by John Berger
I mean your future.
Mine? Everything depends upon my health.
You don’t look sick to me.
If you’re sent to hospital when you are sick, your dog doesn’t look after your cows. I live alone.
She raised her glass to his. I think I could find you work in Mestri.
He was looking at her small feet, thinking: everything between a man and a woman is a question of how much you give up of one thing to have another—an exchange.
You are bound to be influenced by the property relations of which you are a part. Her voice was tender, as if she were explaining something intimate. The Kulaks sided with the bourgeoisie, and the little peasants with the petit bourgeoisie. You are wrong to think only about the price of milk.
She comes, he told himself, from this place of water and islands where there is no earth at all.
The fact is peasants will disappear, she continued, the future lies elsewhere.
I’d like to have children, he said.
You have to find a wife.
He poured out more wine.
You’d find a wife if you moved here.
I’d cut off my right hand rather than work in a factory.
All the men dancing there, she said, they’re nearly all factory workers.
He had never seen so many men in white shirts. They wore their shirts tied round their waists to show off their stomachs. They were as cunning as weasels. Their cuffs were rolled back only halfway up their forearms, as if they had just got out of bed.
Do they caress well? he asked.
Who?
The weasels over there.
Caress?
What a man should do to a woman.
Let’s dance, she said.
The owl was hooting a tango.
Who’s milking the cows tonight? she whispered.
Who am I dancing with?
Marietta is dancing with Bruno, she said, as he pulled her hand up and looked along their arms—as if taking aim with a gun.
As the tempo increased they advanced and turned more and more quickly. People began to watch them. His shirt and his heavy shoes announced he was from the country. But he danced well, they made a couple. Some of the bystanders began to clap in time with the music. It was like watching a duel—a duel between the paving stones and their four feet. How long would they keep it up?
Now they were walking down a narrow street, with old men on wicker chairs, and grandmothers playing with balloons to amuse their grandchildren. At the end of the street was suspended another gigantic portrait: a great domed head, like a beehive of thought, wearing glasses.
That’s Gramsci.
He put his arm round her shoulders so that she could lean her head against his damp flannel shirt.
Antonio Gramsci, she said. He taught us all.
You wouldn’t mistake him for a horse dealer! he said.
Past the portrait, they came to a cobbled quayside overlooking the lagoon toward Murano. In places grass had grown over the cobbles. He stared across the black water and she, carrying her sandals, wandered over to an abandoned gondola, moored by the corner of the Rio di Santa Eufemia. She sat down on the platform by the stern near the wooden oarlock. Sun and water had stripped the gondola of its paint, which was now wood grey. It must once have belonged to a wine merchant, for several demijohns lay on their sides in the prow.
Do you think they are empty? she asked him.
Instead of answering, he jumped into the gondola, which rocked violently. Making his way forward to the prow, he did his best to correct every lurch by leaning in the opposite direction, like someone dancing in a conga line.
Sit down, for God’s sake, sit down! she shouted.
She was crouching in the bottom of the boat. Its sides were smacking the water and splashing the air.
He picked up a demijohn and held it against the sky with one hand as if wringing the neck of a goose.
Empty! he boomed.
Sit! she shrieked. Sit!
This is how they found themselves lying on the rush mat in the bottom of the gondola. After a while the smacking of the water ceased and a quiet lapping took its place. Yet the calm did not last long. Soon the gondola was again lurching from side to side with water dripping from its gunwales and its staves thumping the lagoon.
If we capsize, can you swim? she whispered.
No.
Yes, Bruno, yes, yes, yes …
Afterwards they lay on their backs, panting.
Look at the stars. Don’t they make you feel small? she said.
The stars look down at us, she continued, and sometimes I think everything, everything except killing, everything takes so long because they are so far away.
His other hand was trailing in the water. Her teeth bit his ear.
The world changes so slowly.
His hand from the water grasped her breast.
One day there’ll be no more classes. I believe that, don’t you? she murmured and pulled his head down to her other breast.
There’s always been good and bad, he said.
We’re making progress, don’t you believe that?
All our ancestors asked the same thing, he said, you and I will never know in this life why it was made the way it is.
He entered her again. The gondola smacked the water and splashed the air.
When they crossed the narrow island to the pierhead, where the last vaporetto would stop, the music was over. Only a few drunks, immobile as statues, remained in the piazza. Marietta went to fetch his instrument case. He gazed across the lagoon. He could see the bell-tower they had climbed. The guide said it had toppled over at the beginning of the century. No roots. He remembered the date: 14th July 1902, the year of his father’s birth. To the right there were still lights in the Doge’s Palace. According to the guide, the Palace had been destroyed or partly destroyed by fire seven times. There had never been peace in that building. Too much power and no roots. One day it would be robbed and pillaged and after that it would be used as a hen house.
Marietta handed him his instrument case.
Play for me. Play me something.
He put the case down on the quayside. Out of his pocket he took a small mouth organ, and turning toward the Doge’s Palace, began to play. The music was speaking to him.
Before it is light—
She was staring at his back, relaxed and downcast like the back of a man peeing, except that his hands were to his mouth.
—Before it is light … when you’ve dressed and gone into the stable—
With her fingers she was touching the nape of his neck.
—the animals are lying there—
She was pressing her hand between his shoulder blades and could feel his lungs and the music in the roof of his mouth.
—lying there on beech leaves, and your tiredness like a child you have dragged from its sleep—
Her hand felt under the belt of his trousers.
—and through the window you see the span of the stars—
She noticed that one of his bootlaces was undone. She knelt down to tie it for him.
—the span of the stars into whose well we are thrown at birth like salt into water—
Neither of them noticed the vaporetto approaching the pierhead.
Come to Mestri, she sighed, come to Mestri. I’ll find you work.
The bus left at 3 A.M. Most of the band wanted to sleep. Some husbands put their heads on their wives’ shoulders, in other cases the wife leaned her head against her man. The lights were switched out one by one as the coach took the road for Verona. The young drummer sitting beside Bruno tried one last joke.
Do you know what hell is?
Do you?
Hell is where bottles have two holes and women have none.
[For Jacob]
Their Railways
Keep tears
My heart
For prose.
Train
Flammes bleues
Fleurs jaunes.
>
In the ditches
I am water.
Between
Grow kingcups of your childhood.
Sunk in my eyes
Skies of the churchyard.
Through arteries
Of gravel
Whispering to my grasses
The blood of good-byes.
Flammes bleues
Fleurs jaunes
Their railways.
1985/86
Acknowledgements
The trilogy Into Their Labours occupied me for fifteen years. During this period, Tom Engelhardt edited my books. Dear Tom, you encouraged, corrected, and upheld me. Thank you.
Perhaps I would never have had the courage to begin the project if I had not received, before a page was written, the support of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. To everyone in Paulus Potterstraat and Connecticut Avenue and to Saul Landau, thank you.
A Note on the Author
JOHN BERGER was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel G, To the Wedding and King. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. He lives and works in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag). His collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket was published in 2001. His latest novel, From A to X, was published in 2007.
By the Same Author
Fiction
The Foot of Clive
Corker’s Freedom
A Fortunate Man
Seventh Man
The Trilogy: Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag)
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Photocopies
To the Wedding
King
Here is Where We Meet
From A to X
Poetry
Pages of the Wound
Non-Fiction
A Painter of Our Time
Permanent Red
Art and Revolution
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays
The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles
Ways of Seeing
Another Way of Telling
The Success and Failure of Picasso
About Looking
The Sense of Sight
Keeping a Rendezvous
The Shape of a Pocket
Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger)
Selected Essays of John Berger (ed. Geoff Dyer)
Bento’s Sketchbook
Also Available by John Berger
G.
Winner of the Booker Prize
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize
In this luminous novel, John Berger relates the story of G., a modern Don Juan forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war.
With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, top reveal the conditions of the libertine’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumlation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through the liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi’s attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.
‘The most interesting novel in English I have read for many years … It is one of the few serious attempts of our time to do for the novel what Brecht did for drama: to reshape it in the light of twentieth-century experience … A fine, humane and challenging book’ New Republic
‘A rich and pleasurable reading experience’
Guardian
‘To read G. is to find a writer one demands to know more about. Not to sit at the feet of his aphorisms or unravel the tangles of his allusions, but to explore more fully an intriguing and powerful mind and talent’
New York Times
Pig Earth
With this haunting first volume of his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth, relates the stories of sceptical, hard working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvellous, indomitable Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains.
‘Brilliant … These stories have a remarkable sense of celebration’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Pig Earth is a relentlessly realist work … Doggedly scrupulous in its detail, its sheer unshowy knowledgeability … Berger is one of the few English writers who can interleave poems and political essays of equivalent intricacy’
New Statesman
Lilac and Flag
As Dickens and Balzac did for their time, so John Berger does for ours, rendering the movement of a people and the passing of a way of life. In Lilac and Flag, the Alpine village of the two earlier volumes of the Into Their Labours trilogy has been forsaken for the mythic city of Troy. Here, amidst shanty-towns, factories, opulent hotels, fading heritages and steadfast dreams, the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meagre livings as best they can. And two young lovers embark upon a passionate, desperate journey of love and survival and find transcending hope both for themselves and for us as their witnesses.
‘Remarkable … Like all great novelists John Berger guides his characters and readers tenderly and with intimate humour’
Michael Ondaatje
‘A magnificent trilogy … Moving in an almost unbearable way’
Anthony Burgess
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos
This book – call it a book of love letter meditating on place, mortality, art, love and absence – is as breathtaking and spare as we have come to expect of John Berger. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio, or the sight of a spray of lilac on a windowsill, to profound explorations of death and immigration, this is a beautiful and intimate response to our century.
‘He handles thoughts the way an artist handles paint. His mind is spattered with colour … His writing has a physical reality’
The Times
‘John Berger is genius invisible. His life’s work is synonymous with the creation of unforgettable living portraits’
Scotsman
Photocopies
In his new book John Berger traces in words moments lived in Europe at the end of the millennium. These moments are not fiction. They happened. As he wrote them Berger sometimes imagined a frieze of ‘photocopies’ arranged side by side, giving future readers a panoramic view of what this moment in history was like when lived. Each ‘photocopy’ is about somebody for whom Berger felt a kind of love, but the book also becomes an unintentional portrait of the author as well.
‘This beautiful book bring non-fiction writing close to drawing – the sort of drawing that both records and investigates … Berger makes you believe in goodness: not an impossible state out of our reach, but a capacity in all of us to do with honesty, not faking. This is a marvelous book’
New Statesman
‘Awe-inspiring … All the writing has a still, insistent beauty … Berger sometimes manages a moment of absolute and truthful emotion, which can be extraordinary’
Observer
To the Wedding
With an introduction by Nadeem Aslam
‘No one knows more about the necessity of love than John Berger: what love makes us capable of, and incapable of. This is a book of the most precise humanity. No one
who reads it will forget what it makes us understand: every action has its twin, conscionable or unconscionable; every truth, its shadow in the world; everything lost, alive in love’
Anne Michaels
A mother and father, estranged for years, are travelling across Europe to their daughter’s wedding. Vibrant, beautiful Ninon has fallen in love with the young Italian Gino. She is twenty-three years old – and she is dying of AIDS. As their wedding approaches, the story of Ninon and Gino unfolds. On their wedding day, Ninon will take off her shoes and dance with Gino: they will dance as if they will never tire; as if their happiness is eternal; as if death will never touch them. To the Wedding is a novel of devastating heartache, soaring hope and above all, love that triumphs over death.
‘A great, sad, and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death’
Michael Ondaatje
‘A wonderful book, one which yields immediate pleasure and promises to stay long in the mind’
Sunday Times
‘The finale, the wedding itself, is a masterpiece … This is a novel that will haunt you’
Sunday Telegraph
‘One of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time’
Colum McCann
Here is Where We Meet
No one appreciates the detail of being alive more than the dead. In Lisbon, a man encounters his mother sitting on a park bench who laughs with the impudence of a schoolgirl. She has been dead for fifteen years. In Krakow market he recognises Ken, his passeur, the most important person in his life between the ages of eleven and seventeen. They last met when Ken was sixty-five – forty years ago. The number of lives that enter any one life is incalculable. In this nomadic and playful book, which travels through fictions across Europe, seemingly disparate stories reveal themselves to be linked, mislaid objects find their place and sensual memories penetrate the present.
‘A triumph … Magical … Peppered with unforgettable images, it makes us stop and take a breath. It makes us see the world afresh’