The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

by Peter Handke

  KILB

  And I? Is it my job to take care of the entertainment? Am I the critter whose ears are allowed to hear everything? Or the poodle in front of whom you lie down naked in bed? I can drag you across your beautiful lawns with my teeth. I’ll stuff the gaps in your beautiful whole sentences with pus. I’ll cram your spray-deodorized private parts into Baggies. You singe the fluff off slaughtered chickens with a candle. In Switzerland they say “chicken skin” instead of “goose bumps.” Enjoy! Enjoy! I always speak this calmly, dear lady. Here, you’ve dropped your Charmin. (He pulls out a strip of toilet paper and places it over her arm; she smiles, unimpressed.) If you ever catch fire it will be me who wraps you in blankets until you choke to death. And when you all freeze to death I’ll sit beside you cracking my knuckles. Diabolical, don’t you agree? (More and more embarrassed) Let yourselves be conjured up out of your personal hedgerows, you, the bewitched of the business world, a free man stands before you, a model, a picture-book figure. (He slaps his hands together, slaps his thighs and the soles of his shoes like a folk dancer, only more slowly and awkwardly.) Let’s swing a little! Action! Lights! A little circus atmosphere! Not just words against which the brain is defenseless anyway! Conserve your vocal chords! More body language! (He picks up a champagne glass and lets it drop somewhat helplessly, makes a vain reflex movement to catch it, which he tries to overplay.) And don’t stand around like a bunch of stiffs! Anyway, far too statuesque! Move. You will be recognized by your movements. Let’s celebrate. (He dances PAULA a few steps farther across the stage, then stops in front of her. He starts unbuttoning her blouse … He encourages himself by beating his fists together and blowing into the hollow of his hands. In between he sticks his hands into his armpits as if they were freezing. No one stops him. Sidelong glances at QUITT. QUITT watches him attentively as well as remotely, almost impatiently. KILB tugs the blouse out of the riding britches, somewhat indecisively. PAULA merely smiles. He steps back as if he were giving up, performs another pathetic slapping gesture without really slapping his hands together. Suddenly QUITT leaps forward, seizes KILB’S hand, and wants to use it to tear off PAULA’S blouse himself. KILB resists. QUITI“S WIFE enters, watches with interest. QUITT lets go of KILB and tears off the blouse himself. PAULA crosses her arms in front of her breasts without undue hurry. QUITT’S WIFE leaves. QUITT places another champagne glass in KILB’S hand, simultaneously takes the other glasses into his fist, and smashes them, one after the other, on the floor, repeating KILB’S words—”Enjoy! enjoy!“—while doing so … nudges him in the side until KILB, too, drops his glass, somewhat indecisively. QUITT walks from one person to the other and spits into each face; lifts up a splinter of glass and attacks KILB with it, throws the splinter away, and puts KILB into a headlock; leads him back and forth like this and butts his head against the others. In the headlock, trying to free himself) You misunderstood me, Quitt. There’s no method to your madness. It is unaesthetic, vulgar, formless. But worst of all, it is unmusical, has neither melody nor rhythm. That wasn’t how we planned it. Don’t you understand a joke? Can’t you distinguish between ritual and reality any more? Know your limits, Quitt.

  QUITT

  (While pushing him into a chair and dragging him offstage on it) Until now you have lived off the fact that I have my limits, you phony. Now show me my limits, you model of the independent life. (Far upstage he tips him out of sight and comes back.)

  (PAULA walks off with measured steps. HANS reappears with a dustpan and whisk broom. The others are cleaning themselves. Everyone begins to smile. QUITT does not smile. HANS sweeps the splinters together. PAULA returns dressed and smiles also, with closed lips.)

  VON WULLNOW

  I believe he’s finally learned his lesson.

  KOERBER-KENT

  He’ll never learn anything, He’s got no memory. The jack-in-the-box merely uses the floor to propel himself. He doesn’t forget because he doesn’t remember anything. The horsefly lands on the very spot it’s just been shooed away from. He doesn’t think backward and forward like us who have a sense of history—as Mrs. Tax might say—he only has a good nose. I would call him a mere animal, an involuntary, fidgeting animal. The sparrows in the field, not by living, but by being lived, are the divine principle. I can see him now on his bicycle animalistically rushing down the tree-lined avenues.

  QUITT

  Don’t always look at me when you speak; I can’t listen to you that way.

  VON WULLNOW

  It’s a pity that there are no more tree-lined avenues. How sweet, for instance, the memory of the manor house at dawn—the house at the vanishing point of the two rows of chestnut trees, the windows reflecting darkly, only the dormers of the servants’ quarters already lighted up; a hedgehog rustles in the dry leaves at our feet, the special stagnant air of that time of day when the sick go into themselves and die willingly, and a chestnut suddenly thuds down and bursts on the gun on our shoulder while we have turned around for one last look at our parents’ house before we stalk cross-country to our hunting ground. Yes, a delicate being, our minority stockholder, as delicate as a thief when it comes to opening a drawer, as delicate as a murderer when it comes to handling a knife.

  LUTZ

  Von Wullnow, your language is so elevated it makes me hesitate to tell my joke now.

  VON WULLNOW

  I order you to. You’ve been looking all this time as if you had something to get off your chest.

  LUTZ

  Two people love each other. They make love so rapidly, the way you sometimes devour a slice of bread with honey on it. When they are finished—(Glances at PAULA.) Oh, pardon me.

  VON WULLNOW

  Mrs. Tax isn’t listening anyway. And besides, she’s above that sort of thing. She’d probably consider our dirty jokes as proof of our commercialized sexuality, wouldn’t you? Go on.

  LUTZ

  —the man gets up at once. Oh, says the woman, you’ve scarcely finished and you’re already leaving? And that’s supposed to be love? Look, the man replies, I counted to ten, didn’t I?

  (There’s either brief laughter or there isn’t. VON WULLNOW is already in the process of departing with LUTZ and KOERBERKENT —only HANS, who is still sweeping up broken glass, giggles, kneeling on the floor. The gentlemen turn around toward him; he gets up and proceeds out in front of them, giggling.)

  VON WULLNOW

  Quitt, we trust you as you trust us. Forget your superannuated sensitivity. Sensitive for me is a word I only associate with condoms.

  QUITT

  (To PAULA ) Aren’t you leaving?

  PAULA

  I was to remind you that you still wanted to explain something to me.

  QUITT

  I merely wished you would stay, now you can go. (Pause. PAULA sits down again. Pause.) I noticed how I happened to think of you disgustingly by chance. One minute before and all I could have attached to you was your name. Suddenly there was something conspicuous about you. I wanted to get up and grab you between the legs.

  PAULA

  Are you speaking about me or about a thing?

  QUITT

  (Laughs briefly. Pause.) Just now I almost said: About you, you thing. Something seems to want to slip out of me today, something I’m afraid of but which still tantalizes me. You know the stories about laughing at funerals. Once I sat opposite a woman I didn’t know. We looked into each other’s eyes until I felt hot. Suddenly she stuck out her tongue at me, not just mockingly, a little between her lips, but all the way to the root, with the whole face a gruesome grimace—as though she wanted to stick herself out at me. Ever since then I’ve felt like doing something like that myself. Usually I manage to do it only in my head, for just a moment. It starts with my wanting to undo someone’s shoelaces who’s walking by or pulling a hair out of his nose, and stops with the urge to unzip my fly in company.

  PAULA

  Shouldn’t we talk about our arrangement instead?

  QUITT

  But
I’m finally beginning to enjoy talking. I am speaking now. Before, my lips just moved. I had to strain my muscles to enunciate properly. My whole chin ached, the cheeks became numb. Now I know what I am saying.

  PAULA

  Are you Catholic?

  QUITT

  Why! You’re actually listening to me!

  PAULA

  Because you’re talking about yourself like the deputy of universal truth. What you experience personally you want to experience for all of us. The blood you sweat in private you bring as a sacrifice to us, the impenitent ones. Your ego wants to be more than itself, your sentimentality appeals to my inability to feel, your urge to confess merely has the effect of demonstrating to me that I’m still unawakened. You behave as though your time had finally come. Actually, your time as Quitt who suffers his life in exemplary bourgeois fashion has long since passed. Your suffering is over. The fact that you insist so much on yourself makes you suspect. You lack a sense of history, you’re much too much of an example of Western civilization for me.

  QUITT

  But even if it is for the last time, I’d like to be at the center of things, just by myself. Otherwise I would feel written off once and for all, like a machine, wouldn’t be able to utter a single word meant for someone else. Once when I stepped out of the house the children yelled after me: I know who you are! I know who you are! Tauntingly, as though the fact that I could be identified was something bad. Besides, it seemed inappropriate to me just now to tell something like a story after you thought about me in such abstract terms.

  (Pause.)

  PAULA

  Sit down. (QUITT does so. Pause. They look at each other. PAULA looks away. ) Yes, my outfit bothers me too now. And I can’t think of anything I’d like to say to you. But I would like to say something to you. (Pause.) It’s pleasant to sit here in the twilight. I wasn’t thinking of anything just now. That was nice too. (Pause.) Do you like evaporated milk? I suddenly feel like having evaporated milk. (Pause. She speaks as if she wants to avoid speaking of something else.) My workers should never see me like this. Normally, I buy my clothes ready-to-wear, I even feel good in them. By the way, it occurred to me before that we should also plan our advertising together from now on. I would like to go on the basis that we don’t generate any artificial needs but only awaken the natural ones of which people aren’t conscious yet. Most people don’t even know their needs. Advertising, insofar as it describes a product, is only another word for consciousness-raising. What we should avoid is advertising which is inappropriate to its product because it creates misconceptions among the consumers about the nature of the product. That would be the very deception or simulation of something that isn’t there which we are always accused of. But our products exist and their very existence makes them rational—otherwise we, as rational beings, would not have had them produced in a rational manner from rational raw materials by rational people. And if our advertisements don’t lie but only provide an exact description of our rational products, then the advertising will be just as rational. Take a look at the socialist states. They have no irrational products—and still they advertise, because the rational needs advertising most of all. That’s what transmits the idea of what is rational. For me advertising is the only materialistic poetry. As an anthropomorphic system it endears us to the objects from which we have been alienated by ideology. It animates the world of goods and humanizes them, so that we can feel at home with them. I can’t tell you how deeply touched I am when I read on an old fire wall in giant letters PEPSI-COLA HITS THE SPOT. When I see a detergent container in front of a rising sun, it blows my mind. Today, twenty years later, they simply gave the same product the sappy designation IT’S THE PEPSI GENERATION, and my mind goes blank. When I’m feeling unproductive, I look at ads in magazines, it makes my mood seem ridiculous; so advertising is also a form of consolation, but of a concrete, rational kind, as distinct from bourgeois obscurantist poetry. And think with how much more dignity and how much more progressively the copywriters can work than the poets! While the poets in their isolation conjure up something vague, the copywriters, working as an efficient team, describe the definite. Indeed, they are the only truly creative ones—they think something they had no idea about beforehand. Incidentally, we noticed recently what was wrong with the slogan for one of our products. It contained the phrase “a level tablespoon” and the product didn’t sell. Finally it occurred to one member of the team to substitute the word “heaping” for small. Instead of “level tablespoon” we used “a heaping teaspoon,” and suddenly sales increased by almost 100 percent.

  (HANS enters during the last sentence and turns on the light. )

  QUITT

  (To HANS) We don’t need any light.

  (HANS turns off the light and leaves.)

  PAULA

  I can hear my wristwatch ticking.

  QUITT

  You should be able to afford a noiseless watch. But that probably is an heirloom, not just any old watch. So please try to remember. (Pause.) Or don’t try to remember—as you please.

  PAULA

  If you tell a child who is singing to itself: Very nice, go on singing! it will stop singing. But if you say: Stop! it will go on singing.

  QUITT

  There are women who—

  PAULA

  Stop it, nothing can come of that.

  QUITT

  There are women you can’t touch because if you did you would be desecrating an heirloom. A necklace, then, has a story which makes every caress of the neck a mere afterthought. Everything about the woman is so complete that every experience you share with her only reminds her of something in her past. Whatever you tell her, she immediately interrupts you with this introverted nodding of the head. She is untouchable, inside and out. She is so full of memories. The most mysterious, delicately stuttering impulse immediately evokes a doppelganger who has already made the impulse crystal-clear to the woman. You begin to understand sex killers: only the slitting open of the belly provides him with the attention every individual deserves. You can’t run your hands through a hooker’s hair—so that her hairdo won’t get messed up.

  PAULA

  It’s just as you say it is. But why is it like that? Who is responsible for that? And who makes sure that it stays that way? And who profits by it? Instead of naming the causes, you make fun of their appearances. And precisely that happens to be one of the causes. To describe pure appearances is a man’s kind of joke. Von Wullnow would say that I would say: undialectical impressionism.

  QUITT

  And you: because you’ve got so many causes on your mind, you forget to bother with the appearances. Instead of appearances, you see nothing but causes. And when you eliminate the causes so as to change the appearances, they have already changed so that you have to eliminate entirely different causes. And if you look at me now, please become aware of me for once and not my causes.

  PAULA

  You have a beautiful tie pin. Your shirt is so new that one can still see the pinholes. Your grinding jaws manifest will power. Your delicate hands might be those of a pianist. One of your earlobes has dried shaving cream on it. And while you behave animalistically, the creases on your pants give you away.

  (QUITT gets up and pulls PAULA toward him. She wraps her arms exaggeratedly around him and also puts one leg around his hip, throws back her head, and sighs derisively. He lets go of her at once and walks away. She walks backward. They pursue each other alternately for a short time. Then they walk around by themselves, finally stop.)

  QUITT

  Please stop being conceptual. I once gave someone a present, some chocolate for his child. The chocolate was wrapped in small squares, each one with a picture of a different fairy-tale motif. Oh, the father said disappointedly, it’s not a puzzle! And then he said: That’s it, deprivation of the imagination by the chocolate manufacturers. When he said that, I suddenly stood very distantly beside him and felt radically alone. I looked down at the floor in utter loneli
ness. So, please stop.