John Berger - G.

At Domodossola, in communication with Brig by telephone, everyone waits. The factories have stopped work. The workers are watching the sky. The old forego their siesta. The young are making their way to the field where Chavez will land, refuel and then take off for Milan. On every balcony and in every window which has a view of the Ossola valley, green, peaceful but climbing up to pine forests and then to rocks, people stand, eyes half-shut, staring into the sky above the Alps. There is no wind.

It is a tragedy! We ought to be able to see him by now.

Perhaps he has turned back.

But he crossed the Simplon.

How do you know?

Roberto told us.

And Roberto?

Signor Lucchini, the clerk of the Mayor, came into the Garibaldi twenty minutes ago and said that he had passed the hospice.

Praise be to God.

Since this morning I knew it was going to be a tragedy. I dreamt about him last night.

That’s because you are in love with him.

To clap my eyes on him just once!

And we’ll all call out his name — Geo! Geo!

Thousands in Domodossola pick out the plane, minute against the pine forest. It is lower than they expected. With shouts the watchers try to quieten each other, so as to be able to hear the engine. It is too far away. Slowly the movement of the aeroplane becomes clear. It is coming down towards Domodossola.

Duray, racing-car driver and friend of Chavez, unrolls two lengths of white calico on the grass of the landing-field to make a cross, visible from the air; a crowd of boys compete to help him peg the cloth to the ground.

The plane is flying and losing height so regularly, so serenely, that all of those watching feel personally elated.

He is the first man to fly the Alps; he has done what was previously thought impossible. It is a momentous event that we are witnessing, yet, look! it is simpler than we imagined, he is flying straighter than a bird and effortlessly, and that is how he has flown over the Alps; achieving greatness is perhaps less hard than we have been led to believe. This sequence of feelings (formulated in many different ways) leads to a conclusion of sudden elation. Why can we not all achieve what we wish?

The Mayor, being driven in a car to the landing field and wearing his ceremonial robes in order to welcome the great aviator, announces to his companions on the back seat that the town will name a street after Chavez to commemorate his victory over the mountains.

An express train for Milan left Domodossola station at 14.18 hours. A young man in the train spots the Blériot monoplane through the carriage window and pulls the alarm signal. The train comes to a sudden halt. The young man jumps down on to the track and runs along the length of the train shouting to the other passengers to watch and pointing with his arm at the plane which is now only a little higher than the tree, and in which Chavez is clearly visible. When he reaches the locomotive, the young man stops and waves with both arms at the sky, hoping that Chavez will see him and wave back; he will then have been the first to salute the hero. But Chavez does not wave back. A fact about which the young man and his friends who were flying enthusiasts were to speculate for many years.

Leonie’s head is thrown back like a singer’s singing. Her eyes too have rolled back so that he sees only the whites of them, not the irises. Her mouth is open and her throat swollen. She makes a noise in her throat which is a word said very slowly but he does not decipher it.

Some cry, some lie motionless, some thump with their fists, some lie curled up, some push their tongues between their lips, some clench their brows and set their mouths in determination, some wave their hands and others open them until they are like starfish: no two are the same until they leave behaviour behind, until they come with him to that moment when everything is simultaneous and every one of them is there together.

He experiences every orgasm as though it were simultaneous with every other. All that has occurred or will occur between each, all the events, actions, causes and consequences which have and will separate in time woman from woman, surround this timeless moment as a circumference surrounds the circle it defines. All are there together. All despite all their differences are there together. He joins them.

Sexual desire, however it is provoked or produced circumstantially, and whatever its objective terms and duration may be, is subjectively fixed to two points in time: our beginning and our end. When analysed, sexual desire has components which are violently nostalgic and lead us as far back as the experience of birth itself: other components are the result of an ineradicable appetite for the unknown, the furthest away, the ultimate of life — which can finally only be found in its negation — death. At the moment of orgasm these two points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When this happens everything that lies between them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantaneous. It is thus that I explain the protagonist of my book to myself.

He lay on his back beside Leonie, holding her hand, his eyes shut. She no longer saw secret promises in his face. She knew what he promised and the secret involved the two of them. With her hand he wasn’t holding, she touched his face. She followed with the tips of two fingers the contours of an eyebrow and then down the side of his nose, past the corner of his mouth, which twitched when she passed it, to his chin. By touching his face in this way she could make her feeling of familiarity more natural and destroy a little of its mystery. She could localize the feeling of familiarity in what she felt in her fingertips. And thus she was less overwhelmed by it. She wanted to cup her hand over his nose. She raised her hand to her own nose to smell it. She placed it on his forehead instead. She would have played like this, with isolated words occurring to her with a sense of odd illumination in her head (as though she knew that there was light, white like snow, behind all that she saw or pictured and that this light gave everything a white outline until the instant she saw it), she would have continued like this until he spoke or moved. But a man shouting on the staircase interrupted her. A moment later a woman shouted on the terrace just under the window. Several more shouts followed.

Had Leonie belonged to a different social class, she might have reacted differently. Her immediate response might well have been to question the right of others in a hotel to raise their voices and disturb her. As it was, a raised voice was a warning signal; she had learnt since childhood that when you heard somebody raising their voice, you either disappeared or prepared yourself to be unjustly abused. She feared that the people were shouting because they were looking for her.

She pulled her hand away from his. He opened his eyes.

They are looking for me, she whispered, they are coming to look for me. Nobody will come in here, he said, and closed his eyes again. There was a knock at the door.

What is it? he asked.

A man’s voice on the other side of the door: Chavez has crashed.

Where?

When he came down to land at Domodossola.

You mean he made the crossing and then crashed?

At the very last moment, yes, a couple of metres above the landing field, he didn’t level out, he just dived into the ground at about a hundred kilometres an hour.

Is he dead?

No. He has broken both his legs, but they said on the telephone he isn’t badly hurt otherwise. He’s been taken to hospital.

All right. Thank you for telling me.

Are you coming down?

I’ll see you later. He turned to Leonie. You see, he said, they weren’t looking for you. And he began to laugh.