by John Berger
The Works of John Berger
Pig Earth (first book
of the Into Their Labours trilogy)
Once in Europa (second book of the trilogy)
Lilac and Flag (third book of the trilogy)
A Painter of Our Time
Permanent Red
The Foot of Clive
Corker’s Freedom
A Fortunate Man
Art and Revolution
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays
The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles
Ways of Seeing
Another Way of Telling
A Seventh Man
G.
About Looking
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
The Sense of Sight
The Success and Failure of Picasso
First Vintage International Edition, September 1991
Copyright © 1972 by John Berger
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1972.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berger, John.
G. : a novel / John Berger.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
Previously published: New York : Pantheon Books, 1980.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79423-9
I. Title.
[PR6052.E564G24 1991]
823’.914—dc20 91-50094
v3.1
For Anya
and for her sisters in Women’s Liberation
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In this book there are a few unacknowledged quotations in the text:
1. ‘One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is.’ is a quotation from Cézanne. Source unknown.
2. paragraph which begins ‘He was poorly equipped …’ from ‘Personal Reminiscence of Garibaldi and the Garibaldini’ by the Rev. H.R. Haweis. Quoted by G.M. Trevelyan in Garibaldi and the Making of Italy.
3. paragraph which begins ‘Animals do not admire each other …’ Pascal, Pensées, No. 685.
4. paragraph which begins ‘Honey may be either healthy or toxic …’ Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques III, L’Origine des Manières de Table.
5. paragraph which begins ‘All history is contemporary history …’ R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History.
6. paragraph which begins ‘An assault on the town hall …’ From a contemporary account. Source untraceable.
7. paragraph which begins ‘The land surface …’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edition 1911. Entry: British Empire.
8. paragraph which begins ‘I despise this dust of which I am compounded’, Saint Just, Discours sur les Institutions Républicaines.
9. This page and following pages: in the account of the battle of Auvers Ridge, I have drawn heavily on the research done by Alan Clark and published in his book called The Donkeys. I have also quoted sentences by him.
For the writing of this book the author acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Other acknowledgements to friends are too deep and intensive to tabulate.
J.B.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Part 1
Chapter 1
Part 2
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part 3
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 4
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
About the Author
1
1.
The father of the principal protagonist of this book was called Umberto. He was a merchant from the city of Livorno and he dealt in candied fruit. He was a short fat man who looked shorter because of the largeness of his head. To women not unduly frightened of gossip and public opinion, the unusual size of Umberto’s head may have been attractive. It suggested obstinacy, weight and passion. Most of the women of the merchant class in Livorno or Pisa were timid. Consequently he had gained among them the reputation of being monstrous. He was called ‘La Bestia’: a word nominally justified by his rudeness, his leering and his arrogance, but nevertheless retaining in their usage just sufficient of its rawer meaning to both feed and suppress the feelings of attraction they unconsciously felt. It was significant in this respect that they never called him ‘La Bestia’ in front of their husbands. The nickname was reserved for purely feminine conversations during the afternoon.
Umberto’s wife, Esther, was the daughter of a Jewish Livornese journalist, who had been a liberal. She married Umberto when she was twenty. Her father disapproved of the marriage because he considered Umberto coarse and uncultured but he refused to act against his liberal principles by forbidding it. When she was twenty-one her father died suddenly. The mystery of her own poor health began with his death and gradually established the foundations of a lifelong right: the right to be less than present, the right to withdraw. It seemed to Umberto that he had married a ghost. (All ghosts for him were connected with women and their supernatural tendencies.) It seemed to her that she had married a beast—although at that time she did not know how her women friends referred to her husband.
Esther led a full social life in the provincial city. Scarcely an afternoon passed without her visiting or being visited. Nobody refused an invitation to her dinner parties. Her secret—and it was partly the secret of her husband’s power in Livorno—lay in her appearance. She had a very pale skin, dark brown hair which she wore tightly drawn back from her face and slow-moving eyes with heavy shadows beneath them. Both her face and her body were exceedingly thin. Yet she did not look sickly. The sickly emphasize the unpredictability of the flesh: there is a kind of pathetic and grating sensuality about them. Esther looked delicate, fragile, as though she were made of some material other than flesh: a material which had been wrought and intricately finished so that there seemed to be no danger of it ever changing.
To her circle of friends and acquaintances in Livorno Esther’s physical character was a sign of unusual spirituality. It was she who understood what they aspired to. It was she who appreciated better than any of them Faith, Beauty, the Longings of the Soul, Forgiveness, Innocence, Filial Piety, Love. If a guest, when talking, wished to evoke the spirituality of his experience, he turned towards her for confirmation; one nod from her, even the slow lowering of her eyelids, was sufficient to make him feel that he had been understood and that therefore he was telling the truth.
When women were alone with her, they talked of themselves. In talking they tended to present themselves in as bad a light as possible, for the worse they made themselves out to be, the more licence they would have afterwards when she had approved of them. It was her approval they sought. They gained it as soon as they had finished talking. It then became clear to them (and each time it was a surprise) that since she had listened with interest and made no critical comment (which she never did), she must approve of what they had done or intended to do. She was like a father confessor who belonged to their own sex.
None of this would have been possible however without her husband. Had it not been for Umberto, she might have been suspected of being a saint, instead of just looking like one. And this would have been fatal for her social position. She might represent certain spiritual values, but she must first and foremost represent them, the bourgeoisie of Livorno. The fact that she was the wife of a successful candied-fruit manufacturer
preserved her for them. More than that, she was the wife of a man notorious for hard bargaining, coarse manners and heavy appetites. Consequently they believed it was impossible that living with him had not to some degree corrupted her. And this corruption, which could never be entirely refuted, prevented her spirituality from ever appearing excessive or embarrassing.
Similarly, the fact that Esther was Umberto’s wife saved him from appearing too extreme. Without her, he might have been reckoned a profligate. With her, it was possible to believe that he had been tamed.
The mother of the principal protagonist was a woman of twenty-six, whose first name was Laura. Her mother was an American, her father, now dead, a general in the British army.
I see Laura and Esther, who never met, side by side as they must have appeared sometimes in Umberto’s mind. Laura is short with fairish hair and a slightly snub nose. Beside Esther she looks like a dumpy child. Yet her bearing is not altogether childish. She wears expensive clothes with skill—though not with Esther’s dignity. She talks a great deal in an insistent voice; Esther listens. Esther’s hands are tapered and sensitive; Laura’s are podgy and squat. Laura’s eyes are hazel-coloured and when she wants to give warning of her disagreement she opens them very wide. When Esther disagrees, she closes her eyes. If Esther were surprised whilst taking her bath, she would ‘freeze’ like certain wild animals and remain absolutely motionless; if Laura were so surprised, she would clap her hands over her breasts, huddle up her body and shout.
Each was jealous of the other: Laura because she believed, on the evidence of a photograph which she had persuaded Umberto to show her, that Esther had all the natural feminine qualities she lacked; Esther because she suspected that Umberto spent vast amounts of money on his American mistress.
Laura had been married in New York at the age of seventeen to a copper millionaire; after two years she left him and she came to Europe to join her mother in Paris. She had met Umberto, three years ago, on a passenger ship going to Genoa. Umberto courted her with a concentration and persistence such as she had never dreamt was possible. He made her feel, she wrote to her mother, like Cleopatra. (The ship had come from Egypt.) They immediately spent a month together in Venice.
He arranged for singers, she reported to her mother, to accompany us at night, either side of us, in gondolas. I will remember it always. He made funny jokes about his hands being like crabs. You would love him! Which is why I shan’t bring him to Paris yet! He has friends everywhere and there is a ball we should have gone to here. He wanted to order me a dress. But, believe it or not, I told him that I would prefer not to go. And so instead we went to the island of Murano.
During the next three years he met her in Milan, Nice, Geneva, Lugano, Como and other resorts, but he never allowed her to come near Livorno. When she was not with him, she returned to her mother’s rich American circle in Paris, where she never admitted that her Italian lover was a merchant in candied fruit. She took singing lessons (until she decided, despite her teacher’s protestations, that she had no talent) and she interested herself in the theories of Nietzsche.
Whenever Umberto arrived to meet her after a period of separation and she first saw him approaching, she was struck by the improbability of their relationship. His lack of subtlety and his provincial ostentation in matters of money offended her. In New York, she said to herself, he would have been a waiter in a restaurant whom she and her friends would not have deigned to notice. But after an hour or so of his company she could no longer see him critically. It was like entering a tower which she could not leave until he departed. Inside the tower she was both mistress and child. She played there, either gravely or frivolously, with whatever he gave her. She could look out from the tower but she could never see the tower from the outside. The tower was their love affair. During the months when she did not see him, she thought of him and his passion for her and her own feelings about him as though they were a place. She could visit and revisit it; she visited it, too, in her dreams; but nevertheless it was a place in which she never stayed for long.
Umberto, who as a young man had worked in New York for a firm that imported olive oil and Italian vermouth, speaks English fluently but with a strong Italian accent.
Ah! Laura, the grandeur of the mountains! And the lake so calm and peaceful. It is a beautiful thing the peace at the end of a day, but you are more beautiful, mia piccola. And it is only with you that I can share such peace … To think that I came under those mountains, the tunnel is fifteen kilometres long, fifteen. It is a marvel of science to make that—fifteen kilometres through a mountain. And on this side of the mountain, passeretta mia, you are waiting for me.
(The St Gothard tunnel was opened in 1882. Eight hundred men lost their lives in its construction.)
Umberto and his mistress are driving in a carriage from the station at Montreux to their hotel. Umberto has just arrived. Laura finds him more improbable than she has ever done. He puts his arms around her and tries to lick her ear. She pushes him away.
What do you think I am? she says.
My Laura, my Laura, he says, I think you are my Laura.
From the inside of his overcoat he pulls out a packet, tied with pale blue ribbon. He inclines his head and offers the packet to her on the palms of his hands, as though offering something on a tray. She accepts it. He lets his hands fall down on to her hips. She makes a point of looking at them there to discourage him from continually making such demonstrations in public. (They have argued about this before. He says the inside of a cab is like a private room in a restaurant. She has replied that you don’t make a public place private just by paying a little more!) The backs of his hands, covered with wiry black hair, are very familiar to her. His hands have authority; they arrange things the way he wishes. At the dinner table with his business colleagues in Livorno his hands construct in front of their eyes large invisible models of schemes with which they consider themselves fortunate to be associated. At the wholesale market his hands guarantee the quality of the fruit they touch approvingly and spoil the fruit which they reject. He leans back to watch her open the present.
Inside is black tissue paper and inside that a green velvet Juliet cap decorated with pearls. Laura gasps. Umberto takes this to be a sign of delighted surprise.
The pearls are the real ones, passeretta mia.
On this of all days, she thinks, a cap like this is for a girl of sixteen or seventeen, a kind of toy, a bauble. Her lover’s lack of judgement suddenly infuriates her. She equates it with his trying to bite her ear within two minutes of their meeting. Why is it, she asks, that he has always refused to notice her likes and dislikes, why has he never learned?
I couldn’t wear it, she says, I would look ridiculous in it, it’s for a young girl just out of convent school!
In the half-light of the cab it is difficult to make out the shape of the cap, but the three lines of pearls look like a necklace lying on her lap.
There’s no point in my pretending is there? You would only be disappointed because I couldn’t wear it.
We’ll buy you a necklace, he says.
It is her independence that he loves. She travels anywhere to meet him. She reads the history of the place before they arrive. She shows him chateaux and fountains and she always knows what she wants to do. Yet he has only to put his arms round her and she becomes as docile as a sparrow. That is why he calls her passeretta mia.
We will eat, he says, a banquet in our room with the Swiss white wine you told me was like a fish with a knife—do you remember?—and afterwards we will go to bed, passeretta mia, and tomorrow we will look for the necklace, and if we do not find one here which pleases you, we will go to Milano in a few days.
In bed Umberto has always found his mistress surprising. His impatience now is partly the result of his not being able to fully believe that he will once more be surprised. Upright, she is brisk, strong-willed, independent; lying beside him she has always been delicate and pliant and the touch of her hands has
always been lighter than he could remember later.
She had sparse, unusually fine pubic hair as soft as silk thread; her nipples were small and pink and when he kissed them they became red; when her head was thrown back and she smiled, baring her teeth, her upper and lower teeth did not quite touch-between them the space for perhaps a grain of sand to pass. The delicacy and susceptibility of her body had never failed to surprise Umberto and to rouse him to violent passion.
I will keep the velvet cap, she says, and one day perhaps I will give it to my daughter!
She lays her hand on his arm.
Delighted, he says: Ah my little one, you are mad, quite quite matta.
Matta (mad) was the term of endearment he applied most often to her.
For Umberto madness is native to Livorno: he sees madness in the massive monolithic warehouses, eyeless and mute like deserted forts, in the four Moors chained cursing to the monument of Ferdinand I of Florence, in the conglomeration of stuffs with which the capacity of the city is overfilled, in the rectangular spaces of sky cut out by the massive regular buildings above the dark canals, in its shifting population, in the blankness of its walls, in the indeterminacy of its spaces, in its smell of poverty and superfluity, in its furtive opening to the sea.
Madness is native to the town, he believes, but it breaks out only spasmodically. Each time reminds him of the first time, in 1848 when he was ten.
The bridges, the indeterminate spaces, the quays, the Piazza San Michele by the four cursing Moors, the decks of the ships and the rigging of the masts which lined the furtive opening to the sea, all were filled with a crowd, a crowd vertically dwarfed by the massive geometric buildings, but horizontally extending without cease, despite ever tighter and tighter concentration: i teppisti!
