John Berger - G.

He has never seen you naked and now you are.

Some say of my writing that it is too overburdened with metaphor and simile: that nothing is ever what it is but is always like something else. This is true, but why is it so? Whatever I perceive or imagine amazes me by its particularity. The qualities it has in common with other things — leaves, a trunk, branches, if it is a tree: limbs, eyes, hair, if it is a person — appear to me to be superficial. I am deeply struck by the uniqueness of each event. From this arises my difficulty as a writer — perhaps the magnificent impossibility of my being a writer. How am I to convey such uniqueness? The obvious way is to establish uniqueness through development. To persuade you, for example, of the uniqueness of Leonie’s experience by telling you the story of what happened when Eduard discovered that Leonie had been unfaithful to him. In this way the uniqueness of an event can be explained by its causes and effects. But I have little sense of unfolding time. The relations which I perceive between things — and these often include casual and historical relations — tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters. And so I am forced to use another method to try to place and define events. A method which searches for co-ordinates extensively in space, rather than consequentially in time. I write in the spirit of a geometrician. One of the ways in which I establish co-ordinates extensively is by likening aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them. On the bed they were not such prisoners.

On the road across the Kulm pass Chavez sees figures waving to him. Among them are Christiaens and Luigi Barzini. In a few hours the Corriere della Sera will carry a report of this moment.

‘A profound emotion nails us to the spot. We do not move. We are lifeless, our souls shining in our eyes, and our hearts beating fast. We are spellbound by the great beauty of what we are seeing. A thousand years of life cannot annul this memory.

‘After a few seconds we jump back into the car. Christiaens is beside us. Two Swiss police climb in also — and we are away! We look at each other; our eyes are red. The Swiss guards too have tears in their eyes as they mutter germanically: Mein Gott, mein Gott. The plane is now just about to enter the Krummbach valley which two hours ago was rent by wind and lightning. It is above the fields around the hospice. It looks as though he is losing height.

‘ “He’s landing,” we yell. “There he is! He’s landing!”

‘It is clear that the aviator has a moment of doubt. He may be thinking of landing; then he decides that the wind is not as terrible as he feared and he continues …’

All pilots at that time took their bearings from what they could see on the ground. And the ground reassured them, for on it they could expect to land and to receive help. When Blériot, the year before, had flown the Channel, a French destroyer had escorted him. Briefly, for about ten minutes, he lost contact with the ship and saw only the sea; he said afterwards that during those long minutes he had felt terrifyingly alone. Chavez’ decision now makes him the first man to fly deliberately beyond the sight and reach of other men.

The cold surrounds him like the four walls of a cell; but the cold also enters the cell. One wall presses relentlessly and continually against him. The right side of his face and body are icy. It is the wall of the wind: the wind which he once (twenty minutes ago) so wrongly under-estimated. The wrong no longer appears to him a matter of miscalculation but of transgression. It is the original sin to explain his life, now identical with this flight. The wall opposite that of the wind is made of rock and snow.

On his left he can see Monte Leone. The snow, white in the sunlight, both emphasizes the presence of the mountain and transforms it into a kind of absence.

Not a stain would remain on that white.

He tries to break through the wall of wind. Whenever he turns to the right, the roar of the Gnome engine becomes louder, because the wind blows it back at him, but the plane hangs almost stationary in the air. He has lost height which he must regain if he is to cross the Monscera. Yet he is frightened to climb. The wind above him is stronger than the wind blowing at him and it blows up there from all directions at once. It is bad when the plane drops, but it is even worse when it is lifted up by the wind. Then his own legs, his own feet in their boots above the engine move in a sickening way: the linen on the top surface of the wings blisters irregularly as though the wind had already torn holes on its underside.

Below the shoulders of Monte Leone and much nearer to him, the lower mountains rise like the broken eroded galleries of a semicircular amphitheatre in which he is alone in the centre.

He remembers Paulhan’s last words of advice: Keep high! Keep high! The words have become absurd.

His immediate difficulty will be to clear the far ridge of the amphitheatre after he has flown across the arena. The wind is edging him further and further into the semi-circle, towards the blind galleries. If he can clear the ridge where it breaks (west of the Glatthorn), there will be worse difficulties to face. He is too far east and he believes he has to climb three or four hundred metres to cross the Monscera. The wind, holding him down, and forcing him to the east, is cornering him and the corner where it will smash him to pieces will be in the gorge of the Gondo.

He must have considered whether he should turn into the wind and circle the arena to gain height. Yet, I believe, the idea of turning round, even momentarily, filled him with horror. If he once circled this theatre of blind gulleys and ridges, he would never break out of the circle but would die in it when his engine stopped. He would rather fight in a corner.

He can no longer distinguish between rock and silence. The surfaces of his body are by now completely numb from the cold. The most that his consciousness can oppose to the rocks which surround him is air and the noise of the engine at his feet. He flies on towards the Glatthorn like an arrow towards its target.

He is beside a rock face which is like the loose hide of a gigantic mule stretched across the frame of the letter A and, apparently, blown inwards, between the legs of the letter, by the same wind which is blowing against him and his plane. On the mule-hide of this rock Chavez sees the shadow of his wings, sometimes lurching away, sometimes rushing towards him as the shadow crosses folds. Looking down he sees rock rising up at him. Ahead he can see higher peaks still. Reverberating and echoing against the rock beside and below him, the noise of his engine falls and rises like his shadow, and his shadow seems to clatter with the noise of his engine and of falling stones.

Here there could have been no question of conscious decisions.

Here I cannot calculate as I write.

Chavez has the impression that he is about to enter the jaws of an animal whose passages and gullet and stomach and arse are made of solid rock, an animal whose digestion is geological. An animal that can kill before it is alive, and eat when it is dead.

Here it is not a matter of courage or the lack of it; here men divide themselves into those who still want to live and those who do not. Which they are may be revealed in the way they scream. Some ascend with their screams; some die with them. Chavez climbed, indifferent to the risk of stalling, indifferent to everything, except to the necessity of escaping from the jaws of the animal: upwards.

He was in the Gondo.