by Peter Handke
“Yet the way in which I found myself increasingly alone, almost imperceptibly yet steadily, struck me as all the more threatening. And finally I was left without them. They no longer said anything to me. I no longer said anything to them. I now had nothing to say or to give to anyone, to take from anyone, and likewise there was no longer anyone to say or give anything to me, to take anything from me. I no longer reacted to anything, either for good or for ill. I was alone. I was without a reference point. I am alone. I am lost.”
The woman at his side said, more affirming than interrupting: “I, too, am lost.”
The stonemason is said to have continued speaking, in an even deeper, more resonant voice: “But I am not giving up. My chosen era, the Middle Ages, is gone, once and for all. And so I must move to another period. I must find my way to others, against whom I can measure myself without shriveling up in their presence or letting myself be hemmed in and limited by them, or letting them clip all my antennae. I shall set out to find other people, people of now and today, in whose presence I can breathe a sigh of relief when I measure myself against them: people, living people, whose presence strengthens mine, as I do theirs. Such people must exist, even in the present. They do exist. It cannot be that I am lost and done for in the present. It cannot be that nowadays people like us have no choice but to perish.”
The woman at his side: “No, we are not lost and done for.”
They say the itinerant stonemason drew a deep breath, hit the table with one of his hammers, and picked up the thread again, addressing himself particularly to the woman who had commissioned the story: “In a transitional phase I was focused exclusively on destruction, just like your brother. I used these tools here no longer for constructing, shaping, laying stone upon stone, repairing, but for smashing, tipping, toppling, ruining. With my chisel I no longer struck shapes out of stone. I struck again and again, but not forms, and it was no longer only blocks of stone before me as earlier. With the mallet I split and smashed whatever lay in my path, anything that might have been used as a building block, let alone a cornerstone or a foundation. With my masonry saw I no longer sliced roofing slates and thresholds. With my masonry bit I drilled everything but friezes and ornaments, vents or drainage holes. With my level I measured everything but level surfaces. With my acetylene torch I cut everything but steel girders. Quite a few of the piles of rubble you encountered on your way through the Sierra were my doing.”
As he spoke, the mason, so the story goes, fell to gesticulating, more and more wildly and less and less in control of his movements, and in the end he was so tangled up in his fingers, arms, and legs—the fingers of one hand jammed between his knees, one leg wrapped around the other and as if bolted to it, his second hand caught in an armpit, incapable of moving backward or forward—that he crouched there completely immobilized, tied in his own straitjacket, violently scrunched up, and with every attempt to free himself from this position merely squeezing himself more hopelessly and painfully into his self-induced jam.
And subsequently, so the story goes, the other one, the pale young woman at his side, the former magazine-story girl, took charge of this almost grotesque figure, entangled in itself like a medieval gargoyle, as follows: one after the other, she unraveled, separated, loosened, freed the various limbs of the man beside her, with astonishing effortlessness in fact, just plucking at one hand, tapping the other, patting a knee, rubbing an ankle.
And then the woman did the final untangling by blowing on him from a slight distance, that, too, without straining, very delicately, a mere puff, which reached, however, not only his face, but the entire body of the stonemason and solitary wanderer, widened his eyes and nostrils, expanded his shoulders, arched his thorax, bumped out his hips, curved his buttocks, tightened his thighs.
And then, according to the story, a first kiss was exchanged between the woman and the man, before the eyes of all the others in the midnight clay-wood inn-tent of Pedrada, in the innermost reaches of the Sierra de Gredos, a kiss from mouth to mouth, again something that had become the rarest of the rare in the particular period in which this story takes place, especially with others looking on, and, as in this case, downright festive. At this time one had to earn something like this! And the two had earned it.
And furthermore: the two kissed each other without touching in any other way. They remained seated with a space between them. And their hands were completely uninvolved. They both kept their hands motionless, wherever they happened to be. Before this the woman had taken a swallow from her paper cup. And even this drinking had been done without the assistance of her hands, merely with her lips, which she allegedly dipped into the drink, with her head bent. And the two are said not to have closed their eyes. On the contrary, as the story goes, they kept their eyes fixed on each other, without blinking.
And subsequently, in the background of the barn or hall of the Milano Real, for a moment a long-legged animal flitted past the sleeping tents, a deer? a gazelle? an ostrich (in the meantime they were being raised even up there in the mountains)? a Great Dane? And after the long kiss, qubla in Arabic, which lasted past the stroke of midnight—impossible to tell whether their tongues were involved; that was apparently superfluous—the new couple leaned back with a laugh, a soundless one, supposed to have lasted almost as long as the main thing just now. It was chiefly the stonemason, or whatever he was, who laughed, and, according to the story, it was the longest laugh of his life up to then, also one unlike any he had laughed before. (“‘Laugh,’ djahika in Arabic,” the woman who had commissioned the story dictated to the author.)
That night he, like the woman, did not speak another word. But if he had said something, it might have been this, for example: “I once spoke twenty-four languages, and now I do not speak a single one. There: the spot of sunlight deep in the underbrush, by the ruins of the wall I knocked down: my departed mother!” Or he might perhaps have said: “From now on I shall give the widest possible berth to all the people of today who are not my type, and not our type, and no good for you and me—I know that immediately, do I know it?—give the widest berth to the overwhelming majority, I know that—how do I know that?—and shall pass outside the range of their seeing and hearing and reality, but no longer slavishly and constrained by them, but rather of my own free will and with verve, strengthened by their kind of being or reality, pushing myself off from that type, moving, with the help of their tyrannical omnipresence, away into a different, at least equally promising realm of reality, into a no less real reality, and thus, full of joy and in good spirits, staying as far as possible from those others, and at the same time, thanks to them, tracing or plotting the world around its edges, arc by arc, and this will be the world, this will yield a world; and those who are not my type, not our type, and not good for you and for me, and who fill me with the most profound disgust, will thus at least have been something for us; beyond the boundaries of their world, the world of my world will begin, the genesis of the world will come into view, the worlding of our world—but what does ‘my,’ what does ‘our’ mean?”
And the woman would have said, “You wonder whether I am all dressed up this way for a man? For whom else? To be nothing more than a body, entirely body, all body, a single body. To matter. And for whom else but a man?”
And then, so the story goes, sometime after midnight, the king, emperor, the one in costume, the actor or amateur player, or whatever he was, got up from his metal drum, or whatever it was, at the end of the table, or, more precisely, was heaved to his feet by his bearers or assistants, with considerable effort, and now began to sing, no longer supported by anyone, in an ageless voice, clear and almost too high: “No more journeys! And no more flies flying into my mouth. And no more battles, either in Tunis or in Mühldorf or in Pavia, either on water or on land. And no business transactions, no money chests, no more gold and silver routes. And no more popes, and no more of that alleged community of faith, which has long since become the greatest and most brutal of all s
ects. And no painter, and no paintings, and no more picture galleries.
“And no more summer residences. And no rivers, no río Guadalquivir in Seville, no río Guadiana in the Sierra Morena, no more río Tormes in the Sierra de Gredos. And no more love affairs, either in Regensburg or in Lodi or in Pedrada. And no more king and no more emperor. And no more music and no more fading of music into silence. And no more olive trees with roots like rocks. And no more reek of cadavers.
“And no more Flanders and no more Brabant. And no more godforsaken, seemingly insane mother. And no more sour milk. And no more woman and no more tears. And neither Turks nor French, neither Augs-burgers nor Würzburgers nor Innsbruckers, and neither marks nor talers, neither dollars nor escudos, neither maravedi nor gulden for my songs anymore. And no more ibexes. And no more Sierra, Almanzor, Mira, or Galana. And no more apple trees. And no more wooden ladders propped against the apple trees. And no more blue pickers’ tunics on the rungs of the ladders propped against the apple trees. And no patches on the blue tunics of the pickers on the rungs of the ladders propped against the apple trees.
“And no Lord have mercy, and no lift up your hearts, and no transubstantiation, and no more go in peace. And no more children’s voices. And no more fountainheads and deltas. And no more Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, Cheyenne, Sorbs, Wends, Sufis, and Athabasques. And no more salt mines. And my lonely-hunter heart no more. And no more white angel. And no more moons in my fingernails, and no more nails on my fingers, and no more fingers on my hands. And no more sun never setting over my empire. And no more empire. And no more feral dogs. And no more dirt on my comb. And no more mountain passes and mountain taverns. And no more wild strawberries.”
The singer, so the story goes, was carried back to his tent as soon as his song ended, as if to die. And in that night the last word belonged to that guest at the table who had barely been mentioned up to then (except that he seemed to be the only one “entirely of the present,” “unmistakably of today”). He set down his cutlery—he had been the first to start eating and now was the last to finish—and said, in a voice that sounded as if it had been trained for years in front of microphones, in radio studios, or elsewhere: “To an outsider such as myself, it immediately becomes apparent that your most frequently used expressions are ‘not,’ ‘no,’ ‘neither this nor that,’ ‘not he, not she, not that, but.’ You express yourselves chiefly in negations, evoke and define yourselves and your concerns almost exclusively ex negativo, by reference to something that you and your concerns are not, or are no longer, or are on the contrary or in contrast to. To judge by the words you use, your experiences in particular consist almost entirely of things you have not experienced, or at least not in the way that would be considered experiences elsewhere. To all of you, experience often means something diametrically opposite to what is commonly called ‘experience’ elsewhere. As a result, almost all of your so-called stories consist chiefly of negations. They are the stories of things that did not happen. You did not go to war. You did not cross the tracks. No one has read today’s paper. No one fired at you. You did not see anyone throwing stones. No black smoke billowed out of any window. No one placed the noose around someone’s neck.
“What kind of happenings do you have? What kind of stories are these, without observations and without images—at least without planned, balanced, and well-observed images; without recourse to anything a contemporary audience would consider eventful; without reference to the realities, either individual or even societal—which you people either proudly avoid or about which you sanguinely keep silent—as if the rest of us, nosotros, could guess them by ourselves or could figure them out.
“Stories like yours, which primarily tell about things someone does not do, and furthermore without any illustrations, without close-ups, without the camera’s viewfinder: to the rest of us, these without a doubt simply do not count as stories. They are actually a kind of stinginess. You stint with yourselves and your experiences. Instead of plunging into life in front of the rest of us, you hurl yourselves into thin air.
“Your way of eating and drinking conforms to that. I have been observing you all evening; I am here for purposeful observation, you know, not for pointless fantasizing: you leave not a single crumb, not a scrap, and not only on your plates. You pick up the tiniest morsel that has fallen to the ground and shove it into your mouths. Not a speck on the table or on your clothes that is not scraped off by you people and licked up. You people, vosotros, lick every bowl and suck every glass to the last blob and the last drop. That is what I have observed.
“No doubt about it: you all live in a state of inexpressible deprivation. You doubtless lack most of the basic things that create social bonds between people of today and make them contemporaries of the rest of us. You convey to us the image not merely of cardsharps but of possible criminals, capable of an appalling act of violence, which you perhaps committed long ago and keep secret here: which is no doubt also the reason for your non-stories, consisting primarily of evasions, distractions, avoidances, and deflections.”
The postmidnight speaker had delivered these remarks with that unwavering, pasted-on smile for which he was known throughout the civilized world at the time of this story, known from newspapers and even more from television, the smile that viewers of the day found “simpatico,” to use one of the terms fashionable at the time: according to contemporary viewers, his lips were always drawn back in a friendly expression, which created “dimples” in his cheeks and a steady “warm glow” in his “fawn-colored” eyes, or, as others would have it, “tawny eyes.”
And while speaking he had propped his legs on the table, “not as a provocation, but to show that in spite of everything he felt at home even here among them, even in the notorious region of Petrada, and to make the others less shy.” For the same reason he had slipped in the two little words in their native language mentioned above, even though nosotros and vosotros were all the Spanish, or Iberian, or whatever, that he knew.
Now he stood up and prepared to leave, still with his tried-and-true smile. Of course he did not pay: that would presumably be taken care of by the organization by which he had allowed himself to be sent out, since early in life, as an observer and reporter, and, after missions here and there, now into the Sierra? Unlike the other supper guests, he would not be spending the night in The Red Kite but “in modest private lodgings,” in one of the infinitely smaller and less comfortably appointed tent huts with a local family, as he always did, “to be as up-close and personal as possible to the pulse of the local happenings.” And according to his fellow observers, as he made his way out of the hall, in the flickering of the lightbulbs, his “boyish freckles and chubby cheeks” and his “eternally rebellious Irish-red hair” showed all the more distinctly.
Other eyewitnesses, however, did not see him leave on foot but rather on a low-slung wheeled chassis, as if drawn by invisible spirits, while he looked straight into a camera being pulled a slight distance ahead of him, whereupon his presence in the half-barbarian mountain hamlet was beamed simultaneously to all the civilized channels. The way in which he moved along just above the ground: was that not in fact a form of being driven, pushed, and pulled, in which he bestirred neither knees nor arms nor shoulders, unlike a person walking?
And now, when he had already reached the door, and stood there for a few seconds, as if expecting the door to the clay tent structure to open automatically, a woman got up from among the crowd of those other eyewitnesses, approached him with giant steps, and, forgetting her image, her office, and her feminine dignity, gave him a kick, only one, but a powerful one, sufficient to propel the reporter through the door, which, before it closed, briefly swung out again, like the door to a saloon.
The report on his stay among the people of Pedrada that he later published all over the world claimed not to be influenced in any way by this incident. Some of the observations captured in the report are supposed to be incorporated later by the book’s heroine into the book o
n the loss of images and on crossing the Sierra de Gredos; but this is not yet the place for that.
22
She stayed up all night.
The others were sleeping in their tent compartments at the back of the big tent, or at least were lying there in their beds. She cleared the table as usual, washed up, put things in order, stacked the dishes. Then she sat alone for a while at the bare table—the lightbulbs out at last; no more roaring of the generators—in a shimmer of light that came from the mica cliffs outside.
Later she sat in her tent, almost without light, and later still she made the rounds of the other tents, going from one to the other. She kept watch. But it is also possible that as she sat there, her eyes open, she occasionally dozed off.
And all night long, whether she was awake or dozing for a moment, a pain was gnawing inside her (“an ache,” she told the author), which, if it were to continue, would break her heart. Not only her more or less random entourage, but all of Pedrada, the entire population of the innermost Sierra, was asleep or lying in bed.
At one point she felt cold, in a way that otherwise only a person abandoned by God and the world can feel cold. She was freezing, wretchedly, from inside out. Had she been abandoned by God and the world? “No.” Little by little, the inhabitants of the village came to mind. Although she had seen them for only a few seconds, upon the bus’s nighttime arrival, on the way to the parking lot in the orchard and to the Milano Real, an image had remained with her. And as she thought of the images, she felt warm again.
She had been in Pedrada several times before. Each time there had been some small change or other. But this time almost everything seemed new, and not merely the tent colony at the confluence of the various tributaries of the Tormes. In the crowd of nocturnal roamers outdoors, the natives were clearly in the minority. For one thing, most of them, as quasi-mountain-dwellers, were unaccustomed to a corso and had long since withdrawn into the few ancestral stone houses. And then, since her last sojourn here, the last stop before any crossing of the Sierra, the population had evidently increased considerably. A mighty influx had occurred.
