John Berger: Once in Europa

To my surprise there were three or four other guests in the dining room. Michel was sitting at a table by the window, where there was a large vase of orange gladioli. I can still see the flowers. He had changed his shirt and washed.

So too had the proprietor, who had discarded the sack and was now wearing a tie. He led me to the table. Michel insisted upon getting to his feet. We said good evening to each other like people do in films.

Would we like an aperitif? asked the proprietor. Two Suzes, said Michel. My sense of us having lost our way reminded me of the uncertainty children feel when they find themselves having to do something for the first time. Yet I’d never felt older.

Can we propose to you, sir, poularde en soutien-gorge?

What is it? asked Michel.

A skinned chicken roasted in pastry, sir. Unforgettable. And as an entrée perhaps truite au bleu?

It’s the chicken you’ve cooked this way for the first time? I asked.

Precisely, Madame, the first soutien-gorge I’ve ever fitted! he winked at Michel.

Four point to the sky, four walk in the dew, and four have food in them; all twelve make one — what is it? I asked the man.

He didn’t know and I wouldn’t tell him. We ate well, like at a baptism.

If you wanted, I could help you, Michel said.

What do I need help for?

To live.

I’ve managed not too badly up to now. It’s good, this white wine, isn’t it? Santé.

Do you know what people say about you?

I’ve never worried. It’s the one thing, Michel, I’ve never worried about.

There’s no talking with her, they say. When Odile’s made up her mind to do something, she does it. When she’s made up her mind not to, nothing can make her. There’s no approaching her. They respect your courage, they respect the way you’ve brought up the boy — but from a distance. You’re alone.

I don’t feel it.

In a few years it’ll be too late.

Too late for what?

Too late to change.

You want to change everything, Michel, the world, hell, people, politics, now me.

You think things can stay as they are?

I don’t know.

Happiness doesn’t say anything to you?

There’s more pain than happiness, I said.

Pain, yes.

Have I told you the story of the two bears? I asked.

Who’s been eating from my plate? The story of the three bears?

No, two. Two bears in the snow …

Fairy tales, Odile! We’re too old now for fairy tales. We need to face reality.

Like we both do all the time.

Then he said something that impressed me, for he said it so slowly and emphatically: Things can’t … go on … as they are. These words were more grunted than spoken and the gladioli I was gazing at in their vase blurred before my eyes.

They do go on, I replied, every day, every hour. People work, people go home to eat, feed the cat, watch TV, go to bed, make jam, mend radios, take baths, it all goes on all the while — till one day each of us dies.

And that’s what you’re waiting for! he said.

I’m not waiting for anything.

You know you talk like an old woman?

I’m a widow. I was a widow at eighteen.

You talk like an old woman and you’re not thirty.

In three months. Very soon. You believe age makes a difference?

It’s not age, it’s time running out. He dabbed at his forehead with his red handkerchief.

Say it again, Michel, I taunted him, according to you things can’t go on. But they do — you know it as well as I do. Things go on!

If we don’t fight, he said, we lose all.

Do you really think life’s only a battle?

At this he laughed, laughed till the tears came to his eyes. He filled up my glass, raised his, and we clinked them.

You of all people, Odile, not to know the answer to that question. Do you — you, Odile Blanc — really think life isn’t a battle?

He laughed shortly again but this time his tears were those of sadness.

When I went up to my room, with the freezer full of meat and a reproduction of the Angelus above the bed, I didn’t undress. I waited for half an hour and watched the river. Then I brushed my hair and, without putting my shoes on, I edged my way past the wardrobes in the corridor and found the door to Michel’s room, which I opened without knocking.

Our shadow is moving over the white snow, Christian, and looks like the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, something between a D and an L. In Cluses, where I learnt words off the blackboard in the school, which, after the factory, was the tallest building I’d ever seen, in Cluses words were strange to me. Now they are coming back into my head like pigeons into their pigeon loft.

From our union, Marie-Noelle was born on 4 August ’67. At birth she weighed 3.2 kilos, a little less than you. The milk came up into my breasts and I fed her for more than nine months. I didn’t want to stop. I was no longer working in the Components Factory, for the four of us lived together above the shop in Pouilly.

Madame Labourier knitted a pink blanket for the cradle. Odile Blanc was not exactly the daughter-in-law Madame Labourier would have chosen for her son, but facts were facts, and Marie-Noelle was her granddaughter.

When Michel was young, Madame Labourier informed me, you couldn’t count the number of girls he went out with. After the accident, during the years he was away in Lyons, they all got married. All things considered, it’s understandable, isn’t it? After all, they were young healthy girls.

Later she warned me about the future. As he ages, he’s going to change, he’s going to become more and more demanding. I saw it with Neighbour Henri who had polio, and my poor cousin Gervais who had diabetes. As they get older, cripples — particularly men cripples — become difficult and crotchety. You’ll have to be patient, my girl.

After you were born, Marie-Noelle, it was as if you gave him back his legs. He was so proud of you, his pride had feet. He hated being separated from you for more than an hour or two. When you were old enough to go to school, he refused to take the car, he walked with you a good half-kilometre, holding your hand.

The limbs he had lost were somehow returned to him in your small child’s body. It was he, not me, who taught you to walk. Now you are no longer a child and from the sky I can talk to you.

Women are beautiful when young, almost all women. Don’t listen to envious gossip, Marie-Noelle. Whatever the proportions of a face, whether a body is too skinny or too heavy, at some moment a woman possesses the power of beauty which is given to us as women. Often the moment is brief. Sometimes the moment may come and we not even know it. Yet traces of it remain. Even at my advanced age now there are traces.

Look in a mirror if you pass one this afternoon in the hearing aid shop in Annecy whilst you’re waiting for Papa, look at your hair which you washed last night and see how it invites being touched. Look at your shoulder when you wash at the sink and then look down at where your breast assembles itself, look at the part between shoulder and breast which slopes like an alpage — for thirty years still this slope is going to attract tears, teeth clenched in passion, feverish children, sleeping heads, work-rough hands. This beauty which hasn’t a name. Look at how gently your stomach falls at its centre into the navel, like a white begonia in full bloom. You can touch its beauty. Our hips move with an assurance that no man has; yet they promise a peace, our hips, like a cow’s tongue for — her calf. This frightens men, who knock us over and call us cunts. Do you know what our legs are like, seen from the back, Marie-Noelle, like lilies just before they open!

I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who spend their lives looking for God. The rest are pigshit.