by Peter Handke
Be that as it may: on that long-ago spring night, after I had turned off for the first time to look at the house I had always overlooked, which I knew instantly would be mine, I forgot for the time being my plan of writing down day by day my year in the area. I stood in the half-darkness up on the railroad embankment, the only person waiting for the last train to Paris, and imagined that after moving in I would do nothing but live there for an indefinite period, and I saw that as an activity that would occupy me completely. Furthermore, no one, not even my friends, was to know where I was. No one in the world would visit me here, and this image, empty and at the same time spacious, branching out, gave me the sensation of being showered under my arms, and I felt wondrously refreshed.
From the beginning I thought of myself as alone with the house, also without the family that we had become once again at that time. Just me and these night-black rain puddles, as at a railroad station on the border, and all my kith and kin over the hills and far away. To inhabit the house and the place in this exclusive way, to do nothing else, also to make no new acquaintances—how robust that seemed to me, how I could picture myself caught up in such a project.
The following months we spent waiting for the house to become avail-Table; we were living in one of the painter’s Paris apartments, with a tree-rustling inner courtyard, in the midst of the city, the broad Seine right around the corner, crossed by the Pont Neuf, the bridge on which the woman from Catalonia and I had once agreed we could spend our lives, going from one bank to the other.
But I was already feverishly looking forward again to my move into the suburb beyond the ridge of hills, and every day spent the entire morning hiking out to my property; when I skipped that, I saw the day as lost.
I made a point of approaching the house from all possible directions, and then walked past it without stopping. A glance out of the corner of my eye at the place, barely visible from any vantage point, and the day had taken on color.
And each time I set out alone. No one was to accompany me, not even Ana, who had said that the house in its wide, hummocky hollow of a yard looked like something out of a fairy tale, by which she meant she felt closed off from the world there.
From the list of previous owners the lawyer had given me, I knew that the house had been occupied almost exclusively by retired folk—a general, a plumber, a professor of ancient Greek, a gravestone maker. My immediate predecessor certainly appeared to have been constantly busy in every room, with shelves of binders, computers, specialized maps of the most distant parts of the earth. But I later learned that he had been unemployed for years. Along with the house I bought the garden tools from him, not only rakes, shovels, and hoses but also the power equipment—lawn mower, chain saw, hedge clipper, even something like an edger—only Flaubert knew the proper name for it—the smallest of the power tools, which at the same time made the most noise, and that was how it was meant to be, as I was told later by a neighbor who worked in a factory that manufactured such tools.
I did this with the firm intention of taking care of things as much as possible exactly like those before me and those around me. Yet to this day I have not even started up most of these instruments, and various neighbors, seeing me hacking away again with my bare hands, have offered their help with the words “I have power tools!”
Am I entitled to call that first evening in the house “ours”?
On the one hand I saw myself as having arrived as never before —the opposite of what the woman from Catalonia had hinted about the building and its location—in the external world. On the other hand I felt hostility toward the presence of my son and my wife. I wanted to be alone with the house, bare yet livable, the doors and windows wide open to the warm July night, its darkness so uncitylike. Or at least no one, not even one of my near and dear, was to obstruct with face and voice the admission of the outside world into the house, the lights from the transmitter flashing in from the eastern hill, the rustling of leaves in the garden and of the trees in the forest wafting toward the house, late trains chiming in, the coolness from the pond waters drifting by.
I turned off all the lights in the house. Valentin went up to his room. I sat at some distance from Ana, on the floor by a window. I had forgotten those entrusted to me. They did not exist.
From the darkness outside the silence spoke to me, on and on, and breathed in, from room to room. That was how it should go on speaking forever. And my house should continue to be as empty as this. And on this night I would not touch that beautiful strange woman somewhere over there.
It did not work out this way, however, and even before winter the house had lost its initial emptiness. If during those first weeks my only connection with the everyday world had come from listening to that transistor radio no bigger than my hand, and then almost exclusively Arab music from Radio Beur, from the metropolitan nowhereland beyond the hills, from time to time we came together of an evening in front of a television set; the turning of the pages of a newspaper, even if it was my own doing, sounded to me like the crack of a whip; books piled up wall-high, when I had wanted to have an armful of them at most in the house, and those as much out of sight as possible, in the closet under the stairs or in one of the many wall niches, of which I still cannot keep track; my wife’s things spread from one bare spot to the next; on the table the tiny little garden flowers and wildflowers were elbowed out by florists’ bouquets, which, furthermore, against my intentions, were purchased not here in the suburb but in the metropolis; and the lamps, hardly larger than clothespins, and also like them clipped on here and there—a temporary arrangement that I as usual had thought of as permanent—were replaced by lanterns, “remember the ones on the bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez?,” and a chandelier from a plantation house in the American South.
A friend (the carpenter, the painter, the reader?) on his second visit praised the improvement in livability; one could feel a woman’s hand at work. Yes, I had not kept to my resolution not to let anyone in here, or into my new region at all.
And it was not only my friends who came, who were shown around the house by me, who slept in a guest bed (which, now that I am living alone, is mine, because right next to my study), who gave advice, who also blocked out the emptiness round about in bars and on wood roads, but also people with whom I had nothing to do except to let them interrogate me, persuaded to do so by the woman from Catalonia, who decreed that my concerns were public, and it was my duty to behave accordingly.
What about that metamorphosis? Was it even still in effect? (Luckily most of those who made their way here had eyes neither for the house nor for the surrounding area—which on the other hand annoyed me: I wanted even them, the strangers, now that they were here, to be pulled up short at least now and then, to look and listen and then perhaps to let me tell them something about the place.)
No, after the first quiet summer nothing about my life in the remote bay remained the way I had sketched it out for myself. A new publisher stopped by, coming from the funeral of one of his authors, the twelfth in the current year, and on his way to the University of Montana in Missoula, where he was to receive an honorary degree, and sat facing me with barely contained disapproval, directed if not at me then at the too small chair, which squeaked and creaked under his weight. All my Catalan in-laws gave the property the once-over, and Ana’s mother was convinced the balcony was about to collapse, while her father would not want even to be buried in such a poorly lit suburb, indistinguishable at night from a Transylvanian forest, and with the strangest bunch of hut dwellers swept together from all over the world, and sang the praises of his Gerona and the Catalan nation.
I just barely managed to avoid being talked into a wine cellar, and remained true to my idea that the birds flying past should suffice as pets (though the house was invaded by the barking of a wolfhound right next door, which my new publisher said he would buy himself, too, if he lived in such an area).
Whereas one favorite saying of the woman from Catalonia was
“No, no, no!” I myself could hardly ever get out a single no. I never really resisted that, and in the first couple of years in the bay, with the monthly and then also weekly interruptions by visitors, often from far away, of the invisibility I had promised myself, I took satisfaction in this peculiarity for a time. There were moments when I harbored the thought of creating a center in this area, without a groundbreaking or public announcement, simply by regularly inviting one person or another, whose work or style of idleness appealed to me, to come here over the hills and be put up in my house or one of the hard-to-find inns in the bay, preferably in whichever one was being operated just then by the prophet and bankrupt restaurateur, at that time still a station away from Porchefontaine, who could be counted on to contradict my guests, with me as a mere listener. Even if they happened to be very famous, my visitors would have no need to worry that they might attract attention in this area, and that alone had to yield something positive. No face from film or television would be recognized here. At the very most one of the local residents would be taken aback for a moment, but would promptly calm down, thinking it impossible that the person over there could be Michelangelo Antonioni, or, let us say, Eric Cantona, P. Zaroh, Pedro Delgado, Pane Secundo, or Ama Nemus—for never would such celebrities come to our remote corner of the world, even to drop in. I conceived of this center as neither an academy nor a school, though perhaps Pythagoras’ rule about mulling over with others the day before yesterday influenced me, to the extent that I imagined that by retracing our steps this way in our minds, instead of changing fundamentally, which was probably what the philosopher had had in mind, we would see what we were made of. Thanks to my argumentative prophet and even more thanks to his cuisine, this project actually got off the ground, but it soon fell apart, for one thing because by myself I was not enough of an audience for those celebrities, for another because it turned out that strangely enough those who were invited felt a need to be recognized out here after all, and by more than just a few. When they went unrecognized, almost all these famous folk remained silent, actually seeming offended. Or at any rate they were not generous with themselves. Or did none of these people, so dear to me from afar, ever want to let down their guard? That, to be sure, was what I would have wished for, among other things.
Thus during my entire decade here, to the present day, I have never been able to give a party either in my house or in the region for a single visitor—and in the meantime almost none come anymore. That, too, I have not stopped wishing for, if only for just one time.
Never would I have believed that it could be a source of pleasure to live in a house and have the title, the legal title, of owner. Yet that was what it turned out to be in those days, even beyond that first period with the almost empty rooms, and more than that—a joy.
I felt impelled to live in accordance with it, this joy, and that meant more attentively. I resolved to treat my house, just as it was, more carefully than anything previously. I decided not just to treat it gently, but also to give it the benefit of constant observation, including the inconsistent shapes and ill-chosen colors left by the succession of previous owners, along with the harmless peeling and weathering. I then felt annoyed with myself for so much as letting a door slam or pressing a latch without thinking.
My property made me pull myself together in my dealings with it. At the same time, I wanted to use it and make it fruitful (and not only the kitchen and the orchard section of the grounds), and that without adding anything; everything had to remain the same, except perhaps for a fresh coat of paint and a new shrub here and there.
Using it in this sense could mean that I simply went from one to the other of the many nooks and crannies in the house as well as on the grounds and did nothing but let the effect of this spot in the beech thicket, or the shoe closet at the bottom of the cellar stairs, or the room with the stalactite-like plaster, sink in for as long as possible. And time and again it was as though in the process that particular dream of mine was fulfilled in which an undiscovered floor turned up in a long-inhabited house, with rooms like the chambers in a castle, all of them with quiet festive lighting, all of them having stood empty for a long time until I entered them, at the same time filled with an expectancy that now merely strengthened with my presence.
As an owner I also rid myself of certain opinions about right and wrong, beautiful and ugly objects.
Thus among other trees in the yard there was a pine that I would otherwise have judged did not belong there; its place was in a forest. Yet now I thought nothing of the sort, but instead rubbed the smell of the fresh shoots under my nose in springtime or from time to time soaked up the special pine wind rustling through it, no different from the sound I had heard long ago on the edge of the forest in Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain.
That the weeping willow next to it, a sight that would earlier have made me gloomy, now appears differently to me, I owe to what I heard a workman in the bay say one Sunday evening about such a tree as he stood in front of it with his family: “They’re lovely, these weeping willows” (although his voice sounded subdued).
I wanted my fellow residents in the bay to see the owner in me, yes, in their eyes I should be nothing but the owner of this house here, of these grounds, of this narrow, gorgelike lane, in the same sense as on quite a few tombstones in my place of origin, instead of the person’s profession, beneath the name was inscribed “house and property owner” —except that in my case they would not even know the name. The most they would glimpse of me was a silhouette at the window, by the garden gate, in the lane, and they would say nothing but “Ah, there he is, the owner, the same as yesterday, the same as always!” with an undertone of relief, as if my being there like this contributed to their daily sense of security.
It may be that all this led me to feel, if not like the owner of the entire area beyond my own property, then at least responsible for it, especially since hardly anyone else seemed to care about the place, to see himself as one who also had something to say and some say, if only “Out of the way!” “Don’t build here!” “Don’t you dare cut down this apple!” or even just “Quiet!” Although not borne out by the facts, it seems to me as though my chief occupation during that first period in the bay consisted of such using and cherishing, guarding and defending.
When did the woman from Catalonia disappear for the second time? One can almost describe it as “an entire lifetime” that we have been playing the game of losing each other. Perhaps we are both convinced that nothing can happen to us, we will never be finished with each other, and thus push the game to the limit, keep putting off the serious part, or what is real in us, longer and longer, until suddenly there will be no going back, and one of us will be irrevocably lost to the other. It is a dangerous game, a sinful one (it was not my friend the priest who said so, but I myself); for we see that we should stay together, even without the formal sacrament, in glory, and that it would be a dreadful shame to spoil it. “Fragmentary experience—complete dreams”: in this belief, too, one of my favorite mottoes for many years, Ana resembles me.
So it was always for only moments at a time that we were serious with each other. And but a moment after such a repeat honeymoon we might run into one another, coming from different directions, and cringe; so thoroughly had we forgotten the other person’s physical reality in no time at all.
Very often the intimacy we had just experienced would be transformed abruptly into mutual rage. Who was this man? Who was this woman? The house in the bay, not so much roomy as full of odd corners, favored such estrangements, and as far as I am concerned, so did the fact that I was infatuated with my property, or, to use an old expression, I “had a fancy for it.” Such a fancy tended to have a paradoxical effect. And once more Ana and I used the game of loss to put off thinking about our true relationship with each other, put it off until the relationship was over. With each new day of grim dissension she and I both thought to ourselves that there was still time to find our way to the relationship we h
ad had before, and one day: too late. It was the end not only of the game but of the two of us. And now, in retrospect, too late, I think: we were not really those two who once walked toward each other on the bridge to find harmony, nor those two who wanted to destroy each other with their bare hands, but beings of a third sort who had not yet been discovered for one another.
2
The Year
I almost missed the right moment for telling the story of or reporting on this particular year in this region.
For one thing, it seemed to me that simply by living, walking about, taking things in, I had already written the book, that each day in itself was at the same time the day’s work, and explicit word-making was more like a superfluous addition, a retracing, that would result in gratuitous ornamentation; for another thing, now that I had already spent several years in the bay, it was too late for such a one-year report, because, always thinking “too soon, too soon,” I was waiting for the aforementioned right moment, instead of simply beginning at some point.
This is what I finally did, actually with little faith, half convinced that the execution of my plan was a mere re-presenting, and was also taking place at the wrong moment, too late, or perhaps too soon after all. But I did it, and with the very first sentence all these hesitations were gone. (They were replaced and intersected by others.) I, the writer, was now the one who decided; and if I was ever anything, it was the writer. I experienced that once again simply by sitting down, as after every longer intermission, and writing—from the activity itself.
