Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) Read Online Free Page A

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 ongraves 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, andArchangelo 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