by John Berger
A Man Baring His Chest
A crowd. So large that one can’t imagine it, even when one is part of it. A crowd in which all that the past has left is bursting out, searching, cheating, achieving, hoping, waiting, despairing for a future.
The crowd is there because of the market. Getting richer. Getting poorer with the hope of getting a fraction richer later. The market has nothing to do with the wealthy. Here a voice and a glance of the eyes can still make a difference. Everything glistens because it may be a bargain. Everything sold is a little gain because it has been sold.
Octopus, sparking plugs, hair combs, pomegranates, cassettes, pig bladders, celery, old ribbons, rings, jeans, new shoes, old shoes, exhaust pipes, samovars, bread, lamb meat, black peppers, sheets, pillowcases, nappies, irons, perfumes, chicken liver, almonds, crash helmets, figs, wooden spoons, cameras …
I’m looking for a whet stone to sharpen knives with. (Simple pleasures: to gather flowers in the morning and bring them into a room and place them in a vase. To cut with a sharp knife. To splash cold water on the face after sleep. To receive a letter from a loved one.) I go from stall to stall. Nobody is beautiful. Everyone is second-hand and powdered with dust. Everyone has at least one joke. And some have a pride which outdoes beauty.
It’s difficult to walk because the crowd is so tightly packed. Each person has to proceed like a trickle of water finding his way between pebbles. And for the others he is a pebble.
One can read about demographic curves in the newspapers, but in such a crowd the energy of procreation, as patient and violent as the current of a great river, is a warmth, a radiation felt on the back of the hands and a smell which mixes with all the others of mazout, car fumes, cement dust, fish, cinnamon, shit, burning plastic, iodine, honey and vinegar. Life insisting on itself in the Omonia district of Athens just below the Acropolis.
At last I find a whet stone, spit on it and try it out on a knife. The vendor, unsmiling, nods his head, for he knows that I am now almost morally obliged to buy it and I haven’t yet proposed a price. The noise of a whet stone running along a blade is swift and yet granular. Like a snake crossing sand.
How much?
Six hundred.
Five.
He wraps up the stone in a newspaper. And it was at that moment that I saw the blind man. He had a white stick and was wearing an unbuttoned shirt. He was moving through the crowd with more ease than anybody else. His face had a concentrated expression.
The tool vendor gives me a five hundred note as change for a thousand, and I place it in the blind man’s open hand. He had paused, waiting for me to do this. He is blind in such a way that his eyes (he wears no glasses) are permanently shut. He must be in his forties. Still holding the money, he pulls open his shirt to reveal his chest. Pale in colour, ribs distinctly visible. Beneath his left nipple there is a piece of lint stuck to his skin with adhesive tape.
Then I see, pinned to the inside of his shirt, a brooch. A part of me immediately reasons that the brooch, when his shirt is hanging normally, may be the cause of the sore which the little dressing covers. Another part of me is amazed to see a painted crucifixion on the medallion of the brooch. The cross is very near – one could put out one’s hand to touch its wood, as in the large picture painted by Velázquez when he was thirty-one years old.
The blind beggar holds his shirt open and waits to make sure I’ve seen the miniature. I think he can hear me looking at it.
The eye is the lamp of the body, he says as he begins his ritual recitation. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness.
I found the passage in the Gospel of St Matthew.
[24]
A House in the Sabine Mountains
About her I know for certain only two things. The first is that she’s the mother of my friend Riccardo and the second I’ll tell you at the end.
A dust road runs along the crest of a long undulating hill. Sometimes the slopes on either side are steep enough for the hill to merit almost the name of a mountain. The road runs through olive groves and leads past two or three small houses until it reaches the last one, which is where Riccardo’s mother was born in the 1920’s at about the time Mussolini took over the country, and there it stops because the hill stops. You stand there and it’s like standing on the prow of a high ship and you look over the sea of hills and valleys, stretching to the horizon.
To the north there’s a small town built on a hill-top like a fortress. In its town hall thousands of documents are stacked in piles, recording marriages, deals, litigations, deaths, transfers of property, the birth of children legitimate and illegitimate, fines paid, years of military service completed, criminal charges, debts paid and unpaid, yet, as the years pass and the recorded events recede, the ferocious choices made on these occasions are forgotten and only the recurring names – since all the families were related – only the recurring names still murmur like the sea.
The road was always full of surprises because the baked soil, the chips of stone, the grasses, the thistles, the lizards, the fossils of sea shells, the wild chicory, the thunder when there was a storm, the silver of the wet olive leaves afterwards, and, next day, the stillness of the early afternoon heat around your ankles as you walked along it, these events were as endless as childhood itself, and none of them could be kept in place for long, since it would wriggle out at the far end and be back the next day. To maintain the minimal order among these hills required the work of generations.
Today the olive trees are still in their rows. A few, near the houses, have been pruned so that their branches follow a logic like the fingers of an extended hand. But some of the trees grow unchecked and undergrowth is burying the terraces. The first houses along the road have been done up and painted in unheard-of colours: the colours invented after the discovery of polyesters. Nobody lives on the road any more. The grown-up children of the last inhabitants come for weekends, do what they can, rest a little, pick the figs when they are ripe. But the endless work has stopped. And the last house is deserted.
Riccardo’s mother left it when she got married, as did the other children. The grandparents stayed on until they died. It has been empty for forty years.
In one of its thick walls there is an oven for baking bread. The cellar below was a stable for the donkey and the horse. In the downstairs room there’s a concrete sink and a cooking stove to be heated by embers taken from the fire. Every day, every year, during mealtimes, this confined room was crowded and noisy. A staircase, almost as steep as a ladder, leads up to the parents’ bedroom. From there you jump down into an annexe like a ship’s fo’c’sle where the ship’s crew sleep. This fo’c’sle was the children’s and everybody else’s bedroom. To be indoors in this house was to be close to others. If you wanted solitude you went out and climbed down to one of the rocks.
As soon as you woke, you slid down the steep staircase and you ran out to the prow to look across the valleys. Each day was the same and was different. When you woke up late, and you went out there, you heard the horse behind you blowing out his breath and making his big lips quiver.
Since some time the weight of the house’s roof has forced the long walls to cave outwards. The beams sag. The damp, which nags old mortar to dust, has entered everywhere. The doors no longer hang true. The house is saveable but to restore it will cost money. From time to time the family talks about it: all the children need to agree. Would any of them ever live there? When? How to win a lottery to get enough money?
Meanwhile, eighteen months ago, Riccardo’s mother made a decision of her own. She obtained a jasmine plant. She went to the house at the end of the road, the house in which she was born, and in the earth against the southern wall by the side of the door, she planted the jasmine plant and tied it carefully with raffia to a stick, so it might resist the wind and, when there are storms, the rain.
> It’s doing well and is 50 centimetres high. This is the second thing I know for sure.
[25]
Two Cats in a Basket
A chimney goes up through the centre of his house. Every winter – except for the few years when the farmhouse was unoccupied, this was before the man lived there – the chimney has been heated by a fire in the kitchen, a fire to which the chimney gives a draught.
The stoves which held the fire have perhaps changed, but nothing else. The mason who planned and constructed the chimney would be as proud of his work today as he must have been when he fixed a pine to the roof to announce that the building of the house was finished. That evening there was a fête in the village and everyone drank to the new home. Over the front door, made of panels of pearwood, the mason carved his initials and the date in stone: C.J. 1883.
Behind the stove now, in 1993, there’s a shopping basket, half full of kindling wood. The basket was made by another mason. He built the walls of the escarpment along the route nationale at the other end of the village, and when he was old and his wife had died, he liked to plait baskets for his friends. On top of the kindling wood in the basket behind the stove lie two sleeping cats. They look like a calendar picture for the month of January. They lie, heads touching and their forelegs around each other. A mother and a daughter. Occasionally one of them moves and licks the other’s face.
A man is sitting in a chair beside the stove, idly watching the two cats in the basket. Animals sleep with members of their family but seldom with their mates. Human rhythms are different, accompanied by different fears. Yet the mutual pleasure of the cats behind the stove communicates a kind of happiness which is familiar.
In the spring when the two cats are on heat and after they’ve been mounted and the tom-cats have left, in the spring they lie on their backs in the dust and their paws jerk and their heads roll from side to side, as they stretch to make themselves longer.
Whilst the man alone in his kitchen on a winter’s night gazes dreamily at the basket made by Jean-Marie, he thinks that, just as cats have no need to sleep with their lovers, the gender of animals, unlike that of humans, doesn’t suggest a division or a separation into two parts of something which was once one. It’s only men and women who long for a lost unity. The cats are dreaming of their own languor and warmth behind the stove. And when one licks the other, it’s as if she’s licking a part of herself.
He remembers a story that talks of this.
In the beginning was a single lump of clay with four arms and four legs. One day God decided to cut it into two equal parts. Afterwards he had to sew up the two new bodies with string where he’d cut them. He had a ball of string with him. And he bit it with his teeth into what he thought were two equal lengths. And there he made a mistake. One was longer than the other. With the short string he sewed up one body but there wasn’t enough to sew right the way round. With the other one there was too much string, so he made a knot and let one end dangle!
The man by the stove smiles because it’s so easy to recognise himself in the story. But with the two cats nobody made a mistake. He puts a log into the fire. Outside it is cold. Mineral cold. He tells himself another version of the beginning.
God decided to give men free will. As soon as there was such a thing as free will, the natural laws of necessity – all the laws of cause and effect – were called into play. Every story ever told by men or women is in part a protest against the indifference of those laws.
The orange-and-white mother cat puts her hind leg over the black daughter cat.
Life became hard and cruel. So cruel that men, and particularly women, could not bring themselves to wish life on to another. It was better not to be born, and better, they said, not to give birth, they would stop. It was then that God had to invent all the acts that promise sexual pleasure. One by one he invented them. And since that time, when making love women and men pardon this life and glimpse another …
The man’s head nods, his chin touches his chest as he drifts into sleep and the chimney draws the fire.
[26]
A Young Woman Wearing a Chapka
Olga. I call you that because I don’t know your name. Nor your age. My guess is nineteen. All I know for certain about your origins is that you were in Moscow on the evening of Sunday, October the 3rd, 1993.
You have a head wound with a bandage. The bandage is not very visible because you’re wearing a chapka which you took from a soldier who had just been killed. You also took his fur jacket and army belt which you are wearing. I guess you took his gun too, but it’s not in the photograph. You took them as if he had bequeathed them to you. He was fighting on your side. Probably he was one of the Cossacks who crossed the lines to join Routskoy.
You were wounded when you and several thousand others, barely armed, tried to take the television building of Ostakino. Now you have come back to defend the parliament in the White House: the parliament that has been under siege for twelve days because it is said to be a danger for democracy.
You are pale, thoughtful. Your eyes have an expression that comes from looking intently at something which is neither close-at-hand nor distant. You are looking at what-might-have-been a few hours ago. Now you know that the Omons, the Forces of Order, are shooting to kill. It has been decided in the Kremlin that more deaths are acceptable. Out there their fire-power is shattering.
You know this and you came back to defend the White House, since what is at stake is more than either defeat or victory. Now that they want deaths, they are bound to win.
At stake is your delicacy and, for example, the belt you’re wearing. It could have been from your father’s uniform, even your grandfather’s.
It is not only the rouble which has lost its value a thousandfold during the last two years. Everything once lived has lost its value. Everything has become junk for sale. Each day in the streets you have seen people selling treasures, once close to their hearts, in order to buy sugar or a pair of boots for the winter. All the sacrifices of three generations are now being sacrificed on the altar of the Free Market. And, once sacrificed, instantly spent so that nothing remains. Nothing.
With your delicacy you came to protect against that nothing.
The news headlines pretended you were nostalgic for communism and were a threat to democracy. According to them you took your country to the brink of civil war, Olga, then, fortunately, the people were saved by Yeltsin, backed by the statesmen of the West.
The memory of the people, however, is not as short as the dealers assumed. And this is already visible in your face. It is hard to decide whether you are a child or a grandmother. (At historic moments, two, three, even four generations are sometimes compressed and co-exist within the lived experience of a single hour. Those who believe that history is finished have forgotten this.) It is hard to know whether you came to defend the White House because you have classmates who have emigrated to become prostitutes in Hamburg or Zurich, or because you remember losing a husband fifty years ago in the battle of Stalingrad. This too is part of your delicacy.
The dealers of the Free Market and their corollary, the Mafia, assume they now have the world in their pocket. They have. But to maintain their confidence they have to change the meaning of all the words used in languages to explain or praise or give value to life: every word, according to them now, is the servant of profit. And so they have become dumb. Or, rather, they can no longer speak any truth. Their language is too withered for that. As a consequence they have also lost the faculty of memory. A loss which one day will be fatal.
Tomorrow, Olga, a friend will change your bandage.
Of the photograph I make this verbal photocopy so that some who missed the photo in the French press on Tuesday, October the 5th, 1993, will see you.
[27]
Men and Women
Sitting at a Table and Eating
Two lunches during my lifetime, and in memory they are filed side by side. The two occasions may seem to be in contrast, yet I d
oubt whether this is why my imagination persists in placing them together. Anyway, the two photocopies are for ever on the same page.
The first was at Maxim’s in Paris. I was invited to the legendary restaurant by some Russian friends who worked for the theatre. I had some difficulty in being admitted to the dining-room because I wasn’t wearing a tie. The entrance barman agreed to lend me one which he asked me to select from a drawer. There was a choice of colours – all of them sombre. For a fraction of a second, standing before a mirror, I wondered whether I would remember how to tie the knot.
Finally I joined the others. We were about twenty, and we sat at a long table as in a refectory. The other smaller tables, already occupied, were far from us, placed further into the somewhat mysterious décor of the restaurant. Mysterious in the same way as a stage in a full theatre is mysterious before the first words have been spoken. Downstage we were alone.
We started to talk and to drink from our glasses and to eat – with the impression of eating little, spared any burden of consuming! Soon we forgot where we were, and I had the sensation of sailing on a river in a long boat. Between each of us at the table there was an invisible oarsman, almost continually there, almost continually rowing, yet invisible, for he performed his duties only when our glances were elsewhere. These oarsmen were the waiters and they rowed by foreseeing, arranging and serving our every last wish.
I ate sole fourrée with prawns and mushrooms. The sauce over the fish was the colour of a milky opal and the marigold carrots were sliced as thin as wafers.
We were the dead gliding harmoniously, unhindered, downstream and across the river to our funeral pyre. We were in fact alive, tasting, swallowing, wiping our mouths, remaining sober, laughing, enjoying ourselves, trying to remember, telling stories, but we were also foutus (everything reassuringly demonstrated it) and we were in the hands of the ferrymen.
