John Berger - G.

The gloves fitted her perfectly. The leather across her tiny bony knuckles was so tight that it shone as if it were wet.

Take one hand in the other, he told her.

She did so.

You see, he said, you take your left hand in your right.

Is it strange? she asked.

No, he said, but it means you are confident, you are the mistress of your own fate.

She laughed, reassured that he recognized this. I am quite content, she said.

You can be content and a slave. Contentment has little to do with it. Why do you say content?

She thought it best not to answer. I am easily startled though, she said, like I was in the street just now.

Startled! You turned upon me with the fury of a virago defending her honour, and when you recognized it was me you extended me an utterly confident welcome.

Camille pulled off the gloves angrily, lay them on the counter and turned towards the door. He asked the shopkeeper how much they were.

I don’t want them, said Camille.

He paid for them. The shopkeeper folded them in mauve tissue paper. Camille stood facing the door. From behind he took both of her elbows in his hands.

(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. Her elbows are in his hands.)

Trust me, he said. Nobody else knows why you take your left hand in your right. It doesn’t compromise you.

I don’t want the gloves, she said.

They won’t compromise you either, he said, it is certain that you would have bought them. And I offer them to you only as a modest homage to your elegance, Madame Hennequin, this morning.

The formality with which he spoke confused her. It was impossible to decide whether its falseness was deliberate or the result of his far from perfect grasp of the language. Either way it emphasized how by showing her anger she had been indiscreet.

It is too early for us to disagree, he said, and he held out the gloves to her and bowed.

She took them.

Je t’aime, Camille , he said, opening the shop door.

The hospital is near the centre of the town. A square yellow building, it looks like a classical early-nineteenth-century villa in its own garden. The main door is flanked by camellia trees. In the doorway is a table with a book open upon it. The book is for passers-by or visitors who do not wish to disturb the flyer, to write messages or tributes in. For some, however, it seems a sinister omen, for in certain parts of the Mediterranean a book is placed by the front door when there has been a death in the house; and in this book neighbours and acquaintances sign their names as an expression of condolence.

Weymann is waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

He says he remembers nothing after the Gondo, Weymann whispers.

How does he seem?

Very shaken and erratic.

What do the doctors really think?

His injuries are not serious. He has no concussion. There’s nothing to prevent him making a complete recovery.

Except?

I didn’t say except.

But except?

He’s too nervous, says Weymann.

They enter the room in which there are already half a dozen men, including Christiaens and Chavez’ close friend Duray. On the wall opposite the bed are pinned telegrams from all over the world: enough to cover the entire wall.

To the wounded man the wall might have represented a vast transparent window on to the world’s view of his achievement; but it does not, it remains a wall with confused meaningless rectangles of paper pinned to it, some of which stir slightly when the door is opened. His temperature is only slightly above normal. His brain is lucid. Time and again his imagination approaches the irreversibility of the events since he announced ‘I’m going now’. Their irreversibility confronts him like a rock face which moves with him as he turns his head or shifts his gaze. However high he climbs, however daringly he breaks through the wall of the wind westwards, it is still there, in front of his eyes and above his swollen lips. He repeatedly makes the approach but the geology of the events never changes. Meanwhile these silent endlessly recurring private approaches make everything else said or seen in his room seem as far away as the words he cannot read on the telegrams.

They found him under the débris of his plane with his face pressed against the earth. He did not lose consciousness.

G. takes Chavez’ hand and offers his congratulations. He is unaccustomed to finding a man mysterious; mystery, for him, is the prerogative of women. About men he asks only questions to which the number of answers is limited, as one asks what time it is — according to a clock or a watch. He looks into Chavez’ dark eyes, whose expression is suspicious, at his swollen lips which, even when unbruised, were absurdly full and curved, at the backs of his hands, and he sees the whole appearance of the small young man, forced to lie unexpectedly there in a bed in a hospital in a garden in Domodossola, as an outer covering no less arbitrary or opaque than the misshapen cylinders of plaster round his legs. A hand on a woman’s breast conjures up the same mystery. Beneath the tangible extends the enormity of what is intangible and invisible. A doctor can take the plaster off his legs. But a surgeon making an incision in his flesh and opening up the organs within would not disclose the mystery. The mystery lies in the vastness of the system by which Chavez, so long as he is alive, constitutes the world in which he is living (which includes your hand shaking his) as his own unique experience.

This morning I went into a glove shop and the woman who served me spoke of you as though you were a saint, a saint with the courage of a hero.

I know, interrupted Chavez, they think of me like that. Perhaps they are right or perhaps they are not. Anyway the question will never be settled because, meanwhile, I’m dying.

The weather improved. He suggested that Monsieur Hennequin should drive the motor car. In the late afternoon they were driving through a pine forest which overlooked the lake. Madame Hennequin wanted to stop so that they could walk a little in the forest.

The light enters the forest almost horizontally. Each entry between the trees into the depths of the forest acquires in this light an exaggerated stereoscopic quality. The trees which are against the light look entirely black. The tree trunks which are sunlit are a greyish honey colour. The same light falls upon the taffeta and silk of the two women’s dresses which are pearly and luminous. As the women walk, their feet in their buttoned boots tread lightly but deeply into a carpet of pine needles, rotted cones, moss and the leaves of flowers. Every surface is more than usually vivid, but in the forest everything loses something of its substantiality.

To Camille he has been no more than formally polite, so as to emphasize to her the depth and seriousness of the conspiracy which now links them. He has concentrated his attention upon Monsieur Hennequin and Harry Schuwey. He is encouraging the latter to talk about the resources of the Congo. He appears to listen with interest; every so often he asks a supplementary question or makes an encouraging sign of agreement. Yet despite the impression he gives, he is scarcely listening to what is being said. In a mixed language, where words are only one of the expressive means — a language not essentially different from that in which he questioned himself as a child but now possessing a wider range of references — he addresses, silently, the two men whom he is walking between.