by John Berger
Within an instant he had shut the windows and had turned round to face her. That he had succeeded, that it was indeed she, Leonie, who was standing there, looking with uncertainty at him, was established once and for all in his mind by the most characteristic facts about her: her large fingers, her broad squashed-looking nose, the coarse stringy wisps of hair escaping from under her maid’s cap, her peasant’s unpowdered complexion with, to the left of her chin, a pale slight discoloration the size of a small fingernail, her rounded shoulders and bosom, her brown eyes the colour of dark wood. He scarcely noticed the features which had made Weymann call her sweet, for these she had in common with many others.
He put his arms round her. She stood there, her cheek against his chest, waiting. She listened to his words. My heart. My happiness. My brown-eyed lamb. Leonie, Queen of the Alps. (But such words recorded for a third person lose their precision and their outrageous eloquence.) She was passive neither in her listening nor in her apparent submission to his will. She was constructing, precisely and furiously, the meaning of what had happened to her.
A week ago she had never seen him nor even imagined a man like him. He was rich. He was the friend of men who flew aeroplanes. He bad flown in an aeroplane himself. He travelled from country to country. He spoke a peculiar German. He had a face like a man in a story. She counted on none of these facts for what they might say in themselves. They were merely items of proof that he was different from anybody else who had spoken to her. Yet, if this had been all, she would have attached no great significance to his being different. Her expectations in life were modest. She knew very well that the world was full of people who were utterly different from the townspeople of Brig or the peasants of the Valais, and that they could have nothing to say or do with her. But he—and this is what so profoundly impressed her—addressed himself to her, Leonie. For a week he had concentrated on nothing else but seeking her out, offering her presents and compliments, talking with her and demonstrating to her her own uniqueness. Like all people who are not set upon deceiving themselves, Leonie was able to distinguish intuitively between sincerity and insincerity. She knew that he was not lying to her, even if she remained ignorant of the truth he was telling her. She could distinguish, too, as most women can, between a man who is begging for favours, or, alternatively, may try to grasp them, and a man who, in face of a particular woman, is compelled to present himself to her as he is. This is some of what she meant when she said to herself: he has come for me.
When Zeus, in order to approach a woman he had fallen in love with, disguised himself as a bull, a satyr, an eagle, a swan, it was not only to gain the advantage of surprise: it was to encounter her (within the terms of those strange myths) as a stranger. The stranger who desires you and convinces you that it is truly you in all your particularity whom he desires, brings a message from all that you might be, to you as you actually are. Impatience to receive that message will be almost as strong as your sense of life itself. The desire to know oneself surpasses curiosity. But he must be a stranger, for the better you, as you actually are, know him, and likewise the better he knows you, the less he can reveal to you of your unknown but possible self. He must be a stranger. But equally he must be mysteriously intimate with you, for otherwise instead of revealing your unknown self, he simply represents all those who are unknowable to you and for whom you are unknowable. The intimate and the stranger. From this contradiction in terms, this dream, is born the great erotic god which every woman in her imagination either feeds or starves to death.
When he answered Weymann’s question: what do you do? by saying: I travel, the answer was neither superficial nor evasive. The constant stranger must continually travel.
For a moment longer her arms hung straight at her side. Out of the window she could see the sky above the mountains, September blue, familiar as the colour of a plate. The Blériot engine was still just audible.
The plane fell fifty metres, like a dead plaice dropped. Chavez wanted to turn back. What prevented him was what he had previously said to himself even although, at the time of saying it, it was unimaginable to him that his plane might drop like a dead fish.
Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.
Her upbringing and education at home, at school and in church has prepared her for the situation she now finds herself in. She must reject this unknown man who is about to ruin her life. She must save her honour. She must guard herself, her womanhood, for her beloved Eduard who has courted her for two years and with whom she will live in the house near the river where he keeps the beehives, and who will be the father to her children who will go to the same school in Brig as she went to. She is in danger of mortal sin. She must resist the evil temptation. In this way Leonie had been prepared. She must think of her own mother and of what she would wish for her daughter now. She, the daughter of her mother, she, the child of God, she, the promise of her beloved Eduard, she, the bride of her bridegroom in two months’ time, she, the mother of her future children, she, the elder sister of her younger sisters, she must preserve her honour as daughter, Christian, promise, bride, mother, sister. But she as I? I, Leonie, what should I do to preserve my honour? I did not know what to do. For this she had not been prepared. In her life as it is she cannot kiss this man. But he is not in her life; he is outside it. I was alone with him. There was nobody else. She will never again, she senses, be in the arms of a man outside her life. It was like a dream. What she does with him is not part of her life—although others will consider it so and its consequences may continue all her lifetime. What she does with him will be the doing of that part of her which is not in her life. My weakness was stronger than I was.
He slid his hands down her back until they were under her buttocks. Then slowly and deliberately he lifted her up. Her feet left the ground. He lowered her, but not so that her feet took her full weight.
She had the sensation that wherever his hands went they lifted her and took away some of her weight. He was putting his hands between her and gravity. She looked up into his eyes, which were entirely concentrated upon her. He was smiling and the gaps in his teeth looked as dark as his eyes. Although she could still recognize the sunlight streaming through the window, she could believe that there was a black curtain behind her back, black like his eyes and the gaps in his teeth, and that this black curtain was being slowly drawn around them until finally it would be like a black round tent. She felt him touching the parts of her which were naturally down-weighted, heavy, pendant, and each time he touched them he lifted them up and took away some of their weight. It was then that she put her arms round him.
His hands, which had counteracted the pull of gravity on all those parts of her body of whose mass—however slight—she could be conscious, had a further effect. Within the mass of each of these parts she felt a force of attraction, drawing it, not yet continually but in broken impulses, towards him and the larger mass of his body. (The sensation was comparable to the obvious one in her breasts but was deeper and more diffused.)
She began to repeat his name.
Any attempt at an exhaustive description of what she was experiencing is bound to be absurd. The experience was central to her life: everything that she had been, surrounded her present experience as land surrounds a lake. Everything that she had been was turned to sand and shelved at the borders of this experience to disappear beneath its waters and become its unseen, mysterious lake bed. To express her experience it would be necessary for us to reconstruct around ourselves her unique language. And this is impossible. Armed with the entire language of literature we are still denied access to her experience. There is only one possible way of, briefly, entering that experience: to make love to her. Then why do I want to describe her experience exhaustively, definitively, when I fully recognize the impossibility of doing so? Because I love her. I love you, Leonie. You are beautiful. You are gentle. You can feel pain and pleasure. You are tiny and I take you in my hand. You are large as the sky a
nd I walk under you. It was he who said this.
He placed her seated on the bed and went to the door. From the bed she held out her arms to him.
No, he said, not like drunken peasants.
The sudden harshness of his words did not hurt or surprise her. She simply waited to see what he would do next.
He told her to undress. She hesitated—not because she was unwilling but because she did not know how she should undress with him watching her. He started taking his own clothes off. She undid the buttons of her cuffs but no more. He stood there on the far side of the room, naked. She had often swept and cleaned this room. He stood there naked. Remembering the past, remembering that she had washed the curtains which he had just pulled across the window, she lowered her head.
Leonie, look up. He sees you. Look at him seeing you. You are being seen as you are. When you were born, before you opened your round crinkled mouth and cried out, you were first seen, not as yourself, but as the alternative to a boy. Their eyes went to your sex—a line drawn on your pink damp tummy—before they looked at your expanding eyes. You were a girl and they called you Leonie. Look, his looking surrounds you. He recognizes you as each mirror you have ever stopped in front of has reflected you. The mirror reflects: he recognizes. He stands naked seeing you. As you bend forward to take off your worn slip with a hole in it under one arm, he sees your two breasts fall forward not quite silently.
Your image covers the entire surface of his body like another skin. All your appearances surround his penis.
You have never seen yourself like this.
Looking at you he recognizes you. His recognition cannot be put out. It burns what it recognizes. And by the light of its burning it recognizes more and more until it is so bright that it recognizes as familiar what it has never seen.
He has never seen you naked and now you are.
Some say of my writing that it is too overburdened with metaphor and simile: that nothing is ever what it is but is always like something else. This is true, but why is it so? Whatever I perceive or imagine amazes me by its particularity. The qualities it has in common with other things—leaves, a trunk, branches, if it is a tree: limbs, eyes, hair, if it is a person—appear to me to be superficial. I am deeply struck by the uniqueness of each event. From this arises my difficulty as a writer—perhaps the magnificent impossibility of my being a writer. How am I to convey such uniqueness? The obvious way is to establish uniqueness through development. To persuade you, for example, of the uniqueness of Leonie’s experience by telling you the story of what happened when Eduard discovered that Leonie had been unfaithful to him. In this way the uniqueness of an event can be explained by its causes and effects. But I have little sense of unfolding time. The relations which I perceive between things—and these often include casual and historical relations—tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters. And so I am forced to use another method to try to place and define events. A method which searches for co-ordinates extensively in space, rather than consequentially in time. I write in the spirit of a geometrician. One of the ways in which I establish co-ordinates extensively is by likening aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them. On the bed they were not such prisoners.
On the road across the Kulm pass Chavez sees figures waving to him. Among them are Christiaens and Luigi Barzini. In a few hours the Corriere della Sera will carry a report of this moment.
‘A profound emotion nails us to the spot. We do not move. We are lifeless, our souls shining in our eyes, and our hearts beating fast. We are spellbound by the great beauty of what we are seeing. A thousand years of life cannot annul this memory.
‘After a few seconds we jump back into the car. Christiaens is beside us. Two Swiss police climb in also—and we are away! We look at each other; our eyes are red. The Swiss guards too have tears in their eyes as they mutter germanically: Mein Gott, mein Gott. The plane is now just about to enter the Krummbach valley which two hours ago was rent by wind and lightning. It is above the fields around the hospice. It looks as though he is losing height.
‘ “He’s landing,” we yell. “There he is! He’s landing!”
‘It is clear that the aviator has a moment of doubt. He may be thinking of landing; then he decides that the wind is not as terrible as he feared and he continues …’
All pilots at that time took their bearings from what they could see on the ground. And the ground reassured them, for on it they could expect to land and to receive help. When Blériot, the year before, had flown the Channel, a French destroyer had escorted him. Briefly, for about ten minutes, he lost contact with the ship and saw only the sea; he said afterwards that during those long minutes he had felt terrifyingly alone. Chavez’ decision now makes him the first man to fly deliberately beyond the sight and reach of other men.
The cold surrounds him like the four walls of a cell; but the cold also enters the cell. One wall presses relentlessly and continually against him. The right side of his face and body are icy. It is the wall of the wind: the wind which he once (twenty minutes ago) so wrongly under-estimated. The wrong no longer appears to him a matter of miscalculation but of transgression. It is the original sin to explain his life, now identical with this flight. The wall opposite that of the wind is made of rock and snow.
On his left he can see Monte Leone. The snow, white in the sunlight, both emphasizes the presence of the mountain and transforms it into a kind of absence.
Not a stain would remain on that white.
He tries to break through the wall of wind. Whenever he turns to the right, the roar of the Gnome engine becomes louder, because the wind blows it back at him, but the plane hangs almost stationary in the air. He has lost height which he must regain if he is to cross the Monscera. Yet he is frightened to climb. The wind above him is stronger than the wind blowing at him and it blows up there from all directions at once. It is bad when the plane drops, but it is even worse when it is lifted up by the wind. Then his own legs, his own feet in their boots above the engine move in a sickening way: the linen on the top surface of the wings blisters irregularly as though the wind had already torn holes on its underside.
Below the shoulders of Monte Leone and much nearer to him, the lower mountains rise like the broken eroded galleries of a semicircular amphitheatre in which he is alone in the centre.
He remembers Paulhan’s last words of advice: Keep high! Keep high! The words have become absurd.
His immediate difficulty will be to clear the far ridge of the amphitheatre after he has flown across the arena. The wind is edging him further and further into the semi-circle, towards the blind galleries. If he can clear the ridge where it breaks (west of the Glatthorn), there will be worse difficulties to face. He is too far east and he believes he has to climb three or four hundred metres to cross the Monscera. The wind, holding him down, and forcing him to the east, is cornering him and the corner where it will smash him to pieces will be in the gorge of the Gondo.
He must have considered whether he should turn into the wind and circle the arena to gain height. Yet, I believe, the idea of turning round, even momentarily, filled him with horror. If he once circled this theatre of blind gulleys and ridges, he would never break out of the circle but would die in it when his engine stopped. He would rather fight in a corner.
He can no longer distinguish between rock and silence. The surfaces of his body are by now completely numb from the cold. The most that his consciousness can oppose to the rocks which surround him is air and the noise of the engine at his feet. He flies on towards the Glatthorn like an arrow towards its target.
He is beside a rock face which is like the loose hide of a gigantic mule stretched across the frame of the letter A and, apparently, blown inwards, between the legs of the letter, by the same wind which is blowing against him and his plane. On the mule-hide of this rock Chavez sees the shadow of his wings, s
ometimes lurching away, sometimes rushing towards him as the shadow crosses folds. Looking down he sees rock rising up at him. Ahead he can see higher peaks still. Reverberating and echoing against the rock beside and below him, the noise of his engine falls and rises like his shadow, and his shadow seems to clatter with the noise of his engine and of falling stones.
Here there could have been no question of conscious decisions.
Here I cannot calculate as I write.
Chavez has the impression that he is about to enter the jaws of an animal whose passages and gullet and stomach and arse are made of solid rock, an animal whose digestion is geological. An animal that can kill before it is alive, and eat when it is dead.
Here it is not a matter of courage or the lack of it; here men divide themselves into those who still want to live and those who do not. Which they are may be revealed in the way they scream. Some ascend with their screams; some die with them. Chavez climbed, indifferent to the risk of stalling, indifferent to everything, except to the necessity of escaping from the jaws of the animal: upwards.
He was in the Gondo.
At Domodossola, in communication with Brig by telephone, everyone waits. The factories have stopped work. The workers are watching the sky. The old forego their siesta. The young are making their way to the field where Chavez will land, refuel and then take off for Milan. On every balcony and in every window which has a view of the Ossola valley, green, peaceful but climbing up to pine forests and then to rocks, people stand, eyes half-shut, staring into the sky above the Alps. There is no wind.