by John Berger
Jean Ferrero found the pizzeria by chance because he took a wrong turning in the petrol-town of Cortemaggiore and it was the crowd of men laughing by the door who attracted his attention when he was asking his way for Cremona. Inside there’s a long table down the middle of the eating saloon, and thirty or more men are sitting at it. The walls are in white tiles. He has found a small table near the ovens, from where he can keep an eye on his bike in the street.
Luciano, the pizzaiolo, works in his vest. Most of the men eating are also bare-shouldered. Jean Ferrero has hung his helmet, jacket, gloves, shirt on a hat stand. Some of the men have the newspaper hats of building workers on their heads, others wear red and yellow peaked caps with the names of petrol companies printed on them. Like this, the gathering looks like a party. Every day each of them at the big table takes the same place and so everyone knows his neighbour’s sore points and how much or how little wine or water to pour for him. It’s the younger ones who do the pouring. The older ones explain what’s happening in the world.
Luciano is pummelling an armful of dough like a trainer punches his boxer to tease him. At one moment he leans over the counter covered with flour, away from the ovens, to shout at Jean: In a pizzeria without laughter the ovens cook badly—no doubt you’ve heard that!
One waitress, Elisa, serves all the men. Jean observes the confidence with which she carries the plates and carafes, and the skill with which she avoids their fondling and grasping hands. She is about the same age as Ninon.
Who ordered the Siciliana?
Here Lisetta, it’s for Otello, here.
Why are you so serious today, Lisetta, didn’t you sleep well?
Did he keep you awake all night, Lisetta?
And the Quattro Stagioni, she sings out, who ordered the Quattro Stagioni?
Elisa’s wrists are thin like Ninon’s, too.
Lisetta! Give us a smile and some more water!
I started with a mule, interrupts Federico, today my dump is the largest in Lombardy. Fifteen hectares of scrap. I can’t sleep and I’m thinking about Gino, so I walk around my stacks and they give off a kind of peace. It comes from their stillness. Every precious thing I’ve brought here was once manufactured for movement, for turning, as they say. (Laughter) Now each one is still, so still, surrounded by hundreds and thousands of almost identical ones who are still. It must be below freezing. In some of the stacks the metals are talking. I’m not hard of hearing yet. They zing in the cold, icy air. If I stop walking and listen, they zing out whole sentences. In below-zero temperatures metals sometimes do this. Just as on stifling summer nights the thinner metals chirp with accumulated heat, like cicadas. I’m already explaining to you, Counsel, so you’ll be fully prepared for defending me. I’m explaining to you how I made up my mind. Very calmly, Counsel. The sounds my stacks are making don’t disturb the stillness of the night.
And their wisdom isn’t violent. This is why I come back to the office at peace with myself and sure, sure of what has to be done tomorrow. She’ll be spared a lot of suffering, she’s condemned anyway. And like this Gino will be saved. When they put me on trial, I’ll lay out, with your help, Counsel, the whole godforsaken situation and every father in the country will support me. The Scrap Man of Asola will be called a national hero. But I’m doing it for their sakes, both of them. Which gun would be best? I’m wondering about my Beretta 921 which I bought off a Sardinian lawyer. Perhaps you even know him, Counsel? Agostino, he was called. He said he bought it to protect himself in Cagliari. Lawyers need guns there, and he sold it to me with a box of ammunition.
You’re my daily happiness, says one of the men in newspaper hats, to Elisa.
You want to pay now? Elisa asks Jean Ferrero, who is staring like a deaf man into the open oven from which Luciano has just slid out another pizza.
I got too close, Gino, I saw the pain in her eyes, so much pain there was no room for more. Then she started to laugh and I couldn’t do it. I drank my coffee and left. I couldn’t do it.
You want to pay now? Elisa asks Jean Ferrero a second time.
See that heap of spark plugs there? Big enough to fill a railway truck. In principle, Gino, their porcelain can be recycled. Everything has to be sorted out. Putting the same things together, separating like from unlike. It’s what I’ve done all my life. People mix up everything. They throw everything away in the same place. That’s how they make trash. There’s no such thing as trash. Trash is the confusion we make throwing things out.
You can’t give her up, you tell me. You want to, but you can’t. That’s already trash, Gino. You don’t want to give her up and you know very well you could. She has told you to leave her many times. There’s nobody who would say a word if you left her. There’s no future for you. There’s more future for those radiators there than for you and her. Anyway leave is the wrong word. To leave you have to share a front door and you’ve never lived in the same place together. There’s no question of leaving. It’s a question of not going further, of stopping. And you, you want to go further. I don’t ask why. Any more than I ask why there’s a metal called tungsten. Tungsten exists. (Laughter)
So does love. In your case, love’s as heavy as tungsten. You want to give this Frenchwoman everything you can. Then separate things out. You love her. She’s going to die. So are we all. She’s going to die soon. Then be quick. You can’t have children, you can’t risk passing that abomination on to another generation.
The ancients believed that metals were engendered underground, all of them, engendered by the coupling of mercury with sulphur. Use a capote, Gino, and marry her. You’ll be marrying a woman, not a virus. Scrap isn’t trash, Gino. Marry her.
The wheels screech against the rails as the tram corners. It is the No. 11 beneath the windows of Zdena’s flat. Zdena is ironing a blouse in the room with the tiled stove. On the floor lies an open suitcase already packed.
I used to help Tante Claire hang out the washing. We went out to the garden together carrying a plastic basin—a thing just large enough to bath a baby in. That is something I shall never do. The basin was blue. The geese were there in the grass. Piece by piece we picked out the wet laundry and hung it on the line with pegs. I carried the pegs in my apron. They were made in plastic, coloured red and yellow like baby’s toys. All my babies have been killed.
When everything was on the line, flapping in the wind which blew down the valley, it always surprised me how much Tante Claire and I had carried out in the basin! Enough to fill a whole garden! I have the same surprise when I watch Gino unloading his van. It’s hard to believe so much gear can be fitted into a Mercedes D320. Under his sunshades, which have wooden spokes like giant parasol mushrooms, Gino starts to arrange jeans, waistcoats, hunters’ jackets, caps, swimming trunks, shirts, sweaters, shorts, headbands, neck rags, suits, macs, sandals, bathrobes, kimonos. He doesn’t let me help him unload. You can chat up the clients, he says, they’ll buy to make you smile! He’s selling a kind of bathrobe which I called an Egyptian Tunic and that’s what he’s written on the piece of cardboard above the rail where they hang: TUNICHE EGIZIE. 99,000 lire.
The other day he sent me into the van to find a jumbo shirt for a client who was so fat he looked as if he’d need a bell-tent for a shirt. And there, behind a pile of slips, I noticed what looked like a letter in Gino’s handwriting, stuck with scotchtape to the metal side of the van. Who’s he writing to? I ask myself, and why does he stick it there? I could see it wasn’t a stock list.
So I squat down and read it and it says something like: You’re beautiful, love, there’s no spot on you. Your lips, beloved, taste like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under your tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home. You, my wife, are my garden, a secret spring, a fountain that nobody knows. The smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home. And underneath in capital letters is written my name: NINON.
I come straight out of the van, I scream at him in front of everybody who’s there. I call h
im a liar and a cheat.
It’s from the Bible, he says.
Fuck it, I tell him, you know what I have …
There appeared before my blind eyes something which was part of the story, yet I could not say how.
The cross is not made of a noble wood like cedar. It’s a common wood, like that used for shuttering concrete. Christ’s hair with his head slumped forward hides one of his eyes and falls over half his face. The nails nailed through his feet, and the thorns of the crown tugged over his head by hands wearing gloves, show forever the cruelty of men. This cruelty can use anything. This is why the Christ has a body. His body is also loved. He was betrayed, abandoned, forsaken and he was loved. His body—pallid, fragile, doomed—shows this love. Don’t ask me how. Ask the criminals, ask children, ask the Magdalen, ask mothers …
Zdena places her ironed, folded blouse on top of the other clothes and packets and toilet articles in the suitcase. She kneels on the floor to close the case and she looks at the acacia tree through the window. What has she forgotten?
Tante Claire loves birds. Her geese with red beaks recognise me as soon as I come home from school, as soon as I turn into our little road. She hears them squawking and she comes out to talk to me. They are always there, the geese, they wake up every morning, they guard the house, they lay eggs, they never forget to look up twice every minute to see who’s coming next and to quack, and if the grass is too tall and they can’t see over it, they flatten the grass down with their feet which are like flatirons. If one of her feet is hurting, a goose limps like I do when my foot hurts.
A long the Po there is such a heaviness in the air that the swallows are flying at knee level to collect the weighed-down insects. In the villages along the SS 343 the dust and the hens wait, one leg raised, beaks open. Everywhere there is electricity. The bar of a level crossing slowly descends, its bell ringing and its red light flashing. Jean Ferrero slows to a halt, puts both his feet on the ground and straightens his back.
Okay, Papa, why not? Take me to Athens for Easter. If I could, I’d take a trip round the world. Like that I’d know what I was leaving. You have enough money for Athens?
A goods train passes. The signalman counts sixty-four wagons. Then the first drops of rain arrive. Very sparsely to begin with, each one like a water-berry which explodes on hitting the tarmac, scattering tiny water-seeds in every direction. He leans forward on the petrol tank and he lets the bike surge away. As they gather speed, the rain too falls faster and faster. The Po is so pock-marked the boatmen can’t see across. He is obliged to open his visor for he can see nothing. The rain hits his eyes and the skin around them as he reads PIADENA, the name of the town he’s entering.
The piazza is deserted. He dismounts and hurries into the nearest doorway for shelter. Once there, he shakes the rain off himself, and a class of school kids, who are waiting in the entrance hall for the storm to pass, watch him as if he were a comedian.
That’s rain, he says.
We’re used to it. It pisses and pisses on us here.
Is this your school?
Museum here.
Museum?
Museo Archeologico. We come here for our injections, punture. Out at the back there’s a Red Cross post.
Sometimes the Po floods! another kid shouts, floods and floods!
When the Po breaks a dyke here, nothing can stop it!
The last time was eleven years ago!
Fourteen!
Eleven!
Where’s the museum?
Through the big door there.
He pushes it open and steps into a long, dimly lit, deserted gallery, where he walks along a line of statues. The gallery has a roof of skylights, and the rain, which has turned to hail, clatters so fiercely that he puts his crash helmet back on his head for fear that the hailstones will smash the glass of the skylight.
He passes trays of ancient coins and shelves of pottery. Then he goes towards a display case and, after peering into it, he holds it between his arms as if it were a pinball machine and had flippers to operate on its sides.
Inside is a gold necklace lying on a scrap of dusty brown velvet. A typewritten card gives a date of 1500 B.C. And adds a question mark.
The necklace is of golden tubes strung on a thread. Each tube is no longer than a child’s fingernail is wide. After each third tube, a beech leaf hangs from the thread, a leaf the same size as a real one. But the leaves of the necklace are of a gold beaten thinner than any natural leaf could be. And on them the leaf’s veins are incised, each incision shining like a platinum hair.
Worn around the neck, the leaves would flutter against her sternum and collarbone as she walked. When she stood still, they would stir as she breathed, light and metallic, with a crisp sound. To wear this necklace would be to feel protected by every leaf of every tree in the world.
The signalman searches for the hinges of the glass lid and its lock. He takes out a knife from his pocket. He examines the underneath of the case. He hesitates. Finally he lifts the whole thing off its legs. Inside, the leaves of the necklace stir. With his arms around the case he takes several steps with the glass case against his chest.
I heard a woman’s voice in Homeric Greek: It’s so long, Kallias, since you sailed. Where are you? Come close. I undress and I take off my necklace, my gold necklace of leaves, and much later—after everything I choose not to remember whilst you are away, perhaps after we have fallen asleep once—I lie on my back, my hair over the cushions, and I turn so my left shoulder’s in the air and my right cheek’s against the sheet, like this you are beside me and behind me, and you lie with your left thigh raised between my two, and it presses upwards so I ride on it, and my right leg I trail behind me till it finds your left calf and, our ankles touching, we cross our two feet and your left arm comes under mine to hold my breast and the hand of your other arm comes over me to hold the other one, with your mouth on the nape of my neck and your nose in the hollow of my occipital, like the two of us are one, Kallias, my left hand holding your arse … Kallias.
The signalman in the museum puts the case down. He would like to steal the necklace. He’d like to buy it. He’d like his daughter to wear it. He’d like to give it to her. He’d like her to have it forever. And it will stay nevertheless in the ramshackle museum of Piadena.
The streets outside smell of dust washed away. The swallows are flying as high as the bell tower of the white church in the piazza, and, as happens after a thunderstorm, people have come out of their houses to examine what’s there as if a new era had dawned.
Three youngsters have taken possession of one of the stone benches: two young men in white T-shirts and a woman wearing a quilted waistcoat. They smile, they hug their knees, they lean a little against one another and they wait together, as they often wait. In small towns like Piadena on this plain, where the skyline hides nothing, they wait for the moments during which life counts. When they arrive, these moments, they come and they pass quickly. Afterwards, nothing is quite the same and they wait once more. Time here is often like time for athletes who prepare for months or years for a performance which lasts less than a minute. Now they watch the motorcyclist drive across the piazza and leave their town.
Zdena is on the fifth-floor landing of the wide staircase which has neither carpet nor wallpaper but a polished wooden handrail. She has already put her suitcase by the head of the stairs. Through the half-open door of her flat, her glance lingers on the mirror and her desk and the lace curtains of the grand windows and the armchairs in which her friends sprawl and talk, and on her coffee tables chaotic with papers. Wearing a smart gabardine trench coat, she turns the key in the lock very slowly so as to make the least possible noise, like a mother leaving a room on tiptoe when she has put her child to sleep.
Gino wants us to get married. I have told him a hundred times—No. Last week I said: All right. I remembered Gino’s grass. It hangs above my bed.
Afterwards we’ll go on a trip together, he said.
&n
bsp; Where?
I haven’t decided, and if I had, I wouldn’t tell you. It’ll be a secret. A surprise, he said.
I know where I want to be married.
Tell me.
Where the river Po goes into the sea!
Sì, he said.
We’ll hold hands! I said, that’s it, that’s all.
I have an aunt who lives in a place called Gorino. You can’t be farther into the sea. We’ll get married from her house.
In June, I said.
June the seventh.
Gino knows what day of the week every date in the year is. It comes from working the markets.
Friday, June the seventh, in Gorino, he said.
The way Jean Ferrero is driving makes me remember Nikos. Nikos from Gyzi. We used to swim together—this was before I went blind. Nikos particularly liked diving into the sea from the rocks at Varkiza. When he walked solemnly to the edge and stood there, his two feet together, taking a deep breath, it was as if he had left his body. He was absent from it. He had given his body to a diver and he, Nikos, was elsewhere. After he had dived, when he clambered out of the water in order to dive again, it was the diver who was wet, not him. Nikos was still somewhere in the air watching the sea, the diver, the rocks and the sun. And it’s the same with the signalman as he rides between Viadana and Bergantino. He has left the saddle, he is in the air, and he is watching his bike, the road and the pilot. The road is a small one on the north bank of the Po.
We climb the mountain above the school, we place our feet very carefully so no stones roll and we make no noise except our breathing, then the sentinel won’t hear us coming, and when we’ve climbed to the ridge if they’re there today, we’ll see the marmots. The teacher says they woke up last week. They wake up when the snow melts. Without it they feel cold, they feel hungry too, they haven’t eaten anything for five months, they’ve used up all their fat and their bones ache. So, they rub their eyes and their blood comes pounding back. The marmot sentinel is standing up. He is going to whistle. He has seen us. Who goes there? he asks. Friend, I say.