John Berger - G.

Our beautiful ladies, says the host, must be beginning to feel the cold night air rising from the lake. Let us go indoors.

They talk of attraction and magnetism; these notions suggest a force acting between two given bodies; what is left out of account is how utterly the bodies appear to change in themselves; they are no longer the given bodies. The fact of being given has changed them.

It is not that you see her so differently; it is that she frames a different world. The shape of her nose doesn’t change much. In outline she is the same. But within her unchanged contours everything you perceive is different. She is like an island whose coastline still corresponds to what was shown on the map, but on which, and surrounded by which, you now live. The sound of the sea on all her beaches — unless you accept the dictatorship of your intelligence — ultimately that is the only thing you can oppose to death.

For bruises sand is cool and like silk to the touch. For wounds it is inflaming and harsh, each particle contributing its degree of pain.

But by abstract metaphor I distance myself from my unique perception of her.

The tip of each of her fingers, with its bitten nail, is as expressive as an eye looking at me. I follow from the tip of each finger past the two knuckles to where it joins her hand. Her hand looks curiously thin and ineffective. As an object her hand looks as though it has been discarded. I can imagine or foresee it being different. It might caress me. It might hammer against my back. It might present itself as a five-teated udder to my mouth for me to suck each finger. None of this, however, is of any importance. My attention happened to fall upon her hand. It might just as well have been another part of her. Her elbow. Sharp with her bone pressing against her skin and making it white and bloodless. What can I foresee her elbow doing? Nothing of significance. Yet I perceive it in the same way as her hand. I receive from it the same promise and in the same way it fulfils its promise. I isolate parts in order to follow my eyes, instant by instant, faithfully. But my eyes move, reading her, at incredible speed. The fresh evidence of each part, of each new sight of her, contributes to my perception of her as a whole, and makes this whole continually move and pulsate like a heart, like my own heart.

What is her promise? Of her love in the future? But that is not yet fulfilled. If I made love with her it would be to complete, to put an end to, something that had already happened to us. When you describe something, when you name it, you separate it from yourself. Or to some degree. To fuck is like naming what has happened in the only language adequate to expressing it. (Only when nothing has happened is it possible to separate sex from love.) All acts of physical love are anticipatory and retrospective. Hence their unique significance.

My eyes touch her almost but not quite in the same way as my hands might. If I touched her, her skin, the surface of her body, a contradictory sensation would accompany my sense of touch. I would have the feeling that what I was touching also enclosed me: that this exterior surface (which is her skin with its variegated pores, its degrees of softness and heat and its different smells) that this exterior surface was at the same time, according to another mode of experience, an interior surface. I do not speak symbolically: I am referring to sensation itself. Touching her from the outside would make me aware of being inside.

I look at her fingers as though I were on the point of inhabiting each one, as though I might become the content of its form. I and her phalanxes. Absurd. Yet what is the absurd? Only a moment of incongruity between two different systems of thinking. I am speaking of her fingers, the flesh and bones of another person, and I am speaking too of my imagination. Yet my imagination is not separable from my own body; nor is hers.

The light which, falling upon her, discloses her, is like the light that falls upon and discloses cities and oceans. The facts of her physical being are the events of the world, the space in which she moves is the space of the universe, not because I am unmindful of everything except her, but because I am prepared to risk all that is not her for the sake of all that she is.

The way she plants her feet, the exact length of her back, the tone of her rasping voice (which he said he would recognize anywhere) — each of these and every other quality I see in her, appears as significant as a miracle. There is no end to what she can offer: it is infinite. And I am not deluding myself. I desire her single-mindedly. The value of everything about her, the significance of her smallest movement, the power of what differentiates her from every other woman — this may be determined for both of us by what I am prepared to risk for her. And that is the world. And so she will acquire the value of the world: she will contain, so far as she and I are concerned, all that is outside her, myself included. She will enclose me. Yet I will be free, for I will have chosen to be there, as I never chose to be here in the world and the life which I am ready to abandon for her.

Je t’aime, Camomille, comment je t’aime . That is what he must say.

The guests entered the large room where the furnishings were dark and heavy and the lamps cast bright distinct circles of light — like those lit arenas on conference tables in which it was traditional to depict statesmen signing treaties. The arrangement of the room suggested its principal use as a place where Milanese politicians and businessmen came to work out their plans undisturbed: it offered comfort but not distraction: it was a male room, like a minister’s private reception room in a parliament building. There was nothing in it (except now the women’s bare arms) which was equivalent to the flamingoes in the garden. As the guests entered this sober but comfortable room through the large double door beneath a portrait painting of Giolitti, he noticed Madame Hennequin talking with her friend Mathilde Le Diraison and there was something in the relationship between the two women which intrigued him. They had an air of scarcely disguised conspiracy, such as sometimes sisters preserve between them even after they have become adults and their parents are dead.

In a corridor Madame Hennequin had passed a huge mirror in the shape of the sun and in this mirror she had found herself trying to see the mantle over her shoulders and the fringe over her forehead as he might see them. Through his eyes she found herself pleasing.

Now in the room she compared him with her husband. They were unequally matched. Monsieur Hennequin was stronger and had greater authority. He was like a father; with her two children at home she often referred to her husband as Papa; he was a man who understood the world. His discretion about his mistress — even this — was an example of how well he understood it. Whereas the other, who spoke French badly, did not read poetry but could explain Mallarmé: Mallarmé whose poetry she loved so much because it was inexplicable: the other was imprudent and careless. But since they were so unequally matched she could allow herself to smile at him. Circumspectly, in her own rather distant manner and always in reference to her husband who could at any moment rescue her from the consequences of her own childishness, she was willing, for the duration of the evening, to flirt with this friend of the American aviator: to pretend that a relation existed where in fact there was none.

She asked him what kind of man Chavez was. He replied that he had only met him once or twice, but that Chavez was a nervous man and perhaps also a desperate one. He addressed his reply, however, as much to Monsieur Hennequin as to Madame Hennequin. It was as if he were aware of the comparison she had made and the conclusions she had reached. Having alerted her to his interest, he was now content for them both to concentrate on her husband, the owner.