Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) (4 page)

though her voice breaks convulsively with passion in the highest registers. In view of such apparently icy self-control, some commentators have been inclined to regard the laments of the
voceratrici
as a hollow sham, a spectacle prescribed by tradition, and this idea is supported by the observation that merely getting a chorus of mourners together will have called for a considerable amount of practical organization in advance and rational direction of the singing itself. In truth, of course, there is no discrepancy between such calculation and a genuine grief which actually makes the mourners seem beside themselves, for fluctuation between the expression of deeply felt sorrow, which can sound like a choking fit, and the aesthetically—even cunningly—modulated manipulation of the audience to whom that grief is displayed has perhaps been the most typical characteristic of our severely disturbed species at every stage of civilization. Anthropological literature contains many descriptions by writers such as Frazer, Huizinga, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, and Rudolf Bilz of the members of early tribal cultures who, while celebrating their rites of initiation or sacrifice, retained a very precise and ever-present subliminal awareness that the compulsive extremes to which they went, always connected with the infliction of injury and mutilation, were in essence mere playacting, even though the performance could sometimes approach the point of death. Those in severe psychological conditions also have a clear idea somewhere, in their inmost hearts, that they are literally acting body and soul in a play. Moreover,
the pathological state of mind of the Corsican
voceratrici
, characterized by both total collapse and the utmost self-control, was probably not fundamentally different from that of the somnambulists who have fallen into carefully rehearsed paroxysms of hysteria on the stages of opera houses evening after evening for two hundred years or more. But in any case the lamentations in the dead person’s darkened house, illuminated only by the flickering light of a single candle, were followed by the funeral feast. The expense to which the bereaved had to go for the sake of their own and the dead man’s honor in this feast, which often lasted several days, was so great that it could ruin a family if bad luck brought several murders or fatal attacks in quick succession, perhaps as part of a blood feud. Mourning was worn for five years or longer; on her husband’s death, a widow stayed in mourning for the rest of her life. It is not surprising that the high-necked black dress and black headscarf, or the black corduroy suit, seemed to be Corsican national costume until well into the twentieth century. According to the accounts of earlier travelers, there was an aura of melancholy about those black figures seen everywhere in the streets of villages and towns and out in the country, an aura that even on the brightest sunlit days lay like a shadow over the green and leafy world of the island, and was reminiscent of the pictures of Poussin, for instance those depicting the massacre of the innocents or the death of Germanicus. Remembrance of the dead never really came to an end. Every year on All Souls’ Day, a table was especially
laid for them in Corsican houses, or at least a few cakes were put out on the windowsill as if for hungry birds in winter, since it was thought that they visited in the middle of the night to take a morsel of food. And a tub of cooked chestnuts was left outside the door for the vagabond beggars who, in the minds of the settled population, represented restless wandering spirits. Since the dead are known to be always cold, people took care not to let the fire on the hearth go out before day dawned. All this indicates both the lasting grief of the bereaved and the fear they could barely assuage, for the dead were thought of as extremely touchy, envious, vengeful, quarrelsome, and cunning. Given the least excuse, they would infallibly take their displeasure out on you. They were not regarded as beings forever at a safe distance in the world beyond the grave, but as family members still present, although in a different condition, and forming a kind of solidarity in the
communità dei defunti
against those who were not yet dead. About a foot shorter than they had been in life, they went around in bands and groups, or sometimes followed a banner along the road, drawn up in regiments. They were heard talking and whispering in their strange piping voices, but nothing they said to each other could be understood except for the name of whomever they intended to come for next. There are many stories of their appearances and the methods they used to announce their presence. Until the very recent past, there were people living who had seen pale lights above a house in which someone was soon to die, who
heard a dog howling at the wrong time, or the squealing of a cart that stopped outside the gate after midnight, or the beat of drums from the darkness of the
maquis
. There, in that vast space still almost untouched by human hand, was the abode of the armies of the dead, and clad in the full, billowing cloaks of the brotherhood of corpses, or the colorful uniforms of fusiliers who had fallen on the battlefields of Wagram and Waterloo, they set out from the
maquis
to ensure that they received the share of life due to them. They were known from time immemorial as the
cumpagnia
, the
mumma
, or the
squadra d’Arozza
, and they were believed to be bent on entering their former dwellings or even the churches, to say a blasphemous rosary as they prayed for a new recruit. And the power of the squadrons of the dead, increasing in numbers and strength year by year, was not all that must be feared: there were also individual restless ghosts intent on revenge, lying in wait by the roadside for travelers, suddenly emerging from behind a rock or manifesting themselves on the road itself, usually during the sinister hours of the day—at noon, when everyone was usually at table, or after the Angelus was rung, when pale shadows discolored the earth in the brief space of time between sunset and nightfall. And a man might often happen to return from working in the fields with the eerie news that in the middle of the empty countryside, where you usually knew everyone in your own or the next village by his bearing and his gait, he had seen a crook-backed stranger, if not the
fulcina
in person, the Reaper with sickle in hand. Dorothy
Carrington, who frequently visited Corsica in the fifties and spent long periods there, says that a certain Jean Cesari, whom she had met in London and regarded as an enlightened man perfectly familiar with the principles of scientific thinking, and who later introduced her to the mysteries of his native Corsica, was firmly convinced of the real presence of ghosts, and indeed swore by his eyesight that he had seen and heard them himself. When he was asked in what form the ghosts appeared, and if you might meet dead friends and relations among them, Cesari said that at first glance they seemed to be like normal people, but as soon as you looked more closely their faces blurred and flickered at the edges, just like the faces of actors in an old movie. And sometimes only their upper bodies were clearly outlined, while the rest of them resembled drifting smoke. Over and beyond such stories, which are also handed down in other popular cultures, there was still a widespread belief in Corsica, until well into the decades after the last war, that some special people were in a way in the service of death. These
culpa morti, acciatori
, or
mazzeri
, as they were called, men as well as women, who were reliably said to come from every class of the population and outwardly differed not at all from other members of the community, were believed to have the ability to leave their bodies at home by night and go out hunting. Obeying a compulsion that came over them like a sickness, they were said to crouch in the darkness by rivers and springs, ready to strangle some creature, a fox or a hare, when it came to quench its thirst, and in the animal’s
distorted countenance such people, victims of this murderous form of noctambulism, would recognize the image of some inhabitant of their village, sometimes even a close relation, who from that terrible moment on was doomed to die. What lies behind this extremely bizarre superstition, something that we can hardly imagine today and is obviously entirely untouched by Christian doctrine, is the awareness, arising from the family’s shared suffering of an endless series of the most painful experiences, of a shadow realm extending into the light of day, a place where, in an act of perverse violence, the fate we shall finally meet is predetermined. But the people whom Dorothy Carrington called dream-hunters, the
acciatori
, now almost extinct, were not just the spawn of an imagination ruled by profound fatalism; they could also be cited as evidence for Freud’s psychological theory—as enlightening as it is impossible to prove—that to the unconscious mind even those who die a natural death are victims of murder. I remember very well how, as a child, I stood for the first time by an open coffin, with the dull sense in my breast that my grandfather, lying there on wood shavings, had suffered a shameful injustice that none of us survivors could make good. And for some time, too, I have known that the more one has to bear, for whatever reason, of the burden of grief which is probably not imposed on the human species for nothing, the more often do we meet ghosts. On the Graben in Vienna, in the London Underground, at a reception given by the Mexican ambassador, at a lockkeeper’s cottage on the
Ludwigskanal in Bamberg, now here and now there, without expecting it, you may meet one of those beings who are somehow blurred and out of place and who, as I always feel, are a little too small and shortsighted; they have something curiously watchful about them, as if they were lying in wait, and their faces bear the expression of a race that wishes us ill. Not long ago, when I was queuing at the supermarket checkout, a very dark-skinned man, almost pitch-black in color, stood in front of me with a large and, as it turned out, entirely empty suitcase into which, after paying for them, he put the Nescafé, the biscuits, and the few other things he had bought. He had probably arrived in Norwich only the day before from Zaire or Uganda to study, I thought, and then forgot him, until toward evening of the same day the three daughters of one of our neighbors knocked on our door bringing the news that their father had died before dawn of a severe heart attack. They are still around us, the dead, but there are times when I think that perhaps they will soon be gone. Now that we have reached a point where the number of those alive on earth has doubled within just three decades, and will treble within the next generation, we need no longer fear the once overwhelming numbers of the dead. Their significance is visibly decreasing. We can no longer speak of everlasting memory and the veneration of our forebears. On the contrary: the dead must now be cleared out of the way as quickly and comprehensively as possible. What mourner at a crematorium funeral has not thought, as the coffin moves into the
furnace, that the way we now take leave of the dead is marked by ill-concealed and paltry haste? And the room allotted to them becomes smaller and smaller; they are often given notice to leave after only a few years. Where will their mortal remains go then, how will they be disposed of? It is a fact that there is great pressure on space, even here in the country. What must it be like in the cities inexorably moving toward the thirty million mark? Where will they all go, the dead of Buenos Aires and São Paolo, of Mexico City, Lagos and Cairo, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Bombay? Very few of them, probably, into a cool grave. And who has remembered them, who remembers them at all? To remember, to retain and to preserve, Pierre Bertaux wrote of the mutation of mankind even thirty years ago, was vitally important only when population density was low, we manufactured few items, and nothing but space was present in abundance. You could not do without anyone then, even after death. In the urban societies of the late twentieth century, on the other hand, where everyone is instantly replaceable and is really superfluous from birth, we have to keep throwing ballast overboard, forgetting everything that we might otherwise remember: youth, childhood, our origins, our forebears and ancestors. For a while the site called the Memorial Grove recently set up on the Internet may endure; here you can lay those particularly close to you to rest electronically and visit them. But this virtual cemetery, too, will dissolve into the ether, and the whole past will flow into a formless, indistinct, silent mass. And leaving a present
without memory, in the face of a future that no individual mind can now envisage, in the end we shall ourselves relinquish life without feeling any need to linger at least for a while, nor shall we be impelled to pay return visits from time to time.

Once upon a time Corsica was entirely covered by forest. Story by story it grew for thousands of years in rivalry with itself, up to heights of fifty meters and more, and who knows, perhaps larger and larger species would have evolved, trees reaching to the sky, if the first settlers had not appeared and if, with the typical fear felt by their own kind for its place of origin, they had not steadily forced the forest back again.