by Peter Handke
“As he had done at noon in the funeral procession, he kept turning his head to look over his shoulder as he made his way hither and yon across the city. This behavior contrasted oddly with the way he strolled along and lightfootedly snaked his way through the crowds. He must have expected to see someone behind him (certainly not me), and he expected nothing good of this person. To me he looked like someone on the run, like someone checking behind him for pursuers, no, a single pursuer. If initially he had meandered through the streets in a leisurely fashion, now he began to zig and zag, and increasingly made sudden turns. Might this still be a game, a game with himself, with his own imagination? But again no: if it was a game, then a game involving someone else. His frolicsome flight, or his performance of fleeing, was meant to catch his pursuer’s attention, or perhaps turn that person into a pursuer in earnest.
“What seemed to confirm this supposition was that he disappeared into an arcade with which I was familiar. I waited to see whether someone would follow him in—no one did—and then went in myself. By now night had long since fallen. There he stood, but not alone at a game console as I had expected, but in a sort of pack with others, in front of a dart board, you know what I mean, a target like the one on the boat here, but with an electronic scoreboard, and so on. To his fellow players, who came every evening, he was a complete stranger. But despite having joined them only minutes earlier, he already seemed to fit in completely. He hit the bull’s-eye again and again, and at each of his tosses the board lit up with astonishing scores. The person whose turn was supposed to come after his kept pulling the darts out of the target and handing them back to him, something that happened with none of the others. Later that night, however, when I had long since stopped watching, he lost his rhythm, his momentum. Finally he was no longer even hitting the board, or if he did, the arrows did not stick, and no one picked them up off the floor. His new pals had forgotten him, letting him continue playing out of sheer hospitality; he no longer existed for them. And was my writer—for whose sake I stuck around, even if this person was merely some unmasked trenchcoat hero—thinking himself unobserved, now showing his real face, a face, as I saw distinctly, precisely in the semidarkness of the arcade, that appeared more contorted after every missed throw, contorted with impatience, impatience with himself, with the world, with space, with time, with night, an impatience bordering on hate, a hate as undefined as it was universal? His true face? His true self? His other self? His third self? His hundredth? Or was I discovering myself in this imagined writer, my villager self from granite-bound Galicia with my not very granite-worthy, unvillagelike impaciencia to go home to the women, whichever women they might be! And do you know, do you all know the name of that game arcade in La Coruña? ‘Saint Paciencia.’ And why? Because it’s located on Calle Santa Paciencia. It’s a very short alley, I can tell you that, my friends. Hallowed patience. So there was once a saint called Patience. I wonder when her saint’s day falls?”
In the nighttime salon on the boat, the Galician fell silent. Or was he merely pausing, hoping that one of us would ask him about the women in his life? Nothing followed but general silence. True, we were all waiting to hear at long last a story that involved a woman, but not from him. Even the croaking of the frogs ebbed away, as if to signal that something of the sort could now begin, or that a fresh beginning could be made. For a while only the Morava could be heard. Suddenly it was flowing faster, suggesting that the snowmelt from earlier in the day, coming downstream from the mountains to the south, had arrived, as if released by the opening of a lock, in a sudden surge in the vicinity of Porodin and the Moravian Night. What seemed like a flood slapped against the sides of the boat, and from the riverbed below came a roar. All the more silent the night sky high overhead, with the last winter constellations still visible in the west as they grew dim, and likewise silent the one falling star that shot past Orion and the Pleiades, from below to above, like matches in a Western movie being struck on a wall or on the soles of boots.
Then a sighing in the half-darkened salon, a sighing such as could come from only one person. Only our host sighed that way now and then. Early in our acquaintance each of us had asked him what was wrong. In the meantime it had become clear that the sighing held no particular significance. It was simply part of him, part of his villager’s or rather family heritage. Such sighs had already been heard from his grandfather, in the house, the farmyard, the fields, and from his great-grandfather. Actually it was not so much a sighing as a snorting, sometimes turning into a moan, which, however, had no significance either, as already noted. And usually nothing followed from it. Only in exceptional cases did it announce that something was about to happen: that in a moment he would begin to speak. And during the night in question, and especially in those moments, that was the case, and exactly what the rest of us expected. It was from him we wanted to hear a story involving a woman. From him, who had never shared such a story before.
But as usual he put off starting the story, put off opening his mouth. Before he settled down to talk, he went outside and blew with all his might on the clapper of the boat’s bell—but in vain: not a peep. And back in the salon he first described in great detail his wanderings in search of a church ruin, almost a thousand years old, still in Galicia, in the interior, to which he had fled from the coast, the surf, the lighthouses, the residual effects of the oil spill, in the face of which no continuation of his project—for that was how he viewed his tour—presented itself. “And there,” our trusty interrupter broke in, “you came across a woman? In the rain? In a storm? What was she wearing? What eye color? Her complexion? Her shoe size? Profession? Age? Siblings? Her mother’s given name? Good in bed? Can she cook? Her favorite author? Favorite tree? Favorite name? Favorite constellation? How did she smell? Did she have money on her? How much?”
He did not favor the interrogator with a reply, instead going off on tangents, more and more of them. His first involvement with a woman had not been his only mistake. All his involvements with women during his writing period—ah, if only they had been real involvements at least—had been mistakes, not to a greater or lesser degree, but all of them: complete and utter mistakes. Because he was committed to writing, or saw himself as committed, he promised one woman or another, without actually doing anything, something on which he would be unable to follow through, and on which no one could follow through in his stead. As the writer for whom he took himself, he had no right to be with any woman. He could not be any woman’s man. It was a delusion if a woman thought the glow or the radiance that at times emanated from him, or more durably from his writing, was intended for her. And so both of them, as a couple, landed in a trap. She thought he was the one. And at first he believed it, too, against his better judgment—“I’m repeating myself!” he said. But then, right away, “the very next morning—no, in the middle of making love,” it would fall apart. I’m not the one. I wasn’t the one. He was just performing being a twosome. He performed the role, and sometimes with a thievish or robberly gusto.
It dawned on him again and again, and always too late, that with his notion of writing he was tuned differently, so to speak. His role was to be a third party, not part of a couple. Every time a heavy, heavy guilt weighed him down, and at times, with the woman in his arms, he felt a burning inside, as if of damnation (“Ah, I can’t help repeating myself”).
The guilt pertained only to his life as a writer. Not that this life excluded love altogether—on the contrary, as he discovered over the course of years; but it required, “on pain of spiritual death,” a life beyond love between the sexes. He kept the woman secret, without the slightest sense of guilt, not merely from the outer world but also from himself. And likewise, when he deludedly saw his writer’s existence threatened by her (“Oh, delusion!”), he was prepared without hesitation—a situation in which he, the champion of hesitation, did not once hesitate—to betray the woman, to deny her, if necessary thrice thirty times, to get her out of his life at any cost, so lo
ng as my life as a writer continued. During his “creative period” he had suspected an enemy in every woman. And when he shook off that enemy and put distance between them, he did so with conviction, certain he was in the right.
Whenever he suspected the woman close to him of being an enemy, she would turn into one. And her enmity consisted of becoming active, not, however, as an enemy of his person but as an enemy of his work. If this work insisted on taking precedence and induced him to push the woman away, surely the work had to have something seriously wrong with it. Instead of loving his work, he was obsessed with it, and that obsession had to be exorcised. And thus commenced the struggle between him and the woman, without ill will on either side, but rather out of helplessness, which made the struggle all the more merciless. To both of them it was a question of justice, and thus one injury led to another. He would have liked to speak about the whole thing more lightheartedly, even more humorously, but that was out of the question, unless one took his current venture into purposeful storytelling as an element of humor. At any rate, he smiled slightly and spared us further sighs as he launched into the story of the woman he had once almost beaten to death. Perhaps he smiled because of the obvious exaggeration in his very first sentence, something in which he otherwise did not indulge, or, in his own words: “not my style.” It was also obvious that he intended to keep the story short and sweet—“it stands for others, is only an extreme example.” Violence was apparently not his thing either. “And what is?” (A quiet question from the person who usually interrupted so loudly.)
The conflict broke out—again—when he was on a book tour. As so often before, once he set out he felt unsure of himself, repeatedly assailed by doubts as to whether he was on the right course. On some days he merely asserted that he was, and set out trying to find what was right, if only in a single sentence, and at such times he was especially vulnerable, if for no other reason than that he buried himself in his work as if it were a question of life and death. And in his imagination it literally was a matter of life and death, of to be or not to be, no matter whether the book turned out to be just another book; god—or the devil—knows why he took these things so much to heart. The woman, by contrast, did not want all this drama, the more so because she sensed that he was merely claiming to be right. No, this man was not obsessed with his project, merely weak. It could not possibly be the project. She did know about his conflict. But she did not want to know. And she attacked him. This attacking consisted of her blocking his path, the path to the book, every day. She did not act maliciously. She simply could not help herself. In the presence of this man, who treated her from morning to night as his adversary—did not even treat her but just avoided her, with one excuse after another—she had no choice. The truth had to come out: that he was doubly impotent, vis-à-vis her, the woman, and even more so vis-à-vis his supposed beloved, the book. And when he sat working on it, or pretended to be working, she had to continue the conflict, willy-nilly. This conflict had not even been declared. Indeed it was not even a conflict. It was not possible to fight this man, curled up like a hedgehog at his desk. What she did was more like disturbing him, involuntarily, compulsively, all the more mercilessly. She seized every excuse to knock on his door, or, let’s say, toss pebbles at his window, or, when she had just wished him a productive workday on the telephone, she would call him right back to ask whether he was finished, and then a minute later, asking how long she would have to wait for him, and so forth. And at night, she would refuse to let him leave—him, whose motto might read, “I am the one who goes away”—even locking the outer door, and then, when he could not help staying, she would not let him sleep, not this way, not that way, him, who according to another of his sayings, needed sleep and dreams for recharging when he had a book in the works. And when, after fervent requests, even pleas, on his part, he was allowed for a change to go home to his room, to his desk—which for him, so weak in periods like this, was literally a homecoming—after he had taken a few deep breaths in his own four walls, the woman would barge into his life again, giving him no respite. He could not unplug the telephone. If he did so, in no time she would appear at his door in person. And what if he simply let it ring? After an hour of ceaseless ringing, the same thing would happen—a few moments after the telephone finally stopped, in “no time” again, as if this woman had wings, her voice, as tender as it was merciless, would be heard calling his name outside through the nocturnal stillness, keeping it up until he let her in.
And one night, when he finally opened the door, it had reached the point that he promptly threw himself at the woman, without even looking at her, and began to beat her. It almost seemed as if she had been asking for it, for she let it happen without trying to protect either her body or her face. He had never struck anyone as he struck this woman. Even when she fell to the ground, he could not stop, kicking her without caring where the blows landed. In the middle of the fracas he almost picked up the heap lying there on the ground and without more ado skewered it on a nearby fence post with a pointed finial: Now I’m going to do it, he thought, as if she deserved it; as if he were acting in self-defense.
He stopped the story there, having no memory of what had happened next. But even from the earlier part nothing had stayed with him about the violence but the violence itself, no night wind, no light, no star, no tree rustling, as if that were a law governing violence. His memory remained blank until the next day, when the woman and he saw each other again as if nothing had happened: her face and her body unscathed, no redness, no swelling—this, too, suggesting that nothing had happened. “Never again a woman. Never again a book!” ran through his mind. And why was he telling us all this? (Thus our interrupter, loudly this time.) This part of the story went with his later experience at the remote monastery in ruins.
So at least our host would get to the heart of the matter, to the other story about a woman, which we hoped would be different, the story the poet of Numancia had prophesied to him, the story of being on the road with the woman. But he continued to put us off, refusing to indulge us. Was this a trick? A ploy? No. We knew our friend well enough to recognize that he could not help postponing discussion of an occurrence of burning importance to him, postponing it as long as possible, whether that was his nature or the nature of the story itself, or both. During his writing period he had no doubt missed the moment for his story by postponing it, just as his double, or whoever, had missed the moment for shooting the arrow. Whatever would come would come. It would remain his problem that, unlike the writer Heinrich von Kleist or members of a certain American school, he could not plunge with his sentences directly in medias res; as was previously the case with his writing, this problem now affected his speaking, and it actually seemed to spur him on.
Since giving up his profession, he had been in the running, and not only for a woman. Once he decided to be a nobody, he knew he amounted to something, entirely different from a certain author or another. He was in the running because he was available, and radiated availability. At the same time, that availability made him appear massive, which had nothing to do with his actual size or weight. Those around him saw him as someone who had both feet on the ground as much as anyone else, who lived entirely in the present, and embodied the present more than anyone. Thus wherever he turned up, it did not occur to people to ask about his profession. He was there, without calling attention to himself, took an interest, participated, fit in. If he had ever felt he had a calling, it was to hearing and going to hear, and in that respect he now found himself in his element. He no longer needed any special atmospheric conditions, only the ground, and he, now anonymous, rested on it with the necessary gravity. His indefinability resulted in his emanating a kind of colorfulness, a dark, earthy, peaceable, humane color and, at the same time, a music, soundless—that was how he wanted it to be heard—a music of empathy. Not only was nothing to be feared from him, the indefinable nobody; he inspired trust. Was he speaking now from experience, or was this rather his ide
a of himself, finally free of a profession that over time had threatened him not merely with a certain inability to function in society but also with incurable misanthropy?
“Be that as it may.” After all the battles and defeats with women during his writing years, he now considered himself ready at last, having renounced his constricting profession, for a woman, for the woman. Despite his failures he continued to believe in the tale of man and woman. This belief was not an idea but rather a dream, one of those dreams that deserved to be believed, and since he still dreamed such dreams, he believed in them as he also believed in the lyrics of certain popular love songs, and not only the line “We’ll never say goodbye.” Actually he believed more in mutual enthusiasm than in love, or at least he avoided using that word. And as far as the tale of man and woman was concerned, he felt sure everyone on earth had to experience the same thing he did, as in general his personal certainties had to be universally valid—that notion probably a holdover from his profession?
The day on which he set out to find the ruined church, located in the interior of the Galician granite region, was a brimstone-butterfly day, reminiscent of the Numancia poet’s “owl night.” Brimstone-butterfly day, that meant a sky of prevernal blue, and one could expect, with a probability bordering on certainty, that on the wind, growing perceptibly warmer in the course of the day, a first little yellow fellow would come swirling along, against a sky truly bright for a change.