by John Berger
Naturally in these circumstances the meal went on longer than anybody noticed, we found ourselves late and in a hurry and so were obliged to take a taxi. The driver was a woman.
So you lunched at Maxim’s? she asked smiling. I’ve never been there but if the chance comes it’s something you should do once in a lifetime, no? she said.
The second meal was in the small Galician town of Betanzos on the north-west tip of Spain. On the Day of Ascension in mid-August. It also happened to be market day, and on market days in Betanzos a canteen on a hill, a little outside the town where the animal pens are, opens for lunch, always offering the same dish.
It is hot, the selling is over. The unsold cattle are being herded back into their lorries. A man of my age in a white suit, which would be worthy of a count, is loading his old Peugeot with cages of unsold chicks. Behind the driving seat there are packaged eggs and the floor of the car is covered with tiny brown feathers. Now it’s time to eat. Dressed as he is today in his ivory suit and silver tie, the chicken-count could be admitted to Maxim’s.
I follow him into the canteen: a concrete hangar with a corrugated roof, windows high up on the wall, and on the asphalt floor, rows of narrow wooden tables made of three planks, the width of three hands. Two hundred or more people are already sitting on the benches eating. Each one of them, like the chicken-count, has dressed for the occasion.
Ascension Day is the sexiest of the religious fiestas. A little like a heavenly wedding, but lighter than a marriage. So, a new comb in the hair. Clean jeans. White socks. Ribbons for the very young children. Wear the new cap for the first time. Put on your angel shoes.
Every year since a century ago, the town of Betanzos releases at midnight a multi-coloured air balloon into the sky, and, gas-jets burning, it ascends as the Madonna once did. And every year the thousands of spectators waiting gasp as they follow it and its passengers with their eyes, as if their breath might help them on their way.
In the canteen now, along the wall opposite the entrance, burn braziers of flaming wood. On each fire is balanced a massive copper cauldron of water which has been simmering since dawn. The cooks are women dressed in peasant black, and they stand behind the cauldrons. Whenever more food is needed, one of them bends over the steaming water and forks out another cooked octopus.
The creatures are big, the size of the largest sunflowers. Before being put into the cauldron they were smashed against rocks to make their flesh tender. Then they were lowered into the water three times before being left to cook in it. The third time they turned reddish.
A woman in black settles a cooked octopus on a wooden worktable. It glistens there, no longer reddish but phosphorescent – with the colours of gas-jets – green, white, violet. She cuts it with a pair of secateurs into round slices. The slices are about the size of signet rings. Sprinkled with salt, vinegar, oil, cayenne, and served on round wooden plates, these rings are the feast.
The wooden plates are shared. You spear the jewel you’ve chosen with a wooden toothpick and you eat it with Galician bread which has kept the secret of yeast.
Each of the narrow tables has its wooden plates, its little glasses of toothpicks, its piles of bread and its white china bowls for drinking the local rosé wine. The rings of octopus taste of the sea and of sailors’ lips.
Behind me some cattle dealers with their hats pushed back – they wear their hats so they can be spotted in the crowd from a distance – drink from their white bowls and look triumphant. So does a four year old in a black velvet dress sitting at the next table. So do the worker’s family on holiday from Madrid. A quiet, not exuberant, almost suppressed triumph – like a joke one is trying to keep to oneself. This keeping of a secret is most clearly expressed on the face of an old man opposite me telling a story to an old woman.
In the heat, which would stop any dog from barking, I look around the canteen, china bowl to my lips, rosé and octopus in my mouth, and I wonder: What’s the triumph about? And an answer comes.
Everyone has dressed up and climbed the hill to the canteen. Another year has passed, another summer, they have all come here, they are all still here on this earth, each with a toothpick for the feast!
[28]
Room 19
It was called the Hotel du Printemps and was in the 14th arrondissement. The entrance with a reception desk was no wider than a corridor. Room number 19 was on the third floor. A steep staircase with no lift. Sven and I climbed slowly up to his room. He had arrived in Paris the day before and we had been friends for forty years.
Room 19 was small with a window which gave on to a deep narrow yard. The light’s better in the toilet, said Sven. Beside the window was a wardrobe, and the toilet alcove on the other side of the bed, which took up most of the floor space, was the size of the wardrobe.
On the pinkish fluffy bed cover lay a large portfolio, tied up with tapes, two of which had broken. The walls were papered with a yellowish wallpaper that was both bleak and friendly – like a vest which the room slept in and never took off.
At our age and with our past, it was normal that Sven and I had artist friends who had become successful, who were invited as guests of honour to Venice and stayed in the Hotel Danieli, and about whom monographs with many colour plates were written. They were good friends and when we met, we laughed a lot with them. We, however, each in his own fashion, were chronically unfashionable, or – to put it more baldly – we didn’t sell much.
When together, Sven and I, we saw this as an honour, almost as part of a conspiracy. Not a conspiracy against us. God forbid. The conspiracy was ours: it was in our nature to resist, he in painting, I in writing. We weren’t somewhere between success and failure, we were elsewhere.
A year or two ago, Sven began suffering from Parkinson’s disease. When not holding a brush, his hand trembled considerably. I had ricked my back that summer bringing in hay and was suffering from sciatica.
So, there we were, two elderly men in rather crumpled clothes and with not very clean hands, edging our way crab-like along the narrow path around the bed in Room 19.
The lampshade on the fitted wall light which had only a 25-watt bulb in it was melon-coloured. Thirty years before at this time of year – the end of August – we used to walk through the melon fields of the Vaucluse, Sven with his paintbox and I with a camera, a Voejtlander. It’s hot, his peasant friends would say to us, they quench the thirst, pick one whenever you want to.
He pulled back the window curtain to let in a little more light and air and I untied and opened the portfolio. In it was a pile of unstretched canvas which Sven had just painted in tempera. Open, the portfolio took up almost the whole double bed. I picked up a canvas and arranged it somehow to lean against the back of the chair at the foot of the bed. Sven remained standing. Then I went back to where the pillows were and sat down cautiously.
It’s the left side, Sven asked, the sciatica?
Yes.
Is this the first? I asked him, nodding at the painting of sea and rocks.
No, it’s one of the last; they’re not in any order.
He had an unanxious but curious expression. Curious not, I believe, about my opinion, but about exactly what had happened when he painted the canvas.
Then we looked. It was very hot in the room and we were sweating, our shirts like the wallpaper. After a long while – but time had stopped – I got to my feet. Mind your back! Sven said. I went to examine more closely the canvas against the chair, then returned to the pillows and gazed.
What we were doing in Room 19, we had done several hundred times before in his studio, or on beaches, or outside the tent we slept in with our families, or against the windscreen of a Citroën 2CV or under cherry trees. And what we were doing was looking together intently, critically, silently, at something he had brought back. I say silently but often on these occasions there was music in the air. The colours and lights and darks on the canvas and the traces of the stubby gestures of the brush – gestures which made it u
nmistakably a painting by Sven – made a kind of music. We could hear it now in the hotel bedroom.
Over the years piles of canvases, taken off their stretchers, had grown higher and higher in the lofts and basements of the houses through which he had passed. The pile on the bed was less than 5 centimetres high. The ones I’m thinking of were 2 metres high. Once finished, his paintings were discarded. Maybe they kept each other company in their piles.
Anyway there had never been time to bring them out and offer them to the world. There were a few exceptions – sometimes he gave a painting to a friend. Sometimes a maverick collector bought one. I remember a man who manufactured paints and lived in Marseille. All the other canvases were forgotten. And this seemed right because finally they belonged to the field or the oil tanker or the street of traffic or the dog which had been their starting point.
After forty years we both accepted this fatality which was also a happiness. When the canvases were put aside, they were carefree. No frames, no dealers, no museums, no literature, no worries. Only the very distant music.
Although we knew this, each time we examined a newly painted canvas we nevertheless did so with the critical concentration of judges selecting a painting for a permanent collection. We couldn’t be bought and we couldn’t be influenced.
The second canvas was on the chair. I got up to go closer.
Careful of your back! warned Sven.
Wet rocks seen from above.
I recognise something today which I didn’t before. Sven is the last painter who looks at what is out there, as Cézanne and Pissarro did. He doesn’t paint like them. He doesn’t try to. But he stands there, brush in hand like them, his eyes open in the same way observing thoughtlessly. Thoughtlessly? Yes, following without asking why. This is what makes these men a little like saints and this is why their modesty is so unassumed.
The light from where the sun touched the wet rocks came through several layers of paint as if, impossibly, the light was the first thing painted.
We scrutinised canvas after canvas. We drank tepid mineral water as we sweated. Perhaps Room 19 of the Hotel du Printemps had never been filled with such an intensity of looking before. The unstretched canvases, with their ragged margins of white, carrying weeks of looking in Belle Île where they had been painted, and the two of us, studying each scribble of paint to ensure that nothing false should pass. And maybe this would still be true for Room 19 even if once or twice we were mistaken in our assessment.
Sven never sat down. Once he went into the toilet to splash some water on his face.
A canvas on which the pile of a green hill slid like the blade of a plough under a pale-orange sky at exactly the right angle to turn the landscape into a furrow.
I carry a spare egg with me always, Sven mused, in case I need to mix more colour.
[29]
Subcomandante Insurgente
In a suburb to the south of Paris, France, a municipal swimming pool. In term-time the local schools use it and the indoor pool is only open to the public at certain hours. The public are serious women and men (of all ages) who swim up and down without a smile and wear black goggles to protect their eyes. Maybe swimming the length of the pool you pass one another fifty times but there’s never a flicker of recognition. Single-minded fitness.
Now in July and August with the schools shut and the pool open to the public all day long, something changes. The place becomes a water playground for anybody who, for one reason or another, is not leaving the city for a holiday by the sea. (The reasons for not leaving are mostly economic.) Sisters come hand in hand, along with spinsters, truants, old-age pensioners and young fathers who teach their small children to swim. With its glass walls and tiled floors the whole place echoes with screams, laughter and the splashes of dare-devil dives.
People on beaches are usually indulgent to their bodies and so it’s their bodies you notice; here it’s not the bodies but the souls which grab your attention. The souls in bathing costumes. Some in the water, some climbing out, others about to jump in. Tight caps over the hair are obligatory – even for bald men. We have something else in common too – everybody here is each day offering or learning a little confidence.
On a bench outside, my towel drying in the sun, I open a book that has just been sent to me from New York. It is a collection of letters and communiqués, written by Subcomandante Marcos between January and June of last year for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). The story has been told across the world many times.
Just after midnight (as usual we were late, Marcos says in an aside), just after midnight on January the 1st 1994, an army of several thousand indigenous (Mayan) men and women took up arms, seized the town of San Cristobal in Chiapas, the poorest province of Mexico, and challenged the federal government to recognise their claims.
We are denied the most elementary education so that they can use us as cannon fodder and plunder our country’s riches, uncaring that we are dying of hunger and curable diseases. Nor do they care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health, no food, no education. We do not have the right to freely and democratically elect our own authorities, nor are we independent of foreigners, nor do we have peace or justice for ourselves and our children. But today we say Enough!
After twelve days of fighting – during which the Mexican air force bombed villages which were thought to be pro-Zapatista – an uneasy cease-fire was agreed, which militarily speaking, gradually became a kind of stalemate. On one hand, the EZLN obliged to withdraw to the mountains but with a considerable part of the indigenous peasant population loyal to them and finding increasing support from civil society across the whole of Mexico; on the other hand, the federal army, with massively superior arms and numbers, and the private army of the ranchers hell-bent on destroying everything the Zapatistas stood for, but nervous and perplexed before the mountains which protect outlaws.
From these mountains in March the Subcomandante writes to a schoolboy who has sent him a photo of his dog:
I have the urge to write to you and tell you something about being ‘the professionals of violence’, as we have so often been called. Yes, we are professionals. But our profession is hope … out of our spent and broken bodies must rise up a new world … Will we see it? Does it matter? I believe that it doesn’t matter as much as knowing with undeniable certainty that it will be born, and that we have put our all – our lives, bodies and souls – into this long and painful but historic birth. Amor y dolor – love and pain: two words that not only rhyme, but join up and march together.
A kid comes out of the municipal swimming pool with his feet in the air and walks down the steps on his hands, laughing. Clowns go on. In French public life, however, humour has practically disappeared, for there is not enough energy left to spare for it. Tired public men! Surprisingly, in the mountains the Subcomandante still has that energy and in the book on my lap there’s a joke on every other page.
The style has of course become legendary, but don’t let us be confused by the word style. True style is inseparable from what is being said, it’s not something chosen. And in my own experience as a writer it’s also inseparable from the voices I’m listening to when trying to write. The style in question here combines modesty with unflinching excess:
Don’t forget what our path was. We sincerely looked for other doors that might open to admit our timid light. You must now learn from this sad story. Never forget the words that made us important, although it was only for a moment: everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves.
The excess is not that of political extremism. The Zapatistas have no political programme to impose; they have a political conscience which they hope will spread through their example. The excess comes from their conviction (which personally I accept completely) that they also represent the dead, all the maltreated dead – the dead who are less forgotten in Mexico than anywhere else in the world. No mystics, they believe in words being hand
ed down through the suffering and the centuries, and they hate lies:
Here we are, the forever dead, dying once again, but now in order to live.
Twenty months after the insurrection, the outcome in Chiapas is uncertain. The Zapatistas, still armed, have recently called for a national and international popular Convention to come together to consider their demands.
The Mexican economy, hailed by the IMF last year as a world model of contemporary development, collapsed last winter and was only saved by international capital for fear of a world crisis. In exchange for the largest loan (50 billion dollars) ever accorded to a country, the Mexican government put their petrol in hock for ever and agreed to step up the neo-liberal economic shock treatment they have been applying for the last thirteen years – half the active population is under-employed.
The Mexicans were also told – notably by the Chase Manhattan Bank – to eliminate the Zapatistas who were bad for the confidence of foreign investors. ‘The moment has come,’ announced Fortune magazine six months ago in New York, ‘to buy Mexico!’
Meanwhile, thanks to newspapers, particularly in Mexico and Spain, and thanks to Internet which no government has yet found a way of policing, the Zapatista Declarations are being more and more eagerly read across the world and their stand appreciated and supported. Their message is reaching Santiago, Berlin, Barcelona, even the suburbs of Paris.
A strange unprecedented ideological struggle between a few thousand faceless but true men and women, hidden in the sheltering mountains, and the triumphant World Order. How is such an unequal duel possible, if ‘only for a moment’?