by Peter Handke
Thus far he had remained alone. Even his squires, his escort, he no longer had, not one. He still wrote poetry, publishing one chapbook a year. Some of his poems still evoked young women. But for him, the poet, they were now out of the question. In the meantime he had come to see that it was his fate to remain an outsider, and not merely with respect to the world of women. Not a single person in the whole wide world—and Nueva Numancia remained the whole world for him—cared one bit about him, despite the fact that when his yearly chapbook appeared, for a few days a photo of him was displayed in the window of the town bookstore with the caption “Our Local Poet.” If people had largely overlooked him earlier, now they perceived him as a nuisance, and not just in his imagination. In spite of everything, he had become something of a public figure, not only because of his picture in the window but also because of the local newspaper, yet no one had read what he wrote. People recognized him on the street, but unlike with a singer familiar from television or a famous soccer player, they had no idea of what he actually did. The profession of poet no longer held any associations for them, neither an image nor a sound. Even Antonio Machado was nothing but a name to most people, but because that name turned up almost everywhere in the town, it not infrequently aroused irritability, as witness the defaced poems that still hung in some of the taverns. And Juan, his successor, his only one, now made the streets unsafe day after day, and people protected themselves by either turning away or giving him a look that expressed disapproval of his profession, of which those fellow citizens knew only the name and which, since he also practiced it in solitude and secrecy, they thought must threaten their existence. He was their secret enemy.
“And the people of Nueva Numancia are not entirely mistaken about that,” Juan Lagunas commented during the hike through the steppe. “I began with love poems, addressed not only to women or to one woman in particular, but by now I write almost exclusively poems of loss. Just as I’m an outsider, the others, my fellow residents in the pueblo, are outsiders as well. That’s how I see them, hear them, capture them in poems: as they are now, in comparison to earlier. A horde surrounded by black dust: that’s what my pueblo has become, and concealed within the black dust is a lamento and a memory, which I want to revive with the lash of a whip.”
His poems did not sound much different: a quiet raving. Except that this raving hardly captured anyone’s attention these days. It was as if he, the melancholic, had to do penance for the high spirits of the poets who had gone before him, whose works were now read only in schools, and who, in the face of current circumstances, came across as heretical or at least irresponsible. These days neither poetic high spirits nor appropriate melancholy meant anything or moved anyone. Did the poet’s calling still exist? Or did those who insisted that it did make that claim out of pretentiousness? Wasn’t it significant that even Juan’s mother—with whom he still lived, occupying the very room he had had as a child—had always urged him not to be so stubborn, to open his mouth and speak up, and when he presented her, his only confidante for these many years, with his poems, she had received them with an anguished expression and later, without any pretense, simply refused to listen to him read them aloud? (“No more poetry readings, please. I, too, as a listener, have sworn off all poets’ readings, the melancholic as well as the high-spirited ones, especially the latter.”)
And his fellow hiker on the steppe would not have been able to come up with answers to his questions either—which Juan Lagunas did not expect in any case. The man of prose was also filled with uncertainty when it came to the role of poets in the contemporary world. Yet he was certain that at one time in his life he had needed the poetic moment, more intensely than anything else. There were poems that, teetering on the brink and to be read only in a faltering voice, a solitary voice that could not be made audible, poems without rhyme and without a preestablished rhythm, had called him back from his own brink or precipices into the midst of life—back to prose—to writing prose. “As with painting, so also with poetry.” And for a single poem of that sort he would have forgiven any contemporary poet for his actual or presumed pretension to that status, more than forgiven. And to that extent writing poetry, regardless of whether it was a profession or not, could still represent a status?
“At one time,” Juan Lagunas then said, “we had a fatherland: we could name things. You see, there were names for everything, names for every moment in life, also for recurring moments. We could name the mother, and the son, even God, but this time is past, never to return; never again will we be able to name the days, the twilights, and the dawns. We lost the names, lost this fatherland, lost that village. Our life is empty now. We’re buried alive, our eyes fixed on the heavens that we can’t see anymore. And never again will we encounter a woman and be able to speak with her about our lost fatherland. All that remains is to wait for the nights and arrange meetings with our ancestors. When all the dead begin to speak: then we will be able to name life again, the poem in the depths of the night like a snake that hibernates, waiting, its slanted eyes almost closed, for the spring and the sun on its skin.”
And, lo and behold, suddenly Juan switched to prose. And only a poet could become prosaic in this way. And in the process he acquired a voice, and what a voice, between screaming and screeching. “I’m a social problem. Every year a few more weeks on a locked ward. The only woman in my life was my mother. I never fucked a woman.” (“¡ Jodido!” he bawled in his native Spanish.) “I would even have done it with a cow. Fallen in love with her like, if I’m remembering this correctly, one of the feeble-minded men who haunt the pages of your William Faulkner’s novels. With my beloved vaca I would have wandered the steppe day after day, mounting her from time to time, staring her in the eye, her head with its blond curls over the forehead quietly turned to look at me, and in her long, extra-quiet bovine eyelashes not the slightest quiver. And do you know what my mother said to the asylum warden the last time? ‘Why don’t you keep him, for good!’ I can’t even sew on a button. I can’t even polish my own shoes, let alone cook something for myself. Not even the shepherd’s crumbs, migas del pastor, the only poor people’s dish around my Numancia, am I capable of brushing from the table into my wooden poet’s, no, beggar’s, bowl. Emperor, king, nobleman; bourgeois, poet, beggar. I secretly beg some people to give me money, in return for a copy of a poem. And if someone does give me some spare change, it’s only so he won’t have to take the poem. I beg my mother for money, too, every day before I go out. If I wouldn’t be completely lost without her, I would have done away with her long ago. Every Sunday afternoon I put my hands around her evil old throat. And now she is dying, my mother. What will become of me? Maybe when I go home this evening, to our apartment in the projects on the edge of Nueva Numancia, she will be lying in her coffin already, the coffin she has cried out for from time to time, in my presence. The sound a coffin makes when it lands at the bottom of that hole in the ground is no laughing matter. Will be no laughing matter. Will have been no laughing matter. And if I know her, she will have darned my socks before dying. She will have cooked a batch of olla podrida, of stew, enough to last me for a whole week, on a low flame. She will have pressed my father’s suit, of English worsted, from the area around Manchester, double-breasted, with wide pinstripes and mother-of-pearl buttons and particularly deep trouser cuffs, of the type that have come back into style, will have pressed it with the heavy old flatiron, heated on the stove, and a damp cloth, and the creases, sharp but not knife-sharp, will have allowed her to forget death, my father’s as well as her own. Yes, my poem lies: I can name things, all sorts of things. But what I can name and speak of, I am not capable of doing. And I don’t want to do it either. It’s my job to name things, not to act. It’s not my job to act. I’m a poet, and it’s my job not to act, not to be an Olympic champion, but also not to be a cook, a greeter, a night porter, a travel guide, a wood- or steelworker, a landscaper, or a pimp, a firearms dealer, a cotton-picker, a pipeline-layer, a laundryman, a sho
elace-threader, a locksmith, a dining-table-finisher. Not a person of action, no way, no how.”
But wasn’t it a sort of action after all when Juan Lagunas finally turned on his companion, striking him in the chest with his fist, and not gently, either? For that moment it was as if the other man embodied the poet’s actual or imagined nemeses and mockers in his native town, from the beginning to the present—no, from before any manifestations of hostility and disrespect, those who in his view lived wrong and whose way of life disgusted him in a way for which he had no use in his role as a poet.
Thus he attacked his companion as, at the end of the day, the two steppe-hikers stood atop the mound of ancient, pre-Christian, Celtic-Iberian Numancia. During his first stay in this region, the former prose-writer had met Juan Lagunas only in town, intra muros. He had always been alone when he ventured beyond its boundaries. Now, during this second visit, it became clear that the poet had never set foot outside his city. The soil of the steppe beneath his feet was unfamiliar. He stumbled repeatedly, stubbed the toes of his shoes against the chunks of weathered rock lying here and there, and got his legs tangled even when nothing was there to trip him up, only short grass, sand, and the wide expanses. He raised his knees where no objects needed to be stepped over and dodged a bull that was actually a cow, and not one nearby but far off on the horizon. He also kept expecting a path where none was necessary. Trackless steppe? The entire steppe, even if here and there it offered small obstacles—narrow rivulets, a rotted fence—was one big path, easy to see. Even the sound of his own footsteps seemed to make him uneasy. Whereas his fellow hiker revived an old pleasure upon hearing the sand crunch underfoot, grass stems from the previous year and the years before crackling as his ankles brushed them, cushions of moss, still damp with the morning dew, sighing—all of which was and remained a new music to his ears, one that made his entire being fall silent and listen—the poet did not pause for a moment in his daylong monologue to listen, let alone fall silent. Even when his attention was called to the rustling of pebbles as they brushed against each other, to the constantly varied concert produced by dried reeds, at most he gestured impatiently and continued spewing out his town talk, undeterred by his own stumbling and the absent sidewalks. The many-voiced concert of the steppe meant nothing to him.
A cold wind, signaling the imminent onset of night, whipped around the two men atop the mound of ancient Numancia. From the new Numancia far below in the bend of the river rose mist, spreading like a reservoir over the already darkened steppe. Despite the desolation of the scattered farms, the smell of wood smoke grew stronger and stronger. The smell came from underground, beneath the site of the old fortress, long since vanished but at one time besieged for years by the Roman Empire’s legions. The men were standing atop a special charcoal heap. They did not speak. Juan Lagunas, too, kept silent as a matter of course. A dog circled them. It had been following them all day, and the narrator of the Moravian night wanted it to be the same dog as the one in Porodin, at the beginning of his tour, although now the dog was as large as a calf, with a dachshund-like belly that sometimes grazed the gravel of the steppe: the padding of its feet had sounded exactly like that of the little mutt of the enclave.
The wind, too, without specifically swirling or changing direction, now gradually seemed to be wafting in from another era. The smell of wood smoke was joined by that of damp animal coats and sour milk. Inside a stockade fence, for the benefit of local tourism an attempt had been undertaken to reproduce the pre-Roman settlement, complete with cave-like thatched-roof huts and alleys that also served as sewers. By this late hour the attraction was long since closed. But the Numancia that now surfaced was different, entirely independent of the imagined or reimagined one. It produced no image, nor could anything be heard: neither pots clattering nor battle cries ripe for a film portraying antiquity, nor any other hoopla. Even the olfactory hallucination was gone in a jiffy. What gave this Numancia substance had been the wind. No matter whether now, in this early-evening hour, it blew in a vacuum: for a few moments, no, for a prolonged second, a Numancia had burst forth in a way that no reconstruction and no historical account could conjure up or put within grasp. Numancia lived. And in what respect did it live? As what? As a sudden intimation. As a lasting intimation. As an alternative present. Who had had the insight at one point that ideas were deeds and should be treated as such? And weren’t intimations, or at least intimations of this sort, perhaps also facts that one ought to perceive in their physicality, as living matter in the full sense—as a particular network of arteries?
Nightfall, coming on suddenly—this was the south, after all. The dog, which continued to circle the two men on the mound, broke into wolflike howls. And the poet from New Numancia howled in sympathy. The man beside him, who since his stay in the provincial town had been a faithful reader of his poetry, realized that the poems, without once mentioning the name, all dealt with the vanished Numancia. If he constantly cursed the present town and all towns of the present day, and wished to see them destroyed, he was actually conjuring up the earlier or alternate-reality settlement. What he called “pain of absence,” in which the “music of distant parts” was no longer to be heard, for which he blamed “the thieves of illusion,” with their “sharp thorn, stabbing our veins”—these images evoked his dream, his intimation, his idea of a different or differently conceivable Numancia. He prayed for that Numancia. He begged for it. He howled for it to the now dark horizons, so furiously that the dog fell silent. Something like a stench billowed from the poet, the stench of a—no, of desolation.
The man beside him had always felt love, if at all, for a lost soul, whether actually lost or lost only in his imagination, and always just one person, never more than one—for a single lost person. His love had sprung, without exception, from the fervent desire to save the person in question. The few times he had fallen in love had gone hand in hand with this thought: “This woman wants to be saved by me, by me and me alone.” Even writing books, at the time when he still saw himself as a writer, had always been triggered by the need, yes, the need, to rescue someone, and one day it had become clear to him how he wanted to die: either at his desk, in the middle of writing something, or while trying to save someone, for instance from a burning building or from a firing squad.
But when it came to this Juan Lagunas, there seemed to be nothing more to be saved, and apparently the man also expected nothing of the kind. And besides, our host had hardly anything to say about the outcome of his various rescue attempts. But at least he drew the howling poet to him and stood cheek to cheek with him until he fell silent. The lost poet’s skin was not merely cold; it was completely lifeless. Not a pore that exhaled anything or responded in any way to the touch of the other cheek. It was reminiscent of an Indian mask into whose cheeks mice had gnawed their way, a mask supposed to represent a human being “in the process of losing his soul.” And nonetheless this seemingly dead skin expected something, and with it, palpably, the entire person there in the darkness. He was expressing a demand. He was still entitled to something from the other man. And if he received it, he would make further demands. He would not let him leave, ever again. And if the other man left him, that would be called betrayal. It would mean: So you are leaving me in the lurch, like everyone else. And would he, at that moment still his partner (or “pardner,” as in Westerns), in fact leave him in the lurch, without further ado, just as he had eventually done with everyone else? He had had to do so if he wanted to save himself? And would do it again this time?
The night turned out to have no stars. The poet of Numancia claimed to be unable to see in the dark, “like my mother.” So the two of them descended arm in arm from the mound to the steppe, the dog going on ahead, as if to sniff out the path. From all around them, near and far, came a monotonous tooting, a sort of croaking, though an octave higher, you might say, and also emanating more from the air above than from any ditches below, while each individual note formed a layer in a sound horizon th
at receded into the darkness. Juan, his arm hooked into his companion’s, unexpectedly took a hop, then another, and so on all the way down the hillside. It became a dance, and not the dance of someone lost and done for. And he, the storyteller, could not help dancing along with the poet, suddenly vivacious. Yes, he, despite his lack of night vision and all, now showed himself to be in the best of spirits. And it was probably not true that he could find his way around only in his familiar haunts in town: taking his cue from the scents that rose from beneath his dancing feet, he named the plants or herbs that gave them off: “lavender,” “thyme,” “poppy,” “globe thistle” … His wailing earlier on the hillcrest: it seemed now as if he had actually gathered strength from it and were drawing on it to get himself in the right mood. “Ah, my dear old nightmares,” he said at the bottom of the hill, his voice now both calm and resonant: “Up to now you have always saved my life, roused me at the last moment from the sleep of death. Nightmares, my guardian angels.”
In front of the convention center in the semiwilderness, unlit and closed for the week, Juan Lagunas made a rattling noise with something: his car keys. So the lone Jeep parked on the edge of the gravel trail belonged to him. He promptly unlocked three doors: one for himself on the driver’s side, one for the storyteller next to him, and the third in the rear, for the large dog, now silent once more. “It’s going to be a night of owl calls,” he remarked before starting the engine. How would he drive without night vision? On went the headlights, no problem. (But was he really unable to see in the dark?)