Photocopies: Encounters (Vintage International) by John Berger

Author:John Berger
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780307794338
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-13T04:30:00+00:00

[15]

A Bunch of Flowers in a Glass

I said he wasn’t going to die. He knew he was. When I said he wasn’t he looked at me as he often did: as if there was something mysterious about me and as if, at the same time, I was a fool.

Marcel was about eighty. His life had been hard and perhaps about a third of it happy. He spent four months every year in the alpage with his cows. A third of his life at 1,700 metres. Surrounded by the metal of the mountains he knew a kind of peace. What I foolishly call happiness.

In the mountains he had two dogs, about forty cows and a bull. He liked it when friends came to visit him and he questioned them about news from below, about life in the village. He questioned them as one asks somebody about the latest episode in a TV serial.

His own life was up there – making cheeses, and imposing a precise but fragile daily order on the unceasing flow of days, nights, weathers, seasons, which passed the ledge where his chalet was. A ledge, near to the fire balls of lightning, and from which he could look down on a rainbow – as one looks down on the arch of a bridge one is crossing.

Up there, the question of solitude doesn’t arise after a while – because one’s naked. Naked one becomes aware of another kind of company. I don’t know why this should be so. But it’s a fact. Of course Marcel wasn’t physically naked. On the contrary he didn’t undress even to go to bed. Nevertheless after a week or two alone in the alpage, the soul goes naked, takes off its jacket – and one is no longer alone. This is what his eyes told.

The soul apart, there was the continual fear of mislaying an animal. His dogs knew the name of every cow but nevertheless a cow can easily get lost or break a leg. The laws of probability change up there. Sometimes the pine trees seem as if they’ve just stopped walking. There are nights when the Milky Way looks as close as a mosquito net. And there were August mornings when the handles of the metal wheelbarrow, in which he took the shit out of the milking stable, were frozen.

Marcel’s hands were scoured, fissured, with swollen joints, and very warm. Calloused and at the same time sensitive. They were like certain old words that today are going out of use.

The last time I saw him was when I drove him home after we had seen the New Year in together. He was already waiting for next June to take his cows up to the alpage again. I told him it would happen. And he looked at me as sceptically as you look at a rockface from which an echo has come. Then he shook his head.

Last June I was on Marcel’s mountain. There were no cows grazing, no bells, no dogs, but there were many wild flowers.

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