Don Juan

by Peter Handke

  Don Juan was still quivering with the memory of taking secret leave, in that same bar at the ferry station, of the Ceuta woman—his own. Secret did not mean secretive or surreptitious, however. She passed by outside on the dock in the company of an older man, and they nodded to each other, but openly, except that even the keenest observer would not have noticed this openness—such an observer least of all. These secret partings from his women, in a crowd, with people all around, at a distance, were the kind Don Juan liked, and in his eyes they were also the partings between a man and a woman most likely to go well; all other partings, he thought, were doomed to failure from the outset. And to go well meant that both their bodies took leave of each other secretly, from afar, their entire bodies. These two bodies had enjoyed each other, purely and simply, and now they felt pleasure again in the secret leave-taking, even more purely, if possible. At least he had a sense that a glow radiating at a distance from her body came over his own, whereupon he in turn, his gaze resting on her back—all he could see of her now—recognized that something entirely different was going on with the woman. She did not want a permanent parting—any more than the other women. He should not, must not, leave her forever. Her back, with the shadows of her naked shoulder blades playing over it, issued a threat: Too bad for you if you don’t return! Her back demanded, it commanded. And in between her back also begged, quietly, pleadingly, as it disappeared into the distance. And Don Juan, engrossed in the scene, found himself looking forward all the more keenly to the next country and the next woman, felt all the hungrier for the next bodies that would come his way.

  The old man walking with the pregnant beauty of Ceuta was her father, by the way, with whom Don Juan had sat harmoniously for hours the previous evening as they both gazed down at the sea, and in their sporadic dialogue each took the words out of the other’s mouth, as if they had known each other a long time, and in the father’s case known also meant trusted, indestructibly: Don Juan had nothing to fear from his back, and not because it looked so thin and emaciated.

  The chief memory of Ceuta, as Don Juan described it a week later in Port-Royal, was the cinema, in which Don Juan sat alone, the sole member of the audience, and watched a film based on the Odyssey, in which Odysseus—at the end of the film, without a reunion with Penelope or his son—after seven years of sailing around was set down in his sleep by strangers on his own island of Ithaca, and when he woke up had no idea he was there, in the place he had longed for all those years. Then there was the lonely bar in that finisterre of Ceuta—no enclave in the world without this kind of land’s-end bar—at the edge of the steep promontory where the African continent fell off, high above the channel, where the tavern keeper was a former Mr. Universe, still somewhat higher in rank than the local beauty queen, and for the benefit of Don Juan, his only guest, the man rippled his muscles one after the other under his now slack skin, imitating his victorious poses in the photos on the wall with a woeful smile, for a woman had just left him again, too. Then there was the tiny newsstand on the “Square of the Blessed Virgin of Africa,” still open at midnight, the only place lit up in the entire darkened enclave, illuminated from deep within, a light that flickered only dimly through the newspapers and magazines hanging outside, but when one stuck one’s head through the opening, with the vendor silently watchful behind the counter, the four walls were lit as if by floodlights, no, not the walls, the unbroken shelves of books, not a patch of wall without a book’s spine, and all the books for sale, now, during the blackout, with war threatening, a bookstore such as Don Juan had never come upon before, and how hard the book Don Juan was looking for—it was there, of course—had to be tugged at to pry it loose from the rest of the crammed-in inventory. And: the cancer patient on the ferry, whose hair had fallen out, had been at the wedding back in the Caucasian village. And likewise the village idiot, who strode with giant’s steps down the empty alleys of the fortress, had already been there in Damascus, directing the crowd to the right or the left with commanding gestures. And over there in North Africa he had already encountered the motorcycle couple from whom he fled to me in Port-Royal.

  It did not occur to Don Juan to do a count of the women during that week. Women and counting: the question did not arise for Don Juan, either then or ever before. He experienced the womantime instead as a time out. Not counting but spelling out. His womantime was a time in which there were no numbers. Nothing more to count, nothing that could be expressed in numbers. Having a time out meant that places and the distances between them, the stretches to be traveled, also did not count, did not embody any unit of measure. Being on the move was simultaneously a kind of constant arriving, and similarly, when he arrived, he thought of himself as still on the move. And he felt protected by this womantime, exempt from countingtime. As long as it was in effect, nothing could happen to him; even each of his escapes was part of his time out; every one was a new, quiet, positively calm escape, with eyes wide open. Womantime meant again and again: one had time. Was in time. In accord with time. Time kept striking a chord in one, even as one slept. And one felt time pulsing and warming one, down to the balls of one’s feet and the tips of one’s fingers. One felt not merely protected by this kind of time but borne along by it, and therefore instead of being counted, one was recounted by it. For the duration of such time one knew one was supported and transported in the process of being recounted.

  There was not much for Don Juan to recount about the woman in Norway, other than that she waited for him behind a church, after the service, during which they had been more and more drawn to each other (nothing more natural and less frivolous, he told me, than for a man and a woman to have their eyes opened for each other, soul as well as body, by the celebration of the liturgy, far more naturally than by any other celebration). Besides, according to local definitions, the woman was ill, disturbed, or insane. Except that Don Juan could not see any insanity in her and also did not want to believe it when she described herself as insane, that least of all. He simply wanted to be there for her, and then actually was—and how! At least that is how I pictured it, without his offering any details.

  What Don Juan recalled from the day by the fjord, with the Norwegian woman: the wooden table outside; the soot on the spring snow (as just a little while earlier in the Caucasus); the light on the water, in the evening, which instead of disappearing became brighter and brighter for a while, as if for always; the moon almost the spitting image of the moon the previous day in Ceuta and the day before that in Damascus; the mirror-smooth red-and-yellow troughs left behind by the glacial tongue as it melted very recently; sitting there; being all eyes and ears; reading, reading, turning the pages, until the following day among the Dutch dunes, until the approach of the spring flood there. A fish leaped out of the fjord. An old woman passed by, her pocketbook dangling on long handles over her left arm, and how small this pocketbook was, and how empty it seemed. A man, even older, passed by, Chinese, his blue suit buttoned up to his chin, and gave everyone he met a wide berth, with a respectful manner that Don Juan found unforgettable. A child kept pushing buttons on a discarded boom box out on the bank of the fjord. A child, a second one or the same one, kept licking its plate, its face invisible behind the plate. A child, a third one or the same one, was missing, and all the people along the fjord set out to look for it, calling out over the desolate rocky landscape the name the mother had given them, until it was brought back, soaked to the skin but safe (only later did I learn who had found it, from Don Juan’s servant, who had turned up again at last). Of course the teenager delivering pizza on his motor scooter was there as well; back in Ceuta he had failed to find his way to the customer, and here in Norway he kept speeding off in all sorts of wrong directions, only to slam on his brakes after a while in utter confusion. And on the head of the cancer patient, oh ho! a little fuzz of hair had grown back. And oh ho! the autistic person who had sat as if praying, legs crossed Indian-style, in the middle of the bus station in Damascus among the pools of oil, wi
th his black caretaker beside him, was now lying on his stomach by the fjord, sleeping among the fish skeletons in the middle of the path that ran along the bank, his caretaker sitting dark and silent next to him as in Damascus, arms crossed. And without Don Juan’s having to mention it, I saw again those billows of poplar-seed fluff, silvery to mouse gray, blowing everywhere, up, down, and sideways, to north and south, as I already expected to see them at the next way stations, the one in the Netherlands and the nameless final one in Port-Royal. By the way, after the time with the Norwegian woman, Don Juan’s servant disappeared for the time being, not without having prepared the most necessary things for his master’s onward journey, and more than that: socks darned as meticulously as otherwise only a woman could do, and likewise his suit and shirt pressed, the buttons sewn on so tightly they could not be ripped off, all ready for any escape, his shoes gleaming up to the tongue, the smallest wrinkles polished, with bouncy new soles as if they belonged to Seven-League Boots. So Don Juan was fleeing again? He merely hinted to me that in the end he had had to run, lest he become the woman’s murderer—a murderer on demand.

  He had even less to tell about the woman in Holland as a person—which to my ears as a listener did not necessarily convey disappointment or satiety: on the contrary, Don Juan’s storytelling grew more enthusiastic from day to day. His eyes, which almost constantly gazed past me into thin air, glowed. In the end he seemed astonished at the turns his story was taking, as one perhaps becomes astonished at something one has experienced because in the telling it sounds more and more made up, which, however, does not mean in the slightest that it is untrue—and it was only in such moments of amazement that the listener, to whom Don Juan otherwise merely showed the side of his face, found himself the recipient of a piercing look.

  It was probably also part of this astonishment at what he had experienced, growing from weekday to weekday, that the sites of Don Juan’s adventures became increasingly nameless (as the women had been from the beginning, as was only proper). In the case of Norway, the fjord still had a location, near the city of Bergen—or perhaps I merely supplied this detail while listening; as for Holland, no place name was mentioned at all. The only thing Don Juan told me about the woman there was that she had met him, the man on the run, out on the artificial dune, actually a covered and compacted landfill, she on the run as well, pursued by a pimp for whom she had been supposed to prostitute herself exactly a week earlier, but she was in no sense “that kind of girl.” (In his narrative Don Juan was using the present tense more and more, and when he came to the last way station, he offered me almost nothing but cues.) The only other detail about the Dutch woman: she sits with him at a window overlooking a gracht or canal—poplar seeds blowing, et cetera—while a May rain plops into the mirror-smooth yet dark water, and the woman, with tears in her eyes, all of a sudden says, “That’s Holland for you.”

  Otherwise I saw, or sensed, Don Juan completely alone there for a day and a night. Only a dog, homeless, or perhaps not, keeps him company for a while, sometimes even running ahead and waiting for him, as if to show him the way. Dust flies up from the streetcar tracks. In a pine forest Don Juan pulls a thorn from the paw of the dog, which is still with him, and then on the promenade trims the dog’s nails with a penknife, so the two of them will not make so much noise walking along on the pavement. During one of the day’s many rain showers he sits under the roof of a snack bar by a bicycle path and reads the book he acquired at that very different stand in North Africa, the book’s pages, as well as his hands and feet, constantly sprinkled with raindrops, sits there in the changing light and reads and reads, the dog next to him in the grass, or perhaps not. But wherever he walks, stands, and sits, Don Juan is startled, and he turns his head suddenly and jumps up and runs off whenever he hears a child calling or even shouting, and on this day he hears children’s shouts everywhere, or imagines them when a gull mews or the streetcars screech as they round the bend. Toward evening, in the strip on the horizon over the North Sea there appears the ship of the Argonauts, empty, without Jason, without the Golden Fleece, and Medea leaves the beach and goes into the house to kill their children. As darkness falls, all of Holland takes on the appearance of a land of neon and candles, and on all sides music is turned up, and each time Don Juan tries to get away from the music, away from the music, from this kind as much as from that. Instead he sniffs at the flower shops, long since shuttered—smells everything but tulips—sniffs at the book, sniffs his own fingertips, womantime, fingertiptime. And finally late night, peace and quiet at last, the quiet of the ocean, and at last, after all the preceding nights, the full moon, to which the solitary walker on the one hand constantly looks up, while on the other hand gazing into the conveniently curtainless houses, to catch the television news, and so on. Don Juan certainly had a song to sing about that day, and in fact he spoke of it in a singsong, or I am the one imagining that now. And the abrupt cessation of the singsong, and then another flight.

  And then the last country, completely nameless, with the last woman. It was not that Don Juan withheld the country’s name from me; he did not know it himself, from the very beginning, had no desire to know it. He did not even know how he got there, had no image of the trip (yet he must have used some form of transportation). Opening his eyes, after overwhelming tiredness: he was there. And the woman was there, on top of him, under him, facing him. Again he had no idea how the two of them had come together, and there was nothing to know there, either. No words to describe anything in their surroundings, and yet all around was the very opposite of a jumble. Not merely the fact that the place and everything there seemed so unknown and unnameable, since one simply did not care: it signified the height of amazement; without any form of magic it was magical.

  Seven days later, when Don Juan told me about the day of namelessness, actually stuttering and stammering in confusion, he did not even know, in regard to himself and the woman, who remained a stranger to the end, which of them had said what, which of them had done what. (And they had stayed together for almost the whole day and for the whole night, a deviation from the week’s pattern.) Don Juan no longer knew: Had he read aloud to her, or she to him? Had she eaten the fish or had he? Had he warmed her up when she felt cold, or wasn’t it rather she who warmed him? Had she won the chess game or had he? Who caught up with the other when we went swimming—was that you or me? Who hid from whom for a while: you or me? Who talked and talked: she or he? Who listened the entire time: you? me? me? you? And that one did not know: as it should be. Let us be glad.

  What did remain certain was that in that no-name way station the still childish pizza-delivery boy on his motor scooter, a Global, was trying to find his way, in vain (he had also run out of gas); that the autistic man and his caretaker, the former bawling up at the sky, the latter holding him by the arm, were continuing their two-person procession; that the motorcycle couple set out for their love hollow (except that there the woman still had black hair, not blond); that the old man from Damascus and Bergen was again stuck in the gutter, breathing hard and unable to lift a foot, either the right one now or the left, to place it on the sidewalk . . . Don Juan did not even have to mention these cues by now. As time went by, I saw these scenes all the more clearly when he refrained from describing them.

  Don Juan and the women: this story, told by him himself, was thus at an end. He and I had spent seven days out in the garden this way, and in the meantime Pentecost was just around the corner. The hazel branch that had heralded his arrival was still stuck in the ground, hidden by the grass, which had shot up during the week like wheat. Even when it rained one time, we stayed outdoors, under the chestnut tree and then under the lime tree, whose foliage was so dense that hardly a drop got through, the roof of leaves over our heads almost solid, with only specks of sky visible, like flashes of daytime stars here and there against the dark green lime firmament. During the final phase Don Juan got up from his seat more and more often and paced as he talked, going backward.
When the sun shone and the May wind wafted through the trees, the alternation between almost white light, quivering, and dark shadows became so powerful that for moments Don Juan disappeared from sight.

  When his tale of the weeklong adventures was over, he stayed on at my inn at Port-Royal-in-the-Fields. Because he was waiting for his servant, or for whatever reason: I did not ask. I was happy that Don Juan did not set out again immediately. I had even come to appreciate his presence. The ideal of neighborliness, which has been with me all my life, and at which I thought I had failed once and for all in my hermit’s solitude in Port-Royal, was reborn with this stranger, this fugitive, close by. I could picture Don Juan as my neighbor, if not right on the other side of the inn’s wall then certainly at a distance of a few miles, perhaps over on the slope of Saint-Lambert. Altogether, thanks to his stay, I stopped, at least for the time being, thinking of myself as a failure. Even the way he ate the dishes I cooked for him: it had been an eternity since I had seen anyone eat so reverentially; his chewing was like a prearticulation of what he later put into words. It was not only a neighborhood that I could thus imagine having once more, but also my inn—serving guests again, which as far back as my childhood had been my favorite game.