by John Berger
You talk like an old woman and you’re not thirty.
In three months. Very soon. You believe age makes a difference?
It’s not age, it’s time running out. He dabbed at his forehead with his red handkerchief.
Say it again, Michel, I taunted him, according to you things can’t go on. But they do—you know it as well as I do. Things go on!
If we don’t fight, he said, we lose all.
Do you really think life’s only a battle?
At this he laughed, laughed till the tears came to his eyes. He filled up my glass, raised his, and we clinked them.
You of all people, Odile, not to know the answer to that question. Do you—you, Odile Blanc—really think life isn’t a battle?
He laughed shortly again but this time his tears were those of sadness.
When I went up to my room, with the freezer full of meat and a reproduction of the Angelus above the bed, I didn’t undress. I waited for half an hour and watched the river. Then I brushed my hair and, without putting my shoes on, I edged my way past the wardrobes in the corridor and found the door to Michel’s room, which I opened without knocking.
Our shadow is moving over the white snow, Christian, and looks like the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, something between a D and an L. In Cluses, where I learnt words off the blackboard in the school, which, after the factory, was the tallest building I’d ever seen, in Cluses words were strange to me. Now they are coming back into my head like pigeons into their pigeon loft.
From our union, Marie-Noelle was born on 4 August ’67. At birth she weighed 3.2 kilos, a little less than you. The milk came up into my breasts and I fed her for more than nine months. I didn’t want to stop. I was no longer working in the Components Factory, for the four of us lived together above the shop in Pouilly.
Madame Labourier knitted a pink blanket for the cradle. Odile Blanc was not exactly the daughter-in-law Madame Labourier would have chosen for her son, but facts were facts, and Marie-Noelle was her granddaughter.
When Michel was young, Madame Labourier informed me, you couldn’t count the number of girls he went out with. After the accident, during the years he was away in Lyons, they all got married. All things considered, it’s understandable, isn’t it? After all, they were young healthy girls.
Later she warned me about the future. As he ages, he’s going to change, he’s going to become more and more demanding. I saw it with Neighbour Henri who had polio, and my poor cousin Gervais who had diabetes. As they get older, cripples—particularly men cripples—become difficult and crotchety. You’ll have to be patient, my girl.
After you were born, Marie-Noelle, it was as if you gave him back his legs. He was so proud of you, his pride had feet. He hated being separated from you for more than an hour or two. When you were old enough to go to school, he refused to take the car, he walked with you a good half-kilometre, holding your hand.
The limbs he had lost were somehow returned to him in your small child’s body. It was he, not me, who taught you to walk. Now you are no longer a child and from the sky I can talk to you.
Women are beautiful when young, almost all women. Don’t listen to envious gossip, Marie-Noelle. Whatever the proportions of a face, whether a body is too skinny or too heavy, at some moment a woman possesses the power of beauty which is given to us as women. Often the moment is brief. Sometimes the moment may come and we not even know it. Yet traces of it remain. Even at my advanced age now there are traces.
Look in a mirror if you pass one this afternoon in the hearing aid shop in Annecy whilst you’re waiting for Papa, look at your hair which you washed last night and see how it invites being touched. Look at your shoulder when you wash at the sink and then look down at where your breast assembles itself, look at the part between shoulder and breast which slopes like an alpage—for thirty years still this slope is going to attract tears, teeth clenched in passion, feverish children, sleeping heads, work-rough hands. This beauty which hasn’t a name. Look at how gently your stomach falls at its centre into the navel, like a white begonia in full bloom. You can touch its beauty. Our hips move with an assurance that no man has; yet they promise a peace, our hips, like a cow’s tongue for—her calf. This frightens men, who knock us over and call us cunts. Do you know what our legs are like, seen from the back, Marie-Noelle, like lilies just before they open!
I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who spend their lives looking for God. The rest are pigshit.
Men aren’t beautiful. Nothing has to stay in them. Nothing has to be attracted by any peace they offer. So they’re not beautiful. Men have been given another power. They burn. They give off light and warmth. Sometimes they turn night into day. Often they destroy everything. Ashes are men’s stuff. Milk is ours.
Once you’ve learnt to judge for yourself and are no more fooled by their boasts, it’s not hard to tell the man who deserves respect and the man who is pigshit. Yet the power of a man to burn, we discover only by loving him. Does our love release the power? Not always. I loved Stepan for many weeks before we lived IN EUROPA. He was burning when I met him on the footbridge.
Michel I started to love when we returned to the village. We never got to Paris. I can die happily without seeing the capital. We stayed for three nights at the mad hotel with the white geese and his room opposite the wardrobes. Then we came home.
Once in the factory Stepan and Michel worked on the same shift for three days, yet it’s in me they still meet. Marie-Noelle, Christian—embrace each other tonight, whatever happens, do this tonight, and know your fathers are embracing each other.
It is getting late and the light is already turning. The snow on the Gruvaz, facing west, is turning pink, the colour of the best rhubarb when cooked. I imagined we would come down to earth before it’s dark, but Christian must know what he’s doing. He’s a national instructor, he came second in the European Championship of Hang-gliding and when I said to him, they’ve both gone to Annecy, they needn’t know anything, need they? they won’t be frightened, take me up this afternoon, the time’s come, he simply replied: Are you ready?
Strange how I’m not cold. I can feel each toe and each finger, they’re warm as they were when I was a baby—I suddenly remember.
You take a man right into you and you cannot compare him or measure him or make a story of him. Everything that has ever been is swelling with the lips of the mouth into which you take him and he fills you, where you know as little as you know about an unborn child in your womb.
You can tell yourself other things about him when he has left, yet all of it remains far away compared to the places within you to which you lead him. Hay in the barn cannot change back into grass. If he’s burning, the places to which you have led him are flooded with light. In your belly there are stars and of these stars you may be a victim. Poor Clotilde gave birth in the stable all alone, the door locked on the outside by her father.
It is painful for us to judge the man we have taken, for he’s ours, already like a son. How can you judge a body which has been where he has been, who has come from there? Beside his single name all else is dead coals. How reluctant we are to judge! If we have to, if we are forced to, if we are picked up by the ears like a rabbit, we judge him and suffer the pain, the violence done to the sky within us where the stars shone. Men, poor men, judge more easily.
I never judged the life Stepan led before the Ram’s Run. All that happened before the 31st of December 1953 was beyond judgement or comparison, for it had brought him to me in shed A, IN EUROPA. Since his disappearance, he has stayed with me where I first took him and hid him, beyond ashes. He has stayed with me as the seasons stay with the world.
The furnaces which robbed Stepan of his life took away from Michel his legs and now they are taking away his hearing. At night when he unfastens the prostheses he is legless. The two stumps are the co
lour of molybdenum bread when it’s cooling before the spray rains on it. Only their colour is like molybdenum. The specific gravity of molybdenum, Michel once told me, is 95.5—one of the heaviest metals, less heavy though than uranium, tungsten or lead. Legless, he weighs fifty-nine kilos. The colour alone of the stumps is like molybdenum, for they, unlike that monstrous metal, are alive. I know with my fingertips where their tissue is sensitive and the nerves murmur, and where the scarred flesh is numb, giving off warmth and taking in no sensation. On his back are light scars where they took skin to graft onto his face. Perhaps you are kissing my arse! he joked once when I was licking by his ear.
Without his artificial legs he hops like a bird on crutches. There are evenings when he lets me serve him like a king. Other times he is irritable and glowering and he pushes me away and, seizing his crutches, hops round the room like a plucked turkey. If he hears footsteps, when he’s doing this, he flings himself onto the bed and pulls the sheet up to his grey beard. He has never let his daughter see him unharnessed. Passionately he wants his daughter to have an unmutilated father.
The wind is ruffling the sheet and the sheet is slapping like the washing in the orchard of my childhood when the bise blew. It won’t blow away, Christian, are you sure?
Often the burnt come to the shop to have their pain taken away. Michel insists on being alone with them, I have never seen what he does. Sometimes somebody asks him to go down to an accident in the factory. Once or twice he has succeeded in taking the pain away by telephone. Four years ago, Louis’s son, Gérard, was pruning an apple tree with a chain saw, standing on a ladder. Somehow he slipped and the chain saw, still turning, touched his neck before clattering to the ground. Blood was pouring out of a jugular vein into his shirt. He came running into the shop, his face like a sheep’s. Michel stopped the bleeding within a minute without touching the wound. Then he sent Gérard down to the doctor, who couldn’t believe his medical eyes.
Each time he takes away the pain he is exhausted afterwards, and, when I’m there, I massage the back of his neck and shoulders to give him relief. One night when I was doing this to him, he said: Paradise is rest, isn’t it? Repose. You go to paradise after you’ve worked three shifts running, twenty-four hours without a break. You stop and there’s the pure pleasure of stopping, doing nothing, lying down. Paradise is doing fuck-all. You don’t know anything else exists. No relations in paradise, Odile, no children, no women, no men. Undistilled egotism, paradise! Isn’t that it, my love? I went on massaging him and I felt his cart-horse shoulders relaxing, accepting. After a while he turned towards me, his eyes piercing me, and he pronounced my name. Then he took me in his arms, and he carried me, yes, he carried me to the bed and murmured: It’s only in hell, my love, that we find each other!
And Michel found me there on the bed. He found Odile.
Look, look down there—can you see?—there’s a heron flying. Tzaplia, the last message before nightfall.
Tell them, Christian, tell them when we land on the earth that there’s nothing more to know.
Play Me Something
What is it that men have and women don’t and which is hard and long?
On your left is the city of Verona, announced the bus driver over the loudspeaker. Verona was conquered by the Ostrogoths, later by the Barbarians, and still later by the Austrians. In the fourteenth century Verona was the setting of the love story between Romeo and Juliet.
What is it that men have and women don’t and which is hard and long?
Tell us! demanded the boys.
Military service!
The flatness of the surrounding countryside was unfamiliar, making it difficult to judge distances. The coach was traveling fast, yet it seemed that time passed and nothing changed.
You see their maize? They’re two months ahead of us.
Finally the coach crossed the motor causeway to the Queen of Cities. In the vaporetto the men stood up very straight, as if on parade. This was because they were reminded of the first time they had left the village as conscripts in the army. The women lounged on the deck seats, and the younger ones pulled up their skirts to bare their legs to the sun. The vaporetto swayed first to one side and then to the other, like a woman pedaling very slowly on a bicycle.
How would you like a white suit like the ship’s captain?
Look at those insects!
Where?
There!
She’s been drinking!
He must change it every day.
Look! Along the water line.
Good God, yes, thousands of them.
They come up for the sun.
They’re crabs.
I’ve never seen crabs that size.
You don’t know what to look at.
I tell you, it looks like a flood.
You couldn’t make cheese here!
They disembarked at the Piazza San Marco and climbed the circular staircase of the Campanile. Afterwards the men were thirsty and insisted upon having a drink in one of the cafés on the piazza, which Napoleon called the largest ballroom in Europe.
It costs more to piss here than to drink a whole case at home!
Inside the café he noticed a poster announcing a festival organised by L’Unità, the Communist daily newspaper. Why not?
They crossed the Bridge of Sighs and stopped beneath a statue of Eve in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace.
It’s a wife like that you need!
Later the men climbed onto the terrace of the Cathedral of San Marco to look at the horses.
The festival was to be held on the island of Giudecca. From the Doge’s Palace he could see the coloured lights decorating the buildings across the water and from time to time he heard a strain of music.
If you’re not at the bus station by two, we’ll know they drowned you.
He’s more adventurous than the rest of you men!
He sat in the stern of the vaporetto with his instrument case on his knees.
You’re not from here.
These words were addressed to him by a young woman with magenta lipstick and white sandals.
How is that?
You look too quiet.
You know what I have in this box?
She shook her head. She had glasses and her black hair was drawn back in a chignon.
A trombone.
It’s not true, she cried. Play it! Please, play something.
Not here on the boat, he said. Are you going to the festival?
If you brought it with you, you must have had the idea of playing it.
We came from the mountains. I didn’t want to leave it in the bus.
Around her neck was a white necklace.
You, do you live down here?
In Mestri, across the bay, where the oil tanks are. And you—I’d say you work on a farm.
How do you know?
I can smell the cows.
If she had been a man, he would have hit her.
What do you think I smell of?
Scent.
Correct. I work in a chemist’s shop.
One look at your hands told me you didn’t work with them.
Do you know what my father calls that?
No.
Infantile proletarianism.
He said nothing. Perhaps it was a Venetian expression.
The vaporetto was approaching the island. Hung from the first-storey windows on the far side of the piazza were banderolas with slogans printed on them. He could make out the hammer and sickle. As he stepped ashore, he held his instrument case tightly under his arm. The festival, he reminded himself, was organised by the Communist Party, but this did not mean there were no thieves there. He could spot them already.
Do you like dancing? she asked.
I can’t dance carrying this.
Give it to me.
She disappeared with his instrument case into one of the nearby buildings.
And if it’s stolen? he said, when she came back empty-handed.
Comr
ade, she replied, this is a workers’ festival, and workers do not steal from one another.
Peasants do! he said.
What is your name?
Bruno. And yours?
Marietta.
He held up his arm for her to take his hand. He did not dance like a man from here, she thought. He was more single-minded, as if, when dancing, he put everything else out of his mind.
What is it like on your mountain?
There are rhodos and wild goats.
Rhodos?
Little bushes of flowers.
Pink?
Blood-red.
How do they vote in your village?
For the right.
And you?
I vote for anyone who promises to raise the price of milk.
That isn’t good for the workers.
Milk is all we have to sell.
They were dancing round a plane tree in a corner of the piazza. In the tree was a loudspeaker, perched like an owl on one of the branches.
You came here alone? she asked.
With the whole band.
A band of friends?
The brass band of the village.
The next time the owl fell silent he proposed that they should have a drink. She guided him to a table beneath a gigantic portrait, drawn on a sheet and hung from the top windows of a house. The painted face was so large that even the flanks of the nose had been drawn with a six-inch housepainter’s brush. They looked up at it together.
Do you live alone? she asked.
Yes, I’ve lived alone for eight years. A fifth of my life.
She liked the way he hesitated before speaking, it was very deliberate, as if each time he answered one of her questions, he came to the door of a house, opened it to a visitor, and then spoke.
How many mirrors do you have at home? She asked this as if it were a schoolgirl’s riddle.
He paused to count.
One over the sink, one over the drinking trough outside.
She laughed. He poured out more white wine.
That’s Karl Marx, isn’t it? He nodded up at the sheet.
Marx was a great prophet. What do you see in the future? she asked.
The rich getting richer.
