The Shape of a Pocket (14 page)

It is a new day, and Goya is taking the dog for a walk. They are both in exile. In the town of Bordeaux which, when there is a west wind, smells of the Atlantic.

As the Nikkei Stock Average breaks through the 2,000-point mark, European money managers brim with confidence that the market to watch next year will be Japan.

An eye with a perfect retina, going, going, gone!

‘In these parts it is a miracle the people are still alive,’ said Moisés, a young man who joined the Zapatista insurrection in south-east Mexico. ‘Families of seven to twelve people have been surviving on a hectare or half a hectare of infertile soil … We have nothing, absolutely nothing, no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health, no food, no education …’ The year was 1994.

Now I’m going to send you by radio a strange likeness – that of a man whose face we do not know. Whenever he’s in company, he wears a black ski mask. ‘Here we are,’ he says, ‘the forever dead, dying once again, but now in order to live.’ His assumed name is Marcos.

A terrorist! It was agreed that this was a radio talk about economics, and you contrive to introduce a terrorist. An expert in violence!

I’m transmitting his likeness. A likeness created by his own words:

I have the urge to write to you and tell you something about being ‘the professionals of violence’, as we have so often been called. Yes, we are professionals. But our profession is hope … out of our spent and broken bodies must rise up a new world … Will we see it? Does it matter? I believe that it doesn’t matter as much as knowing with undeniable certainty that it will be born, and that we have put our all – our lives, bodies and souls – into this long and painful but historic birth.
Amor y dolor –
love and pain: two words that not only rhyme, but join up and march together.

Empty leftist rhetoric!

Here is the rest of the likeness:

There is something else about this passionate moving of words, something that does not appear in any postscript or any communiqué. It is the anxiety, the uncertainty, the galloping questions that assault us every time one of the couriers leaves with one, or several, communiqués. Questions and more questions fill up our nights, accompany us on our rounds to check the guards, sit beside us on some broken tree trunk looking at the food on the plate … ‘Were these words the best ones to say what we wanted to say?’ ‘Were they the right words at this time?’ ‘Were they understandable?’

A likeness is a gift and remains unmistakable – even when hidden behind a mask.

A likeness can be effaced. Today Che Guevara sells T-shirts, that’s all that is left of his likeness.

Are you sure?

[Silence]

Silence, you know, is something that can’t be censored. And there are circumstances in which silence becomes subversive. That’s why they fill it with noise all the while.

* * *

Goya is walking with his dog by the ocean.

The other day I was listening to Glenn Gould playing Mozart’s Fantasy in C Major. I want to remind you of how Gould plays.
He plays like one of the already dead come back to the world to play its music.
And that’s how he played when he was alive!

Three nimble hands.
Why three?
One of the two women had an accident at work.
Bought.

I’ll tell the story of the best likeness ever made. John is the only one who tells the story. The other Evangelists don’t refer to it – though they refer to Martha and Mary. The two sisters had a brother, Lazarus, who fell sick and died in the village of Bethany. When Jesus, who was a friend of the family, arrived in the village, Lazarus had been dead and buried for four days.

‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked.

‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied.

Jesus wept.

Then the Jews said: ‘See how he loved him!’

But some of them said: ‘Could not he, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man from dying?’

Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. ‘Take away the stone,’ he said.

So they took away the stone.

Jesus called in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen and a cloth round his face.

Jesus said to them: ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go.’

This was the perfect likeness. And it provoked Caiaphas, the high priest, to lay the plot for the taking of Jesus’s own life.

Goya is going back to work in his studio.

Now he is painting. Can you hear him? Faces appear on the canvas. Then they disappear. All have gone.

Try turning the volume of the silence up – higher – higher. Higher still …

[Total silence]

Is this the silence of a likeness, of the mountains at night in south-east Mexico, or of us listening together?

Acknowledgements

The essays in this book were first printed – sometimes with different tides and in a slightly different form – in the following publications:

1. Opening a Gate
   The Russian Way (Opus 31)
   by Pentti Sammallahti Photographic Portfolio, Finland, 1996
   

2. Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible
   Das Abenteuer der Malerei (The Adventure of Painting)
   , Editions Tertium, Ostfildern, Germany, 1995
   

3. Studio Talk
   Miquel Barceló, Recent Paintings
   , Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, 1998
   

4. The Chauvet Cave
   Guardian
   , London, 16 November 1996
   

5. Penelope
   Tages Anzeiger
   , Zurich, 18 April 1997
   

6. The Fayum Portraits
   El Pais
   , Madrid, 20 December 1998
   

7. Degas
   Die Weltwoche
   , Zurich, 29 July 1993
   

8. Drawing: Correspondence with Leon Kossoff
   Guardian
   , London, 1 June 1996
   

9. Vincent
   Aftonbladet
   , Stockholm, 20 August 2000
   

10. Michelangelo
    Guardian
    , London, 21 November 1995
    

11. Rembrandt and the Body
    Frankfurter Rundschau
    , Frankfurt, 2 May 1992
    

12. A Cloth Over the Mirror
    Independent
    , London, 3 June 2000
    

13. Brancusi
    Die Weltwoche
    , Zurich, 6 June 1995
    

14. The River Po
    ‘du’ Die Zeitschrift der Kultur
    , Zurich, November 1995
    

15. Giorgio Morandi
    El Pais
    , Madrid, 7 February 1997
    

16. Pull the Other Leg, It’s Got Bells On It
    Guardian
    , London, 3 June 1995
    

17. Frida Kahlo
    Guardian
    , London, 12 May 1998
    

18. A Bed
    Wet Roks Seen From Above.
    Paintings: Christoph Hänsli Memory/Cage Editions, Zurich, 1996
    

19. A Man with Tousled Hair
    Le Monde Diplomatique
    , Paris, December 1991
    

20. An Apple Orchard
    Le Monde Diplomatique
    , Paris, September 2000
    

21. Brushes Standing Up in Jars
    Aftonbladet
    , Stockholm, 5 April 1996
    

22. Against the Great Defeat of the World
    Race & Class
    , London, October 1998-March 1999
    

23. Correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos:
    

    1. The Herons
       El Pais
       , Madrid, 27 April 1995
       

    2. The Herons and Eagles
       La Jornada
       , Mexico City, 3 June 1995
       

    3. How to Live with Stones
       Le Monde Diplomatique
       , Paris, November 1997
       

24. Will It Be a Likeness? First performed by John Berger at Das Tat Theater im Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, 1996. Directed by Juan Munoz. Simultaneous radio broadcast: Heissischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt. BBC Radio 3, 1996. First printed
    La Jornada
    , Mexico City, 4 August 1996.
    

Copyright © 2001 by John Berger

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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Illustrations from a photograph by Peter Marlow © Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Berger, John.
The shape of a pocket / John Berger.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49084-1
1. Art—Themes, motives. I. Title.
N7560.B47 2002 701’.18’09—dc21 2001036513

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