by Peter Handke
At any rate, each image among the thousands was under the control of its receiver, even if it had flashed by in the twinkling of an eye, as if the receiver were also the transmitter. What remained of the image was the imprint, which, before it faded, sooner or later, and in some cases not at all (in this respect comparable to an unusual dream), could “bear fruit,” and this without exception (whereas with dreams this was the exception). And one could decide which of these images would bear fruit—as the selection and utilization of those just described rested on the intensely personal choice made by the one “image person” in question.
“Those images,” she dictated, for the moment more a “banquière” than an “aventurière,” to the author, “are a form of capital. Capital without any exchange value, but with all the more use value. Capital whose owner one remains only if one chooses to use it to the utmost. If one allows this capital to sit unused, it collapses, and—this is the unique feature of these moveable and/or immoveable image assets, my most liquid holdings and at the same time my soundest real estate—one collapses with it, even if the opposite appears to be true. Having and owning as a process of constant trading, yet not speculating and lining one’s pockets but rather pure usufruct, as much to one’s own benefit as to others’. By putting the image-capital to work, and why shouldn’t one?, for profit and enrichment, shared profit and joint enrichment, without claiming to be an owner, without the title of ownership: a way of handling property that has hitherto gone unrealized in any economic and banking system—” She broke off; end of dictation. But had the author taken it all down? His scribbles indecipherable; his private shorthand.
Over time the lightning flashes of images had become sparser. In this barren countryside all one saw, as far as the horizon, was this barren countryside. The cloud behind her had dissipated, as clouds sometimes do over the ocean. Oh (in Arabic, ja), how fruitful this interlude had been: it was right that now the images dwindled and finally disappeared altogether. Although outwardly nothing was happening—which, given the rocky baldness of the mesa, perhaps contributed to the hail of images?—, the lone driver felt like someone who had just crossed a newly discovered and at the same time tranquil, strangely familiar continent. This had been the time for images, and now there would come a time without. Yet she could have spent an entire day, even an entire month, alone in their company. And hadn’t she just experienced an entire month, an entire year?
But at the end she pursued a final image, one that had filled her with particular astonishment. With it came the idiot from the riverport city at home, the “idiot of the outskirts.” He was perched on the site of the weekly fish market. As befitted such an image, she had actually once seen him sitting there in just this way. She walked past him, and he looked at her. He was bald and barefoot. The day was windy and cold—even if in the image now neither wind nor cold played a role. Or, rather, yes, at least the wind did. For between the woman walking past and the idiot, papers and plastic bags are swirling around, intermingled with the gleaming of fish scales. The market is closed. The stands are dismantled; the square is empty, although not yet cleaned up. Fish heads and lemon slices in wooden crates, or littering the ground. The idiot not perched as usual by the side of the road or on the curb, but on one of the hydrants that will be used to wash the trash out of the marketplace. He sits there as on a throne, at eye level with her, the passerby, who has known him, as he knows her, for a long time.
And one day the idiot had been standing beside her in the narrow little Armenian church on the outskirts, both of them equally strangers there, or perhaps not? the others at the mass not any less strangers, only less noticeably so? More than once they had crossed each other’s paths on the way to the forest, he meanwhile riding a motor scooter without a muffler, and now and then with a woman, a different one each time, all of them appearing normal, so to speak, at least in comparison to him, who was constantly throwing his arms in the air and babbling in fits and starts, either in a deep guttural voice or a falsetto—normal, and, in the idiot’s company, in such high spirits that one would not have recognized them if earlier one had happened to run into these particular women or girls alone. And one time he had shouted enthusiastically into her car, from one of his favorite spots, a coach’s brake-chock inscribed with a king’s crown, left centuries earlier along the road leading out of the city: “I know everything about you. I’ve read all about you, everything!”
Now there/here on the market hydrant the idiot is trembling. He is freezing. His teeth are chattering. In a moment he will be shooed from his perch and soaked through, which will make him freeze even more. Far and wide no female companion in sight. And his elderly parents, who have taken care of him for decades, have both died, she the day before yesterday, he yesterday, or at least, mortally ill, were taken away, and now the idiot is living in the house all by himself, an excessively spacious old building with espaliered fruit trees out in front, and many paths through the rear garden, where one sometimes saw him strolling with a small book in hand, like a priest praying from a breviary in earlier times—though merely pretending to read, or perhaps not?
The square smells of fish, the often rather oily kinds from the rivers. The sky northwest-gray. The idiot hungry. And without any money either, except for the two coins he has always jingled in his pocket; which he lays on the counter in the suburban bars; and which would not pay even for the sugar in the coffee to which they always treat him, which he sweetens with so many cubes that the cup almost overflows. And how strange that outside of the office she almost always ran into people who had no money and, stranger still, had no interest in money, and that this suited her, strange or not?
In contrast to the others, that shower of images with the idiot as its central figure was not set in peacetime. The figure on the hydrant there was suffering. Not merely that he was cold, and so on; there was also a terminal hopelessness; the imminent prospect of being dragged away from his house and from the region where he had spent his entire life; of being removed, perhaps in an hour, from the only sphere of existence halfway possible for the idiot.
And yet, also in contrast to the rest of the current image series, not a trace of grief in his face; no sorrow at parting; no hint of fear of dying or perishing. In the midst of the swirling market debris, and his dire straits, the idiot remains untouched, and untouchable. On his temporary perch there, he is the essence of untouchability, beyond peace and war, heaven and hell. He crouches—no, sits “enthroned”—there, defying death—and life as well? no, transcending all our stupid thoughts of imperfect continuity, transitoriness, and irrevocability; the epitome of presentness, beyond my sorrows and joys; the embodiment of the current moment; simply there, and above all, as only an idiot can be, there and then.
And thus one sees oneself perceived by that figure on the cistern in a manner unlike any other; a form of perception that accompanies one, step for step, and meanwhile registers one, word for word, or sentence for sentence—note the movements of the idiot’s lips; if not narrating one, then enumerating one, in an impartial, merciless, seemingly inhuman manner; precisely the kind of enumeration specific to an idiot, which, however, can occasionally validate and acknowledge one like a particular kind of narration; a registering that does not categorize—a blessing. How affirming such enumeration by the idiot is, in that it challenges one to do a better job at anything one does in his field of vision, or at least to do it more clearly, which means more rhythmically! And so, as she passed him back then, she set her feet down more firmly and let her shoulders roll back a bit more. And now on the highway she does nothing for the time being but drive.
She drives on. Dust flies up. The sun shines in her face. She does not squint. It is possible she will be dead soon. She is wearing a ring. Her belt is broader. Her mouth is the broadest. I caress her. She does not notice. Maybe she is a man? In her heart a white lily blooms. Her ribs are sharp as a knife. You stink. She turns the wheel. The road is straight. By the side of the road lies a skull.
Another over there. The fields are gray and yellow. There stands a tree, full of dried-up leaves. The leaves tinkle. From that tree hung a black boar. It was slit open. The intestines were spilling out. Who will wash them? On a pole sits an owl in the bright sun. My girlfriend has a small mole in the hollow above her collarbone. Now she drives faster. My mother smoked, one cigarette after the other. One time I beat her because of that, in a dream. Another time she had an operation, but thirteen nurses blocked my way to her. Where will she turn in to spend the night? An empty bed is already waiting for her somewhere, or perhaps not. She is hungry. There is a line of dust around her nostrils. She is alone. I have never seen her not alone, except in photos. In the company of others she is unrecognizable. She plays at being sociable. And she does not play very well. She would play better with me. And in the pictures she plays particularly badly when she is in the company of a woman. She looks disfigured to me then, and ugly. Or no, not ugly, worse than that, a beautiful caricature. And her gestures and body language toward the other woman. She seems to be waving five hands in the air, jerking two heads, shifting from one foot to the other, jiggling like a millipede, her hips constantly bent like a tailor’s dummy. My father was a tailor, down in New Orleans, and in his deserted shop still hang a couple of suits and garments dropped off for alterations. And nevertheless, nonetheless, despite everything, and even so, I would like to see her in her story with someone else, at long last. Perhaps she just cannot stand being photographed? Even though she was a film star in her youth? Although or precisely for that reason? (This expression I picked up during the time when my parents listened to “Radio New Europe.”) To see her with someone, where she would be more, by a factor of one, by a factor of one hundred, than she is by herself.
She drives on. The dust flies up more and more. The sun shines on the nape of her neck. She pins up her hair. She pulls her shirt up over her shoulder. Her knees are sharp as daggers. She clamps her legs around me and draws me home into herself. There I curl up blissfully. There is a fragrance of lilies. And perhaps she will die this very night.
11
Toward evening, traffic on the carretera swelled. It was not only from both directions that the number of cars increased. Vehicles also came lumbering onto the road from the previously empty fields, steppes, and semideserts, fewer tractors than trucks, many of them with flapping tarpaulins, all grayish yellow like the earth, a sort of camouflage, and now and then convoys of tanks and armored personnel carriers, as if returning from maneuvers, and likewise ordinary automobiles, not only those made for rocky slopes but also many sporty little cars more suited to city traffic, hobbling along oddly from the trackless savannahs.
And all these vehicles, most of them, like her Santana, heading south, merged onto the highway, which continued almost straight as an arrow. And still no village in sight, let alone a city. Beautiful old Segovia at most a felt presence, as a strip of haze above the seemingly infinite mesa, to the east, at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama (not her destination), which was white down to a fairly low altitude—suggesting that the considerably higher Sierra de Gredos was even whiter? Or was this whiteness the result in part of the craggy massifs in the distance, lit up by the rays of the sun?
And then, just as abruptly, planes in the sky, flying quite low, not sport or private planes but dark, quite massive wide-bodied four-propeller bombers, zooming in from the south, seemingly springing up out of the ground, flying even lower as they approached and slowing to a speed that almost matched that of the stream of vehicles directly below them, and with their flaps set almost perpendicularly, describing a sort of landing curve, a broad ellipse, heading for which airport? the one at “Nuova Segóvia,” nearby according to the highway sign, yet out of sight, despite the roar of planes landing in quick succession, on the otherwise still apparently uninhabited mesa; and bombers like these returning to their base, each with its nose almost touching the tail of the one in front of it, each with the same sound, something between droning, rumbling, growling, and clattering, maneuvers inextricable from war, unlike those of tanks.
And now the shattering of her windshield, as if simply from the sound waves; glass shards in the car, also on her; not a single remnant of glass left in the frame there in front of her. And then the sign “Deviación,” detour. And was this possible: In the middle of the seemingly endless high plateau, almost unvarying except for the occasional rock outcropping, suddenly a “straits”? The road a cut through an outcropping, from a distance hardly distinguishable, yet from close up clearly higher than all the other outcroppings and also infinitely longer, crossing the entire countryside, forming a natural barrier, traversable only at this one notch, which had been carved out deeper for the carretera, forming a “straits,” or an estrecho, like the straits or estrecho of Gibraltar between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
And there, with walls of rock on both sides, the road did in fact narrow. Two vehicles could barely pass one another. For a truck, the vehicle approaching from the opposite direction had to stop to let it go by. A pedestrian would have had to flatten himself against the cliff (if that was even possible), and not only during the evening rush hour, as now. “Estrecho del Nuevo Bazar”—that, according to the sign, was the name of this pass. And, again according to a sign, it was more than a thousand meters above sea level. That meant that the meseta, to all appearances completely flat since the beginning of her drive, had imperceptibly gained about four hundred meters in altitude.
Immediately after the straits, after the cordillere, came the detour; the carretera blocked with steel chevaux-de-frise, a type of barricade now known almost exclusively from early war films and old newsreels, spirals of barbed wire wound through metal spikes. The highway sign, with “Ávila—Sierra de Gredos” crossed out with a thick line, barely legible, and further obscured by splashes of tar and bullet holes. The names of these places no longer occurring after the detour arrow, except for “Nuevo Bazar,” phosphorescent, and not only from the deep-yellow evening sun.
The straits was familiar to her from many previous trips. The settlement known as “El Nuevo Bazar” had also existed for years. She had spent the night there, in one of the many new hotels. And yet she no longer knew where she was, sitting in the line of vehicles, now moving at a snail’s pace, on the turnoff with which she was supposedly familiar. After the straits, had this huge hollow or basin in the landscape been there the last time? Was she on the right road? Was this even a road? With all the cars, bumper-to-bumper and rearview-mirror-in-rearview-mirror, and with the constant rumbling and pounding from the stones underneath, with dust flying at her, as well as thistles, steppe grasses, wild bees, and the occasional hornet—what, in the middle of winter?—even that was soon no longer a certainty.
Then the moment when she did not merely wonder, “Where am I?” but also, “Where is this place?” An area such as she had never encountered before. As if, with the passage of time, this familiar countryside had been transformed into something entirely different. As if it had been stood on its head; tipped over; turned upside down. As if this place, including the blueing sky and the greening patches (fields of winter rye dotting the fallow land), were ultimately not “here” anymore, but where? at the antipodes? on a distant star? As if this region, despite the bronze-glittering patches of water and the swaying dog rose bushes here and there—the little fruit capsules glowing reddish purple on the canes, arching against the evening sky—could not even be called “a country”; “a province”? (misleading); “a region”? (even more misleading); “a stretch”? (too innocuous); “an evil star”? (too pretentious).
And yet: as if one were nevertheless being ineluctably drawn in, breathing freely despite the dust, drawn into an atmosphere inimical to life, one that pulled the ground out from under one’s feet, now, now; that tipped one over or swallowed one up and let one tumble into a pit called “nowhereland,” into its non-name.
Time and again, often merely as a result of deviating from the beaten path a bi
t, she had landed in a sort of white hole. And after the initial blow to the head (literally), it had done her good, and now? “Don’t know,” she said to herself. “Who knows.” And still no sign of the “Nuevo Bazar,” announced, with each rotation of the wheels, along and above the road, also up in the sky, with banner in tow: no plantation or lone farm, not even a shed out in the fields. Instead billboards, one crowding and blocking the next, and then, out of nowhere, broad, smoothly paved sidewalks, with no one walking on them, accompanying the road, which meanwhile had become a distinctly good one, with electronic temperature displays on every light pole, the degrees differing markedly, not only because of sun and shade, as did the times flashing on the screens. Then floodlights, from a stadium? Suns infinitely more glaring than our familiar sun; the latter setting.
Finally, among the billboards—on which one often saw not merely a picture of the item offered for sale but the actual object, a house, a yacht, a car, an entire garden, a castle gate, in the original, on poles, suspended, on wheels for taking with one immediately (including the gate and even the garden)—a small, seemingly forgotten sign: a turnoff after all for “Ávila—Sierra de Gredos,” probably the last one. And this little sign was not crossed out, not blackened, was unharmed; and the road, albeit narrow, led in a curve, shimmering with emptiness, in the direction she wanted. The peak of one of the foothills of the Sierra already visible beyond the curve of the horizon. Yet she stayed in the pack with the others, on the road into Nuevo Bazar.
