by Peter Handke
He was not the one who then initiated the exchange of glances with the bride. She fixed her eyes on him first. This happened in a hall, but seven days later he saw the young woman not under a roof but under the clear blue sky. The wedding party was eating at a long table, and the guests who, like him, had turned up unannounced, of whom there were not a few, had been seated without any fuss at a number of small tables. Don Juan was shown to the smallest table, in the most distant corner of the hall, without its feeling like a slight. Rather it was a combination of hospitality and considerateness, part of which was that he had the table to himself and at the same time could survey the entire hall, together with the village landscape outside the windows. His servant was apparently a member of the extended family and had a seat at the head table, from where he repeatedly came over to Don Juan’s table and relieved the waiters of the necessity of serving his master.
Don Juan told me how startled he was to find the bride looking at him. It was not a come-on, just a widening of the eyes. Such beautiful eyes, and without any effort she made the most beautiful eyes at him with those beautiful eyes. And Don Juan’s startled response was by no means alarmed. It was a sudden yet quiet awakening after a sleep lasting many years, or, more precisely, being in a daze. Quiet: because the constant murmur of his interior monologue suddenly ceased. His forehead seemed to open up. Yet at first he still felt racked by confusion. His mind once made up, he rose from his seat and then strode—toward her?—out of the hall.
The decision had been made at once, however. There was no going back. For Don Juan avoidance was out of the question; he had to take on this unknown woman; it was his duty. (Even though he did not constantly use the term “duty” in the presence of me, his listener, it was often implied.) By the evening of this day at the latest, an epoch in his life would come to an end, and indeed he now saw it as an epoch. The Caucasian village was located on a fairly bare rocky formation. As he traversed it in increasingly large arcs and then struck out into the surrounding pastures and fallow fields, taking one detour after another, he felt certain this was the last time for an indefinite period that he would register all the allegedly small or insignificant things that for an entire epoch had meant the world to him, more than any thing or any person. As in an earlier time, in a past long since inoperative, the phenomenon of woman would crowd out the thousands of little things, mundane but all the more lovable, would leave them no breathing space. Woman as a curse? As the curse of aridity?
At that point Don Juan did not yet know that this time he was wrong, at least in this respect, was wrong primarily about himself. So now, as he was tracing his arcs, he was saying farewell. The snow-covered expanses in the mountains to the north for the coming period or perhaps from now on would hold no reality for him. The hissing of the wind in the brambles: play that for me one more time, you bushes. The funeral procession, hardly more than a couple of older folks and a child following a casket up ahead, while behind him the wedding music changed, from the folk songs with which it had begun to more transcontinental tunes: just a brief lingering with you mourners. Farewell, clay yellow and marl red. Take care, labiate broom blossoms and ant trails. Goodbye forever, tufts of wool caught on the pasture fences.
Conjuring up that epoch no longer worked. The new era, the womantime, had him in its thrall; its force or effect had set in at the very moment Don Juan got up from his table in the corner and headed outdoors. And soon he was more than merely reconciled to the new era. To be sure, it signified danger! But that lit a fire under him again, at long last.
On his way back to the village, dogs cleared out of his way. A village cat, which could equally well be a wildcat, was rolling on its back under some bushes, and then kept brushing between his legs. Large black flying beetles attacked him, their buzzing swelling to a dull roar, or at least they were pretending to dive-bomb him. To Don Juan animals had always seemed like messengers—whose message he could not know and also did not want to know. And he treated them with special courtesy, addressing the pigs, the donkeys, and the ducks in the dried-up village pond as politely as people of substance, speaking to them in complete sentences, carefully chosen, old-fashioned, yet contemporary sentences. Whenever things got serious he began to speak in this manner, and that included his silent conversations with himself.
How lovely and good this long period of solitary roaming had been, without friendships, without enmities. He had harmed no one, had promised nothing to anyone, had had no obligations to anyone. And now he was on duty. And soon he would hurt, perhaps destroy, someone. Don Juan was fully aware, as he bowed toward the woman, that he had to expect to make an enemy (and he did not mean the bridegroom or the bride’s father or brother), and in anticipation he even saw himself, or part of himself, as a kind of enemy, as the coldest, most evil sort of enemy. What to do? In removing himself from the fray, he would become a swindler and a traitor. In going to her, sooner or later he would inevitably turn her into the woman he had abandoned, the woman bent on revenge, though perhaps only in thought, which was often even more powerful from a distance. How lovely and good his solitude had been, and how sinister and tasteless, yes, ridiculous. Whatever would be would be. This much was certain: to evade the woman who wanted him now would be a particular kind of abandonment—a particularly cowardly and shameful form of desertion.
At the threshold to the wedding hall, Don Juan used a leaf from the lone tree in the courtyard to wipe the dirt off his shoes. He rubbed his hands with a bunch of wild thyme. He opened and closed his eye several times fast, meanwhile slapping his cheeks rhythmically, as the heroes in old movies do after applying aftershave. Inside, the dance music resumed after a considerable pause, and instead of circling in time to the music, he balanced on one leg and looked back over his shoulder and up at the sky, which appeared to him more open than ever before, while at the same time his dead child came to mind, a thought more painful than any other. How fruitful, how incomparably substantial and spatial the sky could appear when one looked up at just the right moment—still appeared—no object more spatial, no space more substantial. And from this moment on, all that was over, at least for the present. Not unlike a shoemaker who steps from the sunny street into his dim workshop, to spend the rest of the day there, or a miner who disappears down his mine, and not for one shift only, Don Juan stepped over the threshold, back into the hall; these are the images at any rate that came to him as he was telling the story.
Previously he had taken in not only the bride but also various others in the hall. He saw his servant, for instance, bantering with the ugliest woman present and laughing excitedly, as one might with a real beauty. He noticed especially that the young fellows kept going to an open window and spitting in the direction of the Caucasus, perhaps an ancient wedding custom. He saw the orthodox priest arriving from the neighboring village after a long hike over hills and through rocky gullies. His floor-length black soutane was spattered up to the knee with yellow clay and pollen from the broom blossoms. Standing in the doorway, he raised the fingers of his right hand and moved them first vertically, then horizontally through the air, blessing all those present, while his deeply tanned face, not sweaty in the slightest, glowed, and a longish object, very thin, and light in color, with a pointed end, stuck out between his lips—a toothpick. He saw all the wedding guests, including the infirm and the children, stand up as best they could for a succession of toasts—at least those who were sitting down—all ears for the person or subject being toasted, and saw that for the duration of the toast it remained ah, so quiet in the hall.
Now there was nothing and no one but the unknown woman. Even before this moment the bridegroom at her side had hardly been present, or present at most as a silhouette, no, not even as a silhouette, as just a shoulder, a flash of white shirt, a moustache. Now he no longer mattered at all. He was completely interchangeable, not even a placeholder or a substitute—a meaningless X in the equation to be solved. It was an equation in which only two givens counted: he, Don Juan
, and she, the bride over there. Which bride? No bride was sitting there anymore, only the woman. And this woman, like all the other women who in one way or another became his in the course of the week, indescribably beautiful.
He went on to tell me that as he remained standing in the doorway he saw her as close up and as large as through a telescope, and above all as exclusively so—as, for instance, one can focus one’s binoculars on a single cherry, or train one’s telescope on the moon, a full moon, which fills the entire lens, without a trace or a wisp of the surrounding night sky. And she had no need to look at him specifically; a second glance on her part, and the equation would promptly have lost all value; for she was worth something, was worth more than anything else in the world at that moment.
Don Juan was no seducer. He had never seduced a woman. He had certainly run into some who had accused him of doing so. But these women had either been lying or no longer knew what they were thinking, and had actually intended to express something altogether different. And conversely, Don Juan had never been seduced by a woman. Perhaps now and then he had let one of these would-be seductresses have her way, or whatever it was, only to make it clear to her in the twinkling of an eye that there was no seduction involved and that he, the man, was neither the seducee nor the opposite. He had a kind of power. But his power was of a different sort.
He, Don Juan, was in awe of this power. Perhaps he had been less self-conscious at one time. But for a long while he had been reluctant to use that power. He told me straight out, and in a tone that suggested neither pride nor vanity but was almost casual, that the women in question, at least in this story he was telling now, recognized their master in him, not at the first moment of meeting, but rather later, in the moment of coming to know him. The other men had been, and would be, what and who they happened to be, and those women regarded him, Don Juan, as their master, their sole master, for ever and ever (without “lord and”). And as such they laid claim to him almost (“almost”) as a savior of sorts. Savior from what? Simply savior. To save them from what? Simply to save them. Or simply: to get them, the women, away from here, and here, and here.
Don Juan’s power emanated from his eyes. It was superfluous to mention that this was not a technique he had developed. He never intended or planned any such thing. Nonetheless he was conscious in advance of the power or the significance conveyed the moment he laid eyes, or rather his eye, on the woman, not conscious in a masterly way but rather an almost anxious way.
The manner in which he avoided for as long as possible looking straight at the woman could easily be mistaken for shyness or cowardice, and it actually was, he told me, something like shyness, but cowardice not in the slightest! Once his eye came to rest on her, it meant: now there was no going back, for both of them, and it was a question of more than the present moment, or one night.
A philosopher once characterized Don Juan’s desire as irresistible, even “victorious,” perceived as it was by women as unconditional. But his story, as he told it to me, had nothing to do with victory and desire, at least not his, Don Juan’s. On the contrary, the situation was that with his gaze—and not with his looks, which were rather inconspicuous—he unleashed the woman’s desire. It was a gaze that took in more than her alone, and different things, a gaze that extended past her and let her be, and thus she knew it was directed at her, and appreciated her; an active gaze. Enough of playing around while walking down the street, while sitting and standing on railway platforms and at bus stops: at last things were turning serious, could turn serious, and she experienced that as a form of liberation.
From Don Juan’s eye on her and additionally on the space around her, this woman came to a realization of how alone she had been until then, and recognized that this moment would promptly put an end to that. (During this entire week it was only lonely women of this sort whose paths crossed his.) Becoming aware of loneliness—the energy, pure and unconditional, of desire. And in the woman this expressed itself in the form of a demand, as unspoken as it was powerful, indeed “victorious,” a demand that, if it came from a man, even such a solitary man, would certainly have no effect. Additionally, this demanding rendered the woman, even if she was a beauty to begin with, more beautiful still, beautiful to the point of impossible-to-be-more-beautiful, whereas for a man such an expression . . .
Don Juan left open the ending to the episode with the bride from the Caucasian village, both in general and in detail. Nor did I want to hear any particulars, at least any definitive ones. Besides, the ending had been clear to me from his very first sentences. As was his habit, he described the actions primarily in the form of negations, especially when he became the active party, or he simply skipped over them, as something not worth mentioning. Thus it was enough for him to say that from the door to the hall he did not head for the young woman. And he had not thrown himself at her, or anything of the sort. Nor had they slipped out together to the next room or the outdoors. Nor had they exchanged a word, not “Come!” or “Now!” or “It’s time!” And although they had been together without shyness or shame, as completely as two people can be together, openly and in broad daylight and surrounded by all the wedding guests, no one had had eyes for them, let alone noticed or seen anything; the alternative system of time that went into effect with their conjoining, however that came about, resulted in their no longer being visible, rather like those moving bodies that the human eye is not fast enough, but also not slow enough, to perceive as moving.
Don Juan did tell me, however, about various other things from this day that had stayed with him, in the fore-front or back of his mind. He had one action of his own to report, though a rather minimal one: after he had finally circled toward the bride and with his gaze revealed himself dutifully to her from a distance, he had taken a few steps backward and thus created a magnetic field, to which the young woman yielded without hesitation, as if it were the obvious thing to do. Worth noting, perhaps, that when actions did occur in his narrative, Don Juan merely reported them quickly, whereas when it came to inner states and complications, he repeatedly gave himself plenty of time.
What made it easier for the two of them to approach each other was an incident that almost ended with a death. One of the guests got a fish bone stuck in his throat and was in danger of choking. The entire hall went into an uproar when the man jumped up from his seat, uttering piercing shrieks, which changed more and more into howling and whimpering, then into gasping, and finally into soundless flailing in all directions. By now the man had crumpled to the ground and was thrashing around on the floor, his face so dark red it was almost as black as an octopus. The people crowding about were shouting all kinds of advice as they bent over him. Except that the choking man could not hear anything at this point, and he convulsively spat out the chunks of bread that were stuffed into his mouth on the theory that they would push the bone down. In the end it was a look that then made him come to himself, and all this time he had been scanning the room pleadingly for such a look. Anyone could have supplied it; no special ability or training was necessary. For a moment he calmed down, and that was enough to allow others to help. They pounded him on the diaphragm, et cetera, and soon someone pulled the bone, or whatever it was, out of his throat, and so on.
It was not merely this person but the entire company gathered there in the hall that seemed to have been brought back to life. The others sat with the man, now that he was saved, and groaned, panted, and so forth, in sympathy. From one moment to the next, death had been omnipresent, and each of the guests had felt it break out in, not break into, his very own personal midst, and there was no one whose sense of life, no matter how tenuous, had not been enhanced by this outbreak of death, if not increased to the maximum, if not to the utmost. What joyful dancing now ensued, and among those thronging to the dance floor were some who had never danced before or had not danced in a long time, and the dancing was not wild or extravagant, at least in the beginning. And conversations sprang up among the few uninvited guests a
lways expected at a Caucasian wedding and between relatives who had been on bad terms for ages, these conversations animated by the sudden increased flow of wine at the tables, on which, as was also customary in Georgia, several bottles were plunked down at once, even on the small tables. And here and there one saw a child, without benefit of wine, fervently kissing and hugging its father or mother, and it was clear that in the past these children had never embraced their parents, even fleetingly.
Don Juan and the young woman, now face-to-face as a result of the general tumult, had long since stopped breathing. Something else was breathing in their stead. When their time was then up, in a last blaze of gleaming splendor, which was both a privation and a deprivation, as minimal as it was crushing, and at the same time—as far as Don Juan was concerned—an acceptance of deprivation, they laughed, let go of each other, and turned away, their gestures and movements exact mirror images. He escorted the bride back to the bridegroom at the long table, walking a few steps ahead of her. What astonished him, experienced though he was from previous encounters, was that the gleaming and silent laughing persisted as they made their way there. The wooden floorboards gleamed. The apples from the previous fall, actually quite shriveled and dull, laughed and gleamed in a bowl. Even the spiders and daddy longlegs in the smoke-stained ornamental plaster molding had a sort of gleam. And outside, through the windows: what a sky! And he had not seen such clean snow in an eternity. Even the rushing of the wind had a gleam to it, accompanying the accordion inside the hall, the only instrument playing just then, so softly as to be almost inaudible, and not a folk song or a hit tune but a melody from The Magic Flute—an operatic aria interpreted with an accordion: again, Don Juan had not heard anything so tender in an eternity. They took each other by the hand, both hands, as if parting for a lifetime. He parted from her enthusiastically: the paradise of parting.