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Literary Review
Dying with dignity
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Controlled and polished, To the Wedding is an eloquent exposition of the power of words and the stories they tell, says SHELLEY WALIA.
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THE language is rich but not over-elaborate. Ideas arise out of direct, sensuous perception. The band is playing "Last Friday drives Monday crazy". Ninon is in Gino's arms. The pain in the slow number carries in its heart centuries of irrepressible hope. On her wedding day Ninon will kick off her shoes and dance forever with Gino. To the Wedding is about joy and sorrow, of approaching death and celebration of life, a story that could take place only at the end of the millennium. It is an eloquent exposition of human nature and the power of words and stories they tell.
At the novel's heart is Gino and Ninon. We are in Italy, where political liberty moves in accordance with the play of human longing and where Berger's book is conceived in the complex, emotive context of Europeans "perched like puffins on a cliff ledge in the dark" and delusively imagining that they are far away from the Dark Ages and its massacres. It is a kind of historical amnesia, which Russell Jacoby defined as "memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of society... it is society's repression of remembrance — society's own past". In other words, it embodies the despair of a society that cannot face the future. Nevertheless, the story of these two lovers is the celebration of the present. As Christopher Lasch asserts, their story suggests that "there is history that remembers and history that originates in a need to forget". Berger obviously gives serious consideration to the need to recover history and reconstruct historical consciousness, which is reflected in almost all his works.
It is people and their responses, their robustness and fragility, that interest Berger most. We eavesdrop on the voices of a blind Greek peddler, of Gino and of his fiancée, Ninon. We follow Ninon's mother, Zedena in Bratislava, and her father, Jean Ferrero in the South of France, as they travel separately to the Italian coastal village Gorino, located on the River Po di Goro where their daughter will get married. Ninon's life-journey to this village and the literal journeys made by her parents seem to possess the inevitability of union and separation.
There is no acceleration towards a buoyant, yet sad climax full of personal peace. Small sentences, succinct one-paragraph chapters draw together all the history and the geography of the French Alps in their splendid forward movement. The father, a signalman by trade and an Italian, rides his splendid Honda motorbike over the Alps, and the Slovakian mother, an intellectual and an artist, travels on a carriage. The two leitmotifs of the highway and the river reflect the movements of history, so "unstoppable and too vast to notice us," forces that coldly and enticingly steer us. In its sheer size, history scorns at human arrangements and organisations and makes its way through weird and wonderful meanders and spirals.
And through Jean's and Zedena's journeys, Ninon's story unfolds: how her parents met, the events of her childhood, her first romance that lasts only for a day and results in the calamity of her ending up HIV-positive. There is only one truth now for her and that is her death. She goes through a period of soul-searching, self-hatred mingled with compassion, as well as wrath at the man who is the cause of her misery: "The gift of giving myself has been taken away. If I offer myself, I offer death... Come close enough to me, once, twice or a hundred times and, supposing I love you, you will die. Not if you use a condom, they say. With a condom there's latex rubber between you and your death, and latex rubber between you and me. Latex solitude. Latex solitude for ever and ever. Nothing can touch any more."
She is going to die after getting sicker and sicker; in other illnesses, death comes one day and snuffs you out, but in her case life slowly abandons her, one part after another failing. She takes medicines which make her ill but which stop her dying for a little while. Physical pain produces anguish which in turn increases the pain. The infections and parasites which the body cannot resist provoke hellish itching, nausea, cramps of the stomach, open sores in the mouth, migraines following radiotherapies, shooting pains along the legs, accompanied by a crippling fatigue. The pain and discomfort prevent the sick from thinking anything else. Pain cuts off, isolates and paralyses. And in this brief period there is merely pain and time but no hope.
But before she discovers her affliction, she has already fallen in love with Gino, and now rejects him only to be won back by his persistent efforts. When we do a thing, when we decide to do something, we are already thinking about what it will be like when it is done and over with. But Gino only thinks about what he is doing at the moment. And at the moment he only loves Ninon and would give the world to marry her. He consoles her that her second life would begin on the wedding day. And all the time Berger ensures that action and emotions are muted and never turn into theatricality.
As they dance joyfully in the little village, the sad future reminds those who know of Ninon's disease that in a few months "she will not be able to speak any more. To put a few drops of water into her dried mouth he will have to use a syringe. She will not have the strength to move anything, except her eyes, which will question him, and the tip of her tongue to touch the drops of water. He will be beside her. And one afternoon she will find the strength to raise her arm so that her hand rests in the air. He will take her hand in his. The turtle ring will be on her fourth finger. Both their hands will stay in the air." She will die with the ring on her hand.
We are reminded of how Ninon will have a morphine drip every morning, and how Gino will touch the bones of her loved body now reduced to 17 kilos. And all the time her eyes, with their long lashes in their dark hollow sockets will gaze into the eyes of a man who loved her truly and knowingly married her. There is a sense of lightness about the narrative quality of the novel that is peculiarly moving and eloquent about slightest shifts and scents of memory. Never has Berger's writing been so controlled and polished, marked as it is by such deft observation and wry humour. He communicates in this story his frank, personal view of a relationship and a mishap, in a style at once lyrical, self-conscious and profound. Selecting words with a poet's precision, he arranges them artfully to conjure the desired effect of painful sensation, of inevitable separation, in a novel that could easily be called a prose poem, subtle, discreet and strong, much like the quietly exceptional characters that he portrays. Berger has found the perfect form for his elegiac, still-hopeful revelation of the worth of us all, so easily stolen by time. Though in his concept of human suffering there is no optimism, yet his indefatigable account of pain leaves one with a sense of dying with dignity.
To the Wedding, John Berger, Bloomsbury, p.202, $22.
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