by Peter Handke
Even the servant, who was preparing him for his big scene like a page, constantly making the wrong move as he was distracted by the perhaps merely imagined louder and louder whistles from outside the walls, contributed to the confusion. Don Juan, however, consistent with the earlier story, showed himself perfectly at home amid the panic. He looked around, completely calm, with the calm of a savage.
During his seven days in my garden, a whole series of Don Juans had shown up, in the evening programming on television, in the opera, in the theater, and likewise in what is called reality, in flesh and blood. Yet from what my Don Juan told me about himself I learned the following: those were all false Don Juans—including Molière’s, including Mozart’s.
I can attest: Don Juan is different. I saw him as someone who was faithful—the quintessence of faithfulness. And he was more than merely kind to me—he was considerate. And if I have ever encountered a fatherly person, it was he: one listened to him and believed him. Yet during those seven days he remained nicely distant from me, which suited me and also pleased me, a person whose dreams for a long time have focused only on others and on the stories of others, in which I do not occur. During our time together he hardly ever looked at me, only past me or through me, particularly while he was telling his story. Once he did look at me, however—and how!—when something like a talisman fell out of his hand and almost broke. A name escaped his lips—not that of a woman—and I caught the talisman, or whatever it was, in the nick of time.
Just before he opened the garden gate, however, I saw him laugh and wave to those outside. Out there I saw someone also laugh and wave, a man who had come out of the riparian forest and joined the women. And over his shoulder Don Juan told me that this was the brother of one of the women, the Norwegian or the Dutch woman or a third one, and unlike the woman, the brother had established friendly relations with him as he was leaving the country; what else was possible? The rest of the story cannot be told, either by Don Juan or by me, or by anyone else. Don Juan’s story can have no end, and that, on my word, is the definitive and true story of Don Juan.
