Don Juan

by Peter Handke

  Don Juan was asleep. He had propped his legs on the crumbling tabletop, which had previously served me as a reading stand. His legs were swollen. When he began to eat he had hardly managed to open his eyes, and then he kept them almost closed, after a brief flash of alertness. But his closed eyes now meant something else. In eating he had reinforced his capacity for perception. Or was it his imagination? No. And subsequently he fell into a rhythm that soon had nothing to do with whether he was enjoying the food. Or was his humming not so much rhythmic as melodic, a melody to which his whole body swayed, if almost imperceptibly? (Later in his story Don Juan forbade me to interrupt with questions and comments. Altogether, I should become more unquestioning, he remarked.)

  He sat in the mild May sun as he talked, while I, his listener, took advantage of the partial shade provided by an elderberry bush that happened to be in bloom just then, its tiny—”teeny-tiny” was the current expression out here in the country—cream-colored blossoms, not even as big as shirt buttons, shooting periodically down into the special elderberry grass without even a wind gust to propel them. The sporadic hail of blossoms crossed paths with the winged poplar seeds roaming around constantly, all day long, all week long, not only through the grounds and ruins of Port-Royal but also through the branching system of valleys carved by watercourses in the western Île-de-France. These airy and translucent flocks of flying objects seemed to loosen and lighten everything heavy, massive, stony, anchored, earthbound. As they whizzed by they made such things weightless, or at least less weighty. It was the period between the feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost, and more often than usual church bells echoed through the riparian forests with their tangles of woody vines. After the first and before the second they sounded from Saint-Lambert, in whose churchyard a mass grave held the remains of the nuns of Port-Royal, ostracized as heretics. Police cars kept driving by on the road, a mere spur leading to the ruins. They drove slowly, without a sound, then turned and made their way back, searching for who-knows-whom. One day a tornado in the form of a bomber squadron burst over the grounds of the inn, nothing special in and of itself—because the plateaus above the seemingly safe little valleys are home to a number of military airfields, that of Villacoublay, and that of Saint-Cyr with the military academy—but unusual nonetheless because squadron after squadron, made up of all different types of planes, almost brushing the treetops, churned up the air and darkened the blue of the May sky as they took part in pan-European maneuvers or who-knows-what.

  Don Juan had changed his clothes. Or perhaps he had merely reversed his cloak. At any rate, he looked ready for a journey. The impression was reinforced when he stood up now and then and took a few steps backward, as if he were checking to see whether a conveyance had arrived. He murmured his first story to himself, probably, I thought, because this experience, the incident with the leather-clad bikers, had just taken place. It was not ready for telling. Thus there was no material to embellish. For now all he could do was pin down the facts, muttering a few cues to himself. He saw himself as still too prominent in the story; only when it was no longer about him could he embellish at will. With the passage of time I have come to see the situation differently. He also wanted no music to go with his story, any kind of music. He claimed it made him incapable. Incapable of what? Incapable.

  On that particular day he was walking along unsuspectingly under the May sky of the Île-de-France, an especially expansive sky. Even nowadays, although the network of roads is becoming increasingly dense, it was possible to cut across the fields, which offered a pleasure perhaps entirely different from that of earlier times. He had landed in this region only that morning—landed in the literal sense, in a plane. He had spent the previous night and day in a foreign country, as indeed he had been in a different part of the world every day, and not merely in our Europe.

  The area around Port-Royal looks like a single plain, yet when you cross it, it turns out to have all kinds of crags and fissures, carved by the many brooks, with the Bièvre functioning as the collector of all the others as they flow toward the Seine basin: what was masquerading as a plain turns out to be a plateau with deep gullies and gorges. The settled parts, particularly the new housing developments that sprawl both horizontally and vertically and the office complexes and factories, are located almost exclusively up on the plateau, which is quite barren and very windy. The few remaining stands of trees bear no resemblance to real forests. On the other hand, the valleys or canyons created by the brooks are all thickly wooded, with oaks and edible chestnuts on the slopes and alluvial alder and poplar forests at the bottom, interrupted by clearings once occupied by old mills, now either in ruins or transformed into tree farms or riding stables. The brooks’ headwater areas remained relatively untouched through the centuries, without sizeable buildings, the notable exception being Port-Royal, at the head of the Rhodon gorge, half an hour’s ride from Paris, which formed almost a whole town, or rather fort, a fortress of the spirit, of a particular spirit of adventure. (I am adding all this detail not only because I have become so fond of the district around the ruins of Port-Royal, but also because I picture it as the right setting, or a possible setting, or at least the obvious setting, for the story I have to tell now, for something of the moment, or for the moment altogether, as perhaps the desolate walls of the Italian industrial suburbs were for Antonioni’s films, and the sculpted sandstone buttes of America’s Monument Valley were for John Ford’s Westerns.)

  The sister valley of the Rhodon valley is that of the Mérantaise, right by Saint-Quentin. Its upper course, likewise carved into the plateau, is free of settlements; in some spots there is an almost impenetrable thicket of woody vines and blackberry canes. He had passed through there that same morning, my Don Juan. Initially he had still followed woodland trails. He knew how to make himself inconspicuous. The joggers and riders, of whom there were quite a few, never noticed him. If anyone would have looked good on a horse, it was he—but perhaps not, after all. He jumped into the bushes, out of habit and a spirit of adventure. His goal was to be in control of his time; he described that as his chief occupation, or at least what gave it pizzazz. So he set his course for the cedar that stood out even at a distance, rising above a clearing in the meadows along the Mérantaise, a dark, spreading form beyond the shimmering tangle of primeval forest—even though this diverted him from his original route.

  Just as a solitary mushroom-gatherer sometimes comes upon a dead body, or so they say, Don Juan suddenly came upon the naked couple as he was cutting through the forest. He promptly stopped in his tracks. The woman was most visible through the underbrush, a rear view. All the terms, whether euphemistic or coarse, for what the couple were doing or what was happening with them had seemed inadequate approximations up to then, and will remain so. Of the man, Don Juan could see almost nothing except a bent knee. Nor could he hear any sound from the couple. They were lying in a sort of hollow, and he was standing at least “a stone’s throw away,” and the rushing of the brook and the rustling of the leaves were loud.

  Don Juan’s first impulse: to beat a silent retreat. But then he decided to stay and watch. It was a conscious, sober decision. He had to take in those two, whose bodies were conjoined and remained joined. There could be no question of averting his eyes. It was his duty now to register and to measure. To measure what? Don Juan did not know. At all events, he watched without emotion and also without a breath of excitement. All he felt was astonishment, calm, natural astonishment. And in time that became a sort of frisson, though entirely different from the kind one experienced upon overhearing the goings-on in the hotel room next door, which as a rule was more of a bristling, with every hair standing on end.

  It was obvious that the two of them had no sense that what they were doing there was secret, was anything they had to hide. They were performing not merely for chance onlookers but for the whole world. They were putting on a show. The act could not possibly be carried out more proudly or monumentally. The blond or bleache
d woman in particular visibly transformed this remote semi-wilderness, with flowering broom all around and the cedar nearby, into a stage, which for these very long moments really did represent the world. She played with the sun—now on her shoulders, now on her hips, now more and more on her buttocks—weaving like a dancer, a snake charmer. How proud she looked as she worked away, her back arched high. And it seemed as if only she were working (and as if her work was what mattered, and as if this were the best thing, if not the only thing, she had to offer the world, or whomever); the man beneath her was a mere prompter, so to speak, at her service, her tool, and thus almost invisible. With the man invisible and the woman radiating far and wide, this sight could also have been a stock scene from a film, yet its nature was fundamentally different, and not merely because Don Juan was observing it from a considerable distance, rather than from close up as in a film; even viewed this way, the scene loomed large, but that certainly had nothing to do with a close-up.

  Not until the week following this experience, when Don Juan was thinking about the couple, celebrating their one-week anniversary, as it were—he was sure he was celebrating it, and how!—did it occur to him that the labiate flowers on the broom branches framing the couple had been intensely yellow. And that the wind had whipped those intensely yellow branches apart and together. From the cedar came the whooshing characteristic of cedar limbs. High above, almost unbelievably high for a bird, circled one of those eagles that normally waited for those particularly clear, still days that came only at the height of summer to leave their nesting places or refuges in the Rambouillet forest for an excursion to the skies closer to Paris. A few wasps could be heard rubbing on a weathered woodpile, just as they were doing on one of the wooden tables here in my garden while Don Juan described the scene; May was their nest-building month. From a branch above the Mérantaise brook dangled or swayed something longish and striped, much lighter than a shoe, for instance, or a piece of tape from an audiocassette; only a shed snake-skin could be that weightless. So snakes still lived in the Port-Royal region—or had returned. A cone from the previous year dropped from the cedar and rolled toward the couple. Mica sand glittered in the fishless rill, and the sound of tractors came from the fields up on the plateau. Along the edge of the forest on the opposite slope a family group, including grandparents, parents, and children, was laying out a picnic, and on one of the numerous rural roads a school bus was passing, the children all piled into the back, and the air was full of those little brown moths that always look like three whenever two of them are fluttering around each other.

  Nonetheless, Don Juan felt disappointed by the couple in the end. The whole thing turned all too predictable. The two of them became audible. The woman’s cries could be heard, and from the man came a kind of muttering, grunting, and growling. She tipped forward, and he ran one hand over her back while with the other he scratched his knee, which was bent again. After crying out she uttered something along the lines of “love,” and he murmured something similar. Don Juan should have left the scene sooner. At this point it was no help that a cuckoo piped up, calling not in a dyad but in a triad, as if stuttering. Don Juan continued to watch conscientiously, but he was counting the seconds as he did so, or rather merely counting, as one does when forced to be somewhere against one’s will or when time is hanging heavy. And for Don Juan time was a problem, the problem.

  Not until the two naked people in the hollow were apparently attacked by flies and ants did he turn to leave. Actually the insects had been there all along, but only now did they seem to start annoying the couple. Up to the last moment Don Juan had been waiting for something to happen with the two of them that would alter the course of events. What, for instance? No questions! he scolded me.

  As he turned to leave, he stepped on a fallen branch, and the couple became aware of him. He corrected himself: rather than the sound of cracking wood it was his sighing, the listener’s sighing, that startled the two of them. Sighing in disappointment? No more questions now! At any rate, I have hardly ever heard a sigh like Don Juan’s. And all week long, both when he was telling his story and when he was simply sitting there in silence, he sighed repeatedly. It was the sigh of an old man, and at the same time that of a child. It was exceedingly soft, even gentle, yet audible through any noise—the intermittent roar of the super-highway that periodically filled the Rhodon valley these days, or the drone of the bombers, the rhythm of whose Pentecost maneuvers resounded overhead all week long. Don Juan’s sigh filled me with confidence, and not only in that one person.

  To the lovers, however, that sigh signaled betrayal. What enraged them was not that someone had been watching them. The reason they pulled on their gear and came hurtling toward him on their bike was that with his sigh the spectator had demeaned the experience they had just shared, an experience that was perhaps still quivering between them. And as always, though always in different circumstances, Don Juan did not want to flee. He thought he should not flee. He must not flee. And as always there was no choice: he had to flee.

  In this landscape he had the advantage: because he was on foot, he could cut straight across brooks and through underbrush, while the two on the motorcycle had to go the long way around, finding the dirt roads between fields and looking for the infrequent bridges. Now and then he even took his time. Part of it was that he occasionally walked backward, an old habit and not meant as a taunt. Yet it obviously irritated his pursuers, for eventually they boldly took off after him, over rough terrain and smooth, ignoring all obstacles. Now they were right behind him, and at last he had to take to his heels. They were shouting at him. Actually they were merely calling out to him, the tone almost friendly. Maybe he should have simply stopped running and faced them. Except that he would have had nothing to say to them. Not until a week later, still in my garden, could he turn to the now distant couple and wish them good luck and a life full of surprises.

  To tell his actual story, on the evening of the day he arrived in Port-Royal-des-Champs, Don Juan started with the day that fell exactly a week earlier, when he was still in Tbilisi, in Georgia. He did not serve up the story of his life, or even that of the past year, only the most recent seven days, working his way through that week, day by day, on the days that followed. On this Monday, for example, the previous Monday came to mind, more vividly, yet also more matter-of-factly and calmly, than would ever have been the case with the previous Tuesday, or, let us say, the Monday of a month earlier, and that pattern held as he cast his thoughts back. “On Monday, exactly a week ago”—and already the images came rushing in, the images of the entire day, unbidden. These images from that day precisely a week earlier came to life, presented themselves as they had not presented themselves at the time, took their places, lined up quietly, without the hoopla of self-conscious remembering, without making a show of reaching into the past, without affecting a resonant voice. If it had a rhythm, then it was that of an orderly progression free of hasty interruptions, with matters small and large weighted equally, nothing large anymore, but also nothing small.

  That was the form it took. That was how I heard Don Juan recounting his week, his style of narration probably determined to some extent by his having been in a different place every day, by his having been on the move all week long. Don Juan was not settled. A settled Don Juan would have had nothing to tell about those seven days, or at least not in this fashion, even if he had had similar experiences. A week narrated in this way, rather than the tale of a single day or a year, seemed right for someone like this Don Juan. But it was also right for me. And it was right for various others as well, if not in wartime then in a precarious and threatened time of peace.

  In finding words for the seven stations of his week, Don Juan imbued them with reality and turned them to practical effect. And his story became a narrative without any piquant details. Not that he avoided such details; they were simply out of the picture for him from the beginning. It was obvious that they were not to be mentioned. “Piquant details�
� were not to be narrated. Indeed, they did not exist. And from the outset I would not have wanted to hear them. As I saw it, only in their absence did Don Juan’s adventures acquire a significance above and beyond his person—and ultimately they did strike me as adventures. Certainly details did turn up as he cast his memory back to the previous week, more and more of them, but of a different sort, and adventurous in an unusual sense.