by John Berger
The hotel is full of rumours according to which Italy is on the brink of Revolution. It is said that shooting has already begun in the industrial suburbs of the city.
To Umberto the red leather furniture, the winter garden plants, the lifts with gilded cages, the dragooned maids in white suddenly seem absurd. His long-cultivated taste for grand hotels ends in disgust. He wishes to take his son home. In such a hotel intimacy (except sexual intimacy in bed) is impossible. The staff carry messages from guest to guest. There is nothing of his own which he can show his son. The grandeur is anonymous and false. It seems to him that his one-time mistress and his son hide from him in their rooms behind innumerable doors: he has the sensation that everyone in the hotel is being forced to wear a disguise. And so, for a few hours, and despite his hatred of Revolution, Umberto listens to the rumours with a kind of anticipation. Because he is conscious, now that he has found his son, that nothing will ever be the same again for him, his fear of violent change is momentarily reduced. He sees the nervousness in the eyes of some of the other hotel guests and he distinguishes between himself and them: they need their disguise whereas he does not. For a few hours he feels an uncertain correspondence between the violence of his emotion, to which he cannot in this hotel give proper expression, and the violence threatened by the crowds already gathered in the northern suburbs.
When he explains the political situation to his one-time mistress, he does so with unaccustomed vehemence. He speaks of the senility of Crispi: the impotence of Rudini ‘the gentleman’: the genius of Giolitti. There are only two choices, he says, Giolitti or the anarchists! Progress or revolution! We may even need a little revolution to strengthen Giolitti’s hand! He raises his own large hand and opens it wide in front of Laura’s face. Dimly (because without any emotive associations) she remembers that she used to think of him as a bandit. She feels her own motives for coming to see him generally confirmed by his manner and by the events he is describing. She too has come to demand—not for herself, but for her son—the share which is his right. The word JUSTICE, silently spoken in her mind, is spoken with the characteristic intonation which her son has noticed.
Why hasn’t your government a plan for solving the problem of poverty? All over the world people—
The problem of poverty! Umberto interrupts, repeating the words very loudly and laughing. In our country, he says, poverty isn’t a problem. It’s a life. There is only one way of being rich but there are a thousand ways of being poor.
And look what happens! snaps Laura.
Both parents frequently glance at their son as though appealing for his support. His father looks at him protectively, his mother seeking protection. The boy senses that the three of them have met too late; he is no longer the child who can receive what each of them, independently, wishes to give, and what he might once have welcomed. In the history of his own life he is older than they: about the history of his own life their innocence makes them like two children.
As he watches his parents, he returns again and again to the same question: what was his mother like before she was so shapeless and his father was so fat? How is it that she, who rejects him in every word she utters, every gesture she makes, must once have accepted him? What force then disarmed her? Or could she have yielded of her own accord? He cannot find the answer.
Meanwhile they talk of the alternatives to Revolution.
Towards evening clouds mass above the city. The leaden light makes the cathedral look like a gigantic piece of shrapnel. The canals in the suburbs appear to turn black. The open spaces are airless as though the whole city had been placed in a box.
Milan is noted for the violence of its thunderstorms and during the moments preceding them one can experience this strange sensation of a distorted, inconsistent size-scale. The scale of the buildings and the extent of the city remain overwhelmingly large in relation to one’s own size; one feels dwarfed; and yet, simultaneously, one has the sensation that the city—with oneself in it—has been reduced to the size of an exhibit in a glass case in a museum. The experience may be related to dramatic changes in air pressure. This evening the sensation of distortion is particularly strong.
In the hotel more and more electric lights are switched on. The bulbs are a sulphuric yellow. The colonnade of the Scala is visible from the first-floor hotel lounge. The colonnade is lit up; evidently the evening’s performance has not been cancelled.
Guests stand at the tall windows looking out. There is the sound of distant shouting. The Piazza is unusually empty. A man wearing a stock runs his hand up and down the velvet curtain at his side; the texture of the material reassures him.
The Head Porter hurries up the stairs and into the lounge with the news just delivered to the Junior Porter at the front entrance. He whispers to an old man in an arm-chair who, having received the news, raises his head and announces in a high voice: Signore, Signori! Whereupon the Head Porter delivers the news in the manner of a Master of Ceremonies. The workers of the Pirelli factory have seized a police barracks. A column of insurgents from Pavia is marching upon the city. The anarchist leaders are inciting the workers to attack the centre. They have already set fire—
Another old man shouts out to his two sons standing near by (one of them is in officer’s uniform): The cavalry! Don’t delay! Martial law and the cavalry! The sons shrug their shoulders.
A few seconds later thunder rattles the tall windows and the force of the rain is such that it sounds like fire. The guests look towards the streaming dark windows. The lights on the colonnade of the Scala have gone out. Laura whispers to Umberto that she wishes to lie down in her room.
The boy stares at the dark life-size portraits on the opposite wall: they represent Piedmontese notables of the Risorgimento. Alone with his son for the first time in his life, Umberto wants to make a ritual gesture. He approaches his son from behind and lays his hands upon his head in the manner of a bishop. The boy remains motionless. He is more aware than he has ever been of the question he cannot formulate when he looks down at the farmhouse before daybreak.
It is now as if the rain is beating upon the glass case in which the city is being exhibited. From a stair-well at the back of the hotel there ascends a woman’s long-sustained scream.
A waiter hurries to the heavy wooden door with brass fittings which opens on the corridor leading to the back of the hotel. But the scream (the scream of a new kitchen-maid from the country who fears lightning and thunder because they are a sign of the wrath of God) has already had its effect. It has already reminded many of the guests that they have been awaiting such a scream in such circumstances—with dread or with inexplicable expectation—for years. For them the scream is a signal.
The immediate effect of the storm is to disperse the open-air meetings of workers and demonstrators. It achieves what Turati, the socialist leader, failed to achieve in his appeals for order and calm.
But there are other effects. It is not only the country kitchen-maid whom the storm has frightened. Those responsible for law and order in Milan have been reminded of the ineluctable nature of storms when once they begin. In the flashes of lightning which, although they emanate from the sky, appear to light up the piazza from below, in the rolls of thunder echoing between the far mountains and the near buildings, in the incontestable force of the downpour and in the hysteria of the electrical tension, they have seen the spectre of their working population in revolt. Two workers and one policeman have been killed during the day. After the storm the spectre looms larger than the facts. The forces of order must immediately take the most extreme measures against the least provocation: only thus can the revolutionary storm, of which the natural one that has just passed was only a harmless symbol, be averted. The massacre of the following days is assured.
Dinner in the hotel dining-room is well attended. The guests wear evening dress. Thus the male diners and the waiters, both wearing black and white, are distinguished by their positions and actions rather than by their appearance, a
nd one has the impression that all the men in the large room are attendant upon the women in their multi-coloured dresses. A fountain plays, and around it are arranged lemon trees and oleanders in wooden tubs. On the tables are roses.
Umberto takes a white rose from the chalice on his table, carefully trims its stem, wipes it with his folded handkerchief, stands up and, holding the barely open white rose in front of his vast, untidy face, the colour of yellow clay, bows to Laura, pouting his mouth in the vulgar Italian manner which, describing a kiss, denotes appreciation. Yet Umberto modifies the vulgarity of the gesture: the symbolic kiss is restrained and he holds the rose in front of his mouth—as though the flower were the word which his lips were forming.
Please, dear Laura, accept—
Put it down, she says, furiously embarrassed by his theatricality and by the implication of present courtship: an implication which, in her mind, unpardonably confuses the past with the present.
Umberto gently hands the rose to his son who is seated between the two of them.
You give it to her, he says.
The boy places the rose by his mother’s soup spoon.
Suddenly she is reassured. She considers it possible that Umberto has understood what she wishes to establish: namely that all his dealings with her must be made by way of her son. Picking up the rose she slowly twirls it between her fingers, raises it to her eyes, and lays it down again on the table in front of the boy.
Umberto, noticing the sudden change in her attitude and incapable of not exploiting an unexpected success, says: Shall we eat Pollo alla Cacciatore? If I am not wrong, dear Laura, you always liked Pollo alla Cacciatore.
This is the first time that he has mentioned the past. The boy is immediately alerted. Laura is momentarily touched by his remembering. The remark confirms what she wishes to be confirmed: the fact that, a long time ago, Umberto was in a position to be the father of her child. Unaware of the eloquence of her expression, she half smiles at Umberto. The boy, intercepting the glance, recognizes it. He has seen Beatrice look at Jocelyn with a similar expression. It is a look which confesses a secret common interest deriving from some past experience from which, by its nature rather than by its timing, he is conscious of being inevitably excluded. It is a look which makes him conscious of being the third person.
What does Pollo something mean? he asks.
It is a chicken cooked in wine with mushrooms and peas and young vegetables. Pollo alla Cacciatore.
But is that what it means?
It means chicken cooked like hunters cook it.
The look and the dish henceforward became associated in his mind. It is the look of the Pollo alla Cacciatore.
The Mediterranean breaks along the long coasts of Italy. In places the waves are phosphorescent in the dark. Between the coasts millions are hungry. In the south they riot without hope.
An assault on the town hall, devastation and destruction of the tax registers; then the arrival of police or soldiers, volleys of stones from the crowd, opening of fire by the troops. The crowd retreats, cursing, leaving its dead and wounded on the ground. In a few months in another commune the story repeats itself.
The tax on flour is over 50 per cent: on sugar 300 per cent, on meat and milk 20 per cent. Salt is so highly taxed that many peasants never taste it. Meanwhile it is an offence against the excise for those who live by the coast to draw salt water from the sea. Guards have shot at women coming down to the beaches with buckets. It is safest at night. Phosphorescent drops form for a moment along the rim of the bucket, in whose illegal water she will cook tomorrow’s pasta.
I FATTI DI MAGGIO 1898
The boy wakes early, as he intended to do. He slips out of the hotel before either of his parents are astir.
Because the people in the streets are speaking a language which he cannot understand, the significance of most of what he sees is ambiguous. The commonplace and the exceptional are mysteriously confused. Is the gentleman who flings himself into a carriage and shouts at the driver frightened or late? The six girls advancing with linked arms (and their hair tied up in scarves)—do they sweep the other pedestrians off the pavement every morning as they are doing today? A man by the kerb is reading out loud from a newspaper. Is it a tram stop? The men who gather round him begin to shout. Are they shouting in approval or anger? A jeweller has closed his shop and pinned a piece of paper with writing on it to the shutters.
There are so many people that the carriages and trams can pass through only with difficulty. The wheels of the trams screech against the rails. He wonders whether they always screech like that.
A young very short man with a beard is puzzled by the presence of the boy, whose clothes make it clear that he comes from a rich bourgeois family. The entire crowd is made up of workers on strike, assembling to listen to their speakers near the Giardini Pubblici.
What are you doing here, he asks in Italian, this has nothing to do with you!
The boy, almost as tall as the young man, shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. This increases the suspicions of his questioner.
It won’t help you spying on us, he says.
I do not understand, says the boy in English.
So you’re not an Italian.
They try to talk but the boy understands nothing. The young man puts his arm round the boy’s shoulders. Within a few seconds his whole attitude is reversed. If the boy cannot understand their language, he is immune to the hypocrisy of deception of words and thus can be the pure witness of their actions. The boy’s wordlessness now appears to him, in an unclear paradoxical way, to be comparable with the universality of the Revolution in which he believes. He calls to his sister in a nearby group of mill-girls: Come and meet our pulcino, he says. Ecco il nostro pulcino.
Despite his diminutive shortness, the young man with a beard has a wide flat brown chest. His face is like a ferret’s. He works as a maintenance mechanic in a cotton mill. Since 1894 he has twice been arrested and deported under Crispi’s law of Public Security (the decreto-legge).
Let him stay with you, he says to his sister, he can’t speak our Italian.
Out of the six mill-girls to whom the boy has been entrusted, he notices particularly a Roman girl, only two or three years older than himself, whose face is pock-marked and who already has a growth of black hair above her upper lip. He notices too—for she wears a white short-sleeved bodice—that her arms are unnaturally thin, like long brown handles to her hands. Her moustache intrigues and embarrasses him.
To them he is a fascinating enigma. They can talk about him as though he were not there.
He has beautiful eyes.
Look at the leather of his shoes.
Where does he come from?
Yet they can also approach him, touch him, study his reactions. Half child and half man, he appears to them as an ambassador between the romantic dreams of their own childhood and the men from whom in reality they must soon choose. (The eldest of these girls earns less than Iod a day).
Let us call him my affianzato, cries the Roman girl, made brazen by the excitement, her acknowledged ugliness and the fact that the boy will never understand.
The crowd in and around the Corso Venezia numbers fifty thousand. Some are organized into columns and contingents from particular factories; other groupings are smaller and less organized. They do not know exactly how many they are; but all of them sense that they represent the majority. This majority can claim what each has felt but cannot say when alone: Look at this head, this body—ill-taught, badly-fed, poorly-dressed, overworked. It deserves the best the world is able to offer.
Near the edge of the Giardini Pubblici, the boy sees the young man with a beard standing in a tree and addressing the crowd. He is giving them directions about where to go.
The crowd see the city around them with different eyes. They have stopped the factories producing, forced the shops to shut, halted the traffic, occupied the streets. It is they who have built the city and they who maintain it. They a
re discovering their own creativity. In their regular lives they only modify presented circumstances; here, filling the streets and sweeping all before them they oppose their very existence to circumstances. They are rejecting all that they habitually, and despite themselves, accept. Once again they demand together what none can ask alone: Why should I be compelled to sell my life bit by bit so as not to die?
Of the reality of politics most of the crowd are ignorant. Politics are the means by which they are kept suppressed and impoverished. Politics are the means by which they are deceived and disarmed. Politics is the State which oppresses them. In the heart of each there is a desire to challenge the entire political armoury of their oppressors with the single and simple weapon of justice: the justice of their own cause, crying out to the sky above Milan and to the future. Yet justice implies a judge. And there is no judge and no judgement.
The cavalry charge as the first shots are fired. The shots are above the heads of the crowd.
They ride out in lines of five or six. After a line has passed, sections of the crowd appear to re-form—not in order to resist, for resistance at this instant is unthinkable, but because in order to avoid the horses they have pressed themselves into unimaginably tight units which, as soon as the danger has momentarily passed, inevitably enlarge again. The lines of cavalry turn and wheel. Sections of the crowd repeatedly contract and expand like pumping hearts. Screams ascend and dissolve. Shouts persist.
A line of cavalry approaches. The nearest horse rears above a huddled group. The boy has never as yet seen from the ground a horse used as a weapon. Like his uncle he has always been a rider. The under-side of a rearing horse seen from below is awful in a very particular way. The body is large and heavy with four metal-shod hooves on legs whose pounding power is utterly evident. But the physical threat is compounded with something else. The horse too is made of sinews, bones, flesh and blood. It is breathing hard and is frightened. The rider’s violence has already distorted its nature. The horse shares your defencelessness as it is about to crush you. It is as though your fear has uncontrollably entered the horse which threatens you.
