John Berger - G.

Madness is native to the town, he believes, but it breaks out only spasmodically. Each time reminds him of the first time, in 1848 when he was ten.

The bridges, the indeterminate spaces, the quays, the Piazza San Michele by the four cursing Moors, the decks of the ships and the rigging of the masts which lined the furtive opening to the sea, all were filled with a crowd, a crowd vertically dwarfed by the massive geometric buildings, but horizontally extending without cease, despite ever tighter and tighter concentration: i teppisti !

Such a crowd is a solemn test of a man. It assembles as a witness to its common fate — within which personal differentiations have become unimportant. This fate has consisted, so far as its own memory is concerned, of continual deprivation and humiliation. Yet its appetites have not atrophied. A single pair of eyes, met in that crowd, are enough to reveal the extent of its possible demands. And most of these demands will be impossible to meet. Inevitably, the discrepancy will lead to violence: as inevitably as the crowd is inexorably there. It has assembled to demand the impossible. It has assembled to avenge the discrepancy. Its need is to overthrow the order which has defined and distinguished between the possible and the impossible at its expense, for generation after generation. In face of such a crowd there are only two ways in which a man, who is not already of it, can react. Either he sees in it the promise of mankind or else he fears it absolutely. The promise of mankind is not easy to see there. You are not of them. Only if you have previously prepared yourself, will you see the promise.

Umberto feared the crowd. He justified his fear by believing that they were mad.

Men ran with the crowd and harangued it. The summer heat of 1848 made the boy Umberto sweat even at night in bed. The faces of these men were swollen to apoplectic proportions and the sweat ran down their faces like tears.

Umberto considers that a sane man should always try to see himself as an exemption from the rest of the world: then he will be able to see what he can or cannot take from the world. According to him the madman demands all or nothing! Roma o Morte!

Umberto cannot leave his wife. Neither by way of his children (for he has none) nor by way of society can he find any sense of succession or continuity; he is alone, abandoned in time. To continue his business and gain concessions he is forced to be amiable, not once but a thousand times, to people whom he dislikes or even hates. He can never speak to anybody of more than one tenth of what is on his mind.

Ah my little one, you are mad, quite, quite mad.

What Umberto calls madness is what threatens him. Not what threatens him personally — another merchant, a thief, the man who will cuckold him — but what threatens the social structure in which he lives as a privileged being.

His privilege is more important to him than his life, not because he could not survive without his American mistress, four servants at home, a fountain in his garden, hand-made silk shirts, or his wife’s dinner parties, but because implicit in his privilege are the values and judgements by which he must make sense of his lived life. All values stem from his belief — that his privileges are deserved.

Yet the sense he makes of his life does not satisfy him. Why must liberty, he asks himself, always be retrospective, a quality already won and controlled? Why is there no liberty to pursue now?

Umberto terms madness that which threatens the social structure guaranteeing his privileges. I teppisti are the final embodiment of madness. Yet madness also represents freedom from the social structure which hems him in. And so he arrives at the conclusion that limited madness may grant him greater liberty within the structure.

He calls Laura mad in the hope that she will bring into his life a modicum of liberty.

Umberto, I am going to have a child, and perhaps it will be a girl. If it is a girl (Laura has seized upon the subject of the cap in the hope that it will make her announcement less stark. She is happy at the thought of being pregnant, she thinks continually of what her child will be like, but she finds the announcement humiliating). If it is a girl, I will give her your Juliet cap on her fifteenth birthday and she will look beautiful in it.

The cab has arrived at the hotel. A porter is holding the door open. Please shut the door, says Umberto. Then he instructs the driver to drive them slowly along the lake-side. The driver shrugs his shoulders. It is raining and it is getting dark and there is nothing to see of the lake.

Are you quite sure you are right? asks Umberto.

Quite sure.

Have you been to a doctor?

Yes.

How was he called, this doctor?

He was a doctor in Paris.

What did he say?

He said it was true.

He said it was true?

True.

The doctor said so?

Yes.

The word true echoes at last with the authority of the doctor and this authority offers Umberto the means of coming to terms with the news. He must demystify it, he must make it manageable and negotiable, he must give it a colour so that it can be handled, so that it loses its initial infinite, entirely abstract whiteness.

I am the father, says Umberto.

It is a statement, not a question; but Laura nods her head. She can see no advantage to either of them in his being the father.

Why didn’t you tell me when you wrote to me?

I thought I could explain better when I saw you.

Umberto’s head is teeming with calculations of what can and cannot be done in Livorno to accommodate his illegitimate son.

How long — he makes a counting gesture with his hand.

Three months.

We’ll call him Giovanni.

Why Giovanni? she asks.

Giovanni was the name of my father, his grandfather.

And supposing she is a girl?

Laura! he says. But it is not altogether clear whether he is suggesting this as a name or expressing surprise at his mistress’s suggestion that a child of his might be a girl.

How do you feel, my little one? he asks.

In the mornings I don’t feel so fine, but it passes, and in the afternoon I feel quite hungry, and I don’t know why we are driving up and down the lake-side like this, it is so dismal, and I would like to eat some cakes. They make a special sort of cake here which my mother is always talking about, of almond paste.

You know, I have never had a child, he says, and I was — how do you say it? — rassegnato .

He tries to put his arms round her. She struggles.

You are the mother of my child, he protests. It is not far from being a wife. If I could, I would make you my wife.

It might seem that in such a situation this was an honourable response. Yet far from satisfying Laura, it infuriated her. He is turning her, transforming her at this moment, she feels, into his wife in Livorno — into his wife to whom he has always wanted to say ‘You are the mother of my child’, but has never had the opportunity. She, Laura, is now the mother of the child of the pater-familias. And just as she has been transformed, so too, she fears, has his wife in Livorno: Esther will now represent all that is seductive and free and not inexorable. For two months she has been peaceful and happy at the thought of her child. But to bear a child for a man, and to be condemned to bearing it for him irrespective of her will — she starts to sob.

She allows herself to be comforted. Umberto is the cause of her distress, but he can alleviate it. Not by removing the cause — which is the fact of his being the father elect — but by temporarily surrounding her with his own physical presence so that her awareness of herself and her bitter destiny starts to dissolve, as the outlines of a gate dissolve in the dusk or the words of a letter become illegible in the gathering darkness of a room. In his arms she feels her interests receding, and her name, with the intonation it once had when she was a child, emerges from some remote repository inside her and surfaces everywhere through her childish, so easily irritated, skin.