by John Berger
‘I did not think,’ said Antigone, ‘your edicts strong enough
To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws
Of God and heaven, you being only a man.
They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting,
Though where they came from, none of us can tell.’
The poster looked down on the streets of Paris as might a ghost. Not the ghost of the man with tousled hair, nor Géricault’s. But the ghost of a special form of attention, which for two centuries had been marginalised but which every day now was becoming less obsolete. This is the second finger.
Pinched, what do we do? Wake up perhaps.
20
An Apple Orchard
(An Open Letter to Raymond Barre, Mayor of Lyon)
Monsieur Le Maire,
I have been asked to write to you whilst you are dreaming. Not an easy task. Dreams proceed in their own way, have their own manner of jumping and sidestepping and throwing the dreamer (why in English are nightmares called night mares?), dreams have their own predilection for not saying things, their own form of mystery, and their own intimate and inexplicable relation with what may be true. On the one hand I have to tread carefully so as not to wake you up, and, on the other hand, I have to avoid straight lines, otherwise you will stop dreaming. In a dream nothing is insignificant.
The prison of St Joseph was built in Lyon between 1829 and 1831. It faces the River Rhône just before it is joined by the Soane.
Forty years later, the second prison of St Paul was built beside St Joseph’s. Hexagonal in form and using new construction techniques with metal, St Paul’s was planned for women. It had four long dormitories instead of cells.
Today, the two buildings, connected by an underground tunnel, serve as the city’s principal Maison d’Arrêt for prisoners awaiting trial or serving short sentences. Where the dormitories once were, cells have been installed. The prison complex is known today, by those who are familiar with it, as La Marmite du Diable. The Devil’s Cauldron.
Most theories about, or visions concerning, prisons tend to be false, because the practice defies everything, or anything, which has been thought out. The containment, the way the spaces are interlocked, the hours, the codes, the isolation and the overcrowding – these things together produce the unpredictable, before which some inmates are more vulnerable than others, but before which all who find themselves there, inside – including the warders and even the Director – are, at certain moments, powerless.
Prisons are planned and manned in such a way that supervision – electronic and otherwise – maintains a maximum control over the imprisoned at all times. Yet in practice the uncontrollable is constantly present. There is no other institution on earth where the uncontrollable can explode so quickly.
On the far side of desperation, men become either wise or beyond control, beyond the control of any system or of themselves. The uncontrollable is incarcerated in the same cell as wisdom, behind the same door of desperation.
Sometimes the uncontrollability enters a prisoner’s own body. It is this which ‘explains’ the frequent cases of self-mutilation. Men damage themselves because the prison and its uncontrollability have already penetrated their bodies. Nothing stops nothing. The mutilation is not to the self, but to what has penetrated that self before the swallowed spoon, the swallowed broken glass, the swallowed knife.
Who was Delandine? Perhaps it was a nickname. What is certain is that there’s a street named after her, the narrow short street which separates the two prisons.
After midnight and at weekends the Rue Delandine, which in the daytime is usually deserted, is full of people who have come to talk, to fling words over the high walls, to their prisoners inside. Certain shouts come back like boomerangs. I love you too! At another window: Why don’t you fuck off and let me be!
The visitors come to the Rue Delandine after midnight because the noise of the city traffic has diminished by then, and it’s easier to hear and be heard. On Monday nights there’s often nobody there. On Mondays the silent street becomes full of something else. Stay dreaming, sir, and you may feel it. Behind the walls, across the narrowest gully, and then very close behind the second walls, on both left and right, there is a sense of stacked sleep, and, confronting that sleep, almost touching it, the total indifference of the hewn stones, iron bars, and laid bricks. A strange congruity, even harsher than that of the earth around corpses.
What kind of building would you say, sir, houses the most dreams? School? Theatre? Cinema? Library? Intercontinental Hotel? Discothèque? Mightn’t it be a prison?
First, the modern prison was founded on a set of dreams. The dream of Civic Justice. The dream of Correction. The dream of a City of Civic Virtue.
And then there are the dreams dreamt now, each night. Dreams include, of course, nightmares and insomniac terrors. Under certain circumstances the insomniac may lose, like a dreamer, his sense of physical time and place.
Inside the walls, on the other side of the narrow gullies, there is the great perennial dream of Escape. Amongst the screws there is the perennial nightmare of a Prisoners’ Revolt.
Further, there are the endless small dreams. The dream of the sea – the Rhone is the length of a garden away and the pigeons, who shit on the wire netting, fly over the river. The dream of taking the TGV to Paris. It leaves every hour and its tracks are even nearer than the Rhone. Dreams of privacy. These are as much about time as space. The dream of private time. Choosing a date – say Saturday May 6th – to do something one has chosen for oneself! On Saturday, I’ll go and see the brother-in-law in Bapaume. Or, on Saturday, I’ll go to the cemetery in Clamart and there I’ll find the vodka bottle under the flowers on my friend’s grave and I’ll drink to him. (He too was in another kind of prison for twenty-seven years.)
The dream of women. The dream of open doors. The dream of Saturday nights. The furious dream of putting an end to everything. The dream of no more mistakes.
And, finally, there is a dream which may be the most persistent and ubiquitous of all. In St Joseph’s isolation block, in the prétoire where punishments for insubordination are handed out twice a week, in the showers, in the exercise yard under the wire netting with garbage where the stars might be, walking on all fours, sitting before the television, on the stairs, in the mitard, alternating between insults and silence, day and night, year after year, men dream in flashes of their thousand mothers, many of whom are lost or dead and, who being so, find their own way instantaneously through the prison walls.
Once inside the Maison d’Arrêt, some of these mothers tell stories to their children. Many many stories. Here, sir, is one.
Once there was a man who, every morning, picked up a bread-knife and cut off ten centimetres from the loaf of bread he was holding, and threw this chunk away, before cutting another slice for his own breakfast.
The man did this because every night mice had nibbled a hole from the centre of the loaf. Each morning the hole was about the size of a mouse. The house cats, although they hunted moles, were strangely indifferent to the grey mice who ate the bread, or perhaps they had been bought off.
This had been the state of affairs for months. Many times the man had written down mousetrap on a shopping list. And many times he had forgotten, perhaps because the shop where the villagers once bought mousetraps no longer existed.
One afternoon this man is searching in a shed beside the house for a metal file. He doesn’t find a file, but he comes upon a strong, obviously handmade, mousetrap. It consists of a plank of wood, 18cm. × 9cm., with a cage around it made of stout wire. The space between any two parallel wires is never more than half a centimetre. Enough for a mouse to poke its nose through but never enough to get its two ears through. The height of the cage is 8.5cm., so that, inside, a mouse can stand up on its strong hind legs, clutch the bars at the top with its four-fingered hands, and poke its snout between the wires of the ceiling, but it can never get out.
One end of the cage is
a door which hinges upwards. A spiral spring is attached to this door. When the door is held open, the spring goes taut, ready to pull it back shut.
On top of the cage is a trip wire which fastens the door when open. The trip wire, however, extends beyond the doorframe by less than a millimetre. In wire-terms by a hair’s breadth! At the other end of the wire, inside the cage, is a hook on to which a piece of cheese or raw liver is fixed.
The mouse enters the cage to take a bite. No sooner does he touch the morsel with his teeth, than the trip wire releases the door and it slams shut behind him, before he can turn his head.
It takes the mouse several hours to realise that he is a prisoner, unhurt, in a cage measuring 18cm. by 9cm. After that, something in him never stops trembling.
The man takes the mousetrap into the house. He tests it. He fixes a lump of cheese on to the hook and places the trap on the shelf in the cupboard where the bread is kept.
Next morning the man finds a grey mouse in the cage. The cheese in the cage is untouched. Since the door was shut, the mouse lost his appetite. When the man picks up the cage, the mouse tries to hide behind the spring attached to the door. The mouse has jet black eyes which stare without blinking. The man places the cage on the kitchen table. The longer he looks into the cage, the more clearly he sees a resemblance between the sitting mouse and a kangaroo. There is a silence. The mouse becomes a little calmer. Then the mouse begins to circle the cage, testing again and again with one of his fingered forepaws the space between the wires, searching for an exception. The mouse tries biting the wires with his teeth. Then he sits back on his haunches, paws to his mouth. Rarely does somebody look at a mouse as long as the man does. Or vice versa.
The story is interrupted by voices from the Rue Delandine.
Tell Alex he has to send money.
I did.
Tell him if he doesn’t, he’ll burn.
I can’t hear you.
He’ll burn.
The man takes the cage to a field outside the village, places it on the grass and opens the door. It takes the mouse a minute to realise the fourth wall has disappeared. He tests the open space with his muzzle. Then he darts out, and scuttles to the nearest tuft of grass where he hides.
I’ll wait for you, Jacko. I love you, Jacko, I love you. However long, Jacko, I’m waiting.
The next day the man finds another mouse in the cage. He’s heavier than the first, but more agitated. Perhaps he is older. The man puts the cage on the floor and sits on the floor himself to watch. The mouse climbs on to the wires of the ceiling and holds himself there upside down.
Forgive me, Toni, can you hear me? Forgive me!
When the man opens the cage in the field, the old mouse runs away in a zig-zag line until he’s out of sight.
One morning the man finds two mice in the cage. It’s hard to say how much they are aware of each other, or to guess whether the presence of the other lessens or increases their mutual fear. One has larger ears, the other glossier hair. Mice resemble kangaroos because of the relatively enormous force of their hind legs, and the way their strong tails press against the ground for leverage when they leap.
Need to get a message to Jo-Jo.
Jo-Jo asks how you’re doing, Lenuta.
Tell him I’ll be working the lorry route from Warsaw next month if things don’t take a turn for the better.
Not good news.
Tell him he didn’t leave me much choice.
Take a pistol in your bag, Lenuta.
Tell him old peasant women sell blueberries along the same lorry route!
Don’t trust the Russians.
He’s crazy. That’s why he’s inside. Jo-Jo is crazy.
Lenuta!
In the field, when the man lifts the fourth wall, the two mice do not hesitate. They leave immediately, side by side, and take opposite directions, one going east and the other west.
Gilles! Can you hear me? Gilles, tell me if you can hear me. Gilles, I sent you a parcel today with all the grub you listed. Plus the mint chocolate you like …
Scarcely any bread in the cupboard has been eaten. The mouse, when the man picks up the cage, reacts with the usual panic, but moves more heavily. The man leaves the kitchen to take his mail and to chat for a moment with the postman. When he returns, there are nine newly born mice in the cage. Perfectly formed. Pink. Each one twice the size of a grain of long rice.
No, sir, do not wake up. Do not be disturbed. Remember this story is being told by a mother. Listen to her in your dream.
After ten days, the man asks himself whether some of the mice he has released in the field are not returning to the house. He decides, on reflection, that this is unlikely. He observes each one so closely that he is convinced that, should one return, he would recognise her or him immediately.
Harry! It’s me! I couldn’t come on Wednesday. Harry, I’m here tonight!
Harry asked me to tell you if you came. He’s been transferred to the hospital. He didn’t want to go. They took Harry to the hospital, chained his legs and took him.
The mouse in the cage holds his head on one side as if he was wearing a cap. His two front paws, with their four fingers, are planted firmly on the ground either side of his muzzle, like the hands of a pianist on a keyboard. His hind legs are tucked in close and extend along the ground so that they are almost under his ears. His ears are perked up, and his tail, stretched out far behind him, is pressed firmly on the floor of the cage. His heart’s beating very fast and he is frightened when the man lifts up the cage. Yet he doesn’t hide behind the spring; he doesn’t cringe. He holds his head acock, and he stares back. For the first time, a name for the mouse comes into the man’s head. Alfredo, he calls him. He puts the cage on the kitchen table beside his coffee cup.
Later the man goes to the field, kneels down, places the cage on the grass and holds the door, which is the fourth wall of the cell, open. The mouse approaches the open wall, raises his head, and leaps. He does not scuttle, he does not dart, he flies. Relative to his size, he leaps higher and further than a kangaroo. He leaps like a mouse who has been freed. With three leaps he has covered more than five metres. And the man, still on his knees, watches the mouse he called Alfredo leap again and again into the sky.
We’re going to begin again, honey, begin from scratch.
The following morning the bread has not been touched. And the man believes the mouse in the cage may be the last one. Kneeling in the field outside the village, holding the door open, the man waits. It takes the mouse a long while to realise he can leave. When he finally does, he scuttles into the thickest and nearest tuft of grass, and the man feels a slight yet sharp pang of disappointment. He had been hoping to see, one more time in his life, a prisoner fly, a prisoner realise his dream of freedom. He had hoped that there would be another Alfredo.
* * *
Monsieur le Maire, you are, I trust, still dreaming. The first step, if I understand it well, in your extensive plan for the rebuilding of the centre of Lyon (the plan to which you gave the magical name of Confluence), is the demolition of the prisons of St Joseph and St Paul.
What will take their place? I would like to make a suggestion. The area the two prisons cover is small. Less than two hectares. Imagine this site turned into an apple orchard, being used and enjoyed as a public park. It would be the first apple orchard in the heart of a city in the entire world! And the blossoms in the spring, and the fruit in late October, would be a memorial to all the dreams dreamt here. Here, if I may emphasise that word, sir, Here.
Recently I went, sir, to see my friend Zima Lewandowski near Zamosc, not far from the Ukrainian border. He is one of the great forestry experts in Poland; he discovered a new way of dating trees. Forests form a script and their experts can sometimes be a little like etymologists. Zima when he speaks has that kind of precision. I told him about our project – the project you are dreaming, sir – concerning an apple orchard in the centre of Lyon, and I asked his advice about what species of fr
uit would be best. He thought for a while, asked me questions about the climate and atmospheric conditions in the city, and then said: Spartans! Spartans would be the best apples there. They are a late apple, you pick them in October, and, if kept properly, they last the whole winter.
The Park, sir, could be called Delandine’s Orchard, no? As for the Spartan apples, when they are ripe, they are a smoky red, almost like the colour of a mineral dug out of the earth. The trees should be planted, according to Zima, 6 or 8m. apart. The present cells measure 3m. × 3.6m.
21
Brushes Standing Up in Jars
One of his recent paintings is called The Eel. It shows a painter’s studio, brushes standing up in jars, a long slender woman reclining naked, and an eel in a bowl surrounded by drawings on a table. When eels on dry land want to escape from the sun or to hide, they use their tails like corkscrews, make a hole in the earth and disappear tail-first. Some of his other paintings are of holes, rather like those made by eels.
Another one of his tides is La Deluge, and in L’Amour Fou the sea invades a library. He’s an aquatic painter. Even when he depicts the African desert, he makes you aware that once, aeons or a few seconds ago, the white surface was flattened and pulverised by water.
In his art, as on the earth, a flood is both an abundance and a calamity, a deliverance and a death, a beginning and an end.
In 1994 Miquel Barceló wrote the following in one of his notebooks:
To paint a flayed ox has rebecome important. Like in other times but always different. Not like the Romans painted food, not like Rembrandt, not like Soutine or Bacon, not like Beuys – suddenly the chance to paint this has become something urgent, necessary, essential: blood and sacrifice … but it would work also with an apple, with a face … one has to take things, one after another, from the stickiness of Berlusconi, and make them anew, fresh and clean, show them palpitating, or with their own sweet rottenness.
