John Berger - G.

I haven’t found the key to that mare’s mouth yet, said Jocelyn.

Then they had both fallen silent.

In the narrow steep lane the boy asked: Have you heard from Aunt Beatrice?

Jocelyn appeared not to hear. The boy glanced sideways at him.

The man’s eyes were screwed up and his face was thrust forward into the damp, increasingly cold air. He could have been trying to spot something in the light which was beginning to fail. Or he could have been a man leaving his house with the determination never to return, a man thrusting his face forward so that it might the sooner be immersed in the unknown and the indifferent.

Several minutes later he said: She says they’re saying in Durban, that the war is as good as over. Lord Roberts is on his way home.

She’ll be here soon then.

You forget that she’s married, said Jocelyn.

Where will they live?

I’ve no idea.

Why are all the things still kept in her room?

Because it is still her room.

Will they both come here?

Again Jocelyn appeared not to hear. They emerged from the lane into a spinney. At the end of the lane Jocelyn’s dog was awaiting him. A springer spaniel called Silver.

Do you know why you have bad dreams, said Jocelyn, it’s because you spend too much time indoors. You don’t exercise yourself enough. Too much in the house. It’s a woman’s life that. Not a man’s. You should come out with me more.

I’m sorry if I disappoint you, said the boy. He said it insolently as though it were inconceivable that the man could have any real grounds for disappointment. When I give my first concert you’ll be proud of me.

We’ve only got about twenty minutes more in this light, said Jocelyn, let’s clear the wood and cross the quarry field. You work the left and I’ll take the right below. Silver, come here Silver!

His voice changed when he spoke to the dog, becoming both firmer and softer. To the boy be spoke more loudly and yet hesitantly.

They separated and began to go forward through the wood. The trees and the slope of the ground made it impossible for them to keep in sight of one another.

Hup! Hup! cried Jocelyn to show how far forward he was.

Hup! Hup! replied the boy to show that they were advancing in level line.

It is a cry which is thought not to alert the birds. It sounds more like a wooden stick striking a hollow wooden vessel (the wood of the vessel water-logged) than a voice speaking.

Nothing stirred in the wood. The tree trunks looked grey. The spaniel was seeking half-heartedly as if it found the damp entirely vegetable odour of the wet leaves disagreeable.

Hup! Hup!

For Jocelyn the cry belonged to a language which was theoretically infinite. Those two repeated wooden monosyllables filled the spinney with the splendour of a tradition as no sentence or speech or music ever could. Through the cry and the response to it, was invoked the understanding of honourable men acting in concert, disinterestedly, to experience certain moments of pure style.

Hup! Hup!

This time Jocelyn’s cry was addressed gently and specifically to the boy. He was talking to the boy, including him in the tradition. The boy noticed the difference in the man’s cry, but he answered as before.

Hup! Hup!

The tradition envisages men in close but special contact with nature. The men are unspoilt by comfort yet they are free of the necessity of having to exploit nature. They enter into nature rather as a swimmer, who has no need to cross it, enters a river. They play in the current: in it and yet not of it. What prevents them being swept away are time-honoured rules to which they adhere without question. The rules all concern ways of treating or handling specific objects or situations — guns, boots, bags, dogs, trees, deer, etc. Thus the force of nature (either from within or from without) is never allowed to accumulate; the rules always establish calm, as locks do in a river. Such men feel like gods because they have the impression of imposing an aesthetic order upon nature merely by the timing and style of their own formal interventions.

Hup! Hup!

If Silver puts up a woodcock, thought Jocelyn, it will be almost too dark now.

The tradition envisages that at the end of the day tiredness finally forces the men to cease. They return home stiff, hungry, chilled or soaked, caked with mud. At home they offer to women and friends the invisible unmade masterpieces which they have fleetingly constructed in nature; they offer them in the soiled or torn clothes they throw off, in their stiff bodies, in their excited distant eyes, in the names they possess and the names of where they have been with whom.

Hup! Hup!

It was the boy’s turn to respond. He did so, as before, flatly — without the conspiratorial intensity of his uncle.

Advancing level with Jocelyn, doing what was expected of him, his presence indicated only by his prescribed responding cry, it occurred to him that he could be any man walking up with his uncle. Under cover he had entered the company of men.

They emerged from the wood and proceeded across the open quarry-field. The cries were no longer necessary for they could see one another. Jocelyn whispered urgently to his dog, checking him so that he should not get too far ahead. His way of talking to the dog was part of the same language.

A hare leapt from covert some twenty-five yards away. Jocelyn fired one barrel. The report and its echo from the quarry face momentarily supplied an axis to the uniform grey dusk, as though the two sounds were magnetic poles to which every particle of the dusk turned and pointed.

The hare ran on, the pulse of its leaps undisturbed. It was running cross-wise, offering the boy a broadside shot.

He saw it running. He saw it as a brown furry smudge. He saw the muscles along its shoulders and down its haunches flex as it zig-zagged. He was unaware of squeezing the trigger, unaware even — for a second’s delay — of the recoil: he simply saw the hare in mid-leap going small and falling.

Imagine an invisible net which can fly through the air but remains open-ended like a wind-sock: the net flies towards the hare, the hare leaps into the net whose neck is only wide enough to admit the animal’s head and shoulders, so that the hare, entering the net, has to bunch itself up as a rabbit does when scuttling into its burrow. As the hare bunches, the foot of the net is filled with lead. It drops immediately to the ground.

The dog was whimpering. In this light, said Jocelyn placing a hand under the boy’s elbow and holding the hare by its hind legs level with their two faces, I couldn’t have done that.

What does castrati mean? he had asked Umberto in Italy.

Castrati? Castrati!

Umberto was surprised but delighted by the question. It was the antithetical question to all that he wanted to tell the boy.

Un castrato cannot be a father.

Umberto began to explain at length and fulsomely. He poured out wine and insisted that his son drink. As he talked Umberto’s fingers chopped themselves off, made hooks of themselves, wagged.

The boy had seen Tom castrating lambs: a flick of the knife and then the two testicles sucked out into the mouth and spat upon the ground. But he had not connected the Italian word with the English.

Umberto cited himself as a father, and hit the lower part of his stomach with his flat hand. He leant across the table so that his huge face was close to the boy’s. But il castrato today, he said, is an insult. It does not mean it properly. It means a weak man, a man who is not capable, a feeble one. Him. Quest’uomo è castrato . He could be called that. Un Castrato . Umberto was so close to his son’s face that he could not resist touching it. Ecco my boy my boy, he said.