G.

by John Berger

  It is a tragedy! We ought to be able to see him by now.

  Perhaps he has turned back.

  But he crossed the Simplon.

  How do you know?

  Roberto told us.

  And Roberto?

  Signor Lucchini, the clerk of the Mayor, came into the Garibaldi twenty minutes ago and said that he had passed the hospice.

  Praise be to God.

  Since this morning I knew it was going to be a tragedy. I dreamt about him last night.

  That’s because you are in love with him.

  To clap my eyes on him just once!

  And we’ll all call out his name—Geo! Geo!

  Thousands in Domodossola pick out the plane, minute against the pine forest. It is lower than they expected. With shouts the watchers try to quieten each other, so as to be able to hear the engine. It is too far away. Slowly the movement of the aeroplane becomes clear. It is coming down towards Domodossola.

  Duray, racing-car driver and friend of Chavez, unrolls two lengths of white calico on the grass of the landing-field to make a cross, visible from the air; a crowd of boys compete to help him peg the cloth to the ground.

  The plane is flying and losing height so regularly, so serenely, that all of those watching feel personally elated.

  He is the first man to fly the Alps; he has done what was previously thought impossible. It is a momentous event that we are witnessing, yet, look! it is simpler than we imagined, he is flying straighter than a bird and effortlessly, and that is how he has flown over the Alps; achieving greatness is perhaps less hard than we have been led to believe. This sequence of feelings (formulated in many different ways) leads to a conclusion of sudden elation. Why can we not all achieve what we wish?

  The Mayor, being driven in a car to the landing field and wearing his ceremonial robes in order to welcome the great aviator, announces to his companions on the back seat that the town will name a street after Chavez to commemorate his victory over the mountains.

  An express train for Milan left Domodossola station at 14.18 hours. A young man in the train spots the Blériot monoplane through the carriage window and pulls the alarm signal. The train comes to a sudden halt. The young man jumps down on to the track and runs along the length of the train shouting to the other passengers to watch and pointing with his arm at the plane which is now only a little higher than the tree, and in which Chavez is clearly visible. When he reaches the locomotive, the young man stops and waves with both arms at the sky, hoping that Chavez will see him and wave back; he will then have been the first to salute the hero. But Chavez does not wave back. A fact about which the young man and his friends who were flying enthusiasts were to speculate for many years.

  Leonie’s head is thrown back like a singer’s singing. Her eyes too have rolled back so that he sees only the whites of them, not the irises. Her mouth is open and her throat swollen. She makes a noise in her throat which is a word said very slowly but he does not decipher it.

  Some cry, some lie motionless, some thump with their fists, some lie curled up, some push their tongues between their lips, some clench their brows and set their mouths in determination, some wave their hands and others open them until they are like starfish: no two are the same until they leave behaviour behind, until they come with him to that moment when everything is simultaneous and every one of them is there together.

  He experiences every orgasm as though it were simultaneous with every other. All that has occurred or will occur between each, all the events, actions, causes and consequences which have and will separate in time woman from woman, surround this timeless moment as a circumference surrounds the circle it defines. All are there together. All despite all their differences are there together. He joins them.

  Sexual desire, however it is provoked or produced circumstantially, and whatever its objective terms and duration may be, is subjectively fixed to two points in time: our beginning and our end. When analysed, sexual desire has components which are violently nostalgic and lead us as far back as the experience of birth itself: other components are the result of an ineradicable appetite for the unknown, the furthest away, the ultimate of life—which can finally only be found in its negation—death. At the moment of orgasm these two points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When this happens everything that lies between them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantaneous. It is thus that I explain the protagonist of my book to myself.

  He lay on his back beside Leonie, holding her hand, his eyes shut. She no longer saw secret promises in his face. She knew what he promised and the secret involved the two of them. With her hand he wasn’t holding, she touched his face. She followed with the tips of two fingers the contours of an eyebrow and then down the side of his nose, past the corner of his mouth, which twitched when she passed it, to his chin. By touching his face in this way she could make her feeling of familiarity more natural and destroy a little of its mystery. She could localize the feeling of familiarity in what she felt in her fingertips. And thus she was less overwhelmed by it. She wanted to cup her hand over his nose. She raised her hand to her own nose to smell it. She placed it on his forehead instead. She would have played like this, with isolated words occurring to her with a sense of odd illumination in her head (as though she knew that there was light, white like snow, behind all that she saw or pictured and that this light gave everything a white outline until the instant she saw it), she would have continued like this until he spoke or moved. But a man shouting on the staircase interrupted her. A moment later a woman shouted on the terrace just under the window. Several more shouts followed.

  Had Leonie belonged to a different social class, she might have reacted differently. Her immediate response might well have been to question the right of others in a hotel to raise their voices and disturb her. As it was, a raised voice was a warning signal; she had learnt since childhood that when you heard somebody raising their voice, you either disappeared or prepared yourself to be unjustly abused. She feared that the people were shouting because they were looking for her.

  She pulled her hand away from his. He opened his eyes.

  They are looking for me, she whispered, they are coming to look for me. Nobody will come in here, he said, and closed his eyes again. There was a knock at the door.

  What is it? he asked.

  A man’s voice on the other side of the door: Chavez has crashed.

  Where?

  When he came down to land at Domodossola.

  You mean he made the crossing and then crashed?

  At the very last moment, yes, a couple of metres above the landing field, he didn’t level out, he just dived into the ground at about a hundred kilometres an hour.

  Is he dead?

  No. He has broken both his legs, but they said on the telephone he isn’t badly hurt otherwise. He’s been taken to hospital.

  All right. Thank you for telling me.

  Are you coming down?

  I’ll see you later. He turned to Leonie. You see, he said, they weren’t looking for you. And he began to laugh.

  How can you laugh, she asked, when your friend must be suffering so much.

  I’m laughing at us.

  At me because I was frightened?

  No, at the two of us here whilst he was crossing the Alps.

  He may die.

  And one day I’ll die and you too, with your beautiful brown eyes and your white teeth. There is never any time to lose.

  Don’t you have any feelings for him at all?

  I had no time.

  I don’t understand what you say.

  No chance ever comes twice.

  They just told you he crashed.

  Then I will try to console his fiancée.

  Who are you? She said this fiercely but in a whisper as though she were frightened that he might answer in a voice loud enough for the whole hotel to hear. She believed that he might be the Devil. Abruptly she turned her back on him and buried her face i
n the pillow. Why me? she asked.

  You are like you are, that’s why.

  Why me out of all the others? There are so many.

  You as well as many others.

  Am I—she raised her head to look at him and then changed her mind about what to say: I must go, she said, they’ll be looking for me. Let me go.

  Yes, he said.

  Don’t you really care about your friend who is hurt?

  You talk about him but you don’t mean him.

  I don’t understand what you say.

  When you ask about him, you are thinking of yourself.

  No—when I saw him flying off—

  —but by then I had already come to find you.

  He placed his hand on her shoulder. Her whole body turned towards him and she lay on her back looking up at him. She could see in his face what had happened to them both after he had come to find her; his face was different; but it was not the face of the Devil.

  She knew that he could not take her with him when he left. It was not worth her asking. It was not even worth asking whether he would be leaving tomorrow or the day after. That much she could discover from the hall porter. She might ask whether he would return to Brig. But she already knew the answer. Chavez had crossed the Alps. No aviator would try from here again. He would not come back. Everything she had ever noticed in the world stood between his life and hers.

  Will I see you tomorrow?

  Yes, I will find you.

  She recognized that he was lying. The total unexpectedness of what had happened did not mean that it was likely to happen again. A more sophisticated and privileged woman would have found it hard to accept that the encounter was unrepeatable, and so would probably have needed the lie and have failed to recognize it as such. For Leonie it was not hard to accept. The choices open to her had always been limited; she thought of most of the conditions of living as unchangeable; and so the idea of the extraordinary was central to her life. She was superstitious.

  She shivered. He pulled up the sheet to cover her. As he did so, he saw her body stretched almost straight, save that one hip was slightly raised. There are women—often they are wide-hipped and plump—whose bodies become unforeseeably beautiful when recumbent. Their natural formation, like a landscape’s, seems to be horizontal. And just as landscapes are for ever continuous, the horizon receding as the eye of the traveller advances, so, to the sense of touch, these bodies seem borderless and infinitely extended, quite regardless of their actual size. His hand set out. The large dark triangle of hair on her pale skin announced unequivocally the mystery which it hid.

  She would have liked to have said before washing, whilst they were still extraordinary, lying on the bed, that if he asked her to go away with him, she would go. It would have been a way of telling him how she felt: all he had supposed about her had been right: he had known more about her than anybody else had: so now he must know—because she did not believe that she would see him again—that she loved him, loved him like her own child. Yet if she spoke of going away with him, he would lie and misunderstand what she said. She must find another way to tell him. She feared that if she did not tell him, Eduard might kill himself or her. She believed that her telling him would protect them all later.

  And so it happened that the young peasant bride who, an hour and a half earlier, had been shy to undress in front of him, suddenly threw off the sheet and kneeling on the bed seized hold of his head, pressed his face against her stomach, and, with her own head thrown back, so that she saw blue light in the pear-shaped blobs of glass hanging from the candelabra in the centre of the ceiling, repeatedly called out his name, whilst tears ran down her face.

  Later, in the evening, G. saw Weymann. Weymann, normally so imperturbable, was distinctly nervous. During the afternoon, after the news of Chavez’ crash, Weymann took off in his plane and tried to climb towards the Simplon; the prize for reaching Milan still remained to be won. But the wind proved too strong and he turned back to land again in the field with the canvas hangars.

  What time did you take off?

  At 3.43, about two hours after Geo.

  Was the wind much stronger?

  Not appreciably on the ground. But when I climbed to about a thousand metres, just after the Napoleon bridge, there I hit it full force. It’s always been there, about the same spot. Suddenly it comes at you, and it knocks you sideways, like the slipstream of an express train. It couldn’t have been much less when he went through. But I don’t believe in taking unreasonable risks, and he did.

  He succeeded though. So didn’t the risks seem less? He’d proved the risks weren’t that great.

  He’s proving it in hospital I’m afraid.

  But he crossed!

  You don’t think like that when you hit that wind. You can feel it straining every strut and joint of the kite.

  Supposing he crossed and landed safely but then had engine trouble on the ground, would you have turned back then? Supposing he proved it without mishap, would you have turned back?

  Yes, I study my plane and the weather conditions, nothing else. You have to stay very sober in the air, my friend. You have to be quite sure of what you can or you can’t do. And if you’re in doubt, don’t do it. Geo wanted to be a hero. And that’s fatal in the air.

  He has shown that something was possible which people thought impossible. Isn’t that an achievement?

  I pay my respects to his courage, but it’s a dangerous example.

  That’s why there’s a prize offered. If there wasn’t any danger—

  No. No. I don’t mean the natural hazards of flying. I mean the danger of encouraging foolhardiness and the taking of unnecessary risks. In the end flying’s like everything else, the secret of success is a healthy respect for what you’re up against. If you want to get on, you don’t pee into the wind. I’m not a coward, but I’m not an idiot either.

  You’re saying he is an idiot.

  He’s a hero. But I’ll lay you whatever odds you want that at this moment he’s cursing himself for an idiot. They say it’s not at all sure that he’ll ever have the proper use of his legs again.

  You feel bad about turning back.

  Come with me. I’m driving to Domodossolo tomorrow to go and see him. I’ve borrowed a Fiat. Or are you still waiting for a reply to your letters to that maid? What’s her name?

  She’s called Leonie.

  The same as the mountain over there? Leone.

  It’s spelt differently.

  I wouldn’t trust either of them! joked Weymann.

  I’ll come to Domodossola.

  6

  This morning as I was shaving I thought of a friend of mine who lives in Madrid and whom I haven’t seen for fifteen years. Looking at my own image in the mirror I asked myself whether, after so long, we would recognize each other immediately if we met by accident in the street. I pictured to myself our meeting in Madrid and I began to imagine his feelings. He is a friend to whom I am deeply attached, but I hear from him only once or twice a year and he does not occupy a constant place in my thoughts. After I had shaved, I went down to my letterbox and there found a ten-page letter from him.

  Such ‘coincidences’ are not uncommon and everyone is more or less familiar with them. They offer us an insight into how approximate and arbitrary is our normal reading of time. Calendars and clocks are our inadequate inventions. The structure of our minds is such that the true nature of time usually escapes us. Yet we know there is a mystery. Like a never-seen object in the dark, we can feel our way over some of its surfaces. But we have not identified it.

  The way my imagination forces me to write this story is determined by its intimations about those aspects of time which I have touched but never identified. I am writing this book in the same dark.

  A SITUATION OF WOMEN

  Up to then the social presence of a woman was different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence was dependent upon the promise of power which he embodied. If the promise was large and c
redible, his presence was striking. If it was small or incredible, he was found to have little presence. There were men, even many men, who were devoid of presence altogether. The promised power may have been moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual—but its object was always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggested what he was capable of doing to you or for you.

  By contrast, a woman’s presence expressed her own attitude to herself, and defined what could and could not be done to her. No woman lacked presence altogether. Her presence was manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste—indeed there was nothing she could do which did not contribute to her presence.

  To be born woman was to be born within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of man. A woman’s presence developed as the precipitate of her ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited cell. She furnished her cell, as it were, with her presence; not primarily in order to make it more agreeable to herself, but in the hope of persuading others to enter it.

  A woman’s presence was the result of herself being split into two, and of her energy being inturned. A woman was always accompanied—except when quite alone—by her own image of herself. Whilst she was walking across a room or whilst she was weeping at the death of her father, she could not avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she had been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she came to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

  A woman had to survey everything she was and everything she did because how she appeared to others, and ultimately how she appeared to men, was of crucial importance for her self-realization. Her own sense of being in herself was supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. Only when she was the content of another’s experience did her own life and experience seem meaningful to her. In order to live she had to install herself in another’s life.