John Berger - G.

The tax on flour is over 50 per cent: on sugar 300 per cent, on meat and milk 20 per cent. Salt is so highly taxed that many peasants never taste it. Meanwhile it is an offence against the excise for those who live by the coast to draw salt water from the sea. Guards have shot at women coming down to the beaches with buckets. It is safest at night. Phosphorescent drops form for a moment along the rim of the bucket, in whose illegal water she will cook tomorrow’s pasta.

I FATTI DI MAGGIO 1898

The boy wakes early, as he intended to do. He slips out of the hotel before either of his parents are astir.

Because the people in the streets are speaking a language which he cannot understand, the significance of most of what he sees is ambiguous. The commonplace and the exceptional are mysteriously confused. Is the gentleman who flings himself into a carriage and shouts at the driver frightened or late? The six girls advancing with linked arms (and their hair tied up in scarves) — do they sweep the other pedestrians off the pavement every morning as they are doing today? A man by the kerb is reading out loud from a newspaper. Is it a tram stop? The men who gather round him begin to shout. Are they shouting in approval or anger? A jeweller has closed his shop and pinned a piece of paper with writing on it to the shutters.

There are so many people that the carriages and trams can pass through only with difficulty. The wheels of the trams screech against the rails. He wonders whether they always screech like that.

A young very short man with a beard is puzzled by the presence of the boy, whose clothes make it clear that he comes from a rich bourgeois family. The entire crowd is made up of workers on strike, assembling to listen to their speakers near the Giardini Pubblici.

What are you doing here, he asks in Italian, this has nothing to do with you!

The boy, almost as tall as the young man, shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. This increases the suspicions of his questioner.

It won’t help you spying on us, he says.

I do not understand, says the boy in English.

So you’re not an Italian.

They try to talk but the boy understands nothing. The young man puts his arm round the boy’s shoulders. Within a few seconds his whole attitude is reversed. If the boy cannot understand their language, he is immune to the hypocrisy of deception of words and thus can be the pure witness of their actions. The boy’s wordlessness now appears to him, in an unclear paradoxical way, to be comparable with the universality of the Revolution in which he believes. He calls to his sister in a nearby group of mill-girls: Come and meet our pulcino , he says. Ecco il nostro pulcino .

Despite his diminutive shortness, the young man with a beard has a wide flat brown chest. His face is like a ferret’s. He works as a maintenance mechanic in a cotton mill. Since 1894 he has twice been arrested and deported under Crispi’s law of Public Security (the decreto-legge ).

Let him stay with you, he says to his sister, he can’t speak our Italian.

Out of the six mill-girls to whom the boy has been entrusted, he notices particularly a Roman girl, only two or three years older than himself, whose face is pock-marked and who already has a growth of black hair above her upper lip. He notices too — for she wears a white short-sleeved bodice — that her arms are unnaturally thin, like long brown handles to her hands. Her moustache intrigues and embarrasses him.

To them he is a fascinating enigma. They can talk about him as though he were not there.

He has beautiful eyes.

Look at the leather of his shoes.

Where does he come from?

Yet they can also approach him, touch him, study his reactions. Half child and half man, he appears to them as an ambassador between the romantic dreams of their own childhood and the men from whom in reality they must soon choose. (The eldest of these girls earns less than Iod a day).

Let us call him my affianzato , cries the Roman girl, made brazen by the excitement, her acknowledged ugliness and the fact that the boy will never understand.

The crowd in and around the Corso Venezia numbers fifty thousand. Some are organized into columns and contingents from particular factories; other groupings are smaller and less organized. They do not know exactly how many they are; but all of them sense that they represent the majority. This majority can claim what each has felt but cannot say when alone: Look at this head, this body — ill-taught, badly-fed, poorly-dressed, overworked. It deserves the best the world is able to offer.

Near the edge of the Giardini Pubblici, the boy sees the young man with a beard standing in a tree and addressing the crowd. He is giving them directions about where to go.

The crowd see the city around them with different eyes. They have stopped the factories producing, forced the shops to shut, halted the traffic, occupied the streets. It is they who have built the city and they who maintain it. They are discovering their own creativity. In their regular lives they only modify presented circumstances; here, filling the streets and sweeping all before them they oppose their very existence to circumstances. They are rejecting all that they habitually, and despite themselves, accept. Once again they demand together what none can ask alone: Why should I be compelled to sell my life bit by bit so as not to die?

Of the reality of politics most of the crowd are ignorant. Politics are the means by which they are kept suppressed and impoverished. Politics are the means by which they are deceived and disarmed. Politics is the State which oppresses them. In the heart of each there is a desire to challenge the entire political armoury of their oppressors with the single and simple weapon of justice: the justice of their own cause, crying out to the sky above Milan and to the future. Yet justice implies a judge. And there is no judge and no judgement.

The cavalry charge as the first shots are fired. The shots are above the heads of the crowd.

They ride out in lines of five or six. After a line has passed, sections of the crowd appear to re-form — not in order to resist, for resistance at this instant is unthinkable, but because in order to avoid the horses they have pressed themselves into unimaginably tight units which, as soon as the danger has momentarily passed, inevitably enlarge again. The lines of cavalry turn and wheel. Sections of the crowd repeatedly contract and expand like pumping hearts. Screams ascend and dissolve. Shouts persist.

A line of cavalry approaches. The nearest horse rears above a huddled group. The boy has never as yet seen from the ground a horse used as a weapon. Like his uncle he has always been a rider. The under-side of a rearing horse seen from below is awful in a very particular way. The body is large and heavy with four metal-shod hooves on legs whose pounding power is utterly evident. But the physical threat is compounded with something else. The horse too is made of sinews, bones, flesh and blood. It is breathing hard and is frightened. The rider’s violence has already distorted its nature. The horse shares your defencelessness as it is about to crush you. It is as though your fear has uncontrollably entered the horse which threatens you.

The eyes of the rider stare fixedly into the middle distance, with only quick furtive glances downwards. His back teeth are clenched so hard that he cannot swallow. His head is like a head strung through its eyes on a line five feet above the faces of the crowd: the line of his orders. His spurred boots kick out blindly at the hands and arms trying to grab them. Repeatedly his spurs jab into the horse’s flanks to force it forward.

Hypnotized by the sight of horse and rider, the boy does not move until the Roman girl pulls his arm so abruptly that he almost falls. Then they begin to run. With her free hand she holds up her skirts as she runs. He notices again how unnaturally thin her arms are; but her hand is big and encloses his. She does not hesitate about where to run — towards the trees in the Giardini Pubblici.