Angelo would smoke one of his little cigars. In the course of these patrols he made with his little bell, just ahead of the nun, he had passed that famous police station into which he had been pushed on the day of his arrival. It was now deserted, its doors stood open. He could see inside, at the back, the desk behind which the faille cravat had stood. Now no one stood behind the desk. “Here’s a lamppost I was nearly hanged from,” he said to himself. In another street he saw a tobacco shop. The desire to smoke emboldened him to stop ringing his bell and say to the nun: “Wait for me.” He offered an écu and asked for some of his usual small cigars. The box was held out to him. “Help yourself,” he was told. His écu was refused. He realized it was because of his corpse-carter’s shirt. He had missed smoking so badly and wanted it so much that he helped himself lavishly and filled his pockets. “This job has its perquisites,” he said to himself. He was also astonished at the calmness with which the nun waited for him in the street. She always insisted on going at a gallop and feverishly ringing the bell. All she said was: “What did you take?” He showed her the cigars. They continued with their round.
When he saw that the nun could smile, he considered the thing in its miraculous aspect. He was a little like the man who sees the first day succeed the first night. When he perceived that she often smiled for herself alone, then for him, he settled down in the sweetness of that smile, which was extremely childlike.
The nun never nursed the sick. “I take them over,” she said. “They are my clients, I am responsible for them. On the day of the Resurrection they will be clean.”
“And the Lord will say to you: ‘Well done, sergeant!’” replied Angelo.
She retorted: “If God says: ‘Well done!’ poor idiot, what have you to say, you creature?”
“But some of them can be saved,” said Angelo; “at least, I think so.”
“And what is it I’m doing?” said she. “Of course they’re being saved.”
“I mean,” he said, “brought back to life.”
“They’ve been dead a long time,” she said; “all this is only a formality.”
“But, Mother,” said Angelo, “I too am stuffed full of sins.”
“Hide yourself, hide yourself,” she said.
She covered her face with her huge hands. At length she looked at him between her fingers and, lowering her hands, said: “Give me a cigar.”
She had rapidly acquired a taste for smoking. She seemed ready-made for the pleasures of smoking. The very first time, she held her cigar not like a clumsy and rather scared woman, but like a man who knows what to expect and needs it. She even seemed to enjoy the first puff. Angelo had gladly given her the little cigar, but he knew they were very strong and watched in case she felt sick. She didn’t bat an eyelid; her huge lips opened slowly to emit an already skillful jet of smoke. As the peak of her coif kept the smoke before her face, she screwed up her eyes; with her lion’s nose and greedy mouth, she appeared through the blue mist like the embodiment of some very ancient wisdom.
She knew more than she said. She had not a very wide vocabulary. She had only that of the book she had read, following the lines with her finger. Nor did she talk much. She was so tired that she couldn’t even bring herself to wash her hands. “Washing the dead is enough,” she said. In fact, her hands, which were not only enormous but very plump, had the washed-out and whitish skin of washerwomen’s hands. A sort of faint white dirt remained in halos around her nails and in the hollows of her finger joints. The same fatigue made Angelo fidgety and talkative. He was always scratching at some spot on his breeches. Once he even washed his shirt in the well bucket. The nun never touched the filth that caked her robe. Her ample sleeves, which had trailed through countless messes, were stiff as leather. She would lay her hands flat on her knees. She would then settle like an enormous, squat, rectangular rock, like one of those enormous stones earmarked by the architect to serve as foundation stones. She smoked without touching the cigar, leaving it planted in her mouth for as long as it lasted. She would say peacefully to herself: “Alleluia, glory to Thee, Oh God! Praise to the heavenly host! Holy Trinity! God, Creator of the whole world, help me! Everlasting and true God!” Then immediately afterward there would be a long silence, during which she often fell asleep. Angelo, watching her, would come over and take from her mouth what was left of the cigar.
Once she also said: “Immaculate Virgin!” then, immediately afterward, “Let’s go!”
She always went out on a sudden inspiration. He had to obey promptly. She never waited. She became furious and choked in her rage like a peacock. At those moments she used a sort of language made up of unrelated words, any old words strung one after the other, almost shouted; she would end up with wild cries that had in them something of a dirge and of a beast’s roaring. Angelo was literally fascinated. He thought only of her.
A few days after he had come down from his rooftops, and when the first fierce impulse had passed, Angelo had asked the nun if she knew a certain Giuseppe. She might have. On her rounds? She went no rounds. Her order went no rounds. It was a convent for rich girls. Her job was in the kitchen. There was no more question of Giuseppe than of Peter or Paul. Who was this Giuseppe? An Italian refugee. More precisely, a Piedmontese. What did he do in the town? Oh! Nothing: he probably passed unnoticed. He was a shoemaker. He lived very simply, alone, speaking to nobody. He had quite enough to say to himself. The last time Angelo had seen him was more than a year ago, and at night. All Angelo could say was that he lived in a room in a very big house where there also lived, as in a barrack, some tanners and their families. A shoemaker, did he say? All the nun could tell him was that the sisterhood had its shoes resoled by a man called Jean, who was also an Italian. No, it wasn’t he. And what was he doing, looking for Giuseppe? It was too long a story: among other things, this Giuseppe was in touch with Angelo’s mother. What sort of touch? Oh! she came from Piedmont and … no relation to a shoemaker. My mother is young and very beautiful. She’s a duchess? Ah! good. She corresponds with this Giuseppe because I am always par orte, on the road, in the hills and valleys. She writes to Giuseppe and sends him money for me; he acts as a sort of treasurer for me. Ah! yes. No, she didn’t know who Giuseppe was. It was the first time she had heard of such a thing.
Angelo told himself that perhaps in going about the streets he would run into Giuseppe. But now the streets were deserted. Only from time to time he would meet a white-shirted man as he preceded the nun with his little bell.
He now thought only very seldom of Giuseppe. He hardly had any need of what Giuseppe could give him. “It’s all right,” he told himself. Along the streets, in the bedrooms, in the charnel houses, he told himself: “It’s all right.” He could no longer reflect about very much, or develop his ideas. He helped to wash the dead: he plunged his grass brush into the pails of hot water. For a long time now the sound of the grass rubbing over parchment skins had ceased to astonish him; he didn’t even worry about saving lives; he knew that, all in all, one can get to be perfect at washing a corpse. He felt a self-satisfaction he had always sought and never attained. Even the Baron had not given him this spiritual contentment. As he delivered his thrust and felt it strike home, he had had a brief feeling of intense joy, but happiness had been far away.
He was on the right side of the cholera. “What pride!” he exclaimed suddenly one evening.
“Ah! son of a Pope,” said the nun softly, “you’ve found that out!” She covered her face with her huge hands, then asked for a cigar.
Those nocturnal patrols, at three in the morning, through a town desolated by the epidemic, were as gloomy as could be. Most of the street lamps were out; only a few were still kept going. Angelo carried a lantern. He rang his bell only at jerky intervals, between which there stretched a silence rendered still more silent by the twittering of the nightingales and the nun’s heavy tread as she dragged her huge shoes over the cobbles. Night encouraged selfishness. People brought their dead down into the stree
t and threw them on to the pavement. They were in a hurry to get rid of them. They even went so far as to leave them on other people’s doorsteps. They parted from them in every possible way. For them the main thing was to drive them away as quickly and as completely as possible from their own homes, to which they quickly returned and hid. Sometimes, beyond the halo of the lantern, in the half-darkness, Angelo saw pale shapes fleeing, agile as the beasts that leap into the thickets of the woods. Doors shut slowly, creaking. Bolts were rammed home. Nobody called. The bell, which Angelo swung every now and then, rang in a pure void. Nobody wanted help. Night permitted everyone to look out for himself. They all did so in the same way. Nobody found a better one.
“Did they love one another?” said Angelo.
“Lord, no,” said the nun.
“In a town like this, though, there are surely people who loved one another?”
“No, no,” said the nun.
Often indeed, when Angelo clanged his bell, the bands of light framing certain shutters went out. The groaning and wailing ceased abruptly. He imagined hands clapped suddenly over mouths.
They washed abandoned corpses. They could not wash all that they found in the night: they lay in every corner. Some were sitting up: they had been deliberately arranged to look like persons resting. The others, thrown down anyhow, would be hidden under filth, even under dung. Some were curled up in the recesses of doorways, others stretched flat on their bellies in the middle of the street, or on their backs with their arms forming a cross. It was useless to knock on the doors outside which they found them. Nobody knew them. Neighborhoods were surreptitiously exchanging their corpses. Making their rounds, Angelo and the nun could hear the faint sounds of this furtive traffic. It might be a body borne by two men, one at the head, one grasping the legs like the handles of a wheelbarrow; a wife dragging her husband over the pavements; a man carrying his wife like a sack of wheat on his shoulder. They all crept through the dark. Children were sent to smash the street lamps with stones.
Angelo would swing his bell. “Come on,” he would mutter, “snap it up, snap it up, get the hell out of here, get the job done!” He would walk slowly, without haste, before the nun, who followed heavily as if on two church pillars. He had the right to be scornful.
They washed only the foulest. They carried them one by one to the side of a fountain. They undressed them. They scrubbed them with plenty of water. They laid them out neatly to be picked up when day came.
It was utterly useless. Massaging the dying was also utterly useless. The poor little Frenchman had saved no one. There was no remedy. At the beginning of the epidemic he had seen sick people die like flies though surrounded by every care; others who had hidden themselves to smother their colic sometimes emerged fresh as daisies. The choice was being made elsewhere.
“If I’m going to die,” said Angelo to himself, “I shall have time enough to be frightened when my moment comes. Just now, fear is out of place.”
When he was in some deserted square, in the dead of night, in this town so completely terrorized that the most ignoble cowardice appeared quite natural, alone with the nun, when four or five naked corpses were spread out within the circle of their lantern and they were washing these corpses, as he fetched water from the fountain, he would say to himself: “I can’t be accused of affectation. No one sees me, and what I’m doing is quite useless. They’d rot just the same, foul or clean. I can’t be accused of running after a medal. But what I’m doing classifies me. I know I’m worth more than all these people who had social rank, who were addressed as ‘sir’ and now throw their loved ones on the dung-heap. The main thing isn’t that others should know and even acknowledge that I’m worth more: the main thing is that I should know it. But I’m more exacting than they. I demand from myself unquestionable proof. And here at least is one.”
He had a taste for superiority and a terror of affectation. He was happy.
It is true that the sound of the hemp swab as it rubbed over these skins, stiff and resonant from the cholera, stretched over bodies with the flesh calcined inside, was rather hard for anyone with imagination to bear. It must also be admitted that the gasping flame of the lantern never ceased to drape the shadows. A romantic soul might find a certain exaltation in a struggle with these things, simple though they were.
There was very little ugliness in his pride. At any rate, barely what was necessary to make it human. “I left that loutish captain to look after the body of the poor little Frenchman,” he thought. “He certainly had it thrown into quicklime like a dog. The soldiers must have dragged it by the legs without ceremony. I see it as if I were there. And yet I had more than love for that man: I had admiration. It’s true I was quite ready, body and soul, to bury him with my own hands, decently. And even to embrace him. No, that would have cost me nothing; on the contrary, I’d have done it gladly. I was chased away by gunfire.”
But he added: “Well, you should have stood up to the guns.” He went so far as to say: “You should have been humble enough for them not to want to fire guns at you. You preferred to be arrogant with the captain. Wouldn’t the sign of a really superior spirit have been not to reply to his insults? Not to give in? You don’t give in to other people. But is that enough? It’s to yourself that you mustn’t give in. You gave in to the immediate pleasure of giving an insolent man an insolent retort. That’s not strength. That’s a weakness, because look at you now, filled with remorse at having failed to perform a duty that was dear to you or, to be frank, a deed which would give you self-esteem. In reality the poor little Frenchman doesn’t give a damn for you and your clean hands. Quicklime for quicklime, the soldier’s hand did the job perfectly. What would have interested the Frenchman would have been to cure at least one. How conscientiously he looked for the last ones! But am I using the right word? For him, now dead, and for me, still alive, is it really a matter of conscience? Was conscience the motive when he rode his nag up that valley of Jehoshaphat? He was certainly the very image of conscience, alive all alone amid the corpses and seeking to save. But was he there to do his duty, or to satisfy himself? Did he have to force himself or did he enjoy it? Wasn’t his way of seeking out those whom he called the last ones even behind the beds, the way of hunting-dogs? And if he had managed to save one, would his satisfaction have come simply from seeing life restored, or from feeling himself capable of restoring life? Wasn’t he quite simply trying to earn a medal from himself on grounds of nobility? We’re all bastards in the same boat. Isn’t that why I admired him—I mean, envied him? Wasn’t I looking for a medal myself when I stayed with him? First-class men always want to put their backsides on two chairs at the same time. Could there be such a thing as devotion without a desire to please oneself? An irresistible desire? That’s what makes a saint. A cowardly hero is an angel. But what merit does a brave hero have? He acted to please himself. He satisfies himself. It’s human beings, male and female, of whom the priests (and they know) say: they find satisfaction in themselves. Is there ever a disinterested devotion? And even,” he added, “if it exists, isn’t the total absence of self-interest then the sign of the purest pride?
“Let’s be thoroughly frank,” he told himself. “This fight for liberty, and even for the liberty of the people, which I have undertaken, for whose sake I’ve killed (with my usual attitudinizing, it’s true), for whose sake I’ve sacrificed an elevated position (bought with good money by my mother, it’s true), did I undertake it really because I think it is just? Yes and no. Yes, because it is very difficult to be frank with oneself. No, because one must make an effort to be frank and it is useless to lie to oneself (useless but convenient and usual). Good. Let’s grant that I believe my cause is just. All the daily pleasure of the fight, all the advantages of pride and position that this fight brings me, let’s forget them, let’s push all that aside. This fight is just and it’s for its justice that I took it on. Its justice—its justice pure and simple, or else the esteem I feel for myself at the moment of taking up th
e fight for justice? There’s no denying that a just cause, if I devote myself to it, serves my pride. But I serve others. In addition only. So you see, the word ‘people’ can be removed from the discussion without loss. I could even put anything I liked in place of the word ‘liberty,’ on the one condition that I replace the word ‘liberty’ by an equivalent. I mean, by a word that has the same general value, equally noble and equally vague. What about ‘the fight,’ then? Yes, that word can stay. The fight. That is to say, a trial of strength. In which I hope to be the stronger. At bottom, it all comes back to: ‘Long live me!’”
He would wash the dead and say to himself: “Haven’t we, the nun and I, the merit of extreme honesty in performing this completely useless act, which none the less demands so much courage? Useless, let’s get it clear, useless to everyone but very useful to our pride. Here we are, alone in the night with this disgusting work, which does, however, give us a high opinion of ourselves. We’re deceiving nobody. We need to do something that will class us. We couldn’t do anything more clear-cut. It’s impossible to work for one’s self-esteem with less affectation.”
They were really very lonely beside their fountain. The town stirred only as a dying man stirs. It was struggling in the peculiar selfishness of its death agony. Under the walls there were dull murmurs as of muscles relaxing, lungs emptying, bellies opening, jaws chattering. One could no longer ask anything of this social body. It was dying. It had enough to do, enough to think about, just dying.
The lantern only lit a small space, just the four or five spread-out and stripped bodies around which Angelo and the nun were busy for their own sakes. Beyond them, the muffled murmurs, the sound—like the rubbing of hands—of the elms and sycamores in which the wind and the birds were stirring.
The nun’s chief care was to prepare the bodies for the Resurrection. She wanted them clean and decent for that occasion. “When they stand up with their thighs plastered with shit,” she said, “what will the Lord think of me? He’ll say to me: ‘You were there and you knew; why didn’t you clean them?’ I’m a housekeeper; I’m doing my job.”