Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger Read Free Book Online Page A

repair a little of what was broken. This is why we occurred.
    Occurred?
    Came to be.
    You talk as if nobody can choose anything!
    Choose whatever you like. What you can’t do is to hope for everything.
    She was still beaming.
    Of course.
    Hope is a great magnifier – which is why it doesn’t see far ahead.
    Why are you smiling?
    Let’s hope only for what has some chance of being achieved! Let a few things be repaired. A few is a lot. One thing repaired changes a thousand others.
    So?
    The dog down there is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he’ll be able to reach the shade, and he’ll lie down and he’ll stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she’ll do more ironing. And the father’s shoulders in a freshly ironed shirt will ache less when he goes to work. And so when he comes home he’ll sometimes joke, like he used to, with his teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, just this once, to bring her lover home one evening. And on another evening, the father will propose to the young man that they go fishing together . . . Who in the wide world knows? Just lengthen the chain.
    The dog was still barking.
    There are certain things which, to be repaired, require nothing short of a revolution, I suggest.
    So you say, John.
    It’s not a question of my saying, it’s a question of circumstances.
    I prefer to believe it’s your saying.
    Why?
    It’s less evasive. Circumstances! Anything can hide behind that word. I believe in repairs, as I was telling you, and one other thing.
    What would that be?
    The inevitability of desire. Desire cannot be stopped.
    At this point she got up from her portable stool and leant against the parapet.
    Desire is unstoppable. The other day I heard one of us explaining why. But I knew it before. Think of a bottomless pit, think of a nothing. An absolute nothing. In it there’s already an appeal – are you following me? A Nothing is an appeal for Something. It can’t be otherwise. Yet the appeal is all there is; there’s only a naked crying-out appeal. A yearning. And so we come to the eternal conundrum of making something out of nothing.
    She took a step towards me. She was whispering, with her bathing-costume smile, and her brown eyes fixed on some point in the distance.
    The something which is made can give no support to anything else, it is only a desire. It possesses nothing, nothing is given to it, there is no place for it! Yet it exists! It exists. He was a shoemaker, I believe, the man who said all this.
    Sounds to me like Jacob Boehme.
    Stop dropping names!
    She laughed her impertinent seventeen-year-old laugh.
    Stop dropping names! she repeated and giggled. From here you could kill somebody dropping a name!
    We gazed down at the red tiles and the double mattress in the window. The dog had stopped barking. And, when she stopped laughing, I held her cold hand.
    Just write down what you find, she said.
    I’ll never know what I’ve found.
    No, you’ll never know.
    It takes courage to write, I said.
    The courage will come. Write down what you find, and do us the courtesy of noticing us.
    You are no longer here!
    Hence, the courtesy, John!
    After saying this, she got to her feet, handed me the folding stool and proceeded to the door that Fernando had left unlocked. There she tugged it open and stepped – as if she had done the same thing every morning of her life – over the water duct, up on to the narrow flagged walkway.
    Inside the air was cooler – as if we were underground instead of being in the sky. The light too was different. Outside, the daylight had been sparkling and transparent; having penetrated the tunnel, it changed and became golden. Every fifty metres the vaulted roof opened out into a small tower, which was built like a stone lantern so that daylight could enter. And from each lantern, as one after another they receded into the