Trespass by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-04-02T22:00:00+00:00

Whenever Aramon went down to the small general store in La Callune in the early morning, which he did perhaps twice a week, he bought a copy of the local paper, Ruasse Libre.

Back at the Mas Lunel, he’d make himself coffee, put on his spectacles, spread the paper out on the table, and spend the rest of the morning reading it from cover to cover. If he was lucky, there would be some gripping murder story to spice up all the rest of the mundane content: news of another protest by farmers against the high cost of diesel; the arrival in the region of a genetically modified strain of drought-resistant maize; reports of local fêtes, bullfights, pop concerts, art exhibitions, boules championships and car boot sales; surveys of river levels, forest fires, campsite numbers and falling infant-school attendance . . .

It amused Aramon to read how the world still danced about in its whirl of pointless endeavour. It cheered him to imagine the meandering crowds at a car boot sale, buying up mutilated books and brass trinkets and bits of crockery – when they could have stayed at home, like him, and saved their money.

Sometimes, he considered buying a ticket for a bullfight. He used to enjoy the atmosphere of terror, and the ear-splitting brass instruments glinting in the heat. The courage of the bulls, the way they never tired, even when their necks were running with blood, always moved him, somehow. But in recent years, he’d begun to find the matadors ridiculous: their strutting pride, their sequined arses. He now longed for the bull to kill the bullfighter, to see him dragged away to a slaughterhouse through the dust . . .

Today, a headline on the front of Ruasse Libre caught his eye: Displacement of local people by foreigners must end, says Mayor. The article included a graph showing how house prices in the Cévennes had risen in the last ten years, mainly due to ‘foreigners’ and quoted the mayor of Ruasse as saying:

Enough is enough in our beautiful region. Encroachment has gone too far. The sale of property to non-French nationals must now be closely monitored and possibly made subject to quotas. We do not condone racial discrimination, but we find ourselves now living in an age when our own young people, born in our villages, can no longer afford to buy or build houses here in the land they know and love, because of the invasion by Belgians, Dutch, Swiss and British, in search of second homes. And so I think we have to ask: why should these fortunate people have the right to second homes, while our children are effectively deprived of their right to homes of any kind?

Aramon read this article several times, until his eyes hurt. Seldom did anything written in Ruasse Libre appear to be talking to him – but this was.

He thought about the €475,000 that was out there waiting for him – waiting to release him into a new and blameless

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