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Nevertheless the story of these
two lovers is the celebration of the present. As Christopher
Lasch asserts, their story suggests that "there is history
that remembers and history that originates in a need to
forget". Berger obviously gives serious consideration to
the need to recover history and reconstruct historical
consciousness which is reflected in almost all his works.
It is people
and their responses, their robustness and fragility, that
interest Berger the most. We eavesdrop on the voices of a blind
Greek peddler, of Gino and of his fiancée, Ninon. We follow
Ninon’s mother, Zedena in Bratislava, and her father, Jean
Ferrero in south of France as they travel separately to the
Italian coastal village Gorino located on the River Po di Gro
where their daughter will get married. Ninon’s life-journey to
this village and the literal journeys made by her parents seem
to possess the inevitability of union and separation.
There is no
acceleration towards a buoyant, yet sad climax full of personal
peace. Small sentences, succinct one paragraph chapters draw
together all history and the geography of the French Alps in
their splendid forward movement. The father, a signalman by
trade and an Italian, rides his splendid Honda motorbike over
the Alps, and the Slovakian mother, an intellectual and an
artist, travels on a carriage. The two leit motifs of the
highway and the river reflect the movements of history so
"unstoppable and too vast to notice us", forces that
coldly and enticingly steer us. In its sheer size, history
scorns at human arrangements and organisations and makes its way
through weird and wonderful meandering and spirals.
And through
Jean’s and Zedena’s journeys, Ninon’s story unfolds: how
her parents met, the events of her childhood, her first romance
that lasts only for a day and results in the calamity of her
ending up as HIV-positive. There is only one truth now for her
and that is her death. She goes through a period of
soul-searching, self-hatred mingled with compassion, as well as
wrath at the man who is the cause of her misery: "The gift
of giving myself has been taken away. If I offer myself, I offer
death . Come close enough
to me, once, twice or a hundred times and , supposing I love
you, you will die. Not if you use a condom, they say. With a
condom there’s latex rubber between you and your death, and
latex rubber between you and me. Latex solitude. Latex solitude
for ever and ever. Nothing can touch any more."
She is going to die after getting sicker and sicker; in other
illnesses, death comes one day and snuffs you out, but in her
case life slowly abandons you, one part after another failing.
She takes medicines which make her ill but which stop her dying
for a little while. Physical pain produces anguish which in turn
increases the pain. The infections and parasites which the body
cannot resist provoke hellish itchings, nausea, cramps of the
stomach, open sores in the mouth, migraines following
radiotherapies, shooting pains along the legs, accompanied by a
crippling fatigue. The pain and discomfort prevents the sick
from thinking anything else. Pain cuts off, isolates and
paralyses. And in this brief period there is merely pain and
time but no hope.
But before she
discovers her affliction, she has already fallen in love with
Gino, and now rejects him only to be won back by his persistent
efforts. When we do a thing, when we decide to do something, we
are already thinking about what it will be like when it is done
and over with. But Gino only thinks about what he is doing at
the moment. And at the moment he only loves Ninon and would give
the world to marry her. He consoles her that her second life
would begin on the wedding day.
And all the
time Berger ensures that action and emotions are muted and never
turn into theatricality.
As they dance
joyfully in the little village, the sad future reminds those who
know of Ninon’s disease that in a few months "she will
not be able to speak any more. To put a few drops of water into
her dried mouth he will have to use a syringe. She will not have
the strength to move anything, except her eyes, which will
question him, and the tip of her tongue to touch the drops of
water. He will be beside her. And one afternoon she will find
the strength to raise her arm so that her hand rests in the air.
He will take her hand in his. The turtle ring will be on her
fourth finger. Both their hands will stay in the air." She
will die with the ring on her hand.
We are reminded of how Ninon will have a morphine drip every
morning, and how Gino will touch the bones of her loved body now
reduced to 17 kilos. And all the time her eyes, with their long
lashes in their dark hollow sockets will gaze into the eyes of a
man who loved her truly and knowingly married her.
There is a
sense of lightness about the narrative quality of the novel that
is peculiarly moving and eloquent about slightest shifts and
scents of memory. Never has Berger’s writing been so
controlled and polished marked as it is by such deft observation
and wry humour. He communicates in this story his frank,
personal view of a relationship and a mishap in a style at once
lyrical, self-conscious and profound. Selecting words with a
poet’s precision, he arranges them artfully to conjure the
desired effect of painful sensation, of inevitable separation in
a novel that could easily be called a prose poem, subtle,
discreet and strong much like the quietly exceptional characters
that he portrays.
Berger has found the perfect
form for his elegiac, still hopeful revelation of the worth of
us all so easily stolen by time. Though in his concept of human
suffering there is no optimism, yet his indefatigable account of
pain leaves one with a sense of dying with dignity.
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THE
language is rich but not over-elaborate. Ideas arise out of
direct, sensuous perception. The band is playing Last Friday
Drives Monday Crazy.
