by Peter Handke
ALSO BY PETER HANDKE
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Short Letter, Long Farewell
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays
A Moment of True Feeling
The Left-Handed Woman
The Weight of the World
Slow Homecoming
Across
Repetition
The Afternoon of a Writer
Absence
Kaspar and Other Plays
The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling
Once Again for Thucydides
My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay
On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House
Crossing the Sierra de Gredos
Don Juan
Don Juan
HIS OWN VERSION
PETER HANDKE
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
BY KRISHNA WINSTON
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
NEW YORK
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2004 by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main Translation copyright © 2010 by Krishna Winston
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published in German in 2004 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Germany
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handke, Peter.
[Don Juan. English]
Don Juan : his own version / Peter Handke ; translated from the German by Krishna Winston.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-14231-5 (hardcover)
1. Cooks—France—Fiction. 2. Don Juan (Legendary character)—Fiction. I. Winston, Krishna. II. Title.
PT2668.A5D6613 2010
833'.914—dc22
2009029526
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
www.fsgbooks.com
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Chi son’ io tu non saprai.
(Who I am, you shall not discover.)
—Da Ponte/Mozart
Don Juan
Don Juan had always been looking for someone to listen to him. Then one fine day he found me. He told me his story, but in the third person rather than in the first. At least that is how I recall it now.
At the time in question, I was cooking only for myself, for the time being, in my country inn near the ruins of Port-Royal-des-Champs, which in the seventeenth century was France’s most famous cloister, as well as its most infamous. There were a couple of guest rooms that I was using just then as part of my private quarters. I spent the entire winter and the early spring living in this fashion, preparing meals for myself and taking care of the house and grounds, but mainly reading, and now and then looking out one little old window or another in my inn, formerly a gatekeeper’s lodge belonging to Port-Royal-in-the-Fields.
I had already lived for a long time without neighbors. And that was not my fault. I liked nothing better than having neighbors, and being a neighbor. But the concept of neighborliness had failed, or had it gone out of style? In my case, though, the failure could be attributed to the game of supply and demand. What I could supply, as an innkeeper and chef, was no longer demanded. I had failed as a businessman. Yet I still believe as much as ever in the ability of commerce to bring people together, believe in it as in little else; believe in the invigorating social game of selling and buying.
In May I pretty much gave up gardening in favor of simply watching how the vegetables I had planted or sown either thrived or withered. I used the same approach with the fruit trees I had planted a decade earlier, when I took over the gatekeeper’s lodge and turned it into an inn. I made the rounds again and again, from morning to night, through the grounds, which were situated in the valley carved by a stream into the plateau of the Île-de-France. Holding a book in my hand, I checked on the apple, pear, and nut trees, but without otherwise lifting a finger. And during those weeks in early spring I continued steaming and stewing for myself, mostly out of habit. The neglected garden seemed to be recovering. Something new and fruitful was in the making.
Even my reading meant less and less to me. On the morning of that day when Don Juan turned up, on the run, I decided to give books a rest. Although I was in the middle of reading two seminal works, seminal not only for French literature and not only for the seventeenth century—Jean Racine’s defense of the nuns of Port-Royal and Blaise Pascal’s attack on the nuns’ Jesuit detractors—I concluded from one minute to the next that I had read enough, at least for now. Read enough? My thought that morning was even more radical: “Enough of reading!” Yet I had been a reader all my life. A chef and a reader. What a chef. What a reader. I also realized why the crows had been cawing so ferociously of late: they were enraged at the state of the world. Or at mine?
Don Juan’s coming on that May afternoon took the place of reading for me. It was more than a mere substitute. The very fact that it was “Don Juan,” instead of all those devilishly clever Jesuit padres from the seventeenth century, and also instead of a Lucien Leuwen and Raskolnikov, let us say, or a Mynheer Peeperkorn, a Señor Buendía, an Inspector Maigret, came as a breath of fresh air. At the same time, Don Juan’s arrival literally offered me the sense of a widening of my inner horizons, of bursting boundaries, that I usually experienced only from reading, from excited (and exciting), blissful reading. It could just as well have been Gawain, Lancelot, or Feirefiz, Parzival’s piebald half brother—no, not him, after all! Or perhaps even Prince Myshkin. But it was Don Juan who came. And he was actually not altogether unlike those medieval heroes or vagabonds.
Did he come? Did he appear? It would be more accurate to say that he hurtled or somersaulted into my garden, over the wall, which was an extension of the inn’s façade along the street. It was a truly beautiful day. After the kind of overcast morning so common in the Île-de-France, the sky had cleared, and now seemed to continue clearing, and clearing, and clearing. Yes, the afternoon stillness was deceiving, as always. But for the moment it predominated, and cast its spell. Long before Don Juan hove into sight, his panting could be heard. As a child in the country I had once witnessed a farm boy, or whatever he was, running from the constables. He raced past me on a path leading uphill, and at first nothing could be heard of his pursuers but their shouts of “Halt!” To this day I can see that boy’s face, flushed and puffy, and his body, which looks shrunken, his pumping arms seeming all the longer. But what has stayed with me even more vividly is the sound he was making. It was both more than panting and less. It was also more than whistling and less that burst out of both of his lungs. Besides, it was really not a question of lungs. The sound I have in my ear breaks or explodes out of the entire person, and not from his insides but from his surface, his exterior, from every single patch of skin or pore. And it does not come from the boy alone but from several, a large number, a multitude, and that includes not just his pursuers, bellowing as they gain on him, but also nature’s silent objects all around. This whirring and vibrating, no matter how unmistakably the hunted boy had reached the end of his strength, has stayed with me, representing an overwhelming power, an elemental force of sorts.
I had hardly heard Don Juan’s breathing, far off on the horizon and at the same time very close, when I promptly had the runaway before me. The long-ago bellowing of the constables was replaced by the roar of a motorcycle. As the rider gave gas, the engine’s howl rose rhythmically, and it seemed to be coming ever closer to the garden, bucking over everything in its path, unlike the breathing, which h
ad immediately filled the garden and continued to fill it.
The ancient wall had crumbled a bit in one place, creating a sort of breach, which I had left that way on purpose. That was where Don Juan came hurtling head over heels onto my property. He had been preceded by a sort of spear, or lance, that whizzed through the air in an arc and dug itself into the earth right at my feet. The cat, which was lying next to that spot in the grass, blinked a few times, then went right back to sleep, and a sparrow—what other bird could have pulled this off?—landed on the still quivering shaft, which then continued to quiver. In actuality the lance was just a hazel branch, slightly pointed at the tip, such as you could cut for yourself anywhere in the forests around Port-Royal.
That boy fleeing years ago from the local constabulary had not even noticed me. Unseeing, his pupils bleached white in his fiery red face like those of a poached fish, he had thudded past me, the child observing the scene (if it was a powerful thudding, it was with his last reserves). This Don Juan on the run did see me, however. As his body, head and shoulders first, came flying through the breach, not unlike the spear, he had me directly in his sights. And even though this was the first time the two of us had laid eyes on each other, this intruder immediately seemed familiar. He had no need to introduce himself, which he could not have managed anyway, his breathing nothing but a strange, uninterrupted singing. I knew I had Don Juan before me—and not just some Don Juan, but the Don Juan.
Not often, yet repeatedly, in my life, total strangers like this—they in particular—have seemed familiar at first sight, and in each case this sense of familiarity has proved consequential, without even needing to be deepened as we have come to know one another. This familiarity had potential. But whereas on the previous occasions (all too infrequent), the other person had become my confidant, when Don Juan turned up the opposite happened: his eyes sought me out first, and he immediately made it clear that the role of confidant for the story he had to unload was reserved for me.
Still, that farm boy on the run so long, long ago and the Don Juan before me had something in common. Both of them offered an image of festiveness. Indeed, that panting boy stumbling by had been dressed in his Sunday best, the standard outfit worn by country folk for going to church. And today’s Don Juan was also festively dressed, though in an outfit that went with the blue May sky. Furthermore, his fleeing, like that fleeing long ago, itself exuded a festive air. Except that the glow that surrounded Don Juan came from inside him, whereas the boy’s—well, where did it come from? No glow had emanated from him personally, none at all.
Had the motorcycle in hot pursuit got stuck in the Rhodon valley, still swampy in places even today? The roar of the engine kept coming from the same spot. No more revving. The vehicle hummed evenly, almost peaceably, at a distance. Don Juan and I positioned ourselves by the dip in the wall, and both of us peered out. Half hidden by the pale green riparian forest, a couple was sitting on the motorcycle, which at that very moment was turning and then chugged off, weaving in and out among the alders and birches. Apparently the enclosed grounds of the former monastery of Port-Royal-in-the-Fields still had the power to offer asylum. No one could be pursued inside its walls. Whoever entered was safe for the time being, no matter what terrible things he had done. Besides, the expression in the couple’s eyes revealed that this Don Juan was not the one they had been chasing. The one they wanted to kill was different. The woman looked especially confused. The man even gave Don Juan a friendly wave as they rode off.
As would be expected of a contemporary and/or classic couple on a motorcycle, these two were all in leather, black leather, and wore helmets that resembled each other as only helmets can. Needless to say, the hair of the apparently young woman in back billowed out from under her helmet, and was some sort of blond. Riding along, the two of them, the man and the woman, looked rather like brother and sister, even twins. What counteracted that impression was the way the woman had her arms around the man from behind, and also the fact that under their leather outfits they were clearly stark naked. The two of them had pulled on their suits in a hurry, and all the buttons, snaps, and zippers were open, so that anything that could flap open was doing so. Leaves, blades of grass, bits of snail shells (along with remnants of snails), and pine needles clung to the half-bared back of the man, but only to his. The young woman’s shoulder blades seemed a flawless white. At most we saw a plump poplar seed sticking to them for a moment—before it blew away. These were no brother and sister who had jumped on their bike and sped off, perhaps to confront Don Juan and destroy him. I puzzled over the pine needles on the man’s back, pressed deep into his skin. For the entire Port-Royal region had only deciduous trees.
Don Juan’s face, which was rather broad and flat, remained blotchy for a while, just as I had imagined Feirefiz’s, Parzival’s half brother, whose mother was a “Mooress,” when I read Chrétien de Troyes. Except that Don Juan’s blotches were not black and white like his predecessor’s but red and white, dark red and white. Also, the pattern was confined to his face, not spread over his entire body like my Feirefiz’s. Even his neck was free of blotches. So only the surface of the redskin’s face was checkered like a chessboard. His eyes were large, and hardly clouded from running; nor were they altogether devoid of mirth. I should consider him as real as anything could be, he told me, and he snapped shut the switchblade in his hand. Then he indicated to me that he was hungry. Sweaty and dehydrated though he was, he did not ask for something to drink but rather for something to eat. And when I, the chef, promptly went in to fix something for him, I was making it plain that I understood him. And how real this person was! I no longer recall the language in which Don Juan addressed me on that May afternoon near the ruins of Port-Royal-in-the-Fields. Whatever: I understood him somehow or other.
I had pushed all my lawn furniture into a corner formed by the wall, and was intentionally letting it rot. So now I brought out a chair from the kitchen for my guest. He walked backward to reach it. On this, the first day of the week that Don Juan would spend with me, I initially assumed that his habit of going backward allowed him to keep his eye on any danger or threat—for instance, from the motorcycle couple. But I soon noticed that his expression was not vigilant in the slightest. He certainly looked awake, but not watchful. Nor did he dart glances in one direction and then in the other or over his shoulder; as he backed up, he gazed straight ahead in the direction from which he had come. For someone like Don Juan, I would have expected this direction to be either the west, with the castles of Normandy and those monasteries still in operation in and around Chartres, or, more likely, the east, with the former residence of the Sun King not that far away at Versailles, and most likely Paris, not much more distant. But he had come running and hurtling into the Rhodon valley from the fields to the north, where the new towns of the Île-de-France were located, blocks and blocks of apartment houses, the towns’ centers occupied almost exclusively by office buildings, the closest of these new towns being Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. On the other hand, that direction made sense in conjunction with the leather-clad motorcycle couple. And wasn’t there at least one fir tree between the Ville Nouvelle and the ruins of the old abbey here, one in particular: The lone cedar on the edge of a residual patch of woods? The most splendid and sturdy growing thing in that entire landscape?
While I cooked for Don Juan, I watched him through the open window of my ground-floor restaurant kitchen—the house had only that one floor, though it was spacious. As he sat out there in the May sunlight, he began to watch me bustling about. Now and then he would get up and place a few ingredients on the windowsill for me, items he dug out of the pockets of his dress coat. No need for him to explain that he had collected these delicacies along the way while he was on the run. Yet the sorrel, stalks of wild asparagus, the St. George’s mushrooms, with their characteristic springtime scent of freshly ground flour, did not give the impression of having been snatched or dug out in blind haste. Don Juan was used to being on the run
and had had plenty of practice. He was in his element, or in one of his elements. Not that being on the run meant he had no fear and anxiety. Rather, fear and anxiety made him see better, more clearly, more spatially. This more spatial seeing: Didn’t it result from the fact that while running he repeatedly whirled around and sometimes also ran backward? And at the same time he had even managed to prepare his finds for cooking—pared, rinsed, and scrubbed them. So running away helped Don Juan gain time? And I was almost irked that he, the newcomer to this area, had found all these fairly well hidden delicacies just like that, these treasures for which I, the longtime resident and expert, had been peeling my eyes all spring, to no avail. A good while before April 23, the Feast of St. George, for whom these tastiest of all “little knights” were named, I had been stung by young nettles as I searched along the edges of all the forests in the western Île-de-France for even one of these round, pale harbingers and embodiments of the new year—impelled by a hope that, according to one of the books I was still reading, increasingly took on “an impudent quality.” And here this interloper deposited an armful of these ardently desired mushroom caps on my kitchen counter, so long bereft. On the other hand, little knights: not a bad match for him and for the story to come.
Don Juan edged his chair closer and closer to my kitchen window. It inspired him, he said, to watch me cook. Inspired? In what way? He sat there as if collapsed into himself. That impression was reinforced by the tall grass, which I had not mowed for weeks—on purpose. With its tawny coat, the cat looked like a lion as it brushed through the grass. This cat belonged not to me but to one of the houses in Saint-Lambert-des-Bois, the only village near Port-Royal, a good kilometer or several spear tosses away (my property’s only neighbors were the ruins of the monastery and the old pigeon tower); that afternoon the animal climbed over the wall on schedule and kept me company at a distance for a while, after which it resumed its rounds to god-knows-where. Not once, when it paid me its daily visit, had this cat greeted me properly, something I kept hoping for almost peevishly. In the cat’s eyes, I did not exist. But it rubbed up against Don Juan and kept weaving between his legs, from in front, from behind, and so on. Swarms of butterflies, of different varieties and colors, also fluttered around the newcomer, a veritable battery of miniature flags, pennants, and standards; and more than a few of the butterflies even alighted on him, especially on his wrists, his eyebrows, his ears, sipping the beads of sweat that welled up constantly as he rested, all the more prolifically as a result of his flight; he served them as a drinking trough. And I saw the muskrat that lived under the rotting lawn furniture, the shyest creature I had ever met, sniffing at Don Juan’s toes, its whiskers relaxed as if it had not a care in the world. And as I stepped outside, carrying the tray, an enormous crow was just flying over, holding something like a tennis ball in its beak, which it promptly dropped to the ground within Don Juan’s reach, a passion fruit, probably snatched from a stall in the market—wasn’t it market day in Rambouillet, not that far off? And at almost the same moment, a second crow, even blacker and more massive, which had been hiding unnoticed in the foliage of one of my trees, a horse chestnut whose leaves had unfurled during the previous week, came hurtling out—a bursting as if the trunk were exploding—and shot into the air after the first crow, while a hail of branches cascaded from the tree’s crown, dead or broken branches, forming a nice pile of firewood in the grass.