John Berger - G.

The crowd in Trieste on the day war with Italy was declared, was neither buoyant nor proud nor calm. It proceeded in fits and starts like a drunk sure of his destination but undecided about the exact route there.

Sometimes men ran ahead waving. One had a bell which he rang like a town crier, but he wore no uniform and the bell was black and rusty — perhaps a ship’s bell found in the mud of the harbour. Faces appeared in windows. It is war! the men in the street shouted. Come and see what we are going to do! Some groups started to sing but nothing was sustained for very long.

G. walked a little behind the vanguard in the middle of the stream of the crowd. Although he had taken off his jacket and was walking in his shirt-sleeves, his clothes made him conspicuous. The man to whom Nuša had spoken in the street was still walking a few steps behind and each time somebody accosted G. he intervened, speaking in Slovene which G. could not understand; each time the interrogator seemed to be appeased and asked nothing more. G. began to feel that he could leave all decisions to the man walking behind him. As the crowd made its way north-westwards towards the Exchange and the Italian part of the city, its character began to change. The contrast between its raggedness and the ordered streets down which it was proceeding became more and more acute. By the arsenal it had looked like a crowd of underpaid or unemployed workers; in these streets now it looked like an army of beggars.

A man near G. threw a stone (which he must have been carrying in his hand since they set out) at the shop front of a grocer’s. The glass broke. Men started breaking the rest of the glass with their hands, bound round with their overalls or shirts for protection. When they could reach the cheeses and sausages, they threw them back into the crowd. A patrol of Austrian police passed near by, pointedly ignoring the incident. The shopkeeper, terrified, began to hand out his own flasks of wine to the nearest fists thrust out in his direction. It is a good wine, he kept on repeating, as if he were still selling it.

Pressure from the back of the crowd forced them onwards past the grocer’s shop. The incident made them all aware, however, of their temporary immunity from the law. When they saw a number of well-dressed people they shouted menacingly: Down with Italy! and sometimes also: The Thieving Rich! The streets became empty. And this again changed the crowd’s character. In their own part of the city they had been a spectacle drawing people towards them. Here they put everything into abeyance. It could not occur to them, as it had occurred to the crowds in Milan in 1898, to take over the city. They had no wish to establish their own control or order. They wished to establish only the empty deserted spaces of the streets and piazzas in which anything might happen without order.

The man behind G. tapped him on the back and passed him an open flask of wine to drink from. G. drank, spilling a little on his shirt. Although the progress of the crowd was haphazard and erratic, he had the feeling of being borne along by it ceremonially, almost like a body in a coffin. He looked up at the buildings they were passing between. Caryatid after caryatid dumbly and uncomplainingly bore the weight of pediments intended to prove the culture of those who lived behind their doors and windows.

Sexual acts, like dreams, have no surface appearances; they are experienced inside out; their content is uppermost and what is normally visible becomes an invisible core.

In a room up there Louise had been lying on her back. His arms around her knees, he put his tongue into her vagina. He could recall the taste only of the wine he had just drunk. Slowly a quiver passed from one of her thighs to the other like a wave. It turned, flowed back again, returned. A grain of sand was shifted first one way and then the other way by the alternating movement. From the grain of sand and the warmth between her legs was born a dog’s ear. A pointed one. The fur on the outside of the ear was softer and smoother than her own skin. The inside of the ear was transparent pink. From the ear was born a jug of milk. Beneath the surface of the milk, invisible beneath its whiteness, were the trees of a wood, winter trees without leaves. The jug poured the milk over her lap. Upon some parts the milk remained in white pools; from others it ran down; drops of milk hung like white berries in her hair. He could see the branches of the winter trees in the traces made by the milk. The man with the bell started ringing it again. Look at their houses! Further! Further! The words rose to G.’s throat involuntarily but calmly. They were as surprising to him as they were incomprehensible to those around him. Further! Further! He walked with his head right back staring at the blue sky.

The crowd turned into the Piazza San Giovanni and quickly filled it. In the centre was a statue of a gigantic man sitting comfortably in a chair shaded by trees. On the plinth was written VERDI. These letters spelt the name of the man who wrote Rigoletto ; but in Trieste they also meant Vittorio Emmanuele Re d’Italia. Two men had climbed on to the lap of the statue and were striking the head with iron bars. You could see the shock of each blow jarring their upper arms and shoulders. Women went from door to door round the piazza trying to gain entrance to the buildings. All were locked or bolted. Occasionally a face, half hidden behind a shutter, looked down in alarm at the piazza below filled with i teppisti . Some youths climbed into the trees. There was the sudden sound of glass being smashed. It worked like a pre-arranged signal. Everybody near the edges of the piazza began to hurl whatever they could find at the nearest unshuttered windows.

Behind the windows was the property of those who benefited from the existence of Trieste. Those who were beating Verdi’s stone head and smashing the windows between the caryatids hated the existence of the city, and they were out to avenge their enforced presence there. They were out to avenge as covertly, as slyly as possible, without further risk to themselves, a small portion of what they had suffered since poverty had forced them or their fathers to leave their villages and settle on the outskirts of the foreign city. The administration of the city was Austrian but its essence was Italian, hence the names of its streets and piazzas, hence the language in which its merciless commerce was conducted. Few of the crowd had any political theory, but all of them knew one thing of which the professors and students of the gymnasium were largely ignorant: they knew that what had happened to them in their villages was part of the same thing as what had happened to them when they arrived in Trieste and had happened every day of their lives since. The unity was historic. Theories may embrace and define this unity. But to each of them it was defined by the unity of his own life’s suffering.

Break his head!

Knock his ears off!

Rip the shutters off!

Has nobody told you about your houses? I discovered it a long time ago. You are walking leisurely — in any city in Europe — through a well-off residential quarter down a street of your houses or apartments. Their window frames and shutters have been freshly painted but their colour barely differentiates them from the façades around them, which absorb the sunlight but give off a slight granular scintillation like starched linen table-napkins. You look up at the curtained windows in which the curtains are so still that they might be carved out of stone, at the wrought iron-work of the balconies imitating plants, at the ornamental flourishes referring to other cities and other times, you pass polished wooden double doors with brass bells and plates, the silence of the street consists of the barely perceptible noise of a distant crowd, a crowd made up of so many people so far away that their individual exertions, their individual inhaling and exhaling combine in a sound of continuous unpunctuated breathing … and then suddenly you realize with a shock that each residence, although still, is without a stitch of clothing, is absolutely naked!