Don Juan

by Peter Handke

  During those seven days when Don Juan sat in my garden and told his story, to me and at the same time to himself, he did not once ask who I was, where I came from, how things stood with me. That did me good. My only regular visitor in the previous months had been the curé of Saint-Lambert-des-Bois, who made my situation more untenable by implying that he was the only person I had left, the very last; often I did not realize how alone I was until the priest turned up, and after he left, my solitude gnawed at me, and gnawed and gnawed, and I pictured myself as one of the people whom the man in black stopped in to see on their deathbeds as he made his sporadic rounds through that region; these visits had become his main occupation. “Ah, my dying parishioners!” he blurted out one time.

  I cooked, and Don Juan told his story. After a while we began to eat together at the table in the garden. How my kitchen came to life! There is nothing more heartwarming, at least to my mind, than a kitchen in which someone is bustling about, preparing all the dishes with gusto. Often I involuntarily balanced on one leg, as in the old days, or actually leaped like a mountain goat from one corner to the other. And I ritualistically dried my hands on my shirt, hanging loose over my pants, as I had once done on my chef’s apron. During his weeklong stay, my guest never lifted a finger. He was used to being served hand and foot. True, I did not ask where his servant was. He would turn up in the story when the moment was right; and in fact that was exactly what happened. Don Juan seemed not to lift a finger—yet every time I came into the kitchen in the morning I would find some new ingredient, and it was not only flavorings and garnishes: a little sack of peppercorns from Szechuan, a coal black spring truffle from Turkey, a log of sheep’s cheese from La Mancha, a fistful of wild rice from Brazil—as if gathered by him—a bowl of hummus from Damascus. Yet he had arrived without any luggage. All week long I did not have to go to the supermarket, of which I was thoroughly sick by now.

  Not that we spent all that time in the house or the garden. Don Juan did not launch into his storytelling until evening, after supper, our only proper meal, and Port-Royal lay so far to the west that on those May days it stayed light almost to the end of the evening news, which we watched on television. During the day we roamed through the area’s wooded river valleys and newly settled plateau. One time we set out in a straight line to the palace of Rambouillet, where suddenly, who knows why, dogs were unleashed on us, though they were interested only in Don Juan. On another day we headed east, in the opposite direction, to the plateau of Saclay, where we found the nuclear power plant surrounded by police cars, fire engines, and ambulances, as sirens blared unceasingly over the plateau. At the same time we watched two lizards copulating motionlessly in a hole in the ground near our feet, while in the air two flies circled, hooked together. On a third day we went north to the legendary springs that formed the source of the Bièvre, which we did not find because we lost our way in the labyrinth recently laid out in honor of the springs (the main spring, as we heard later from someone who had had better luck finding it, had been transformed into a fountain). On the fourth day we took the local bus to the “Jean Renoir” movie house in Trappes, where we saw a film in which a woman wanted to seduce a man into dying with her—into becoming totally wrapped up in her, which grew more and more irresistible to him from scene to scene and eventually inescapable, signifying the end for the man, as well as the woman. On the fifth day we merely took the short path uphill from the Rhodon to the road leading to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, and from the bus stop there watched the local buses, most of which drove right past us without stopping. On the next-to-last day of the week, however, we stayed in my inn, which we furthermore had to lock up tight and partially barricade, for it had come under siege from women trying to get at Don Juan. During the last two storytelling evenings a threat hung over us, an increasingly dicey situation.

  Don Juan was orphaned, and not in any figurative sense. Years earlier he had lost the person closest to him, not his father or his mother, but his child, his only child, or at least so it seemed to me. So one could also become an orphan when one’s child died, and how. Or maybe his woman had died, the only one he loved?

  He had set out for Georgia in his usual way, without any destination in particular. What drove him was nothing but his inconsolability and his sorrow. To transport his sorrow through the world and transmit it to the world. Don Juan lived off his sorrow as a source of strength. It was bigger than he was and transcended him. Armored in it, so to speak, and not merely so to speak, he knew that although he was not immortal he was invulnerable. Sorrow was something that made him impetuous, and, in an opposite and equal reaction (or rather action by action), completely permeable and open to whatever might happen, while at the same time invisible when necessary. His sorrow furnished provisions for his journey. It nourished him in every respect. As a result he had no major needs. Such needs did not even rear their heads. Yet he kept having to ward off the idea that sorrow made the ideal earthly life possible, applicable also to others (see “transmit sorrow to the world”). His sorrowing, fundamental rather than episodic, was an activity.

  For years now Don Juan had had no regular human intercourse. At most there were chance encounters during his travels, out of mind as soon as the shared paths diverged. In the nature of things, not a few of these encounters involved women, and not bad-looking women, either (although with the passing years the number of real beauties to be met on the road was becoming ever smaller, at least in public places such as streets, city squares, and on journeys—as if they preferred to stay home, sequestered in the most remote nooks, or if they traveled at all, they did so in the depths of night and by undisclosed paths). Yet these women, attracted to Don Juan if he so much as allowed them to catch sight of him, attracted especially by his aura of profound sorrow, which in their eyes was a form of strength, always turned their backs on him after taking the first small step, speaking the first word. Whatever the case, he did not respond, was deaf and blind to them, at least as individual and female beings. Indeed he avoided speaking, even guarded against opening his mouth for anything resembling a conversation, as if departing from wordlessness would result in a loss of strength and betrayal of his peripatetic ways. How differently Don Juan had behaved before being orphaned, during the first half of his life.

  Upon landing in Tbilisi he found that a destination offered itself after all. As almost always happened, this destination turned up by chance, simultaneously with his arriving in some place that at first seemed random. He would set out for the Caucasian piedmont he had just flown over, which spread across the entire region, and he would go directly from the airport. He would then turn around and head for the city of Tbilisi in the evening, or whenever he felt like it; he was the master of his time. At first the city would look like every other city he had seen in the past—that was the pattern by now—yet he knew that later on the specific features unique to Tbilisi would reveal themselves: the foreign and characteristic qualities of today’s cities were no longer obvious; they had to be ferreted out, and that was an essential component of Don Juan’s adventures. The idea—and it was an idea—came to him when he caught sight of the Georgian script—smaller script under the large Roman lettering in the arrival terminal (no longer a barrack-like building, and also no longer with passengers carrying chickens and rabbits in cages): in its density, rhythmic qualities, and roundness this writing mirrored the contours of the Caucasian foothills. No help for it: he had to head in that direction, in a new burst of sorrow-energy that revitalized his surroundings as well.

  In the time before his loss Don Juan actually had taken it for granted that he would be waited on. Every new acquaintance soon came to see himself as part of Don Juan’s worldwide cohort of servants. Without a moment’s hesitation Don Juan would send him to get a book, medicine, some object left behind at a previous way station. No explicit order was required; a mere remark was enough: “I forgot my hat in . . .” (On the other hand, Don Juan also never asked for anything: his observation si
mply had to be followed up on.) In the twinkling of an eye he could become the other person’s servant, whether that person was someone he knew or a stranger. And how he could serve, or rather, be of service! Each time it was a wordless and unbidden fetching, hopping to it, and giving a leg up, unobtrusive and without any servile bowing and scraping, and once done, as if in passing, it immediately became anonymous, as he himself took on an anonymous quality as a helper. And his temporary identity as a servant or aide was always noted by the servants without surprise. Or rather, it went almost unnoticed, and likewise elicited no expressions of gratitude, no remuneration. Yet his effect on those he assisted in this way was more than that of a silent servant, incomparably more.

  For his journey to the plains at the foot of the Caucasus Don Juan took on a servant, for the first time in a long while. At least he immediately treated the driver as such, and the driver not only put up with it but seemed to have been waiting for it. He was standing on the edge of the airfield beside his old Russian car, and was holding the car or coach door open for Don Juan, and for him alone, while he was still a good way off. The two of them promptly came to an agreement, without anything being said. And this agreement extends beyond one day’s service to an unspecified stretch of time, for who knows how long. The man seemed more like a longtime trusted partner than a newly hired servant; again it was that strange phenomenon of trust that so often sprang up between Don Juan and strangers, though in an entirely different way with women. This partner and traveling companion had already laid in enough provisions and fuel for a good week. If Don Juan spoke to him at all, it was in the customary pleasantries. And the new servant was dressed far more elegantly than his boss, in a dark, double-breasted suit, with a blindingly white pocket square, on either side of which small bunches of multicolored May blossoms peeped out. The whole car was scented with them, or with the driver’s strangely delicate perfume. Apparently he had decked himself out this way for a particular festive occasion.

  For the first time since the loss of his child, Don Juan felt jolted out of the equanimity that his inconsolable sorrow and his avoidance of all involvements had afforded him. The moment he awakened from his brief in-flight dream, his uneasiness had returned, an uneasiness with which he was familiar, all too familiar. This uneasiness manifested itself as follows: from one minute to the next he was no longer the master of his own time. Or: time was no longer his element. Or: the moments turned into seconds. For instance, instead of watching, listening, breathing, and so forth, Don Juan started to count. And he counted not just the seconds but everything, mechanically or automatically, everything that came within range of his automatic counting mechanism—he now consisted of nothing else: the rows of seats in the plane, the eyelets in his shoes, the little hairs in the eyebrows of the person seated next to him. Not that he suddenly felt bored; it was more serious than that: Don Juan had fallen out of the game of time, that unobtrusive, amiable game. But maybe that was the most serious form of boredom. In the past, this counting could be relied on to stop if he focused intently on another person, at least for a certain length of time, if he purposefully sought another’s company. As now happened once he became a passenger in that automobile crammed with stuff.

  After Russia, still shivering in the last chill of winter—the remaining snow piles in the rearmost of the rear courtyards a dingy gray, indistinguishable from sand—the soft air of the southern Caucasus felt warm, the embodiment of warmth. The sun was shining. As they drove, the two men had the sun at their backs more and more, and the landscape up ahead, rising gently toward the mountains, appeared in a relief of a clarity usually seen only in models, made, for instance, of papier maché. Yet there was nothing papery, nothing hollow here: everything looked compacted, weighty, intermingled, as if inextricably; clay with marl with rock outcroppings with taproots with basket roots, sulfur yellow with brick red with salt gray with coal black. The sandy stretches, too, neither soft nor loose but packed as firmly as mortar and baked hard; anyone who went to pick up a handful would end up with bloody nails, and not a grain of the presumptive sand clinging to his fingertips. Likewise there was not a cloud of dust to be seen, even though for long stretches the ground had hardly any vegetation (the apparent sandscape lying there as naked as white dunes), and even though a wind gust as sudden as it was powerful repeatedly swept through, coming each time from a different direction. The piedmont or balcony presented itself as seductive, uniting all the senses, only to be revealed as literally repellent and inaccessible. It beckoned as if magnetically toward its interior, but then turned out to have no interior. Upon arriving in this region a week earlier, Don Juan was reminded of the Badlands in South Dakota, where a system of broad, deep fissures in a vast expanse of sedimentary formations—each fissure distinct from the others—suggested a valley stretching for many miles yet without exception led nowhere, or merely to naked, scarred walls of clay, or to the ends of washed-out gorges that had been bone-dry for millennia. But now, a week later, as he described it to me, he had the opposite feeling about this region at the foot of the Caucasus: now those famous, even world-famous, Badlands receded into the distance, a mere prelude to and preliminary sketch of this almost nameless, seldom visited terrain, or only a pale imitation of it. This terrain seemed infinitely more impressive than the Badlands, initially so exemplary. It was unquestionably there, in one respect or another, while the eminently filmable Badlands on the other hand . . . But the reason for Don Juan’s describing this landscape so exhaustively in his story was that all six of the following days’ landscapes resembled this one in some way. Each new day saw him enter a new, often distant country, and every time the landscape in which the day’s events unfolded was, or became, largely the same. For each subsequent station of the story he could thus dispense with sketching in the scene of the action (or lack thereof).

  That morning the southern slopes of the Caucasus were by no means deserted. In retrospect the roadsides were veritably packed with people. As he conjured up an image for me, they were all on foot, and the only vehicle on the roads was the one driven by his servant. The Orient? Hardly a trace of that: in clothing and behavior and even smells, the East by now seemed completely part of the West, as the West seemed part of the East, and so forth. Perhaps the only specific element during those seven days was the constantly wafting May air and the poplar-seed fluff flitting above, below, and through it.

  Among all those people moving along the roadside there was hardly even one whom Don Juan recognized as a solitary wanderer. He encountered only groups, always small ones, but innumerable. Had he not stopped counting the moment he stepped into the car, at the latest he would have stopped when he came upon these various processions or migratory peoples.

  The driver was on his way to a wedding, and Don Juan, without having been invited, would of course attend as a guest. In the past he had often taken part in strangers’ celebrations—only strangers’. To be sure, until this day in the Caucasus they had all been funerals. Only at burials could one simply join a group, no questions asked. At christenings, for instance, one corner of the church was usually set aside for the private event, or the whole church was reserved. But there was also something to be said for standing outside and catching an impression at a distance of the baby’s damp hair or bald head, or seeing a cluster of First Communicants lingering in the sun after the ceremony, licking their ice cream cones.

  On the last leg of the journey, before they got to the village where the wedding was taking place, Don Juan changed roles from passenger to driver; his servant, after giving his master directions, stretched out between the canisters and hampers on the backseat and instantly fell asleep. If being alone usually made one more receptive to one’s surroundings, or at least to the significant details, that effect was magnified in the presence of someone who was asleep, especially when his sleep was as relaxed and deep as this new acquaintance’s with his scratched face. (I noticed how often in his story Don Juan used the indefinite pronoun “one” instead
of “I,” as if it were self-evident that what he experienced was applicable to everyone; I wish I could have said the same of the ups and downs in my own life—actually more downs of late.)

  In previous years he had not avoided the sight and sound of other people. Yet he had focused primarily on either very old or very young people, on children. He ignored the great mass in between, the seemingly more and more predominant majority. It did not exist and it did not matter. Don Juan was all the more fervently on the lookout every day for someone feeble and/or in need of protection. Noticing such a person and considering that person worthy of observation meant more and something different to him than immersing himself in nature of whatever kind. And conversely, being considered worthy of observation almost without fail gave these grizzled folks and twerps something like an injection of new life. Strangely, the oldsters, once they were taken in and appreciated, radiated this new life and seemed childlike, while the little and littlest ones suddenly seemed not old, exactly, but settled and positively worldly-wise—the smaller they were, the more settled and worldly-wise. Only one or two “categories” of human beings still had a face for Don Juan, and that seemed to be an increasingly small minority.

  It was not due exclusively to the man asleep on the backseat that this state of affairs perhaps began to change a bit. And likewise it was not primarily the corpse lying there in its blood, with its eyes open, as they rounded a bend. (Or possibly it was, after all.) Whatever the case: during this drive Don Juan gradually encountered faces, faces of all ages, including those in mid life, which until recently had seemed particularly insignificant and formless. It was less their faces than their eyes. It was less forms than colors that gave faces to the people striding or dragging themselves along the roadside. That, too, a sign of a new age: that these eye colors, deep in the Caucasus, were not uniformly brown or black. Just as frequently a green would come along, a blue, a light or dark gray. And this was noteworthy: even when the faces were contorted with exhaustion, with hopelessness, with rage or hate, and here and there even with bloodlust, even when these eyes had an evil cast, or an absent one, or an arrogant one—the colors themselves, so long as one zeroed in on them and caused them to shine forth or dance in the light, were good, forming a range of eye colors. In their succession, precisely because without exception each pair of eyes was gazing in a different direction and as if into the void, these colors now created a pulse; pulsed toward someone or something. Just as one often felt tempted to stroke a child’s head in passing (and now and then actually did so), and as one felt tempted to put one’s arm around some elderly person on the street (which one had never actually done), one felt tempted to run one’s fingertips over all, yes all, those eyes and eyeballs and brush them with one’s lips; the colors were practically waiting for some such thing. (“One.”) Although Don Juan was driving past them, a week later his movement seemed in retrospect like walking, very slow walking.