Once in Europa (22 page)

A band of friends?

The brass band of the village.

The next time the owl fell silent he proposed that they should have a drink. She guided him to a table beneath a gigantic portrait, drawn on a sheet and hung from the top windows of a house. The painted face was so large that even the flanks of the nose had been drawn with a six-inch housepainter's brush. They looked up at it together.

Do you live alone? she asked.

Yes, I've lived alone for eight years. A fifth of my life.

She liked the way he hesitated before speaking, it was very deliberate, as if each time he answered one of her questions, he came to the door of a house, opened it to a visitor, and then spoke.

How many mirrors do you have at home? She asked this as if it were a schoolgirl's riddle.

He paused to count.

One over the sink, one over the drinking trough outside.

She laughed. He poured out more white wine.

That's Karl Marx, isn't it? He nodded up at the sheet.

Marx was a great prophet. What do you see in the future? she asked.

The rich getting richer.

I mean your future.

Mine? Everything depends upon my health.

You don't look sick to me.

If you're sent to hospital when you are sick, your dog doesn't look after your cows. I live alone.

She raised her glass to his. I think I could find you work in Mestri.

He was looking at her small feet, thinking: everything between a man and a woman is a question of how much you give up of one thing to have another—an exchange.

You are bound to be influenced by the property relations of which you are a part. Her voice was tender, as if she were explaining something intimate. The Kulaks sided with the bourgeoisie, and the little peasants with the petit bourgeoisie. You are wrong to think only about the price of milk.

She comes, he told himself, from this place of water and islands where there is no earth at all.

The fact is peasants will disappear, she continued, the future lies elsewhere.

I'd like to have children, he said.

You have to find a wife.

He poured out more wine.

You'd find a wife if you moved here.

I'd cut off my right hand rather than work in a factory.

All the men dancing there, she said, they're nearly all factory workers.

He had never seen so many men in white shirts. They wore their shirts tied round their waists to show off their stomachs. They were as cunning as weasels. Their cuffs were rolled back only halfway up their forearms, as if they had just got out of bed.

Do they caress well? he asked.

Who?

The weasels over there.

Caress?

What a man should do to a woman.

Let's dance, she said.

The owl was hooting a tango.

Who's milking the cows tonight? she whispered.

Who am I dancing with?

Marietta is dancing with Bruno, she said, as he pulled her hand up and looked along their arms—as if taking aim with a gun.

As the tempo increased they advanced and turned more and more quickly. People began to watch them. His shirt and his heavy shoes announced he was from the country. But he danced well, they made a couple. Some of the bystanders began to clap in time with the music. It was like watching a duel—a duel between the paving stones and their four feet. How long would they keep it up?

Now they were walking down a narrow street, with old men on wicker chairs, and grandmothers playing with balloons to amuse their grandchildren. At the end of the street was suspended another gigantic portrait: a great domed head, like a beehive of thought, wearing glasses.

That's Gramsci.

He put his arm round her shoulders so that she could lean her head against his damp flannel shirt.

Antonio Gramsci, she said. He taught us all.

You wouldn't mistake him for a horse dealer! he said.

Past the portrait, they came to a cobbled quayside overlooking the lagoon toward Murano. In places grass had grown over the cobbles. He stared across the black water and she, carrying her sandals, wandered over to an abandoned gondola, moored by the corner of the Rio di Santa Eufemia. She sat down on the platform by the stern near the wooden oarlock. Sun and water had stripped the gondola of its paint, which was now wood grey. It must once have belonged to a wine merchant, for several demijohns lay on their sides in the prow.

Do you think they are empty? she asked him.

Instead of answering, he jumped into the gondola, which rocked violently. Making his way forward to the prow, he did his best to correct every lurch by leaning in the opposite direction, like someone dancing in a conga line.

Sit down, for God's sake, sit down! she shouted.

She was crouching in the bottom of the boat. Its sides were smacking the water and splashing the air.

He picked up a demijohn and held it against the sky with one hand as if wringing the neck of a goose.

Empty! he boomed.

Sit! she shrieked. Sit!

This is how they found themselves lying on the rush mat in the bottom of the gondola. After a while the smacking of the water ceased and a quiet lapping took its place. Yet the calm did not last long. Soon the gondola was again lurching from side to side with water dripping from its gunwales and its staves thumping the lagoon.

If we capsize, can you swim? she whispered.

No.

Yes, Bruno, yes, yes, yes …

Afterwards they lay on their backs, panting.

Look at the stars. Don't they make you feel small? she said.

The stars look down at us, she continued, and sometimes I think everything, everything except killing, everything takes so long because they are so far away.

His other hand was trailing in the water. Her teeth bit his ear.

The world changes so slowly.

His hand from the water grasped her breast.

One day there'll be no more classes. I believe that, don't you? she murmured and pulled his head down to her other breast.

There's always been good and bad, he said.

We're making progress, don't you believe that?

All our ancestors asked the same thing, he said, you and I will never know in this life why it was made the way it is.

He entered her again. The gondola smacked the water and splashed the air.

When they crossed the narrow island to the pierhead, where the last vaporetto would stop, the music was over. Only a few drunks, immobile as statues, remained in the piazza. Marietta went to fetch his instrument case. He gazed across the lagoon. He could see the bell-tower they had climbed. The guide said it had toppled over at the beginning of the century. No roots. He remembered the date: 14th July 1902, the year of his father's birth. To the right there were still lights in the Doge's Palace. According to the guide, the Palace had been destroyed or partly destroyed by fire seven times. There had never been peace in that building. Too much power and no roots. One day it would be robbed and pillaged and after that it would be used as a hen house.

Marietta handed him his instrument case.

Play for me. Play me something.

He put the case down on the quayside. Out of his pocket he took a small mouth organ, and turning toward the Doge's Palace, began to play. The music was speaking to him.

Before it is light
—

She was staring at his back, relaxed and downcast like the back of a man peeing, except that his hands were to his mouth.

—
Before it is light … when you've dressed and gone into the stable
—

With her fingers she was touching the nape of his neck.

—
the animals are lying there
—

She was pressing her hand between his shoulder blades and could feel his lungs and the music in the roof of his mouth.

—
lying there on beech leaves, and your tiredness like a child you have dragged from its sleep
—

Her hand felt under the belt of his trousers.

—
and through the window you see the span of the stars
—

She noticed that one of his bootlaces was undone. She knelt down to tie it for him.

—
the span of the stars into whose well we are thrown at birth like salt into water
—

Neither of them noticed the vaporetto approaching the pierhead.

Come to Mestri, she sighed, come to Mestri. I'll find you work.

The bus left at 3 A.M. Most of the band wanted to sleep. Some husbands put their heads on their wives' shoulders, in other cases the wife leaned her head against her man. The lights were switched out one by one as the coach took the road for Verona. The young drummer sitting beside Bruno tried one last joke.

Do you know what hell is?

Do you?

Hell is where bottles have two holes and women have none.

[For Jacob]

Keep tears

My heart

For prose.

Train

Flammes bleues

Fleurs jaunes.

In the ditches

I am water.

Between

Grow kingcups of your childhood.

Sunk in my eyes

Skies of the churchyard.

Through arteries

Of gravel

Whispering to my grasses

The blood of good-byes.

Flammes bleues

Fleurs jaunes

Their railways.

1985/86

The trilogy
Into Their Labours
occupied me for fifteen years. During this period, Tom Engelhardt edited my books. Dear Tom, you encouraged, corrected, and upheld me. Thank you.

Perhaps I would never have had the courage to begin the project if I had not received, before a page was written, the support of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. To everyone in Paulus Potterstraat and Connecticut Avenue and to Saul Landau, thank you.

JOHN BERGER
was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel
G
,
To the Wedding
and
King
. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are
Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd
(with Katya Berger) and the internationally acclaimed
Ways of Seeing
. He lives and works in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (
Pig Earth, Once in Europa
and
Lilac and Flag
). His collection of essays
The Shape of a Pocket
was published in 2001. His latest novel,
From A to X
, was published in 2007.

Fiction
The Foot of Clive
Corker's Freedom
A Fortunate Man
Seventh Man
The Trilogy: Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag)
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Photocopies
To the Wedding
King
Here is Where We Meet
From A to X

Poetry
Pages of the Wound

Non-Fiction
A Painter of Our Time
Permanent Red
Art and Revolution
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays
The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles
Ways of Seeing
Another Way of Telling
The Success and Failure of Picasso
About Looking
The Sense of Sight
Keeping a Rendezvous
The Shape of a Pocket
Titian: Nymph and Shepherd
(with Katya Berger)
Selected Essays of John Berger
(ed. Geoff Dyer)
Bento's Sketchbook

Winner of the Booker Prize
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize

In this luminous novel, John Berger relates the story of G., a modern Don Juan forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war.

With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, top reveal the conditions of the libertine's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumlation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through the liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi's attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps,
G
. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.

‘The most interesting novel in English I have read for many years … It is one of the few serious attempts of our time to do for the novel what Brecht did for drama: to reshape it in the light of twentieth-century experience … A fine, humane and challenging book'
New Republic

‘A rich and pleasurable reading experience'
Guardian

‘To read
G
. is to find a writer one demands to know more about. Not to sit at the feet of his aphorisms or unravel the tangles of his allusions, but to explore more fully an intriguing and powerful mind and talent'
New York Times

With this haunting first volume of his
Into Their Labours
trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps,
Pig Earth
, relates the stories of sceptical, hard working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvellous, indomitable Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains.