John Berger: G.

Laura had been married in New York at the age of seventeen to a copper millionaire; after two years she left him and she came to Europe to join her mother in Paris. She had met Umberto, three years ago, on a passenger ship going to Genoa. Umberto courted her with a concentration and persistence such as she had never dreamt was possible. He made her feel, she wrote to her mother, like Cleopatra. (The ship had come from Egypt.) They immediately spent a month together in Venice.

He arranged for singers, she reported to her mother, to accompany us at night, either side of us, in gondolas. I will remember it always. He made funny jokes about his hands being like crabs. You would love him! Which is why I shan’t bring him to Paris yet! He has friends everywhere and there is a ball we should have gone to here. He wanted to order me a dress. But, believe it or not, I told him that I would prefer not to go. And so instead we went to the island of Murano.

During the next three years he met her in Milan, Nice, Geneva, Lugano, Como and other resorts, but he never allowed her to come near Livorno. When she was not with him, she returned to her mother’s rich American circle in Paris, where she never admitted that her Italian lover was a merchant in candied fruit. She took singing lessons (until she decided, despite her teacher’s protestations, that she had no talent) and she interested herself in the theories of Nietzsche.

Whenever Umberto arrived to meet her after a period of separation and she first saw him approaching, she was struck by the improbability of their relationship. His lack of subtlety and his provincial ostentation in matters of money offended her. In New York, she said to herself, he would have been a waiter in a restaurant whom she and her friends would not have deigned to notice. But after an hour or so of his company she could no longer see him critically. It was like entering a tower which she could not leave until he departed. Inside the tower she was both mistress and child. She played there, either gravely or frivolously, with whatever he gave her. She could look out from the tower but she could never see the tower from the outside. The tower was their love affair. During the months when she did not see him, she thought of him and his passion for her and her own feelings about him as though they were a place. She could visit and revisit it; she visited it, too, in her dreams; but nevertheless it was a place in which she never stayed for long.

Umberto, who as a young man had worked in New York for a firm that imported olive oil and Italian vermouth, speaks English fluently but with a strong Italian accent.

Ah! Laura, the grandeur of the mountains! And the lake so calm and peaceful. It is a beautiful thing the peace at the end of a day, but you are more beautiful, mia piccola . And it is only with you that I can share such peace … To think that I came under those mountains, the tunnel is fifteen kilometres long, fifteen. It is a marvel of science to make that — fifteen kilometres through a mountain. And on this side of the mountain, passeretta mia , you are waiting for me.

(The St Gothard tunnel was opened in 1882. Eight hundred men lost their lives in its construction.)

Umberto and his mistress are driving in a carriage from the station at Montreux to their hotel. Umberto has just arrived. Laura finds him more improbable than she has ever done. He puts his arms around her and tries to lick her ear. She pushes him away.

What do you think I am? she says.

My Laura, my Laura, he says, I think you are my Laura.

From the inside of his overcoat he pulls out a packet, tied with pale blue ribbon. He inclines his head and offers the packet to her on the palms of his hands, as though offering something on a tray. She accepts it. He lets his hands fall down on to her hips. She makes a point of looking at them there to discourage him from continually making such demonstrations in public. (They have argued about this before. He says the inside of a cab is like a private room in a restaurant. She has replied that you don’t make a public place private just by paying a little more!) The backs of his hands, covered with wiry black hair, are very familiar to her. His hands have authority; they arrange things the way he wishes. At the dinner table with his business colleagues in Livorno his hands construct in front of their eyes large invisible models of schemes with which they consider themselves fortunate to be associated. At the wholesale market his hands guarantee the quality of the fruit they touch approvingly and spoil the fruit which they reject. He leans back to watch her open the present.

Inside is black tissue paper and inside that a green velvet Juliet cap decorated with pearls. Laura gasps. Umberto takes this to be a sign of delighted surprise.

The pearls are the real ones, passeretta mia .

On this of all days, she thinks, a cap like this is for a girl of sixteen or seventeen, a kind of toy, a bauble. Her lover’s lack of judgement suddenly infuriates her. She equates it with his trying to bite her ear within two minutes of their meeting. Why is it, she asks, that he has always refused to notice her likes and dislikes, why has he never learned?

I couldn’t wear it, she says, I would look ridiculous in it, it’s for a young girl just out of convent school!

In the half-light of the cab it is difficult to make out the shape of the cap, but the three lines of pearls look like a necklace lying on her lap.

There’s no point in my pretending is there? You would only be disappointed because I couldn’t wear it.

We’ll buy you a necklace, he says.

It is her independence that he loves. She travels anywhere to meet him. She reads the history of the place before they arrive. She shows him chateaux and fountains and she always knows what she wants to do. Yet he has only to put his arms round her and she becomes as docile as a sparrow. That is why he calls her passeretta mia .

We will eat, he says, a banquet in our room with the Swiss white wine you told me was like a fish with a knife — do you remember? — and afterwards we will go to bed, passeretta mia , and tomorrow we will look for the necklace, and if we do not find one here which pleases you, we will go to Milano in a few days.

In bed Umberto has always found his mistress surprising. His impatience now is partly the result of his not being able to fully believe that he will once more be surprised. Upright, she is brisk, strong-willed, independent; lying beside him she has always been delicate and pliant and the touch of her hands has always been lighter than he could remember later.

She had sparse, unusually fine pubic hair as soft as silk thread; her nipples were small and pink and when he kissed them they became red; when her head was thrown back and she smiled, baring her teeth, her upper and lower teeth did not quite touch-between them the space for perhaps a grain of sand to pass. The delicacy and susceptibility of her body had never failed to surprise Umberto and to rouse him to violent passion.

I will keep the velvet cap, she says, and one day perhaps I will give it to my daughter!

She lays her hand on his arm.

Delighted, he says: Ah my little one, you are mad, quite quite matta .

Matta (mad) was the term of endearment he applied most often to her.

For Umberto madness is native to Livorno: he sees madness in the massive monolithic warehouses, eyeless and mute like deserted forts, in the four Moors chained cursing to the monument of Ferdinand I of Florence, in the conglomeration of stuffs with which the capacity of the city is overfilled, in the rectangular spaces of sky cut out by the massive regular buildings above the dark canals, in its shifting population, in the blankness of its walls, in the indeterminacy of its spaces, in its smell of poverty and superfluity, in its furtive opening to the sea.