by John Berger
Such a crowd is a solemn test of a man. It assembles as a witness to its common fate—within which personal differentiations have become unimportant. This fate has consisted, so far as its own memory is concerned, of continual deprivation and humiliation. Yet its appetites have not atrophied. A single pair of eyes, met in that crowd, are enough to reveal the extent of its possible demands. And most of these demands will be impossible to meet. Inevitably, the discrepancy will lead to violence: as inevitably as the crowd is inexorably there. It has assembled to demand the impossible. It has assembled to avenge the discrepancy. Its need is to overthrow the order which has defined and distinguished between the possible and the impossible at its expense, for generation after generation. In face of such a crowd there are only two ways in which a man, who is not already of it, can react. Either he sees in it the promise of mankind or else he fears it absolutely. The promise of mankind is not easy to see there. You are not of them. Only if you have previously prepared yourself, will you see the promise.
Umberto feared the crowd. He justified his fear by believing that they were mad.
Men ran with the crowd and harangued it. The summer heat of 1848 made the boy Umberto sweat even at night in bed. The faces of these men were swollen to apoplectic proportions and the sweat ran down their faces like tears.
Umberto considers that a sane man should always try to see himself as an exemption from the rest of the world: then he will be able to see what he can or cannot take from the world. According to him the madman demands all or nothing! Roma o Morte!
Umberto cannot leave his wife. Neither by way of his children (for he has none) nor by way of society can he find any sense of succession or continuity; he is alone, abandoned in time. To continue his business and gain concessions he is forced to be amiable, not once but a thousand times, to people whom he dislikes or even hates. He can never speak to anybody of more than one tenth of what is on his mind.
Ah my little one, you are mad, quite, quite mad.
What Umberto calls madness is what threatens him. Not what threatens him personally—another merchant, a thief, the man who will cuckold him—but what threatens the social structure in which he lives as a privileged being.
His privilege is more important to him than his life, not because he could not survive without his American mistress, four servants at home, a fountain in his garden, hand-made silk shirts, or his wife’s dinner parties, but because implicit in his privilege are the values and judgements by which he must make sense of his lived life. All values stem from his belief—that his privileges are deserved.
Yet the sense he makes of his life does not satisfy him. Why must liberty, he asks himself, always be retrospective, a quality already won and controlled? Why is there no liberty to pursue now?
Umberto terms madness that which threatens the social structure guaranteeing his privileges. I teppisti are the final embodiment of madness. Yet madness also represents freedom from the social structure which hems him in. And so he arrives at the conclusion that limited madness may grant him greater liberty within the structure.
He calls Laura mad in the hope that she will bring into his life a modicum of liberty.
Umberto, I am going to have a child, and perhaps it will be a girl. If it is a girl (Laura has seized upon the subject of the cap in the hope that it will make her announcement less stark. She is happy at the thought of being pregnant, she thinks continually of what her child will be like, but she finds the announcement humiliating). If it is a girl, I will give her your Juliet cap on her fifteenth birthday and she will look beautiful in it.
The cab has arrived at the hotel. A porter is holding the door open. Please shut the door, says Umberto. Then he instructs the driver to drive them slowly along the lake-side. The driver shrugs his shoulders. It is raining and it is getting dark and there is nothing to see of the lake.
Are you quite sure you are right? asks Umberto.
Quite sure.
Have you been to a doctor?
Yes.
How was he called, this doctor?
He was a doctor in Paris.
What did he say?
He said it was true.
He said it was true?
True.
The doctor said so?
Yes.
The word true echoes at last with the authority of the doctor and this authority offers Umberto the means of coming to terms with the news. He must demystify it, he must make it manageable and negotiable, he must give it a colour so that it can be handled, so that it loses its initial infinite, entirely abstract whiteness.
I am the father, says Umberto.
It is a statement, not a question; but Laura nods her head. She can see no advantage to either of them in his being the father.
Why didn’t you tell me when you wrote to me?
I thought I could explain better when I saw you.
Umberto’s head is teeming with calculations of what can and cannot be done in Livorno to accommodate his illegitimate son.
How long—he makes a counting gesture with his hand.
Three months.
We’ll call him Giovanni.
Why Giovanni? she asks.
Giovanni was the name of my father, his grandfather.
And supposing she is a girl?
Laura! he says. But it is not altogether clear whether he is suggesting this as a name or expressing surprise at his mistress’s suggestion that a child of his might be a girl.
How do you feel, my little one? he asks.
In the mornings I don’t feel so fine, but it passes, and in the afternoon I feel quite hungry, and I don’t know why we are driving up and down the lake-side like this, it is so dismal, and I would like to eat some cakes. They make a special sort of cake here which my mother is always talking about, of almond paste.
You know, I have never had a child, he says, and I was—how do you say it?—rassegnato.
He tries to put his arms round her. She struggles.
You are the mother of my child, he protests. It is not far from being a wife. If I could, I would make you my wife.
It might seem that in such a situation this was an honourable response. Yet far from satisfying Laura, it infuriated her. He is turning her, transforming her at this moment, she feels, into his wife in Livorno—into his wife to whom he has always wanted to say ‘You are the mother of my child’, but has never had the opportunity. She, Laura, is now the mother of the child of the pater-familias. And just as she has been transformed, so too, she fears, has his wife in Livorno: Esther will now represent all that is seductive and free and not inexorable. For two months she has been peaceful and happy at the thought of her child. But to bear a child for a man, and to be condemned to bearing it for him irrespective of her will—she starts to sob.
She allows herself to be comforted. Umberto is the cause of her distress, but he can alleviate it. Not by removing the cause—which is the fact of his being the father elect—but by temporarily surrounding her with his own physical presence so that her awareness of herself and her bitter destiny starts to dissolve, as the outlines of a gate dissolve in the dusk or the words of a letter become illegible in the gathering darkness of a room. In his arms she feels her interests receding, and her name, with the intonation it once had when she was a child, emerges from some remote repository inside her and surfaces everywhere through her childish, so easily irritated, skin.
When she touches the straying, grey, mane-like hair brushed back above the ears of his massive head, it is with the amazed inquisitive touch of a child.
When Laura was a small child she realized, through her own observation and by way of remarks made by her mother, that there were certain secret aspects of a woman’s body which might be prized above all others and which could equally well be more shameful than anything else in the world. As she grew up, she became convinced that in everything which related to these aspects she was peculiarly sensitive. She had only to be frightened (or so she believed) for her fear to bri
ng on menstruation. If a man touched her in a certain way on her shoulder, she would feel a convulsion in her womb. Ordinary brassieres would chafe her nipples. She used to be ashamed of this sensitivity because it made her awkward and irritable. But she also used to be glad of it because she believed that one day she would be able to share her secret with a man who would become as infinitely curious about it as she was herself.
At the hotel they have dinner served in their own suite. Laura is still tearful and Umberto tries to distract and entertain her with outlandish stories about the intrigues of Livorno. When the meal is over, he takes off his jacket, undoes his collar and tie and says:
Come my little one with eyes green.
She appears reluctant.
If it is dangerous, my sweet, we will lie side by side and hold hands—no more—like children.
She has never for one moment doubted that she wanted to have the child. The child will be hers like nothing else in her life has been. She has no dread of the scandal it may provoke because she has her own fortune and can live wherever she likes, and also because she believes that the individual will should never bow to the demands of conventional morality. Indeed she will enjoy demonstrating her defiance as she did when she married against her family’s wishes at the age of seventeen, and as she did when, two years later, she told her husband in public to leave and never come back.
She lies in Umberto’s arms, content to be held but indifferent to his passion. If he lies still, she is pleased. She finds it acceptable for him to cherish her; she finds it absurd for him to desire her. She has never before been able to ignore Umberto’s advances because they have offered her an opportunity to show him the intricate sexuality of her body which has always seemed to her to be as unpredictable, as delicate and as pure as an almond hidden in its two shells. Her immunity now surprises her. Her child has already offered her the gift of self-sufficiency.
To the physical well-being of the mother of his son Umberto is prepared to make every concession. He lies quiet. Confusedly his mind returns again and again to the mechanics of the forthcoming event. Within them, he feels, is the solution to all problems.
He lies with his hand between her legs, a finger between the lips of her vagina. Warm mucus encloses his finger as closely as if it were a ninth skin. A little earlier he felt with his hand on her stomach, a little below the navel, a small lump.
Instead of his entering her, his son will come out of her. It occurs to him that the very form of the vagina, which he had always assumed was as it was in virtue of his function, has in fact evolved to meet the exigencies of the outward journey of a third person. He is reluctant to withdraw his finger. There is no change to be felt. He moves his finger to confirm this. Not since he first heard about it as a child has the phenomenon of birth seemed more surprising to him.
One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is.
What has been conceived are the essentials of the character about whom I wish to write.
Umberto pulls her violently towards him, holding her far shoulder and rubbing his face against her hair. He realizes how violently they are now exposed to the world, bereft of every exception. He is ignorant of all the details of childbirth, but his premonition of the rough, violent outward journey of the small lump grown large and human forces him to recognize how similar they are to other couples.
In the last gesture of tenderness she will make towards him, she holds his head in her hands.
Lie still, she says, think of the child.
He remembers a morning when he visited a friend who deals in flowers and has a number of large greenhouses on the road to Pisa. The glass of these houses is painted over with a green wash (the turquoise colour of the sea) to diminish a little the power of the sunlight for the flowers inside. This wash is painted on the outside and any passer-by can draw with his finger on the glass because the wash when dry rubs off at the slightest touch. As Umberto walks past the greenhouses, away from the road, he notices the drawings. At first they depict lovers’ hearts with arrows through them and initials, then came crudely drawn naked figures standing upright, then a woman lying on her back, legs apart, slit visible. Finally, drawn larger and bolder than all the preceding ones, a cunt with hair above it and below it a cock with hanging balls. It is inconceivable that he himself would ever draw like that. But he recognizes that the two of them have become the subject for such a drawing.
Previously every part of her—like their liaison—has seemed to him to be secret and exclusively for the two of them: the secret has now been divulged: there is a third person involved, his son.
Donna mia! Donna mia! he cries into her hair.
I did not sleep well. What you told me, our news—you can say that? like what we read in the newspapers—this was beating in my heart all night. Laura, I want to make change in my life, I want to make space in my life for you and for our son.
Are you so sure the child will be a boy?
I have the feeling I have a son.
I have no feeling about it being a boy or a girl, but then for me it’s unimportant. I will be glad of either. I would not like to have a plain girl, for her sake not for mine. It is simpler for a boy. His looks don’t matter.
I am proud of you. I am proud of my son. I want to hide nothing.
You couldn’t hide us if you tried!
I wish to give you all you need.
We are not asking for anything.
Laura, I will tell you something. Perhaps something you have not understood. In all my life, always, I have been rich enough to do what I wish. When I was younger, my wishes were more modest. But now I am ambitious. Ambitious for you and for our son.
Why are you talking about money? Money has nothing to do with it, absolutely nothing. I never think about money.
I was speaking of the feelings in my heart and my plans. I want to tell you how proud I am.
What are your plans?
You, the two of you, must come and live in Italy where I can see you.
Come to Livorno, you mean?
Livorno is an unhappy mad city.
And your wife is there! That is why you call it mad.
She is not from Livorno.
She lives there. Waiting.
Waiting?
Waiting for you to come back.
Passeretta mia, you know I am married. You have known since three years.
So we mustn’t come to Livorno. So we must become your illegitimate wife and your illegitimate child. Do you know what we call that? Bastard. It’s your bastard. But it’s my child. And that’s why we can’t come to Livorno.
Do not be excited.
Why have you never let me come to Livorno? Because you were frightened we would be recognized.
I wanted all possible things to please you. I wanted the days we spent together to have no shadow on them. I feel that still. I want it. But now we have more than days together to share. I can hardly believe what has happened to us, to you and me, to me, Umberto, and to you, Laura. Everything is changed.
What will your wife say when you tell her that you have installed your mistress and your bastard child in the town?
She will say nothing.
You propose to tell her?
No.
And you imagine she will not know?
Naturally she will know, but she will say nothing.
And you say you are proud of us! You are not a father. You are a man with a weakness for a little American tart.
I beg you not to shout and say words like that. Passeretta mia, what has changed you?
This is what has changed me. (She thumps her stomach.)
Yes, he has changed everything. I want you to live in Pisa. I have seen a villa there, a beautiful villa with a magnificent English garden and tall rooms with painted ceilings. Once it belonged to a Conte. I want to buy it for you, Laura.
And we are to wait there for you to visit us. How many times a week? Every Tuesday and Friday?
Or you could li
ve in Florence, in Fiesole above the Arno which is a corner of paradise.
When you have installed us, what do you propose we do? How can you be so stupid? Can you not see that we would be prisoners in a jail?
Jail! You would be free to go wherever you wished.
Who would we meet? Who would we talk to?
I would arrange Italian lessons for you.
That is why you want to call him Giovanni!
I would like him to speak several languages. Then he will be able to travel. I have not travelled enough in my life.
Umberto, I cannot believe you are being serious. You should know better than I what kind of country Italy is. Nobody would know us. We would be outcasts. A woman who is not married with an illegitimate child.
My dear, you are married.
Not to you I’m not.
One day I may be in a position to marry you.
You mean you will get a divorce?
In my country to make a divorce is almost impossible.
So you cannot marry me.
My wife is a sick woman.
I see. We shall wait in our jail until she dies. And then you will be gracious enough to make us respectable. How do you dare to make such a proposal?
I love you.
Love! What is it? It’s a word you use to get what you want. Like all men.
It is a word you have used too, Laura.
Yes, I was in love with you when we went to Venice three years ago. You were like no man I had ever heard of. You could have made whatever you liked of me. But you did nothing. A woman isn’t like money that you put in a bank and it will bring you interest without your doing anything about it. A woman is a person. How do you expect me to live ten months of the year, kicking my heels until you somehow contrive to make a little trip to see me? That is not a proper life.
All this I intend to change. You will live in Pisa or Florence and we will be together often and without interruption. The boy will see more of me than many boys see of their fathers. And I will make him my heir. Let us try to make a life together for all three of us.