Free G. by John Berger

him.
    There’s no need for impertinence.

    The train journey to Paris, two days spent there with friends and then the journey on to Milan comprise the longest period that theboy has spent with his mother since infancy. She is unlike anybody else he knows: yet he has known about her ever since he can remember. She is both strange and familiar. With her he has the sensation of playing a part in a story which concerns a life he might have led. Everything about her suggests an alternative.
    She talks a lot to him, but not as one talks to a child. (From the moment she abandoned him to her cousins she has wanted to think of him as grown up, as formed: then pride in him could supersede her guilt. Now that he is eleven she thinks of him proudly as a man: a man to whom she can refer for support and justification: a man who, in many respects, is like a father to her.) She talks to him about Socialism, the importance of Education, the future of women, about art—they will see Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
in Milan—about her friend Bertha Newcombe who is in love with Bernard Shaw, about the different nations of Europe and their characteristics.
    Some of what she says he does not fully understand. But all of it seems to pass by like the views seen through the train window: distant, continuous, almost disembodied. It is the same with her voice which is unlike any other he has heard (she still talks incessantly), but which does not seem to belong to her. When he returns to their compartment having walked along the train corridor, the fact that his mother is still there in the same place half surprises him. He had half expected her to disappear. When she falls asleep he presses her arm, presses it hard until he can feel how solid it is. He is mystified by this solidity as he might be by an image in a mirror moving of its own accord.
    She has certain characteristics by which he recognizes her instantly in his dreams and thoughts. The smallness of her plump hands, and their surprising lightness of touch; the way she opens her hazel eyes very wide (like the china eyes of a doll); her large bosom and square body (like a silk sack stuffed); the firmness with which she says certain words— RIGHTS, IDEAL, DISGRACE ; a scent, hyacinth-like which covers, as lightly as tulle, another (for him) unnamed but older smell. But these characteristics do not create a person in his mind: they remind him of the fact that his mother happens to have these characteristics.
    When, through the train window or the carriage window in Paris, awoman for some reason or another attracts his attention—it happens rarely—and he has time to observe her, he plays a game of imagining her as his mother. The game is impossible if the woman is in the carriage and likely to talk to him or to Laura: she must be and must remain a stranger. The woman there with a tiny waist, wearing blue satin, who is shaking with laughter and whose screams first attracted his attention and separated her from the crowd, what would it be like, he wonders, to have her as a mother? Or the fat woman who is carrying too much away from the market and who looks as though she is too fat to climb up into the train: or the woman in the landau with ostrich feathers, wearing narrow trousers beneath her slit skirt? He does not compare these women with the woman beside him. If the game were just one of judging between them, of deciding which mother he would prefer, it would soon pall: furthermore, if his judgement were to go against Laura, he would be assuring his own unhappiness. The imaginary mothers he sees through the window are candidates for filling the absence which Laura represents. The game is always to try to imagine more about having a mother. It is the first time he has played the game. It is Laura’s presence which supplies the necessary sense of absence from which to begin.
    It is more than eleven years since Laura and Umberto have met, and their son is there in breeches and a cap to