[fiction]Woven,Sir.doc

Woven, Sir
by John Berger
April 2, 2001

I am in Madrid and waiting for my friend Juan, a sculptor, who will be late, I think. Juan works in a small garage, like a mechanic, lying on his back, as though underneath a car; he looks at his watch only when he crawls out and gets to his feet. We have agreed to meet in the lounge of the Ritz Hotel.
There are two exotic trees and, leading off this lounge, a bar named after Velázquez. (I doubt whether he drank much.) The walls and the ceiling are painted a whitish yellow, not what the paint manufacturers call ivory but the true color of elephants' tusks—much closer to the color of old teeth. The ceiling is as high as three elephants standing on one another's backs.
As soon as you come off the street and the double glass doors swing shut behind you, you are aware of the deafness of money. It's not an empty silence, but a silence of seclusion—like that of the depth of an ocean. The wide, carpeted staircase is palpably quiet, and in the lounge the voices of the people talking are muted. Two waiters, carrying tinkling trays of glasses full of champagne, wear white gloves. The seclusion, here, prompts me to remember the clamor of shanty towns and the everlasting racket in prisons.
The first guests are arriving for an evening reception. A reception is being held to launch the new Venezuelan economy, which, evidently, now depends on Spanish investors. The guests, mostly in their thirties, have surf-riding smiles, controlled eyes, and a way of tilting themselves forward which makes me think of the figureheads once carved on ships. In the muted quiet, cameramen and journalists are waiting for the stars who have been announced ahead of time.
Not far from where I'm sitting, three hotel guests, who appear to have nothing to do with the reception, have installed themselves on two sofas and a deep armchair, as if they were at home. Perhaps they are at home. Perhaps they never leave their home and, like snails, carry it with them.
The waiters and the cameramen are respecting their claimed territory. On the floor between the two sofas is a large Chinese carpet, and the man of the trio, who is also the youngest, is pacing slowly, smoking a Cuban cigar.
Those invited to launch the new economy are all—women and men—agents of promotion. I wonder if it is the imaginative effort of promotion which obliges them to lean forward in the way they do. I imagine some of them, at the end of a long day, catching a glimpse of themselves reflected in a glass, when this leaning forward then provokes a kind of paralyzing panic—a fear of falling forward, flat on one's face! (Like the panic sometimes visible on the faces of those suffering from Parkinson's.) This evening, however, they are confident as they lean forward to take the glasses of champagne from the trays offered them by the waiters with white gloves.
For the man with the Cuban cigar, smoking appears to be a way of slowing down the process—or, possibly, his awareness of the process—of things getting steadily worse.
A young woman, seated on an upright chair opposite me, is reading a book. Like me, she is waiting for somebody who is late, though she looks toward the door more frequently than I do. I suspect she is waiting for a lover and is beginning to doubt that he will turn up this evening. The mounting crescendo of her disappointment is expressed by the ever briefer glances she accords to the book. Suddenly she slaps it shut, gets to her feet, and walks out between the camera lights set up for the stars.
I see a man coming down the wide staircase, a room key dangling from his lightly clenched fist. From the way he holds the key, it could be a bird he has in his hand. He is wearing a checkered cap, tweed jacket, plus fours with heavy woollen socks, and brogues. His name is Tyler. His first name escapes me—probably because I remember that it signified a lot. His first name, whatever it was, evoked the mystery that surrounded him—above all, the mystery of the defeat he had suffered. I always addressed him as "sir."
I don't think I would have noticed him coming down the staircase if it hadn't been for my unexpectedly meeting my mother, in Lisbon, a few months previously. I hadn't given Tyler a thought for years. And the last place that might have triggered a memory of him would have been the Ritz. The meeting with my mother had led to my observing things differently.
I met her in the Praça da Alegria, the Square of Joy. A small public garden with elms, palms, and jacaranda trees, very old-looking. Chickens were pecking for worms on the grass. There was a flowery plaque celebrating Alfredo Keil, who wrote the music for the Portuguese national anthem. An old woman with an umbrella was sitting very still on one of the benches. I thought she was watching the chickens. Then she got to her feet, turned, and walked toward me, using her umbrella as a stick. I instantly recognized my mother.
What are you doing here? I was amazed.
There's something you should know, my boy: it's that the dead don't stay where they are buried.
Naturally, I replied.
I'm not talking about Heaven, she said. Heaven is all very well, but I happen to be talking about something quite different. The dead can choose where they want to live on Earth, always supposing they want to stay on Earth.
They go back to some place where they were happy?
You always thought you knew the answers. You should have listened more to your father.
Where is he now? I asked.
I don't know, but I fancy he may be in Rome.
Because of the Holy See?
Not at all, because of the tablecloths.
I see, I said.
You may meet the dead anywhere, she said.
Tyler is now at the bottom of the staircase and has taken off his cap and is coming into the lounge. As I follow him with my eyes, he looks away. He had a great gift for looking away and avoiding questions. He chooses the chair vacated by the woman who could wait no longer for her lover. There he picks up a menu for drinks and sandwiches, and studies it through his thick glasses, bringing it close up to his forehead. Often when he dropped some small object—the stub of a pencil, or an eraser—it was I who would look for it on the floor, because he could not see without bending down. Once, the frame of his glasses broke—it was a very cold winter—and it was I who mended them for him with some sticking plaster that we bought at a chemist's shop. This was in 1932 or 1933. I was seven years old. Now he turns the chair he has chosen so that he is not facing me, and gives his order to a waiter.
On one of the trio's sofas reclines a woman with platinum hair. Her skeletal legs are crossed, and a shoe is dangling from her arched foot. She is over eighty. She might be the cigar smoker's mother. She, too, is smoking—her cigarette in a long holder—and the skin of her face and neck is like crêpe paper. Her head—chin up as she exhales the cigarette smoke—reposes on a cushion. Her left arm is draped along the back of the sofa, and the flesh of her arm is draped from its bones. She is wearing golden bracelets and a pearl necklace. Does she come from a circus or a château? She is full of disdain and has the pride of all the appetites she has not lost and is determined to satisfy. Maybe Circe, on her island of Aeaea, was more like this woman with the platinum hair than the one in the usual depictions, centuries later, in Renaissance paintings.
The third member of the trio is the confidante, at least for this evening and—who knows?—perhaps for life, of Circe. Maybe she is her sister Pasiphaë, the one who had an affair with the Bull of Crete and gave birth to the Minotaur. It is impossible to guess the age of this person, tumbled into the massive armchair beside the sofa, because of her size. Her immensity seems like that of time itself. She wears rings on seven fingers. Her neck is as wide as a slender woman's waist. From time to time, she glances protectively at Circe.
The waiter brings Tyler a bottle of white wine in an ice bucket, and a silver stand of sandwiches decorated with parsley.
An actress, accompanied by three men, and wearing a backless dress, makes her entrance into the lounge. She is resplendently pregnant. In answer to a journalist's question, she gently pokes a finger to make a dimple in her belly, and says, The middle of June! The people applaud.
A waiter asks me whether I would like to order something. I do so. After a moment, I hear Tyler's voice: I notice that, regrettably, you haven't improved your pronunciation. You are as lost in Spanish as you once were in English, he says.
I do my best, sir.
You don't listen to how other people talk. You never say to yourself, He speaks well, so I'll listen to him and learn how to speak.
I listen all the time, sir.
You don't listen with enough patience.
I can listen for hours.
Then why do you pronounce so badly?
I don't listen to their words, sir.
Exactly.
During this conversation, Tyler sips his wine and doesn't glance in my direction for a second. Circe is eyeing him with some interest. She is probably telling herself that he is only half her age, but that he is so evidently a gentleman he will ignore the difference.
If you want to catch a ball, Tyler explained to us in the Green Hut, you don't snatch at it in the air, you watch it coming and then place your hands accordingly. The Hut was roofed with corrugated iron that was painted green. It had a door that fitted badly and three small windows. There was no heating and no water. Tyler and I brought the water each day in his car. What did we do about shitting? I don't remember. Maybe there was an earth closet outside. A vague memory of vomiting there once. This hut on the edge of a field was our school. Nobody, however, referred to it as such, because Tyler insisted that he was not a schoolmaster but a tutor. A tutor in a green hut.

A young government minister has arrived. He is surveying the lounge to see who else is there. In a minute, he will decide whether to make his entrance straightaway or wait a moment in the Velázquez bar. His bodyguards, too, are surveying the lounge and the entrance hall and the hotel reception desk
It was in the Green Hut before the eyes of Tyler, now eating his sandwiches decorated with parsley in the lounge of the Ritz Hotel, that I first learned to write. At a nursery school, I had learned to form the letters, all of them, from "A" to "Z," belonging, like moles or birthmarks or beauty spots, to the pert, pretty, rounded body of my teacher, Lilles, whom I desired. Forming the letters, however, was not writing, as Tyler pointed out on my first day in the Green Hut. Writing involves spelling, straight lines, spacing, words leaning the right way, margins, size, legibility, keeping the nib clean, never making blots, and demonstrating on each page of the exercise book the value of good manners.
We were six, all from different families. Wood. Henry. Blagdon. Bowes-Lyon. And one I've forgotten. For every lesson we sat at the same small table. Tyler, when he wasn't looking over our shoulders, stood behind the workbench on which, twice a week, we learned carpentry.
Most educational establishments are mysterious, perhaps because teaching and folly are often the same. And the Green Hut was no exception. I still don't know how the place came to be, how long it had existed before I was sent there, where Tyler came from. He coached boys to get into what were considered good schools. I don't think my parents—unlike the others—paid any fees. I think he ate free in my mother's café—in exchange for his improving my English and making it possible to pass me off as a gentleman boy. We both recognized the hopelessness of the project—I was with him for two and a half years—and this was our secret, which made us, in a strange way, accomplices.
You're going to make a mess of your life.
Why, sir?
Because you can't saw straight.
It's difficult to hold, sir.
Only because you're scared of its teeth. Are you frightened of sawing your thumb off?
No, sir.
Then saw straight.
Apart from carpentry, we learned arithmetic, geometry, Latin, drawing, the history of the Royal Family, geography, physics, and gardening.
How do you spell "hyacinth"?
With a "y," sir.
Of course. But where is the "y"? You're in too much of a hurry. Let the question sink in. Take the measure of it.
During the winter in the Green Hut, the six of us suffered from the cold. There was only a portable paraffin stove, nothing more. And on certain days the can of paraffin was empty. Tyler would pretend he had forgotten—because he preferred us to think that he was absent-minded rather than broke. We had red noses, chilblains on our fingers and toes, and sopping handkerchiefs stuffed into the pockets of our shorts. In the months of January and February, Tyler often wore a long loosely knitted woollen scarf, whose colors astounded us: white and lilac with little flecks of pink—such as you see mixed with snot on your handkerchief after your nose has stopped bleeding.
After the last lesson of the afternoon in the Hut, driving in his car to his home, from where, later, I caught the bus to mine, he would offer me, as I sat beside him, half his scarf.
Where did it come from, sir?
You ask too many questions. You do it to draw attention to yourself.
I'm interested, sir.
You never stop being interested, that's where the trouble begins. Wrap this end around you, keep quiet, and put your gloves on.
Circe sits up, and, with a flick of her head, tosses her hair back. Señor, she asks Tyler, do you find the sandwiches here good?
The bread is a little too thinly cut, but otherwise, yes, señora.
She gazes at him shamelessly; the elegance and sadness of his reply allow it.
Tyler's car was an Austin 7. The roof was a kind of tarpaulin, with brackets that folded. On winter mornings he had to start it by turning the crank handle. I sat in the driver's seat, on the very edge, so that my right foot could touch the accelerator if the engine caught. Sometimes it took us ten minutes. I would shiver, and his mustache got frosted.
Tyler lived in two rented rooms on the ground floor of a large house with a rose garden, which he did not have the right to sit in. The house belonged to a widow, whom I occasionally glimpsed wearing a fur coat or a floral summer dress. She, like Tyler, was a Catholic, which is why she agreed to rent him the two small rooms. He was allowed to leave his car in the drive, but only in one place, at the back of the house by the kitchen door, where the dustbins were.
We'll be leaving tomorrow, Circe says, touching the shoulder of Tyler's tweed jacket, leaving for Huesca. I feel, señor, that you would love Aragon. You might accompany us?
The cigar smoker—Telegonus if he's really the platinum-blonde's son— is now helping to get Pasiphaë out of her chair and onto her feet. It is a hard struggle, and they need both her crutches, which fit under her elbow