John Berger - G.

How can you laugh, she asked, when your friend must be suffering so much.

I’m laughing at us.

At me because I was frightened?

No, at the two of us here whilst he was crossing the Alps.

He may die.

And one day I’ll die and you too, with your beautiful brown eyes and your white teeth. There is never any time to lose.

Don’t you have any feelings for him at all?

I had no time.

I don’t understand what you say.

No chance ever comes twice.

They just told you he crashed.

Then I will try to console his fiancée.

Who are you? She said this fiercely but in a whisper as though she were frightened that he might answer in a voice loud enough for the whole hotel to hear. She believed that he might be the Devil. Abruptly she turned her back on him and buried her face in the pillow. Why me? she asked.

You are like you are, that’s why.

Why me out of all the others? There are so many.

You as well as many others.

Am I — she raised her head to look at him and then changed her mind about what to say: I must go, she said, they’ll be looking for me. Let me go.

Yes, he said.

Don’t you really care about your friend who is hurt?

You talk about him but you don’t mean him.

I don’t understand what you say.

When you ask about him, you are thinking of yourself.

No — when I saw him flying off—

— but by then I had already come to find you.

He placed his hand on her shoulder. Her whole body turned towards him and she lay on her back looking up at him. She could see in his face what had happened to them both after he had come to find her; his face was different; but it was not the face of the Devil.

She knew that he could not take her with him when he left. It was not worth her asking. It was not even worth asking whether he would be leaving tomorrow or the day after. That much she could discover from the hall porter. She might ask whether he would return to Brig. But she already knew the answer. Chavez had crossed the Alps. No aviator would try from here again. He would not come back. Everything she had ever noticed in the world stood between his life and hers.

Will I see you tomorrow?

Yes, I will find you.

She recognized that he was lying. The total unexpectedness of what had happened did not mean that it was likely to happen again. A more sophisticated and privileged woman would have found it hard to accept that the encounter was unrepeatable, and so would probably have needed the lie and have failed to recognize it as such. For Leonie it was not hard to accept. The choices open to her had always been limited; she thought of most of the conditions of living as unchangeable; and so the idea of the extraordinary was central to her life. She was superstitious.

She shivered. He pulled up the sheet to cover her. As he did so, he saw her body stretched almost straight, save that one hip was slightly raised. There are women — often they are wide-hipped and plump — whose bodies become unforeseeably beautiful when recumbent. Their natural formation, like a landscape’s, seems to be horizontal. And just as landscapes are for ever continuous, the horizon receding as the eye of the traveller advances, so, to the sense of touch, these bodies seem borderless and infinitely extended, quite regardless of their actual size. His hand set out. The large dark triangle of hair on her pale skin announced unequivocally the mystery which it hid.

She would have liked to have said before washing, whilst they were still extraordinary, lying on the bed, that if he asked her to go away with him, she would go. It would have been a way of telling him how she felt: all he had supposed about her had been right: he had known more about her than anybody else had: so now he must know — because she did not believe that she would see him again — that she loved him, loved him like her own child. Yet if she spoke of going away with him, he would lie and misunderstand what she said. She must find another way to tell him. She feared that if she did not tell him, Eduard might kill himself or her. She believed that her telling him would protect them all later.

And so it happened that the young peasant bride who, an hour and a half earlier, had been shy to undress in front of him, suddenly threw off the sheet and kneeling on the bed seized hold of his head, pressed his face against her stomach, and, with her own head thrown back, so that she saw blue light in the pear-shaped blobs of glass hanging from the candelabra in the centre of the ceiling, repeatedly called out his name, whilst tears ran down her face.

Later, in the evening, G. saw Weymann. Weymann, normally so imperturbable, was distinctly nervous. During the afternoon, after the news of Chavez’ crash, Weymann took off in his plane and tried to climb towards the Simplon; the prize for reaching Milan still remained to be won. But the wind proved too strong and he turned back to land again in the field with the canvas hangars.

What time did you take off?

At 3.43, about two hours after Geo.

Was the wind much stronger?

Not appreciably on the ground. But when I climbed to about a thousand metres, just after the Napoleon bridge, there I hit it full force. It’s always been there, about the same spot. Suddenly it comes at you, and it knocks you sideways, like the slipstream of an express train. It couldn’t have been much less when he went through. But I don’t believe in taking unreasonable risks, and he did.

He succeeded though. So didn’t the risks seem less? He’d proved the risks weren’t that great.

He’s proving it in hospital I’m afraid.

But he crossed!

You don’t think like that when you hit that wind. You can feel it straining every strut and joint of the kite.

Supposing he crossed and landed safely but then had engine trouble on the ground, would you have turned back then? Supposing he proved it without mishap, would you have turned back?

Yes, I study my plane and the weather conditions, nothing else. You have to stay very sober in the air, my friend. You have to be quite sure of what you can or you can’t do. And if you’re in doubt, don’t do it. Geo wanted to be a hero. And that’s fatal in the air.

He has shown that something was possible which people thought impossible. Isn’t that an achievement?

I pay my respects to his courage, but it’s a dangerous example.

That’s why there’s a prize offered. If there wasn’t any danger—

No. No. I don’t mean the natural hazards of flying. I mean the danger of encouraging foolhardiness and the taking of unnecessary risks. In the end flying’s like everything else, the secret of success is a healthy respect for what you’re up against. If you want to get on, you don’t pee into the wind. I’m not a coward, but I’m not an idiot either.

You’re saying he is an idiot.

He’s a hero. But I’ll lay you whatever odds you want that at this moment he’s cursing himself for an idiot. They say it’s not at all sure that he’ll ever have the proper use of his legs again.

You feel bad about turning back.

Come with me. I’m driving to Domodossolo tomorrow to go and see him. I’ve borrowed a Fiat. Or are you still waiting for a reply to your letters to that maid? What’s her name?

She’s called Leonie.

The same as the mountain over there? Leone.

It’s spelt differently.

I wouldn’t trust either of them! joked Weymann.

I’ll come to Domodossola.

This morning as I was shaving I thought of a friend of mine who lives in Madrid and whom I haven’t seen for fifteen years. Looking at my own image in the mirror I asked myself whether, after so long, we would recognize each other immediately if we met by accident in the street. I pictured to myself our meeting in Madrid and I began to imagine his feelings. He is a friend to whom I am deeply attached, but I hear from him only once or twice a year and he does not occupy a constant place in my thoughts. After I had shaved, I went down to my letterbox and there found a ten-page letter from him.