G.

by John Berger

  Four!

  Four?

  You have forgotten you are married.

  I have explained to you already.

  You say you are proud. Me? I am ashamed. You make me ashamed for all of us. How could I look into the eyes of my child whilst waiting, day after day, year after year, for news of her death? Sit now, passeretta mia, and I will talk to you. I am older than you. I am nearer to the earth. If I compare us to most, we are fortunate. You do not know what their lives are filled with. Life is never as we want it. It is of no use to ask for everything. In the end you get nothing. Our life will not be a perfect one—that is for those who believe in the good God after they are dead. But it will be better, and I will make it better, than you believe possible. We have both been mistaken. I am older than you and I have been mistaken more. But not you either can begin life again like an innocent fidanzata of seventeen. With you I have the last chance of happiness. I know it. No chance will come again. You have come to me like an angel to deliver me. Angels come once only. I will spare nothing to make you happy.

  Would you come and live here?

  I can try. But how can I? It is too far.

  Too far from your home?

  From my business.

  Your business comes before us?

  My business is for my son. He will inherit it. He will not be poor.

  You intend to disinherit your wife?

  I have told you what will happen.

  You are shameless.

  No, I am not shameless. I see things for how they are. I want you and my son. Without both of you my life is over. All my life depends on this one chance. I love you as nobody else will love you. Not even a younger man. He will not be as faithful to you as me. I know what you are worth, believe me. Come to Pisa. Give me the opportunity to show you—

  —Where I shall be in jail.

  I will be a father to our son. If you knew what paternal feelings are filling me, if you knew how patient, how adoring, how proud I will be as a father! In him I will see you. He will have your impatience and your love of dreams.

  And what will he have of you?

  You know what they call me in Livorno behind my back, I have told you already, they call me La Bestia, That is because I am cunning and close to the earth. Perhaps he will have my realism.

  You, realistic!

  Yes. You will see. We have one chance now. There will be no more opportunity.

  What do you mean?

  For you to be the mother of your son. For me to be the father. For all three of us to be happy.

  I intend to bring up my child as I choose, not as you choose. I will teach him myself. If he is a boy, he will begin life with the advantage of never having been told lies. If she is a girl, she will be loving and sincere and realistic. No child of mine is going to be satisfied with your half-measures. And to make sure of this, I will devote the next ten years of my life to my child.

  You deny me the right to my own son?

  You have none.

  Laura!

  It’s too late to call me now.

  The sheets on the unmade bed, the carpets, the furniture, the wrought-iron balcony outside the window, the lake which is the colour of steel and lavender, the Alps—everything within their sight—is unaffected by the rapid beating of each heart.

  The principal protagonist was conceived four years after Garibaldi’s death.

  Garibaldi was hero.

  Garibaldi defeated his country’s enemies. He inspired the nation to become itself: to anticipate its own identity.

  Garibaldi was what every Italian wished to be. It is in this sense that one can call him the national genius. There was not an Italian in Italy—not even among the loyal Bourbon troops of the Kingdom of Naples—who did not wish to be Garibaldi. A few hoped to become him by fighting him: some, like La Farina in Sicily, by betraying him. Cavour in Turin became him by using him. What stood between a man and his becoming Garibaldi was not his own identity but the wretched state of Italy: a wretchedness which each interpreted or suffered according to his own theories or position. For the peasant it was the impossibility of leaving his land: for the constitutionalist it was the inefficiency of conspiracy.

  When men set eyes upon Garibaldi they amazed themselves: until that moment they had not known who they were. They met him as from within themselves.

  He was poorly equipped and almost in rags; he had nothing but a sword and a pistol. ‘What induced you,’ I said, ‘to give up ease and luxury for this life of a dog, in a camp without commissariat, pay, or rations?’ ‘You may well ask,’ he said, ‘I tell you a fortnight ago I was in despair myself, and thought of giving up the whole thing. I was sitting on a hillock, as might be here. Garibaldi came by. He stopped, I don’t know why. I had never spoken to him. I am sure he did not know me, but he stopped. Perhaps I looked very dejected, and indeed I was. Well, he laid his hand on my shoulder and simply said, with that low, strange, smothered voice that seemed almost like a spirit speaking inside me, “Courage; courage! We are going to fight for our country.” Do you think I could ever turn back after that? The next day we fought the battle of the Volturno.’

  On 7 September 1860 Garibaldi entered Naples.

  Venù è Galubardo!

  Venù è lu piu bel!

  The Bourbon garrison of several thousand occupied the four castles which dominated the city. The king had fled. The castle cannons were trained upon the city. There was a rumour that Garibaldi would arrive—not with his troops and redshirts on horseback—but alone and by train. The streets were empty under the white glare of the sunlight and the muzzles of the cannons. Nobody knew whether to believe the rumour. Timidly everybody hid indoors. At 1.30 in the afternoon Garibaldi arrived at the station. Half a million people surged into the streets, on to the quays, climbing, pushing, running, shouting—regardless of the cannons and the consequences—to welcome him, to commemorate the moment at which they were living.

  Garibaldi was not a military genius of the first order. Politically he was easily deceived. Yet he inspired a whole people. He inspired them, neither by authority nor by divine right, but by representing the simple and pure aspirations of their youth, and by persuading them, through his own example, that these aspirations could be realized in the national struggle for unity and independence. What the nation found sacred in him was its own innocence.

  All his characteristics fitted him for such a role. His physical strength and courage. His virility. His long hair down to his shoulders, carefully combed after battle. The simplicity of his tastes and appetites. ‘When a patriot,’ he said, ‘has eaten his bowl of soup and when the affairs of the country are going well, what more can anyone want?’ The island to which he retired whenever there was no task for him to perform and on which he lived as a farmer with his sheep. His patriotism which confounded his theoretical principles. (A republican, he recognized the authority of Victor Emmanuel.) His amour propre. His sense of humour. The fact that he was eloquent by gesture rather than word. ‘I believe if he were not Garibaldi, he would be the greatest tragic actor known.’ (Because he did not talk, men of different or opposing opinions supported him and believed that he supported them.) His ignorance of motives in the world as it was. His impatience.

  In what other kind of man could the nation of Italy find its better half in order to become united?

  By way of what other kind of man—with his absolute personal integrity—could the majority of the nation be so successfully deceived?

  The way in which Garibaldi inspired the nation led to moments of danger for the emergent ruling class. If Garibaldi was what every Italian wished to be, his wishes, so encouraged, might go further than the expulsion of the Austrians and the Bourbons. Garibaldi was a threat to order, not only because his methods were conspiratorial, but because he inspired.

  The massing of the crowds in Naples under the mouths of the cannon became a saturnalia which lasted for three days.

  Calabrian peasants believed that Garibaldi, like Chri
st, could perform miracles. When his redshirts were desperately short of water, he fired a cannon into a rock and water gushed from it.

  Garibaldi honoured the memory of Carlo Pisacane, martyr of the Risorgimento, whose writings influenced the thinking of a generation of Italian socialist revolutionaries.

  ‘The propaganda of the idea is a chimera. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but will be educated when they are free. The only work a citizen can do for the good of the country is that of co-operating with the material revolution: therefore conspiracies, plots, assassinations, etc., are that series of deeds by which Italy proceeds towards her goal.’

  Yet Garibaldi was effectively constrained by his alliance with the existing ruling classes. His gestures defied them: the political consequences of his victories confirmed them. The national genius was used to create the pre-conditions for a bourgeois state.

  After Garibaldi’s death, there was scarcely an Italian city or town which did not have a street or piazza named after him. Throughout Italy his name was spoken or written thousands of times daily. Yet this name was as irrelevant to what now occurred in those streets and piazzas as the blue sky above.

  In Paris Laura feeds the new-born child at her breast. It is as though the milk which flows from her is the quicksilver of an extraordinary mirror. In this mirror the child is part of her body, the number of all her parts is doubled: but equally, in this mirror she is part of the child, completing him as he desires. She can be object or image on either side of the mirror. She can do unto him or she can be done unto by herself. The two of them, so long as the nipple remains in the mouth, revert to being parts of an indispersible whole whose energy will lead to their being separate and distinct as soon as the child ceases to suck.

  She asks: What need have I of anything more? The boy will grow, but by looking at him, I can again inhabit him.

  Her nerves and sensibilities answer her own needs perfunctorily; they continuously strain across space and through his flesh to anticipate and answer his. Her feelings are distributed in his body like veins. When she touches him, she has the sensation of touching herself made innocent.

  She wants to worship him because with her he seems to transcend the world as it is. She desires to be totally committed to him, so that this commitment amounts to a rejection of all other claims. She wants with her baby to start an alternative world, to propose from his new-born life a new way of living.

  2

  2

  Laura did not achieve the new way of living with her baby which she had wished. She had not reckoned with the sheer force of routine in a rich nineteenth-century household. Had she decided to live by herself with her illegitimate child—and this would have meant becoming a bohemian—she might have succeeded. As it was, in her mother’s house in Paris, her plans were defeated by nurse-maids, chambermaids, the housekeeper, her mother’s doctor. It was not possible for her to be with the child for more than a couple of hours a day. It was not possible for her to occupy herself with all the daily chores connected with looking after him—washing linen, ironing, cleaning the nursery, preparing his food, etc.; there were servants to do such jobs. The most that she could achieve was bathing him in the late afternoon under the eyes of the nurse and the maid who brought up the hot water.

  Nor could Laura explain what she wanted. If she had said that she wanted to be always within sight and touching distance of her son and that for the next few years in her life everything else should take second place, that she wanted to live with him as an equal, crawling when he crawled, walking when he walked, speaking his own language, never being more than a few steps ahead of him, if she had said this she would have been treated as hysterical. An infant, like everything else in the nineteenth century, had its own place—which was unshareable.

  Umberto implored her to let him see his son. Laura refused to answer his letters and told her mother that the boy’s father had gone out of his mind. Two years passed. Laura’s mother remarried and returned to the United States. Laura went to London and there, through some acquaintances who quickly became close friends, was converted to the cause of Fabian Socialism. It was arranged that until she had found a house, the boy should stay for a few months with Laura’s first cousins on a farm. Laura was to come down by train to visit him every other week. The cousins were in debt. Laura was able to raise money on their behalf through her mother. In London she became more and more involved in her political interests. The secret of life, she considered, was no longer hidden in her own body but in the evolutionary process. Her visits to the country to see her son became rarer and rarer. The boy appeared to thrive in the country. The French nurse was sent back to Paris and an English governess installed. The cousins (a brother and sister called Jocelyn and Beatrice) agreed that the boy should continue to stay with them. On that farm the boy spent his childhood.

  Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companions. It is not that they will not race against each other, but this is of no consequence, for, back in the stable, the one who is heavier and clumsier does not on that account give up his oats to the other, as men want others to do to them. With animals virtue is its own reward.

  At that place the minimum of flesh covers the bone of the skull, but even on this thin, thin soil the fur grows. The bone casing is almost concave. On either side of the space is an eye, large with its depths uncovered. It is the frontal centre of the head. In man there is no equivalent place. The sense organs are too concentrated, the eyes too close together, the face too sharp. By contrast the face of a man is like a blade with the cutting edge facing whoever approaches.

  On this almost concave field of fur with its thin soil, you rub your hand and the animal nods in accord. But the palm of the hand is too soft: its pads muffle the contact. You clench your fist and rub again: this time with your knuckles grazing against the animal’s skull. His eyes remain open, placid and undisturbed because for him there can be no danger which is that close.

  It begins like this in childhood. But grown men, overcome by grief or remorse, thrust their foreheads, skullbone to skullbone, between a cow’s eyes.

  The term ‘dumb animal’ sinks deep into Beatrice’s mind. It implies neither condescension nor pity. But the animal’s inability to speak is somehow related by her to the almost concave field between the eyes.

  Until puberty the horns mystify her: or rather, not so much the grown horns but their growing: the stumps which she feels with her fingers like rock beneath the fur. During adolescence they supply her with a model for what is happening to herself. The growth of the horn, she begins to understand, does not represent the animal’s mere submission to time passing: it has nothing to do with patience: it represents time acquired. Cattle carry their horns as men their years of experience.

  Without the presence of animals (such as she has felt all her life) the farm would be intolerable to her. She does not coddle the lamb that has to be brought indoors. She has no regrets about a cow which has gone dry being sold. But without the animals the farm would oppose her as uninhabited and inert: time passing would claim it as it claims a hollow tree. It is the animals who stand and eat and (at night) sigh and graze and wait and breed between her and the lifelessness of the stars.

  During her childhood the animals are owned by her father. His power is manifest in them. Like her, they do his bidding. And to them as to her he speaks softly. To everyone else he speaks roughly and is ill-tempered.

  She is twenty-four. Her face tends to be laterally over-stretched—as though her ears are constantly pulling her mouth into a smile. In consequence her full lips are always slightly parted, her white teeth just visible.

  At a garden party she may look to a stranger from London like a still eligible daughter of a country gentleman. (Though her father is dead and she keeps house for her brother.) Yet when she moves, she may surprise and slightly disturb him. All her movements and gestures are, despite her small s
ize, curiously emphatic.

  The neighbouring gentry describe her amongst themselves as hoy-denish and so explain why she has not married.

  Her actions, whatever they may be—walking across a lawn, cutting a rose, opening the oven when supervising the cook, folding linen, stepping into her skirt and petticoat when dressing—all suggest this disproportionate force which is the result of her unusual sureness of decision. Once she has decided upon a course of action, any consideration which might modify it she instantly dismisses as a detail. There are no details within her life; they are all exterior to it.

  Beatrice is a woman without morality or ambition because she is incapable of surprising herself. She can propose nothing unfamiliar to herself. This self-knowledge is not the result of prolonged introspection but, rather, of having always been familiar, like an animal, with the patterns of action and reaction necessary to satisfy her own unquestioned needs.

  It is possible that I make her sound like an idiot. If so, I do her an injustice.

  The farm is at the bottom of a valley with hills rising steeply up from it on three sides. The house, built about a hundred years earlier, is large with many chimneys. At one side is a walled fruit garden: and behind the house a steeply rising lawn. The stables and dairy and outhouses are laid out along the valley. Perhaps once when the condition of the farm was different, its situation suggested a well-chosen and protected site. Now the hills seem to overshadow it a little.

  Since her father’s death both house and land have deteriorated. The brother’s interest is in his horses and little else. They have had to sell land. In the father’s time there were five tenant farmers on the estate: now it has been reduced to their own 500-acre farm.