[3] The absence of any dates of death going back even to the early twentieth century was not, as I had at first suspected, to be accounted for by the now very usual practice of successively abandoning old graves, nor could it be explained by the existence of an earlier graveyard somewhere else; rather, the reason was simply that graveyards in Corsica were made official burial places only around the middle of the nineteenth century, and even then it was a long time before the population accepted them. In an account dating from 1893, for instance, we hear that no one used the Ajaccio town cemetery apart from the poor and the Protestants, who were known as luterani. To all appearances, the bereaved were unwilling to remove the dead who owned a piece of land from their hereditary property, or else they dared not do so. For centuries, the usual form of Corsican burial, on land inherited from the forefathers of the dead, was like a contract affirming inalienable rights to that land, a contract between every dead man and his progeny and tacitly renewed from generation to generation. You therefore find little dwellings for the dead everywhere, da paese a paese: burial chambers and mausoleums, here under a chestnut tree, there in an olive grove full of moving light and shade, in the middle of a pumpkin bed, in a field of oats or on a hillside overgrown with the feathery foliage of yellow-green dill. In such places, which are often particularly beautiful and have a good view over the family’s territory, the village, and the rest of the local land, the dead were always in a way at home, were not sent into exile, and could continue to watch over the boundaries of their property. I also read, in a source which I cannot now place, that many old Corsican women used to go out to the dwellings of the dead after the day’s work was done, to listen to what they had to say and consult them on the cultivation of the land and other matters to do with the correct conduct of life. For a long time, when landless people died — shepherds, day laborers, Italian farmworkers, and other indigent folk — they were simply sewn into sacks and thrown down a shaft with a lid over it. Such a communal grave, where the corpses probably lay all jumbled up like cabbage and turnips, was called an arca, and in many places it might alternatively be a stone house without any windows or doors, the dead being pushed down inside it through a hole in the roof, which could be reached by stairs going up the outside wall. And in the Campodonico near Orezza, Stephen Wilson tells us, those who owned no land were just thrown down a ravine, a practice which the bandit Muzzarettu, who died in 1952 at the age of eighty-five, said was still usual even when he lived in Grossa. But this custom, dictated by both the division of property and social order, by no means implies that the poorer among the dead were slighted or despised. They, too, received signs of respect, as far as the means available would allow. Corsican funeral rites were fundamentally extremely elaborate and of a highly dramatic character. The doors and shutters of the house afflicted by misfortune were closed, and sometimes the whole façade was painted black. The corpse, washed and freshly dressed, or in the not uncommon case of a violent death left in its bloodstained condition, was laid out in the parlor, which was usually less a room intended for the use of the living than the domain of dead members of the family, who were known as the antichi or antinati. This was where, after the introduction of photography, which in essence, after all, is nothing but a way of making ghostly apparitions materialize by means of a very dubious magical art, the living hung pictures of their parents, grandparents, and relations either close or more distant, who although or even because they were no longer alive were regarded as the true heads of the family. The wake was held beneath their uncompromising gaze, and on such occasions the women, otherwise condemned to silence, assumed the leading roles, singing laments and wailing all night, tearing their hair and scratching their faces like the Furies of old, particularly when the body was that of a murdered man, and to all appearances were quite beside themselves with blind rage and pain, while the men stood out in the dark entrance to the house or on the steps, pounding the floor with their rifle butts. Stephen Wilson points out that eyewitnesses present at such wakes in the nineteenth century, and up to the interwar period, thought it remarkable that while the wailing women worked themselves up into a trancelike state, were overcome by dizziness, and fainted away, they gave no impression at all of being overwhelmed by genuine emotion. Many accounts, says Stephen Wilson, even speak of a striking lack of feeling or rigidity in which the singer sheds not a single tear, even though her voice breaks convulsively with passion in the highest registers. In view of such apparently icy self-control, some commentators have been inclined to regard the laments of the voceratrici as a hollow sham, a spectacle prescribed by tradition, and this idea is supported by the observation that merely getting a chorus of mourners together will have called for a considerable amount of practical organization in advance and rational direction of the singing itself. In truth, of course, there is no discrepancy between such calculation and a genuine grief which actually makes the mourners seem beside themselves, for fluctuation between the expression of deeply felt sorrow, which can sound like a choking fit, and the aesthetically — even cunningly — modulated manipulation of the audience to whom that grief is displayed has perhaps been the most typical characteristic of our severely disturbed species at every stage of civilization. Anthropological literature contains many descriptions by writers such as Frazer, Huizinga, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, and Rudolf Bilz of the members of early tribal cultures who, while celebrating their rites of initiation or sacrifice, retained a very precise and ever-present subliminal awareness that the compulsive extremes to which they went, always connected with the infliction of injury and mutilation, were in essence mere playacting, even though the performance could sometimes approach the point of death. Those in severe psychological conditions also have a clear idea somewhere, in their inmost hearts, that they are literally acting body and soul in a play. Moreover, the pathological state of mind of the Corsican voceratrici, characterized by both total collapse and the utmost self-control, was probably not fundamentally different from that of the somnambulists who have fallen into carefully rehearsed paroxysms of hysteria on the stages of opera houses evening after evening for two hundred years or more. But in any case the lamentations in the dead person’s darkened house, illuminated only by the flickering light of a single candle, were followed by the funeral feast. The expense to which the bereaved had to go for the sake of their own and the dead man’s honor in this feast, which often lasted several days, was so great that it could ruin a family if bad luck brought several murders or fatal attacks in quick succession, perhaps as part of a blood feud. Mourning was worn for five years or longer; on her husband’s death, a widow stayed in mourning for the rest of her life. It is not surprising that the high-necked black dress and black headscarf, or the black corduroy suit, seemed to be Corsican national costume until well into the twentieth century. According to the accounts of earlier travelers, there was an aura of melancholy about those black figures seen everywhere in the streets of villages and towns and out in the country, an aura that even on the brightest sunlit days lay like a shadow over the green and leafy world of the island, and was reminiscent of the pictures of Poussin, for instance those depicting the massacre of the innocents or the death of Germanicus. Remembrance of the dead never really came to an end. Every year on All Souls’ Day, a table was especially laid for them in Corsican houses, or at least a few cakes were put out on the windowsill as if for hungry birds in winter, since it was thought that they visited in the middle of the night to take a morsel of food. And a tub of cooked chestnuts was left outside the door for the vagabond beggars who, in the minds of the settled population, represented restless wandering spirits. Since the dead are known to be always cold, people took care not to let the fire on the hearth go out before day dawned. All this indicates both the lasting grief of the bereaved and the fear they could barely assuage, for the dead were thought of as extremely touchy, envious, vengeful, quarrelsome, and cunning. Given the least excuse, they would infallibly take their displeasure out on you. They were not regarded as beings forever at a safe distance in the world beyond the grave, but as family members still present, although in a different condition, and forming a kind of solidarity in the вернуться
Feuding Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge University, 1988).