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

wrings its neck he feels his senses faint with pleasure. As soon as he has learned the art of the chase from his father, the urge comes over him to go out into the wilderness. Now he is forever hunting wild boar in the forest, bear in the mountains, deer in the valleys or out in open country. The animals take fright at the sound of the drum, hounds race over the hillsides, hawks rise in the air, and birds drop like stones from the sky.
    The huntsman comes home every evening covered with mud and blood, and so the killing goes on and on until, one icy cold winter’s morning, Julian goes out and, in a daylong frenzy, strikes down everything moving around him. Arrows fall, we are told, like rain beating down in a thunderstorm. In the end, night comes, the sunset is red among the branches of the forest like a cloth soaked with blood, and Julian leans against a tree with his eyes wide open, looking at the vast extent of the slaughter and wondering how he can have done it. He then falls victim to a paralysis of the soul, and begins his long wanderings through a world which is no longer in a state of grace, sometimes in such blazing heat that the hair on his head catches fire of its own accord in the glow of the sun, at other times in cold so icy that it breaks his limbs. He refuses to hunt anymore, but sometimes his terrible passion comes over him again in hisdreams; he sees himself, like our father Adam, surrounded by all the creatures in the garden of paradise, and he has only to reach out his arm and they are dead. Or he sees them passing by in pairs before his eyes, beginning with aurochs and elephant and going on all the way to the peacocks, guinea fowl, and ermine as they looked on the day when they entered the Ark. From the darkness of a cave he hurls darts that never miss their mark, yet more and more follow without end.
    Wherever he goes, wherever he turns, the ghosts of the animals he has killed are with him, until at last, after much hardship and suffering, he is rowed by a leper across the water to the end of the world. On the opposite bank, Julian must share the ferryman’s bed, and then, as he embraces the man’s fissured and ulcerated flesh, partly hard and gnarled, partly deliquescent, spending the night breast to breast and mouth to mouth with that most repellent of all human beings, he is released from his torment and may rise into the blue expanses of the firmament.
    Not once as I read could I take my eyes off this utterly perverse tale of the despicable nature of human violence, a story that probes horror further with every line. Only the act of grace when the saint is transfigured on the last page let me look up again.
    Evening twilight was already darkening half of my room. Outside, however, the setting sun still hung above the sea,and in the blazing light that rippled from it the whole of that section of world visible from my window quivered, a view unspoiled by the line of any road or the smallest human settlement. The monstrous rock formations of Les Calanques, carved from granite over millions of years by wind, salt mist, and rain, and towering up three hundred meters from the depths, shone in fiery copper red as if the stone itself were in flames, glowing from within. Sometimes I thought I saw the outlines of plants and animals burning in that flickering light, or the shapes of a whole race of people stacked into a great pyre. Even the water below seemed to be aflame.
    Only as the sun sank beneath the horizon was the surface of the sea extinguished; the fire in the rocks faded, turned lilac and blue, and shadows moved out from the coast. It took my eyes some time to become accustomed to the soft twilight, and then I could see the ship that had emerged from the middle of the fire and was now making for Porto harbor so slowly that you felt it was not moving at all. It was a white yacht with five masts, and it left not the slightest wake on the still water. Although almost motionless, it moved forward as