by Peter Handke
“And suddenly you yourself were on the ground, primarily thanks to her. Thanks? Yes. For after the period of sheer hate came my period of gratitude; and with it my enthusiasm returned, now no longer childlike but mature, and this period continues to this day and will not end until my life does. Gratitude and ideas: only ideas of this sort deserve the name. She who caused your ruin reminded you. Reminded you of what? Just reminded, without a whom or a what. Reminded you unspecifically and all the more tellingly. And thus, thanks to her, you also discovered for the first time, after an interlude of impotent and inactive hate (more and more directed against yourself), what it means to work.
“Yes, I realized that up to my fall I had never worked, had merely made money. Thanks to her, I learned to work, first under duress, later voluntarily. And eventually you worked enthusiastically, as a baker, a stonemason, a truck driver on the narrowest and most winding dirt roads through the mountains. And not once were you out for profit, old boy. Yes, I wanted nothing but to do my work, slowly and methodically, as well as possible, and that now became my kind of success.
“So you’ve become an entrepreneur again? Yes, but without intending to and without ulterior motives. As an entrepreneur, now, I have come to see myself not as a moneymaker but as someone who works, slowly and methodically, one step at a time, one word at a time, as carefully as possible. And thus I live as if my losses were profits, and am certain of this much: when I lose, I win; when I am enthusiastic or happy, I am enriched and loved. Just as one of the ancient cities here on the plateau has the motto Sueño y trabajo, dream and work, the logo of my new enterprise bears the motto: ‘Enthusiasm and Work.’
“But then, too—oh, dear, we enthusiasts of today! In contrast to the enthusiasts of earlier times, each enthusiast today remains solitary, no longer joins forces with the others.—Yet, for the time being, for this transitional period, isn’t that the way it ought to be?”
At this point in his speech he is supposed to have suddenly bent over his chauffeuse’s hand on the wheel, which she held like reins, and brushed it with his lips, or even touched it? if so, even more softly than with a veil, and he allegedly added, “Your child will turn out not to have vanished for good; your sweetheart will not be absent for many more years; your brother will not have been detained long at the border.”
During this drive she toyed with an inexplicable notion, and not for the first time, a notion somewhat reminiscent of her sensation in the airplane of being filmed: what was taking place just then in the present, as the present moment, was being narrated at the same time as something long since past, or perhaps not long since past but certainly not of the present moment. And besides, it was not she who toyed with the notion that the two of them were traveling—no, not simultaneously, but rather exclusively, in a narrative: the notion acted itself out for her, without any involvement on her part. And since she had been on the lookout for signs from the time she set out, she took this, too, as a sign. And to see and feel herself being narrated was something she considered a good sign. It gave her a sense of security. In the notion of being narrated she felt protected, along with her passenger.
A sort of shelteredness had already made itself felt simply in the act of listening. The man had conducted his monologue in the form of a conversation with himself, instead of directing it at her. And pricking up her ears for such conversations turned out to be much easier than having to play the role of the person being addressed. Long ago, in the village schoolhouse, she had absorbed her teacher’s lessons most effortlessly when he stood by the window, for instance, and murmured into space, or seemed to confide the material casually to a treetop. Being addressed head-on, however, often rendered her deaf, even when she was an anonymous member of a large audience, and thus shielded from the speaker’s direct gaze.
The road shrouded in darkness. By now she must have long since passed the village of Simancas, located on a river, where the archives of the old kingdom and sometime empire were housed; archives with holdings richer than those of Naples or Palermo, archives that even held the records of the 1532 grain harvest in her Sorbian village and the rate of infant mortality between 1550 and 1570. All that had been visible of Simancas as they drove by was a tent city near the mouth of the río Pisuerga, where it flowed into the río Duero, domed tents, all the same size, reddish in the light of the rising moon above this residual territory, in her daughter’s Arabic book a fragment of text pertaining to this phenomenon, “red tents, love tents.” The one hitchhiker on the carretera had not been her brother.
And shortly before Tordesillas, with mad Queen Juana de Castilla in her tower, a dialogue had sprung up between the two travelers after all. The passenger pointed to a medallion attached to the windshield and asked, “Who is the white figure in that image?”—She: “The white angel.” —The passenger: “Which white angel?”—She: “The white angel of Milesevo.”—The passenger: “Where is Milesevo?”—She: “Milesevo is a village in the Sierra de Gredos. And the white angel is all that is left of a medieval fresco there.”—He: “What is the angel pointing to?”—She: “The angel is pointing to an empty grave.”—He: “What confident pointing. Never have I seen a finger extended so energetically.”
They were not expecting him in Tordesillas on this particular evening. He had not reserved a hotel room. Since his first business failure he had given up making special preparations for the future. For his trips, including business trips, he planned only what was absolutely necessary. More than one appointment was out of the question. And this appointment he did not allow others to schedule. He was the one who decided on the time; and it was never to last more than an hour. For the time beforehand and afterward he remained in charge.
If he planned anything else for his travels, it was the uncertainties, and any number of them: missing this connection or that, failing to meet a possible business partner, or perhaps not recognizing him, or better still: not revealing himself to him, remaining unseen as he watched the other person scan the restaurant, the hotel lobby, the railroad platform, for the important stranger; and more than once he had let the person he was supposed to meet simply depart again, and not out of dislike or distaste but for some reason he could not explain to himself—held spellbound in his hiding place by a sort of magnetic effect, yet all the while filled with pleasure and a sense of adventure—and afterward he would spend an enjoyable day or evening alone.
And now the time had come to look for a place for the night. And besides, he was hungry. She, too? Yes. She knew the area and turned off the dark highway onto an even darker side road. Branches scraped the car windows. They had not seen the large city of Valladolid; almost nothing of little Simancas; and now there was nothing to see of medium-size or small Tordesillas but a glow on the underside of a single low-hanging cloud, or was that already another town, farther to the west, Toro or Zamora, or did it come from a wildfire?
But suddenly they had halted in the middle of the barren plateau in front of a castle-like structure, no, really and truly a castle; for wasn’t that the escutcheon of the former dynasty above the entrance portal? And the building and grounds were so vast that it could only be a royal castle, not merely an imitation or a dream of one.
No indication of a “hotel”: neither neon lights nor a sign; also no cars in the courtyard, not even one or two modest ones with local license plates that would show that although there were no guests, at least a few employees were there waiting for them. To be sure, although all the windows were dark, at the main gate a light was shining, in fact a pair of torches, one on either side, and as if they had been there a long time.
They got out of the car. A night breeze was blowing; “from the south-east, from the Sierra,” she said. A buzzing and rattling from the acacias that formed an avenue leading up to the entrance: the sound of the black, sickle-shaped seedpods, with which the bare trees were bursting (the rattling came from the dry seeds in the pods). On the ground of the avenue each of their footsteps caused a crackling in the fall
en sickles. The chauffeuse stuck her index and middle finger in her mouth and blew; her whistle circled the entire castle. (In her Sorbian village such a whistle had been called for in the middle of the gentlest village song.) All the acacia branches, from the fork to the tip, had dagger-like, razor-sharp thorns, each thorn outlined against the star-bright Iberian winter sky, once the car’s headlights were turned off. Did that mighty rushing come from below, from the río Duero, here not so far from where it flowed into the Atlantic, and was the castle located on a bluff high above a broad valley? “No,” she said, as if he had asked: “No river, just a little brook down in a ravine.”
An answer like this was consistent with her viewing the imposing structure as a roadside hostel placed there to accommodate them. When her whistle drew no response, she clapped her hands as she stood there on the graveled circular drive, bordered by box shrubs, in front of the entrance. And to do so, she put down the suitcase. Which suitcase? Which would it be but the one belonging to her passenger, which she had lifted out of the car herself and carried this far.
Still no answer, so she bent down to pick up a pebble, just one, and aimed it at a certain window among the twenty-four on the second floor, dark like all the others. She hit it squarely in the middle: a sound not of glass, or at least not of modern glass, but of very old glass; less of glass than of soft stone or very hard wood.
As our newly minted enthusiast told it, the lord of the manor now opened the window. Lord of the manor? The epitome of one. And he was alone, as a lord of the manor must be nowadays. But she is said to have shouted up to him as if he were the bellhop and supposed to hop to it: “Two rooms!” And in no time: the lord of the manor was coming downstairs from his second floor to meet them, who by now were standing in the flickering light of the hall, having scrambled over the threshold, almost knee high. Before he was even close to them, he held out two keys, keys with bows as shiny as if they were made of crystal. And he smiled briefly, as if in greeting, as if he had been expecting the two, or at least her, the woman; but he spoke not a word, either then or in the hours that followed, as the traveling entrepreneur likewise kept silent from this moment on, as if he had nothing more to add to the long speech he had made during the nocturnal drive.
The lord wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, as if he were simultaneously the hotel manager and the maître d’hôtel, in charge of the restaurant. The curved staircase looked as if it were of marble, and had steps so shallow and broad that one floated up it as if being carried. Their rooms, located in opposite directions, were as spacious as ballrooms, the bed in each case tucked into a corner, and they had floors of something like red brick, with uneven spots, dips and miniature valleys and chains of hills, which made her feel, as she told the author, as if she were walking back home in her garden; “the only thing missing was the swampy patches.”
And when she opened the casement windows and leaned out, gazing toward the south and the Sierra, it looked as if down below in the manor grounds, now brightly lit by the moon, “in my eyes a farmer’s pasture,” a hedgehog hobbled by, the same one as at home; with teeny glittering eyes, as if to say, “I am here already.” And in the castle pond, “in the village puddle,” the glaring reflection of the moon, now transected by the reflection of the familiar matitudinal bat. When, not until their last morning? And the bat mirrored in the still water with a clarity of contour never seen in reality.
8
The two travelers supping on the ground floor, not in one of the reception rooms but in one of the corner rooms, to be reached by way of a labyrinth of corridors, some of which ended at blank walls or trompe l’oeil doors. The corner room no larger than a niche, yet with a domed ceiling set with thousands of tiny enameled tiles whose colors and shapes formed a repeating pattern, so that at first it looked as though the dome were growing larger and larger, and then as though there were no dome at all but a low, flat ceiling, almost low enough to touch with one’s fingertips from a seated position.
The small chamber was reminiscent of certain almost inaccessible places into which people used to withdraw in earlier times, not for any clandestine activities but because they wanted to be alone with their own kind—close friends, members of their own social class or sex. And in fact this had once been a smoking room, a place reserved for men. Only now it was the woman who led the man there, unhesitatingly taking this turn and that, and, playing hostess, pointing out his place at the table, barely large enough for two, making as if to run her finger over the likewise enamel-tiled wall, to wipe away centuries-old soot. And in fact her hands were now sooty, from the fire in the fireplace, whose dimensions matched those of the niche, the opening no bigger than the stovepipe aperture low in the enameled wall. A mere hand’s breadth from the “firehole” (her term for “fireplace”), the enamel was already cold.
A cold winter night, cold as only winter nights on the plateau can be. Distant thunder. Explosions. In the still damp piles of firewood? The once and perhaps future client had changed for supper; was dressed like the lord of the manor or whomever (who in the meantime was standing in the invisible, inaudible, unsmellable kitchen or wherever). The lady banker or whoever was still in the outfit she had been wearing earlier. At most she picked up from time to time, as if playfully, one of the fans lying next to her plate and ran her finger over one of its five, or six? classic segments, always the same one, painted with landscape images, in this case depicting the Sierra, the Sierra de Gredos?—in this country everything was a “sierra,” from the Bay of Biscay to the Straits of Gibraltar, and this sierra or whatever on the fan could just as easily be the Sierra Cantabria, or the Sierra Guadarrama, the Sierra de Copaonica, the Sierra Morena, or the Sierra Nevada. And appropriately, the traditional term for the obligatory landscape images on all fans: simply país, countryside.
And as if the entrepreneur had tacitly asked the lady banker what she was doing in the Sierra de Gredos, of all places, and in winter, of all times, and with the current world situation, of all things, she then, speaking on her feet (or sitting), delivered one of those pronouncements for which she was famous all over the continent and beyond. (The designations “lady banker” and “entrepreneur” no longer fit the two of them, and not only since their arrival at the castle or hostel; from the moment of their landing at the remote little airport of Valladolid, they had become something else besides; and then, during the evening drive along the road, almost exclusively that something else; a different reality; the second wind of being no one in particular.)
During that meal, eaten in the orbit of the queen who had gone mad, she had a deep voice, hardly recognizable as a woman’s voice, and she said more or less the following: “To me the Sierra de Gredos is the mountain range that epitomizes danger—not just physical danger, but danger per se. I have known this Sierra for almost two decades now. The first time I came, I was pregnant with my daughter Lubna, in my next-to-last month. The child’s father was also there. It was summertime, and we were driving along the southern flank of the mountains, coming from the west, from Portugal, from the Atlantic, where we had landed, and heading east, toward Madrid. The plain, or rather lowlands, across which we were traveling, between the Gredos massif and the Montes de Toledo, was and is in the grip of blistering heat. It seems to me we were not making any headway there in the valley of the río Tajo; hardly stirred from the spot, although at the same time we were traveling along at a good clip. That had to do with the Sierra in the distance: a single naked mass of rock stretching to infinity, always at the same distance and unchanged every time we looked, although in the meantime we had covered perhaps ten kilometers and some twenty miles.
“Finally it became clear that we would turn in that direction. That occurred on the heights of Talavera de la Reina. And the route led north toward the foot of the Sierra. And as we approached, the Sierra remained the same pale blue, almost white (yet even on the sharp Almanzor peak there was no snow left), at any rate paler than the sky. And the night was spent in t
he konak, the guest house (still in existence at that time) belonging to the cloister of San Pedro de Alcántara, near the only town for miles around, little Arenas de San Pedro.
“The following day we began to climb, on fairly overgrown paths through the wilderness. The child in my belly was quiet as a mouse, much quieter than usual. I could not walk fast, and soon we separated. The plan was to rendezvous in El Arenal, or Mahabba, its earlier name in Arabic, the highest mountain village on the southern slope.
“Along the way I rested one time in the shade of an overhanging cliff, and fell asleep, perhaps for a short while, perhaps a long while. Perhaps I did not sleep at all, just closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I found myself in an image from an alien world. Everything that had just now been familiar had been jettisoned, and me along with it. Nothing about the vegetation, the granite boulders, the path, was familiar, nor was this hand, this belly, this navel, this big toe. The whole world, and I along with it, stood there twisted and displaced, completely awry, without one’s brain being able to straighten it out one way or the other, everything either crooked or upside down, and the sky, too, upside down.
“Despite my round belly I broke into a run, up the mountainside, which in reality meant down the mountain, and promptly fell flat on my face, luckily into one of the many natural water basins on the south side of the Sierra, troughlike hollows in the otherwise slippery-smooth granite beds of the innumerable mountain brooks. Glorious swimming then, and for years and years after that, soon with the child by my side.
“And curses on the Sierra de Gredos, and not only on the almost insurmountable southern flank, and not only because of the fiendish flies, which you are not spared even in winter, which surround you in swarms that grow larger with every step, which although they do not sting, fly into your eyes and ears, into your nostrils, and, since you cannot keep your mouth shut tight while climbing, eventually get into your throat, into your airway and gullet, which corroborates the story told about King Charles V, the later and only Emperor Charles (the first and last): since childhood he had stood around with his mouth open so wide that even when abroad, in Flanders or elsewhere, he was tracked down and besieged by those famous flies of the Sierra de Gredos, on whose southern slope he then in fact died, though by then almost an old man. Curses on the Sierra de Gredos!”
