies of chalk were resuming their places in the silence.

  “Disinfect yourself,” said the young man, going to lie down in the yellow grass, in a place that the sun would soon reach. But Angelo came and lay down beside him.

  The sun climbed over the crest of the mountains opposite. It was white and heavy, as on the previous days. Angelo let it warm him without moving, until his sweat-soaked shirt was dry.

  He thought his companion was asleep. But when he sat up he saw that the young doctor’s eyes were open.

  “How do you feel?” he asked him.

  “Get out of here,” said the young man in a hoarse voice, unrecognizable. His neck and throat swelled, and he vomited so dense a flood of white and ricelike matter that it masked all the lower half of his face.

  Angelo pulled off his boots and stockings. He stripped him of his breeches. He saw that they were stiff with diarrhea, already old and dry. He stuffed these breeches under the young man’s bare legs. They were icy, already mottled with purple. He sprinkled them with alcohol and began to massage them as hard as he could.

  They seemed to be getting a little warmer. He took off his coat and wrapped it tightly around them. He cleaned out the young man’s plastered mouth. He rummaged in the satchel looking for the drug flask. There was nothing in the satchel but five or six empty phials and a knife. He tried to make the young man drink some alcohol, but he turned away his head saying: “Stop it, stop it, get away, get away.” Finally he managed to get the neck of the flask into his mouth.

  He uncovered the legs. They were again icy, a thick cyanosis had passed the knee and was already spreading wide over the thighs. Still, under Angelo’s ever more rapid rubbing, the flesh seemed to him to be softening, warming up, regaining a faint pearliness. He pressed on harder. He felt filled with a superhuman strength. But below the knee the legs were still icy, and now the color of wine-lees. He dragged the body close to the fire. He heated some stones. Directly he stopped rubbing, the cyanosis stole out from the knee, ramified like some dark fern leaf, and mounted into the thigh. He managed each time to chase it back, driving it down hard with his hands and thumbs. The young man had closed his eyes. This made him terribly ironical, because the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes became strongly defined as the face went to pieces. He seemed indifferent to everything; but once, when Angelo, without noticing, heaved a sigh in which there was perhaps some small satisfaction (he had just driven the cyanosis once more out of the thigh), without losing his toneless expression the young man groped with his fingers round his shirt, pulled it up, and revealed his belly. It was completely blue, terrifying.

  He began to grimace and to be shaken by spasms. Angelo no longer knew what to do. He kept on rubbing the icy legs and thighs, whose purple had joined with the blue of the belly. He was himself shaken with great nervous shudders every time he heard the bones crack in that writhing body. He saw the lips move. There was still a breath of voice. Angelo pressed his ear close to the mouth: “Disinfect yourself,” the young man was saying.

  He died toward evening.

  “Poor little Frenchman!” said Angelo.

  Angelo spent a terrible night beside the two corpses. He was not afraid of contagion. He didn’t think about it. But he dared not look at the two faces, as the firelight flickered over them, their drawn-back lips baring jaws with dog’s teeth ready to bite. He did not know that people dead of cholera are shaken with spasms and even wave their arms at the moment when their nerves relax, and when he saw the young man move his hair stood on end; but he rushed to massage his legs and continued to massage them for a long time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The soldiers arrived in the morning. There were a dozen of them. They had piled their equipment in a small field. Their captain was a fat ruddy man with a curling red mustache, so thick that it even hid his chin.

  Angelo, having been afraid all night long and being in the habit of giving orders to captains, spoke very sharply to him about the soldiers who, before anything else, had set about brewing coffee some way off, joking in loud voices.

  The captain turned red as a turkey-cock and wrinkled his little pug-dog’s nose. “Gentlemen don’t exist any more,” he said, “and you’re singing a little too loud. I’m not to blame if your mother produced a monkey. I’ll teach you to watch your step. Take that pick and start digging if you don’t want my foot up your ass. I don’t like white hands, and you’ll soon learn who I am.”

  “That’s plain already,” said Angelo; “you’re an unmannerly lout and I’m delighted that you don’t like my white hands because you’re going to get them in your face.”

  The captain drew back and pulled out his sword. Angelo ran to the pile and took a soldier’s short saber. The weapon was not half the length of his adversary’s, but Angelo disarmed the captain with ease. In spite of fatigue and hunger, he had immediately felt sure of himself and capable of magnificent cat-leaps. The captain’s sword flew twenty paces in the direction of the soldiers, who hadn’t ceased to stuff wood into their fire while they watched and sniggered over their shoulders.

  Without a word Angelo went back to where he had lain, freed the poor doctor’s horse, saddled his own, mounted, and made off, after casting a quick look at the two corpses, now snarling more fiercely than ever. He crossed the field obliquely at a jog trot. He had covered only a few hundred paces when he heard what sounded like large flies humming by and, immediately afterward, the faint patter of gunfire. He looked around and saw ten or so small white puffs of smoke beside the willows where the soldiers had piled their equipment. The captain had opened fire on him. He dug his heels into his horse and made off at a gallop.

  Shortly afterward he reached the road and continued to gallop. He now had neither cloak nor hat, his shirt was still soaked through with the night’s sweat, his chest too was damp; he felt that it was not so hot as on the other days. Yet it was the same chalky weather, the same mists. He had now neither saddlebag nor linen; his two pistols were loaded with only one round each. “Anyhow,” he told himself, thinking of his altercation with the captain, “I’d rather be hacked to pieces than kill a man with a pistol; even if he does insult my mother. I like settling accounts with weapons that allow me to humiliate rather than anything else. Death is no revenge. Death is odd,” he said to himself, thinking of the “poor little Frenchman.” “It seems very simple; and very practical.”

  He passed through a village where many people had tried this simple and practical device. The dead, fully dressed, in their shirts, naked, or worked over by the muzzles of the rats in their busy troops, lay piled in front of the houses on both sides of the road. They all had those fangs like mad dogs. Here there were already clouds of flies. The stench was so heavy that the horse was seized with panic and, probably terrified also by the carnival attitudes of some of the corpses, which were still standing and had their arms stretched out like crosses, took the bit between its teeth. Angelo let himself be carried on.

  By the end of the morning, he had crossed a deserted stretch of country where nothing suggested the epidemic, except the fields in which the rye, although ripe, was uncut and beginning to flatten. He had slept a little in his saddle, although the horse had maintained a pretty lively pace; he was warm and did not miss his cloak; he had knotted a handkerchief round his head; and, apart from his empty stomach, he felt very fit.

  He saw the Château de Ser among its trees, on a small knoll. He rode up as far as the terrace. It was a mountain manor house, crude and very dilapidated, the sort of place where one could imagine only a bachelor living. It was utterly deserted. His knocks on the door echoed through an empty house. In addition, under a large oak tree, he saw the earth freshly heaped over a rectangle of rather imposing size. All the same, he did not return to the road until he had circled the building two or three times and called repeatedly through a window on the first floor, which was still open, evidently because the shutters, rotted by rain and unhinged, wouldn’t
close. It was useless to call; the house was undoubtedly empty. None the less, he observed that here the dead and the fleeing had respected highly military rules. Nothing was left lying about, the grave had been filled in and, save for the open window under which he was standing, camp had been broken according to the laws of the quartermaster’s science. Near the stables, even the hay had been forked over.

  He took to the road again, at a walk. The day was ending. His hunger was now really fierce, and he thought of the coffee the soldiers had been heating while he stupidly quarreled with the fat captain.

  The valley was widening out, and he saw that ahead of him, perhaps a league away, it gave onto another, much wider valley at right angles, in which the setting sun revealed a whole vista of groves and long alleys of poplars.

  He spurred his horse onward, hoping that he would find this region less devastated. He told himself that there wasn’t really much risk in eating, for example, a roast chicken. His mouth at once filled with a flood of saliva, which he had to spit out. He remembered his cigars. He still had four. He lit one of them.

  He was close to the wide valley when he saw that ahead of him the road was blocked by barrels piled into a sort of barricade. And someone shouted at him to stop. As the person persisted in shouting: “Halt!” yet remained concealed even when he had stopped dead in the middle of the road, he advanced again a little nearer the barrels. He saw a gun-barrel leveled at him, and at last there emerged the head and shoulders of a man in a sackcloth blouse. “Halt, I say,” shouted this sentry, “and don’t move, or I’ll pump you full of lead.”

  The man had a startlingly coarse face, as though someone had amused himself by assembling upon it the basest and most loathsome features. He was sucking the stump of a cheap paper cigar and his chin was stained with nicotine juice. He had been thoroughly shaved: beard, mustache, and hair. He had been scraped in this way for so long that his scalp was as bronzed as his cheeks. “Come on, step forward,” he said.