G. by John Berger Read Free Book Online Page A

I know so well and nobody else yet knows?
    How do I let somebody else know it?
    In what am I—what is this thing in the middle of which I have found myself and which I can’t get out of?
    He is convinced that by means of the same mixed language in which he asks these questions, she can answer them. All the formal questions he asks her in the schoolroom and which she answers (What makes rain? What does a wolf really eat? etc.) are a mere preparation for this.
    Her hands on the keyboard. Pale hands with thin fingers, and very short nails. On Sundays she wears white gloves: when they walk back from church he takes her hand. He is fascinated by an old fascination: her fingers touch the keys in two very different ways. Either they touch them so lightly that no sooner have they touched them than they desist and fly on; or else they descend heavily upon them, pressing the keys down and keeping them down, so that he can see the unpolished sides of the adjacent keys. It is then as though she forces her fingers through the piano. The last note dies away.
    Now you play and I will sing for you.
    What do you want to sing?
    I’ll sing your song back to you.
    Beyond the age of six or seven it is very unlikely for a boy to fall in love—at least until adolescence. He knows too many people. The world-that-is-not-himself begins to become multiple, to separate out into many different people, any one of whom may confront him as somebody different from himself. When he is five this may not yet have happened.
    Lacking parents, he is still searching for one single person to represent all that he is not, to confront him as his other half and his opposite. If the person he finds is entirely distinct from him—in experience, in role, in background, in personal interests, in age, in sex, if the person is, in the most extensive sense of the word, a stranger to him and yet is continually and intimately with him, and if, in addition to all this, she is pretty and nubile, then he is liable to fall in love.
    You may still insist that effective sexual passion is missing. You may present his naked five-year-old body to prove your argument. (Twice a week in his bath he offers the proof himself to his beloved.) But what little he lacks physically, he makes up for metaphysically. He senses or feels that she—by being all that is opposite and therefore complementary to him—can make the world complete for him. In adults sexual passion reconstitutes this sense. In a five-year-old it does not have to be reconstituted: it is still part of his inheritance.
    He begins to sing, regardless of the words, intently watching her fingers on the keys. He takes the opportunity of stepping closer and resting his cheek on her shoulder.
    Miss Helen is soon replaced by a tutor.
    The boy seeks no explanation and is offered none. He is used to accepting decisions as indisputable facts. He has no sense of any ultimate authority residing in any one person: and consequently the idea of appealing against decisions does not arise.
    With his ear to the bark, he listens to the tree. He has never yet dared to listen to a dead tree. There are quite distinct categories in his own mind into which he fits trees. Ones he likes and ones he does not like (without reason). Ones that are too easy to climb. Ones that frighten him a little to climb. Ones with a view at the top and ones without. There are also more complicated categories. Trees are alive but not alive as animals are. What is the difference? First, the tree is more accessible. Second, the tree is more mysterious. Third, the tree is immovable. Fourth, the tree can hide him. If he carves on the bark of a tree, he does not believe that the tree feels pain. If a large branch is lopped off there is neither the sound nor the smell of pain. Nevertheless when he is pressed against the bark of a tree, it feels alive to his own skin to a degree that is more comprehensive than his categorical reasoning. When he touches an animal, the