She was very taken aback one night when, after throwing some buckets of water over a corpse, it opened its eyes, then sat up and asked why it was being treated in this way.
It was a man still in the prime of life. He had fainted in a fit of cholera and been taken for dead. His relatives had put him out in the street. The cold water had brought him round. He asked why he was naked, why he was there. He would have died of fright before the huge nun, who didn’t know what to do, if Angelo hadn’t immediately started to talk to him with great affection, and even to wipe him and then wrap him in a sheet.
“Where is your house?” Angelo asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What is this place? And you? Who are you?”
“I’m here to help you. You’re in the Place des Observantins. Do you live near here?”
“No, indeed. I wonder how I got here. Who brought me here? I live in the rue d’Aubette.”
“We must take him home,” said Angelo.
“He’s tricked us,” said the nun.
“It’s not his fault, don’t talk so loud. They thought he was dead and got rid of him. But he’s alive and, I think, even saved.”
“He’s a swine,” she said. “He’s alive and I washed his backside.”
“No, no,” said Angelo, “he’s alive and it’s wonderful. You take one arm and I’ll take the other. I’m sure he can walk. Let’s take him home.”
He lived at the far end of the rue d’Aubette, and it was quite a task to get him there. He was beginning to realize that he had been taken for dead, that he had been mixed up with the dead. He was trembling like a leaf and his teeth chattered in spite of the stifling heat. He kept tripping over his shroud at every step. All the time he kept leaping like a goat, and Angelo and the nun had to pinion him with both arms. All his nerves in revolt were trying to rid themselves of fear. He kept throwing back his head and neighing like a horse.
“So you pulled a fine trick on me,” the nun kept saying, and she kept shaking him as roughly as a policeman.
At last he sighted his house and tried to run for it; but Angelo held him back.
“Wait,” he said. “Stay here. I’ll go in and let them know. You can’t turn up suddenly like this; you know how bad shocks can be. Who is in there? Your wife?”
“My wife is dead. It’s my daughter.”
Angelo went up and knocked at the door, under which light could be seen. There was no answer. He opened it and went in. It was a kitchen. In spite of the stifling heat, a fire was lit in the stove. A woman of about thirty, wrapped in shawls, was huddling close to the fire. She was shuddering all over; only her enormous eyes were motionless.
“Your father,” said Angelo.
“No,” she said.
“You took him down into the street?”
“No,” she said.
“We found him.”
“No,” she said.
“He’s down below. We’ve brought him back. He is alive.”
“No,” she said.
“What a fuss about nothing,” said the nun from the doorway. “It’s as simple as day. Just you watch!”
She had dropped the man’s arm. He followed her in, let fall his shroud, and sat down quite naked on a chair. The daughter huddled into her shawls, pulled them up over her face, just leaving her eyes visible. The nun removed, one by one, the pins holding her coif. She held them between her lips while she took it off. Her head was round and shaved. Then she shut the door and strode over to the coffee-grinder, rolling up her sleeves.
On leaving the house they returned to their labors. There were still three other corpses by the fountain. These were impeccable. They washed them and prepared them very nicely.
One morning Angelo and the nun were as usual in an arcade of the cloister, lying on the flagstones, more dazed with fatigue than asleep, when a sharp little step, tapped out clearly with the heels, set the vaults ringing. It was another nun, this one thin and young. She was dressed cleanly and very elegantly. Her coif was brilliantly starched, and her huge pectoral cross was of gold. All that could be seen of her face was a sharp nose and a pointed chin.
Immediately the huge nun became subdued. She clasped her hands and, with lowered head, listened to a long, low-voiced homily. Then she followed the thin nun, who had turned quickly on her little heels and was making for the door.
Angelo had followed the performance with eyes half closed in the stupor of his fatigue. Immediately after, he fell asleep. When the burning of the white sun on his face woke him up, it was late. He half thought he had been dreaming, but the fat nun was not there. He looked for her. He gave up and went out.
He did not have his bell, and he no longer knew what to do. His head and heart were perfectly empty. Finally, after some time, he was struck by the silence of the streets. All the shops were shut, all the houses barricaded. Certain doors, certain shutters were even nailed fast with crossed planks. He passed through a good part of the town without meeting even a cat or hearing any sound but that of a slight breeze which caused echoes in the passages.
In a little street near the center, however, Angelo did find a draper’s shop open. Through the window he even saw a well-dressed man sitting on a bench, measuring cloth. He went in. The shop smelled of good-quality velvet and had other comforting odors.
“What do you want?” said the man.
He was tiny. He was playing with the trinkets on his watch chain.
“What has happened?” asked Angelo.
The little man was amazed at the question, but kept his poise and said: “Well, well, a visitor from the moon!”
At the same time he studied Angelo from head to foot.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Angelo murmured some sort of story. Of course he knew there was cholera, devil take it!
“If I want him to show me some consideration,” he told himself, “and, damn it, that’s just what I do want, I simply must not tell this man, trim as a gamecock, that I’ve been washing dead bodies.”
He noticed also that the little man, otherwise dry in manner and even leaning slightly backward in his anxiety not to lose anything of his stature, twitched every time he heard the word “cholera.”
“Why do you keep talking of cholera?” the little man said at last. “It’s just a simple contagion. Why not call it what it is, instead of looking for nonexistent trouble? This country would be healthy, only we are all more or less obliged to reckon with the land. A cartload of manure costs eight sous. You can’t get away from it. No one’s willing to pay those eight sous. During the night people dam up the streams, pile straw there, hold back filth of every kind, and so get manure cheap. There are even some who pay two sous for the right to set open crates over the outlets from the privies.
“This is a well-aired town. It’s watered by eighty fountains. It’s exposed to the northwest wind. But the price of manure’s too high, and without manure, nothing doing! Talk about contagion, and I’m with you,” continued the little man, squinting at Angelo’s still-magnificent boots. “But cholera, that requires thought. And I’d even,” he added, rising on his toes, then dropping back gently on to his heels, “I’d even say: beware! The point is, there’ll always be need of manure. Note the fact. And the contagion will pass. Cholera, that’s a big word, and words cause fear. Once let fear in, and you won’t be able to move a step.”
Angelo stammered something about the dead.
“Seventeen hundred,” said the man, “out of a population of seven thousand, but you yourself look like a horseman in difficulties. Can I be of any help?”
Angelo was literally enchanted by the little man. “He waves his arms, he squeaks his boots, but he never gets outside his skin,” he said to himself. “He’s still got a clean collar, a well-brushed waistcoat, and in his shop he’s put everything tidy, even the shadows on his shelves. He’s right: lying is a virtue. The man’s an obstinate microbe, too. His hypocrisy is much more useful than my extravagance. It takes many more like him than like me to make
a world in which, as he says, there’ll always be need of manure. This is the very proof of his simplicity, of his all-of-a-piece solidity, which nothing can demolish, neither cholera nor war, perhaps not even our revolution. He may die but he won’t despair. Still less will he despair in advance. And that, on the whole, is the way of a man of quality. To know everything or to know nothing amounts to the same thing.”
Meanwhile many other things were being explained to him; for example, that drastic measures had at last been taken.
“You’ve surely noticed that there’s no one left in the town. Except me. All the rest have gone to camp in the fields, in the open air, on the hills round about. There’s only me. There had to be someone to keep an eye on the provisions. I have, under my roof,” (and this expression assumed, in his mouth, an impressive air) “storerooms for my cloth. They’d been stuffed full of camphor for a long time. Against moths. It’s perfect against the fly that brings the contagion. It’s a little fly, not even green.”
“Touch my hand,” said Angelo.
“Gladly,” said the litle man, smiling, “but kindly dip it first in this jar of vinegar.”
In the end Angelo felt ridiculous.
It was without haste, and swinging his arms as though going for a walk, that Angelo left the town. The nun was forgotten. He was even chewing a sprig of mint.
The hills formed an amphitheater. On their tiers, the whole population of the town was assembled, as though to watch some great game. The people were encamped under the olive groves, the clumps of oaks, and in the undergrowth of the terebinths. Fires were smoking on all sides.
Angelo was naturally used to soldiers’ encampments. They would stack arms, get out their canteens, and after that life was fine. They sang, stirred their soup; they had no need of a drawing-room. They were poor bastards, but they knew that a splendid refuge can be made by thinking about nothing.
The first thing Angelo saw by the roadside was a screen planted under the olive trees of an orchard. It was painted in bright colors, perhaps on silk. It had been designed, no doubt, to cheer up some dim corner by a fireside. Here it stood full in the sun (the threadbare foliage of the olive trees gave hardly any shade), full in the furious sun. The screen spluttered with gold, bright purples, and hard blues. It bore a design of the plumed warriors and swelling breastplates of a canto of Ariosto that Angelo at once remembered. It was set out in the open beside an easy chair covered in tapestry, likewise telling a tale, on which were piled a box encrusted with shells, a parasol, a silver-knobbed cane, and some shawls that the wind had disarrayed so that they trailed on the grass. Right at the foot of the nearest olive tree had been placed (dead level, with the aid of sticks wedged under the legs) a small escritoire, nicely polished and coquettishly bearing its glass-domed clock, its candlesticks, its best coffeepot under a faille cosy braided with ribbons. All around, over a space of seven or eight square yards, were disposed with the utmost harmony an umbrella stand, a tall lamp stand, a pouf, a foot-muff and a green plant in a pot—a rubber-plant, supported by a bamboo cane. Not far off, upturned and pointing at the sky its two shafts, from which dangled chains, was the small cart that had transported the whole paraphernalia; and the mule, its straw and its droppings.
The sight was so incongruous that Angelo stopped. Someone beat on the footwarmer with the cane. A large girl who must have been sitting in the grass got up and approached the screen.
“Who is it?” asked an old woman’s voice.
“A man, madame.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Looking.”
“What at?”
“Us.”
“Good day, madame,” said Angelo, “is everything all right?”
“Perfectly all right, monsieur,” said the voice. “What concern is that of yours?” And to the girl: “Go and sit down.”
Then the cane began to thump on the ground like the tail of an exasperated lion.
There were also, at every turn, families of work people sitting in the shade of a wall or bank or bush, or under a small oak, with children, bundles of linen, boxes of tools. The women were rather at a loss, but they had already set up a few utensils, lines stretched between two branches, a tripod supporting a stew pot, and even, here and there, a row of boxes arranged in descending order of size: flour, salt, pepper, spices. The men had been much more disoriented. Their hands would not as yet unclasp from around their knees. They were glad to call good-day to passers-by.
The children weren’t playing. There was very little noise, except that of a light wind rattling the sun-roasted leaves, and, from time to time, the noise of the sun itself like a rapid crackle of flame. Only the horses and mules shook their bridles, kicked at the flies, and sometimes neighed, not to each other but in complaint and furtively. Some donkeys tried to start a concert, but there was a sound of sticks thwacking on bellies, and they choked back their braying. Vast flocks of crows kept wheeling, also in silence, above the trees. The sun was so violent that it turned their feathers white.
The peasants had installed themselves more comfortably. They seemed to unstiffen more quickly. They had all, moreover, chosen extremely favorable sites: oak trees, hollows in which the grass was dry but long, pine clumps. Most of them had already cleared their sites of stones. They were even busy all at the same time, but each for himself, cutting branches of broom that they then transported in bundles into their bit of shade. The women stripped the larger sticks and plaited them into hurdles. Children, looking grave and frowning, sharpened stakes.
Several old women, who were not plaiting the broom and seemed to be invested with diplomatic powers, went off with a smile on their lips to prowl round the other encampments, under cover of gathering plants for a rustic salad. They were getting organized. They had even begun very carefully to make little piles of manure with the litter of their beasts.
The only slight dislocation was in their coops full of chickens, not yet let loose; and the pigs tied by the feet to stumps, torturing themselves by straining at the thongs knotted round their hocks but not squealing, scarcely even grunting, and mostly sniffing with extremely mobile snouts toward the smells stirred up by all these strange movements. They had already learned to crouch down under the bushes whenever there passed overhead the rustle of the great flocks of crows.
Locksmith tits, whose song is like grating iron, called ceaselessly, establishing a void where their cries rang, and a distance by the answers they received from remote trees. One could also hear some rather triumphant children’s voices, women calling out names, men speaking to their beasts and the bells of hunting-dogs setting out on some scent.
They had transported sideboards, sofas, stoves complete with pipes—which they were struggling to fit together and then attach to branches—cases filled with pots and pans, baskets of crockery and linen, mantelpiece ornaments, firedogs, tripods, trolleys. The furniture was set in the orchards, under isolated trees, even out in the wind. It had quite clearly been arranged here just as it used to be in the rooms from which it was taken. Sometimes it even stood around a table, covered with its oilcloth or carpet, with five or six chairs set around it, or armchairs, in their covers. There would then be an idle woman sitting on one of these chairs instead of on the grass, with her hands on her knees, and always by her side or in the immediate vicinity her man, standing and vacant, like a hero caught unawares. They never stirred. They were like characters in a tableau vivant, their eyes fixed on some private horizon, looking at once very knowing and very vulnerable.
Others had heaped merchandise, piles of pieces of cloth, full sacks, cases; and, with their backs against the heap, or even lying on top of it, men, women, and children kept watch.
“Shall I ever find my Giuseppe among all this, or is he dead?” Angelo wondered.
He admitted that, if Giuseppe were dead, well! the situation was grave.
Instead of staying with the nun, he should have looked for Giuseppe. But where in town should he have looked? Whom should he ha
ve asked? (Once more he saw the square piled with dead bodies, people dying in heaps on the ground, and the panic of those whom he had seen racing like dogs through the streets; he heard the carters pounding their drums to the echo in every quarter.) One saw things differently here in the groves, in the open air, in spite of the flocks of crows and the rabid sun. Anyhow it was true, he’d wasted his time with the nun. He thought so. One doesn’t always do the sensible thing.
He found, by the roadside, one of those small pairs of scales with horn pans in which tobacco is weighed. It lay overturned in the grass. He looked up onto the bank. An old woman was arranging some boxes against an olive stump.
“Madame,” asked Angelo, “do you sell tobacco?”
“I did,” she said.
“You haven’t got a little scrap left?”
“Why mess around with scraps?” she said. “I’ve got fresh tobacco.”
Angelo jumped over the bank.
She was a shrewd old crone. She had little magpie eyes and she chewed her gums like a powerful quid.
“Do you have any cigars?” said Angelo.
“Ah, you’re a cigar smoker! I’ve cigars for all ages, sweetheart. If they pay!”
“We’ll manage to pay you for them.”
“Well, what do you smoke?” She looked him over. “Marsh-mallow?”
“Give me some crapulos,” said Angelo drily.
“I’m low on them,” she said; “can you make out with half of one, sweetheart?”
“Don’t talk so much, Grandma,” said Angelo. “Give me a boxful.”
Actually, a box was a pretty tall order. He had exactly four louis left. It was truly essential for Giuseppe to be alive, otherwise times were going to get hard. But it was truly essential to put that woman and her quid in their place.
She rummaged in the sacks she had been unpacking and found a box of cigars, for which Angelo paid with a markedly casual air.