John Berger - Once in Europa

That’s Gramsci.

He put his arm round her shoulders so that she could lean her head against his damp flannel shirt.

Antonio Gramsci, she said. He taught us all.

You wouldn’t mistake him for a horse dealer! he said.

Past the portrait, they came to a cobbled quayside overlooking the lagoon toward Murano. In places grass had grown over the cobbles. He stared across the black water and she, carrying her sandals, wandered over to an abandoned gondola, moored by the corner of the Rio di Santa Eufemia. She sat down on the platform by the stern near the wooden oarlock. Sun and water had stripped the gondola of its paint, which was now wood grey. It must once have belonged to a wine merchant, for several demijohns lay on their sides in the prow.

Do you think they are empty? she asked him.

Instead of answering, he jumped into the gondola, which rocked violently. Making his way forward to the prow, he did his best to correct every lurch by leaning in the opposite direction, like someone dancing in a conga line.

Sit down, for God’s sake, sit down! she shouted.

She was crouching in the bottom of the boat. Its sides were smacking the water and splashing the air.

He picked up a demijohn and held it against the sky with one hand as if wringing the neck of a goose.

Empty! he boomed.

Sit! she shrieked. Sit!

This is how they found themselves lying on the rush mat in the bottom of the gondola. After a while the smacking of the water ceased and a quiet lapping took its place. Yet the calm did not last long. Soon the gondola was again lurching from side to side with water dripping from its gunwales and its staves thumping the lagoon.

If we capsize, can you swim? she whispered.

No.

Yes, Bruno, yes, yes, yes …

Afterwards they lay on their backs, panting.

Look at the stars. Don’t they make you feel small? she said.

The stars look down at us, she continued, and sometimes I think everything, everything except killing, everything takes so long because they are so far away.

His other hand was trailing in the water. Her teeth bit his ear.

The world changes so slowly.

His hand from the water grasped her breast.

One day there’ll be no more classes. I believe that, don’t you? she murmured and pulled his head down to her other breast.

There’s always been good and bad, he said.

We’re making progress, don’t you believe that?

All our ancestors asked the same thing, he said, you and I will never know in this life why it was made the way it is.

He entered her again. The gondola smacked the water and splashed the air.

When they crossed the narrow island to the pierhead, where the last vaporetto would stop, the music was over. Only a few drunks, immobile as statues, remained in the piazza. Marietta went to fetch his instrument case. He gazed across the lagoon. He could see the bell-tower they had climbed. The guide said it had toppled over at the beginning of the century. No roots. He remembered the date: 14th July 1902, the year of his father’s birth. To the right there were still lights in the Doge’s Palace. According to the guide, the Palace had been destroyed or partly destroyed by fire seven times. There had never been peace in that building. Too much power and no roots. One day it would be robbed and pillaged and after that it would be used as a hen house.

Marietta handed him his instrument case.

Play for me. Play me something.

He put the case down on the quayside. Out of his pocket he took a small mouth organ, and turning toward the Doge’s Palace, began to play. The music was speaking to him.

Before it is light —

She was staring at his back, relaxed and downcast like the back of a man peeing, except that his hands were to his mouth.

— Before it is light … when you’ve dressed and gone into the stable —

With her fingers she was touching the nape of his neck.

— the animals are lying there —

She was pressing her hand between his shoulder blades and could feel his lungs and the music in the roof of his mouth.

— lying there on beech leaves, and your tiredness like a child you have dragged from its sleep —

Her hand felt under the belt of his trousers.

— and through the window you see the span of the stars —

She noticed that one of his bootlaces was undone. She knelt down to tie it for him.

— the span of the stars into whose well we are thrown at birth like salt into water —

Neither of them noticed the vaporetto approaching the pierhead.

Come to Mestri, she sighed, come to Mestri. I’ll find you work.

The bus left at 3 A.M. Most of the band wanted to sleep. Some husbands put their heads on their wives’ shoulders, in other cases the wife leaned her head against her man. The lights were switched out one by one as the coach took the road for Verona. The young drummer sitting beside Bruno tried one last joke.

Do you know what hell is?

Do you?

Hell is where bottles have two holes and women have none.

[For Jacob]

Keep tears

My heart

For prose.

Train

Flammes bleues

Fleurs jaunes.

In the ditches

I am water.

Between

Grow kingcups of your childhood.

Sunk in my eyes

Skies of the churchyard.

Through arteries

Of gravel

Whispering to my grasses

The blood of good-byes.

Flammes bleues

Fleurs jaunes

Their railways.

1985/86

The trilogy Into Their Labours occupied me for fifteen years. During this period, Tom Engelhardt edited my books. Dear Tom, you encouraged, corrected, and upheld me. Thank you.

Perhaps I would never have had the courage to begin the project if I had not received, before a page was written, the support of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. To everyone in Paulus Potterstraat and Connecticut Avenue and to Saul Landau, thank you.

JOHN BERGERwas born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel G, To the Wedding and King . Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing . He lives and works in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours ( Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag ). His collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket was published in 2001. His latest novel, From A to X , was published in 2007.

G.

Winner of the Booker Prize

Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize

In this luminous novel, John Berger relates the story of G., a modern Don Juan forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war.

With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, top reveal the conditions of the libertine’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumlation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through the liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi’s attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G . is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.