Jukebox and Other Writings

by Peter Handke

  It was beginning to get dark, and outlines were blurring. The only highway signs pointed to distant capitals such as Barcelona and Valladolid. So he set out down the street with his heavy suitcase—he had been traveling a long time and had intended to stay in Soria into the New Year. He had found several times that the centers of these Spanish towns, which at first glance seemed almost invisible, were somewhere down below, beyond steppe-like stretches without houses, hidden in the valleys of dried-up rivers. He would stay here at least for the night; this once—he actually felt it as a sort of obligation—he had to get to know the place, now that he was here, and also do it justice (although at the moment, shifting his suitcase from one hand to the other every few steps and trying to avoid bumping into the natives, just beginning their evening ritual of strutting along, straight ahead, he did not succeed), and besides, as far as his “Essay on the Jukebox” was concerned, and in general, he had time, as he told himself now, as often before, in this instance using a verb from the Greek, borrowed from his reading of Theophrastus: s-cholazo, s-cholazo.

  Yet all he could think of was running away. For his project, one friend or another had offered him, who for some years now had been roaming about without a home, his second apartment or third house, standing empty as winter came on, with silence all around, at the same time in a familiar culture, above all with the language of his childhood, which stimulated (and at the same time soothed) him right there on the horizon, to be reached at any time on foot. Yet his thought of running away did not include going back to where he came from. German-speaking surroundings were out of the question for him now, as was, for example, La Rochelle, with French, which was like second nature to him, where a few days ago he had felt like a stranger in the face of the wide Atlantic, the squat, pastel houses, the many movie theaters, the depopulated side streets, the clock tower by the old harbor that reminded him of Georges Simenon and those of his books that were set there. Not even San Sebastian with its much warmer air and clearly visible semicircular bay on the often turbulent Bay of Biscay, where just a short while ago, before his eyes, the floodwaters had surged upstream at night along the banks of the Basque Urumea River—while in the middle the current had flowed toward the sea—and in a bar, unlit and cold, as if it had been out of operation for years, stood a jukebox, made in Spain, clumsy, almost without design. Perhaps it was a compulsion in him that he forbade himself to run away, to retrace any of his steps, permitting himself only to move on, ever onward across the continent—and perhaps also a compulsion that now that he found himself without obligations and commitments, after a period of being much in demand, he felt that to get started on writing he had to subject himself, if writing was to have any justification at all, to barely tolerable, inhospitable conditions, to a marginal situation that threatened the very basis of daily life, with the added factor that, along with the project of writing, a second project had to be essayed: a sort of investigation or sounding out of each foreign place, and exposure of himself, alone, without benefit of teachers, to a language that at first had to be as unfamiliar as possible.

  Yet now he wanted to run away, not only from this town but also from his topic. The closer he had come to Soria, the intended site for writing, the more insignificant his subject, the “jukebox,” had appeared. The year 1989 was just coming to an end, a year in which in Europe, from day to day and from country to country, so many things seemed to be changing, and with such miraculous ease, that he imagined that someone who had gone for a while without hearing the news, for instance voluntarily shut up in a research station or having spent months in a coma after an accident, would, upon reading his first newspaper, think it was a special joke edition pretending that the wish dreams of the subjugated and separated peoples of the continent had overnight become reality. This year, even for him, who had a background devoid of history and a childhood and youth scarcely enlivened, at most hindered, by historic events (and their neck-craning celebrations), was the year of history: suddenly it seemed as if history, in addition to all its other forms, could be a self-narrating fairy tale, the most real and realistic, the most heavenly and earthly of fairy tales. A few weeks earlier, in Germany, an acquaintance, about to set out to see the Wall, now suddenly open, where he was “determined to be a witness to history,” had urged him to come along so that these events could be “witnessed by a person good with imagery and language.” And he? He had used the excuse of “work, gathering material, preparations”—immediately, instinctively, actually shrinking from the experience, without thinking (though picturing how the very next morning the leading national newspaper would carry, properly framed, the first batch of poems produced by the poetic witnesses to history, and the following morning, likewise, the first song lyrics). And now that history was apparently moving along, day after day, in the guise of the great fairy tale of the world, of humanity, weaving its magic (or was it merely a variation on the old ghost story?), he wanted to be here, far away, in this city surrounded by steppes and bleak cliffs and deaf to history, where, in front of the televisions that blared everywhere, all the people fell silent only once, during a local news item about a man killed by collapsing scaffolding—and here he wanted to essay the unworldly topic of the jukebox, suitable for “refugees from the world,” as he told himself now; a mere plaything, according to the literature, to be sure, “the Americans’ favorite,” but only for the short span of that “Saturday-night fever” after the end of the war. Was there anyone in the present time, when every day was a new historic date, more ridiculous, more perverse than himself?

  He did not really take this thought seriously. Of far greater concern was the realization that his little project seemed to contradict what was occurring, more and more powerfully and urgently with the passing years, in the deepest of his nocturnal dreams. There, in the dream depths, his inner pattern revealed itself to him as an image, as image upon image: this he experienced with great force in his sleep, and he continued to dwell on it after awakening. Those dreams insistently told him a story; they told, though only in monumental fragments, which often degenerated into the usual dream nonsense, a world-encompassing epic of war and peace, heaven and earth, West and East, bloody murder, oppression, rebellion and reconciliation, castles and hovels, jungles and sports arenas, going astray and coming home, triumphal unions between total strangers and sacramental marital love, with innumerable, sharply delineated characters: familiar strangers, neighbors who came and went over the decades, distant siblings, film stars and politicians, saints and sinners, ancestors who lived on in these dreams transformed (as they had been in reality), and always new to the children, to the child of the children, who was one of the main characters.

  As a rule he himself did not appear, was merely a spectator and listener. As forceful as the images were the feelings this person had; some of them he never experienced while awake, for instance reverence for a simple human face, or ecstasy at the dream blue of a mountain, or even piety (this, too, a feeling) in the face of nothing but the realization “I’m here”; he was acquainted with other feelings as well, but they did not become pure and incarnate to him except in the sensuous intensity of his epic dreaming, where he now experienced not gratitude but the very essence of gratitude, likewise the essence of compassion, the essence of childlikeness, the essence of hatred, the essence of amazement, the essence of friendship, of grief, of abandonment, of fear in the face of death.

  Awakening, as if aired out and leavened by such dreams, he felt spreading in waves far beyond him the rhythm he would have to follow with his writing. And again, not for the first time, he was postponing this task, in favor of something inconsequential? (It was those dreams that engendered such thoughts; no one else had authority over him.) And his habit of thinking that, transient as he was, he could commit himself only to occasional pieces—after all, Simenon’s short novels, most of them written abroad, in hotel rooms, could hardly be said to have epic breadth—wasn’t that again, as his dream reproached him, one of those excu
ses he had been using for too long now? Why didn’t he settle down, no matter where? Didn’t he notice that his travels were more and more just a kind of aimless wandering?

  When the “Essay on the Jukebox” had been merely a glimmer, he had had in mind as a possible motto something Picasso had said: One made pictures the way princes made their children—with shepherdesses. One never portrayed the Pantheon, one never painted a Louis XV fauteuil, but one made pictures with a cottage in the Midi, with a packet of tobacco, with an old chair. But the closer he came to carrying out his plan, the less applicable this painter’s saying seemed to a writer’s subject matter. The epic dreams manifested themselves too powerfully, too exclusively, and also too contagiously (infecting him with a yearning to translate them into the appropriate language). He was familiar with the phenomenon from his youth, yet always amazed at how, toward the winter solstice, night after night these dreams turned up, predictably, so to speak; with the first image of half sleep the gate to narrative swung open, and narrative chanted to him all night long. And besides: what did an object like the jukebox, made of plastic, colored glass, and chromed metal, have to do with a chair or a cottage?—Nothing.—Or perhaps something, after all?

  He knew of no painter in whose work there was a jukebox, even as an accessory. Not even the Pop artists, with their magnifying view of everything mass-produced, non-original, derivative, seemed to find the jukebox worth bringing into focus. Standing in front of a few paintings by Edward Hopper, with isolated figures in the dim bars of an urban no-man’s-land, he almost had a hallucination, as if the objects were there, but painted over, as it were, an empty, glowing spot. Only one singer came to mind, Van Morrison, to whom the “roar of the jukebox” had remained significant forever, but that was “long gone,” a folk expression for “long ago.”

  And besides: why did his picture of what there was to say of this object immediately take the form of a book, even if only a very small one? After all, wasn’t this thing called a book intended, as he conceived it, for the reflection, sentence by sentence, of natural light, of the sun, above all, but not for the description of the dimming artificial light produced by the revolving cylinders of an electrical device. (At least this was the traditional image of a book that he could not shake off.) So wasn’t a small piece of writing like this more suitable for a newspaper, preferably for the weekend magazine, on the nostalgia pages, with color photographs of jukebox models from the earliest times to the present?

  Having reached this point in his ruminations, ready simply to drop everything toward which his thoughts had pointed in recent months (“Be silent about what is dear to you, and write about what angers and provokes you!”), resolved to enjoy his time for a while, doing nothing and continuing to be a sightseer on the Continent, he suddenly experienced a remarkable pleasure in the possible meaninglessness of his project—freedom!—and at the same time the energy to get to work on this little nothing, though if possible somewhere other than in this world-forsaken town of Soria.

  For the night he found a room in a hotel named after a medieval Spanish king. Almost every strange place he had encountered on his travels that had seemed at first sight insignificant and isolated had revealed itself to him, when he set out to walk it, as unexpectedly spread out, as part of the world; “What a big city!” he had marveled again and again, and even “What a big town!” But Soria, to whose narrow streets he entrusted himself on that rainy evening, did not expand, even when he groped his way in the dark out of town and uphill to where the ruined citadel stood; no glittering avenida; the town, nothing but a few faded boxlike walls at the bend in the narrow streets, revealed itself to him, as he then wandered from bar to bar, all of them almost empty already, enlivened now by the repetitious siren songs of the slot machines, as an all-too-familiar Central European town, only with more blackness within the city limits—the winter-deserted oval of the bullfighting ring—and surrounded by blackness. He had already concluded that nothing remained to be discovered and generated there. But for now it was nice to be walking without luggage. The front row of a bookstore’s display consisted exclusively of books by Harold Robbins—and why not? And in a small square toward midnight the damp, jagged leaves of the plane trees glittered and beckoned. And the ticket booths of the two movie houses, the Rex and the Avenida, had their windows, almost invisible, as only in Spain, next to the wide entrances, looking directly out on the street, and inside, half cut off by the frames, showed the face of what seemed the identical old woman. And the wine did not have a small-town taste. And the pattern on the sidewalk tiles in the town of Soria consisted of interlocking squares, rounded at the edges, while the corresponding pattern in the city of Burgos had been battlements? And the Spanish word for equanimity was ecuanimidad. He made up a litany with this word, alternating it with that Greek word for having time.

  In his dream, a hundred people appeared. A general, at the same time an epigone of Shakespeare, shot himself out of sorrow at the state of the world. A hare fled across a field, a duck swam downriver. A child disappeared without a trace, before everyone’s eyes. The villagers, according to hearsay, were dying from one hour to the next, and the priest was completely taken up with burials. (Strange, the role of hearsay in dreams—it was neither said nor heard, but simply moved silently through the air.) Grandfather’s nosebleeds smelled of damp dog hair. Another child had the first name “Soul.” Someone proclaimed, loudly this time, the importance of hearing in these times.

  The next day—it remained rainy, and according to the newspaper, Soria was again the coldest province in Spain—he set out for a farewell stroll through town. Without having intended it, he suddenly found himself standing before the façade of Santo Domingo, its age immediately revealed by its dimensions and the light sandstone, worn smooth in many places by the wind. What a jolt he always received from Romanesque structures; he at once felt their proportions in himself, in his shoulders, his hips, the soles of his feet, like his actual, hidden body. Yes, corporeality: that was the sensation with which he now approached, as slowly as possible, this church shaped like a grain box, in a wide arc. In the very first moment, taking in the delicacy of the surface with its rounded arches and figures, he had thought of a phrase used by Borges, “the brotherliness of the beautiful,” yet at the same time he was overcome with reluctance to absorb the whole thing at once, and he decided to postpone until evening departing for who knows where, and before leaving to come back again, when the daylight on the stone carvings would have changed. For the time being, he merely tried to identify variations in the groups of figures, already dear and familiar to him. And variations there were (without his having to look for them very long), as always in Romanesque sculpture, and they appeared to him again as the secret emblems of the place. Here in Soria they were visible as far as the eye could see: the solicitous way God the Father bent at the hips as he helped the newly created Adam to his feet; the blanket, almost smooth in one representation, in other portrayals consistently lumpy, under which the Three Kings slumbered; the acanthus leaf, shell-shaped, the size of a tree, that rose behind the empty tomb after the Resurrection; in a semicircle above the portal (in almond form the outline of the smiling father with the likewise smiling son on his knees, balancing the thick stone book), the allegorical animals representing the Evangelists, crouching not on the ground but on the laps of angels, and not just the apparently newborn lion cub and the bull calf, but even the mighty eagle …

  As he hurried away, he looked back over his shoulder and saw the delicately carved housing—all the more clearly its emptiness—standing, in the expression used by the cabaret artist Karl Valentin, “out in the open”: from this vantage point, the structure, as broad as it was squat (all the apartment buildings around it were taller), with the sky above, in spite of the trucks roaring by, offered a positively ideal image: the building, so utterly different from the rigid façades surrounding it, appeared playful, active precisely in its tranquillity—it was playing. And the thought came to him
that back then, eight hundred years ago, at least in Europe, for the duration of one stylistic period, human history, individual as well as collective, had been wonderfully clear. Or was that only the illusion conveyed by this absolutely consistent form (not a mere style)? But how had such a form, at once majestic and childlike, and so readily comprehended, emerged?

  Soria, as became apparent now by day, lay between two hills, one wooded and one bare, in a valley sloping down to the Duero. The river flowed past the last, scattered houses, on the other side a vast expanse of craggy land. A stone bridge spanned the river, bearing the road to Zaragoza. At the same time as the arches, the newly arrived observer noted their number. A gentle wind was blowing, and the clouds were in motion. Down there, among the leafless poplars along the bank, an excited dog was chasing the leaves that swirled up now here, now there. The reeds were flattened into the dark water; only a few cattails stuck out. The stranger—strange?—given access here by the locale—struck out in the opposite direction toward the well-known promenade of the poet Machado and went upriver, following a dirt path crisscrossed by the roots of the pines. Silence; a current of air at his temples (he had once imagined that one of the manufacturers responsible for such things might offer for these parts of the face a special moisturizer, so that even the slightest puff of air would be felt by the skin, as the epitome of—what should one call it?—the here-and-now).