G.

by John Berger

  Camomille.

  The feeling of tenderness wells over and makes it impossible for Camille to imagine anything viewed from a distance; the idea of the dryad is momentarily obliterated. Gradually such moments become longer and longer until the dryad disappears into the smell of the crushed grass and the surrounding silence, never to return, and Camille becomes entirely concentrated in the act of following with her tongue the underseam of the penis of the man over whose thigh her head is hanging.

  He is there under her, above her, beside her. He has no claims on her; he has made none. He is there like the trellis with the vine overgrowing it. He is there like a wall against which she could repeatedly bang her head. He is there, outside herself, like everything else in the world which has not claimed a second residence in her consciousness. She has not said to herself that she loves him. He has convinced her of only one thing. Unlike any other man she has ever encountered, he has convinced her that his desire for her—her alone—is absolute, that it is her existence which has created this desire. Formerly she has been aware of men wanting to choose her to satisfy desires already rooted in them, her and not another, because among the women available she has approximated the closest to what they need. Whereas he appears to have no needs. He has convinced her that the penis twitching in the air above her face is the size and colour and warmth that it is entirely because of what he has recognized in her. When he enters her, when this throbbing, cyclamen-headed, silken, apoplectic fifth limb of his reaches as near to her centre as her pelvis will allow, he, in it, will be returning, she believes, to the origin of his desire. The taste of his foreskin and of a single tear of transparent first sperm which has broken over the cyclamen head making its surface even softer to the touch than before, is the taste of herself made flesh in another.

  This can never stop, she whispers, slowly and calmly. My love, my love.

  They were fucking in the grass. Both half believed that they were no longer lying down but standing up and walking as they fucked; towards the end they began to run through tall wet grass. He had the further illusion that others were running towards him.

  All are there. How can I ever open those words to let their original and still potential meaning out? All are there in their own time and at the same time. It is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether the sweet throat is mine or yours. And here, now, here let the word supreme attain its supremacy. It is of no consequence whose is whose. All parts are one. All are there together. All despite all their differences are there together. He joins them. There is no more need. There, desire is its satisfaction, or, perhaps, neither desire nor satisfaction can be said to exist since there is no antinomy between them: every experience becomes the experience of freedom there: freedom there precludes all that is not itself.

  He and Camille lay alone, dishevelled, side by side on the slope by the vine. A peasant passing by on the far bank of the stream spotted them although they were lying quite still. He saw a white arm like a statue’s and a stockinged foot. The peasant was curious and crouched down to observe what would happen next.

  Whom were we walking?

  I was a knee which wanted the thigh on the other leg.

  The sounds of my most tender words were in your arse.

  Your heels were my thumbs.

  My buttocks were your palms.

  I was hiding in one corner of your mouth. You looked for me there with your tongue. There was nothing to be found.

  With your throat swollen, my feet in the pit of my stomach, your legs hollow, my head tugging at your body, I was your penis.

  You were the light which falling on the dark petals of your vagina became rose.

  The blood-vessel was lifted up in the lock of your flowers.

  Normally a shooting incident in Domodossola would only have been reported in the local Italian press, but since the town was full of journalists from all over Europe, who were awaiting the death or recovery of Chavez, the story was printed in many different papers. According to their time-honoured tradition when dealing with incidents affecting respectable members of the bourgeoisie, the Swiss newspapers tactfully withheld the full names of those involved.

  ‘The small town of Domodossola was yesterday the scene of a dramatic crime passionnel. Monsieur H—, a French businessman with interests in the motor car industry, found himself in the town in connection with the recent triumphal crossing of the Alps by the aviator Geo Chavez. At 3.30pm in the crowded Piazza Mercato, Monsieur H—fired three times with an automatic pistol at Monsieur G, a young Englishman who is likewise said to be a flying enthusiast. The latter had just come out of a fruit shop and was walking in one of the picturesque arcades which border the square. The life of the victim, who was wounded in the shoulder, is not in danger. He was taken immediately to the hospital where the aviator hero is also being treated.

  ‘After the incident Monsieur H—offered no resistance to the police and declared that his only mistake had been to fire from too far away. He claimed that he had already warned the Englishman that he would shoot him if he did not desist from embarrassing and pursuing his wife, Madame H—. “It is an affair,” he said, “of elementary honour and I am certain that when the facts have been established, I will be assured of the sympathy of all decent society.” The Englishman, although he evidently speaks fluent Italian, declined to answer questions.’

  On the wall of the old hospital at Domodossola—a new larger hospital has since been built near by—there is a plaque with an inscription which pays tribute to Chavez’ heroism and indicates the room on the first floor where he died on 27 September 1910.

  All accounts of his last hours suggest that Chavez remained haunted by his flight. He could not understand what still separated him from the life continuing around him: the life which, with all the ardour of his determined youth, he wanted to re-enter. His achievement, in so far as he could separate it from the disaster which had befallen him, only increased the mocking appeal of this life.

  ‘I’m going now. Let’s go quickly to Brig.’ Vive Chavez! He remembered writing that on his own legs. What had he done wrong? Whether the fault, the transgression, had been technical or moral was by now hopelessly confused in his mind. He tried to recall what he had screamed when he had entered the Gondo. He could not. And he feared that he would not be able to until he had come out of the Gondo. He was still in it.

  There is no plaque on the hospital wall to indicate the room, only three windows away, where G. was taken from the operating theatre after a bullet had been removed from his wound. A middle-aged nurse with the complexion of a Neapolitan was washing his face and neck.

  For the first time since the shooting, it was comparatively quiet. From his bed he could see the hospital garden. The absolutely still leaves of a willow tree were sharply distinct in the horizontal evening light. It occurred to him how brief moments of drama are; how swiftly order can be re-established. He was reminded of his father’s garden in Livorno and the pool with the perch in it. And he remembered the exhilaration with which, in that garden, he had discovered that what matters is not being dead. He let out his breath in a hiss.

  I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?

  No, no. I thought of something. He paused a moment. Then, in a lighter voice, he said: Now, you tell me, you are an experienced woman, I can see that, and you are not over-fastidious. Now, would you say I was like the devil?

  Shhhhhh! Don’t think about such things.

  You haven’t answered me.

  She glanced at the young man’s face, leering, and his dark eyes looking at her and she thought of the story of how an outraged husband had tried to shoot him dead and she said: You don’t look like a devil to me.

  (Later when she told the story she pretended that she replied like that because it is the duty of a nurse to keep a patient calm.)

  That is what he called me. But imagine trying to shoot the devil! Do you know the only way to get rid of the devil? Offer him what he asks. Would you do that?

  In dr
ying his face with a towel she tried to stop him talking by clapping her hand over his mouth.

  Now, would you offer him what he asked? he insisted. It’s the only way—even if it’s your soul he wants!

  It is wrong to blaspheme even in jest. You shouldn’t talk like that. Bo! he cried.

  (She confessed later that she had been so surprised that she couldn’t help laughing.)

  The face of his fiancée who had come from Paris and was sitting by his bed was the length of the Gondo away from Chavez. If he stretched out his arm to touch her, he had the impression that his arm was the sleeve of the Gondo, from which his fingertips, moving round her mouth, could just emerge but not the remainder of his body.

  His agony of mind was the result of an axiomatic truth, in which he had believed all his life, having been inexplicably overturned. In face of his courage and his survival without serious wounds, God, nature and the world of men should have found themselves in accord. Why were they not? He had proved his right to succeed and he had been forced to forego it. The wind he so wrongly under-estimated, the mountains, the treacherous icy air, the earth which entered his mouth and now his own blood, his very own body refused to accord him his achievement. Why?

  During the night he repeatedly muttered: Je suis catholique, je suis catholique.

  G. woke up and found himself re-hearing word for word what Camille had said in the motor car on the way back from Domodossola.

  I will write to you. Where shall I write to you?

  No, do not write. As soon as I arrive in Paris I will give you a sign.

  You will be amazed to see what I am capable of. I will astonish you. I shall be cunning. I shall be as cunning as an avocat. I will disguise myself. Can you imagine me as a baker? I will come to you disguised as a baker. Or as an old woman. (She laughed a little.) You will be horrified—and then I will take my disguise off and you will see your corn-crake. If Maurice wants to kill me, he can. I am not afraid. But it is you he will try to kill. It is you who must wear a disguise. What would suit you? You might be a Spaniard. A Spanish priest! It must be something unlike you, so that I can hardly believe—but now I would know you, however you were disguised, I would recognize you anywhere, and Maurice would recognize you because of the light in my eyes when I saw you. Supposing you knew afterwards you must die? And I too knew that you must die? I wouldn’t try to stop you now. Now I wouldn’t. Before, I would have done. I would have tried to save you. I would have refused you. Perhaps I would have been afraid myself. I know now. I would welcome you. That is what you would want. And you would want me then under threat of death more than you have wanted any woman. And afterwards I would die with you—happy.

  Next day, Chavez’ last words, whose meaning cannot be interpreted, were: Non, non, je ne meurs pas … meurs pas.

  Weymann came into the room with a pained expression on his face. He greeted G. coolly and then went and stood by the window, through which he kept looking out as though something surprising were happening on the lawn below.

  The funeral is tomorrow, Weymann said.

  I hear everything from the corridor. The walls aren’t very thick here. He died at three o’clock yesterday afternoon.

  The whole town is in mourning, said Weymann.

  If Hennequin had been a better shot, we could have had a double funeral!

  That is a remark in very poor taste.

  It would have been my funeral, not yours. Why are you so solemn? Because it is a solemn occasion and your—your—he struggled for the right word and looked out on the invisible events taking place on the lawn below—your philanderings are most inappropriate. The whole town is in mourning. The factories have stopped work.

  It will be like an opera by Verdi. The Italians love deaths. Not Death but deaths. Have you noticed?

  They feel the tragedy of the occasion.

  You said he was an idiot.

  That was before I knew he was dying.

  Does it make any difference? He asked this in a gentler voice, and Weymann, somewhat mollified, left the window and approached the bed.

  He has passed over into the sky, said Weymann in the voice of the priest whom he often resembled, a bit of the sky which the rest of us, who are still alive, call the paradise of lost flyers.

  I shall be out of here by tonight and then I will be able to pay my respects too. Have the Hennequins left?

  I must tell you that the whole affair in which you were involved has been a considerable embarrassment to all of us. Scenes like the one you provoked give the flying community a bad name. It makes us out to be adventurers—

  But aren’t you?

  You know exactly what I mean.

  Tell me, have they gone back to Paris?

  Madame Hennequin was in a state of collapse, if it gives you any satisfaction to know that.

  And Monsieur?

  He had to be constrained from coming to find you in hospital. The second time he wouldn’t miss, he said.

  You should have let him come. I should have liked to have seen him again.

  Suddenly Weymann was angry. His thin face became red and his eyes protruded as he stared at the figure in the bed: Yes, I think we should have let him come. What are you doing? What are you playing at? Let me tell you something. This town is full of men. Tomorrow it will be fuller—men coming from all over the world to pay their homage to the magnificent contribution, the historic courage of Geo. Do you know there are peasants who have walked from the mountain villages into town today to line up and pay their last tributes to the man they loved. You should look at their faces. You might learn a little modesty. You might see what it means to be offered hope for your children after a lifetime of toil and sacrifice. You might understand what achievement is. And amongst these men, these men who fill the town like pilgrims and lend it their own dignity, there is a little—there is a little runt!

  He banged the door and was gone.

  The crowd made the town look like a village. Figures in black pressed against the walls of the narrow streets. In an open doorway several children were barred and held back by women with straight rigid arms, lest they run out into the street as the procession passed and by this single act diminish the long-lasting gravity of the moment. From first-floor windows and from the balconies above hung improvised flags of black crêpe and tricolours with black upon them. It was sunny. The streets through which the cortège would not pass were deserted. All shops and offices were shut. The bells in the campanile tolled very slowly. The last note of each peal seeped almost completely away before the next refilled the silence. The sound was such that even in the arcade from where you could see neither sky nor mountains you were reminded of solitude. In the precincts of the Piazza Mercato there was an unusually strong smell of horses and leather, for carriages and carts had brought mourners from all over the countryside and many had been left there, unattended, while the mourners followed the coffin on foot.

  The Stationmaster, wearing a gold-braided cap and a long coat, glanced once more at his own reflection in the glass doors of the waiting-room. It was not a question of vanity at this moment but of vocation; in the same spirit an actor may glance in a mirror before going on stage. Within the waiting-room journalists from all over Europe jostled to book their telephone lines to their capitals.

  Assembled outside the hospital the town band began to play a funeral march. The cortège moved off, shuffling at first. In front of the four horses of the hearse, girls in white veils strewed tuberoses on the cobbles and dust. Boys darted back and forth between the main street-corners and the head of the procession to keep the girls supplied with baskets of flowers. The Mayor had announced that the cost of the funeral would be met by the municipality. When they were standing upright, one girl might timidly smile at another; but when they were strewing the flowers on the road, bending forward as if trying to cast a net in a fast-flowing stream, they did so with grave, concentrated expressions, one with her teeth biting her lower lip.

  Close behind the hearse w
alked the hero’s grandmother, brother, fiancée and family friends. The fiancée held her head high with the air of a wife following a cart which is taking her husband, a heretic, to his execution; she defied the occasion; she defied the forces which had killed him. Geo’s brother, a rich young banker, walked with his head down, looking at the flowers on the road, many as yet untrampled. The grandmother walked with a stick, jabbing the ground. Sometimes her stick skewered a flower.

  Behind the family came the diplomats, the senators, Chavez’ fellow pilots, the Mayor, the journalists, the representatives of aircraft-engine firms, the local rich. And after a discrete gap there was the straggling procession of thousands, most of whom had seen Chavez when he first appeared, triumphant, on their side of the mountain, when he was coming down to land in the field where Duray had pegged out the white cross in calico. At this sight of a victory being apparently so easily gained, in face of the impossible being so quickly transformed into the possible, they had felt elated. In the newspapers they had read, or had heard others read, sentences like: The great utopia of yesterday has become reality. And so some had asked themselves: Why should we too not achieve what we wish? Those who were in the habit of answering such speculative questions had given their usual answers. The rich must be overthrown. Private property must be destroyed. Others had maintained that Italy must be united, must be given Trieste, must have more colonies; only then would all Italians fulfil their destiny. To those who asked, all the answers seemed theoretical. But the question had remained.