by John Berger
On a later page of the same diary Zdena has copied out an extract from an article she read in a newspaper. At the top of the page, in capital letters, written in pencil, is the word Pain.
“Those treated for the illness, states a doctor, are frequently not treated for their suffering and pain. Yet physical pain produces anguish which in turn increases the pain. The infections and parasites which the body cannot resist when SIDA has declared itself, provoke hellish itchings, nausea, cramps of the stomach, open sores in the mouth, migraines following radiotherapies, shooting pains along the legs, and all these, accompanied by a crippling fatigue, strike one after the other; consequently they shut every horizon and prevent the sick person from thinking about anything else—as well-meaning advisors sometimes recommend. Pain cuts off, isolates and paralyses. It also produces a feeling of total failure and defeat. Often, in order for the pain of SIDA patients to be taken account of, their suffering has to reach such a paroxysm that it disturbs other patients and only then are steps taken to alleviate it …”
May I ask your mission, Signora?
Blow up your ship!
Ha! Ha! The Signora has a fine sense of humour.
The ship’s officer waits and then abruptly leaves as if he has remembered something he has to do.
Her handbag arranged, Zdena goes to the railing and gazes into the still lagoon water that reflects nothing. The ship, changing direction, creates a momentary breeze which lifts a lock of hair from her damp forehead.
She walks to the bows and waits there, letting the breeze cool her face; later she returns to her bench.
There, she opens her bag, which is now in perfect order, and finds the diary and the pencil stub. On the page for June 6 she writes in her upright handwriting: Let these days never end, let them be long like centuries!
I wanted to ask them in the hospital in Bologna to tell me the truth—as if there was another truth! I stopped myself for I knew there was only one truth—which is my death.
Straightaway I hear a second voice, whispering. It crosses my mind that Gino speaks like a man who, bent over what he’s working at with his hands, is suddenly prompted to look up and smile at a passer-by who has stopped to watch him. And I’m that passer-by.
This lucioperca, Gino is whispering, this five-kilo lucioperca is going to be the first dish of the wedding feast. Aunt Emanuela has already been cooking dishes for three days. I have invited my stall-holder friends and a rock group from Cremona.
I caught the lucioperca this morning and I want to cook him myself. The aunt is the only one of the family who can hold a live eel and cut its head off with one blow from a little axe. She talks to it. When I try, the eels twist themselves round my arm. Yet I want to prepare the lucioperca myself, for he is my surprise.
Ninon has her secrets—like the secret of all she’s going to wear under her wedding dress, which I shan’t see till tomorrow night, and the lucioperca is my secret which Ninon won’t see till we sit down at the wedding table after I’ve carried her across the bridge and she has probably kicked her silver shoes off and one of the girls has put them on her feet again and we are married.
I’m going to make a pesce lesso in aspic. Eighty-three centimetres long. Even Father will raise an eyebrow, for the lucioperca looks metallic—green like oxidised bronze, then copper, then silver … A metallic fish from the depths.
They call him the owl-fish because of his extra large eyes and he has them because he lives in the night at the bottom of the river, two, three, three and a half metres down. He never comes to the surface. They live in gangs, these fishes, on the riverbed. You and your rivers! Ninon says, angry. Gino, she snaps when I come home at midday, what did you find? A frog, I say and I jump like one, a big bullfrog. For months she hasn’t been able to laugh with me and this morning she did. She laughs with her whole body at me imitating the frog, and only her eyes still look perplexed at her own laughing.
To know where the big fish are, you have to know the river, you have to feel the river’s instincts. The fish are doing exactly the same thing in their way. More times than not, they outwit you, le carpe, i lucci.
Can you see there, where the silver scales go a little darker like a narrow path, along his flank? That’s called his lateral line and with it he listens to the river.
I tell Ninon she has a lateral line too and I trace it with my finger. With her it begins under her ear, goes under her arm, circles the little hill of her breast, runs down the steps of her ribs, keeps equidistant between navel and hip, slips by the border of her bosco and tears down the soft inside of her thigh to her ankle. For months she couldn’t laugh. For months she wouldn’t let me near her.
You have two lateral lines, I tease her, left and right and they have eyelashes all the way along them!
You’re going mad, Gino, she says, this fucking illness has sent you out of your mind.
So I hold her in my arms and tell her how under the silver scales there are pores which have little buds like our taste-buds in the mouth, only these ones on the lateral line have tiny tears at their ends and around the tear duct there are lashes, some soft and some stiff and they record every quiver in the current, they send messages about any change in the water, the slightest stir of another body moving, or a stone diverting the flow of water. The lashes are real, I tell her, no madness. Ninon has eyes which are sometimes green and sometimes golden.
I told a doctor I met in the market about the dates and her last lymphocyte count and, according to him, the medico in Parma, we can perhaps count on two, three, three and a half years of clapping—provided she has things to clap for! After that the sickness begins. Nobody can be sure.
Tie together the court-bouillon of bay leaves and thyme and fennel, add white wine, peppercorns, sliced onions and a little lemon peel. The fish saucepan is Aunt Emanuela’s—you could cook a tuna in it.
It’s the biggest lucioperca I’ve ever seen caught anywhere. I knew they were there, the big carnivores, this morning. Don’t ask me how. Up against the bank where a larch had fallen into the river and had been shaved by the water of all its bark. A bad place for casting, for the line could easily tangle with the tree. Be careful, I told myself. Go slow. Me, the crazy man watching his line sink, one, two, three, three and a half metres down till the little lead earring touched the riverbed. I was using a cunning sliver of roach as bait and this I played, jerking the bait to jump like a living gudgeon, little leaps along the silt, as if wounded, never allowing the line to go too slack, little leaps like from one black note to another on a piano, and Lucioperca believes it’s a wounded gudgeon, he opens his enormous mouth and he swallows the hook. The carnivore outwitted. Then the fight is to stop him winding me round the tree. Each time I forestall him. Foreseeing his every move. I forget everything else. Look at him now on the kitchen table!
We’re going to live the years with craziness and cunning and care. All three. The three Cs. Matteo, the boxer, says I’m mad. He says I’m throwing my life away. That’s what most people do, I say, not me.
The fishes, I tell her, listen through their flanks to the river they were born into. I told her this and she fell asleep, smiling.
The signalman was waiting on the quayside at Chioggia when the motonave arrived. Jean Ferrero and Zdena Holecek spotted each other before the ship was tied up, but they didn’t wave. She came down the gangplank and walked across the paving stones to where he was standing beside his bike, by a white bridge which is like the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, except that it is not roofed. He has taken off his helmet.
They look into one another’s eyes and, seeing the same pain, fall forward into each other’s arms.
Jean! And her voice, so helplessly expressive, carries his name across an entire continent.
Zdena! he whispers.
On the bike, as they drive along the road to Gomacchio, their sorrow becomes a little lighter. Like any pilot with a passenger behind, he feels her weight inclined against his back. Like any pillion, she has placed her
life in his hands, and this somehow relieves the pain a little.
I turn and I turn and I can see it in the mirror. It’ll take your breath away, my wedding dress!
The wedding in Gorino hasn’t taken place yet. But the future of a story, as Sophocles knew, is always present. The wedding hasn’t begun. I will tell you about it. Everybody is still asleep.
The sky is clear and the moon almost full. I think Ninon, staying in the house of Gino’s aunt Emanuela, will be the first to wake, long before it is light. She will wrap a towel round her head like a turban and wash her body. Afterwards she will stand before the tall mirror and touch herself as if searching for a pain or a blemish. She will find none. She holds her turbaned head like Nefertiti.
As the river Po approaches the sea, it becomes two hands, its waters dividing into ten fingers. Yet it depends a little on how one counts. One could say four hands with twenty fingers. The waters change all the while and stay the same only on the map. The land is often lower than the river or the sea. In places where the land has been drained, tomatoes and tobacco have been planted. On the wilder strips, plants grow with little pods instead of leaves: antediluvian plants, the cousins of seaweed. The area is sparsely populated—for it is scarcely a place. The village of Gorino is on the branch of the river which is called the Po di Goro.
The ancients believed that the first act of creation was the separation of earth and sky and this was difficult, for earth and sky desired one another and did not want to separate. Around Gorino the land has become water to stay as close as possible to the sky, to reflect it as in a mirror.
The houses where the people of the Po delta live are small and makeshift. Salt eats away their building materials. Many of them, instead of a garden, have a net stretched on a frame as large as the house, and this net can be lowered by a winch to catch fish. The sky is full of birds—cormorants, grebes, terns, herons, ducks, little egrets, gulls, who eat fish.
In Emanuela’s small house, Federico is the next one to wake and, as the waters reflect the first light, he starts to carry benches and trestles and wooden planks out of the house into an adjoining field where there are three apple trees. Later he will fetch Gino’s market parasols with their wooden spokes, each one with a diameter of over three metres.
Aunt Emanuela, her hair in curlers, is making coffee in the kitchen. Today’s the day! she says, smoothing the ground coffee flat with a teaspoon in the machine, today’s the day!
Through the dark kitchen window shine the distant headlights of a vehicle approaching along the dyke, above the roof of the house, like an airplane coming in to land.
Better be Roberto, Federico says to his sister, we should start cooking soon, it needs a good four hours even five to cook a lamb properly.
Roberto knows his job, Federico.
Best butcher in Modena, Gino told me, his scaloppini are leaves from the Bible!
I’m glad Gino didn’t sleep here, one of you is enough.
You cook your eels, Emanuela, and look after the women.
When I see her, she’s so beautiful I want to weep.
Who told you? demands Federico.
Told me what? I’m saying she’s beautiful.
Then don’t talk about weeping.
What’s the matter with you, Federico?
Begin the eels, woman.
When the fire’s hot enough I’ll begin, not before.
A klaxon sounds, the van arrives and Roberto shouts from the driving seat to Federico standing in front of the house: Where’s the kitchen, Count?
In the next field. Come and have some coffee first.
The van has woken up the other women: Leila, Marella and Zdena. Federico was the only man to sleep in the small house that night. He slept on the sofa. How the others managed he doesn’t know. He only knows that his sister insisted upon giving Ninon her letto matrimoniale. Tonight the fiancée must be alone, she said.
When the sun is high enough above the horizon to light the grass on top of the dyke, but before there are any shadows in the village square, the other market friends of Gino will arrive in their vans: Luca, the pastry cook; Ercole, the jeweller who also sells spices; Renzo, the cheese merchant with his nana; Gisella who trades in all the silks of Asia; and Scoto who sells only watermelons and listens to them as if they were oracles. Streetsellers, whether we sell tamata or melons, scarves or meat, have certain things in common. We all know how to get attention, how to joke, how to get up early and how to set ourselves up anywhere where there’s a chance of a stream of people. When we get tired, we long for silence; yet silence we fear, as actors fear empty theatres. With my white stick I wander among Gino’s friends and feel at home.
They have parked the vans in a circle on a patch of land which makes me think of the basement where Zdena went to buy her birdsong instruments in Bratislava. This one is an open-air basement and the ceiling is the sky, but it’s lower than the sea and lower than the village square where the church and the war memorial stand. In the middle of the circle Roberto, the butcher, has begun cooking the lamb. The carcass is turning on a spit over a massive brasier of wood embers. From time to time he bastes the meat, with a spoon the size of a hat, from a bucket of marinade he has prepared. Federico occasionally works a pair of bellows. A ring of men in immaculate white shirts watch and commentate. The roasting meat smells like every feast day since feasts began. The women chatting in the vans are putting the final touches to their hats and make-up. In the house Leila has been working on the bride’s dress for two hours.
The marriage service in the church of Gorino will take place at 11:30 a.m.
Afterwards a hundred people, wedding guests and villagers, will be waiting in the square. Opposite the church porch is a massive plane tree. Around it have been arranged tables with dozens of sparkling glasses and, along one edge, dark green bottles of vino spumante. Federico is systematically turning the glasses the right way up. Certain men are born hosts and they find it difficult to be either guests or spectators. Such men often lead rather solitary lives—gangsters, deep-sea fishermen, cattle dealers. Federico is a solitary. He only put on his splendid pinstripe suit when he saw the curato go into the church and the organ started playing. Now that the ceremony is over, he pours sparkling wine into the glasses, for he knows he can do it better than either of the waiters. They spill too much.
Kids from the school have come to watch. They have never seen so many strangers in the village, not even when a stray coach arrives in the summer and the tourists get out to look at the lighthouse. Today there are women in hats like actresses wear on television. Today there are men with roses in their buttonholes. And there is jewellery everywhere.
What are they waiting for?
Nothing special.
Did you see the banquet? I went down to the tables behind the house. There’s everything you can imagine—melons and prosciutto and asparagus—
Gelati?
The sheep is cooking.
It’s a lamb.
What are they waiting for?
It’s just beginning, this is what weddings are like.
How do you know?
My sister got married. It goes on all night, all night.
One of the boys will make a fucky-fuckie sign with his fingers. The boy whose sister got married shoves his open hand up against the other one’s nose.
Friends of Ninon and Gino are standing by the church porch and their fists are full of rice to throw over the newlyweds as soon as they appear. The rice probably comes from Vercelli, the town from which Jean Ferrero’s parents emigrated in the 1930s.
Jean, standing behind Zdena, surveys the crowd like a delegate at a political meeting; throughout his whole adult life he has only worn a shirt and tie when attending Congresses. The word Comrades is on the tip of his tongue. Impulsively he puts his large hand on Zdena’s shoulder. She touches it immediately with her fingers which ache.
Suddenly the bride and bridegroom are there. A rain of rice. A woman claps, carried away by memori
es. The curato beams.
The air plucking at Ninon’s veil, her white flaring skirt with its quivering lace hems, her loose billowing sleeves buttoned tight around her wrists, the glistening silver shoes on which she walks so delicately as they come forward into the square, that she seems to be half tottering and half gliding, and the manner in which Gino places his feet, as if any one of his steps might have to suddenly anchor them both—all this suggests the force of a mysteriously gentle yet irresistible gale. Have you noticed it blowing at other weddings? At this one the expression of the couple’s eyes has been swept by the gale too.
Zdena and Jean gaze at their daughter and their son-in-law and at this moment their own faces are as astounded as children’s.
They’re married, a man shouts, Long Live the Bride!
A picture please, says the official photographer from Ferrara, a picture, please, with the bride holding her bouquet.
Fetch the bouquet! She left it in the church.
It’s blown away, whispers a little girl, not knowing why she says this.
Gino takes Ninon’s hand, moves closer, and standing side by side, her shoulder pressing against him, the two of them wait for the gale to pass.
Give him a kiss, calls out Ercole the spice man, come on, give him a kiss.
Ssshhh! They’ve a lifetime for that. Let them be. Tranquillo.
She’s so lovely, declares Mimi, the wife of Luca the pastry cook, so lovely she should have ten children! She counts the babies on her ten plump fingers.
Nobody has ten children these days, Mimi.
The young know things our parents didn’t.
It must have taken hours and hours to do her hair in all those little plaits.
What are they called?
People call them dreadlocks. But they’re wrong. Never seen so many.
The waiters are handing out glasses of sparkling wine.
Marella catches Ninon’s eye and sends her a kiss with her hand. In her own eyes there are tears.
