by Peter Handke
And thus a saying has come into use among us: even though we give each other a wide berth when we happen to meet, etc.—which does not mean the same thing it means elsewhere—sometimes the other person calls out to me, “I saw you!” which implies, however, neither a warning nor a threat, but the opposite, and along with “Not to worry!” and “Who’s counting!” is one of the greeting formulas regularly heard in the Hondareda region.
And besides, it is only superficially accurate to say that the immigrants hardly communicate with each other and at most utter a few empty phrases: precisely by means of these empty or coded formulas, which sound strange to an outsider, they convey a number of things to the other person, even beyond ordinary communication; in which case it is always the voice, yes, the voice of the fellow resident, that provides this additional element.
Nowhere else in the world had she, the adventurer, the roamer, heard voices like these here. They were not trained voices, not those of announcers or actors, such as various members of the observation team had. These immigrants’ voices took one by surprise. She understood the observer when he was put off by the inhabitants’ appearance, more vagabondish than hers by x rips in their clothing and y tangles in their hair and z scaly patches on their faces. Yes, they resembled a peculiar cross between knights and beggars.
But: once, long ago, on a street in Paris, or in Palermo, she had passed a similar figure that looked terminally scruffy, and had heard issuing from this seemingly abandoned heap of misery, which had long since lost any resemblance to a human being, a tremulous voice, God! what a voice! And in her mind, she/one had fallen on her/one’s knees at the sound of that tentative and pitiful but oh so vital voice—the voice of a living being if ever there was one—and in reality? one had stopped and listened to that voice, on and on, with one’s back to it, and was sure that the other person was conscious of establishing contact with his voice, at least getting through. How could she be so sure of that? She/one could taste it.
And this same surprising voice rang out, yes, rang out—despite the complete absence of tonality and resonance—from each of her people here in Hondareda.
Without exception they were broken voices, rough and hoarse even in the young people and children. The dying sometimes had such voices, when they were fully conscious—as no healthy person is or any person freed for the moment somehow of all limitations—when they saw their lives, and life in general, pass before them, and were at once filled with zest for life and acceptance of death; or survivors also; or people gratefully exhausted after some mighty task or effort.
These voices resonated for her like—as—no, neither “like” nor “as”: the voices resonated, that was all. (The author likes to slip in the word “resonate,” whether obsolete or not.)
No one else had such a voice nowadays. And besides, the people of Hondareda were not really shabby or ragged in the least—she almost shouted at the observer and scolded him—even the older ones went about in the finest fabrics, with the most elegant cuts, and there, under the mountain sky and close to the trails of wild animals, this seemed infinitely, to the nth power, more appropriate than on models on the catwalk and their imitators sashaying through the megalopolises with rolling shoulders and high-stepping legs—except it happened that the Hondarederos’ garments, which they wore everywhere, even on the spiny savannah and in the coniferous forests, had gradually acquired rips and tears, and in that region people even took pride in this, just look at me! and as far as mending, etc., went, they followed the example of that literary hero of many centuries ago, who left the rips in his garment unmended as a token of the adventures he had survived.
And how could this be: Were my people down there in the glacial trough unemployed, without regular occupations?
This much had again been observed accurately: none of them ever let himself be seen by outsiders engaged in any organized form of work. And, in particular, whatever the Hondarederos did, and especially what they left undone, never looked like work. Except that it was not enough to watch them during their days and nights. And besides, it was wrong to interrogate them about it, or about anything. The trick was to get them to talk by some other means. To get them to talk of their own accord!
In this manner, for example, you would have learned that they do things every day, make things, move things along—without any sign of working or toiling. Yes, they not only have no conventional occupations; they also reject separate professions, along with their labels. And yet, although this is not obvious with any one of them, each is many things in one: producer, manufacturer, tradesman, engineer, entrepreneur, dealer, processor, distributor, and also a knowledgeable customer (of the others). Every time they allowed me to watch them while they were doing something or intentionally leaving something undone, I thought to myself: These are my people, or: These are my kin—and every time—this shows how much I continue to live according to the rhythm of the profession I gave up—I misspoke in my thoughts and said: These are my clients!
And every time I entered their dwellings, even the sight of their shoes in the entryway, of a dog-eared book, of a few hazelnuts, slivers of mica, chunks of alabaster, juniper branches, a black boar ham hanging from the doorpost to cure, made the property seem well managed to me.
Did I just say “property,” rather than shack, grotto, bunker, hut, and so forth? Yes. Where from the outside you see nothing but windowless hovels, I, escorted with the proverbial “inconspicuous hospitality” into the interior, see, if not “crystal palaces,” at least spaces offering rich vistas of the outdoors, all the way to a variety of horizons, and that is no mere glorification, or my reaction against the palatial dwellings that I often perceive as worthless rubble, but also the eye of the trained manager: of a person who sniffs out value and makes sure it bears fruit.
As was already stated: I have always felt driven to bring something to the others, “my kin,” not so much to help them as to help some undertaking along, to suggest ideas to them in conjunction with it—to speed them on their way. What all did I not bring back for my brother and then for my child, and in what direction did I not speed the one and the other? I? Yes, I.
But I came here to Hondareda empty-handed, with nothing but my gaze. And with it I saw, and let the people here see, just as they first let themselves be seen—a seeing, one move at a time, as in business negotiations, yet fundamentally different—that their actions as well as their inaction—apart from any impression of work, effort, strain, muscular exertion, brow-furrowing—prefigured, or sketched, a kind of management that had never before been practiced in just this way, of entrepreneurship, value creation, treasure extraction.
What was new about them was that they never approached their diverse forms of action and inaction (which included reading, looking, etc., as action? as inaction?) with a plan for the day, let alone the year: another unspoken principle shared without prior consultation by the Hondarederos, adopted from a loafer of the previous century, a Swiss loafer! according to whom it was incompatible with human dignity “to make preparations.”
Very often, when she was the guest of one of them, deep inside his house or in his hidden garden—how cordially she was welcomed every time—and observed him going about his day, it happened that the other person, male or female, just sat there for a while or squatted on his or her heels, alternately gazing into space and reading, reading and gazing into space, or likewise gazed into space and alternately tasted something, sipped something, or, in general, from the beginning and also in between, stared absentmindedly at the book, into the air, at the flowerbeds, into the trees, or into the cooking pots, as she had once observed among many inhabitants of her vanished Slavic-Arab village (for which the expression “He [she] is gazing into the idiot box again” was used, or also, borrowed from the game of chess, “the Slavic defense”).
But then suddenly, with a light-footedness very different from the sluggishness and groaning of her fellow villagers back home, who were worn out at an early age, her host wo
uld get up from his place, silently and swiftly, and perform some operation on a piece of work in a distant corner of a room or the orchard, write something at the desk in an even more distant room, push a tub containing a fruit-bearing plant into the light in a third room fathoms away, hang out a piece of wash to dry in the wind on the line above the boundary wall, and was already back in his place, reading, tasting, doing nothing, as if he had not moved at all and had accomplished everything only with his fingertips.
And she was even tempted, in the presence of such effortless managing—entailing nothing but looking at things, combined with finger dexterity—to come up with one of those wordplays of which the observer next to her was so fond: a new form of brilliance was coming to light.
In any case, this was no longer the contemporary economy, in which the forecasting and bringing to fruition she saw as appropriate to her profession had been displaced by sleazy, greedy speculation. In the new economy here—her silent speech almost became audible at this point—instead of such dangerous, fantastical notions, something else was at work, in operation, and in effect: that incomparably more productive and constructive form of imagination that represented a value in and of itself and deserved that designation, which, again according to the Swiss loafer, is “warming-up,” illumination, revelation “of that which exists.”
Yes, in the Pedrada-Hondareda area economic activity consisted of imagining, and lighting a fire under, and putting in the right light, that which already existed. And a corollary was that letting things go and leaving things alone for now was more fruitful than action; and that in the case of such an innovative economy, the word “inspiration” applied first and foremost to things that it was both good and necessary to leave alone. What a boost leaving things alone gave in the direction of even better things. How I would have contributed to their economy if I had not arrived too late; or if only theirs had not been a lost cause from the outset here in the former glacial hollow—and not because of the glacial hollow.
Yes, indeed, if she had not arrived too late and if they had not been a bunch of losers from the moment they immigrated here, and a lost people (and here the observer threw her a glance, as if he understood what she was saying, although her speech to him continued to be silent), she would have established, together with them down there, a type of economy never before attempted. For such an economy was sorely needed, and all over the world.
Together with the founding fathers of Hondareda she would have taken the elements that were available there so plentifully and so full of promise and developed a new system of use and consumption, of saving and spending, of storage and distribution.
Nothing usable would have been thrown away anymore, even the smallest fragments: use, expend, buy, employ, yes, time and again, in a constant and stimulating cycle and in invigorating variation—but for heaven’s and the earth’s sake, not an iota, a flake, a drop, a knife-tip, a tea-or tablespoon, a smidgen (detergent, fruit-tree fertilizer, pepper, salt), not a grain (pill, sugar, flour), not a crumb, screw, nail, scrap of firewood, match, soap bubble, fingertip, not a dozen, three, two, or even just one of any item of use and consumption over and above what was strictly necessary—although in this new economic system the very strictness would have had a liberating effect, and how!
In such an economy, instead of the brutal distinction between sinister winners and wretched losers, equilibrium would have finally prevailed and, as could be observed at times between vendors and customers in public markets, a general cheerfulness; to paraphrase the saying that God loves the cheerful giver, spending, saving, storing, paying, taking money, producing, trading, consuming, would have gone hand in hand, all intensely cheerful.
Simply in the way the individuals in Hondareda allowed themselves to be seen in their daily life, this possible economy was prefigured, she thought: in the way each living space in their dwellings was simultaneously a studio and workshop and storeroom and shed and laboratory and library, and so forth.
For if I had not arrived too late and if the people of Hondareda had been a little more open to outsiders, their pattern of action and inaction could also have helped shape a new way of life, as is fitting for an economy. I could use such a new way of life. And so could you, my observer. And now enough of this talk of a different world order. Let us leave the question open. This is a story, and it should remain open.
Just one last comment on the money economy: there is no other realm in which God’s will and the work of the devil seem to lie so close together. And: when it came to money matters, one could not help making a hash of things. And: in the meantime, money was causing more pain than gain. And yet: engaging in economic activity as a sort of salvation, “I have kept the faith—I have engaged in economic activity.” And then again: “So much money!” just as one might say in disgust, “So many people!” And then again: Perhaps the power of money was the least cutthroat, in that it did not hide behind religious dogma? Managing economic activity was bringing things together?
Why, during your entire time here, did you remain the reporter on the outside? Your guiding principle, “No, I will not go inside, for no one is there!” may be accurate in most situations, but not in the case of this high-altitude hollow, which may be stripped of its future as early as tomorrow.
It remains true: no video- and no audiotape could capture what I experienced in Hondareda. And no film could tell the story of the Hondarederos. They are not a subject for a newspaper feature, nor does their story fit into a film, not even one set in the Middle Ages or whenever. For all that exists of their story is internal images: it takes place primarily inside: inside the garden and house walls, and in general indoors. For if you, my freckled observer, had entered even one time and had let yourself enter in, once inside you would have recognized from the interior images that the people here, in contrast to the externals you observed, are by no means incapable of playing, or played-out. There is sometimes a playing and dancing inside them that is a joy to behold.
The same thing applies when, as often happens, their head is in danger of dropping from exhaustion: whereas elsewhere people nowadays deny tiredness as something shameful, the people here try to resist it by transforming it into a game, recognizable as such only to themselves.
One of the most common games here: in a crowd and in narrow passageways, to avoid each other, squeezing into the most confined space and making oneself thin, thinner, thinnest. Altogether, these games or dances take place in the most confining space and often for no more than the twinkling of an eye—and are therefore also utterly inconspicuous and altogether invisible from the outside. But how much composure they gain from a dance like this, lasting only a second.
All their internal games and dances consist of these avoiding and skirting and countering motions, a balancing of contradictions: and in addition to recaptured composure, they give them fresh strength and a new outlook, contribute to conversions: of tiredness into alertness, of timid recoiling into calm gazing around, of getting out of the way into discovery of new ways, of getting lost into finding one’s way to some other destination entirely. These are transformative games and dances that produce a reversal, growing precisely out of failures and false starts. One could thus, with more justification, characterize the dancers of Hondareda as “transformers” than as scientists, engineers, planters, animal husbandmen, bakers, shoemakers, shepherds, hunters, gatherers (yes, really), readers, writers, technicians, carpenters, breadwinners, gardeners, merchants.
They transform the bustle in the streets and town squares—after all, up here in the mountains they are not out of this world—into a dance of haste: by slowing down inwardly, not outwardly, they transform slavish haste into briskness. And they accomplish all those actions and operations that are otherwise inevitably accompanied by annoying sounds and noise either by merging the sounds into a sequence, like relaxing dance music, or, when the person nearby, a grandson, a neighbor, a person entrusted to them, is sleeping or ill, by becoming quieter and quieter in th
eir actions, a special art, which, entirely unlike a disturbing complete absence of noise, fans the person sleeping or sick in bed in the next room or next building with relief and rocks him to sleep. A dance and a ballet like this quieting dance is something you, my observer, have never seen, and you will never see it anywhere else, and you will not see it here anymore, because with my departure it will no longer be here to be seen.
And you, my Herr Cox or Jakob Lebel, you reporters sent here from elsewhere, suspect these players and dancers of the internal world of being the evil enemies, the mortal enemies, of those who sent you on this mission, and therefore also your enemies. And the chief reason for your suspicion: the contrariness among the new settlers here, culminating in their relationship to numbers and, a critical element in the remote-controlled furor against the new settlers, above all their relationship to time.
And it is true: you outsiders have a way of experiencing and measuring time that strikes the Hondarederos as harmful to reality. Not that they would have the temerity to throw myths at you and charge that in your attitude toward time you are repeating the murder of the first of the gods, the god of time, progenitor of all the other gods. But they do accuse you—and see you in turn as their enemies—of stripping time of its reality, humiliating and desecrating it, with your way of measuring, dividing, manhandling it; instead of letting time play an active role in life, actually enlivening life, time as the life of life, even if one does not see anything supernatural or divine in it.