by John Berger
The women were walking behind the men. Harry Schuwey is explaining that whereas ivory is a luxury material today, rubber with the development of the motor industry is becoming an essential one and that therefore the future of the Congo lies in rubber. The forest is very still except for the party advancing along the path. Occasionally, high up among the topmost branches, a bird sings a few notes and then stops.
Has nobody told you about your houses? I discovered it a long time ago. You are walking leisurely—in any city in Europe—through a well-off residential quarter down a street of your own houses or apartments.
The trees are spruce firs or larches. Lichen grows more readily on the former. Many dead branches are festooned with matted pale green hair, like dried seaweed. On other branches lines and clusters of lichen algae are fixed like tarnished white silver press-studs.
Their window-frames and shutters have been freshly painted but their colour barely differentiates them from the façades around them, which absorb the sunlight but give off a slight granular scintillation like starched linen table-napkins. You look up at the curtained windows in which the curtains are so still that they might be carved out of stone, at the wrought iron-work of balconies imitating plants, at ornamental flourishes referring to other cities and other times, you pass polished wooden double doors with brass bells and plates, the silence of the street consists of the barely perceptible noise of a distant crowd, a crowd made up of so many people so far away that their individual exertions, their individual inhaling and exhaling combine in a sound of continuous unpunctuated breathing, gentle as a breeze, this silence which is not entirely a silence, receives and contains the noise of a front door being shut by a maid, or the yapping of a dog among upholstered furniture and heavy carpets, as a canteen with its green baize lining receives the knives and forks deposited in it. Everything is peaceful and well-appointed. And then suddenly you realize with a shock that each residence, although still, is without a stitch of clothing, is absolutely naked! And what makes it worse is their stance. They are shamelessly displaying themselves to every passer-by!
As the party strolls on, the spaces they see between trunks and branches change in shape and colour. Colour and shape can conspire to suggest the presence, there, between two trees, of a deer.
Look! whispers Mathilde.
The process is the obverse of that of natural camouflage whereby animals merge with their surroundings; her knowledge that deer live in the forest has led Mathilde to create an animal out of the surroundings.
He has deduced from the way Mathilde smiles at him that Camille has confided in her. In her attitude there is an openness, an undisguised curiosity such as women can only afford to show to a new lover or suitor of an intimate friend.
I really thought it was a deer, says Mathilde.
The path leads to a clearing, a meadow of tall grass in which every blade is rendered separate and distinct by the horizontal light and which is full of the stillness and peace of early autumn wherein it seems that all development has been suspended, all consequences indefinitely delayed. Monsieur Hennequin, ignoring the present arguments of Harry Schuwey, stoops to pick some meadow saffron which he presents to his wife. The moment reminded him of the year in which he had courted her.
You chose this woman as you made her your own. At any moment the degree of conviction in your choice depended on your estimate of how exclusively she belonged to you. In the end she belonged to you entirely, and then you were able to say: I have chosen her.
Camille takes the flowers in her gloved hand. And Mathilde pins them to her friend’s blouse.
It is necessary to believe that what you choose for yourself is good. But a part of yourself—the part that was cunning, listened to other men and had known since childhood that life benefits those who benefit themselves—this part remained sceptical. By marrying her, you would lose the opportunity of marrying another. By possessing her you would limit your possible powers of possession. True, you could still choose your mistress. But in the end the same would apply to your choice of her. And so the sceptical part of yourself asked: is she desirable enough to convince me consistently of my own good sense in making her mine? Is her desirability such that it can console me for finding her, rather than any other, desirable?
Camille laughs at a joke of Mathilde’s. Monsieur Hennequin walks through the high grass like a man walking into water. Harry Schuwey is explaining why the official annexation of the Congo which occurred two years ago will benefit trade.
Had the answer been No, you would have dropped her as though she had ceased to exist.
I have never seen such large butterflies, shouts Monsieur Hennequin and running a little distance tries to catch one in his cap.
In order to console you for the loss of all or nearly all the other women in the world, she had to become an ideal. She collaborated with you in the choice of the qualities to be idealized. You chose Camille’s innocence, delicacy, maternal feeling, spirituality. She emphasized these for you. She suppressed the aspects of herself which contradicted them. She became your myth. The only myth which was entirely your own.
Schuwey is arguing that the colonial methods of King Leopold and his private Congo Free State were effective enough twenty years ago and that it was hypocritical of the other European powers to condemn the use of forced labour and harsh repressive measures when they themselves had once used similar methods—less effectively. Nevertheless, Schuwey says, it is perfectly true that kings make bad businessmen because they always put revenue before investment.
You—you have idealized different qualities in Mathilde. She is different in temperament and she is not your wife but your mistress. She has, you say, the most beautiful neck in the world. She is lazy, you believe, as only a pleasure-loving woman can be. She is, you pride yourself, devilishly attractive to men. To idealize the last quality is uniquely satisfying—so long as a second proposition, about which you feel less confident, pertains: and she does not deceive me.
When you consider leaving Camille, when you find that Mathilde, is, after all, too extravagant and erratic, it will not be because you are dissatisfied with what they are but because they will no longer be able to compensate you for what they are not!
I hate you. You have power not because of your wealth but because most men obey you. Everything they learn makes them envy you and envy leads to obedience. They want to be like you. So they live by the same laws, and in the end they choose obedience as their own good.
Your power in yourself is paltry. Your eyes peer out like dead men propped up at their windows to make the crowds in the street below believe they are being watched. Ears, which are the most innocent, the most receptive feature of the face, become either side of your head useless vestigial appendages from a former age, like the useless nipples on your chests. Where do you live? At your fingertips? In your heart? At the bottom of your dreams? Across your shoulders?
You live in the ill-lit, airless space between your last skin and your clothes. You live in your own perambulating mezzanine. Your passions are like rashes.
I hear the lark, says Camille, but I can’t see it.
You cannot threaten me. Your existence reconciles me to the idea of my own death.
I do not want to live indefinitely in a world which you dominate; life in such a world should be short. Life would choose death rather than your company. And even death is reluctant to take you. You will live long.
Monsieur Hennequin approaches the group standing in the corner of the meadow. He holds his clasped hands out in front of him. Apparently he has caught a butterfly.
Let it go, says Camille, you are worse than a small boy.
You wouldn’t have said that to Linnaeus, replies Monsieur Hennequin.
Who was he? asks Schuwey.
Monsieur Hennequin throws his hands up into the air above his head and opens them. There is no butterfly. He roars with laughter.
When you laugh, you laugh crazily (panting in momentary relief) at the perso
n you might have been, and of whom the joke briefly reminded you.
As soon as one of you disappears, there is another to take his place, and the number of places is increasing. There will be shortages of everything in the world before there is a shortage of you!
After the meadow, the path leads to a point which commands a wide view of the plain and the first southern slopes of the Alps. When they stop talking, the silence, the expanse of the lake, the snow on a single Alpine peak, the late extension of the autumn afternoon, combine to make an amalgam which is like a lens for the imagination of even the habitually unimaginative: the lens enables them to glimpse the space surrounding their own lives.
Why should I fear you? It is you who speak of the future and believe in it. You use the future to console yourself for the youth you never had. I do not. I shall be beyond the far reaches of your ridiculous and monstrous continuity, as Geo Chavez has gone. I shall be dead, so why should I fear?
I fear the idea now: the idea of your immortality: the idea of the eternity you impose upon the living before they are dead.
On the return walk to the car he again affably accompanies the men. The forest is darker and cooler. The smell of pine is stronger. In the dusk of the trees the unity of the trees is more pronounced. A single twig of a larch has small bossy protuberances running on alternative sides along its length. When the twig was smaller, each of these was a needle. When the twig becomes a branch, each of these will be a twig. And branches grow from the trunk in the same way. The forest is the result of the same stitch being endlessly repeated.
As he helps Camille into the back of the motor car, he passes her a note. She will read it later. In it is written: My corn-crake, my little one, my most desired, I have something to tell you and you alone. Meet me tomorrow afternoon. I shall wait for you in a car outside Stresa Station tomorrow afternoon.
Monsieur Hennequin discovered the note the same evening. Camille had put it between the pages of Mallarmé’s Poésies which at that time she always kept by her side. The oil lamp on the writing table started to smoke; she called her husband from the adjoining room and asked him to adjust it. (In their Paris house they already had electricity.) By accident Monsieur Hennequin knocked the book off the table. The note fluttered separately to the ground. He stopped to pick up both paper and book. The folded piece of paper intrigued him: he wondered whether Camille had begun to write her own poetry. He unfolded it. The note was signed. He put it back in the book, kissed Camille on the top of her head and left the room as though nothing had happened.
Camille, unsuspecting, instructed her maid to prepare a bath. She had decided that she would ignore the note. But she could not cease asking herself and trying to answer the question: what is it in me that makes him so heedless and so insistent?
After a quarter of an hour Monsieur Hennequin had assessed the full magnitude of the wrong done to him, and he entered his wife’s room without knocking and as though he had just at that instant discovered her infidelity. The door banged against the wall. Camille had unpinned her hair and was in a dressing gown. Monsieur Hennequin did not raise his voice. He spoke harshly between his teeth.
Camille, you must be mad. Can you explain yourself?
She looked up at him, surprised.
Open that book, you know already what is in it. There is a note—a note of assignation addressed to you. From whom is it?
You have no right to spy on me. It is humiliating for both of us.
From whom is it?
Since you have read it and it is signed, you obviously know.
From whom is it?
You tell me—and you can tell me, too, how many other notes I have received from the same gentleman, You are being very stupid, Maurice.
From whom is it?
He stood upright in front of her, his fists clenched, his head slightly inclined so that he could see the place on her head where he had kissed her before leaving the room to decide what it was necessary for him to do. She, in her chair, either had to lean back as though cowering away from him, or else stare at his watch-chain, a few inches from her face. She stared at the gold chain.
I have nothing to be ashamed of, she said. I did not intend to reply to his note, which I found very foolish, and I have done nothing whatsoever to encourage him. You must really believe me.
From whom is it?
Can you say nothing else, Maurice? Why don’t you ask me what has happened. Me. Before jumping to your own conclusions.
From whom is it?
My God, what is the matter with you?
I want to hear you speak his name.
Then I am afraid I shall not give you that satisfaction.
Exactly. Because you know as well as I do that your voice will betray you. You will not be able to keep your feelings—if they can be called feelings—you won’t be able to keep your feelings out of your voice. Say his name now.
I refuse. You are being absurd.
You refuse. Of course you refuse, I have seen the two of you together. I was blind. Blinded by my own trust in you. But now I can see. From the first moment you met him, you ogled him, you put yourself at his side, eyeing him, murmuring—
You have gone out of your mind. You have no right to say these things to me. I have done nothing.
Done nothing! In two days you haven’t had the time to do anything—as you so delicately put it. But you have wanted to, and like—like a prostitute you have interested him.
She tried to push him away with her hands. Then she lowered her head and began to cry.
We shall leave for Paris tomorrow afternoon, he said. You can tell Yvonne to pack. He strode to the door and turned to face her again. The shamelessness of it is what I find so disgusting, he said, the vulgarity! In two days under my very eyes in a small town where we are all of us of necessity on each other’s doorsteps!
Doorsteps! she said, angry whilst crying.
I shall warn him tomorrow morning, he said, if I catch sight of him again with you, I shall shoot him—and have every court in France on my side. I shall shoot him down like—
Would it not be more honourable to challenge him to a duel?
I daresay you see yourself as a great courtesan. But you have neither the tact nor the charm for that. And you happen to be living in the twentieth century.
I beg you not to speak to him.
Him!
Where her gown crossed over he could see her white, rising breasts. Let us go back to Paris, she said, if that will really satisfy you, but do not speak to him.
Evidently, my dear Camille, you are frightened of what I will learn from him.
Very well.
He took the key out of the door and left the room. He took the key because otherwise she might lock him out. She had done so on several occasions after disputes; and later tonight—he was aware of it now—it was possible that he might decide to fuck her like a prostitute.
Camille slept fitfully. At six she got up. Her husband was not in his room and had apparently not slept in his bed. She opened the shutters. The sky was blue without a cloud in it. The pace of the day had not yet established its rhythm; time, like the street with only a few people in it, seemed elongated. The length of the day and the depth of the blue sky constituted a stage whose dimensions suddenly made her shiver. From the window she could see the railway station.
She waited impatiently for the time when she could decently send Yvonne with a message to Mathilde, asking the latter to join her as quickly as possible because she needed her help.
Whilst waiting she ordered coffee.
From the window she saw a cat cross the courtyard with that undeviating fleetness which characterizes cats when they have direct access to what they want. The cat had heard the noise of the coffee grinder being turned by the peasant girl in the kitchen, who sat on a stool and held the grinder between her knees. For the cat the noise signified cream. When the maid finished grinding the coffee, she would go to the wooden larder in the wall and take down a large jug o
f cream. She would pour the cream from this jug into small silver jugs, and if the cat rubbed itself against her leg, she would also pour some into a chipped blue and white plate and place it by the door to the yard for the cat to drink.
She looked several times through her wardrobe to decide what to wear today. They would be catching the train to Paris. She was being taken home to her children, herself like a child who had misbehaved. She had a dark travelling suit in linen lined with patterned satin, which would be highly suitable. She decided, however, to wear her trotteur of pale lilac grey. She was being taken home under protest.
It was not for her advice that she needed Mathilde but for her assistance. Mathilde was a person, Camille considered, with different standards from her own and with far more luxurious tastes. Mathilde understood contracts and because she understood them, she was able to keep them. When she married Monsieur Le Diraison, aged sixty-four, she undertook to make the rest of his life agreeable in exchange for the inheritance she would receive at his death. And for five years she had spoilt the old sick man like a child. She, Camille, would be incapable of carrying out such a bargain; she believed that life should be finer than that. She believed in a justice whose essence was spiritual, not material. She liked the parable of the labourers in the vineyard of whom the last to be hired, who worked for only one hour, were nevertheless paid the same amount as those who had borne the burden and heat of the whole day.
