by John Berger
That is no way to speak of your mother and father.
Is lying better?
I find it regrettable that you should come across such stories at school.
They call me Garibaldi because they say my mother might have been his mistress too.
It is terrible.
I laugh.
Laugh?
Do you expect me to defend my mother’s honour?
Jocelyn wanted to tell the boy that he had argued many times with Laura that it was necessary to tell him the truth. Yet he felt that anything he said would now be incomprehensible because it belonged to a past which existed only in his own memory.
He turned back to the table and began wiping the stock of his gun.
Why is Captain Bierce a cad? asked the boy in a gentle, almost tender voice.
He’s a bullying Irish braggart—a mutton-fisted loud-mouthed pack-horse captain!
That’s no way to talk about your brother-in-law!
Having said this, the boy laughed. And Jocelyn laughed too. They laughed at the collapse of the formalities which had surrounded them. In face of this collapse they were for a moment equal. The boy got up from the chair and went over to the table. The man sat down and leant back in the arm-chair. He was trembling.
The boy, picking up the stock, noticed that the firing-pins had not been released. Pressing the front of the stock against the table top, he squeezed each trigger. The two sharp taps of the pins against the wood broke the silence. The surface of the table there was already scarred with thousands of tiny pock marks caused during the years by this method of releasing firing-pins so that their springs should not be weakened.
Jocelyn began to speak from the depths of the chair, staring at the fire grate, and softly as though almost to himself:
He tore her out of her own place. I know what she is like. She is as fine as china. She’s like that figure there with flowers around her waist. She needs to be protected and free.
The boy could not see the man for he was hidden by the back of the chair. Above the chair he could see the mantelpiece: on it were a dusty packet of envelopes, a ball of twine, a leather strap and a porcelain figure of a shepherdess, about eight inches high.
He tore her out of her own place. She was part of this place. She knew it. There were no secrets from her. She was the spirit of this place and this house. She was why I lived here.
The boy stared at the porcelain figure, its pink, almost white glaze shining in the lamplight.
I begin to be glad I’ve lived half my life. A fair part of it has been good. But from now on everything will get worse. Everybody is becoming ignorant and mutton-fisted and too busy judging everybody else. We’re going to have sermons and commerce. I hate this damned farm now. No one knows how to wait any more, because they haven’t anything worth waiting for. I don’t know how to wait myself. I used to wait for her.
The man stopped talking.
I’ll go and change, he said later, it’s cold here.
The boy approached the mantelpiece still staring at the porcelain figure of the shepherdess.
How did it happen that on 2 May 1902, Beatrice was in her bedroom, her hair loose, wearing only a nightdress and wrap, in the middle of the afternoon?
The previous day, walking through the walled vegetable garden, she had noticed that several boughs of lilac had come out on the tree in the north-east corner. She wanted to pick some to take into the house. But to get to the tree she had to cross a bed of wet earth and rotting brussel sprout plants. She took off her shoes and stockings and left them on the path. Her feet sank into the mud up to her ankles. When she reached the tree, she discovered she was not tall enough. A little way along the wall was a black, rotten ladder. (During her absence in South Africa the house and farm had deteriorated dramatically.) She tested the first three rungs and they seemed strong enough. She moved the ladder to the lilac tree and climbed up. A wasp, caught between her skirts and the wall, stung her on the instep of her foot. She cried out (a small cry like a child’s or a gull’s), took little notice, cut the lilac and went barefoot into the house to wash her feet. By evening, her foot was inflamed and during the night she slept badly.
The next morning she decided to stay in bed. She knew that it was not the kind of decision she would ever have made before her marriage, before she left the farm. Jocelyn expected her to run the house and keep an eye on the dairy: he was away at a point-to-point in Leicestershire. A surveyor who was coming that afternoon expected her to prepare papers for him. Everybody would expect her to treat a small, already less swollen wasp bite as though it were nothing. Before her marriage she did what was expected of her. Now she did not.
She gave instructions and took a bath. Still wet, she stood looking at herself in the tall tippable mirror in the bathroom.
She did not pretend that her gaze was that of a man. She drew no sexual conclusions as she stared at herself. She saw her body as a core, left when all its clothes had fallen from it. Around this core she saw the space of the bathroom. Yet between core and room something had changed, which was why all the house and the whole farm seemed changed since her return. She cupped her breasts with her hands and then moved her hands slowly downwards, over her hips, to the front of her thighs. Either the surface of her body or the touch of her hands had changed too.
Before, she lived in her body as though it were a cave, exactly her size. The rock and earth around the cave were the rest of the world. Imagine putting your hand into a glove whose exterior surface is continuous with all other substance.
Now her body was no longer a cave in which she lived. It was solid. And everything around, which was not her, was movable. Now what was given to her stopped at the surfaces of her body.
In nightgown and wrap she returned to bed. She lay back against a bank of pillows and imitated the cackling noise of a turkey. When she noticed the portrait of her father she stopped. Some women might have considered the possibility that they were going mad. She began to move her head from side to side on the bank of pillows, thus tilting her view of the room from side to side. When she felt giddy, she got out of bed and dropped on to her hands and knees: the carpeted floor was level and still. On the level ground in the free space she was conscious of being happy.
At her dressing table with a silver-backed mermaid-embossed hairbrush in her hand she asked herself as she had many times during the previous six months: Why do I feel no deep loss? Her way of answering the question was to search in her mind to make sure that its supposition was correct. Then her answer, which entirely satisfied her, was: Because I don’t.
Captain Patrick Bierce was killed on 17 September 1901, in the mountains north of the Great Karoo, Cape Colony. A British encampment was attacked by Boer commandos under General Smuts. The commandos were desperate, lacking both supplies and ammunition. In some close fighting among rocks Captain Bierce had half his head blown away. The Boer who shot him at close range had used an explosive Mauser cartridge (generally used for big game) because he had no other ammunition. Later, after the British had surrendered, the Boer found the mutilated officer whom he had shot dead, and was distressed at having had to use such ammunition. He argued to himself, however, that there was not a great deal of difference between killing a man with an explosive bullet and smashing him with a lyddite shell.
The colonel who broke to Beatrice the news of her husband’s death said: We soldiers count as our gains—our losses. Those men we love most to honour are those who die in a great cause.
What afflicted her was the shock which she imagined her husband feeling at his own death. She imagined him dying in mortal disappointment. But the fact that their life together was over impressed her too as a gain rather than as a loss. She could leave Africa. She could leave him. She could leave his brother officers.
I do not know for how long the relationship between Jocelyn and Beatrice had been incestuous.
I do know that Beatrice must have married Captain Bierce in order to simplify her life.
/>
The power which Jocelyn exercised over his sister was essentially the power of the elder brother of childhood prolonged into adult life. He was protective and possessive; he was the moral arbiter in a world he knew better than she. Her virtue must lie in her obedience to him and her indifference to the judgement of others. Yet after adolescence this power of his over her depended upon her collaboration. More than that—this collaboration contributed more to their relationship than any adult ability on his part to be masterful. His domination was the result of her willing it for him. Hence the strangely circular nature of their moods and intimacy …
Into this circle stepped Captain Bierce, confident, huge, beaming, straight-speaking—simple and uncomplicated as only a man in uniform can appear to be. He courted her. He knelt before her and said he was her servant—her giant servant. He worshipped, he said, the very ground on which she trod.
He seemed to demand neither connivance nor complicity. Instead he asked her formally for the gift of her hand in marriage. The conventional metaphors became persuasive in their very simplicity. Leading her by the hand, he would show her the world.
She accepted his proposal.
They were married in the parish church of St Catherine’s.
They left for Africa.
The land surface of the earth is estimated to extend over about 52,500,000 sq. miles. Of this area the British Empire occupies nearly one quarter, extending over an area of about 12,000,000 sq. miles. By far the greater portion lies within the temperate zones, and is suitable for white settlement.… The area of the territory of the Empire is divided almost equally between the southern and northern hemispheres, the great divisions of Australasia and South Africa covering between them in the southern hemisphere 5,308,506 sq. miles while the United Kingdom, Canada and India, including the native states, cover between them in the northern hemisphere 5,271,375 sq. miles. The alternation of the seasons is thus complete, one half of the Empire enjoying summer while one half is in winter.
Within a few weeks of their arrival in Durban, Beatrice began to suffe: a delusion: she came to believe that everything was being tilted, that everything around her was taking place on an incline which was gradually becoming more acute. As the angle of incline increased, so everything on it began to slip downwards, nearer to its bottom edge. The inclined plane extended over the whole sub-continent, and the bottom edge gave on to the Indian Ocean.
One early afternoon in February 1899 in Pietermaritzburg she took a rickshaw despite the fact that Captain Bierce had recently been mysteriously insistent that she should not do so. However, she had few illusions left concerning her husband’s mysteries.
The Zulu rickshaw-boy wore a head-dress of tattered, dyed ostrich feathers which smelt of burnt hair. His long legs were crudely whitewashed. The previous night there had been a thunderstorm and the sky, cleared by the storm, was an unusually harsh blue. The frayed ostrich feathers above her, shaking as the Zulu between the shafts ran, appeared to brush the blue sky as though it were a tangible, painted surface.
They passed a company of marching British soldiers. Under the blue sky, in front of the low, shack-like hastily constructed buildings, along the unmysterious absolutely straight streets, each platoon looked like a box in which twenty or thirty men were helplessly vibrating.
Here, as in Durban, the activities of her countrymen never ceased. Every moment had its duty. The rickshaw passed some officers on horseback who bowed slightly without looking at her. To them she was an officer’s wife. She had selected among Captain Bierce’s brother officers those whom she would prefer to be killed at Ladysmith if a certain number had to be.
She began to stare at the running whitewashed legs, one, unflexing, continually giving place to the second, flexing. The movement was very different from that of a horse’s hind legs as seen from a trap; and the difference disturbed her. Yet her feeling led her to no conclusion. What separated her from the British wives with whom she was obliged to pass most of her time, was her lack of opinions. She had come to hate the sound of talking. She trusted certain feelings in herself precisely because they did not lead to conclusions.
They turned into a narrower but equally straight street which led past the backs of bungalows and some unused sites of land. Trees cast intermittent shade. They came upon a file of African women walking along the grass verge. By their costumes it was clear that they had walked to the city from a Location kraal. (For certain brief occasions women were allowed to come to the city to visit their menfolk employed there.) On their heads they carried immense gourds. The rickshaw slowed down. One of the women shouted something at the Zulu which Beatrice could not understand. Another made a gesture and laughed. None of the women looked at her. Two were old with withered breasts. Another carried a baby.
At the end of the narrow street they joined a busy avenue and reached her destination: the entrance gate to the botanical gardens. She climbed out and asked the rickshaw-boy what was in the gourds the women were carrying. Looking down at her—for she was much shorter—he told her that it was kaffir beer. It was then that everything tilted for the first time. She had to cling to the railings of the botanical gardens. She clung to them, facing them, her head thrust between two bars. The rickshaw-boy stared at her, dumbfounded, until a policeman arrived and started to threaten him.
The second time was in Durban at a dinner party given by the harbour master. She saw the dinner table tilting. She put out her hand to prevent a silver candelabra with candles burning in it from falling over. In making this abrupt movement (which was incomprehensible to those sitting around her) she knocked over a guest’s glass of wine.
Later that night, made tender and menacing by drink, Captain Bierce hissed at her affectionately: A clumsy slave, my dove, must be chastised, I have no choice but to tie you up again. Try to slip out, Beatrice, I must tighten the bindings. Speak to me, Beatrice. Declare your allegiance.…
As her delusion became more and more frequent, the physical sensation of everything being tilted gave way to a conviction that it was being tilted. She suddenly knew it instead of feeling it.
She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted.
Even when the delusion had passed, the idea of the sub-continent being tilted did not strike her as implausible; on the contrary it seemed to correspond with the rest of her daily experience and to make that experience more credible.
Gradually the anguish accompanying the delusion lessened. She consulted nobody. She ceased to be worried by its abnormality. She accepted it. She accepted it as the consequence of living first in Pietermaritzburg, then in Durban, and later in Capetown. She no longer wondered whether she was going mad; instead she awaited her chance to escape.
Beatrice’s disturbance was probably partly due to her discovery of what her husband was like out of his uniform. All that he demanded was that she should allow him to tie her up and gently maltreat her. The mere sight of her tied up was usually sufficient to bring him to a sexual climax; she suffered not from his violence but from her own shame and disappointment. The unfamiliar climate of Natal and Cape Colony may have further exacerbated her nervous condition. But there was another factor.
THE GREAT AMAXOSA DELUSION
On 23 December 1847, the British Governor of Cape Colony, Sir Harry Smith, summoned together the chiefs of the Amaxosa tribes on the Eastern Frontier. He told them that their territory—the most fertile in South Africa—was to be annexed and made a crown dependency: British Kaffraria. After a while it became clear that the Gaika tribe and their chief Sandila were determined to offer the most stubborn resistance. Sir Harry Smith re-summoned the chiefs. Sandila refused to come. Whereupon Sir Harry deposed him of his ch
iefship, and in his place, as chief of the Gaikas, appointed an English magistrate called Mr Brownlee. Convinced that they had now dealt with the matter masterfully, the two Englishmen ordered the arrest of Sandila. On 24 December 1850 the force sent out to arrest him was ambushed and the Gaika tribe rose in revolt. White settlers in the military villages along the frontier were attacked and killed whilst celebrating Christmas. Thus began the Fourth Kaffir War: the penultimate stage in the Amaxosas’ long defence of their independence, which had continued for sixty years.
By 1853 the British, with their prodigious military advantages (the war cost the Colonial Office nearly a million pounds), were able to impose a military defeat on the tribes. In 1856 there followed what the British were later to call ‘The Great Amaxosa Delusion’. This ‘delusion’ constituted the ultimate stage of the Amaxosa nation’s defence of its independence.
A girl named Nongkwase told her father that when going to draw water from a stream she had met strangers of commanding aspect. The father went to see them. They told him that they were spirits of the dead who had come to help their people drive the white men into the sea. The father reported to Sarili, an Amaxosa chief, who announced that the people must do what the spirits instructed. The spirits instructed the people to kill all their cattle and to destroy every grain of corn they possessed. Their cattle had become thin and their crops poor as a result of the land already stolen from them by the white man. When every head of cattle was killed and every seed of corn destroyed, myriads of fat beautiful cattle would issue from the earth, great fields of heavy ripe corn would instantly appear, trouble and sickness would vanish, everybody would be young and beautiful, and the white man, on that day, would perish utterly.