by John Berger
After the last photo, Ninon pulls at her husband’s arm. The gale has abated. Her husband leans his head towards her and she says into his ear: So we’re running together, Hare, are we? I have to do everything today … everything, you understand.
He will show her the lucioperca lying on the silver platter, varnished with aspic, shining as if moonlit, every scale silver or gold, bejewelled with almonds, coriander leaves and ruby-red pimentos, and he will turn the platter so Ninon can see the lucioperca standing on her tail, waiting like a dancer in a long clinging dress for the music to begin. And at this moment Ninon will take hold of Gino’s finger, and with the finger she will slowly trace down her own body the lateral line he taught her. When she releases his finger, she will tap with the toe of her shoe on the grass under the apple trees and she will order him: Look at me, husband, I’m your wife now. And then she will laugh. A laugh which comes from another time and from a language that has been lost.
They will sit side by side at the large table, surrounded by thirty people, and she will notice everything which is happening. Nothing will escape her. Wedding feasts are the happiest because something new is beginning, and with the newness comes a reminder of appetite, even to the oldest guests.
Renzo and Ercole will carry Emanuela out of the house on their shoulders and she’ll hold, high up above her head, a plate as wide as a bicycle wheel, piled with eels cooked in her own fashion. She cuts them into thick slices and impales them on a spit with sage, bay leaves and sprigs of rosemary, and bastes them before a fierce fire with their own oil, till their skins turn almost black. Then she serves the eels on the plate as wide as a bicycle wheel with the Mostarda di Cremona which is made from mustard oil, melons, pumpkins, little oranges, apricots, according to a recipe which dates back to the time of Sikelidas. Wonderful, said the same Sikelidas, wonderful the spring winds for mariners who long to set sail …
Ninon will be the first to clap, men will cheer, and Emanuela, the widow, her face flushed from the fire, will suddenly remember her husband saying to her: If you’d like to marry me, I have this house and a boat …
The two men lower the widow to the ground and she places her dish on the table in front of the newlyweds and Ninon kisses her, and only then does Emanuela take the hem of her apron to dab at her eyes.
Jean is distributing bottles of spumante in blue buckets full of broken ice: the plastic buckets are the ones Aunt Emanuela’s husband used on his fishing boat before he died. After Jean has opened a bottle and filled the nearest glasses, he sits down beside Marella. Other bottles pop as they are opened under the apple trees around them.
I’d know you were Ninon’s father anywhere, says Marella.
We look alike?
It’s the way you smile.
For a moment Jean is shy, lost for words.
You’re her best friend, he says at last.
In Modena, yes, I am. Have you noticed? Nobody can take their eyes off her, even when they’re eating.
She’s the bride, says Jean.
And she’s so determined, so determined to live. She says this quietly, their two heads close together. You have a tough daughter, Signor Ferrero.
You’ve been a great help to her.
I’m her friend, yes, and I feel closer to her than I ever have. But what could I do? I invented the word STELLA. And I told Gino to be patient. I told him she was dead. Dead. When you learn what she learnt, it kills you. I told him he had to wait and perhaps, just perhaps, she might have a second life, if he really wanted her, I added. And you know how he replied? He surprises me, Gino does, he never hesitates. Her second life, he said, will begin on our wedding day. They’d never thought of marriage before. Now look at them.
Zdena is sitting beside Scoto, the watermelon seller.
Happy? asks Scoto, are we happy?
Zdena lowers her eyes.
The sun is in your eyes? He asks, miming the dazzle and offering her his sunglasses. She shakes her head and finds her own sunglasses in her meticulously arranged handbag.
Everyone is eating and talking, joking and drinking. The cascading noise of feasts which nobody can recall until they are fortunate enough to find themselves at another.
Good? The melon seller asks Zdena.
First time, says Zdena.
Behind Scoto’s sad joker’s eyes there’s a love of questions which cannot be answered. A great mystery, he says, like everything.
Like some things.
Many things, Signora, and the most mysterious of all creatures is the anguilla.
He looks to Jean on the other side of the table, hoping he will translate.
Misterioso.
Jean translates sentence by sentence.
They have no lungs, begins Scoto, and they live for days out of water. Nobody knows how. They swim, swim very fast, and they cross overland. When they make a hole in the earth, they make it like a corkscrew tail first!
Zdena, as she listens to the story of the eels, gazes at her daughter.
The females are larger than the males and when they are ready to lay their eggs their bellies turn silver and their faces fill out and they smile … When the high tides come, they taste the saltier water and it makes them want to leave the river for the sea. This is the sacred moment for catching them. Millions of anguille swim into the traps which are called lavoriere. Yet some escape. We don’t know how. Everything about these creatures is mysterious.
If only I could take her place, whispers Zdena to Jean.
The ones who make their way to the open sea reach the Atlantic and swim across the ocean to the Sea of Sargasso, which is deeper than anybody knows, and on the ocean bed there, they lay their eggs and the male eels fertilise them.
Ninon suddenly laughs at a joke Emanuela has told her. She laughs as if laughing is the joke, and the joke is spinning the world round faster and faster so that only the joke holds and doesn’t go dizzy and gets bigger and bigger like a man’s prick, and throws off light and flecks of laughter and grains of sugar and with its head back swallows vino spumante, and plays with the bubbles and gives them to every comer with a kiss when they join her laughter.
The little eels start their long journey home, says Scoto. It takes them two, three, perhaps four years. And when they arrive here, Signora, they’re still no larger than one inch of shoelace!
And the parent eels? asks Jean.
Dead in the Sargasso Sea. The little ones come back alone.
I can’t believe it, says Zdena.
Again she hears her daughter laughing. Zdena lets her head fall back abruptly. Beyond the branches of the apple tree above her, there is the dazzle of the sky and, for one brief instant, without understanding anything, Zdena is happy.
I propose a toast, announces Federico, getting to his feet, a toast to our children’s happiness.
Happiness, Scoto says, come here happiness!
Then they will eat the meat. The sea, which farther south becomes my Aegean, is calm. Imperceptibly between the fingers of the Po’s hands, the sea slips into the lagoon where the inhabitants fish for mussels and where the shallow waters once drove sailors crazy with the desire to leave this swamp and sail across the world. The lagoon is lapping the dyke which protects some scattered houses, the church and the village square with the bench by the bus stop. From the church tower you’d smell the meat roasting. Lower than the square and far lower than the lagoon is the orchard of three apple trees beside the house. Beyond the house is the grass basement where the vans are parked and where Roberto and Gino are carving the lamb. I hear a knife being sharpened and men’s laughter. The smell of the fire hangs everywhere. Around the table in the orchard the women guests in their finery and the men in their shoes of softest leather sit or stroll or loll, yet all of them are in orbit round the bride. She doesn’t let them go, or they don’t let her go? As with a player on a stage it is hard to know which; both are true. And her dress glimmers amongst the boughs of the apple trees.
Roberto and Gino will carry th
e meat, sliced and served on boards as square as an arm is long, into the orchard. Their faces are stained and streaky. With the eating of the meat something changes at the feast, a last formality gives way to something older. Rose pink, infiltrated with garlic, heady with thyme and wood smoke, the lamb has an animal taste of young flesh and fresh cropped grasses.
Eat for a lifetime! Ninon will sing out. Gino and I, we went to the mountains together, we want the one there, we said, the one with the black nose, because we’d felt her with our hands, that’s our lamb! Where has Roberto gone? Drink to Roberto who has cooked for us!
Roberto kisses the bride, holding his blackened hands behind his back so as not to dirty her dress.
Everyone at the table in the orchard sits down to eat. With the meat they will drink the dark wine of Barolo. The guests start to touch each other more often, the jokes pass quicker. When somebody forgets, somebody else remembers for him or her. They hold hands when they laugh. Some take off things they were wearing before—a tie, a scarf, a jacket, a pair of sandals which have become too tight. The cutlets on the board demand to be picked up and stripped clean with the teeth. Everybody shares.
The wedding guests are becoming a single animal who has fed well. A strange creature to find in a widow’s orchard, a creature half mythical, like a satyr with thirty heads or more. Probably as old as man’s discovery of fire, this creature never lives more than a day or two and is only reborn when there’s something more to celebrate. Which is why feasts are rare. For those who become the creature, it’s important to find a name to which it answers whilst alive, for only then can they recall, in their memory afterwards, how, for a while, they lost themselves in its happiness.
Luca will fetch the wedding cake from his van. It has five tiers and is decorated with sprays of orange blossom in icings of three colours. Written in moon-silver on the topmost face is the name: GINON.
Only five letters, he says, and you’re both there! I suddenly saw it when I finished doing the flowers. Do you know what I’m going to do, Mimi? I said. I’m going to write GINON. The two of you in one!
And this becomes forever the name of the thirty-headed creature in the orchard.
Ninon will offer a slice of the cake to everyone who has come to the wedding, offer it herself. They will make a wish, they will remember, they will relish the sweetness of it. On each piece there are sugared petals of orange blossom.
She carries the plate high against her bosom. Before each guest she stops, says nothing, smiles and lowers her eyelids with their long lashes so that the guest has the impression the bride has inclined her head. Behind the plate she is holding, the white buttons of the bodice of her dress tug in their little nooses of white cotton. The top three have come undone.
The thirty braids on her head, which bob up and down and gyrate as she walks, have taken so much patience and time to plait that she proposes to let Gino only undo one a night after they are married. Each night they will choose which little lock.
On her left hand she is wearing the turtle ring from Africa, and today the turtle is coming home, swimming towards her, his head pointing to her wrist. On her right hand is the wedding ring which has never been worn, which Gino slipped on to her finger five hours ago, and which she will die with on her hand.
Gradually everyone stops talking as they watch her. Her gait is so light and at the same time so solemn.
I’m leaving you, the poetess Anyte said, I’m leaving you, across my eyes death draws his black scarf, it is dark where I’m going.
The kids come out of school. Several tear across the square to look down into the orchard.
They’re still at it!
The bride has taken off her thingamajig! See him—the one there on the grass—he’s drunk.
At weddings there’s always people who go drunk, they wait for the excuse, my mum says.
When I get married I’m going to—
What’s she doing?
When you get married! First you have to find a boy big enough—
She’s waving to us.
She’s telling us to come down.
They tumble down the bank, yelling and laughing. When Ninon approaches them with the plate, they become a little shy. They take a piece—yet are not sure whether to eat it now or keep it for later.
Eat! orders Federico, it’s the best you’ll taste in your lifetime.
Chico, who is twelve and the son of the Fiat garage man, stares at her so intently that he forgets to lift his hand and take a slice.
What, his eyes are asking, what is she underneath? He has never been so close to a bride before. What is she underneath? Is she the same every day? She is already half undressed. Or is she different, never the same twice? He knows how they fuck, there is nothing mysterious, he has seen enough strip cartoons, but she’s so small, she’s scarcely bigger than him and the mystery is on her skin, it shines and comes from her legs and her body and her face and her strange hair and the million things she can do with them. It shines and glistens and has a temperature and a smell and all the time it changes with the expression of her eyes and with what her fingers are touching when they touch. To the man she marries she is going to give something. If he shuts his eyes he can guess what. It’s not what you feel with the girls, when you put your finger there. If he shuts his eyes, he can guess. She’s going to give him a secret which is the bride. All the soldiers know every bride is the same. Minas dressed up, about to give their secrets to men in the big marriage beds. The thing is, each secret is a secret which nobody can guess with their eyes open. So it goes on. All of her is the secret and the secret is sweet and warm, with nothing between grazing, nothing keeping them apart and everything underneath helping. Pure like orange flowers, the bride’s secret, tasting of sugar. In the tree underneath the dress, which is undone, a little bird is telling what?
What’s your name? Ninon asks him.
Chico.
Don’t you want a piece of my wedding cake, Chico?
It is the hottest time of day. Even the butterflies perched on poppies on the bank of the dyke flutter more slowly. Scoto who sells watermelons goes to fetch some jugs of iced tea from one of the vans. Gino has found a hose with which he is filling a red plastic bath with cold water. Some kids are already plunging their heads in and shaking the water from their hair.
When Ninon passes on her way to the house, her skirt gets soaked and on her legs she feels a pattern of coolness where the lace holes of her stockings have let the water through.
In the bedroom which last night was hers, she dabs on to the back of her neck some of the perfume her father gave her. Saba. Where they will sleep tonight she doesn’t know. Gino says it’s a secret. Perhaps they don’t have to sleep …
Zdena has followed her daughter into the house.
Lie down for ten minutes, my little one, says Zdena, who has come into the room. You mustn’t get tired.
They’re honking! The musicians are coming. Ninon hums the tune: Last Friday Drives Monday Crazy. They’re as wild as Gino, she says. Drives Monday crazy …
Don’t tire yourself out, says Zdena, there’s all night still to come, dear. Lie down for ten minutes.
Tired! Today I’m tireless. I could do more today than you’ve done in all your lifetime, Mother.
That’s true.
You didn’t even marry, did you? Not even when you left and went back. Perhaps you will one day, Maman. I wish that for you. A passionate man with big shoulders whom you don’t know … and one day you’ll tell him about your daughter Ninon and her wedding in this house and the banquet in the orchard.
Zdena can’t stop the tears coming into the corners of her eyes.
Take some of Papa’s perfume. Ninon holds out the flask to her mother. Saba it’s called. Ninon is alive, you can see that. This morning Ninon was married, you can see that. Don’t talk about Ninon being tired.
A lorry will draw up by the plane tree in the square. Five men will climb out with long hair and sleeves with fringes. They
seem too tired to walk or talk. Two lean against the lorry, one lies on the bench by the bus stop and the other two look up at the sky. Perhaps they are waiting for their own music to remind them of why they promised to come to play in this godforsaken square.
A long time ago, a Roman consul gave a dinner party for eighteen guests in the hollowed-out trunk of a plane tree. It was in the eternal shade of a plane tree that Zeus changed himself into a bull in order to seduce Europa. The plane tree I’m talking about in the square at Gorino was planted only a few decades ago.
The musicians unwind their cables, plug in their circuits. One of them climbs up into the tree. Musicians, like streetsellers, seek crowds, set up their stands, perform and drive on. The difference is that what they offer, nobody can put in a bag. It’s in the air. Yet for it to have a chance of being there, an electronic precision is needed: levels, points, mikes—all have to be carefully checked. This evening the five men go through their routine sluggishly, as though obliged to work for somebody else. Maybe for the gods on whom they can’t depend.
Never come so far, complains the singer, our next gig will be on a raft at sea! The knuckles of his left hand are bruised and in places the skin is broken. He neighs into a mike, testing it.
Can fish hear? asks the guitarist. The guitarist wears thick glasses and has myopic eyes. I don’t think fish can hear, he says, answering his own question. Then he strums on his guitar and looks questioningly at their driver who works the mixing desk.
“Where the Po ble ble blee runs into the sea shoo see shee,” hums the singer, who had a fistfight last night. He adjusts the height of the mike.
“It’s the end of the world,” grooves the bass, the only one of them who has a jacket.
The hell it is! yells back the singer at him. Gino’s got family here. I was at school with Gino, and for him we’d play in Kathmandu if he wanted. We’re in Gorino, right?
Ninon comes across the square towards the five men. In some places sand has been blown on to the tarmac, in other places grass grows through its eruptions and fissures, yet she walks towards them as though she were crossing the tiled courtyard of her palace. Her composure is such that nobody can judge her.