by John Berger
You may still insist that effective sexual passion is missing. You may present his naked five-year-old body to prove your argument. (Twice a week in his bath he offers the proof himself to his beloved.) But what little he lacks physically, he makes up for metaphysically. He senses or feels that she—by being all that is opposite and therefore complementary to him—can make the world complete for him. In adults sexual passion reconstitutes this sense. In a five-year-old it does not have to be reconstituted: it is still part of his inheritance.
He begins to sing, regardless of the words, intently watching her fingers on the keys. He takes the opportunity of stepping closer and resting his cheek on her shoulder.
Miss Helen is soon replaced by a tutor.
The boy seeks no explanation and is offered none. He is used to accepting decisions as indisputable facts. He has no sense of any ultimate authority residing in any one person: and consequently the idea of appealing against decisions does not arise.
With his ear to the bark, he listens to the tree. He has never yet dared to listen to a dead tree. There are quite distinct categories in his own mind into which he fits trees. Ones he likes and ones he does not like (without reason). Ones that are too easy to climb. Ones that frighten him a little to climb. Ones with a view at the top and ones without. There are also more complicated categories. Trees are alive but not alive as animals are. What is the difference? First, the tree is more accessible. Second, the tree is more mysterious. Third, the tree is immovable. Fourth, the tree can hide him. If he carves on the bark of a tree, he does not believe that the tree feels pain. If a large branch is lopped off there is neither the sound nor the smell of pain. Nevertheless when he is pressed against the bark of a tree, it feels alive to his own skin to a degree that is more comprehensive than his categorical reasoning. When he touches an animal, the animal’s will intervenes. There is a tree which, when he is as high as he dare climb, he kisses. Always in the same place.
The day, when once it is established, is barely noticed in itself; continuous interests claim us; only if there is a dramatic thunderstorm, a blizzard or a partial eclipse of the sun may we momentarily forget the pursuit of our own life. But at the beginning or end of the day, at dawn or at sunset, when our relationship with all that we can see is in process of rapid transformation, we are inclined to be as aware of the moment as of what we fill it with—and, often, more aware. In face of the dawn, even the supreme egotist is tempted to forget himself. Thus I assume that the experience of day breaking or of night falling is somewhat less subject to historical change than the experience of days themselves.
On certain days he is allowed to breakfast in the kitchen with the farm-hands. He has worked at the limits of this special licence, and slowly, week by week, he has extended them so that Breakfast in the Kitchen now signifies getting up as early as he wishes, going out, wandering where he likes, and making his appearance in the kitchen with the head cowman at 7.30.
On several winter mornings, a few months after Miss Helen’s departure, the boy has left the house when it is still dark and climbed the steep lawn to the copper beeches.
What he feels when he looks down at the lit windows of the house and dairy is the icy complement to the burning mystery of his own body in bed. Every lit window suggests to him the room within. Through each window he pulls out the drawer of the room. In it is warmth, safety and his own familiarity with the life he is living. But he himself is not in it. He is in the darkness by the beech trees. The range of his senses in this darkness and in the cold is so restricted that he has the sensation of standing in a little hut, scarcely larger than his own body, with one side open where he looks out. A question which this time he cannot even formulate in a mixed language resides somewhere between the house and his hut. In the field, higher up the hill, are sheep, slightly lighter than the dark, like breath on a windowpane giving on to total blackness. He is aware that the sheep will always remain exterior to the question he cannot formulate. As soon as there is enough light for him to see his own feet the hut disintegrates and with it the presence of the question he cannot ask.
He goes down to the yard and stands in the doorway of the cowshed where the head cowman and two dairymaids are milking. The boy pats the rump of each cow and calls it by its name.
The tea for Breakfast in the Kitchen is different from tea in the schoolroom. The cups too are different: thick-lipped and almost as large as basins.
The taste of the tea which he drinks as hot as he can bear to is a strong but thin taste. It lines the mouth with its thin covering: the surface of the covering non-absorbent and shiny like that of mica which they use for lantern slides. Within the mouth, so lined with the taste of tea, there is also the extra-strong exaggerated taste of sugar. This is a taste whose effects are not confined to the mouth. Sweetness is like Eurydice’s thread: it leads from the tongue down the throat and then, mysteriously, through the stomach to the sexual centre, to the tiny region (distinct in a male from the sexual organs themselves) where sexual pleasure accumulates before extending outwards in waves. It is sugar that first induces us to love life.
Honey may be either healthy or toxic, just as a woman in her normal condition is ‘a honey’ but secretes a poison when she is indisposed … in native thought, the search for honey represents a sort of return to Nature, in the guise of erotic attraction transposed from the sexual register to that of the sense of taste, which undermines the very foundations of culture if it is indulged in for too long.
The kitchen smells of bacon and labourers’ boots.
The cook, standing by the range, watches the seven men and three maids eating with an expression of apparent surprise on her face. If she is not harried, it is the expression she habitually wears when watching people eat the food she has prepared. The surprise cannot be at the fact that they eat it with such appetite—for this can surely no longer surprise her. Perhaps it is less personal: the elemental surprise provoked by watching anything being devoured and then apparently ceasing to exist.
His aunt strides into the room, ruffles the boy’s hair and then turns abruptly to walk to the low window by the dresser. The maids at the table glance at her timidly. She has gone to the window to see whether she can see her brother. When she is not occupied with the house or some aspect of farm management which her brother has negelected, as soon as she is unoccupied, she becomes anxious and impatient to see him. Like a newly-wed wife she becomes attendant upon him. She has observed that his growing up has disabled him, making him ineffective. What she admires in him is the unwounded boy of twenty years ago. It is to that boy that she has remained faithful.
The other boy, who is drinking his tea, watches her. Her face is close to the window-pane, almost touching it. He knows that she is waiting for his uncle. He has often seen her waiting like this. He slips away from the table and out of the door through the pantry and into the courtyard. Keeping close to the wall of the house, so as not to be seen from inside the kitchen, he creeps round until he is underneath the window at which his aunt is standing. He pauses a moment, a little excited and on the brink of laughter at the thought of the trick he is about to play.
She is waiting for my uncle and bo! it’s me!
He climbs on to a water trough, slowly straightens up and presses his nose against the window-pane. His head comes level with her midriff. For an instant she does not notice him: her eyes are still fixed on the middle distance where she expects her brother to turn into the yard. The boy has time to glimpse from below her face with its fixed gaze. Then he sees her lower her eyes, perceiving him. In changing focus her eyes brighten. As they do so, she smiles and he laughs. Bo!
NUMBERS
A blackboard has been installed in the schoolroom. It is no longer a woman’s sitting room or a nursery. There are schoolbooks on the bookcase. A map of the world, a large area of it pink the colour of a hunting coat to denote the Empire. A clock has been fixed to the wall. An era passed with Miss Helen and the boy recognizes that it is irrevocab
le. As irrevocable as the fact that he has no father. But the latter fact he has been told, the former he has told himself.
If I see you looking at the clock again, we shall continue our arithmetic this afternoon.
This afternoon I’m going to go riding with my uncle.
If necessary I shall speak to your uncle.
It will make no difference whatever you say.
I beg your pardon?
I’m going to go riding with my uncle.
Stand up!
The tutor also rises, and walks slowly across to the piano. It is a ritual walk, quite unnatural in its slowness, so that the boy may recognize it and foresee its meaning. From the wall above the piano he unhooks a cane.
What is the punishment for impertinence?
One stroke across both hands, sir.
He holds out his hands, palms up.
He has learnt how to come to terms with this punishment. After a stroke the tutor always stares intently into the boy’s face—as though searching for a proof. The boy’s determination to control his face must exactly balance the smarting of his hands. If he over-clenches his face, he becomes self-conscious of his expression and position, and, continuing from this, he may become self-pitying and so cry. If he under-clenches it, the sting in his hands may rise for expression to his eyes and throat quicker than he can control them. Thus he must estimate exactly on each occasion how hard the tutor is going to hit him. He gauges this by the tutor’s breathing and by how, beneath his waistcoat, he draws in his stomach. If his estimate proves correct so that he reveals nothing, so that the tutor searches his face in vain, the boy scarcely suffers at all.
The boy receives one stroke on his left hand if he persists in repeating the same mistake as the tutor was forced to correct on the previous day (e.g. until has one ‘l’ not two): for a mistake repeated more than three times on the same day, he receives a stroke across the right hand: for insubordination (as now) a stroke across both hands: for rank disobedience three strokes. At first this systematized tariff of punishment surprised the boy: by now it seems no more arbitrary than the time announced by the hands of the large clock on the wall. One hour can seem interminable: two hours out of doors can pass unnoticed.
Which is the larger, two thirds or three sevenths?
The boy stares out of the window at Basset’s Wood and senses that there is a trick in the question.
The tutor tells himself that he likes his new charge but that the boy’s wilfulness must be checked lest it be his undoing.
In the cook’s sitting room there is a grandfather clock. The ticking of this clock has a hypnotic effect upon the boy, alone in the room. Its promise of a seemingly endless time lulls him; but the way the ticking fills the time, whose passing it records, oppresses him. He has thought of smashing the round window in the clock through which he can see the brass bob of the pendulum, always continuing to swing slowly from side to side after he has abandoned the attempt to count two or three hundred swings.
The cook’s cat settles on his legs and increases the hypnotic effect. It purrs as he rubs its ears. His trance-like state is hung like a hammock between two branches of awareness: the endlessness of time within the house which he can never successfully imagine destroyed (he is seven and a half and he has lived in the house for over five years): and the unconcerned, categorically separate life of the animal on his lap. The warmth of the animal, permeating his breeches, paints the wall of his stomach and the tops of his legs hot.
TWO MEN
Descending to the house at dusk through the wood above the beech trees. An autumn evening. Puddles. A red sky. Smoke rising straight from the chimneys. The wooden noise of a pigeon flying from one copse to another. Cold rising from the ground: now at waist level. Having a dog with him changes his sense of distance. Objects and events impinge less persistently. There is more space around him. The dog, circling him, charges and worries the frontier of the unknown back: the opposite to what a dog does when it herds sheep together. The unknown is persistent. What is it that cannot happen? And the child answers himself: Nothing. What is it that can happen? And the adult answers himself: Nothing. He is a child and he walks through the wood like a child.
Twenty yards ahead of him the dog starts to bark. Poachers poaching? As with much else at this stage of his learning, the idea of poachers has led to a mystery. His uncle speaks of them as of murderous criminals: beings with whom and for whom there is no mercy because they stop at nothing. (Poachers are the equivalent in his uncle’s code of public danger to the city mob in Umberto’s.) Yet listening to the farm-hands talk and being quick to interpret their winks and sign-language laughter, he has learnt that some of their friends are poachers. A man said: If the magistrates had ever gone hungry … The boy asks himself, are all poachers hungry?
But the notion of being hungry, of being so hungry that you poach, is the most mysterious of all. Dogs jerk their heads eating when they are hungry. In the dusk he sees the possibility of men jerking their heads when they eat to satisfy their extreme hunger. He refuses either to run or to slow down. He knows the fear is inside him. He is carrying it like a full jug. Above all it must not be spilt, for then it will be uncontained and will flow over everything.
The dog stops barking and stands quite still, ears pricked, one front paw raised. There is the unmistakable wood-noise of a booted, two-legged walk: twigs, wet leaves, roots record the sound in their own manner. Two men appear. They have sacks draped over their heads and tied round their waists. In places the sackcloth is damp and dark. They are men he has never seen before. One of them has a bottle in his hands. Sonny! one of them shouts, and the other tells the boy there is no need to be frightened.
He stands absolutely still lest the jug spills. They have square heavy faces like the ones carved on the two top front corners of the wardrobe in the room where the dairymaids sleep. They ask him to come with them. We shan’t hurt you, the one with the bottle says. They speak to him as to a child. In this there is a certain kind of security. What is your name? they ask him. He tells them. They walk on. Nothing that has so far happened to him has prepared him for this walk through the wood beside the men in sackcloth: yet he is uncertain about how exceptional it really is. Will it turn out to be an incident that his uncle or his tutor will explain to him? Or is it already beyond their power to explain? Where are we going? he asks. The man with the bottle says: We have something to show you. We want you to see something. It is too dark to distinguish the faces of the two men.
Stop. Wait. One of the men goes off and comes back with an unlit lamp, like a carriage lamp. The man with the bottle pours from it into the lamp. The boy can smell the paraffin. When the lamp is lit and turned up they continue walking. The dog disappears whimpering into the darkness further along the track. Nobody says a word. The light from the moving lamp appears to cast shadows upwards into the sky.
The man in front stops and holds his lamp up above his head. What can you see? Peering into the darkness, the boy makes out three branches lopped from a tree, laid across the track; but the shape of these branches is entirely familiar and it is this which frightens him. He has already recognized them. They are horses’ legs. The man’s arm moves a little and one edge of a horse-shoe catches the light, like a nail in the branch. The legs are entirely still. What do you see? A horse on the ground. Only one? asks the man with the bottle whose voice is always gentler than his companion’s. I don’t know.
Come on, says the other man, what are you stopping for? He climbs up on to a bank and holds the lamp still higher. There are two horses, both on their sides. Massive dray horses. Their positions contorted, as though they had fallen on to their knees, broken their legs and then rolled over. The only sound now is the dog Sniffing at one of their mouths. Are they dead? asks the boy? The man with the bottle, the man with the gentler voice says: Wait. What do you mean? demands the one with the lamp. You were always a fool, says the other and turns to the boy. Look, sonny, I’m going to kill them now. You can see
they can’t get up can’t you. So I’m going to kill them.
The man on the bank lowers the lamp. You’d better watch him if he says so, he says to the boy. The man goes to the head of the first horse, bends over and strikes it. The boy can’t see what he strikes with. Perhaps it is the bottle. He does the same to the second head. Not one inch of the horses’ flesh such as the boy can see in the lamplight so much as quivers from either blow. The man stands upright, nothing in his hand. So I killed them, you saw I killed them, didn’t you? The boy knows he must lie: Yes I saw you. The man approaches him, evidently pleased, and pats him on the shoulder. There is blood on his hand which reeks of paraffin. So you saw, he says. Yes I saw, says the boy, you killed two horses. He is aware that it is he who is now talking to the man as to a child. You killed them very well, he hears himself saying again.
We will take you back now, says the man, and if anybody asks you, you tell them what you saw me do. We’ll light you back with the lamp.
Can I go? says the boy.
We’ll take you back, sonny.
I know my way, says the boy, even at night.
No terror on the way can match the disgust he feels for the man in front of him: it is a disgust to the point of nausea. In a moment the smell of paraffin will force him to vomit.
