by Peter Handke
Back from the wide-open spaces, he had a cup of coffee in a bar down by the river called Río, a young gypsy behind the counter. A few retired men—the Spanish word, according to the dictionary, was jubilados—were without exception watching the morning TV program with utter concentration and enthusiasm. From the incessant traffic passing on the highway, glasses and cups shook in the hands of all those present. In one corner stood a barely knee-high cylindrical cast-iron stove, tapered toward the top, with vertical fluting and in the middle an ornament like a scallop shell; in the grate down below the fire glowed red-hot. From the tiled floor rose the scent of the fresh sawdust that had been strewn that morning.
Out on the street, as he was climbing the hill, he came upon an elder, its trunk as thick as a sequoia, its short, bright branches forming a myriad of interwoven and crisscrossed arches. No superstition, even without such signs and portents: he would stay in Soria and, as planned, get to work on his “essay.” In between he intended to soak up as much as possible of the mornings and evenings of this easily read little city. “No, I’m not leaving until the thing is done!” In Soria he would watch the last leaves sail off the plane trees. And now the landscape was bathed in that dark, clear light, as if streaming from the earth below, that had always encouraged him to go off at once and write, write, write—without a subject, or for that matter on something like the jukebox. And out into the wide-open spaces, with which here, scarcely out of town, one was promptly surrounded—in which major cities was that the case?—was where he would go every day before sitting down to work, to find the peace and quiet his head required more and more as he got older; once tuned to the silence, the sentences were supposed to take shape on their own; but afterwards he would expose himself to the racket, as well as the quieter corners, of the city; no passageway, no cemetery, no bar, no playing field could be left unnoticed in its respective uniqueness.
But it turned out that just now several Spanish holidays fell at the same time—travel time—and so there would be no rooms available in Soria until the beginning of the following week. That was all right with him; it meant he could again postpone getting started, his usual pattern. And besides, forced to decamp temporarily to another city, he could, upon his departure and return, form a picture of Soria’s location, remote on the high plateau, also from other directions, not only the westerly one from Burgos; he imagined that would be useful for what lay ahead. So he had two days, and he decided to spend the first in the north, the second in the south, both in places that lay outside Castile, first Logroño in the wine-growing region of La Rioja, then in Zaragoza in Aragon; this plan emerged mainly from his study of the bus schedules. But for the time being he sat down in one of those Spanish back-room restaurants where he felt sheltered because there one could be by oneself and yet, through walls no thicker than planks and the frequently open sliding door, follow what was going on out in the bar, where, what with a television set and pinball machines, things were almost always pretty lively.
In mid-afternoon a nun was the only other passenger on the bus to Logrono. It was raining, and in the mountain pass between the two provinces the route seemed to lead through the middle of the main rain cloud; other than its billowing grayness, there was nothing to be seen through the windows. From the bus’s radio came “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, a song that more than any other stood for that “roar of the jukebox,” and was one of very few that had held their own in jukeboxes all over the world (had not been replaced), a “classic,” one of the passengers thought to himself—while the other, in her black monastic garb, talked with the driver, to the accompaniment of the space-filling sonority of Bill Wyman’s guitar, which seemed to command respect, about the construction accident that had occurred in a side street nearby while he was eating in his sheltered back-room restaurant: two men crushed under reinforcing rods and freshly poured concrete. Next came Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas” on the radio, that song pleading with the beloved not to leave him, another of those few songs that constituted what might be called the classics of the jukebox, at least according to his inquiries in French-speaking countries, and listed as a rule on the far right in the sacrosanct column (where in Austrian music boxes, for example, one found so-called folk music, and in Italian ones operatic arias and choruses, above all “Celeste Aïda” and the prisoners’ chorus from Nabucco). But it was strange, the traveler thought, that the Belgian singer’s psalm, rising out of the depths, the human voice almost alone, holding nothing back, searingly personal—“I tell you this, and you alone!”—did not seem at all suitable for an automatic record player set up in a public place, coin-operated, yet did seem suitable here, in this almost empty bus taking the curves of a pass almost two thousand meters above sea level, crossing a gray no-man’s-land of dreary drizzle and fog.
The pattern of the sidewalk tiles in Logroño was bunches of grapes and grape leaves, and the town had an official chronicler with a daily page to himself in the newspaper, La Rioja. Instead of the Duero, the river here was the headwaters of the Ebro, and instead of being on the edge of town, it ran straight through the middle, with the newer part of the city as usual on the opposite bank. High snowbanks lined the wide river; on closer inspection, they turned out to be industrial effluent rocking in the current, and against the façades of the tall buildings on both sides of the river, laundry flapped in the dusky rain. Although he had observed a similar sight in Soria, and although Logroño, down here in the wine-growing plains with a noticeably milder climate, showed itself in its holiday illumination to be an expansive, elegant city with avenidas and arcades, he felt something like the tug of homesickness at the prospect of settling in for the winter up there on the meseta, where he had spent barely a night and half a day.
Zaragoza on the following day, to the southeast and even farther down in the broad Ebro Valley, had its sidewalks decorated with looping serpentines, which, he thought, represented the meanders of the river, and in fact the town appeared to him, after his first fruitless wanderings in search of the center, a pattern by now familiar to him in Spain, as a royal city, as indicated by the name of the soccer club. Here he could have read foreign newspapers every day, seen all the latest films in the original language, as only in a metropolis, and been there on the weekends when one royal team played against another from Madrid, with Emilio Butragueño himself on the ball—he had a pair of small binoculars in his luggage. Butragueño’s uniform was always clean, even in the mud, and one felt one could believe him when he once replied to a reporter who asked whether soccer was an art form: “Yes, for seconds at a time.” In the city’s theater Beckett was being performed, and people were buying tickets as they did at movie box offices, and in the art museum, looking at the paintings of Goya, who had served his apprenticeship here in Zaragoza, he could have acquired the same receptivity of the senses for work as out there in the stillness around Soria, as well as the agreeable impertinence with which this painter infected one. Yet now only the other town could be considered, where, on the rock-strewn slopes adjacent to the new construction, flocks of sheep had already worn paths and where, despite the altitude, sparrows flew straight up in the wind—he would have missed them. (Someone had once observed that something you could always count on seeing on the television news, in an on-location report, whether from Tokyo or Johannesburg, was the sparrows: in the foreground a group of statesmen lined up for the camera, or smoking ruins; in the background the sparrows.)
What he undertook to do instead in these two cities was to look casually for a jukebox; there had to be at least one in Logroño as in Zaragoza, from earlier times and still in operation (a newly installed one was unlikely; in the Spanish bars the least bit of free space belonged to the slot machines that were squeezed in, one on top of the other). He thought that in the course of time he had developed a sort of instinct for possible jukebox locations. There was little hope downtown, or in urban renewal areas, or near historic monuments, churches, parks, avenues (not to mention the fancy resi
dential sections). He had almost never come upon a music box in a spa or winter resort (although the usually unknown, out-of-the-way neighboring communities were under suspicion, so to speak—O Samedan near Saint Moritz), almost never in yacht harbors or seaside resorts (but certainly in fishing harbors and, even more frequently, in ferry stations: O Dover, 0 Ostende, 0 Reggio di Calabria, 0 Piraeus, 0 Kyle of Lochalsh with the ferry across to the Inner Hebrides, 0 Aomori far in the north of the Japanese main island of Hondo, with the meanwhile discontinued ferry over to Hokkaido), less frequently in bars on the mainland and in the interior than on islands and near borders. In his experience, the following locations were especially hot: housing developments along highways, too sprawling to be villages, yet without a downtown, off the beaten track for any kind of tourist traffic, in almost uncontoured plains without lakes nearby (and if there was a river, far outside of town and dried up during most of the year), inhabited by unusual numbers of foreigners, foreign workers and/or soldiers (garrisons), and even there jukeboxes could be ferreted out neither in the middle—this often marked by nothing more than a larger rain puddle—nor on the outskirts (there, or even farther out, along the highways, one found at most a discotheque), but in between, most likely next to the barracks, by the railroad station, in the gas-station bar, or in an isolated saloon along a canal (of course in a bad neighborhood, “on the other side of the freight tracks,” for instance, the face of the most faceless conglomerations). Such a prime location for a jukebox, aside from the one of his birth, he had once found on the Friuli plain, in Casarza, which has given itself the epithet “della Delizia” because of the type of grapes harvested in the region. From the pleasant, wealthy, jukebox-purged capital of Udine he had arrived there one summer evening, “behind the Tagliamento,” going on only six words from a poem by Pasolini, who had spent part of his youth in this small town and later had castigated the jukeboxes of Rome, together with the pinball machines, as an American continuation of the war by other means: “in the desperate void of Casarza.” After an attempted walking tour that would include the outskirts of town, soon broken off because of the traffic on all the arterial roads, he turned around, went at random into the bars, of which there were not a few, and in almost every one he could see from the entrance a jukebox glowing at him (one fancy one had a VCR with a screen above it, from which the sound also emanated). And all these variously shaped old and new boxes were in operation, playing not background music, as was often the case elsewhere, but loud, insistent music; they were blaring. It was a Sunday evening, and in the bars—the closer he got to the railroad station, the more so—farewells were taking place or recruits were already waiting out the last hours before having to report for duty at midnight, most of them apparently having just returned by train from a short furlough. As it got later, most of them no longer formed groups but sat there by themselves. They gathered around a Wurlitzer, a reproduction of the classic rainbow-shaped type, with bubbles pulsing around the rainbow. The soldiers were clustered so thickly that the blinking lights of the machine peeked through their bodies here and there, and their faces and necks, bent toward the record arm, were bathed alternately in blue, red, and yellow. The street across from the station formed a wide curve behind them and immediately disappeared into the darkness. In the station bar itself, the surfaces were already being washed down. But a couple of the fellows in gray-and-brown uniforms were still hovering near the jukebox, some of them with their duffel bags already on their shoulders. Here, to match the neon lighting, the jukebox was a newer, no-nonsense model in bright metal. Each man stood there by himself, and at the same time as if in formation around the apparatus, which, in the otherwise empty room, with the tables shoved against the wall and a chair here and there, boomed out at a higher volume over the damp tiled floor. While one of the soldiers stepped aside as the mop approached, his eyes, wide open, unblinking, remained fixed in one direction; another lingered, his head turned back over his shoulder, on the threshold. It was full moon, in the glass door the shaking, rattling, pounding, long-drawn-out, of a dark freight passing, which blocked the corn fields beyond the tracks. At the bar the young woman with even, fine features and a gap between her teeth.
But in these Spanish towns his instinct betrayed him every time. Even in bars in the poorer parts of town, behind piles of debris, at the end of a cul-de-sac, with that dim lighting that here and there made him hasten his steps even at a distance, he did not find so much as the coldest trail, even in the form of a paler outline on a sooty wall, of the object he sought. The music played there came—standing outside, he sometimes let himself be deceived through the walls—from radios, cassette players, or, in special cases, from a record player. The Spanish street bars, and there seemed to be more of them in every town than anywhere else in the world, were perhaps either too new for such an almost ancient object (and all lacked the back rooms suitable for it), or too old, and intended mainly for old people, who sat there seriously playing cards—jukebox and cardplaying, yes, but only in the less serious establishments—or sat with their heads propped in their hands, alone. And he imagined that in their heyday jukeboxes had been banned by the dictatorship here, and after that had simply not been in demand. To be sure, he made not a few discoveries in the course of his futile searching, taking a certain pleasure in the almost sure fruitlessness of it, about the special corners, the variations in the seemingly so similar cities.
Back from Zaragoza in Soria, of whose eastern province he had seen hardly anything, traveling at night on a railroad line that ran far from any roads, he now needed a room suitable for his essay; he wanted to get started—finally—the very next day. Up high on one of the two hills, or down below in the midst of the town? Up high, and by definition outside of town, he would perhaps feel too cut off again, and surrounded by streets and houses too confined. A room looking out on an inner courtyard made him too melancholy, one looking out on a square distracted him too much, one facing north would have too little sun for writing, in one facing south the paper would blind him when the sun was shining, on the bare hill the wind would blow in, on the wooded one dogs being walked would be barking all day, in the pensions —he checked out all of them—the other guests would be too near, in the hotels, which he also circled, he would probably be alone too much in winter for a good writing mood. For the night he took a room in the hotel on the bare hill. The street leading up to it ended in front of the stone building in a muddy square; the footpath into town—he tried it out at once—led through a steppe covered with moss and thistles, then past the façade of Santo Domingo, its very existence stimulating when he looked at it, and straight to the small squares, whose dimensions included plane trees, evocative of the mountains, the remaining leaves swaying in the breeze, curiously full at the tips of the highest branches, glittering star-shaped against the night-black sky. The room up there appealed to him also: not too confining and not too spacious—as a rule, he did not feel as if he was in the right place when there was too much space. The city, not too close and not too far, also not too far below, shone into the neither too large-paned nor too small-paned window, toward which he shoved the table, away from the mirror, experimenting further: a tiny table, to be sure, but enough of a surface for a piece of paper, pencils, and an eraser. He felt well taken care of here; this was his place for the time being.
When the next morning came, he experimented with sitting at the right hour, testing the light as it would really be, the temperature as it should be for the essay: now the room was too noisy for him (yet he should have known that precisely in so-called quiet locations the noises posed far more of a risk to collecting one’s thoughts than on the loudest streets, for they came abruptly instead of steadily—suddenly the radio, laughter, echoes, a chair scraping, something popping, hissing, and, to make it worse, from close by and inside the building, from corridors, neighboring rooms, the ceiling; once the writer’s concentration was lost, the image got away from him, and without that, no language). Then it was strange
that the next room was not only too cold for sitting hour after hour (didn’t he know that only luxury hotels kept the heat on during the day, and that, besides, when the writing was going well, he involuntarily always breathed in such a way that he didn’t feel the cold?), but this time also too quiet, as if the enclosed spaces meant being locked in and a sense of openness were available only outdoors in nature, and how to let this kind of quiet in the window in December?
The third room had two beds—one too many for him. The fourth room had only one door separating it from the next room—at least one too few for him … In this way he learned the Spanish word for “too much,” a very long word, demasiado. Wasn’t one of Theophrastus’ “characters” or types that man “dissatisfied with the given,” who, upon being kissed by his sweetheart, says he wonders whether she also loves him with her soul, and who is angry with Zeus, not because he makes it rain but because the rain comes too late, and who, finding a money purse on the path, says, “But I’ve never found a treasure!”? And a child’s rhyme also came to mind, about someone who was never happy anywhere, and he changed the words a little: “A little man I knew was puzzled what to do. / At home it was too cold, so he went into the wood. / In the wood it was too moist—soft grass was his next choice. / Finding the grass too green, he went next to Berlin. / Berlin was far too large, so he bought himself a barge. /The barge proved far too small, so he went home after all. / At home …” Wasn’t this the recognition that he wasn’t in the right place anywhere? On the contrary, he had always been in the right place somewhere —for instance?—in locations where he had got down to writing—or where a jukebox stood (though not in private dwellings!). So he had been in the right place wherever, in any case and from the outset, it was clear that in the long run he couldn’t stay?
