John Berger - To the Wedding

Blow up your ship!

Ha! Ha! The Signora has a fine sense of humour.

The ship’s officer waits and then abruptly leaves as if he has remembered something he has to do.

Her handbag arranged, Zdena goes to the railing and gazes into the still lagoon water that reflects nothing. The ship, changing direction, creates a momentary breeze which lifts a lock of hair from her damp forehead.

She walks to the bows and waits there, letting the breeze cool her face; later she returns to her bench.

There, she opens her bag, which is now in perfect order, and finds the diary and the pencil stub. On the page for June 6 she writes in her upright handwriting: Let these days never end, let them be long like centuries!

I wanted to ask them in the hospital in Bologna to tell me the truth — as if there was another truth! I stopped myself for I knew there was only one truth — which is my death.

Straightaway I hear a second voice, whispering. It crosses my mind that Gino speaks like a man who, bent over what he’s working at with his hands, is suddenly prompted to look up and smile at a passer-by who has stopped to watch him. And I’m that passer-by.

This lucioperca , Gino is whispering, this five-kilo lucioperca is going to be the first dish of the wedding feast. Aunt Emanuela has already been cooking dishes for three days. I have invited my stall-holder friends and a rock group from Cremona.

I caught the lucioperca this morning and I want to cook him myself. The aunt is the only one of the family who can hold a live eel and cut its head off with one blow from a little axe. She talks to it. When I try, the eels twist themselves round my arm. Yet I want to prepare the lucioperca myself, for he is my surprise.

Ninon has her secrets — like the secret of all she’s going to wear under her wedding dress, which I shan’t see till tomorrow night, and the lucioperca is my secret which Ninon won’t see till we sit down at the wedding table after I’ve carried her across the bridge and she has probably kicked her silver shoes off and one of the girls has put them on her feet again and we are married.

I’m going to make a pesce lesso in aspic. Eighty-three centimetres long. Even Father will raise an eyebrow, for the lucioperca looks metallic — green like oxidised bronze, then copper, then silver … A metallic fish from the depths.

They call him the owl-fish because of his extra large eyes and he has them because he lives in the night at the bottom of the river, two, three, three and a half metres down. He never comes to the surface. They live in gangs, these fishes, on the riverbed. You and your rivers! Ninon says, angry. Gino, she snaps when I come home at midday, what did you find? A frog, I say and I jump like one, a big bullfrog. For months she hasn’t been able to laugh with me and this morning she did. She laughs with her whole body at me imitating the frog, and only her eyes still look perplexed at her own laughing.

To know where the big fish are, you have to know the river, you have to feel the river’s instincts. The fish are doing exactly the same thing in their way. More times than not, they outwit you, le carpe, i lucci .

Can you see there, where the silver scales go a little darker like a narrow path, along his flank? That’s called his lateral line and with it he listens to the river.

I tell Ninon she has a lateral line too and I trace it with my finger. With her it begins under her ear, goes under her arm, circles the little hill of her breast, runs down the steps of her ribs, keeps equidistant between navel and hip, slips by the border of her bosco and tears down the soft inside of her thigh to her ankle. For months she couldn’t laugh. For months she wouldn’t let me near her.

You have two lateral lines, I tease her, left and right and they have eyelashes all the way along them!

You’re going mad, Gino, she says, this fucking illness has sent you out of your mind.

So I hold her in my arms and tell her how under the silver scales there are pores which have little buds like our taste-buds in the mouth, only these ones on the lateral line have tiny tears at their ends and around the tear duct there are lashes, some soft and some stiff and they record every quiver in the current, they send messages about any change in the water, the slightest stir of another body moving, or a stone diverting the flow of water. The lashes are real, I tell her, no madness. Ninon has eyes which are sometimes green and sometimes golden.

I told a doctor I met in the market about the dates and her last lymphocyte count and, according to him, the medico in Parma, we can perhaps count on two, three, three and a half years of clapping — provided she has things to clap for! After that the sickness begins. Nobody can be sure.

Tie together the court-bouillon of bay leaves and thyme and fennel, add white wine, peppercorns, sliced onions and a little lemon peel. The fish saucepan is Aunt Emanuela’s — you could cook a tuna in it.

It’s the biggest lucioperca I’ve ever seen caught anywhere. I knew they were there, the big carnivores, this morning. Don’t ask me how. Up against the bank where a larch had fallen into the river and had been shaved by the water of all its bark. A bad place for casting, for the line could easily tangle with the tree. Be careful, I told myself. Go slow. Me, the crazy man watching his line sink, one, two, three, three and a half metres down till the little lead earring touched the riverbed. I was using a cunning sliver of roach as bait and this I played, jerking the bait to jump like a living gudgeon, little leaps along the silt, as if wounded, never allowing the line to go too slack, little leaps like from one black note to another on a piano, and Lucioperca believes it’s a wounded gudgeon, he opens his enormous mouth and he swallows the hook. The carnivore outwitted. Then the fight is to stop him winding me round the tree. Each time I forestall him. Foreseeing his every move. I forget everything else. Look at him now on the kitchen table!

We’re going to live the years with craziness and cunning and care. All three. The three Cs. Matteo, the boxer, says I’m mad. He says I’m throwing my life away. That’s what most people do, I say, not me.

The fishes, I tell her, listen through their flanks to the river they were born into. I told her this and she fell asleep, smiling.

The signalman was waiting on the quayside at Chioggia when the motonave arrived. Jean Ferrero and Zdena Holecek spotted each other before the ship was tied up, but they didn’t wave. She came down the gangplank and walked across the paving stones to where he was standing beside his bike, by a white bridge which is like the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, except that it is not roofed. He has taken off his helmet.

They look into one another’s eyes and, seeing the same pain, fall forward into each other’s arms.

Jean! And her voice, so helplessly expressive, carries his name across an entire continent.

Zdena! he whispers.

On the bike, as they drive along the road to Gomacchio, their sorrow becomes a little lighter. Like any pilot with a passenger behind, he feels her weight inclined against his back. Like any pillion, she has placed her life in his hands, and this somehow relieves the pain a little.

I turn and I turn and I can see it in the mirror. It’ll take your breath away, my wedding dress!