G.

by John Berger

  Can I go?

  Don’t ever forget what you saw me do.

  Away. The lamp invisible. The smell of paraffin present but now imaginary. He feels his way between the trees.

  His fear is overcome, both his fear for himself and (for it is different) his fear of the unknown: not overcome by an appeal to will-power or the summoning up of courage—how often can such direct appeals of a purely formal morality ever work?—but overcome by another, stronger, revulsion. It is beyond me to create a name for this revulsion: the ones I can think up all simplify. It has nothing to do with the slaughtering of horses or with the sight of blood. It is a revulsion not uncommonly felt by children and men, but one that quickly disappears never to recur if systematically ignored. With him it was always to remain stronger than his fears, for he never ignored it.

  He emerges from the wood at the top of an incline above the farmhouse. The slope, far too steep to plough, has been left uncultivated and is overgrown with bracken. As he comes down it in the dark his foot catches in a skein of bracken and he falls forward. Unhurt, he begins to roll down the slope. It would be simple for him to stop himself; he has only to grasp at some roots. But he has no wish to. He will roll to the bottom. Each time his legs come over his head it is as though for an instant the side of the hill is a flat plain and the lights in the windows of the farmhouse below are mysteriously large lights on the distant horizon. Each time his head comes off the ground it is as though he is falling across the sky. The dog, running behind him, begins to bark excitedly and to nose the ground. Each turn is like a door opening and shutting. Plain shut sky shut plain shut sky and the smell of the wet bracken on either side of the door. Bang, shut, bang, shut. The level. The sound of hosing in the dairy.

  After the incident in the wood that autumn night he not infrequently climbs up to the near edge of the wood and deliberately rolls head over heels down the bracken slope.

  The cook sees him one late afternoon.

  You’ll break your neck, she says.

  My neck won’t break.

  TAKING A FALL

  He saw the branch as though it were created to sweep him from his pony. All consequential reasoning, all the speculation which pertains to being able to choose among possibilities, was swept away in the same moment that it became clear to him that the branch must inevitably sweep him off the pony.

  Time is measured not by numerals on a clock face but by the incidence of our apprehended possibilities. Without these—in face of the branch already above the galloping pony’s ears, time suffers an extraordinary change. The slowness of it cannot be imagined.

  The boy lies on a bed in a farm-labourer’s cottage, calm, waiting for the pace of time to revert to normal. When it does, he may moan.

  The old man moves about the room. It is like an outhouse with a bed in it. There is a window with very green leaves outside it: on the sill is a candle. The bed on which he is lying is covered with rags and an old horse blanket. It smells of damp foul cloth.

  The old man is lighting a fire beneath a blackened kettle. The ceiling of the room is stained brown and in places the plaster has fallen off and the laths are visible. The brown of the ceiling is the colour of tea. The old man moves slowly and with difficulty. The boy believes that he is an old man of whom he has heard his uncle speak. His uncle said that he would die in the Workhouse.

  He can feel how swollen his mouth is. With his tongue, cautiously, he feels the holes from which his teeth have been knocked out. (What will come to be known as his leer has been born.) The pain in his chest breathes in and out like the old man blowing into the fire on his knees.

  Who are you? he asks the old man.

  The old man comes to the bed and sits on it. In face of the arrested time just ending, the boy may be as old as the man.

  What the old man says I do not know.

  What the boy says in reply I do not know.

  To pretend to know would be to schematize.

  Meanwhile development is so retarded, progress and consequence so slow that the determination not to cry out is left inviolate. It can endure for hours.

  The branch struck him on the chest and face. It may be like this at the instant of being shot. The violence of the impact is so great that the self withdraws from all further contact. This is not the same phenomenon as unconsciousness. He was conscious, but suddenly his own body, its sensations and acquired memories became a vast estate in which he could wander without concern about his means of locomotion. Far away from where he was in his estate he saw a dark mass, composed of stone surfaces and water. He was approaching it fast. He entered it as his back struck the pony’s haunches. He lay vertical in a fissure of a cloud-like substance as his feet shot up into the air above the pony’s withers. When he hit the ground, curtains of whole fields were drawn back to reveal the blue sky without any land but him beneath it. Then he lost consciousness.

  His courage on the bed, when he regains consciousness, derives from his original decision, when he first saw the branch, not to cry out. That was an hour ago and before the old man found him. On the bed he is still deciding. In time as he now experiences it, sustaining his decision is not what demands courage: on the contrary, it is the making of the decision which never ends.

  (It is in order to break and destroy the concession of this experience of time which the body invents to protect itself, that torturers alternate torture with comfort.)

  Everything you write is a schema. You are the most schematic of writers. It is like a theorem.

  Not beyond a certain point.

  What point?

  Beyond the point where the curtains are drawn back.

  Come back to the boy.

  Who says that?

  The old man does.

  What does the boy feel?

  Ask the old man.

  Look at him, says the old, man, poor bugger. Not a cry out of him.

  The last barrier against consequence is the home. This is why the dying want to die at home.

  The boy is not dying.

  But he is in a home in bed with the bedclothes that smell of damp foul cloth over him.

  In the time which his fall and his pain arrested, he found a home.

  The old man was there as the boy emerged from his estate.

  They met as equals. No rules governed their encounter. Bone to bone.

  But when the boy’s sense of time began to revert to normal, he became young again.

  That was a nasty toss you took, sir. Don’t fret yourself. Lie quiet.

  Your uncle’s coming to take you home in the buggy.

  I don’t want to move.

  You can’t stay here can you?

  Why not? Whose is it?

  Whose what?

  Whose bed is this I’m on?

  It’s mine, sir. I found you on the edge of Hawk’s Rough, and I carried you back and laid you on the bed.

  Whose home is it?

  He will look through the windows of other labourers’ cottages and he will climb up to the window of the dairymaid’s room. He will try on her aprons. He will strap on one of Tom’s leather leggings and it will come to the top of his thigh. To be another!

  Don’t fret. I’m going to see to the fire. We must keep you warm mustn’t we?

  What else did you do?

  I cleaned the blood off you and laid you down.

  Am I badly hurt?

  Nothing that won’t mend itself.

  It hurts when I talk.

  Don’t fret.

  Stay with me.

  The sound of the buggy, and his uncle is in the doorway. His uncle makes the old man look almost as small as a dwarf. Jocelyn looks down at the boy and speaks gently to him, smiling. To Jocelyn it is a form of initiation that his ward has undergone. The curtain has gone up on his life.

  He confers with the old man and gives him a two shilling piece. The boy sees the money change hands, and the old man continually tapping his forehead to convey gratitude.

  His uncle lifts the b
lanket, lets it fall to the floor, and takes up the boy in his arms. The pain in his chest is such that he screams and loses consciousness.

  Jocelyn whispers tenderly to soothe, to propitiate.

  You’ve the making of a real thruster my boy.

  Carrying the boy through the door, he hisses quietly, mollifyingly, as a groom does grooming a horse.

  A thruster, my boy, a hard-bitten thruster.

  All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.

  3

  In the Piazza San Michele on the waterfront at Livorno there is a statue of Ferdinand I. At each corner of the pedestal on which the archduke stands, a bronze figure of a naked African slave is chained. For this reason the statue is often referred to as I Quattro Mori. There is an inscription on the pedestal, the last part of which reads in Italian as follows:

  ‘… made in 1617 after the death of Ferdinand. Later (between 1623 and 1626) Pietro Tucca added his admirable slaves, the models for which he chose from the local prison.’

  THREE CONVERSATIONS OVER THE YEARS ABOUT HIS FATHER

  Why don’t I have a Papa?

  Your Papa died.

  Dead? Yes.

  In the cemetery he’s dead?

  If you are good, you go to heaven when you die.

  Was Papa good?

  I’m sure he was.

  Always?

  We didn’t know him. I don’t think your uncle or aunt knew him either.

  But Maman—

  Your mother met him in Italy I think.

  What was he doing in Italy?

  He had something to do with ships.

  Was he English?

  I think he was Italian.

  What did Maman call him?

  Now finish your soup and no more silly questions.

  Was he run over by a train?

  Who?

  Papa when he was dead.

  I don’t know.

  Couldn’t Maman stop him?

  Finish your soup.

  I’m dead too! Ha! Ha! Dead! Dead!

  Finish—

  Why will nobody tell me anything about my father? Whenever I ask about him, you change the subject.

  I never saw him. Nor did your uncle. You must ask your mother about him.

  You are only pretending not to know. Please who was he?

  He was a merchant from Livorno in Italy.

  Was he Italian?

  Yes, an Italian merchant.

  Were they married long before he died?

  A very short time.

  And did he really die in an accident with a train?

  Who told you that?

  That’s what Cook used to tell me.

  I didn’t know.

  Was he very old when he died?

  He was much older than your mother.

  Am I like him?

  I’ve told you I never saw him.

  But guess.

  Perhaps your dark eyes. You certainly don’t get them from her.

  Would you like to go to Italy?

  When?

  Next week—to Milan.

  Is Milan near Livorno?

  It’s quite a long way.

  I should like to visit Father’s grave in Livorno.

  Who told you he had a grave?

  Nobody told me. All dead people have graves.

  I meant why did you think it was in Livorno?

  Because that’s where he lived.

  What would you say if your father was alive?

  He can’t be.

  And supposing I told you he was?

  You told me he was dead.

  It was a terrible mistake. We thought he was dead.

  But why didn’t you hope he was alive?

  It was all a terrible mistake.

  You mean he’s alive.

  Yes.

  The train didn’t kill him.

  Would you like to visit him? The two of us together.

  Us? If he’s alive, I’d say the question is whether you want to see him.

  There’s no need for impertinence.

  The train journey to Paris, two days spent there with friends and then the journey on to Milan comprise the longest period that the boy has spent with his mother since infancy. She is unlike anybody else he knows: yet he has known about her ever since he can remember. She is both strange and familiar. With her he has the sensation of playing a part in a story which concerns a life he might have led. Everything about her suggests an alternative.

  She talks a lot to him, but not as one talks to a child. (From the moment she abandoned him to her cousins she has wanted to think of him as grown up, as formed: then pride in him could supersede her guilt. Now that he is eleven she thinks of him proudly as a man: a man to whom she can refer for support and justification: a man who, in many respects, is like a father to her.) She talks to him about Socialism, the importance of Education, the future of women, about art—they will see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan—about her friend Bertha Newcombe who is in love with Bernard Shaw, about the different nations of Europe and their characteristics.

  Some of what she says he does not fully understand. But all of it seems to pass by like the views seen through the train window: distant, continuous, almost disembodied. It is the same with her voice which is unlike any other he has heard (she still talks incessantly), but which does not seem to belong to her. When he returns to their compartment having walked along the train corridor, the fact that his mother is still there in the same place half surprises him. He had half expected her to disappear. When she falls asleep he presses her arm, presses it hard until he can feel how solid it is. He is mystified by this solidity as he might be by an image in a mirror moving of its own accord.

  She has certain characteristics by which he recognizes her instantly in his dreams and thoughts. The smallness of her plump hands, and their surprising lightness of touch; the way she opens her hazel eyes very wide (like the china eyes of a doll); her large bosom and square body (like a silk sack stuffed); the firmness with which she says certain words—RIGHTS, IDEAL, DISGRACE; a scent, hyacinth-like which covers, as lightly as tulle, another (for him) unnamed but older smell. But these characteristics do not create a person in his mind: they remind him of the fact that his mother happens to have these characteristics.

  When, through the train window or the carriage window in Paris, a woman for some reason or another attracts his attention—it happens rarely—and he has time to observe her, he plays a game of imagining her as his mother. The game is impossible if the woman is in the carriage and likely to talk to him or to Laura: she must be and must remain a stranger. The woman there with a tiny waist, wearing blue satin, who is shaking with laughter and whose screams first attracted his attention and separated her from the crowd, what would it be like, he wonders, to have her as a mother? Or the fat woman who is carrying too much away from the market and who looks as though she is too fat to climb up into the train: or the woman in the landau with ostrich feathers, wearing narrow trousers beneath her slit skirt? He does not compare these women with the woman beside him. If the game were just one of judging between them, of deciding which mother he would prefer, it would soon pall: furthermore, if his judgement were to go against Laura, he would be assuring his own unhappiness. The imaginary mothers he sees through the window are candidates for filling the absence which Laura represents. The game is always to try to imagine more about having a mother. It is the first time he has played the game. It is Laura’s presence which supplies the necessary sense of absence from which to begin.

  It is more than eleven years since Laura an
d Umberto have met, and their son is there in breeches and a cap to remind them both of how long eleven years may be.

  On a platform in Milan railway station the son sees his father for the first time: the father sees his son for the first time: the lover sees his ex-mistress as mother to his son, and the mother sees her ex-lover as her child’s father. On the platform beneath the distant and extensive glass roof of the station the three of them assemble as a family group: prosperous and to be envied. Mother and father do not kiss, but the mother proffers her son (who is as tall as she) for the embrace of the father. For an hour or so the three of them seem to each other to be huge, improbable, giant apparitions—like faces drawn on kites.

  Laura explains to herself how Umberto has changed. He has become like a caricature of a capitalist. Her Fabian friends in London would find it hard to believe that he was the father of her child. He must have taken advantage of you, they would say, taken advantage of your naivety and your good heart. He is heavier and more stupid than before. She sees in his face the obstinacy and stupidity of all the letters he has written to her. His skin has become darker and coarser. He has huge bags under his eyes. She compares him with her son. It is far easier, she has already decided, to talk intelligently and naturally with him than with Umberto. Umberto is like a rich fat old child. He is incoherent: his eyes become tearful: his massive fat hands bang and grasp and he keeps on repeating phrases like All my life! All my life!

  Umberto scarcely notices how Laura has become shapeless, how she clenches her small hands when walking, how she has acquired the habit of baring her teeth in an ironic smile when she is impatient. These are all details beside the single transformation he was expecting: she has become the mother of his son who is no longer a child. He has eyes only for the boy.