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

inexorably as the big hand of a clock. The ship was moving, so to speak, along the line dividing what we can perceive from what no one has ever yet seen.
    Far out above the sea, the last gleam of daylight faded; inland, the darkness was gathering closer and closer, until the lights on board the snow-white ship showed against theblack heights of Capo Senino and the Scandola peninsula. Through my binoculars I saw the warm glow in the cabin windows, the lanterns on the superstructure of the deck, the sparkling garlands of light slung from mast to mast, but no other sign of life at all. For perhaps an hour the ship lay there at rest, shining in the dark, as if its captain were waiting for permission to put in to the harbor hidden behind Les Calanques. Then, as the stars began to show above the mountains, it turned and moved away again as slowly as it had come.
    * Of the forests I have seen, Bavella is the loveliest.… Only, if the tourist wishes to see it in its glory, he must make haste!
* My husband, who always used to come home with five or six partridges, got only one.

La cour de l’ancienne école
     

 
    After this picture was sent to me last December, with a friendly request for me to think of something appropriate to say about it, it lay on my desk for some weeks, and the longer it lay there and the more often I looked at it the further it seemed to withdraw from me, until the task, in itself nothing worth mentioning, became an insuperable obstacle looming ahead. Then one day at the end of January, not a little to my relief, the picture suddenly disappeared from the place where it lay, and no one knew where it had gone. When some time had passed and I had almost entirely forgotten it, it unexpectedly returned, this time in a letter from Bonifacio in which Mme Séraphine Aquaviva, with whom I had been corresponding since the summer before, told me that she would be interested to know how I had come by the drawing enclosed without comment in my letter of January 27, showing the yard of the old school of Porto Vecchio, which she had attended in the thirties. Atthat time, Mme Aquaviva’s letter continued, Porto Vecchio was a town almost dead, constantly plagued by malaria, surrounded by salt marshes, swamps, and impenetrable green scrub. Once a month at most, a rusty freighter came from Livorno to take a load of oak planks aboard on the quayside. Otherwise, nothing happened, except that everything went on rotting and decaying as it had for centuries. There was always a strange silence in the streets, since half the population was drowsing the day away indoors, shaking with fever, or sitting on steps and in doorways looking sallow and hollow-cheeked. We schoolchildren, said Mme Aquaviva, knowing nothing else, of course had no idea of the futility of our lives in a town made practically uninhabitable by paludism, as the phenomenon was called at the time. Like other children in more fortunate areas, we learned arithmetic and writing, and were taught various anecdotes about the rise and fall of the Emperor Napoleon. From time to time we looked out of the window, across the wall of the schoolyard and over the white rim of the lagoon, into the dazzling light that trembled far out over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Otherwise, Mme Aquaviva concluded her letter, I have almost no memories of my schooldays, except that whenever our teacher, a former hussar called Toussaint Benedetti, bent over my work he would say:
Ce que tu écris mal, Séraphine! Comment veux-tu qu’on puisse te lire?
(How badly you write, Séraphine! How do you expect anyone to read that?)

     

[ Essays ]
     

Strangeness, Integration, and Crisis

ON PETER HANDKE’S PLAY
KASPAR
     

Between History and Natural History

ON THE LITERARY DESCRIPTION OF TOTAL DESTRUCTION
     

Constructs of Mourning

GÜNTER GRASS AND WOLFGANG HILDESHEIMER
     

 

I. THE INABILITY TO MOURN:
DEFICIENCIES IN POSTWAR LITERATURE
     
    And if the burthen of Isaac were sufficient for an holocaust,