by John Berger
Music demands obedience. It even demands obedience of the imagination when a melody comes to mind. You can think of nothing else. It’s a kind of tyrant. In exchange it offers its own freedom. All bodies can boast about themselves with music. The old can dance as well as the young. Time is forgotten. And that night, from behind the silence of the last stars, we thought we heard the affirmation of a Yes.
“La Belle Jacqueline” once more! the dressmaker shouted at Félix. I love music! With music you can say everything!
You can’t talk to a lawyer with music, Félix replied.
Perhaps they are right, those who pretend there are harps in heaven. Maybe flutes and violins too. But I’m sure there are no accordions, just as I’m sure there’s no green cowshit that smells of wild garlic. The accordion was made for life on this earth, the left hand marking the bass and the heartbeats, the arms and shoulders labouring to make breath, and the right hand fingering for hopes!
Finally we stopped dancing.
Come on, Caroline, come on, Félix muttered as he made his way alone to the door. It’s time to go.
Boris Is Buying Horses
Sometimes to refute a single sentence it is necessary to tell a life story.
In our village, as in many villages in the world at that time, there was a souvenir shop. The shop was in a converted farmhouse which had been built four or five generations earlier, on the road up to the mountain. You could buy there skiers in bottles, mountain flowers under glass, plates decorated with gentians, miniature cowbells, plastic spinning wheels, carved spoons, chamois leather, sheepskins, clockwork marmots, goat horns, cassettes, maps of Europe, knives with wooden handles, gloves, T-shirts, films, key rings, sunglasses, imitation butter-churns, my books.
The woman who owned the shop served in it. She was by then in her early forties. Blond, smiling but with pleading eyes, pleading for God-knows-what, she was buxom, with small feet and slender ankles. The young in the village nicknamed her the Goose—for reasons that are not part of this story. Her real name was Marie-Jeanne. Earlier, before Marie-Jeanne and her husband came to the village, the house belonged to Boris. It was from him that they inherited it.
Now I come to the sentence that I want to refute.
Boris died, said Marc, leaning one Sunday morning against the wall that twists like the last letter of the alphabet through our hamlet, Boris died like one of his own sheep, neglected and starving. What he did to his cattle finally happened to him: he died like one of his own animals.
Boris was the third of four brothers. The eldest was killed in the War, the second by an avalanche, and the youngest emigrated. Even as a child Boris was distinguished by his brute strength. The other children at school feared him a little and at the same time teased him. They had spotted his weakness. To challenge most boys you bet that they couldn’t lift a sack of seventy kilos. Boris could lift seventy kilos with ease. To challenge Boris you bet him that he couldn’t make a whistle out of a branch of an ash tree.
During the summer, after the cuckoos had fallen silent, all the boys had ash whistles, some even had flutes with eight holes. Having found and cut down the little branch of wood, straight and of the right diameter, you put it in your mouth to moisten it with your tongue, then tapped on it, all round, briskly but not too hard with the wooden handle of your pocket knife. This tapping separated the bark from the wood so that you could pull the white wood out, like an arm from a sleeve. Finally you carved the mouthpiece and reinserted it into the bark. The whole process took a quarter of an hour.
Boris put the little branch into his mouth as if he were going to devour the tree of life itself. And his difficulty was that he had invariably struck too hard with his knife handle, so that he had damaged the bark. His whole body went tense. He would try again. He would cut another branch and when it came to tapping it, either he would hit too hard, or, with the concentrated effort of holding himself back, his arm wouldn’t move at all.
Come on, Boris, play us some music! they teased him.
When he was fully grown, his hands were unusually big and his blue eyes were set in sockets which looked as though they were meant for eyes as large as those of a calf. It was as if, at the moment of his conception, every one of his cells had been instructed to grow large; but his spine, femur, tibia, fibula had played truant. As a result, he was of average height but his features and extremities were like those of a giant.
One morning in the alpage, years ago, I woke up to find all the pastures white. One cannot really talk of the first snow of the year at an altitude of 1,600 metres, because often it snows every month, but this was the first snow which was not going to disappear until the following year, and it was falling in large flakes.
Towards midday there was a knock on the door. I opened it. Beyond, almost indistinguishable from the snow, were thirty sheep, silent, snow on their necks. In the doorway stood Boris.
He came in and went over to the stove to thaw out. It was one of those tall stoves for wood, standing free in the centre of the room like a post of warmth. The jacket over his gigantic shoulders was white as a mountain.
For a quarter of an hour he stood there silent, drinking from the glass of gnôle, holding his huge hands over the stove. The damp patch on the floorboards around him was growing larger.
At last he spoke in his rasping voice. His voice, whatever the words, spoke of a kind of neglect. Its hinges were off, its windows broken, and yet, there was a defiance in it, as if, like a prospector living in a broken-down shack, it knew where there was gold.
In the night, he said, I saw it was snowing. And I knew my sheep were up by the peak. The less there is to eat, the higher they climb. I drove up here before it was light and I set out. It was crazy to climb by myself. Yet who would come with me? I couldn’t see the path for the snow. If I’d lost my foothold, there was nothing, nothing at all, to stop me till I reached the churchyard below. For five hours since daybreak I have been playing against death.
His eyes in their deep sockets interrogated me to check whether I had understood what he was saying. Not his words, but what lay behind them. Boris liked to remain mysterious. He believed that the unsaid favoured him. And yet, despite himself, he dreamed of being understood.
Standing there with the puddle of melted snow at his feet, he was not in the least like the good shepherd who had just risked his life for his flock. St. John the Baptist, who crowned the Lamb with flowers, was the very opposite of Boris. Boris neglected his sheep. Each year he sheared them too late and they suffered from the heat. Each summer he omitted to pare their hooves and they went lame. They looked like a flock of beggars in grey wool, Boris’s sheep. If he had risked his life that day on the mountain, it wasn’t for their sake, but for the sake of their market price.
His parents had been poor, and from the age of twenty Boris boasted of the money he was going to make one day. He was going to make big money—according to the instructions received at his conception and inscribed in every cell of his body.
At market he bought cattle that nobody else would buy, and he bought at the end of the day, offering a price which twelve hours earlier would have appeared derisory. I see him, taciturn beside the big-boned animals, pinching their flesh with one of his immense thumbs, dressed in khaki and wearing an American army cap.
He believed that time would bring him nothing, and that his cunning must bring him everything. When he was selling he never named his price. You can’t insult me, he said, just tell me what you want to offer. Then he waited, his blue, deep-set eyes already on the brink of the derision with which he was going to greet the price named.
He is looking at me now, with the same expression. I told you once, he says, that I had enough poems in my head to fill a book, do you remember? Now you are writing the story of my life. You can do that because it’s finished. When I was still alive, what did you do? Once you brought me a packet of cigarettes whilst I was grazing the sheep above the factory.
I say nothing. I go on writing.
The uncle of all cattle dealers once told me: A ram like Boris is best eaten as meat.
Boris’s plan was simple: to buy thin and sell fat. What he sometimes underestimated was the work and time necessary between the two. He willed the thin cattle to become fat, but their flesh, unlike his own, was not always obedient to his will. And their bodies, at the moment of conception, had not received the same instructions.
He grazed his sheep on every scrap of common land and often on land which wasn’t common. In the winter he was obliged to buy extra hay, and he promised to pay for it with lambs in the spring. He never paid. Yet he survived. And his herd grew bigger: in his heyday he owned a hundred and fifty sheep. He drove a Land Rover which he had recuperated from a ravine. He had a shepherd whom he had recuperated from an alcoholics’ clinic. Nobody trusted Boris, nobody resisted him.
The story of his advancement spread. So too did the stories of his negligence—his unpaid debts, his sheep eating off land which belonged to other people. They were considered a scourge, Boris’s sheep, as if they were a troop of wild boar. And often, like the Devil’s own, his flock left and arrived by night.
In the Republican Lyre, the café opposite the church, there was sometimes something of the Devil about Boris too. He stood at the bar—he never sat down—surrounded by the young from several villages: the young who foresaw initiatives beyond the comprehension of their cautious yet wily parents, the young who dreamed of leisure and foreign women.
You should go to Canada, Boris was saying, that’s where the future belongs. Here, as soon as you do something of your own, you’re mistrusted. Canada is big, and when you have something big, you have something generous!
He paid for his round of drinks with a fifty-thousand note, which he placed on the counter with his wooden-handled knife on top of it, so that it wouldn’t blow away.
Here, he continued, nothing is ever forgiven! Not this side of death. And, as for the other side, they leave it to the curé. Have you ever seen anyone laughing for pleasure here?
And at that moment, as though he, the Devil, had ordered it, the door of the café opened and a couple came in, the woman roaring with laughter. They were strangers, both of them. The man wore a weekend suit and pointed shoes, and the woman, who, like her companion, was about thirty, had blond hair and wore a fur coat. One of the young men looked out through the window and saw their car parked opposite. It had Lyons license plates. Boris stared at them. The man said something and the woman laughed again. Her laughter was like a promise. Of what? you may ask. Of something big, of the unknown, of a kind of Canada.
Do you know them?
Boris shook his head.
Shortly afterwards he pocketed his knife, proffered the fifty-thousand note, insisted upon paying for the two coffees the couple from Lyons were drinking, and left, without so much as another glance in their or anybody else’s direction.
When the strangers got up to pay, the Patronne simply said: It’s already been settled.
Who by?
By the man who left five minutes ago.
The one in khaki? asked the blond. The Patronne nodded.
We are looking for a house to rent, furnished if possible, said the man. Do you happen to know of any in the village?
For a week or a month?
No, for the whole year round.
You want to settle here? asked one of the youths, incredulous.
My husband has a job in A_____, the blond explained. He’s a driving instructor.
The couple found a house. And one Tuesday morning, just before Easter, Boris drew up in his Land Rover and hammered on the door. It was opened by the blond, still wearing her dressing gown.
I’ve a present for you both, he said.
My husband, unfortunately, has just gone to work.
I know. I watched him leave. Wait!
He opened the back of the Land Rover and returned with a lamb in his arms.
This is the present.
Is it asleep?
No, slaughtered.
The blond threw her head back and laughed. What should we do with a slaughtered lamb? she sighed, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
Roast it!
It still has its wool on. We don’t know how to do such things and Gérard hates the sight of blood.
I’ll prepare it for you.
It was you who bought us the coffee, wasn’t it?
Boris shrugged his shoulders. He was holding the lamb by its hind legs, its muzzle a few inches from the ground. The blond was wearing mules of artificial leopard skin.
Come in then, she said.
All this was observed by the neighbours.
The hind legs of the lamb were tied together and he hung it like a jacket on the back of the kitchen door. When he arrived, the blond had been drinking a bowl of coffee which was still on the table. In the kitchen there was the smell of coffee, of soap powder and of her. She had the smell of a buxom, plump body without a trace of the smell of work. Work has the smell of vinegar. He put out a hand to touch her hips as she passed between the table and the stove. Once again she laughed, this time quietly. Later he was to recall this first morning that he found himself in her kitchen, as if it were something he had swallowed, as if his tongue had never forgotten the taste of her mouth when she first bent down to kiss him.
Every time he visited her, he brought her a present; the lamb was only the first. Once he came with his tractor and trailer and on the trailer was a sideboard. He never disguised his visits. He made them in full daylight before the eyes of his neighbours, who noticed that each time, after about half an hour, the blond closed the shutters of the bedroom window.
And if one day her husband should come back unexpectedly? asked one of the neighbours.
God forbid! Boris would be capable of picking him up and throwing him over the roof.
Yet he must have his suspicions?
Who?
The husband.
It’s clear you’ve never lived in a big town.
Why do you say that?
The husband knows. If you’d lived in a big town, you’d know that the husband knows.
Then why doesn’t he put his foot down? He can’t be that cowardly.
One day the husband will come back, at a time agreed upon with his wife, and Boris will still be there, and the husband will say: What will you have as an aperitif, a pastis?
And he’ll put poison in it?
No, black pepper! To excite him further.
Boris had been married at the age of twenty-five. His wife left him after one month. They were later divorced. His wife, who was not from the valley, never accused him of anything. She simply said, quietly, that she couldn’t live with him. And once she added: perhaps another woman could.
The blond gave Boris the nickname of Little Humpback.
My back is as straight as yours.
I didn’t say it wasn’t.
Then why—
It’s what I like to call you.
Little Humpback, she said one day, do you ski?
When could I have learned?
You buy the skis and I’ll teach you.
I’m too old to start, he said.
You’re a champion in bed, you could be a champion on the ski slopes!
He pulled her towards him and covered her face and mouth with his huge hand.
This too he was to remember later when he thought about their two lives and the differences between them.
One day he arrived at the house carrying a washing machine on his shoulders. Another day he came with a wall-hanging as large as a rug, on which were depicted, in bright velvet colours, two horses on a mountainside.
At that time Boris owned two horses. He’d bought them on the spur of the moment because he liked the look of them and he’d beaten down their price. In the spring I had to deliver a third horse to him. It was early morning and the snow had melted the week before. He was asleep in his bed and I woke him. Above his bed was a Madonna and a photograph of
the blond. We took a bale of hay and went out to the field. There I let the horse go. After a long winter confined to the stable, she leapt and galloped between the trees. Boris was staring at her with his huge hands open and his eyes fixed. Ah Freedom! he said. He said it in neither a whisper nor a shout. He simply pronounced it as if it were the name of the horse.
The blond hung the tapestry on the wall in the bedroom. One Sunday afternoon, when Gérard was lying on the bed watching television, he nodded at the tapestry where the horses’ manes were combed by the wind as if by a hairdresser and the horses’ coats gleamed like polished shoes and the snow between the pine trees was as white as a wedding dress, and he said:
It’s the only one of his presents I could do without.
I like horses, she said.
Horses! He made a whinnying noise.
Your trouble is that horses scare you!
Horses! The only thing to be said about a picture—and that’s a picture even if it is made out of cotton—
Velvet!
—same thing, the only thing to be said about that picture there—is that in a picture horses don’t shit.
In your mind everything’s shit, she said.
Have you talked to him about the house yet? Gérard asked.
I’ll talk to him when I choose.
Calling him Little Humpback’s not bad!
She turned off the TV.
I call him, Gérard, whatever I love to call him. He’s my business.
How difficult it is to prevent certain stories becoming a simple moral demonstration! As if there were never any hesitations, as if life didn’t wrap itself like a rag round the sharpest blade!
