by Peter Handke
Eventually the Damascus sandstorm escalated to the point that it became monotonous after all. Except that after the previous melody, with its rising and falling notes, what one could hear from the iron latticework was not a monotonous howling and shrieking—although it was that, with an undertone of roaring—but the mighty finale. By then the two of them, the woman and the man, were lying behind the stretch of wall and listening. In the midst of all this Don Juan’s heart was almost breaking from sorrow. But precisely this restored his strength. It allowed a person to transcend himself. The sorrow made one leave the personal behind. And its presence worked wonders. In the midst of the darkness and the storm, colors appeared. In the foliage of a half-stunted cherry tree in the rubble, the red of cherries suddenly became visible above the couple, without any obvious source of light. With blackness all around, a bluing of the sky. A powerful greening on the ground, which crunched under them. In this panic-stricken world, Don Juan felt at home. This world, if any, was his own. And there he came together with her, the woman. In the panic-stricken world they found each other.
Some language or other had the expression “in no time” for a certain kind of time or duration: “In no time he got from A to B.” And Don Juan often used this expression, and often, though in a somewhat different sense, for the story of the seven days of his womantime. In no time, for instance, as he lay with the woman beside him in that Damascus rubble, it was morning. In no time the sandstorm had given way to a softly whiffling prematutinal wind, “from Yemen,” as the woman remarked out of the blue. Already roosters were crowing, city roosters as well as Syrian country roosters. Already turkeys were gobbling all around—no, they had been gobbling all night long. Already peacocks were screeching—no, they, too, had screeched that way all through the night. In no time the voices of the muezzin were summoning people to morning prayers from the minarets, either live or on a crackling phonograph record or a buzzing tape. Instead of the sand, billows of exhaust fumes. Already contrails in the sun, already swallows, flashing upward in their swooping flight, already the glow of the poplar-fluff tufts as they drifted along high up in the air. And what was that squealing and bellowing, a persistent howling: here among the Arabs it could not be a hog on its way to the slaughterhouse; as the whimpering and sobbing now revealed, it could not be an animal at all—but neither could it be a person, at least not a big person, a grown person; or maybe it was an adult after all, abandoned by God and the world and crying as otherwise only a child would, and at least all the previous night, and continuing from now on without end.
The moment came when Don Juan and the woman returned, by mutual agreement, to ordinary time. (He noticed a bit later that in her case this was not entirely true, and as a result he had no choice but to get away as fast as possible.) They did not part immediately. He accompanied her home. She gave him her necklace, with Fatima’s protecting hand. They breakfasted together, and her child, who was awake now, ate with them. At the table the child sat next to the stranger as if nothing were amiss. It took Don Juan’s presence more than for granted. It beamed at him wordlessly, as if it had been expecting him for a long time. This stranger, whether he stayed or not, was a friend. Here a child took the place of the bridegroom in the Caucasus.
His servant was asleep in the next room at the inn. No response to Don Juan’s knocking. The door was not locked, and he went in. Pitch black in the room, the window shutters closed tightly. Then a glow appeared, from a cigarette, and the next moment another, next to the first. No sounds except from the inhaling and exhaling of the smoke, in duplicate each time, and this continued for quite a while, until Don Juan tiptoed over to the window, as quietly as if he were the servant and the two in the bed his masters, drew the curtains apart, and even more quietly, if possible, pushed open the shutters. In the meantime the couple continued to draw on their cigarettes, without appearing to be blinded at all by the sudden daylight; it was like a nocturnal scene in a film. They acted at first as if the third person were not even there. For his part, he did not look at them directly, concentrating instead on the morning bustle out on the street, but from his quick glance at the servant and his woman he had gained an even more vivid and lasting impression, one that stayed with him long after his departure from Damascus. By the way, he told me later, if one refrained from looking directly at a thing and instead just brushed it with a glance, the image could burn itself onto one’s retina in a way that no purposeful observation or contemplation could. Be that as it may: what he took in of his servant’s new lover was only her striking ugliness or disfigurement, caused by acne, chickenpox, or leprosy scars, and along with that a shamelessly blissful smile, while her lover, whose bite marks or scratches from the previous days seemed to have healed overnight, puffed calmly on his cigarette while constantly plucking at the girl’s hair, breasts, and, most insistently, her overly long and of course also crooked nose, with a facial expression in which fury and pleasure, tenderness and disgust, satiety and hunger, yearning and guilt, were inextricably blended (the latter had nothing to do with his master’s appearing on the scene).
A week later, as Don Juan revisited that night and the next half day spent in Damascus, he offered the following meager details: a couple on the street below in front of the inn, the woman, already old, walking at a great distance behind the equally old man, a distance that remained the same, even though she seemed to quicken her pace and the man in front of her seemed to slow his. (A similar couple had also passed by in the Caucasian village, except that there the man was behind the woman, far behind, and she was walking slowly, while he was pumping his arms, his legs trotting along.) And a bird had sped from one grassy patch to the next, like a frog. And a child at a spring had tripped over the rocks around it and had tried for a long, long time to hold back tears. But then . . .
On the way to the enclave of Ceuta—this, too, in retrospect more a way than a journey—Don Juan was overcome by a monumental yawning. But it was not the kind of yawning caused by tiredness, like that of his servant, who was seated several rows behind him, as if he were a complete stranger, a fellow passenger who seemed to have no connection to his master during long stretches of their travels together. Don Juan’s yawning was the sort that set in when one had barely skirted some danger. That was how one yawned after so-called last-minute rescues, hauled back to terra firma from the brink of a precipice, or in certain war comedies, actually not so funny, when the hero has just lit a cigarette in the middle of a battle and finds that all he has between his lips is the butt of a butt—that is how close the enemy bullet whizzed by his head. It was a hearty yawning. Now life, or his story, would not merely putter along somehow. Whisked to safety, Don Juan saw himself as more on the alert than ever. Confident that his safety was merely temporary and of short duration, he could also revel in it on the way through North Africa, while any other kinds of safety would have had the opposite effect.
Such reveling soon awakened happy anticipation of the woman, the stranger, who would be his lot at the next way station, and he in turn would be hers, and meanwhile he was looking forward, on this third day of his woman-week, not merely to the next one but also to the one after that. And at the same time he hauled his sorrow from one station to the next; his inconsolability. In this fashion a plan gradually took shape, without any effort on his part. He saw himself peacefully engaged in flight; his fleeing was peace itself; only in fleeing did he become so calm. Uneasiness seized hold of Don Juan again only as the next way station and the encounter with the woman approached. When it was almost upon him, he would have had no objection if a higher power—a fire, an earthquake, even the end of the world, for all he cared—had intervened. But during this period he soon realized that nothing could prevent the encounter. The state of war under way in Ceuta even made this encounter imperative, “as stated previously.” From one day to the next no higher power intervened than that between him and the woman. Yet not a word about “love” from Don Juan. That would have merely attenuated what occurred.<
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As for the woman in Ceuta, Don Juan told me hardly more than that their first and definitive encounter took place far from any organized event. She did not follow him from a celebration or from any other busy scene to an isolated spot. She was there from the beginning, somewhere near the mined strip along the border, with its multiple rows of razor wire, which nonetheless did not prevent the peoples of the surrounding Moroccan and the more distant Mauritanian deserts from smuggling themselves by way of Ceuta, which was claimed by Spain, across the Mediterranean to the promised land of Europe. He was strolling behind the fortress there, and all of a sudden she was behind him. The woman followed him in that steppe of packed sand the way men supposedly follow women on the street, except that she never pretended that she merely happened to be going in the same direction or was headed for another destination altogether. He was her destination. Thus, whenever he looked back, she did not hide, either behind bushes or ruins—nor did she hide herself, not her eyes, not her shoulders, not her body; she pursued him with long strides, her arms akimbo, her head raised, her gaze fixed unwaveringly on him. Now and then she also tossed pebbles at him, actually empty snail shells. Now and then she seemed to have disappeared, and Don Juan liked that. He lay down on the bare earth, on his stomach, and fell asleep, and when he woke up he saw the woman walking around him in a circle, lit up by the spotlights along the border, which flashed incessantly, without a sound. And that was not all, he told me: her circles grew smaller and smaller, and finally the woman hiked up her dress and climbed right over the man lying there, and not only once but again and again, saying not a word, barefoot. And only then did Don Juan notice that the young woman was pregnant, and not in the early stages, either.
Later he spent much more time with an entirely different woman in Ceuta, a woman with whom not the slightest thing happened, as he immediately made clear. The following morning she came into the bar at the station from which the ferry departed for Algeciras. She was on the arm of his servant, and sat down next to Don Juan. She described herself as a vagrant and a conqueror, and he offered only an approximate account of what this conquering vagrant dished up for him.
She said she had once been the beauty queen of this Spanish enclave. It could not have been that long ago, yet apparently she was the only person around who remembered this fact. At first sight she seemed shapeless—Don Juan avoided using the expression “heavy,” and certainly the term “fat” never crossed his lips. In her shapelessness she was nonetheless self-confident, even brassy, and thus it was not surprising that the servant had become involved with her—as was evident. While the woman was talking to his master about herself, he kept gazing at her from the side with that expression, familiar by now, of mingled revulsion and devotion. This time, however, his attitude revealed a third element, an air of abasement, and the revulsion was merely feigned, the devotion on the other hand slavish. It was also clear that she was not the one sitting next to him but that he, the man, was sitting next to her—at her side, merely tolerated, someone she was allowing to keep her, the woman, company for a while.
She had always—even as a child? yes, perhaps even as a child—wanted to get back at the opposite sex. There was no basis for this desire for revenge, not the slightest. She had not been raped by her father or her grandfather or an uncle, nor had she been cheated on or jilted by a lover. Very early in her life it had been enough if some boy looked at her in a certain way, not even on purpose, merely in passing—and from the beginning it was almost impossible not to notice her—and immediately she would react with the thought: That’s it. Revenge. I’m going to get you. No sooner said than done, even when she was still a child. The boy would be lured into an ambush, then allowed liberties that made him completely vulnerable, and finally, as if nothing had happened (and in fact nothing had happened, nothing at all; it had all been for show, a dance of the seven veils), sent packing or made to “walk the plank,” if possible in front of an audience, a male audience if possible, one member of which, thinking he was the new favorite, would become the next victim of her revenge campaign, and so on up to the present day: just as the schoolboys of long ago, robbed by her of all their illusions and banished from the world of childhood, would never find their way into a proper man’s world, now she wanted to emasculate the grown men who became involved with her day after day and were promptly sent packing. Her revenge took the form of making them unsure, after their encounter with her, whether they were male or female. And she told Don Juan that it was not thirst for revenge but a passion for revenge. This passion manifested itself, in conjunction with her sexual passion, by the way, in the moment of her copulating with any man, and was promptly satisfied. She wanted him out of her. She did not even give the man the satisfaction of witnessing her rapture. As far as he was concerned, nothing had happened. A rude awakening from the most profound male dreams for him, to whom she had initially appeared as the paradise he had been seeking. “I was crazy. I am crazy. I will be crazy.”
Yet this conqueror and avenger enjoyed the company of men more than that of women, incomparably more, infinitely more. And she said so in a voice that held not a trace of menace or scorn. Her tone was positively tender, and with that tone her face, as well as her whole body, emerged with a lovely suddenness from their shapelessness. Without any effort on her part, her lips took on contours; instead of bulges flaring nostrils appeared, and both eyes, suddenly and beautifully large, opened wide. Some of this, to be sure, was a deliberate effect; as she herself then demonstrated, achieving this transformation without the aid of cosmetics was part of the repertory she had early practiced in front of the mirror, thanks to which she had incidentally beaten all her rivals and become the beauty queen of Ceuta, going on to become Miss Spain. Yet practice played no part in what happened with her skin; as she conversed with the men (not “man,” not “men” in general, but “ the men”), despite the fact that her youth was long past, her skin became blooming, smooth, and glowing. And this was not the smooth face of one bent on revenge, taut and unyielding. Apparently, as one could tell from the few lines still visible on her forehead, it was a soft smoothness, receptive though not needy, rosy, with lips that now looked pale by contrast. What became taut and ready for action was her body. Only men counted for her. Women: the very word repelled her. Only men: now this one, then that one, then another, and yet another—they alone were worthy of consideration. And with each of them, as was clear from the outset, without her formulating any plan, she insisted on revenge. Every man, whoever he might be, was to be won over, made to do her bidding, then finished off.
In the bar of the Ceuta ferry station she now demonstrated this process to Don Juan on his servant, openly setting her sights on yet another man. All she had to do was cast her eyes over the place, and he came to her table, as if on command. She whispered something in his ear. He did not reply, just waited obediently in a special at-attention posture, in fact slavishly, for what would come next, for her further instructions. She then named a particular place, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, and an approximate time in the evening. He already had a ticket for the trip across the straits to Europe, but would put that off, or—as one could immediately tell by looking at him—cancel his plans altogether. She got up to leave, without smiling, as indeed she had shown no expression all the time she was talking, as if the person listening were not even there. And in parting she did not favor her lover from the previous night with so much as a glance, even though he was there beside her, any more than she acknowledged his possible successor. Instead she turned to a couple snuggling in a corner of the room: “You two, mooning at each other like co-conspirators—you are so wrong about last night. On the contrary, both of you should be staring into the distance, bemused and bewildered, each of you bemused all alone.”
Now she noticed Don Juan, and it was different from before: he was the one who made himself noticeable to her, as Don Juan; he did not say how (and I had long since stopped wanting to know). She recognized him
and recoiled. Recoiled as from an apparition? As from the apparition. She had to get away from this person, her judge and executioner. It was true that she needed someone, needed this man or that intensely. But this particular man was the last she could have any use for. Never again should he set eyes on her. She could not grant him power over her, not for a second. No one could be allowed to prevent her from continuing to take revenge, not even this man. And thus the dignified departure of the former Miss Ceuta became an escape. In the end it was she who fled from Don Juan, and unlike his escapes, hers took place head over heels, without a moment’s reflection, blindly, including movie-style collisions with the ferry passengers, knocking-over of metal drums, and the like.
It was also at that third stop during the week’s travels that Don Juan opened his heart to his new servant. It happened as the two of them were sitting across from each other on the ferry benches. The other man was cowering there, white as a sheet, and it had nothing to do with the storm-tossed sea in the Strait of Gibraltar. People who had suffered embarrassment and humiliation like that were his people, Don Juan told me without explaining why, or, even in the form of this one man, they were his entourage, and in return he felt a powerful urge to provide a sort of escort for them, for him, even if it simply amounted to standing by them, or him, in silence. Thus, as they were about to sail from Ceuta, he had hauled his servant’s luggage onto the boat—the man had almost three times as much as he did. He had found the best seat for him and taken it upon himself to show their tickets. And thus, too, he kept his servant company during the crossing and watched over him, staying by his side while at the same time looking away from him as the rocky enclave of Ceuta and the North African coastline receded into the distance, his back turned toward Europe as it drew near. And all of a sudden a flash emanated from the man that made Don Juan turn involuntarily and look at him. Tears had welled up in his servant’s eyes, from one moment to the next, without a sound. And at the same time the man was grinding his teeth, as if to work up the appropriate rage to go with the tears. And the droplets of blood on his neck seemed to have just congealed. Needless to mention that the warming poplar seeds were migrating back and forth over this inlet, intersected on the perpendicular by masses of May hailstones, which, as they struck the waves around the ferry, caused innumerable sharp little fountains to shoot up.