John Berger - To the Wedding

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.

Thank you, she says, for coming tonight.

She fixes her eyes on the drummer called Fats. He has the striking leanness that sometimes goes with percussion. To play a battery well, a man listens all the time to silence, until it splits itself open into rhythms, eventually into every conceivable rhythm. It does this because time is not a flow but a sequence of pulses. Listening to that silence often makes a man’s body thin.

Before any of the others can answer, the drummer takes his sticks and does a shuffle on his toms.

The back rhythm of his run — like a child running very short-legged and very fast down several corridors — will recall to Ninon her plan, when she was a child, to have a house in which every window would have a view on to the sea. The run goes on and on.

When he finally brings it to an end with a cymbal crash and the last echo is lost, and they hear again the cicadas sizzling in the abundant grass behind the church, Ninon says: Come and see your friend Gino, my husband.

And Fats the drummer adds two words: Tonight stars …

Gino and Ninon will be the first to dance. The bride, she will announce to him, is going to dance, would my husband like to join me? And they dance alone for everybody to see and remember.

Soon other couples join them. The music is loud. It brings the village to the square. The waiters serve wine. Federico is organizing a game of leapfrog on the grass for the youngest kids. The sun is low in the west, and more and more people dance on the deck: a platform of planks which has been laid on the square in front of the band so that the dancing floor is level. The boards were borrowed from the fish market in Comacchio. There are many spectators, including a man in a wheelchair. Only when Gino and Ninon are lost in the crowd does the music come close to them.

What have you done to me? she whispers and touches his face to bring him closer too.

It is strange how the place, where music comes from, changes. Sometimes it enters the body. It no longer comes in through the ears. It takes up residence there. When two bodies dance, this can happen swiftly. What is being played is then heard by the dancers as if it were a recording, a millionth of a second late, of the music already beating in their bodies. With music, hope too enters the body. All this I learnt in Piraeus.

On the deck in the square in Gorino the dancers dance under the night sky. Fats has found in the silence the fastest pulse yet.

Zdena dances in the arms of the signalman who, because of his resemblance to a certain actor in a Czech film, is destined, she believes, to become her friend. Wherever Jean leaves a foot trace, hers is beside it.

The guitarist leans backwards to prevent his guitar flying off like a toucan into the night sky.

Tonight Zdena’s fingers don’t ache. Her hips and shoulders talk wordlessly to Jean’s of everything which hasn’t happened. Later she will tell him about the thrushes and ask his advice about whether or not she should give the bird-calls to Ninon.

The beat enters Ninon’s bloodstream defying the number of lymphocytes, NKs, Beta 2s. Music in my knees for Gino, her body says, music under my shoulder blades, across my pelvis, between each of my white teeth, up my arse, in my holes, in the curly black parsley on my crotch, under my arms, down my oesophagus, everywhere in my lungs, in my bowel which goes down and my bowel which comes up, there is music for Gino, music in the little bones of my fingers, in my pancreas and in my virus which will kill, in all we fucking can’t do, and in the unanswerable questions my eyes ask, there is music playing with yours, Gino.