by John Berger
She took a step towards me. She was whispering, with her bathing-costume smile, and her brown eyes fixed on some point in the distance.
The something which is made can give no support to anything else, it is only a desire. It possesses nothing, nothing is given to it, there is no place for it! Yet it exists! It exists. He was a shoemaker, I believe, the man who said all this.
Sounds to me like Jacob Boehme.
Stop dropping names!
She laughed her impertinent seventeen-year-old laugh.
Stop dropping names! she repeated and giggled. From here you could kill somebody dropping a name!
We gazed down at the red tiles and the double mattress in the window. The dog had stopped barking. And, when she stopped laughing, I held her cold hand.
Just write down what you find, she said.
I’ll never know what I’ve found.
No, you’ll never know.
It takes courage to write, I said.
The courage will come. Write down what you find, and do us the courtesy of noticing us.
You are no longer here!
Hence, the courtesy, John!
After saying this, she got to her feet, handed me the folding stool and proceeded to the door that Fernando had left unlocked. There she tugged it open and stepped – as if she had done the same thing every morning of her life – over the water duct, up on to the narrow flagged walkway.
Inside the air was cooler – as if we were underground instead of being in the sky. The light too was different. Outside, the daylight had been sparkling and transparent; having penetrated the tunnel, it changed and became golden. Every fifty metres the vaulted roof opened out into a small tower, which was built like a stone lantern so that daylight could enter. And from each lantern, as one after another they receded into the distance, the daylight fell like a golden curtain, the curtains getting forever smaller. Sound was also different. In the quiet we heard the lapping – as discrete as a cat’s tongue when drinking – of water flowing down the two basalt-stone channels on its way to the Mãe d’Agua.
I’m not sure how long we stood there facing each other – perhaps for the fifteen years since her death.
After the death of mothers, time often doubles or accelerates its speed.
Eventually she turned round, bit her lower lip, and began to walk. As she did so, she repeated without looking back: The courtesy, John!
She approached the cascade of light from the first stone lantern. Either side of her, the water reflected sparks that bobbed up and down like floating candles. When she entered the gold, it hid her like a curtain, and I did not see her again until she re-emerged from the light on the far side. She had become small because of the distance. She seemed to be walking with increasing ease; the further away she got, the more sprightly she became. She disappeared into the next golden curtain and when she reappeared I could scarcely distinguish her.
I bent down and I let my hand trail in the water which was flowing after her.
2
Genève
There’s a photo of Jorge Luis Borges, probably taken in the early 1980s, a year or two before he left Buenos Aires to come to die in Genève, a city he claimed as one of his ’native lands’. You can see in the photo how he’s almost blind and you sense how blindness is a prison – something he often referred to in his poetry. At the same time, his face in this photo is one inhabited by many other lives. It is a face full of company; many other men and women with their appetites speak through his almost sightless eyes. A face of countless desires. It’s a portrait which might be lent to the poets across the centuries and millennia, indexed as ’Anonymous’.
The city of Genève is as contradictory and enigmatic as a living person. I could fill in an identity card. Nationality: Neutral. Gender: Feminine. Age: (discretion intervenes) Looks younger than she is. Civil status: Separated. Occupation: Observer. Distinguishing physical characteristic: Slight stoop due to short-sightedness. General remarks: Sexy and secretive.
The only other European town whose natural situation may be as breathtaking is Toledo. (The towns themselves are utterly different.) In thinking of Toledo, however, I’m influenced by El Greco’s painting of the town; whereas Genève has never been painted to any effect by anybody, and her only symbol is a toy water-spout shooting up out of the lake, which she turns off and on like a halogen lamp.
In the sky over Genève, the clouds – depending upon the winds, of which the two most notorious are the bise and the foehn – come from Italy, Austria, France, or, down the Rhine valley from Germany, the Low Countries, and the Baltic. Sometimes they come from as far away as North Africa and Poland. Genève is a place of convergence, and she knows it.
For centuries travellers passing through have left letters, instructions, maps, lists, messages, for Genève to deliver to other travellers arriving later. She reads them all with a mixture of curiosity and pride. Those unfortunate enough not to be born in our canton, she concludes, are apparently obliged to live out every one of their passions, and passion is a blinding misfortune. Her central Post Office was designed to be as imposing as her Cathedral.
At the beginning of the twentieth century Genève was a regular meeting point for European revolutionaries and conspirators – just as today it is one of the rendezvous of the new world economic order. More permanently, it hosts the International Red Cross, the United Nations, the International Labour Office, the World Health Organization, the Ecumenical Council of Churches. Forty per cent of the population is foreign. Twenty-five thousand people live and work there without papers. At the UN about twenty-four men are employed full-time simply to carry files and letters from one department to another.
To the revolutionary conspirators, to the troubled international negotiators, and to the financial mafiosi of today, Genève has offered, and continues to offer, tranquility, her white wine tasting of fossilised sea shells, her trips on the lake, snow, beautiful pears, sunsets reflected in the water, hoar frost on the trees at least once a year, the safest lifts in the world, Arctic fish from her lake, milk chocolate, and a comfort which is so unceasing, discreet and accomplished that it becomes lecherous.
In the summer of 1914, when Borges was fifteen, his family, on a visit from the Argentine, found themselves trapped in Genève by the outbreak of war. Borges went to school at the Collège Calvin. His sister attended the art school. It was probably while he was walking between the Rue Ferdinand-Hodler, where they had an apartment, and the Collège Calvin, that he composed his first poems.
The Genevois themselves frequently get bored with their town, fondly bored – they seldom dream of freeing themselves and leaving her for good, rather they find their excitement in travelling far and wide. They are enterprising, often intrepid, travellers. A city full of travellers’ tales, told around dinner tables she has laid and decorated with her usual meticulous care, with never, as it were, a single spelling mistake, each dish always ready on time and served with a noncommittal smile.
Despite her direct descent from Calvin, nothing she hears or witnesses shocks her. Nothing tempts her either, or rather nothing which is obvious. Her secret passion (for of course she has one) is well hidden and discerned by only a few.
On the southern side of Genève, very close to the Rhône as it flows out of the lake, there are a number of narrowish, shortish, straight streets of four-storey buildings, built in the nineteenth century originally as residential apartments. Some were later turned into offices, others are still used as flats.
These streets lead like the aisles which run between the bookshelves of an extensive library. As seen from the street, each line of shut windows is the glass door to another bookshelf. The closed front doors of varnished wood are the drawers of the library catalogue. Behind these walls everything is waiting to be read. I call them her archive streets.
They have nothing to do with the town’s official archives of committee reports, forgotten memos, resolutions passed, minutes of a million meetings, findings of
obscure researchers, desperate public appeals, the first drafts of speeches with love doodles in the margin, prophecies so accurate they had to be buried, complaints about interpreters, and endless annual budgets – all these are stored elsewhere in the offices of the International Organisations. What is waiting to be read on the shelves in the archive streets is private, unprecedented and almost weightless.
Archives are different from book libraries. Libraries are made up of bound volumes, whose every page has been repeatedly reread and corrected. Archives often consist of papers which were originally abandoned or laid aside. Genève’s passion is for discovering, cataloguing and checking what has been laid aside. No wonder she’s short-sighted. No wonder she arms herself – even when asleep – against pity.
For example, how to catalogue a small page torn from a desk calendar, covering the two weeks from Sunday 22 September to Saturday 5 October in the year 1935? In the small space for notes, between the columns of the two weeks, are written eleven words. The handwriting is sloping and quick and unconsidered. Perhaps a woman’s. The words, in English, are: all night, all night and what is it on a postcard.
What does Genève’s passion bring her? It assuages her insatiable curiosity. A curiosity which has nothing – or very little – to do with inquisitiveness or gossip. She is neither concierge, nor judge. Genève is an observer, fascinated by the sheer variety of human predicaments and consolations.
Confronted with any situation, however outrageous, she is capable of muttering ’I know’ and then of adding gently: Sit there, I’ll see what I can bring you.
Impossible to guess whether what she will bring will come from a bookshelf, a medicine chest, a cellar, a wardrobe or the drawer of her bedside table. And strangely, it is this question about the provenance of what she will bring that makes her sexy.
When he was seventeen, Borges had an experience in Genève which marked him deeply. He only spoke about it much later to one or two friends. His father had decided it was high time his son lost his virginity. Accordingly he arranged an appointment for him with a prostitute. A bedroom on a second floor. A late spring afternoon. Near to where the family lived. Perhaps in the Place du Bourg-de-Four, perhaps in the Rue du Général-Dufour. Borges may have confused the two names. I would opt for the Rue du Général-Dufour because it is an archive street.
Face to face with the prostitute, the seventeen-year-old Borges was paralysed by shyness, shame and the suspicion that his father was a client of the same woman. Throughout his life his own body distressed him. He undressed only in poems, which, at the same time, were his clothes.
When the woman noticed the young man’s distress, that afternoon in the Rue du Général-Dufour, she threw a peignoir over her white shoulders and, stooping slightly, walked over towards the door.
Sit there, she said gently. I’ll see what I can bring you.
What she brought was something she found in one of the archives.
Many years later, when Borges was the Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, his imagination became the tireless collector of put-aside objects, torn telltale notes, mislaid fragments. His great poetic oeuvre is a kind of catalogue of the items of such a collection: some man’s memory of a woman who left him thirty years ago, a ring of keys, a deck of cards, a withered violet crushed between the pages of a book, the mirrored letter on a blotting paper, a fallen volume hidden from sight by the other volumes, a symmetric rose in a boy’s kaleidoscope, the colours of a Turner when the lights are turned out in the narrow gallery, fingernails, atlases, a moustache greying at the ends, the oars of Argus . . .
Sit there, I’ll see what I can bring you.
Last summer while Bush and his army and the petrol corporations and their advisors were ruining Iraq, I had a rendezvous in Genève with my daughter, Katya. I had told Katya about the encounter with my mother in Lisboa. When my mother was alive she and Katya had an understanding, for they shared something quite deep, which they didn’t have to discuss. Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.
After listening to the story of what happened in Lisboa, Katya proposed: Your courtesy can begin with Borges! Why not? You quote him, we discuss him, we’ve often talked about visiting the cemetery, and you never have, let’s go together!
She was working in the Grand Théâtre de Genève, so I drove there to pick her up. As soon as I switched off the engine and put my feet down, the heat was stifling. I pulled off my gloves. There was almost no traffic. Everyone in the city centre leaves in high summer. The few pedestrians, mostly elderly, had the assured slow rhythm of sleepwalkers. They preferred to be outside rather than in their apartments, for such heat is even more oppressive when you face it alone. They meandered, they sat, they fanned themselves, and they licked ice creams or ate apricots. (It was the best summer for apricots for a decade.)
I took off my helmet and stuffed my gloves into it.
Motorbikers wear light leather gloves even on the hottest summer days for a special reason. Nominally gloves are for protection in case of a fall, and to isolate the hands from the sticky rubber of the grips. More intimately, however, they shield the hands from the cool air-rush which, although highly agreeable in the heat, blunts the sensitivity of touch. Riders wear summer gloves on their hands for the pleasure of precision.
I went to the stage door and asked for Katya. The receptionist was drinking iced tea (peach flavour) from a tin. The theatre was shut for a month, and there was only a basic working staff.
Sit there, the receptionist said gently, and I’ll see if I can find her.
Katya’s job was to write programme notes explaining opera and ballet to school classes – including the pupils of the Collège Calvin. When she came running down the stairs from her office, she was wearing a printed summer dress of charcoal-black and white. Borges would have seen only a smudged grey blur.
I didn’t keep you waiting?
Never.
Do you want to see the stage? We can climb right up to the top, it’s very high, and then look down on the whole empty theatre.
There’s something about empty theatres . . .
Yes, they are full!
We started up a metal staircase like an outdoor fire escape. Above us two or three stagehands were controlling the mechanism of the lights. She waved at them.
They invited me, she said, and I told them I’d bring you too.
They waved back at her, laughing.
Later, when we arrived at their level, one of them said to Katya: So, see you’ve got a good head for heights!
And I wondered how many times in my life I had taken part in the ritual of men showing to women the special little risks they run while working. (When the risks are large they don’t show them.) They want to impress, they want to be admired. It’s a pretext for holding the women to show them where to step or how to bend. There’s another pleasure too. The ritual exaggerates the difference between women and men and in that expanded difference there is a fluttering of hopes. For an hour or two afterwards the routine feels lighter.
How high are we?
Nearly a hundred metres, sweetie-pie.
Faintly, from some rehearsal room, we heard the trilling of a soprano warming her voice. Away from the dimmed battery of lights, everything was dark except for an open door, no larger than a hatchway, far below, at the back of the stage. Sunlight streamed through it. It had undoubtedly been opened to let in a little air. The stagehands were in shorts and vests and we were sweating.
The soprano began an aria.
Bellini’s I Puritani, the youngest stagehand announced. Eighty performances last season!
O rendetemi la speme
O lasciatemi morir . . .
Let me hope again
Or let me die.
The stage was as large as a dry dock and Katya and I walked off along one of the bridges. Hanging parallel to the bridge, and descending right d
own to the boards of the stage, were the painted decors of the season’s repertoire.
A beam from a spotlight tracked across the boards; the voice, for some reason, stopped in mid-song, and it was at that moment that we saw a bird fly in through the open door, way below.
For several minutes it circled the dark space. Then it perched, confused, on a cable. We saw it was a starling. It headed towards the lights, believing they were exits into the sunshine. It had forgotten or could not refind the doorway it had come in by.
It flew between the hanging backdrops of Sea, Mountain, Spanish Inn, German Forest, Royal Palace, Peasant Wedding. And as it flew it cried Tcheeer! Tcheeer! more and more shrilly as it realised more and more surely that it was trapped.
Trapped birds need everything to go dark except their path of escape. This didn’t happen and so the starling hurtled against walls, curtains and canvas. Tcheeer! Tcheeer! Tcheeer!
There is an old opera-house superstition that if a bird is killed on stage, the building will catch fire.
The rehearsing soprano, in trousers and a T-shirt, came on stage. Perhaps someone had told her about the bird.
Tcheeer! Tcheeer! imitated Katya. The singer looked up and cottoned on. She too imitated the starling’s cry. The bird responded. The singer improved her pitch and the two cries became almost indistinguishable. The bird flew towards her.
Katya and I hurried down the metal stairs. As we passed the stagehands the young one said to Katya: Didn’t know you were a diva!
Outside in the street, at the corner of the theatre where the little door opened, the soprano, hands clasped before her, repeatedly sang: Tcheeer! Tcheeer! The elderly people with their ice creams and apricots were gathered around her, unsurprised. In such heat, in a deserted city, anything can happen.