The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono Read Free Book Online Page B

he became aware that he was gripping the handle of his spade rather too tightly, and he could look around him at what was, luckily, an almost incredible sight.
    There were three corpses, in which the dog and the birds had created considerable damage. Especially in that of a few-months-old child, lying squashed on the table like a large white cheese. The two others, probably those of an old woman and a fairly young man, were absurd, with their blue-painted clowns’ heads, their disjointed limbs, their bellies bubbling over with guts, and with slashed and stiffened clothing. They were laid out on the ground amid a great confusion of pots and pans fallen from the dresser, of overturned chairs and scattered cinders. There was a sort of intolerable rhetoric in the way these two corpses grimaced and sought to embrace the earth with arms whose elbows and wrists bent the wrong way in their rotted joints.
    Angelo was not so much moved as nauseated; his heart was pounding under his tongue, heavy as lead. At length he noticed a fat crow skulking in the old woman’s black apron and proceeding with its meal. This so revolted him that he vomited and turned on his heels.
    Outside, he tried to run, but he lurched and stumbled. The birds had once more covered the corpse of the young woman, and they did not bother to move. Angelo walked toward another house. He felt cold. His teeth were chattering. He struggled to hold himself very stiffly. He was walking on cotton wool, he could hear nothing but the buzzing in his ears, and the houses in the scorching sunshine looked to him quite unreal.
    The sight of some mulberry trees, laden with leaves and still peacefully shading a little footpath, helped him back to his senses. He stopped in the shade, leaned against the trunk of one of these trees. He wiped his mustache on his sleeve. “I’m ready to fall flat on my back,” he thought. Puffs of smoke, growing colder and colder, filled his head. He tried to unblock his ears with the end of his little finger. Whenever the deafening buzz in his ears let up, he could hear, very far off and like the twittering of fat in a frying-pan, the concert of brays, neighs, and bleating. He felt ashamed, as though he had fainted on parade. Yet he was so used to talking severely to himself that he didn’t lose consciousness, and it was of his full free will that he knelt, then lay down in the dust.
    The blood returned to his head at once, and he could see clearly and hear with ears completely unblocked. He got to his feet: “Miserable wet hen!” he said to himself, “look what comes of your imagination and your habit of dreaming. When reality hits you, you take a quarter of an hour to get used to it. And all the while your blood treats you like a puppet. You go turning up your eyes because these people have elected to kill each other off like pigs! Unless, indeed, there’s been some dirty work here, in which case you’ve got something to say about it! And try to say it on the right side!” He missed his saddlebag, which the horse had carried off. It had two pistols in its pockets, and he was anticipating a fight. But he went back bravely to fetch the spade, and carrying it on his shoulder, advanced toward the rest of the hamlet, whose few houses huddled together a hundred yards farther on.
    â€œAha!” he said to himself, “more birds!” At his approach, indeed, squalls of birds issued from the doors. “What the hell have people been up to in this stinking village? It looks as if they’ve all kicked the bucket. Is it a sort of vendetta, or what?” He talked in sergeant’s language in order to put some fight into himself.
    In the second house he came upon corpses that were not so fresh. They were not putrescent, however, but dry like mummies. The dogs’ teeth and birds’ beaks had ripped them into a bold fretwork, like bites and pecks in a side of bacon. Even so, they exhaled that sirupy