by Peter Handke
While she told him the story of crossing the Sierra de Gredos and the loss of images, she noticed that the listener was increasingly usurping her story, the story. Usurping? Absorbing it? More the latter, if also in the sense that it, in turn, the story, was passed to him, and at times also literally entered him, like a demon? yes, but not an evil demon, rather one that one might almost wish would circulate inside one as long as possible, working its magic. The stooped author pulled himself together and sat up straight. To be sure, at moments this also caused him to sway.
And she, the storyteller? Time and again as she recounted her adventures, she was filled, in retrospect, with a horror of which there had been not so much as a hint at the moment of the experience. At one point, in the middle of a paragraph, she even found herself on the verge of breaking off the story—a child’s crib on the edge of a precipice, tipping (another image after all?)—and for good: the story would end there, would thus not even come into being. For she saw herself still lying in the fern hollow, helpless and unable to move, completely and utterly alone.
And wasn’t she in fact still lying there in the dark? Was in reality not here, safe and sound in human company? The retroactive trembling familiar from so many adventure stories came over her. But wasn’t this, on the other hand, the unmistakable sign of a proper adventure? Trembling and faltering, she and the author went on to the next sentence. In between they both shuddered. But without this shuddering the journey would not have deserved the name. That alone was what validated a journey.
Before the two of them, now calm and wide awake, discussed the loss of images, the author remarked, at the end of her tale—which, nota bene, was only the provisional end—perhaps not in complete seriousness, that he, as a man who had of necessity turned his back on the world, at least the social world, would have wished to hear more about money and banking. Her response: first of all, there was enough written about her as the powerful banker, a modern-day Jakob Fugger (“That was once upon a time”); and, second, there had been plenty said on the subject in the current story, directly and even more indirectly; and, third—this she now dictated to the author: “Yes, money is a mystery. But here more mysteries are at stake than the mystery of money or secret bank accounts.”
It goes without saying that the author, like all the earth’s inhabitants at the time of this story, had experienced the loss of images long before her, the heroine. Yet, nota bene again! the loss of images did not mean that images no longer flashed and flared through the world or that no one noticed and/or registered these flashing and flaring images at least now and then. And here began the nocturnal discussion between the adventurer and her author of the loss of images—which at the same time was a conversation of both parties with themselves—each one of their soliloquies was evoked by the other’s, and so forth.
“The image sparks, the will-o’-the-wisp images within us—no, these are no will-o’-the-wisps—continue to occur, flashing and flaring into our midst.”—“Except that they no longer have any effect. Or no: they could perhaps continue to have an effect. But I am no longer capable of taking them in and letting them affect me.”—“What affects me instead is the ready-made and prefabricated ones, images controlled from the outside and directed at will, and their effect is the opposite of the old ones.”—“These new images have destroyed those other images, the image per se, the source. Particularly in the century just past, the original sources and deposits of images were ruthlessly raided, in the end disastrously. The natural vein has been stripped, and people now cling to the synthetic, mass-produced, artificial images that have replaced the reality that was lost along with the original images, that pretend to be them, and even heighten the false impression, like drugs, as a drug.”
“But anyone who has recognized the loss of images in himself can at least say what the image and the images once meant to him.”—“Yes. The images, the instant they appeared, meant being alive, even if I was dying, and peace, even if war was raging all around; which makes it clear that an image of terror or horror is incompatible with the kind of images of which our story should speak.”—“Those images seemed, in the face of the transitoriness and destructibility of the body, indestructible. Even if only one came to me in a day, just a brief flash, I saw it as a sequel and continuation, as part of a whole: the images as the comet’s tail of the world’s survival, sweeping over the entire earth and revitalizing the smallest nooks and crannies.”
“A single image spark from any place whatsoever—strange that its name always accompanied the flash as well—allowed one to see the entire globe—what used to be called the ecumene, the inhabited world, and reinforced the conviction that we all belong together; made sure that one was face-to-face with the world, including the world of the future, which accordingly seemed eternal, and could exclaim, in all seriousness: Oh happy day!”—“The images were epiphanies. They were epiphanies in the sense in which people used to say: I have had an epiphany. True, they were always the briefest of the brief. But who is to say that the other ones, the reported epiphanies, lasted any longer? And before the loss of images: who said that there were no more epiphanies? Perhaps there has never been anything more than our suddenly appearing and promptly vanishing lightning images?”—“The images were the last inspirations.”
“In the image, internal and external seemed to be fused into a third element, greater and more lasting. The images represented the value to end all values. They were our seemingly safest form of capital. Mankind’s last treasure.” (Three guesses as to which of the two said that.)—“With the images I plunged into the maternal world.” (Three guesses as to who … )—“It was perhaps not my man, but rather merely—merely?—the image inside me that binds me to him forever, and it was my man after all, the one I wanted, body and soul!” (But that, too, came from her!)
“Whenever an image allowed me to see it, it was the answer to an unconscious prayer, a prayer I was not aware was on its way. In the image I was redeemed every day, and opened up, but not for any religion. In the daily image I became a different person, but not for an ideology, not for a mass movement.”—“In the images appeared what was beautiful and what was right, but not the way they appear in any philosophy, sociology, theology, economics—simply appearing, instead of being asserted, thought, or proclaimed. And they were also different from memories, including the so-called collective ones.”—“The image manifested itself outside of legend and myth. The image—how marvelously myth-free it was—just the image, both the switchboard and switch.”—“Physicists: instead of smashing atoms, etc.: map a physics of the images!”
“The loss of images is the most painful of losses.”—“It means the loss of the world. It means: there is no more seeing. It means: one’s perception slides off every possible constellation. It means: there is no longer any constellation.” —“We will have to live without the image for the time being.” —“For the time being. But isn’t precisely such a loss accompanied by energy, even if this energy is undirected for the time being?”—“Cuerpo del mundo. Body of the world. We, the banished, full of passion.”
The author then said, among other things: “How appalled I am at myself that the images that once meant everything to me have been shattered. A leaf had only to move, and I would become a player in the widest world. A scrap of blue morning sky in the blue night sky. A train passing in the dark with all its windows lit up. The eyes of people in a crowd, the eyes especially! The stubbly beard of the man condemned to death. The mountains of shoes from those who were gassed. The thistle silk blown in little balls by the wind across the savannah. In the image I embraced the world, you, us. Images, refuges, dark sheltering niches. Nothing meant more to me than the image. And now—and you?”
The images he had evoked there: Were those, after all, not the sort she meant? Had she been mistaken in the author? Was he the wrong one? But then he launched into the following litany, which reassured her: “Images, you world-arrows. Images, you world-encompassers. Images, do not
let me be orphaned. Image, you grounded perception. Imagen, mi norte (= guide) y mi luz. Images, let life appear to us. Image, word in the universal language. Image, as light as a shed snakeskin. Image, most lasting of all afterimages. Images, you capital realities. Image, give me the world, and let me forget the world. Image, acknowledgment of what has been lived, impetus for what is yet to be lived. In the image the hospitable and enduringly hospitable globe. Image, you who indicate to me that I am still on the right path. Images, you pure opposite number. O image, my life spirit: show me the space where you are hiding.”
And she: “Perhaps I will found an image bank, a new, different world bank, on the basis of the science of images, which, as I picture it, will create a sweetness and prove fruitful like hardly any science before it. A science that will encompass all the others. Or I will act in a film again.”
For a while they then laughed together, silently and from ear to ear. And finally the author made a speech about today’s pencils, which were utterly worthless; above all, the leads, often enclosed in two halves made of different kinds of wood, kept breaking off during sharpening; wood and graphite—if they still were wood and graphite—no longer had any “smell and taste,” in the sense of musk, in which, according to the old Arabs, “smell and taste combine”; also the sound of pencil on paper was no longer the same as before, and the cracking, grinding, and squeaking when one sharpened them and held one’s ear to the sharpener, or vice versa, was outrageous; just putting the finally sharpened lead to paper was a game of chance; even the good old Cumberlands now had low-quality wood and were badly glued; only his “school pencil” had not left him completely in the lurch when it came to managing; down with modern pencils! (His activity, too, was “managing.”) Or not so after all! His favorite pencil bore the inscription EAN, which means “let” in Greek. And she saw that the cuffs of his pants were full of pencil shavings.
That night they alternated among languages. In every language, the two of them had a similar accent: that of villagers, of aldeanos. Like her, the author came from a village, and she and he had met here in a third village.
Finally they were no longer speaking. The light in the hall or storeroom, consisting in any case merely of a few bare bulbs, was switched off. Through the glass door, the moonlit steppe; darkness inside the almacén. The author poured her another glass of steppe wine and left the room. The quince, safurdzul, dunja, from the other tree in the inner courtyard, lightly steamed, that he brought her as dessert, was doubled by the one she had earlier secretly plucked herself. Perhaps thinking that in him, the author, all the threads had to come together, he also brought her the telephone, for a nocturnal call to her property on the outskirts of the distant riverport city.
As she placed the call, out of the corner of her eye she saw on the glass door a single leaf of ivy, or whatever, moving, and taking on the form of someone long awaited. On the telephone: the half-grown neighbor boy from the porter’s lodge. A Spanish proverb occurred to her: “Wipe the neighbor boy’s nose and put him in your house.” And she spoke to him as the guardian of her house. That morning, he told her, the idiot of the outskirts had come toward him, carrying heavy loads in both hands, and while still far off had shifted the load to his left hand, so as to offer the boy his right. And now the idiot was making his rounds, singing and yelling through the empty streets, as reliable as the local night watchman.
But then she heard him say: “I would like to go to my room now.”—“Where is your room?” she asked.—His reply: “Where all the toys are.”
And only then did she recognize that she was speaking not with the neighbor boy but with her vanished daughter. In her absence, her child had come home. Lubna. Salma. Ibna. Alexia. After all the news, this was the greatest news. “A favorable wind for the homeward journey”—who said that?
The two women remained silent. One as well as the other—yes, in Arabic there was a dual!—they pursued their thoughts in silence, each in her distant place: enough of being apart. Stay together, whatever it takes. That was what the story called for. So it was only a story? Only?
Then all this time her vanished child had been near her house, her home? Was that possible? And did the expression “my home” still exist? Vanished within eyeshot. And in a flash of thought it seemed possible to her that the half-grown boy from the porter’s lodge really was her own child, with a slightly altered appearance. Was that possible? Well, well, well! And at the end of their wordless conversation the aventurera felt herself to be absolved by her child: on the one hand because the girl was alive and well; and then by the simple fact of the child’s existence, that she had a child. Never again to feel she had to do something special for her. Just to be with her. The doing would happen by itself.
Was guilt rearing its head again? I would have expected a woman, and a woman’s story, to spare us and me, the author, who sees himself first and last as a reader, a reminder of our eternal guilt, or original sin. Adam and Eve were innocent. Oedipus or whoever was innocent. Enough guilt stories. Mystery, not guilt.
And in the end the aventurera and asendereada, “the pathless yet undeterred one,” had opened her mouth after all and recounted to her child, named after the patron saint of Toledo or somewhere, how a man had introduced himself to her as she made her way through the Sierra: “I live with my wife, my children, and my friends.”
And in the following parágrafo of the last chapter of the tale of the loss of images, the woman in the warehouse palace opened the large glass back door to the Mancha steppe: “door” and “chapter” were the same word in Arabic, bab. She raised her arm to throw the book, her child’s property, which had accompanied her on the entire journey, far out into the night, in Arabic laila.
One second before she let it go, it occurred to her, however, how every time she had thrown something—she had a passion for throwing, and almost always hit her target—her daughter had been horrified and hurt by the sight of the thrower, just as by the sight of her mother as a victor. “Don’t throw, Mother!” And so she laid the book on the ground instead, in the steppe grass, which glistened in the moonlight with dewdrops, some of them already hard, frozen. At that moment, on the horizon, ufuq in Arabic, perhaps precisely because she had broken off her throw, a feathered spear flew past the doorstep at eye level and would never fall to the ground.
The Mancha village, although many of its inhabitants had moved to the cities, turned out to be not so terribly deserted after all. From the solitary church out there on the steppe a small nocturnal procession emerged, with a baldachin borne on ahead, under which was the statue of Our Lady of the Snows: after spending the summer in the hermitage there, she was being moved, as every year, for the approaching winter, to another church in the heart of the village. That was how long the hike through the Sierra de Gredos had taken. It was October, and it was starting to get cold for our Señora de las Nieves out there on the savannah.
But the person who by contrast was not cold in the slightest was the ablaha there, the beautiful idiot. Barefoot, she went out into the scree of the old old Mancha. The many dark, symmetrical parts of her dress, rippling rhythmically as she walked, corresponded to the dark cavities and craters up there on the moon. And then she even ran, sprinted; hurled herself into the moonlit darkness.
In a film, that would have seemed like a flight. In the reality of the story I saw her run toward a group of gypsy musicians—was it still permissible to write “gypsy,” gitano?—that was accompanying the Madonna with flamenco tambourines, trumpets, and drums, and the cante hondo, the song from the depths, to the cathedral. Andalusia was not far from here in La Mancha.
In the following paragraph, one of the last in this last chapter, I saw the woman—the procession with the musicians now silent and gone with the wind—out on the Mancha steppe, going in circles, setting one foot deliberately in front of the other.
In a film that would have signalized danger. (Now and then, since I have been living abroad, away from my country and my people, I
occasionally use such a foreign word.) But perhaps she simply liked walking here on that special Mancha earth, the best earth one could wish for, with firm, granular sand, scree, ash, slag, countless burned patches in the short grass, where the rain and dew puddles were just freezing, in the shape of arrows or giant feet, mirroring the night sky.
And suddenly I then saw her going backward, toward the Fugger warehouse with the glass door. In a film, that would have signalized “fear,” as if she had suddenly stumbled upon her place of execution. But now, already on the threshold, she hurtled forward again. So wasn’t she running toward something or someone instead? A film shot would have shown only her nocturnal eyes. All through the years she had run that way, and crossing the Sierra de Gredos had been her last running start. She flew forward, as only a female idiot in her idiot’s tale can fly toward a male idiot, who for his part flew toward her, could fly toward her. And that was as it was supposed to be. She released her hair net, black, longer than her long hair, as she flew forward.
Actually the song that she struck up as she ran in circles, after the disappearance of the procession and the gypsy band, should have been inserted into the previous paragraph. She sang it, not boomingly, like her singer-grandfather in his day, but almost inaudibly and, to my oversensitive ears, at times slightly off-key, but perhaps as it was supposed to be sung. And at first her singing appeared to imitate a child’s crying. And that song went more or less as follows:
I did not know what you were like
I did not know who your parents were
