Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) by W.G. Sebald Read Free Book Online

he had with him were very large, and the belt carrying them was so broad that it reached like a leather jerkin from his belly to halfway up his chest. When I asked him what he was looking for, he simply replied
sangliers
(wild boars), as if that alone must suffice to send me packing. He would not have his photograph taken, but warded me off with his outspread hand just as guerrillas do in front of the camera.
    In the Corsican newspapers, the so-called
ouverture de la chasse
(the start of the hunting season) is one of the mainsubjects of reporting in September, together with the never-ending accounts of the bombing of police stations, local authority tax offices, and other public institutions, and it even casts into the shade the excitement over the start of the new school year which seizes annually upon the entire French nation. Articles are published about the state of the game preserves in the various regions, last season’s hunting, prospects for the present campaign, and indeed hunting in general in every imaginable form. And the papers print photographs of men of martial appearance emerging from the
maquis
with their guns over their shoulders, or posing around a dead boar. The main subject, however, is the lamentable fact that fewer and fewer hares and partridges can be found every year.
    Mon mari
, complains the wife of a hunter from Vissavona to a
Corse-Matin
reporter, for instance,
mon mari, qui rentrait toujours avec cinq ou six perdrix, on a tout juste pris une
. * In a way the contempt she expresses for the husband coming home empty-handed from his foray into the wilderness, the indisputably ludicrous appearance of the ultimately unsuccessful hunter in the eyes of his wife, women always having been excluded from the hunt, is the closing episode of a story that looks far back into our dark past, and that even in my childhood filled me with uneasy premonitions.
    I remember, for instance, how on my way to school I once passed the yard of Wohlfahrt the butcher on a frosty autumnmorning, just as a dozen deer were being unloaded from a cart and tipped out on the paving stones. I could not move from the spot for a long time, so spellbound was I by the sight of the dead animals. Even then the fuss made by the hunters about sprigs of fir, and the palms arranged in the butcher’s empty white-tiled shopwindow on Sundays, seemed to me somehow dubious. Bakers obviously needed no such decorations.
    Later, in England, I saw rows of little green plastic trees hardly an inch high surrounding cuts of meat and offal displayed in the shopwindows of “family butchers.” The obvious fact that these evergreen plastic ornaments must be mass-produced somewhere for the sole purpose of alleviating our sense of guilt about the bloodshed seemed to me, in its very absurdity, to show how strongly we desire absolution and how cheap we have always bought it.
    All this was going through my head again one afternoon as I sat at the window of my hotel room in Piana. I had found an old volume of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in the drawer of the bedside table, and I began to read Flaubert’s version of the Legend of Saint Julian, which I had not known before, that strange tale in which an insatiable passion for hunting and a vocation for sainthood do battle in the same heart. I was both fascinated and disturbed by the story, which in itself I approached with reluctance.
    Even the episode of the killing of the church mouse, an explosion of violence in a boy who until that moment had always behaved well, got under my skin most uncomfortably. We are told that Julian, waiting by the mousehole, gave the creature a small tap and was taken aback to seethat its little body had stopped moving. A drop of blood stained the flagstones. And the longer the story went on, the more blood there was. Time after time, the crime must be masked by another kind of death. The pigeon brought down by Julian with his sling lies twitching in a privet bush, and as he