John Berger - Once in Europa

He put on his trousers and boots, laid down sheets of newspaper and stepping from one sheet to another reached the door. Outside it was snowing grey snow. He teetered like a drunk into the stable and there, his forehead resting on one of his cows’ haunches, he vomited till there was nothing left in his stomach.

A few days later he beat the cow Myrtille. Myrtille had the bad habit of butting the cow next to her. If he showed Myrtille a stick, this was usually enough to deter her. She glowered at him with her insolently tranquil eyes, and he brandished the stick in the air and said: The bow of the violin, eh! Is that enough or do you want some music!

On the evening in question he forgot the stick and Myrtille knocked him off his stool whilst he was preparing her neighbour’s teats before plugging the milking machine onto her. Seizing a rake, he beat Myrtille across the haunches with the handle. She put her head down and he beat her harder. He was beating her now because she had reduced him to beating her. She lay down on the floor and he beat her out of the fury of his knowledge that he could not stop beating her.

In the name of God! he spat out the words as if they were his own broken teeth. Nothing! Nobody!

The shock of each blow was transmitted to his shoulders. Then the handle of the rake broke.

It seemed to him that the animal never forgave him.

Towards the end of March the giant bedspread of packed snow began to slide down the roof of the house a few centimetres each day. After a while, a border of packed snow overhanging the roof would crack and fall to the ground in a thousand pieces. In the cellar, despite the darkness and the thickness of the walls, the potatoes were putting out pink-violet shoots. The force of these shoots is so strong that they can pierce canvas or denim as if they were thin air.

A week earlier the doctor had asked him: Are you still vomiting? Do you want some more pills?

Félix had replied: No, Doctor … what I need is an extra pair of hands. Can you give me a prescription for that? Preferably a woman’s hands, but I’ll accept a man’s or even a boy’s.

Thus he confirmed one of the doctor’s favourite dinner-table dissertations: namely, that the dearth of women in the valley — the best men having left with the women following them — was pushing the idiots who remained towards homosexuality and even bestiality.

In twenty-four hours a well-fed cow shits a wheelbarrow of dung. The winter had lasted a hundred and fifty days and Félix had seventeen cows. He recalled the time, before they bought a tractor, when all the winter’s dung had to be forked into a tip-cart, hauled by the horse and unloaded in heaps, to be spread out again with a fork over the fields. Now he had a mechanical shovel and a spreader. And now he was alone.

Albertine had been right: there were fewer mole hills. Many moles must have died, the strongest eating the weakest. In the morning when he started up the tractor it was freezing. By midday on the hillside with the spreader, he was sweating. This year he refused to take off his sheepskin jacket. If he caught cold and fell ill, there would be nobody else to milk the cows. His solitude had strange ramifications. His trousers caked with cowshit went on stinking until he himself put them in the washing machine. Sometimes the solitude of the house smelt acrid like cowshit.

Every evening, sitting at the table beneath the clock that was always half an hour fast so that he would not deliver the milk too late at the dairy, he decided what to do the following day. Shit till Sunday, Mick, or shall we do the wood?

During the winter it had been a question of killing time. Now time was resurrected. He forgot obvious things. He fed the chickens and forgot the eggs. He hadn’t collected eggs from the hen house since he was seven when his father went away for the second time. The first time his father went away was for his military service, the second time was when he went to Paris to earn the money to re-cover the roof of the house with tiles; it took him four winters to earn enough.

How often had he heard his father tell the story of his time in the army. Soldier Berthier! Why did you not obey the order given to you? Replied his father: One of you tells me to do this, another of you tells me to do that, another of you tells me to do something else, so what am I to do? Just tell me clearly what you want and I’ll do it! Soldier Berthier! Clean out this room! One of you tells me to do this, another one tells me to do that … To every order, his father replied in the same way. Soldier Berthier, one month’s detention! He was put in a cell. Prisoner Berthier, are you a good shot? You tell me clearly what you want, and I’ll do it. The Company needs a good marksman, Berthier! He was taken out and given a rifle and five bullets. He scored five bull’s-eyes. For the rest of his military service he had no duties and no fatigues. All he had to do was go occasionally and shoot in the regimental competitions on the rifle range. When his father finished the story, he always added: On this earth, Felo, you need to be clever.

In April he planted his potatoes. It was as hot that year in April as it usually is in June. Walking slowly along the drill, he dropped a potato between his legs every twenty centimetres. Sometimes the potato fell badly and he was forced to bend down to place it properly.

There are some who know where to go, Mick, and some that have to be put in their place!

Each time he chose with his eyes the exact place between the clods where he hoped the potato would fall. If he did not do this, it fell badly.

The last potato planted, he climbed towards the house. It was almost noon. Suddenly he stopped in his steps. High above the roof a swarm of bees was flying away from the sun towards the north.

Rushing into the kitchen, he came out with a large saucepan and a metal soup ladle. He ran through the orchard rattling the ladle in the saucepan. Mick was barking at his heels. When he was ahead of the swarm, he drummed harder than ever, and held the saucepan so that it glinted in the sun and flashed like a mirror. The swarm, subject to a single will, made straight for the nearest plum tree and settled on one of its branches.

Now he could take his time. He found an empty hive and rubbed its inside with plum leaves. He strolled over to the outhouse to fetch a saw. He sawed off the branch on which the bees were settled and carried it over to the hive. There he tapped the branch smartly with a plank and the swarm fell off like a wig.

If the Queen is there, they’ll stay. If not, they’ll leave tomorrow.

It was then that he heard his mother’s voice calling him by name. The sound the bees were making gave birth to her voice, and at the same time muffled it. The voice went on repeating his name as if the solitude of his days were now in the name itself.

Each season loads up men as if they were wheelbarrows and then wheels them forward to do its tasks. Félix ploughed the field for the alfalfa. One day, when he was twelve, in the field he was now ploughing, his father had said to him:

Do you want to come hunting with me?

They climbed, both of them, to the forest below Peniel.

We’ll wait here, Felo, and do nothing. Shut your mouth and keep your eyes skinned.

His father cut some branches from a beech tree and arranged them like a light screen in front of them. The beech leaves, just unfurled, were as fresh-looking as lettuces. They waited behind the screen for what seemed to Félix an eternity. The bones in his body began to ache one by one because he didn’t dare move a limb. His father sat there as patient as if he were listening to music, his gun between his knees. From behind a spruce twenty metres away, a wild boar appeared, hesitated, and then walked, like a confident habitué, across their vision. The father fired. The boar keeled over and lay down as if inexplicably overcome by sleep.