by Peter Handke
During our seven days Don Juan had stopped letting me serve him all the time; he lent a hand himself. I had always found it difficult to accept help, especially given my small kitchen, but the limited space even made for a certain pleasure when he was there. It was already a pleasure, mixed with envy on my part, to watch him at work. Not merely that Don Juan was almost dizzyingly dexterous; he managed to carry out completely contradictory actions with both hands or arms, the sort of thing that had always brought me to the brink of despair in my profession, and not only there. I am capable of hopelessly messing up even the simplest operation—for instance, pulling something with my right hand while pushing something else with my left. For him, however, it was no problem to slice an onion with one hand while rolling out dough with the other, let us say. The same was true of rolling with one hand and dotting with the other, piercing and smoothing, hollowing out and filling, throwing and catching, emptying and filling, as if in a single, coherent movement. While his right hand was roughing something up, his left was smoothing it. While he plucked at something, he pounded. While he spooned something out, he was crushing something else. While he was sawing, he was driving screws. While he was tugging, he was stroking. While he was turning a page, he was hammering a nail. And with all these actions, left-handed and right-handed, Don Juan proceeded with perfect control, slowly, and apparently slowing down even more, as if he were mindful, of a person or a thing, while carrying out any operation. That is how I saw him at work.
Now the seven days in the garden were past, and gradually that impression dwindled. Don Juan seemed increasingly clumsy to me. He reached for the wrong object, dropped things, acquired two left hands. Besides, he kept looking at the clock, and mentioned the date of even the most trivial happenings. The book containing Pascal’s letters to the provincial resident of Port-Royal, from which he had read aloud in the evenings and which had made us laugh as only Molière’s comedies could do otherwise, remained unopened. I saw Don Juan give in to a compulsion to count. He counted, at first only moving his lips, then out loud, his footsteps, the buttons on his shirt, counted the cars in the Rhodon valley, counted when a flock of swallows swooped over the garden, even tried to count each of the poplar-seed clouds. Yet it was something other than boredom. Time had not become boring to Don Juan. It was not that there were too few events or significant moments; on the contrary, there were too many, far too many. Every moment—every thing—was significant, and time had become fragmented into a second, a third thing or person. Instead of the coherence that a sense of time created, nothing but details, no, isolated elements. Instead of slow and careful he now seemed awkward and ponderous, or clumsy, as I said, or he rushed and was equally clumsy. Don Juan was having trouble with time. And every other minute he asked me what time it was.
To let him leave would not have changed anything. And I did not want to let him go so soon. Besides, he himself did not want to leave Port-Royal yet. So on the day before Pentecost I took Don Juan along to the village churchyard of Saint-Lambert. Seeing only my garden from morning till night: perhaps that contributed to his time-sickness. But going out into the apparent freedom of nature and stretching his legs did no good. For Don Juan the landscape remained an interior in motion, no different from my house with its walled garden. To look at him, one would have thought he was imprisoned under a thick glass dome. At every step he bumped into a tree, stumbled off the path into the wetlands along the Rhodon, swiped at a mosquito, which was actually a wild dove flapping along high overhead. The time crunch he had blundered into also made him lose his sense of distance and space. When we finally came in sight of the wonderfully broad plateau of the Île-de-France—which I involuntarily thought of as “mine”—I exclaimed, “Look at that sky!” whereupon Don Juan merely asked, “What sky?” When one of his shoes lost its sole as we were going uphill, and I commented that that was a sign of good luck, he answered, “Anything but good luck, please!” which meant something different from his repeated exclamation during our days in the garden, “Boldness, not love!” He hobbled behind me like a clubfoot, hanging his head, whereas the previous week he had always marched in front, directing me toward a distant goal with his eyes alone. The animals especially became his enemies. Whereas in the course of the week the cat from Saint-Lambert had lingered longer and longer on her rounds and finally had even brought company with her, now, as we walked along, Don Juan felt under attack from the butterflies and the newborn dragonflies. The tiny jumping beetles were now jumping at him. The most innocuous spiders were hurling poisonous threads in his face. The first early crickets sounded to him like annoying clocks being wound, the first grasshoppers swishing through the grass like even more aggravating ticking. And although we had hardly any encounters, I heard behind me his constant, furious counting—counting of animals, of misfortunes, of mistakes.
What struck me on the way to Saint-Lambert, however, was how much had changed there since the seven days spent with Don Juan’s story. As I had always hoped, foreigners had finally moved into the village. At least the one store there, which had seemed closed for good, was open now as if for its first day—its grand opening—and in the doorway stood an Indian in a turban, while a young Chinese couple came around the corner, holding the map of hiking trails in the Port-Royal area. Altogether, after my week with Don Juan, all these distant neighbors (yes, neighbors) seemed rejuvenated. The old-timers, the money-hoarders as well as the stingy senior hiking groups, had disappeared from the region. I sensed business booming. And something had changed even in the few remaining longtime residents, as I noted when we passed through: for the first time in all these years I was seeing one or the other outside the usual terrain between their houses and the expressway. They were in the riparian forest, picking the wild cherries, which had just ripened, along the edges of the woods, picking the first wild strawberries. The few times when I had encountered such a gatherer previously, he had been ashamed of what he was doing (or had not been from around there); but now all these people, foreigners as well as locals, were out gathering perfectly naturally, if not self-confidently, and I was able to imagine that all of them, the new ones in the village as well as the old ones out here, would soon become good customers of mine.
For Don Juan, however, even these few people were far too many. They deprived him of what little space he still had, and threatened to push him out altogether. He counted the scattered figures in the seemingly vast Île-de-France as if they were members of an enormous hostile army. On the one hand he became strangely polite; he, who during the previous week had always waited until others greeted him, now was always the first one to utter a greeting, but so awkwardly, and at such a distance, that his greeting was not even registered at first, or if it was, then not as a greeting. On the other hand he seemed almost abrasive. He did not merely bump into the Asian couple, who were walking along holding hands. He rammed the two of them apart, forcing his way between them, head lowered, and it was not mere clumsiness, for at the same time he was uttering curses: What a disgrace that lovers from the Middle Kingdom were now holding hands in public, and so forth. But Don Juan’s time problem, his suddenly erupting “tactlessness,” manifested itself most clearly, it seemed to me, in his new desire for music, of whatever sort. Whereas previously during our time together he had scrupulously avoided music more than anything else, now he seemed positively addicted to melodies, rhythms, notes. He asked me in all seriousness, while we were still in the cemetery, whether I didn’t have a Walkman with me.
Even there he at first continued his tirade of counting and cursing. He counted all the graves and cursed the caretaker, from whose lodge a clothesline was strung across the graveyard, as so often in France, with not only tablecloths but also sheets hanging out to dry, “and red checked ones, too!” I would have been tempted to laugh, had he not been quivering. Don Juan was trembling. He was shaking, and not in any rhythm. The only moment when it stopped was when he contemplated the empty row in back, between the Saint-Lambert graves, dedi
cated to the memory of the nuns of Port-Royal, who had once been branded as heretics and driven from their cloister because they had deemed divine mercy something that could not be taken for granted and was not readily available to everyone. (In his history, Jean Racine, who attended their school when he was very young, honored those women by calling the region of Port-Royal “un désert,” which in his day meant something more than merely “a desert.”) At that moment Don Juan described the trench or hollow that allegedly holds the remains of the nuns as “sublime,” whereas normally this word describes something elevated, something rising above its surroundings.
Another moment for a time out came as we sat on a backless bench behind the churchyard, by what had once been a playground, an artificial mound with steps up its side, hardly any wooden treads left, only the eroded clay, a little pyramid that had taken on a conical shape and was now overgrown with brush. At our feet was sand with little depressions where sparrows usually bathed, each of the depressions renewed annually in the same spot by the current crop of birds, and all the birdbath marks in the sand forming a sort of constellation, Ursa Major. The Great Bear and sparrows: that went well together. Don Juan counting the hollows; this time without the counting compulsion. And along with it the sighing with which I was by now so familiar. Who was it who said that sorrow had to be something that weighed one down? Then it was Don Juan who brought up the sky, when he finally raised his head and exclaimed, “Now that’s a sky for you!” Finally children showed up after all, two of them, to play. They played a couple madly in love, gasping and groaning, and in the end both their tongues were hanging out.
When we got back, in front of the inn at Port-Royal the servant’s car was parked at last. It was just as I had pictured it from Don Juan’s story: an old Russian model. The servant himself, however, was at first different from the way I had imagined him, as was usually the case with those I had come to know only from hearsay. Involuntarily I looked for the scratches and bites on his face. But it looked perfectly fine. Only his moustache seemed to be singed in one spot, and what I at first took for a very un-servant like ruff turned out to be one of those cervical collars that people wear after suffering whiplash. As we approached, the servant stayed in the car, sitting bolt upright and staring straight ahead. Although we stopped in front of and next to him, it was as if he did not notice Don Juan and me. He was in the middle of a monologue that could have begun infinitely long ago, his voice almost inaudible, like that of a sleepwalker, and this was all I could make out:
“. . . woman and death. Whenever I went to you, I was prepared to meet my death. In fact you came hurtling toward me as if to kill me, but then you fell into my arms.
At least in the beginning. The danger of suffocation came afterward. The imprint of your cheek on the window, which I haven’t wiped off to this day. Even from the doorway you cast a shadow that darkened the entire house for me. Oh, how I took pleasure in your darkness. You had hardly arrived when I no longer knew my way around my own room, and not merely because you immediately filled it up and moved everything around, and then moved it around again. Only back in the deserts, in the Arabian and Chilean deserts, were we man and woman. Ah, how your sparse hair, streaked with gray, moved me. Breathing in your smell made me sing, and when I sing that really means something. And once you were lying there, you lay there, and lay, ha! only a woman can lie that way, and lie, and lie, and between you and me lay your child and pressed its damp diaper into my face all night long. How unmistakably you were where you belonged, a woman alone, without a man, in charge, as only a woman can be. ‘Come!’ you said to me, and thought, ‘Die!’ Why didn’t I simply let you pass—which you prefer to do anyway, and which makes you most exciting, in passing? Back to the deserts with you. In this country you now live in a constant rush, and still think the way you go storming through cities and suburbs from morning till night is beautiful. What a mistress of little signs and allusions you used to be—and what do I need more than little signs—and now you have no time for even the smallest of signs. No more messages on the windshield, under the doormat, in my jacket pocket; no more notes in my shoes, to be felt only after I have left you and am walking down the street, no more allusions—the more mysterious, the more durable. ‘You are very much desired,’ I told you. And you: ‘By whom?’ And I: ‘By me.’ What free hands you had in the desert, and how weighed down you are of late, wherever you go, how you drag yourself along, so unlike the way you were during that time in Africa and as a Bedouin. Where are you, women? Ah, instead only deals being offered, at bargain prices. Ah, but how seeing your buttocks passing still fills me with hope, with joie de vivre. Why in the world did I set out every day to find you? To get rid of my male crudeness, to penetrate your secret. And now? Trapped in even more dismal crudeness. I will stroke, shake, rattle, and beat the child out of you, you fiend of a woman. Next to us the leech that grew fatter and fatter while we made love. As you were grabbing my predecessor between the legs, you cast your first glance at me over your shoulder. You want to see me dead, woman, so you can mourn me. My neck injury was no accident; my head jerked back by itself, with the force of a heavy stone. I go looking for you, and when you refuse to show yourself, at least I will have gone looking. You wonderful unavoidability. Go ahead and croak. And tomorrow is Pentecost.” Here the servant suddenly turned to his master, Don Juan, and his tone changed: “Hey, why don’t you interrupt me? I can speak clearly only when I’m interrupted. And you, you keep silent on purpose, to let me go on flailing around.” And getting out of the car: “Ah, I can express things only by talking in circles and taking detours. Ah, if only I were a poet. Ah, isn’t it powerful that I’m here, and that at the same moment I have a hundred different things in my head. Ah, not until she slipped out of her clothes did I notice that she had nothing on. And even though she undressed in front of me, there were no clothes falling to the ground. That made her all the more naked. Who can understand that?”
As the three of us were having supper together, my inn was suddenly surrounded by women. Thinking back a week later to that bright evening in early May, I can hear piercing war cries, which in actuality were never uttered. Likewise I see the six or seven women all dressed in white. Instantaneously—the old term “straightaway” would describe their arrival better—they were there outside the walls, coming from all directions, one landing as if with a parachute, the other riding up on a horse, the third seeming to have just dismounted from an elephant, and so on. The women gazed at me grimly when I was the first to show myself through one of the slits in the garden wall, and they made me think of that forest of pointed spears I had once seen passing, over the top of the Port-Royal walls—which, however, when I saw it again outside the gate, merely belonged to a group of young athletes on the way to the field where they practiced the javelin-toss. “Fort Royal” (instead of “Port-Royal”) came to my mind at the sight of those beautiful women laying siege to us. And they were beautiful, I can tell you that. Don Juan had not been exaggerating when he used the expression “indescribably beautiful.” Even I, who saw myself as long since out of the running when it came to women, promptly thought, in spite of all the grim faces, “Count me in again.” With these women something could still happen—God knows what. And once more I thought the sky was playing a role that day: ah, all those women there beneath the sky. Even if all the signs suggested that their intentions were anything but good, I was captivated by them. When those women out there act in unison, things will be popping! Except that these women did not act in unison. They did not so much as notice one another. The others did not exist. Even if one of them had run the woman next to her over, they would not have noticed each other. Each of the women was laying siege to Port-Royal by and for herself. Each of the “indescribable beauties” clearly existed without the others.
Yet one thing of beauty or another did become describable for me, as was fitting in the presence of those women. In the hill forests around Port-Royal the edible chestnuts had just come into bloo
m, and the cream-colored strings of blossoms hung down among the dark oaks like crowns of foam atop waves, seething on all sides in the area surrounding the ruins, and from the silent surf rose, at the very top, back on the Île-de-France plateau, the pale red roof of the former cloister stables of Port-Royal, a roof with a tile landscape more beautiful and strange and yet more dreamily familiar, as part of a barely discovered planet, than anything I had seen before, and the swallows swooping above it into the last sunlight moved twice as fast, as if propelled by the light. Of course down in the Rhodon valley the poplar seeds were drifting by again, the last batch, so to speak, whirled straight up in the air from the furrows in the paths, meadows, and plowed fields, interlocking more and more to form airy balls and scarves, and eventually piling up like fleeces at the women’s feet, stuck together, while individual seeds continued to swirl around them, tickling their ears and noses, which the women acknowledged with slight grimaces and also with sneezes, without any softening of their grim expressions. A slapping sound in the air of that May evening as if from the soles of running children, yet none appeared. In the meantime the weapons in the hands of the women laying siege to us had come to resemble gifts.
“It’s time!” I heard Don Juan saying behind me. A triple sighing became audible; the servant sighed, too, and yes, I did then as well. When Don Juan showed his face instead of mine in the loophole, the grim expression in the eyes of the six or seven women darkened even more, except that now it was grim in a different way. The faces they made now: wasn’t the tickling of the poplar fluff to blame? A week later, I no longer see them as a number. If the question were asked: numbers or letters? I would reply: letters. What adds to that impression is that Don Juan is moving his lips as if he were spelling something out. Although it “was time,” he gave himself time. The animals in my garden—the strange cat, the stray dog, the goat—also seemed to want to prevent him from stepping through the gate into the great outdoors. One animal dashed between his legs in a panic, another blocked his way, the third even stuck out a leg, obviously meaning to trip him.