The Horseman on the Roof
Keeping an ear cocked for the sound of sandals returning up the street, Angelo tucked the pistol under his arm and tried the wooden handle. The door opened. He went in, reclosed the door, and stood still, holding his breath in the dark.
He listened for a long time to the sounds from the street; then, after the men had looked everywhere (he even heard, upon the leaf of the door behind which he stood, hands going back and forth, trying to decide if the recess were empty) they settled down to watch under the archway at the top of the street and stayed there, talking in loud voices.
Angelo listened to the house’s sounds. They were those of an empty house. He lit his tinder-wick and blew on it to make a faint glow. As far as he could see, he was in the entrance passage of quite a well-to-do house. At last he made out, not very far from the door, a small étagère on which stood a candlestick with a candle and several phosphorus tapers. He lit the candle.
What he had taken for an entrance passage was a hall. A broad staircase led to the floors above. There was no furniture, no pictures, but the banisters and especially the way they were finished in strapwork promised fine things.
Angelo deliberately made a slight noise and even coughed. He stood in the middle of the hall, his candlestick in his hand, looking up the staircase to where the handsome banisters widened into a gallery on the first floor.
“I can’t look exactly pretty in my shirtsleeves and all ragged,” he thought, “but in any case, the way I stand here holding my candle and making no attempt to hide, it’d be hard to take me for a brigand.” He even made so bold as to say out loud but without shouting and in the most friendly possible tone: “Is anybody there?”
Rats were scampering here and there; and there was also the sighing of the walls, the cracking of woodwork leading its woodwork life.
“Oh well, I’m going upstairs,” he said to himself.
He did not dare open a door to his left, near the little console on which he had found the candlestick. He was afraid of being seen to do so: “Then,” he thought, “they might really take me for a thief.”
He went up, holding his candle high, seeing tall doors loom up above the fine wrought-iron gallery. One of these doors was ajar. He said: “Monsieur, or madame, have no fear, I am a gentleman.” He got to the landing: nothing had stirred or replied. The half-open door stood neither more nor less open. He could now, however, see the bottom of the door, and he observed that it was held ajar by a ball of fur with very long hairs from which the flickering of his candle-flame drew glints of gold.
His shudder of fear lasted only a moment when he realized that it was a woman’s hair. He heard the voice of the poor little Frenchman saying in his ear: “It’s the finest outbreak of Asiatic cholera ever seen!”
“Ah! yes, of course,” said Angelo. “That’s the story,” he added. But he went no nearer. He was upset by the beauty of the hair and by seeing it spread on the ground; by the abundance of these loosened tresses, which he now saw plainly with their lovely glints of gold; and even, showing through them, the glimmer of a bluish profile.
She was a very young woman, or a girl. She was still beautiful, snapping at the empty air with extremely white teeth. Emaciation and cyanosis had given her a face carved from onyx. She lay on the cushion of filth she had vomited. Her body had not rotted. She must have died very quickly, of raw cholera. Under her long nightdress, although it was of linen, he could see her black belly, her blue thighs and legs, drawn back like those of a grasshopper about to spring.
Angelo pushed open the door that the body held ajar. It led into a bedroom. He stepped over the corpse and entered. The disorder was that of death and hurry. The woman had just had time to leap out of bed, then she had fouled sheets and floor with her spurting dysentery in a straight line toward the door, where she had fallen. Everything else was undisturbed: a fine marble-topped chest bore its clock under a glass globe, two copper candleholders, a box encrusted with sea shells, some very haughty daguerreotypes, especially one of an old man in uniform wearing a frogged dolman, hand on hip and mustaches like a bull’s horns; and one of a woman at a piano, thrusting into it long, imperious fingers like lances; she was dark-haired. Next to the daguerreotypes a glass cupel held hairpins, a shell flower, stay-laces. Behind the clock-case were a bottle of Eau-de-Cologne, a small bottle of balm cordial, a box of smelling-salts. On each side of the chest, a tall window, with small panes and old rep curtains. Outside, a garden: the dark mass of foliage could be seen moving against the stars. Three easy chairs: over the back of one of them a pair of long black stockings and an elastic garter. A pedestal table, a vase containing paper flowers, then the curtains of the alcove, the bed, a cupboard; near the cupboard a little door covered by tapestry. By the door, a chair; on the chair, underclothes, pantaloons, and embroidered petticoats.
Angelo opened the little door. Another room. But here the disorder told of a more violent struggle. No smell: from the threshold one could just detect the faint violet fragrance of the underlinen piled on the chair. Once inside, there was another smell: that of dirty wool sprayed with water, or rather sprayed with alcohol. The bed was ripped apart, tossed and trampled, the sheets torn, soiled with excrement, and curdled with whitish matter. On the floor, basins full of water, swabs of wet linen. The mattress had been abundantly soaked. It had dried since, but the covering was stained with huge patches like rust with wide greenish halos. There was no body. “One must look for the last one,” the poor little Frenchman used to say, “they go burrowing into places you’d never dream of.” But nothing: not even behind the bed. Angelo pushed another small half-open door: another room, a strong smell of turpentine, again those struggles among dirty linen and torn sheets, but nobody. He went all round. He walked on tiptoe. He held the candle high. He touched nothing. He craned his neck. He felt taut and hard as wire.
He returned to the first room, stepped over the corpse and out on to the landing. He went downstairs, blew out the candle. He was about to open the door. He heard talking in the road. He went upstairs again in the dark, guiding himself by the banisters. He did not light the candle till he reached the first floor.
In addition to the door where the woman with the beautiful hair was lying, there were two other doors. Angelo opened one of them. It led to a drawing-room. The piano was there. A large winged armchair across which was laid a crutch. A couch, a screen, a center table shaped like a four-leafed clover. Portraits, hard to make out, in heavy frames. One was that of a judge or something like a judge; another was of a man holding a saber between his legs. There was nothing in here. But yes! While an icy chill shot down his back, Angelo saw something jump off an armchair; it was a cushion! And coming toward him! No, it was a cat, a large gray cat arching its back and lifting a long, quivering tail. It came and rubbed against the legs of Angelo’s boots. It was fat, neither scared nor wild. What had it eaten?… No, the window was half open. It evidently went out and foraged.
On the second floor, nothing: it took no time to see this. Three rooms, empty, or merely containing jars, bushels for measuring grain, a wicker tailor’s dummy, baskets, sacks, an old violin-case open and unhinged, a trestle for picking olives, some pumpkins, some mattress springs, a music stand, a rat-trap, a demijohn of vinegar, some barrel hoops, an old straw hat, an old gun. But the staircase went on higher. Meanwhile it had become rustic: it smelled of grain and birds; it was even slightly strewn with straw. It ended against a true barn door, which, when pushed, opened with a horrible creaking onto a sparkle of stars.
It was what is called in these parts a “gallery,” that is to say, a sort of covered terrace on the roof.
A warm and extremely supple wind had arisen, which fanned the stars and made the foliage of the trees sway and rustle. A clanging, which it had also set going in the sky, made Angelo look up; in the night, not very far from him, he discovered the iron cage of a belfry, then the jutting confusion of roofs, some of whose tiles were polished so smooth that the mere twinkling of the stars made them gleam.
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Angelo was glad to breathe in this wind smelling of hot tiles and swallows’ nests. He snuffed out the candle and sat down on the edge of the terrace. The night was so overloaded with stars, and they blazed so brightly, that he could see distinctly the different roofs fitted together like plates in a suit of armor. The light was of black steel, but from time to time a spark kindled on the crest of a gable, on the varnished edge of a dovecot, or a weathercock, or an iron bell-cage. Short motionless waves of an extraordinary rigidity covered the whole site of the town with an angular and frozen surf-pattern. Pale pearl house-fronts, on whose surfaces the faintest of lights, like phosphorus, came to die, were inlaid with solid triangles of shadow, raised like pyramids or set horizontally like fields; slopes on which there danced a greenish light threw open, in every direction, rows of tiles like the ribs of a fan; rotundas filigreed with silver bulged with shadows where some large church emerged; towers and the black and gray interlocking of skewbacks and superimposed galleries rose up, bristling with the barbs of stars. Now and then the lamps in the squares and boulevards breathed up vapors of rust and ocher festooned with the frames and crowns of eaves; and the inky rents of the streets carved out each quarter.
The wind, which did not breathe but fell in one solid piece or rolled along slowly like a ball of cotton wool, set the whole expanse of roofs lapping, blew a sleepy booming through the hollows of the bells, brushed the muffled drums of the attics and convent roofs. The laden branches of the elms and sycamores groaned like masts in travail. On the distant hills one could hear rustle the fluttering and beating wings of the great woods. The swaying of the hanging street lamps cast red glows; and that heavy air, leaping like a cat across the heavy exhalation of the tiles, kneaded the colors under the night sky into a sort of bronzed tar.
“Men are indeed wretched,” thought Angelo. “Everything beautiful happens without them. Cholera and catchwords are what they make. They foam with jealousy or die of boredom, which comes down to the same thing, if they’re not allowed to interfere. And whenever they do interfere, there’s a premium on hypocrisy and raving. One need only be up here or in the wilderness that I rode through the other day, to realize where the true battles lie, to become very particular about the victories one strives for. In short, to cease being content with little. As soon as you’re alone, things lay hold of you by themselves and always force you to take the roads that are hardest to climb. And even if you don’t get there, what fine views you have, and how reassuring everything is.”
Accustomed to obeying his youth without reserve, Angelo did not perceive that these thought lacked originality and were false besides. He was twenty-five, that is true, but at that age how many have already become calculating! He was one of those men who remain twenty-five for fifty years. His soul did not comprehend the full seriousness of society and how important it is to have one’s place, or at any rate to belong to the party that distributes places. He always regarded liberty as believers regard the Virgin. The most sincere among the men he trusted saw it as a relative thing, which anyhow should always be consigned to the philosophers if one does not want to be caught napping. He did not realize that, of those who always had the word “liberty” on their lips, some were beginning to sport crosses.
His mother had bought him his colonel’s commission. He had never understood that his position as natural son to the Duchess Ezzia Pardi conferred on him the right to scorn, as on all those who have the obligation of being. Did he even think of all the rungs to be climbed that the word “natural” implies, after having been adored throughout his childhood? That is why he had surprised his acquaintances when they saw him take military service seriously and even regularly attend the drilling of recruits. People guffawed, though behind his back; but at the first review he appeared on his black horse like a golden ear of corn. They could not keep their eyes off the arabesques, the braided clover-leaves escalading his tunic, and the sparkling helmet with its pheasant plumes, below which they saw the purest and gravest of faces. One can see that henceforth he was entitled to the pinpricks of his peers and the love of the sergeants.
“Do I err,” he continued, “in thinking that I’m bigger when I act alone?”
He was, at that moment, one of those born leaders, who are not rare, as people maintain, but on the contrary relatively common.
“But people will say to me, as they have said already: ‘your actions are full of fancy gestures (they didn’t dare say fancy steps) that attract attention. And we don’t need attention, we need to succeed, which is entirely different.’ Whenever it’s a question of liberty, they are right.”
The moment he thought of liberty, which he saw in the shape of a beautiful woman, young and pure, walking among lilies in a garden, he lost his critical sense. Liberty is the hobbyhorse of all beautiful children born to a country suffering alien rule, indeed tyranny.
“For those who accused me of irresponsibility when I killed Baron Swartz in a duel, while the orders were purely and simply to assassinate him, or to have him assassinated if doing it myself disgusted me (as they said later)—for those people, isn’t the time I spent with the little Frenchman time wasted? Wouldn’t they laugh at the sentimentality that made me keep watch over him after his death, and even want to be present at his burial, except for that lout of a captain? They certainly haven’t the same reasons for pride as I have. Would they approve of the way I looked after that man yesterday afternoon? They’d say one should only have a single aim in view. Would they force me to aim low?”
The phrase delighted him. He repeated it several times. He found in it a justification. He was weak enough to seek one.
“Must I be insensitive like a stone or a submissive corpse?” he added. “If so, what good is liberty? Once I had it I’d be unable to enjoy it. It’s quite essential, anyway, that once the goal is reached—in a word, liberty—obedience should cease; and how could it cease if liberty was then given only to obedient corpses? If, in the end, liberty has no one to turn to, shall we not have merely changed tyrants?”
But he believed in the sincerity of the men who were members of the same conspiracy as himself: of whom some were hiding in the foothills of the Abruzzi, and some had been shot (or even thumb-screwed, which he considered naïvely as an absolute proof of sincerity). He had several times gone to join them under the green tent, for important vendite,3 always boldly, sometimes even carelessly, in full uniform. He had been much reproached for his audacity, his uniform, and that recklessness he so loved. That recklessness, always instinctively deliberate, so to say, had often affected the police, and even deterred them, by its mystifying inappropriateness (which made the cops suspect an official trick), from making arrests already decided upon and easy to carry out. Even men who were bombastic talkers and visibly cherished dreams of glory spoke to him then with every sign of the most Jesuitical diplomacy. He saw them turn yellow, as if prey to a sudden liver attack.
“Aren’t they victims of the error of sincerity?” he asked himself, giving free rein to his naïveté at this moment when peace, the night, and above all the feminine velvet of the wind, lent eloquence to his heart.
He had nevertheless had some experiences that his pride would not let him forget. It was always in such moments of abandon that he had been duped. Now, as soon as he perceived his state, he said to himself: “You’re flinching!” And to regain control of himself he began to use cavalry language, with as many f—’s and b—’s as possible. He had learned, in such cases, the high therapeutic value of these simple words.
“Those b—’s,” he said to himself, “would even try to back me into a corner about my flight just now through the streets. ‘You acted like a rookie,’ they’d tell me. ‘You should have given them a taste of your pistol, but not like a paladin or Roland at Roncevaux; like a master, like someone who holds the right of life and death over them and regards them, what’s more, as scum. The important thing was to get them to join the ranks. Ours, of course. The chief revolutionary virtue is the
art of making others damned well respect you. Stunned by the sight of a corpse or two, they would have been in your pocket, and they’d have let you talk. You’d have told them how we are all brothers. We shall be needing a lot of beadles to say “Amen,” even in France.’
“They’re very good! For talk, one has to hand it to them! They have it down pat, as in a book. But you very rarely see them move from theory to practice themselves. How many of those little dark abortions, with priests’ faces into the bargain, would be capable of being soldiers in the ranks they command?
“But it isn’t given to everybody to command. That’s their great phrase. If they aim low and see no farther than the end of their noses, they do really see the end of those noses. I’m sure they’d find this poison idea most appealing. The cholera is a windfall. It’s a fine economy of means when one can take charge of ready-made terrors, drunken sprees to which God is treating the house. After all, aren’t they right, if, in order to give liberty to the people, one must first become its master? Every little bit helps.”
* * *
By the middle of the night the wind had grown gentler. It had become very wily with its favors, despite some highly suspicious smells that it softly fanned up, or perhaps precisely because of these smells. The silence was so complete that Angelo could hear the ticking of the clock in the cage of the belfry a good twenty-five or thirty yards away. Alone, and at long intervals, there came the tired rustle of the great elms, in which the nightingales had fallen silent. Some latecoming stars had created on the angular, surflike sweep of the roofs, a special glimmer. Several street lamps had gone out.
“Become their master to give them liberty,” mused Angelo; “is that the only way? Is there no other goal for man except being king? As soon as passion has a free reign, everyone seeks to make himself king.”