John Berger - G.

A youth in an apron says of the railwayman: That one is like an officer of the artillery. On the word ‘fuoco’ there is the crack of a single shot and the railwayman falls. The shot came from an upper window, not from the street. The bullet is in his face. The bullet belongs, he believes, to the past, preceding his own childhood. The wound in his face, attended by three women, gives birth to his death.

A cubic metre of space; empty it of your conception of that space; what remains is like death.

The soldiers advance again, and are driven off in the same way. But this time they withdraw a hundred yards, and there is a lull whose quiet deceives no one. Behind the barricade it is probably the moment of greatest fear. The enemy have taken the measure of the defenders’ defiance and are re-planning the attack accordingly; the defenders can do nothing but tend their dead comrade and wait, hopelessly out-armed and outnumbered.

In Italian she whispers to him: I promise you if a soldier lays hands on me, I’ll drive a knife down between his shoulders. She touches him lightly with her finger where the blade will strike. As if he had understood what she said and were pretending to die, he lets his weight lean against her. I promise, she says. His head falls on to her shoulder. His legs are trembling and he fears that he is about to lose consciousness. With her arm round him she leads him through the passage of the house to a yard where she splashes his face with water from a tap and tells him to drink. The water is sharply cold and as he gulps it, he hears another volley of shots from the street. The sound in his ears and the swallowing of the cold water in his throat become a single sensation. He sees her face, her heavy eyebrows meeting in the middle, her heavy mouth and moustache, a squashed blemished face with slow eyes; he sees her expression; never before has a second person’s expression appeared to express what he is feeling.

Che Dio li maledica , she says.

Along the street several riflemen have been posted in the windows of upper rooms from where they can fire, over the barricade, at its defenders. Under their covering fire the soldiers in the street are advancing. Already three defenders have been wounded.

Let me speak of one of the wounded. The bullet has entered just beneath his right collarbone. If he keeps his right arm still, the pain is constant but it does not move: it does not lunge out and devour his very consciousness of what remains unhurt. He hates the pain as he hates the soldiers. The pain is the soldiers in his body. He picks up a stone with his left hand and tries to throw it. In throwing it he inadvertently moves his right shoulder. The stone goes crooked and only hits a wall.

Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do that may help a little. Build a barricade of words, no matter what they mean. Speak so that he can be aware of your presence. Speak so that he knows that you are there not feeling his pain. Say anything, for his pain is larger than any distinction you can make between truth and untruth. Dress him with the words of your voice as others dress his wounds. Yes. Here and now. It will stop.

There is no judge.

When the soldiers are twenty yards away, two women climb up the iron bars, which are meant to prevent people or animals falling under the tram, onto its side. As they emerge into view as targets at point-blank range, they scream at the soldiers: Shoot us! Why don’t you shoot us? Several rifles point at them but nobody fires. They stand upright, straddling the broken tram windows. They continue to scream at the soldiers. Figli di putana! And then: Castrati! Castrati! The boy in the street stares up at them from behind. The heel of one of them protrudes through a large hole in her stocking. On the ankle of the second, who is without stockings, is a smear of blood. Castrati! Castrati! More women are climbing the bars to join the first two.

An officer notices a man on a sixth-floor parapet, further down the street, behind the barricade. The man is gesticulating. The officer orders a section of soldiers to fire at him.

The man on the parapet sees the soldiers bring their rifles to the shoulder and aim at him. If I jump, he thinks, they will kill me before I hit the ground. He jumps.

To the officer the young women swearing and prancing on the tram are sluts whom he will later have arrested. But for some of the soldiers, sons of peasants or workers from other cities, they evoke childhood memories. The women’s voices show that their rage is solemn and passionate, precluding all answers. For these soldiers the women on the tram seem to have attained, whatever their actual age, the authority of elders; their rage is inseparable from judgement; before such rage one must ask for pardon.

The soldiers are ordered to advance. This order re-establishes the sense of manhood they were for a moment in danger of losing. Obediently they move forward, rifles at the ready: some to round up the men, others to drag the women off the tram.

Castrati! Cowards!

The words concentrate into a yell. It is not a yell of fear but of total refusal. They are like women yelling on behalf of the stillborn.

I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything, I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent. Yet there was no such convergence and no incoherence. To stop here, despite all that I leave unsaid, is to admit more of the truth than will be possible if I bring the account to a conclusion. The writer’s desire to finish is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another way.

Between 6 May, when martial law was declared in Milan, and 9 May one hundred workers were killed and four hundred and fifty wounded. Those four days marked the end of a phase of Italian history. Socialist leaders began to lay more and more stress on parliamentary social democracy and all attempts at direct revolutionary action — or revolutionary defence — were abandoned. Simultaneously the ruling class adopted new tactics towards the workers and the peasantry; crude repression gave way to political manipulation. For the next twenty years in Italy — as in most of the rest of Western Europe — the spectre of revolution was banished from men’s minds.

In the garden in Livorno the fountain is playing. The fountain, the palm trees, the hibiscus and flowering shrubs have not been allowed to deteriorate since the death of Umberto’s wife, three years ago in 1895. He employs two gardeners. He travels specially to Settignano to order rare plants. Each year his memory of his wife approximates more closely to the picture of her preserved by her acquaintances and friends. He no longer disputes that his wife was a person of great spirituality.

Occasionally there is a noise which suggests a marble dropped into water. It is made by a perch, basking on the surface of the water, abruptly plunging. Umberto cannot enjoy the peacefulness of the garden alone. Alone he feels old and nervous. He will agree to anything Laura asks in exchange for being able to have his son in Livorno.

Umberto thinks that his son is not like a modern Italian but like a youth painted during the Renaissance; his face is like a window onto his soul. He finds the gaps in the boy’s teeth a little disconcerting when he smiles, but these he will have stopped with gold. He tells Laura of all the advantages which the boy would enjoy if he lived in Livorno. Laura does not say what she thinks. Instead she complains, hints, contradicts herself. The more persuasive Umberto becomes, the less encouraging she is. He pleads with her, he begs her on his knees.