John Berger - Once in Europa

For braking your sledge I have heels and buttocks!

The cows were grazing peacefully behind him.

He climbed up on a boulder and stood on top of it, a good two metres above the ground. The sight of his tiny figure on the boulder dwarfed by the vast slopes of Peniel made me understand something. Marius was speaking of his achievement. Marius set no great store on the opinion of others. What Marius had done all his life he had done for its own sake. His achievement wasn’t only his herd of thirty cows. It was also his will. Every day now, old and alone, he found an answer to the question Why go on? Nobody ever replied for him. Every day of the summer he had found the answer himself. And now, alone, he was boasting of it. That is what I told myself.

He thrust his hands into his trousers.

For your grot I have balls! For your grot my balls!

In the grass were autumn crocuses, their yellow and violet petals open like the beaks of baby birds. I smashed them with my fist. I smashed every one I could see.

When the woodcutters came to wash that evening, Danielle took Pasquale aside and said: I must talk to you.

Next Sunday, he said.

No! she insisted. Now! I can’t stay another day if I don’t talk to someone.

Pasquale went over to the trough and conferred with Father. She heard them speaking in Italian. Within five minutes Father was chivying the others to get a move on. The ritual of combing their hair one by one before the broken bit of mirror was renounced. They picked up their sacks, said good-bye, and with the slow list of their habitual fatigue, made their way to the car. Alberto the Sicilian got into the driver’s seat.

Pasquale stayed behind and started shaving in front of the broken mirror.

You can’t see a thing, Danielle said. Why do you have to shave now?

It’s the first time you’ve asked me to supper.

Supper, it’s only soup!

She began to sob silently. At first, peering into the mirror in which he could see nothing, Pasquale did not notice. It was her immobility which finally made him look up in her direction. He saw her shoulders trembling.

Shhh, he said, ssshhh. He walked her towards the chalet. A goose followed them. The door was open. Inside he stopped because it was pitch-dark and he could see nothing. She led him by the hand to a chair pulled up by the table, then she sat down herself on the chair opposite. She thought neither of lighting the lamp nor of heating the soup.

Something happened this afternoon, she said.

What?

In the pitch darkness, her hands placed on the table, she told him, quietly and slowly. She even told him about the crocuses. When she had finished there was silence. They heard a cow pissing in the stable, separated from the kitchen by a wall of pine boards.

Why should an old man talk to the mountains like that? she whispered.

Danielle, said Pasquale, speaking very slowly and weighing each word, it was not to the mountains the old man was shouting, it was not to the mountains he was offering himself part by part, it was to you and you know that, you know that, don’t you?

She began to sob again and the sobs became howls. She stood up to take in breath and to howl louder. Pasquale felt his way round the table and took her in his arms. She pressed her face as hard as she could against his chest. She bit his shirt which tasted of resin and sweat. She bit a hole in it.

On his wrist Pasquale had a watch with an alarm. It woke him at four-thirty. He did not want the others to pass by the chalet to fetch him, for he knew she would not yet understand their laughter. He kissed her repeatedly, he felt for his boots and clothes on the floor, and he slipped out to dress on the grass where they always left the Mercedes.

If today you pass through Bergamo and take the road north towards Zogno, you will find at the edge of the town where the sidewalk is no longer paved and the telegraph poles border the road, opposite an AGIP garage, next to a yard where men repair tyres, a shop with a sign that says VERDURA E ALIMENTARI. If it’s winter you will find Pasquale inside serving. He weighs the vegetables on the scales with the scrupulousness and precision of Saint Peter. He looks preoccupied and proud.

Danielle’s baby was a girl whom they christened Barbara. In the waste-land behind the shop, Pasquale has fixed a swing on a plane tree and Barbara sometimes plays there with her friends. The men in the tyre yard call Barbara their Uccellina , their tiny bird.

If it’s summer you will not see Pasquale, for having spent all his savings on the shop, he’s obliged once again to work as a woodcutter in the mountains on the other side of the frontier. When he’s away he writes to Danielle most Sundays, telling her how many trees they’ve felled and what the weather is like. Danielle speaks Italian to her customers in the shop but with a noticeable French accent. She is more smartly dressed than many of them and wears large gold-coloured rings in her ears. She is expecting another baby.

Hanging on a wall near the door is a cage. The bird in it is blackish, a Blue Rock Thrush with a yellow beak and eyes like sequins. Whenever a customer comes into the shop the Blue Rock Thrush croaks out one of the insults Pasquale taught him. He is able to distinguish between men and women so that the insult fits. The customers would miss him by now if he weren’t there. Sometimes a customer speaks back to the bird as if to a fellow sufferer, cursing men or women or the government or priests or lawyers or the tax office or the weather or the world. And sometimes when no one is paying him any attention or feeding him any nuts, he blinks his sequin eyes and slowly repeats a phrase which has the accent and cadence of another language, of the voice of another teacher.

Marius à Sauva! Marius à Sauva …

In the little grocery shop there’s no question of sounds deceiving.

Before the poppy flowers, its green calyx is hard like the outer shell of an almond. One day this shell is split open. Three green shards fall to the earth. It is not an axe that splits it open, simply a screwed-up ball of membrane-thin folded petals like rags. As the rags unfold, their colour changes from neonate pink to the most brazen scarlet to be found in the fields. It is as if the force that split the calyx were the need of this red to become visible and to be seen.

The first sounds I remember are the factory siren and the noise of the river. The siren was very rare and probably that’s why I remember it: they only sounded it in case of an accident. It was always followed by shouts and the sound of men running. The noise of the river I remember because it was present all the while. It was louder in the spring, it was quieter in August, but it never stopped. During the summer with the windows open you could hear it in the house; in the winter, after Father had put up the double windows, you couldn’t hear it indoors, but you heard it as soon as you went outside to have a shit or to fetch some wood for the stove. When I went to school I walked beside the sound of the river.

At school we learnt to draw a map of the valley with the river coloured in blue. It was never blue. Sometimes the Giffre was the colour of bran, sometimes it was grey like a mole, sometimes it was milky, and occasionally but very rarely, as rare as the siren for accidents, it was transparent, and you could see every stone on its bed.

Here there’s only the sound of the wind in the sheet flapping above us.

Once my mother told me to look after my baby cousin, Claire. She left us alone in the garden. I started hunting for snails and I forgot Claire as I followed the track down to the river behind the furnaces. When my mother came back she found my baby cousin alone in the cradle under the plum trees.