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

distance, the daylight fell like a golden curtain, the curtains getting forever smaller. Sound was also different. In the quiet we heard the lapping – as discrete as a cat’s tongue when drinking – of water flowing down the two basalt-stone channels on its way to the Mãe d’Agua.
    I’m not sure how long we stood there facing each other – perhaps for the fifteen years since her death.
    After the death of mothers, time often doubles or accelerates its speed.
    Eventually she turned round, bit her lower lip, and began to walk. As she did so, she repeated without looking back: The courtesy, John!
    She approached the cascade of light from the first stone lantern. Either side of her, the water reflected sparks that bobbed up and down like floating candles. When she entered the gold, it hid her like a curtain, and I did not see her again until she re-emerged from the light on the far side. She had become small because of the distance. She seemed to be walking with increasing ease; the further away she got, the more sprightly she became. She disappeared into the next golden curtain and when she reappeared I could scarcely distinguish her.
    I bent down and I let my hand trail in the water which was flowing after her.

2
     
    Genève
     
    There’s a photo of Jorge Luis Borges, probably taken in the early 1980s, a year or two before he left Buenos Aires to come to die in Genève, a city he claimed as one of his ’native lands’. You can see in the photo how he’s almost blind and you sense how blindness is a prison – something he often referred to in his poetry. At the same time, his face in this photo is one inhabited by many other lives. It is a face full of company; many other men and women with their appetites speak through his almost sightless eyes. A face of countless desires. It’s a portrait which might be lent to the poets across the centuries and millennia, indexed as ’Anonymous’.
    The city of Genève is as contradictory and enigmatic as a living person. I could fill in an identity card. Nationality: Neutral. Gender: Feminine. Age: (discretion intervenes) Looks younger than she is. Civil status: Separated. Occupation: Observer. Distinguishing physical characteristic: Slight stoop due to short-sightedness. General remarks: Sexy and secretive.
    The only other European town whose natural situation may be as breathtaking is Toledo. (The towns themselves are utterly different.) In thinking of Toledo, however, I’m influenced by El Greco’s painting of the town; whereas Genève has never been painted to any effect by anybody, and her only symbol is a toy water-spout shooting up out of the lake, which she turns off and on like a halogen lamp.
    In the sky over Genève, the clouds – depending upon the winds, of which the two most notorious are the bise and the foehn – come from Italy, Austria, France, or, down the Rhine valley from Germany, the Low Countries, and the Baltic. Sometimes they come from as far away as North Africa and Poland. Genève is a place of convergence, and she knows it.
    For centuries travellers passing through have left letters, instructions, maps, lists, messages, for Genève to deliver to other travellers arriving later. She reads them all with a mixture of curiosity and pride. Those unfortunate enough not to be born in our canton, she concludes, are apparently obliged to live out every one of their passions, and passion is a blinding misfortune. Her central Post Office was designed to be as imposing as her Cathedral.
    At the beginning of the twentieth century Genève was a regular meeting point for European revolutionaries and conspirators – just as today it is one of the rendezvous of the new world economic order. More permanently, it hosts the International Red Cross, the United Nations, the International Labour Office, the World Health Organization, the Ecumenical Council of Churches. Forty per cent of the population is foreign. Twenty-five thousand people live and work there