Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter Read Free Book Online Page A

goat on a snowy night, genre scenes in which men and women engage with domestic beasts on terms of familiarity and respect. Another, more evolved story is organised around a pig-killing, a feast, and the death of the grandfather who is a boy’s ‘authority about everything which was mysterious’; this culture is carnivorous and patriarchal. And the community is growing old.
    Here, youth and, in some sense, hope exist as memory; the sons of Marcel, the orchard planter, won’t work the farm when he’s gone. Young people mostly leave the village. A certain elegaic tone is inescapable and the longest and strangest story, ‘The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol’, takes its narrator finally among the dead. This story, with its fierce dwarf heroine and its hero who has returned to the village to die, is the only one that seems to carry a burden of allegory.
    Tiny Lucie, nicknamed the Cocadrille out of love and hate, despised, half crazy, scours the mountains for berries, mushrooms, herbs that she sells in the city, is murdered for her savings, comes back to haunt the man who rejected her in favour ofthe spurious lure of America, and convinces him at last of her inextinguishable love and the presence of the good neighbours, the dead.
    Pig Earth
is only the first part of a larger work, in which Berger intends to examine still further the meaning and consequence of the threat of the elimination of this reservoir of human experience.
    (1979)

•   6   •
John Berger:
Once in Europa
    Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe. These stories of European country life in the late twentieth century are permeated with a sense of loss. We know that, even as we read them, the world they describe is crumbling away. They are stories about the final divorce of human beings from the land, as great a change as, perhaps greater than, the transition from Stone Age to Bronze Age, yet one that has been accomplished within the lifetime of the old people who still hope to die in the houses where they were born, to which their children will never return.
    Not that the deserted village is a phenomenon unique to the late twentieth century. Throughout history, plague, famine, and changes in agricultural practice have periodically emptied the countryside. What
is
unprecedented is what could be called the
deruralisation
of the countryside, as the multinational agribusiness industry renders subsistence farming in general and the small farmer in particular permanently redundant. Then everywhere that is not part of a city becomes in effect a giant suburb, dependent for all its services on the urban areas. This has already happened in parts of the USA and in much of Britain. In Europe, it is happening at dizzying speed.
    There is a time limit on the timeless, eternal world of the peasant. The villages do not stay deserted for long. They become tourist resorts. Conurbations of weekend cottages. The land becomes so much scenery, no longer the site of labour, reduced to pure decoration.
    John Berger approaches this enormous theme with infinite delicacy, through the experience of some of the men and women ofthe region of the Alps where he himself lives. He is often present, a reticent witness, in these stories, which are remarkable for their quality of visionary intimacy, a sense of the sacred quality of everyday things that recalls the interiors of Vermeer. And also for their intense respect for people, their
seriousness
.
    Berger says that these are love stories, and ‘Boris is Buying Horses’ is, amongst other things, a study of obsession, but they are just as much stories about loneliness, that savage passion, as if love and loneliness are aspects of the same thing.
    In the first story, ‘The Accordion Player’, the central figure, left alone to work his remote farm after his mother’s death, finds himself suddenly weeping for the loss of the past, and also for the loss of the future. ‘He