John Berger: To the Wedding

Hey, he said, there could be something you like here!

So?

You just need to tell me.

I hate jewellers, I said.

So do I, he said.

His face, between his cup-handle ears, broke into a smile, not quite sure of itself, and we walked down towards the sea. I ate the moules on a beach beside a stack of deck chairs. The moules were called Hungarian because of the paprika.

Whilst I ate, he undid the laces of his trainers. He did everything deliberately, as though he couldn’t think of more than one thing at a time. The left shoe. Then the right shoe.

I’m going to swim, he said, you don’t want to swim?

I’ve just come from work. I haven’t got anything with me.

No one’ll see us here, he said, and he pulled off his T-shirt with the palm trees. His skin was so pale I could see the shadow of every rib.

I got to my feet, took off my shoes and, leaving him, walked barefoot down to the water’s edge where the small waves were breaking on the sand and shingle. It was dark enough to see the stars, and light enough to see how he was now undressed. He somersaulted down the beach towards the sea. I was surprised and then I laughed, for I had guessed something: he was somersaulting out of modesty. It was a way of coming down the beach without showing his cock. I don’t know how I knew that, and I didn’t ask him. But the idea came to me.

Whilst I was laughing, he ran into the dark sea. I should have left then. He swam a long way out. I couldn’t spot him any more.

Have you ever tried leaving a man in the sea in the dark? It’s not so simple.

I went back to where we had been sitting. His clothes were in a pile on the sand, folded. Not like recruits in the army have to fold them. They were arranged like things you would be able to find in the dark if need be. They were arranged so that if you came back in a hurry you could gather them up quickly. One cotton T-shirt. One pair of jeans. A pair of trainers, with a hole in the sole of the left shoe, large feet, 44. A slip. And a belt with an engraved hand on the buckle. I sat and looked out to sea.

Twenty minutes must have passed. The sound of waves is like what you hear on the radio when the public claps. But it’s steadier and nobody shouts Johnny! He came up behind me, dripping wet. He stood there dripping and holding two deck chairs under one bony arm and a parasol in the other. I laughed.

So we went on, the cook and I. There was a solidity to his dumbness; it would never change.

After we’d fucked, I asked: Can you hear the waves?

He didn’t reply. He just went: Shooo shooo shooo.

Zdena sits up on the bed, lowers her feet to the floor and walks barefoot to the open window. Her nightdress has a lace neckline which covers her small collarbones. She looks down on to the tramlines. There is still the smell of new bread. A few men in the street are going to work.

I strolled down to the port where the pleasure boats were moored and I happened to think of the cook. I didn’t want anything, I just wondered what he would do if I appeared. Then I saw his menu-boards, so I pushed my way through the crowd but it wasn’t him. It was an old man in his fifties with grey hair. I asked the old man whether he knew the cook, but he shook his head and pointed to his mouth as if to say he couldn’t speak. This made me decide to find the restaurant.

The proprietor was a man with a light blueish suit and the face of a fat boy, a frozen face. I asked him about the cook.

Who are you? he said, without looking up from his calculating machine.

I’m a friend, I have something to give him.

Can you post it?

He’s gone?

He looked up for the first time. They took him away. You want his address?

I nodded.

Correctional Penitentiary, Nantes … You take a coffee?

Everything he said was shouted. He had to shout to somehow get through the freeze of his face. He put the coffees on one of the empty tables and sat down opposite me.

They were looking for your cook for three years, he said. Seven of them broke jail. He was the only one who made it. The others were grabbed. But he got careless, he went downhill, your cook.

I saw there was something which amused him, not in his face but in the way he spoke.

They caught up with him by sheer chance. A prison officer from Nantes was on holiday here. Came into the restaurant with his wife to eat mussels. On his way out, he spotted his old acquaintance. Yesterday, a dozen of them were waiting round the back when he came off the quayside.

What’s so funny?

I was going to give him a job in the kitchen the next week! If he’d been in the kitchen, the flic wouldn’t have seen him, would he?

And that’s funny?

It’s good news! Your cook was biding his time. One Saturday night he’d have robbed the till. No question about it. Instead they clapped the handcuffs on him. You don’t ever smile at good news?

Frozen pig, I told him.

A thrush has begun to sing in the acacia tree. More than anything else, birdsongs remind me of what things once looked like. Thrushes look as if they’ve just taken a dust bath, don’t they? And blackbirds, with their glossy black feathers, look as if they’ve just stepped out of a pond, but when they open their beaks, it’s the opposite. The blackbird’s song is dry. And the thrush sings like a survivor — like a swimmer who swam for it through the water and made it to the safe side of the night and flew into the tree to shake the drops from his back and announce: I’m here!

Jean Ferrero still has his headlights on because he has come through cloud, white cloud washing the broken rock faces. The road zigzags its way down. He comes to the first pine trees. The debris of rocks changes into grass.

A good way below a man is walking, hands in his trouser pockets.

I imagine he is a shepherd, from the way he’s walking. Shepherds have their own way of moving from place to place. No keys in their pockets, no coins, no handkerchief, perhaps a knife but more likely the knife is in the fur-lined leather jacket he’s wearing. He walks nonchalantly to prove his independence, to prove his independence to the peaks, who have just emerged from the night to join a new day, of which he knows neither the date nor the day of the week. He walks this way because he’s proud the night has passed. He had something to do with its passing well.

As he approaches the shepherd, the signalman reduces speed. At the last minute he stops, raises his visor and puts his feet down. Why has he stopped? He himself doesn’t seem to know. Perhaps it was the hour and the lack of any visible habitation. Distantly one of the shepherd’s dogs is barking.

The shepherd takes a few steps past the foreign motorcyclist to say over his shoulder without looking round: Far? Going far?

Far! says the motorcyclist.

Probably the shepherd hasn’t spoken for a fortnight or more. Neither man knows immediately what to say; both of them are calculating and talking out loud at the same time. They are fumbling for a way of talking between Italian, French and a mountain patois which, in principle, they may share. They test each word, sometimes repeating it, like the shepherd’s dog repeating his bark.

I translate from their sounds, their barks and their bastard words.

Is it Sunday? asks the shepherd, turning round to face the motorcyclist.

Wednesday.

You started early?

Early.

The nights are still cold.

No fire? asks Jean Ferrero.

No wood.

No?

There are things I’d steal, says the shepherd.