Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) (3 page)

On the whole, everything was still as Flaubert had described it in the diary of his visit to Corsica: rather unassuming rooms furnished in the style of the Republic; a few chandeliers and mirrors of Venetian glass, the looking glasses now spotted and dim; a soft twilight, for the tall double windows were wide open, just as they had been in Flaubert’s time, but the dark green slatted blinds had been closed. Sunlight lay in white stripes like a ladder on the oak floorboards. It was as if not an hour had passed since Flaubert’s visit. Of the items he mentioned, only the imperial cloak with the golden bees that he had seen shining in the chiaroscuro was no longer here. Family documents inscribed in handsomely curving letters lay quiet in their glass cases, with Carlo Bonaparte’s two shotguns, a couple of pistols, and a fencing foil.

On the walls hung cameos and other miniatures, a series of colored steel engravings of the battles of Friedland, Marengo, and Austerlitz, and a genealogical tree of the Bonaparte family in a heavy frame covered with gold leaf, in front of which I finally stopped. A huge oak towered up from the brown earth against a sky-blue background, and hanging from its twigs and branches were little white clouds cut from paper, bearing the names and dates of all members of the imperial house and the later descendants of the Napoleonic clan. They were all assembled here—the king of Naples, the king of Rome, and the king of Westphalia; Marianne Elisa, Maria Annunciata, and Marie Pauline, the most beautiful and lighthearted of the seven siblings; the unfortunate Duke of Reichstadt, the ornithologist and ichthyologist Charles Lucien, Plon-Plon, son of Jérôme, and Mathilde Letizia, his daughter; Napoleon III with his twirled mustache, the Bonapartes of Baltimore; and many more.

Without my noticing the Maréchale Ney had come up beside me, perhaps seeing my obvious emotion as I examined this genealogical work of art, and told me in a reverent whisper that this
création unique
had been made toward the end of the last century by the daughter of a notary in Corte who was a great admirer of Napoleon. The leaves and sprays of flowers adorned with a few butterflies at the bottom of the picture, said Madame la Maréchale, were genuine dried plants from the
maquis
, sempervivums, myrtles, and rosemary, and the dark, sinuous tree trunk standing out in relief against the blue background was braided from the girl’s
own hair. Whether out of love for the Emperor or for her father, she must have devoted endless hours to her work.

I nodded attentively at this explanation, and stayed there for some time longer before I turned, left the room, and went down to the first floor, where the Bonaparte family had lived after they first came to Ajaccio. Carlo Bonaparte, Napoleon’s father, was secretary to Pasquale Paoli,
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and after the defeat of the patriots at Corte in their unequal struggle against the French troops he had moved to the seaport of Ajaccio for safety’s sake. Accompanied by Letizia, who was pregnant with Napoleon at the time, he traveled through the wild mountains and ravines of the interior, and I imagine that the two tiny figures riding their mules through that overwhelming panorama, or sitting alone by a small campfire in the darkness of the night, must have resembled Mary and Joseph in one of the many depictions that have come down to us of the Flight into Egypt. At any event, if there is anything in the theory of prenatal experience, then this dramatic journey explains a good deal about the character of the future Emperor, not least the fact that he always did everything with a certain precipitate haste, even in the matter of his own birth, when he was in such a hurry that Letizia was unable to reach her bed and had to bring him into the world on a sofa in what is known as the Yellow Room.

Perhaps it was with these remarkable circumstances attending the beginning of his life in mind that Napoleon later made his beloved mother a present of a Nativity scene in rather doubtful taste, carved from ivory and still on view at the Casa Bonaparte. During the 1770s and 1780s, while the Corsicans were adjusting to the new regime, neither Letizia nor Carlo can of course have dreamed that the children who sat at the dining table with them daily would eventually rise to the rank of kings and queens, or that the time would come when the most hot-tempered of them, young Ribulione, a lad always involved in local street fights, would wear the crown of a vast empire extending over almost the whole of Europe.

But what can we know in advance of the course of history, which unfolds according to some logically indecipherable law, impelled forward, often changing direction at the crucial moment, by tiny, imponderable events, by a barely perceptible current of air, a leaf falling to the ground, a glance exchanged across a great crowd of people. Even in retrospect we cannot see what things were really like before that moment, and how this or that world-shaking event came about. The most precise study of the past scarcely comes any closer to the unimaginable truth than, for instance, a far-fetched claim such as I once heard made by an amateur historian called Alfonse Huyghens, who lived in the capital of Belgium and had been pursuing his research on Napoleon for years; according to him, all the cataclysmic events caused by the Emperor of the French in the
lands and realms of Europe were to be traced solely to his color blindness, which made him unable to tell red from green. The more blood flowed on the battlefield, this Belgian scholar told me, the greener Napoleon thought the grass was growing.

In the evening I walked along the Cours Napoléon, and then sat for two hours in a small restaurant not far from the Gare Maritime with a view of the white cruise ship. Over coffee I studied the advertisements in the local paper and wondered whether to go to the cinema. I like to visit the cinema in foreign towns, but neither
Judge Dredd
at the Empire,
USS Alabama
at the Bonaparte, nor
L’Amour à tout prix
at the Laetitia seemed to me the right way to end this day. At about ten, therefore, I was back in the hotel where I had taken a room late that morning. I opened the windows and looked out over the rooftops of the town. Traffic was still driving down the streets, but suddenly everything fell silent, just for a few seconds, until one of those bombs that frequently go off in Corsica exploded with a short, sharp bang, obviously only a few streets away. I lay down and soon fell asleep, with the sound of the firefighters’ sirens howling in my ears.

My first walk the day after my arrival in Piana took me out on a road that soon begins falling away steeply in terrifying curves, sharp bends and zigzags, leading past almost vertical rocky precipices densely overgrown with green scrub, and so down to the bottom of a ravine opening out into the Bay of Ficajola several hundred meters below. Down there, where until well into the postwar period a community of twelve or so fisher-folk lived in dwellings roughly cobbled together and roofed with corrugated iron, some of which now have their doors and windows boarded up, I spent half the afternoon with a few other tourists from Marseille, Munich, or Milan who had installed themselves with their picnics and assorted items of practical equipment in couples or family groups, at regular distances from each other, and I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that
proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away. I watched the sand martins circling the flame-colored cliffs high above in astonishingly large numbers, soaring from the bright side of the rocks into the shadows and darting out of the shadows into the light again, and once that afternoon, which for me was filled with a sense of liberation and appeared to stretch endlessly away in every direction, I swam out to sea with a great sense of lightness, very far out, so far that I felt I could simply let myself drift away into the evening and so into the night. But as soon as, obeying the strange instinct that binds us to life, I turned back after all and made for the land which, from this distance, resembled a foreign continent, swimming became more and more difficult with every stroke, and not as if I were laboring against the current that had been carrying me on before; no, I was inclined to think that I was swimming steadily uphill, if one can say so of a stretch of water. The view before my eyes seemed to have tipped out of its frame, was leaning toward me, swaying and flickering of its own accord, with the upper rim of the picture skewed several degrees in my direction and the lower rim skewed away from me to the same extent. And sometimes I felt as if the prospect towering so menacingly in front of me was not a part of the real world but the reproduction of a now insuperable inner faintness, turned inside out and shot through with blue-black markings. Even harder than reaching the bank was the climb later up the winding road and the barely
trodden paths which here and there link one curve in the road to the next in a direct line. Although I placed one foot in front of the other only slowly and very steadily, the afternoon heat building up between the rock walls very soon brought sweat running down my forehead, and the blood pulsed in my neck as it did in the throats of the lizards sitting everywhere in my path, frozen in mid-movement with fear. It took me a good hour and a half to climb to Piana again, but once there I could walk as if weightlessly, like a man who has mastered the art of levitation, past the first houses and gardens and along the wall of the plot of land where the local people bury their dead. When I passed through the iron gate, which squealed on its hinges, this proved to be a rather desolate graveyard of the kind not uncommon in France, where you have the impression not so much of an antechamber to eternal life as of a place administered by the local authority and designed for the secular removal of waste matter from human society. Many of the graves standing in untidy rows all over the dry slope, their lines everywhere broken or slightly displaced, have already sunk into the ground, and are partially overlapped by later additions. Hesitantly, and with that touch of reluctance that one feels even today in approaching the dead too closely, I clambered over crumbling plinths and edgings, tombstones shifted out of place, ruinous masonry, a crucifix fallen from its mount and disfigured by rust marks, a leaden urn, an angel’s hand—silent fragments of a town abandoned years ago, and not a shrub or a tree to give shade anywhere, no
thujas or cypresses of the kind so often planted in southern cemeteries, whether for comfort or as a sign of mourning. At first sight I really believed that the only reminders in the Piana graveyard of the nature which, we have always hoped, will endure long after our own end, were the artificial purple, mauve, and pink flowers, obviously pressed upon their customers by French undertakers, made of silk or nylon chiffon, of brightly painted porcelain, wire, and metal, appearing not so much a sign of enduring affection as the final emergence of a kind of proof that, despite all assurances to the contrary, we offer our dead only the cheapest substitutes for the diverse beauty of life. Not until I looked more carefully around me did I notice the weeds—the vetch, wild thyme, white clover, yarrow and chamomile, cow wheat, yellow oat grass, and many other grasses with names unknown to me—that had grown around the stones to form actual herbariums and miniature landscapes, still showing some green but already half dead, and far lovelier, I thought to myself, than the ornamental funerary plants sold by German cemetery florists, usually consisting of heathers, dwarf conifers, and pansies of absolutely standard shape, planted in spotless, soot-black soil in strict geometrical rows, as I still see them in unwelcome memories of my now distant childhood and youth in the foothills of the Alps. But here and there among the thin flower stems, the blades and ears of grass in the graveyard of Piana, a departed soul looked out from one of those oval sepia portraits set in thin gilded frames which until the sixties used to be placed on
graves in the Mediterranean countries: a blond hussar in his high-collared uniform tunic; a girl who died on her nineteenth birthday, her face almost extinguished by the sun and the rain; a short-necked man with his tie in a large knot, who had been a colonial civil servant in Oran until 1958; a little soldier, forage cap tilted sideways on his head, who came home badly wounded from the futile defense of the jungle fortress of Dien Bien Phu. In many places weeds already cover the polished marble votive tablets on the newer graves, most of which bear only the brief inscription
Regrets
or
Regrets éternels
in neatly curving characters which might have been copied by a child from a manual of handwriting.
Regrets éternels
—like almost all the phrases in which we express our feelings for those who have gone before, it is not without ambiguity, for not only does the announcement of the everlasting inconsolability of the bereaved confine itself to the absolute minimum, it also sounds, if one stops to consider it, almost like an admission to the dead of guilt, a halfhearted request for forbearance made to those laid in the earth before their time. Only the names of the dead themselves seemed to me clear and free of any ambiguity, not a few of them being as perfect in both significance and sound as if those who once bore them had been saints in their own lifetime, or messengers from a distant world devised by our higher yearnings, visiting this one only for a brief guest performance. Yet in reality they, too, those who had borne the names Gregorio Grimaldi, Angelina Bonavita, Natale Nicoli, Santo Santini, Serafino Fontano, and
Archangelo Casabianca, had certainly not been proof against human malice, their own or that of others’. Another striking feature of the design of the Piana graveyard, and one that revealed itself only gradually as I walked among the graves, was the fact that in general the dead were buried in clans, so that the Ceccaldi lay beside the Ceccaldi and the Quilichini beside the Quilichini, but this old order, founded on not many more than a dozen names, had been forced some time ago to give way to the order of modern civil life, in which everyone is alone and in the end is allotted a place only for himself and his closest relations, a place that corresponds as accurately as possible to the size of his property or the depth of his poverty. If one cannot speak of a wealth of ostentatious funerary architecture anywhere in the small communities of Corsica, even a place like the Piana graveyard has a few tombs adorned with pediments where the more prosperous have found an appropriate final resting place. The next social class down is represented by sarcophaguslike structures made of granite or concrete slabs, depending on the assets of those laid to rest there. Stone slabs lie on the ground above the graves of the dead of even less importance. And those whose means are insufficient even for such a slab must be content with turquoise or pink gravel kept in place by a narrow border around it, while the very poor have only a metal cross stuck in the bare earth, or a crucifix roughly welded from tubing, perhaps painted bronze or with a gold cord wound around it. In this way the graveyard of Piana, a place where until recently only the more or less poverty-stricken lived, now resembles the
necropolises of our great cities in reflecting all gradations of the social hierarchy as marked by the unequal division of earthly riches. The biggest stones are usually rolled over the graves of the richest people, for it is to be feared that they are the most likely to begrudge their progeny their inheritance and to try to take back what they have lost. The mighty blocks of stone erected above them for the sake of security are, of course, with self-deluding cunning, disguised as monuments of deep veneration. Significantly, such expense is unnecessary on the death of one of our lesser brethren, who can perhaps call nothing his own at the hour of his death other than the suit in which he is buried—or so I thought as I gazed out over the highest-standing row of graves, looking across the Piana cemetery and the silver crowns of the olive trees beyond the wall, and so on to the Gulf of Porto shining up from far below. Something that particularly surprised me about this resting place of the dead was that not one of the funerary inscriptions was more than sixty or seventy years old. I discovered some months later that the reason lay in one of those strange Corsican situations involving blood feuds and banditry, finding this information in what I consider in many respects a model study by Stephen Wilson, one of my professional colleagues, who presents the extensive material he has assembled during many years of research to his readers with the greatest imaginable care, clarity, and restraint.
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The absence
of any dates of death going back even to the early twentieth century was not, as I had at first suspected, to be accounted for by the now very usual practice of successively abandoning old graves, nor could it be explained by the existence of an earlier graveyard somewhere else; rather, the reason was simply that graveyards in Corsica were made official burial places only around the middle of the nineteenth century, and even then it was a long time before the population accepted them. In an account dating from 1893, for instance, we hear that no one used the Ajaccio town cemetery apart from the poor and the Protestants, who were known as
luterani
. To all appearances, the bereaved were unwilling to remove the dead who owned a piece of land from their hereditary property, or else they dared not do so. For centuries, the usual form of Corsican burial, on land inherited from the forefathers of the dead, was like a contract affirming inalienable rights to that land, a contract between every dead man and his progeny and tacitly renewed from generation to generation. You therefore find little dwellings for the dead everywhere,
da paese a paese:
burial chambers and mausoleums, here under a chestnut tree, there in an olive grove full of moving light and shade, in the middle of a pumpkin bed, in a field of oats or on a hillside overgrown with the feathery foliage of yellow-green dill. In such places, which are often particularly beautiful and have a good view over the family’s territory, the village, and the rest of the local land, the dead were always in a way at home, were not sent into exile, and could continue to
watch over the boundaries of their property. I also read, in a source which I cannot now place, that many old Corsican women used to go out to the dwellings of the dead after the day’s work was done, to listen to what they had to say and consult them on the cultivation of the land and other matters to do with the correct conduct of life. For a long time, when landless people died—shepherds, day laborers, Italian farmworkers, and other indigent folk—they were simply sewn into sacks and thrown down a shaft with a lid over it. Such a communal grave, where the corpses probably lay all jumbled up like cabbage and turnips, was called an
arca
, and in many places it might alternatively be a stone house without any windows or doors, the dead being pushed down inside it through a hole in the roof, which could be reached by stairs going up the outside wall. And in the Campodonico near Orezza, Stephen Wilson tells us, those who owned no land were just thrown down a ravine, a practice which the bandit Muzzarettu, who died in 1952 at the age of eighty-five, said was still usual even when he lived in Grossa. But this custom, dictated by both the division of property and social order, by no means implies that the poorer among the dead were slighted or despised. They, too, received signs of respect, as far as the means available would allow. Corsican funeral rites were fundamentally extremely elaborate and of a highly dramatic character. The doors and shutters of the house afflicted by misfortune were closed, and sometimes the whole façade was painted black. The corpse, washed and freshly dressed, or in the not
uncommon case of a violent death left in its bloodstained condition, was laid out in the parlor, which was usually less a room intended for the use of the living than the domain of dead members of the family, who were known as the
antichi
or
antinati
. This was where, after the introduction of photography, which in essence, after all, is nothing but a way of making ghostly apparitions materialize by means of a very dubious magical art, the living hung pictures of their parents, grandparents, and relations either close or more distant, who although or even because they were no longer alive were regarded as the true heads of the family. The wake was held beneath their uncompromising gaze, and on such occasions the women, otherwise condemned to silence, assumed the leading roles, singing laments and wailing all night, tearing their hair and scratching their faces like the Furies of old, particularly when the body was that of a murdered man, and to all appearances were quite beside themselves with blind rage and pain, while the men stood out in the dark entrance to the house or on the steps, pounding the floor with their rifle butts. Stephen Wilson points out that eyewitnesses present at such wakes in the nineteenth century, and up to the interwar period, thought it remarkable that while the wailing women worked themselves up into a trancelike state, were overcome by dizziness, and fainted away, they gave no impression at all of being overwhelmed by genuine emotion. Many accounts, says Stephen Wilson, even speak of a striking lack of feeling or rigidity in which the singer sheds not a single tear, even