by John Berger
The people obeyed. Cattle were central to their culture. In the villages heads of cattle were the measuring units of wealth. When a daughter was married, her father, if rich enough, gave her a cow, an ubulungu—‘a doer of good’: this cow must never be killed and a hair from its tail must always be tied round the neck of each of the daughter’s children at birth. Nevertheless the people obeyed. They slaughtered their cattle and their sacred cows and they burnt their grain.
They built large new kraals for the new fat cattle that would come. They prepared skin sacks to hold the milk that was soon to be more plentiful than water. They held themselves in patience and waited their vengeance.
The appointed day of the prophecy arrived. The sun rose and sank with the hopes of hundreds of thousands. By nightfall nothing had changed.
An estimated fifty thousand died of starvation. Many thousands more left their land to search for work in Cape Colony. Those who remained did so as a propertyless labour force. (A little later many were to work as wage slaves in the diamond and gold mines further north.) On the rich, now depopulated, land of the Amaxosa, European farmers settled and prospered.
Who is that? asked the boy.
The Grand Duke: Ferdinando Primo. He was the father of Livorno.
He founded the city and he came from Firenze, said Umberto.
What is it made of?
I do not understand.
Is it made of stone? asked the boy.
It is made in bronze, a metal precioso.
Why are the men chained?
They are slaves. Slaves from Africa.
They look very strong.
They must be strong. They—how you say? Umberto mimed a man rowing.
Rowing a boat?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Why did they want to make a statue of them?
Ma perché son magnifici. They are beautiful.
Beatrice laid aside the silver-backed, mermaid-embossed hairbrush and going to the window stopped by the vase of lilac.
When the boy came into the room she said: I cannot ever remember any lilac having a scent like this lot Then she asked him whether he would please find out whether the second cowman was still sick. After he had left the room, she thought: I am more than twice as old as he is.
POEM FOR BEATRICE
Continually mists change my size
Only territories on a map are measured
The sounds I make are made elsewhere
I am enveloped in the astonishing silence of my breasts
I plait my hair into sentences
Never let loose
I walk where I wish
My cuffs admit my wrists alone
Break
Break the astonishing silence of my breasts.
THE BOERS
‘Our century is a huge cauldron in which all historical eras are boiling and mingling.’ Octavio Paz
African civilization in South Africa was destroyed by the Boers. The Boers colonized South Africa for the later benefit of the British. The British intermittently aided them in this colonization but the essential relation between the colonizers and the colonized was created by the Boers. Yet the Boers were themselves fugitives—in both a geographical and a historical sense. They defeated in the name of defeat. When, in the eighteenth century, they began to penetrate into the High Veld, they did so to escape the controls of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Town, and as soon as they did so, they regressed historically. They abandoned fixed farms; they became nomadic herdsmen and hunters.
The Great Trek of 1835 which led the Boers into Natal, the Transvaal and Orange Free State was a retreat from the demands and disciplines in all spheres of social activity—productive, political, moral—of nineteenth-century Europe. Unlike other colonizers it could not occur to the Boers that they were taking ‘civilization’ into ‘the dark continent’: they themselves were withdrawing from that ‘civilization’.
Their productive means were no more advanced than those of the Bantu whose land they seized, whose crops they burnt and whose herds they stole. Their fire-arms, fast horses and wagons gave them the necessary tactical advantages. But they were incapable of developing what they seized. They were even incapable of exploiting the labour force of impoverished squatters which they created. With all their rights of mastery and property, which they held to be sacred and God-given, they could do nothing. They were impotent; and they were alone among those whom they had uselessly defeated.
In the rest of the world which Europe colonized, enslaved and exploited, native populations were massacred and destroyed (in Australia, in North America): deported elsewhere (from West Africa as slaves): or else they were accommodated within a moral, religious, social system which rationalized and justified the colonizations (catholicism in Latin America, the princely kingdoms and the caste system integrated into the imperial rule of India). In South Africa the Boers were unable to establish such a self-justifying ‘moral’ hegemony. They could accommodate neither victory nor victims. They could draw up no treaty with those whom they had dispossessed. There was no settlement possible, because they were unable to use what they had taken. There was consequently less hypocrisy or complacency or corruption among the Boers than among other colonizers. But it seemed to them that the existence of every African was an incitement to that great black avenging which they continually feared. And since no settlement was possible, the justification, the explanation of their position had to be continually reaffirmed through individual emotion. Day and night every Boer had to insure that his feeling of mastery was stronger than his fear. All that could relieve the fear was hatred.
Politics, so far as Beatrice was concerned, was one of the careers open to men: no more and no less. (She saw Laura’s devotion to politics as proof of her heartlessness.) She was interested in the stories and characters of Greek mythology—but not in history. She knew nothing of the fate of the Amaxosa. When people spoke, as they did continually in Musgrave Road, Durban, or at the Royal Hotel, of the ‘treachery of the Boers’ and the ‘Boer atrocities’, she had the impression that everyone was waiting their opportunity to compete, like singers at an audition, in saying the necessary phrases with their own individual gestures and signs of emotion. The competition never ended so long as there was a second person present. Other subjects included The Empire, The Character of the Kaffir, The Qualities of The British Soldier, The Role of the Missionary. She never questioned the assumptions which underlay the phrases. Both assumptions and competition bored her. She acquired the habit of appearing to listen whilst studying the speaker’s fingers, or looking out of the window or wondering what she herself would be doing in half an hour. Thus her time and her attention were frequently unoccupied. And this is what led to her disturbance, to the possibility of the sub-continent haunting her.
Precisely because she lacked the protection of ready-made generalizations and judgements, because she allowed her thoughts to wander aimlessly, because she lacked what all administrators and troops oppressing another nation must always maintain—a sense of duty without end, she began to feel, between the interstices of formal social convention, the violence of the hatred, the violence of what would be avenged.
In Pietermaritzburg she saw a loyal Dutchman (loyal to the Queen) beating his kaffir servant. As he beat him he made a noise in his throat like a laugh. His mouth was open and his tongue was between his teeth. His passion was such that he did not wish to stop until he had annihilated the body he was beating: yet however hard he beat it, he could not annihilate it. From this arose the necessity of his cry which resembled a laugh. His expression was like that of a small child deliberately shitting himself. The servant, absolutely silent, hunched himself against the blows.
Sometimes in the way an African ran she saw the defiance of all his race.
She could not explain her feelings to herself. There is an historical equivalent to the psychological process of repression into the unconscious. Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred
too soon. This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by that world-view. ‘Mysteries’ grow up within or around the ideological system. Eventually these mysteries destroy it by providing the basis for a new world-view. Medieval witchcraft, for example, may be seen in this light.
A moment’s introspection shows that a large part of our own experience cannot be adequately formulated: it awaits further understanding of the total human situation. In certain respects we are likely to be better understood by those who follow us than by ourselves. Nevertheless their understanding will be expressed in terms which would now be alien to us. They will change our unformulated experience beyond our recognition. As we have changed Beatrice’s.
She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted.
She sat down cross-legged on the rug by her bed to examine the wasp bite on her instep. There was still a pink circle, the size of a halfpenny; but her foot was no longer swollen. Her foot lay on her hand as though it were a dog’s head, whose gaze was concentrated upon the door. Abruptly unbuttoning her wrap and pulling her nightdress up over her knees, she lifted her foot and, bending her head forward, placed the foot behind her neck. The hair that fell over it felt cool. She tried to straighten her back as far as she could. After a while she lowered her head, lifted her foot down and sat cross-legged, smiling.
I see a horse and trap drawn up by the front door of the farmhouse. In it is a man in black with a bowler hat. He is portly and unaccountably comic. The horse is black and so too is the trap except for its white trimming. I am looking down on the horse and trap and the man who is so comically correct and regular, from the window of Beatrice’s room.
On the table between the window and the large four-poster bed is the vase of white lilac. The smell of it is the only element that I can reconstruct with certainty.
She must be thirty-six. Her hair, usually combed up into a chignon, is loose around her shoulders. She wears an embroidered wrap. The embroidered leaves mount to her shoulder. She is standing in bare feet.
The boy enters and informs her that the papers for the man in the trap were the correct ones.
He is fifteen: taller than Beatrice, dark-haired, large-nosed but with delicate hands, scarcely larger than hers. In the relation between his head and shoulders there is something of his father—a kind of lunging assurance.
Beatrice lifts an arm towards him and opens her hand.
Pushing the door shut behind him, he goes towards her and takes her hand.
She, by turning their hands, ensures that they both look out of the window. At the sight of the man in black on the point of leaving they begin to laugh.
When they laugh they swing back the arms of their held hands and this swinging moves them away from the window towards the bed.
They sit on the edge of the bed before they stop laughing.
Slowly they lie back until their heads touch the counterpane. In this movement backwards she slightly anticipates him.
They are aware of a taste of sweetness in their throats. (A sweetness not unlike that to be tasted in a sweet grape). The sweetness itself is not extreme but the experience of tasting it is. It is comparable with the experience of acute pain. But whereas pain closes anticipation of everything except the return of the past before the pain existed, what is now desired has never existed.
From the moment he entered the room it has been as though the sequence of their actions constituted a single act, a single stroke.
Beatrice puts her hand to the back of his head to move him closer towards her.
Beneath her wrap Beatrice’s skin is softer than anything he has previously imagined. He has thought of softness as a quality belonging either to something small and concentrated (like a peach) or else to something extensive but thin (like milk). Her softness belongs to a body which has substance and seems very large. Not large relative to him, but large relative to anything else he now perceives. This magnification of her body is partly the result of proximity and focus but also of the sense of touch superseding that of sight. She is no longer contained within any contour, she is continuous surface.
He bends his head to kiss her breast and take the nipple in his mouth. His awareness of what he is doing certifies the death of his childhood. This awareness is inseparable from a sensation and a taste in his mouth. The sensation is of a morsel, alive, unaccountably half-detached from the roundness of the breast—as though it were on a stalk. The taste is so associated with the texture and substance of the morsel and with its temperature, that it will be hard ever to define it in other terms. It is a little similar to the taste of the whitish juice in the stem of a certain kind of grass. He is aware that henceforth both sensation and taste are acquirable on his own initiative. Her breasts propose his independence. He buries his face between them.
Her difference from him acts like a mirror. Whatever he notices or dwells upon in her, increases his consciousness of himself, without his attention shifting from her.
She is the woman whom he used to call Aunt Beatrice. She ran the house and gave orders to the servants. She linked arms with her brother and walked up and down the lawn. She took him when he was a child to church. She asked him questions about what he had learnt in the School Room: questions like What are the chief rivers of Africa?
Occasionally during his childhood she surprised him. Once he saw her squatting in the corner of a field and afterwards he wondered whether she was peeing. In the middle of the night he had woken up to hear her laughing so wildly that he thought she was screaming. One afternoon he came into the kitchen and saw her drawing a cow with a piece of chalk on the tiled floor—a childish drawing like he might have done when younger. On each of these occasions his surprise was the result of his discovering that she was different when she was alone or when she believed that he was not there.
This morning when she had asked him to come to her bedroom, she had presented a different self to him, yet he knew this was no longer a matter of chance discovery but of deliberate intention on her part. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. He had never seen or imagined it like that before. Her face seemed smaller, much smaller than his own. The top of her head looked unexpectedly flat and her hair over the flatness very glossy. The expression of her eyes was serious to the point of gravity. Two small shoes lay on their sides on the carpet. She was barefoot. Her voice too was different, her words much slower.
I cannot remember, she said, any lilac ever having a scent like this lot.
This morning he was not surprised. He accepted the changes. Nevertheless this morning he still thought of her as the mistress of the house in which he had passed his childhood.
She is a mythical figure whom he has always been assembling part by part, quality by quality. Her softness—but not the extent of its area—is more familiar than he can remember. Her heated sweating skin is the source of the warmth he felt in Miss Helen’s clothes. Her independence from him is what he recognized in the tree trunk when he kissed it. The whiteness of her body is what has signalled nakedness to him whenever he has glimpsed a white segment through the chance disarray of petticoat or skirt. Her smell is the smell of fields which, in the early morning, smell of fish although many miles from the sea. Her two breasts are what his reason has long since granted her, although their distinctness and degree of independence one from the other astonish him. He has seen drawings on walls asserting how she lacks penis and testicles. (The dark beard-like triangle of hair makes their absence simpler and more natural than he foresaw.) This mythical figure embodies the desirable alternative to all that disgusts or revolts h
im. It is for her sake that he has ignored his own instinct for self-preservation—as when he walked away, revolted, from the men in sack-cloths and the dead horses. She and he together, mysteriously and naked, are his own virtue rewarded.
Mythical familiar and the woman he once called Aunt Beatrice meet in the same person. The encounter utterly destroys both of them. Neither will ever again exist.
He sees the eyes of an unknown woman looking up at him. She looks at him without her eyes fully focussing upon him as though, like nature, he were to be found everywhere.
He hears the voice of an unknown woman speaking to him: Sweet, sweet, sweetest. Let us go to that place.
He unhesitatingly puts his hand on her hair and opens his fingers to let it spring up between them. What he feels in his hand is inexplicably familiar.
She opens her legs. He pushes his finger towards her. Warm mucus encloses his finger as closely as if it were a ninth skin. When he moves the finger, the surface of the enclosing liquid is stretched—sometimes to breaking point. Where the break occurs he has a sensation of coolness on that side of his finger—before the warm moist skin forms again over the break.
She holds his penis with both hands, as though it were a bottle from which she were about to pour towards herself.
She moves sideways so as to be beneath him.
