His other hand was trailing in the water. Her teeth bit his ear.
The world changes so slowly.
His hand from the water grasped her breast.
One day there’ll be no more classes. I believe that, don’t you? she murmured and pulled his head down to her other breast.
There’s always been good and bad, he said.
We’re making progress, don’t you believe that?
All our ancestors asked the same thing, he said, you and I will never know in this life why it was made the way it is.
He entered her again. The gondola smacked the water and splashed the air.
When they crossed the narrow island to the pierhead, where the last vaporetto would stop, the music was over. Only a few drunks, immobile as statues, remained in the piazza. Marietta went to fetch his instrument case. He gazed across the lagoon. He could see the bell-tower they had climbed. The guide said it had toppled over at the beginning of the century. No roots. He remembered the date: 14th July 1902, the year of his father’s birth. To the right there were still lights in the Doge’s Palace. According to the guide, the Palace had been destroyed or partly destroyed by fire seven times. There had never been peace in that building. Too much power and no roots. One day it would be robbed and pillaged and after that it would be used as a hen house.
Marietta handed him his instrument case.
Play for me. Play me something.
He put the case down on the quayside. Out of his pocket he took a small mouth organ, and turning toward the Doge’s Palace, began to play. The music was speaking to him.
Before it is light—
She was staring at his back, relaxed and downcast like the back of a man peeing, except that his hands were to his mouth.
— Before it is light … when you’ve dressed and gone into the stable—
With her fingers she was touching the nape of his neck.
— the animals are lying there—
She was pressing her hand between his shoulder blades and could feel his lungs and the music in the roof of his mouth.
— lying there on beech leaves, and your tiredness like a child you have dragged from its sleep—
Her hand felt under the belt of his trousers.
— and through the window you see the span of the stars—
She noticed that one of his bootlaces was undone. She knelt down to tie it for him.
— the span of the stars into whose well we are thrown at birth like salt into water—
Neither of them noticed the vaporetto approaching the pierhead.
Come to Mestri, she sighed, come to Mestri. I’ll find you work.
The bus left at 3 A.M. Most of the band wanted to sleep. Some husbands put their heads on their wives’ shoulders, in other cases the wife leaned her head against her man. The lights were switched out one by one as the coach took the road for Verona. The young drummer sitting beside Bruno tried one last joke.
Do you know what hell is?
Do you?
Hell is where bottles have two holes and women have none.
[For Jacob]
Their Railways
Keep tears
My heart
For prose.
Train
Flammes bleues
Fleurs jaunes.
In the ditches
I am water.
Between
Grow kingcups of your childhood.
Sunk in my eyes
Skies of the churchyard.
Through arteries
Of gravel
Whispering to my grasses
The blood of good-byes.
Flammes bleues
Fleurs jaunes
Their railways.
1985/86
Acknowledgements
The trilogy Into Their Labours occupied me for fifteen years. During this period, Tom Engelhardt edited my books. Dear Tom, you encouraged, corrected, and upheld me. Thank you.
Perhaps I would never have had the courage to begin the project if I had not received, before a page was written, the support of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. To everyone in Paulus Potterstraat and Connecticut Avenue and to Saul Landau, thank you.
A Note on the Author
JOHN BERGER was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel G, To the Wedding and King. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. He lives and works in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag). His collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket was published in 2001. His latest novel, From A to X, was published in 2007.
Also Available by John Berger
G.
Winner of the Booker Prize
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize
In this luminous novel, John Berger relates the story of G., a modern Don Juan forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war.
With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, top reveal the conditions of the libertine’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumlation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through the liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi’s attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.
‘The most interesting novel in English I have read for many years … It is one of the few serious attempts of our time to do for the novel what Brecht did for drama: to reshape it in the light of twentieth-century experience … A fine, humane and challenging book’ New Republic
‘A rich and pleasurable reading experience’
Guardian
‘To read G. is to find a writer one demands to know more about. Not to sit at the feet of his aphorisms or unravel the tangles of his allusions, but to explore more fully an intriguing and powerful mind and talent’
New York Times
Pig Earth
With this haunting first volume of his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth, relates the stories of sceptical, hard working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvellous, indomitable Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains.
‘Brilliant … These stories have a remarkable sense of celebration’