by John Berger
His host shook his head reassuringly. There will be no revolution in Europe, the danger is past, and the reason is simple. The leaders of the working masses do not want power. They only want improvements. They have learnt the techniques of bargaining. They have to pretend to ask for more than they want to receive what they do want. From time to time they bring out the word Socialism. This word is the equivalent of temporarily breaking off negotiations, but always with the intention of re-starting them. If we educate people properly, if we use the benefits of modern science, if we curb the power of monarchy and rely upon parliamentary government, there is no reason at all why the present social order should ever change violently.
The host came over, stood behind Monsieur Hennequin and put his hand on his shoulder. You are sceptical, he continued, come, let me show you a recent photograph of Turati and the Socialist Deputies in Rome. It is a curious picture. And very reassuring.
Monsieur Hennequin got up. Madame Hennequin began to say something but was interrupted—
You are beautiful. You have eyes which say everything. And you have the voice of a corn-crake.
She laughs. A corn-crake! Is that a compliment?
I love you. How I love you. I must see you tomorrow.
In the year 1910, which in this respect was in no way exceptional, over half a million Italians emigrated abroad in order to find work and avoid starvation.
THE NATURE OF LIKENESS
In writing about Camille I cannot get close enough to her.
Who is drawing me
between pencil and paper?
One day I shall judge the likeness
but she who judges
will not be the woman who now
so expectantly poses.
I am what I am.
What I am like is how you see me.
Domodossola, like Brig, was crowded with journalists and flying enthusiasts. It is a small town of narrow cobbled streets. Its roofs are covered with clumsy irregular tiles of blackish-red stone, similar in colour to the rocks of the Gondo. When seen from the air the overhanging eaves hide the small streets and the whole town looks like a scattered pile of blackish-red slivers of shale, the deposit of a landslide.
In the Piazza Mercato the Mayor had ordered a large blackboard to be put up. On it, with white chalk in copperplate script, was written the latest medical bulletin concerning Chavez.
Being Sunday morning, there was a market and the square and streets were crowded. During the night the weather had changed and it was hard to believe that they had dined, twenty kilometres away, on the open platform of the tower above Lake Maggiore. He was slowly making his way towards the hospital. When he saw Camille walking in front he was not surprised.
She was wearing a trotteur of pale lilac grey. Its cut and its colour made her look more enterprising than she had in evening dress. Her walk was light and decided. On her head she wore a low-crowned hat with white flowers, tilted forwards. Her brown hair was swept up at the back into a chignon. He guessed that her trim elegance early in the morning in this provincial town meant that she had slept little or badly.
The temperature of hair to the touch varies considerably from person to person, regardless of the surrounding temperature. There are heads of hair which always tend to be cool; others which seem to generate their own heat in the coldest conditions. In the cold air, whilst she remained quite oblivious of his presence a few metres behind her, he could foresee that Camille’s hair would be unusually warm.
She stopped to look into a shop window of gloves and furs. Abruptly he took her arm from behind. She wheeled round with a little cry and with her fists clenched in anger. When she saw that it was he and not a stranger, she could not prevent the relief from showing on her face. She continued to frown, but a smile wavered along her mouth.
He asked after her husband and said that he wanted to propose to him that if the weather were not worse this afternoon, they, with Monsieur Schuwey and Madame Le Diraison, might accompany him on a motor trip to Santa Maria Maggiore.
During the night she had asked herself many times about his absurd declaration of love. Why had she not turned her back on him? Why had she not protested? She told herself it was because she was too surprised. Yet she might have been forewarned. She had after all consciously encouraged his evident interest in her. But what she could never have foreseen, what still confused her, was the way in which, suddenly, and clearly by an act of will, he was addressing her in the room as though they were alone, as though he had dropped from the sky, or come up from the earth, exactly beside her, without having to interrupt or cross the territory of those who surrounded her. She did not protest because there seemed to be nobody to protest to; nobody could have seen him. Had she made a scene, it would have been about something which had already ceased to exist. At one moment during the night she woke up convinced he was standing by the window. For the same reason she could not cry out.
She was telling him how she had lost a pair of gloves on the train coming from Paris. He asked if he might accompany her into the shop. She hesitated. He assured her there was no other shop in the town and he would be glad to interpret for her.
This morning she saw yesterday’s incident differently. What had happened (mysteriously) had happened; but it was without consequence thanks to the order and routine of her normal life. She was in Domodossola with her husband. In four or five days she would return to Paris and her children. This man (with whom she was in a glove shop explaining that she wanted long white gloves) had taken advantage of one moment at a dinner party such as could not occur again. The incident had been finished before it began.
The woman who served them in the shop spoke at length about the heroism of Chavez. Geo Chavez, he translated to Camille, was a victor over the mountains, a conqueror, to whose present pains the woman behind the counter would gladly minister all night and to the least of whose wishes she would be proud to be a slave. She spoke as a mother although to her great regret she never had a son. One of her daughters worked in Milan, a second helped her with the shop.
The gloves which Camille wished to try on were of the thinnest white leather and tight-fitting. The woman, who was proud to live in the town which would nurse Chavez back to health, brought one of the gloves to her mouth and breathed into it before handing it across the counter to Camille. If it was still difficult to put on, she explained, she would sprinkle some talc
When memory connects one experience with another, the nature of the connection may vary considerably. There are connections by contrast, connections by similitude, connections by way of sensuous metaphor, connections of logical sequence, etc, etc The relation between the two experiences may sometimes be one of mutual comment. In this case the connection is multiform and complex. Yet the comment, although extremely precise, cannot be verbalized any more than a chord in music can be. The experience of watching the Italian shopkeeper breathing into a glove summoned up and commented upon his memory of the mysterious warmth he once found in the clothes of Miss Helen, his last governess. Likewise his memory commented upon his present experience. The comments, however, remain unwritable.
The Italian woman blew into the second glove before passing it to Camille. Filled with her breath, the glove took on the form of a hand which suddenly and deeply frightened Camille. It was a languid boneless hand, a hand without will, a hand floating in the air like a dead fish with its white stomach uppermost. It was a hand she did not want. It was a hand that could not clench itself. It was a hand which in caressing would in no way be a hand and would not caress; it would lead away. At that moment she knew what he was offering her. He was offering her the possibility of being what she pretended to be. He was proposing that she turn Mallarmé’s words into lived mornings and afternoons. But she immediately put her knowledge out of her mind by dismissing the self which recognized it, as unserious. All she had to do to remain safe, she told herself, was to be wary of being unrealistic.
The gloves fitted her perfectly. The leather
across her tiny bony knuckles was so tight that it shone as if it were wet.
Take one hand in the other, he told her.
She did so.
You see, he said, you take your left hand in your right.
Is it strange? she asked.
No, he said, but it means you are confident, you are the mistress of your own fate.
She laughed, reassured that he recognized this. I am quite content, she said.
You can be content and a slave. Contentment has little to do with it. Why do you say content?
She thought it best not to answer. I am easily startled though, she said, like I was in the street just now.
Startled! You turned upon me with the fury of a virago defending her honour, and when you recognized it was me you extended me an utterly confident welcome.
Camille pulled off the gloves angrily, lay them on the counter and turned towards the door. He asked the shopkeeper how much they were.
I don’t want them, said Camille.
He paid for them. The shopkeeper folded them in mauve tissue paper. Camille stood facing the door. From behind he took both of her elbows in his hands.
(What can I foresee her elbow doing? Nothing of significance. Yet I perceive it in the same way as her hand. I receive from it the same promise and in the same way it fulfils its promise. Her elbows are in his hands.)
Trust me, he said. Nobody else knows why you take your left hand in your right. It doesn’t compromise you.
I don’t want the gloves, she said.
They won’t compromise you either, he said, it is certain that you would have bought them. And I offer them to you only as a modest homage to your elegance, Madame Hennequin, this morning.
The formality with which he spoke confused her. It was impossible to decide whether its falseness was deliberate or the result of his far from perfect grasp of the language. Either way it emphasized how by showing her anger she had been indiscreet.
It is too early for us to disagree, he said, and he held out the gloves to her and bowed.
She took them.
Je t’aime, Camille, he said, opening the shop door.
The hospital is near the centre of the town. A square yellow building, it looks like a classical early-nineteenth-century villa in its own garden. The main door is flanked by camellia trees. In the doorway is a table with a book open upon it. The book is for passers-by or visitors who do not wish to disturb the flyer, to write messages or tributes in. For some, however, it seems a sinister omen, for in certain parts of the Mediterranean a book is placed by the front door when there has been a death in the house; and in this book neighbours and acquaintances sign their names as an expression of condolence.
Weymann is waiting for him at the top of the stairs.
He says he remembers nothing after the Gondo, Weymann whispers.
How does he seem?
Very shaken and erratic.
What do the doctors really think?
His injuries are not serious. He has no concussion. There’s nothing to prevent him making a complete recovery.
Except?
I didn’t say except.
But except?
He’s too nervous, says Weymann.
They enter the room in which there are already half a dozen men, including Christiaens and Chavez’ close friend Duray. On the wall opposite the bed are pinned telegrams from all over the world: enough to cover the entire wall.
To the wounded man the wall might have represented a vast transparent window on to the world’s view of his achievement; but it does not, it remains a wall with confused meaningless rectangles of paper pinned to it, some of which stir slightly when the door is opened. His temperature is only slightly above normal. His brain is lucid. Time and again his imagination approaches the irreversibility of the events since he announced ‘I’m going now’. Their irreversibility confronts him like a rock face which moves with him as he turns his head or shifts his gaze. However high he climbs, however daringly he breaks through the wall of the wind westwards, it is still there, in front of his eyes and above his swollen lips. He repeatedly makes the approach but the geology of the events never changes. Meanwhile these silent endlessly recurring private approaches make everything else said or seen in his room seem as far away as the words he cannot read on the telegrams.
They found him under the débris of his plane with his face pressed against the earth. He did not lose consciousness.
G. takes Chavez’ hand and offers his congratulations. He is unaccustomed to finding a man mysterious; mystery, for him, is the prerogative of women. About men he asks only questions to which the number of answers is limited, as one asks what time it is—according to a clock or a watch. He looks into Chavez’ dark eyes, whose expression is suspicious, at his swollen lips which, even when unbruised, were absurdly full and curved, at the backs of his hands, and he sees the whole appearance of the small young man, forced to lie unexpectedly there in a bed in a hospital in a garden in Domodossola, as an outer covering no less arbitrary or opaque than the misshapen cylinders of plaster round his legs. A hand on a woman’s breast conjures up the same mystery. Beneath the tangible extends the enormity of what is intangible and invisible. A doctor can take the plaster off his legs. But a surgeon making an incision in his flesh and opening up the organs within would not disclose the mystery. The mystery lies in the vastness of the system by which Chavez, so long as he is alive, constitutes the world in which he is living (which includes your hand shaking his) as his own unique experience.
This morning I went into a glove shop and the woman who served me spoke of you as though you were a saint, a saint with the courage of a hero.
I know, interrupted Chavez, they think of me like that. Perhaps they are right or perhaps they are not. Anyway the question will never be settled because, meanwhile, I’m dying.
The weather improved. He suggested that Monsieur Hennequin should drive the motor car. In the late afternoon they were driving through a pine forest which overlooked the lake. Madame Hennequin wanted to stop so that they could walk a little in the forest.
The light enters the forest almost horizontally. Each entry between the trees into the depths of the forest acquires in this light an exaggerated stereoscopic quality. The trees which are against the light look entirely black. The tree trunks which are sunlit are a greyish honey colour. The same light falls upon the taffeta and silk of the two women’s dresses which are pearly and luminous. As the women walk, their feet in their buttoned boots tread lightly but deeply into a carpet of pine needles, rotted cones, moss and the leaves of flowers. Every surface is more than usually vivid, but in the forest everything loses something of its substantiality.
To Camille he has been no more than formally polite, so as to emphasize to her the depth and seriousness of the conspiracy which now links them. He has concentrated his attention upon Monsieur Hennequin and Harry Schuwey. He is encouraging the latter to talk about the resources of the Congo. He appears to listen with interest; every so often he asks a supplementary question or makes an encouraging sign of agreement. Yet despite the impression he gives, he is scarcely listening to what is being said. In a mixed language, where words are only one of the expressive means—a language not essentially different from that in which he questioned himself as a child but now possessing a wider range of references—he addresses, silently, the two men whom he is walking between.
How did you choose them? You chose them for exactly the same reasons as you would have chosen any other woman. Men in your position must have the best. The best is not an absolute, though. Men in your position must have the best for men in your position. If you choose a woman without considering this you may jeopardize your position and the putting of your position in jeopardy may cause you—and therefore her—unhappiness. Cut the cloth according to the purse, and choose the wearer of the cloth according to its cut. But apart from being men with positions you are men with penises.
On their left, the ground rises steeply so that t
he roots of the distant trees are level with the top branches of the near ones. Beween the higher distant trees there are rocks, jagged in shape but covered in green moss. On their right, when there is a sufficiently straight avenue to look down, they can see the surface of the lake shimmering like mica below.
And your penises are much given to idealizing. Your penises want the best possible—and to hell with your positions. How can you satisfy both?
A forest is not incontrovertible like a mountain. It is tolerant, like the sea, of everything which occurs within it.
You cannot. But you can protect yourselves or you can try to protect yourselves against the worst consequences of an open rift. And this you have done from the moment you attained the age of responsibility, with the help of your colleagues, your friends, your church, your professors, your novelists, your dressmakers, your comedians, your lawyers, your forces of order, your public men and of course your women.
Monsieur Hennequin wonders whether what his friend is saying might be of interest to Peugeot. Everything that motor cars will need should be of interest to Peugeot. He would like to visit the Congo himself. He has been to Algeria but in his opinion that is scarcely Africa. Africa begins with the jungle. He picks up a stick from the path and with it he lightly taps the trunks of the trees which are within his reach as they pass them.
You had to find a third value, a third interest that your social ambition, which, unlike pure ambition, must always wear the dress of conformity, and the idealism of your penises could acknowledge as arbiter. And this third value was property. The third interest was an interest in owning. Not a remote merely financial interest, but a passionate one which stirs you physically, which becomes a sense as acute as the sense of touch. Indeed you have seen to it that your children are taught to touch nothing that is not theirs, not a flower nor an animal nor the hand of a stranger. To touch is to claim as property. To fuck is to possess. And you take possession either by paying rent or by buying outright.
