by John Berger
The eyes of the rider stare fixedly into the middle distance, with only quick furtive glances downwards. His back teeth are clenched so hard that he cannot swallow. His head is like a head strung through its eyes on a line five feet above the faces of the crowd: the line of his orders. His spurred boots kick out blindly at the hands and arms trying to grab them. Repeatedly his spurs jab into the horse’s flanks to force it forward.
Hypnotized by the sight of horse and rider, the boy does not move until the Roman girl pulls his arm so abruptly that he almost falls. Then they begin to run. With her free hand she holds up her skirts as she runs. He notices again how unnaturally thin her arms are; but her hand is big and encloses his. She does not hesitate about where to run—towards the trees in the Giardini Pubblici.
They pass a group carrying a wounded man. Others are running. Screams gush in accompaniment to the blood—but not always from the same person. Blood runs down a woman’s face, the eyes behind the blood tightly shut. An enormously fat man is half lifting her, his arm round her back. The cleared spaces enable the cavalry to charge more rapidly against those who remain. A middle-aged man alone in the middle of the Corso, fists in the air, curses the soldiers. Cowards! he shouts, Rinnegati! He advances towards a line of horsemen drawn up in stationary formation awaiting orders. An officer behind the line orders him to stop. He continues to advance. When he is shot he falls on his face.
Butterflies the colour of grey sandstone, others the colour of honeysuckle. Grass and wild flowers as high as the knee. Petals faded by the sun so that they are almost white, but not clay white like the miniature snails to be found in places on the dusty earth. Delicate wild gladioli the colour of amethysts, transparent and smaller than a finger joint. The red of poppies—the colour in which a child pictures fire. Fading poppies, damp, their fallen heads the colour of wine stains. Shallow outcrops of flat rock smooth and grey like the sides of dolphins. The whole field surrounded by ilex trees. To die in that field, blood flowing into the dry earth. To be shot, to fall across the tram lines, blood making the cobbles slippery. I picture the first death to make a wreath for the second.
She leads him across the gardens to the railyards and the streets near the station of the Piazza della Republica. She never lets go of his hand. She holds it neither amorously nor protectively but impatiently as if to make him run or walk fast, or, when they stop, as if to make him understand more immediately what they are watching. Occasionally she speaks to him in Italian although she knows that he cannot understand what she says. Shock, the strangeness of their situation and perhaps an innate desperation make her develop the fantasy which began as a joke. Soon she is pretending that one day they will get married. This pretence is no more unlikely than the events taking place round them. And so she establishes, intuitively, a balance between the violence of their circumstances and the violence of her imaginative preoccupation, and this balance enables her to become quite calm.
They watch a tram being overturned to make a barricade. As it falls the glass of all its windows is smashed. Having unharnessed the horse, men and women drag a carriage to overturn beside the tram. A line of railwaymen are carrying picks and crowbars from a railway depot. The news has spread that the army has been ordered to clear the city, street by street, and to hunt down every ‘insurgent’. Another group of railwaymen are dismantling the track.
Everything is about to be transformed.
Imagine the blade of a giant guillotine as long as the diameter of the city. Imagine the blade descending and cutting a section through everything that is there—walls, railway lines, wagons, workshops, churches, crates of fruit, trees, sky, cobblestones. Such a blade has fallen a few yards in front of the face of everyone who is determined to fight. Each finds himself a few yards from the precipitous edge of an infinitely deep fissure which only he can see. The fissure, like a deep cut into the flesh, is unmistakably itself; there can be no doubting what has happened. But there is no pain at first.
The pain is the thought of one’s own death probably being very near. It occurs to the men and women building the barricades that what they are handling, and what they are thinking, are probably being handled and thought by them for the last time. As they build the defences, the pain increases.
A man from the rooftops shouts that there are hundreds of soldiers at the corner of the Via Manin.
Umberto and four of the hotel staff whom he has specially paid and to whom he has offered a further reward of a hundred lire if they find his son, are searching in the streets behind the hotel where there are neither soldiers nor barricades.
At first, says the Roman girl in Italian, we’ll live in Rome because I think we’ll be happier there.
Whenever she speaks, he looks at her in the same way as he would if he understood her. The meaning of her words seems unimportant to him; what is important is that what he is seeing, he is seeing in her presence.
And you will buy me, she says in Italian, some white stockings and a hat with chiffon tied round it.
At the barricades the pain is over. The transformation is complete. It is completed by a shout from the rooftops that the soldiers are advancing. Suddenly there is nothing to regret. The barricades are between their defenders and the violence done to them throughout their lives. There is nothing to regret because it is the quintessence of their past which is now advancing against them. On their side of the barricades it is already the future.
Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment. The barricades break that present.
The Roman girl leads him into a doorway a few yards from a barricade. We will wait here a little, she says in Italian, like a wife to an elderly husband on the occasion of a cloudburst.
The soldiers draw nearer. The last doubt that the action may be deferred disappears. Kneeling at one end of the barricade with his back against a basement grille is a white-haired man with an old pistol across his knee. It is loaded; he has one other bullet in his pocket. Younger men and women are still dismantling the road and adding to the pile of cobbles. Others are armed with bars and sticks.
Everyone falls silent. There is a distant noise of hammering from the yards and, nearer, regular as the sound of a clock (its promise of a seemingly endless time lulls him; but the way it fills the time, whose passing it records, oppresses him) the noise of marching feet. La Rivoluzione o la morte! shouts the white-haired man into the silence. And then: Sing, damn them, sing! They must hear us singing.
When he first commanded Sing! the Roman girl went forward to the step of the doorway, simply, as to the footlights, and began to sing the ‘Canto dei Malfattori’.
It is hard not to romanticize her voice. At first I thought it frail like her arms which so impressed him. But it is full and coarse. For a moment nobody in the street joins in, the better to appreciate how her voice fills the street and seems instantaneously to soften every surface and edge.
The soldiers fire their first volley into the barricade.
The first volley simplifies, its echo killing every distraction. Nothing remains but what is in hand. A few men throw stones towards the soldiers; they fall short. A shutter bangs and an officer fires with his revolver at the window of the house. On the road between the soldiers and the barricade, absolutely still, are the seven stones that have fallen short.
Behind the barricade women get down on their knees to gather stones along the perimeters of the holes already made and to feed them to the men. A railwayman, still wearing his cap with a red and gold braid round it, shouts: Wait! Wait till we can break their heads in! Wait! And when I say—all of us at once! Wait! He has a bony, quick face and he is smiling.
The soldiers close up. A second volley. For the second time nobody is hurt. Nobody believes it, yet nobody fails to consider that the justice of their cause may be a protection. Now! Twenty men hurl their stones through the air. The sol
diers edge back. A woman jeers at them: Faccie di merda!
A youth in an apron says of the railwayman: That one is like an officer of the artillery. On the word ‘fuoco’ there is the crack of a single shot and the railwayman falls. The shot came from an upper window, not from the street. The bullet is in his face. The bullet belongs, he believes, to the past, preceding his own childhood. The wound in his face, attended by three women, gives birth to his death.
A cubic metre of space; empty it of your conception of that space; what remains is like death.
The soldiers advance again, and are driven off in the same way. But this time they withdraw a hundred yards, and there is a lull whose quiet deceives no one. Behind the barricade it is probably the moment of greatest fear. The enemy have taken the measure of the defenders’ defiance and are re-planning the attack accordingly; the defenders can do nothing but tend their dead comrade and wait, hopelessly out-armed and outnumbered.
In Italian she whispers to him: I promise you if a soldier lays hands on me, I’ll drive a knife down between his shoulders. She touches him lightly with her finger where the blade will strike. As if he had understood what she said and were pretending to die, he lets his weight lean against her. I promise, she says. His head falls on to her shoulder. His legs are trembling and he fears that he is about to lose consciousness. With her arm round him she leads him through the passage of the house to a yard where she splashes his face with water from a tap and tells him to drink. The water is sharply cold and as he gulps it, he hears another volley of shots from the street. The sound in his ears and the swallowing of the cold water in his throat become a single sensation. He sees her face, her heavy eyebrows meeting in the middle, her heavy mouth and moustache, a squashed blemished face with slow eyes; he sees her expression; never before has a second person’s expression appeared to express what he is feeling.
Che Dio li maledica, she says.
Along the street several riflemen have been posted in the windows of upper rooms from where they can fire, over the barricade, at its defenders. Under their covering fire the soldiers in the street are advancing. Already three defenders have been wounded.
Let me speak of one of the wounded. The bullet has entered just beneath his right collarbone. If he keeps his right arm still, the pain is constant but it does not move: it does not lunge out and devour his very consciousness of what remains unhurt. He hates the pain as he hates the soldiers. The pain is the soldiers in his body. He picks up a stone with his left hand and tries to throw it. In throwing it he inadvertently moves his right shoulder. The stone goes crooked and only hits a wall.
Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do that may help a little. Build a barricade of words, no matter what they mean. Speak so that he can be aware of your presence. Speak so that he knows that you are there not feeling his pain. Say anything, for his pain is larger than any distinction you can make between truth and untruth. Dress him with the words of your voice as others dress his wounds. Yes. Here and now. It will stop.
There is no judge.
When the soldiers are twenty yards away, two women climb up the iron bars, which are meant to prevent people or animals falling under the tram, onto its side. As they emerge into view as targets at point-blank range, they scream at the soldiers: Shoot us! Why don’t you shoot us? Several rifles point at them but nobody fires. They stand upright, straddling the broken tram windows. They continue to scream at the soldiers. Figli di putana! And then: Castrati! Castrati! The boy in the street stares up at them from behind. The heel of one of them protrudes through a large hole in her stocking. On the ankle of the second, who is without stockings, is a smear of blood. Castrati! Castrati! More women are climbing the bars to join the first two.
An officer notices a man on a sixth-floor parapet, further down the street, behind the barricade. The man is gesticulating. The officer orders a section of soldiers to fire at him.
The man on the parapet sees the soldiers bring their rifles to the shoulder and aim at him. If I jump, he thinks, they will kill me before I hit the ground. He jumps.
To the officer the young women swearing and prancing on the tram are sluts whom he will later have arrested. But for some of the soldiers, sons of peasants or workers from other cities, they evoke childhood memories. The women’s voices show that their rage is solemn and passionate, precluding all answers. For these soldiers the women on the tram seem to have attained, whatever their actual age, the authority of elders; their rage is inseparable from judgement; before such rage one must ask for pardon.
The soldiers are ordered to advance. This order re-establishes the sense of manhood they were for a moment in danger of losing. Obediently they move forward, rifles at the ready: some to round up the men, others to drag the women off the tram.
Castrati! Cowards!
The words concentrate into a yell. It is not a yell of fear but of total refusal. They are like women yelling on behalf of the stillborn.
I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything, I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent. Yet there was no such convergence and no incoherence. To stop here, despite all that I leave unsaid, is to admit more of the truth than will be possible if I bring the account to a conclusion. The writer’s desire to finish is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another way.
Between 6 May, when martial law was declared in Milan, and 9 May one hundred workers were killed and four hundred and fifty wounded. Those four days marked the end of a phase of Italian history. Socialist leaders began to lay more and more stress on parliamentary social democracy and all attempts at direct revolutionary action—or revolutionary defence—were abandoned. Simultaneously the ruling class adopted new tactics towards the workers and the peasantry; crude repression gave way to political manipulation. For the next twenty years in Italy—as in most of the rest of Western Europe—the spectre of revolution was banished from men’s minds.
In the garden in Livorno the fountain is playing. The fountain, the palm trees, the hibiscus and flowering shrubs have not been allowed to deteriorate since the death of Umberto’s wife, three years ago in 1895. He employs two gardeners. He travels specially to Settignano to order rare plants. Each year his memory of his wife approximates more closely to the picture of her preserved by her acquaintances and friends. He no longer disputes that his wife was a person of great spirituality.
Occasionally there is a noise which suggests a marble dropped into water. It is made by a perch, basking on the surface of the water, abruptly plunging. Umberto cannot enjoy the peacefulness of the garden alone. Alone he feels old and nervous. He will agree to anything Laura asks in exchange for being able to have his son in Livorno.
Umberto thinks that his son is not like a modern Italian but like a youth painted during the Renaissance; his face is like a window onto his soul. He finds the gaps in the boy’s teeth a little disconcerting when he smiles, but these he will have stopped with gold. He tells Laura of all the advantages which the boy would enjoy if he lived in Livorno. Laura does not say what she thinks. Instead she complains, hints, contradicts herself. The more persuasive Umberto becomes, the less encouraging she is. He pleads with her, he begs her on his knees.
No, No, she cries, holding his arms to make him get to his feet.
He reminds her of times they have spent together.
Ah my little one you were mad, quite quite mad.
Italy, she insists, is not a country for a child.
Come with him, says Umberto becoming more agitated, I’ll buy a house. I’ll buy you …
The father’s sentimentality will ensure that the mother has her way.
Whilst his unknown mother and newly-discovered father argue about where he should live and with whom, the son returns again and again to his memory of being led into the yard where the wa
ter-tap was. Again the Roman girl throws water on his face. Again he is amazed by her expression. Again something is revealed to him. The revelation is as wordless as the water she threw was colourless.
Where he is (in the garden in Livorno) or where he was (in the Via Manin) is unimportant; what he sees in front of him (his mother’s round face and her hair impeccably arranged in a bun) or what he saw (the Roman girl’s blemished open mouth) belongs to the particular moment; what he hears (the sound of the fountain playing) or what he heard (screams and curses of women) are simple alternatives; what matters is what her expression in the yard confirmed but what, until this moment, was wordless. What matters is not being dead.
4
It has begun, the struggle unto death against what is.
The veil of St Veronica: a kerchief with the image of Christ’s head wearing the crown of thorns imprinted upon it.
I see another image miraculously printed on cloth. Her body with her head thrown back and her eyes shut. The image is naturalistic, quite unstylized. Dark areas of hair. Her pale skin almost indistinguishable from the colour of the linen sheet on which she lay.
