Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  Next day she drove me to the airport. She stood on the terrace with the child as I was walking across the tarmac to the gleaming yellow Braniff Airlines plane that would take me to Tucson, Arizona. All three of us waved until we couldn’t see each other any more.

  After a stop in Denver, Colorado, I arrived in Tucson with a feeling of breathless exaltation. The city is in the middle of the desert, a hot wind blows all day; sand clouds raced across the runway, and on both sides of it there was cactus with white and yellow flowers. While waiting for my suitcase, I put my watch back an hour. In doing so, I made a gesture that was somehow ambiguous; I looked around as if I had been caught doing something forbidden; all I saw was pieces of luggage on the conveyors, which were circling as slowly as the hands on the clock. I calmed down; now my breath was coming evenly again. What was I doing in Tucson? The clerk at the travel agency had put down Tucson on my tourist ticket because he thought from looking at me that I suffered from the cold. “In Tucson it’s already summer,” he said. What was I doing in the summer? It had already become inconceivable to me on the plane that I could be curious about anything in Tucson. I’d seen pictures of everything the place could possibly offer. And now, at the edge of the airfield, the first thing I saw was the agaves from the label of the tequila bottle in Providence! A hot flush came over me as if I were to blame. For this or something else. Though the building was air-conditioned I sweated, not at the thought of going out into the heat, but because I couldn’t even conceive of going out into the heat. My thinking cramp again! The sun shone darkly through the big tinted panes, the travelers were in a solar eclipse. Disgruntled, I strolled back and forth, looking around for my suitcase, which finally turned up alone on the Braniff Airlines conveyor. I got myself a can of Coke out of a vending machine and sat down with it in a niche where you could watch movies on a small screen without paying. People passed by the niche; now and then one of them stopped and looked in, more at the spectators than at the picture. Aside from me, there was a Mexican with his feet beside him on his seat and his knees drawn up so high that to look past them at the screen he had to lean his head on one shoulder. On one knee lay his hat, it had a wide yellow band; one of the Mexican’s hands was resting on the hat. The movie was publicity for an orange plantation near Tucson. Where was his other hand? I looked at the Mexican again and saw it was lying motionless under my coat, which I had put down beside me. I stood up and took a last glance at a basket brimful of oranges, one of which was toppling. At the same time I slowly picked up my coat and, again in the corners of my eyes, saw … the Mexican’s motionless fist; between index finger and middle finger, between middle finger and ring finger there were razor blades. The man himself seemed to have fallen asleep. I tiptoed out of the niche.

  On another airplane’s conveyor another single piece of luggage was circling. I had already passed it when something caught my attention. I went over to it: it was Judith’s brown doeskin bag. A sheaf of baggage checks from various airlines was attached to the handle. The bag had come from Kansas City on a Frontier Airlines plane. I let it circle around once again, then I picked it up and tugged at the baggage checks, but they were on elastic bands that stretched so much that I stumbled. I put the bag back on the conveyor, again it turned, I followed it, picked it up again, put it back. I took my suitcase off the Braniff Airlines conveyor and stood around with it for a while. Somebody whispered in a doorway behind me; a woman gasped for fright. A short eerie sound came out of a throat, then someone was suffocating. White moths were darting about in the marsh grass. I heard nothing; all at once my ears hung heavy from my head, as they had when I woke up in the gray of dawn beside my grandmother who had just died. I looked toward the exit, someone was sighing or wheezing: yes, the glass doors that must have just opened for someone were closing automatically with a wheeze; I breathed again. Outside: a man wearing a hat with a wide light-colored band was going toward a car; he was holding his hat tight, and the wind was so strong that it kept turning up the brim. Inside: a woman came out of the ladies’ toilet. She was heavily made up and was wearing a pants suit with sharp creases, beside which I could see the previous creases! An Indian woman: an Indian woman entered the hall, the doors closed behind her, she turned around to a child who was approaching the doors from outside. She motioned the child to step on the rubber mat in front of the doors. The child hopped up and down on the mat, but wasn’t heavy enough, the doors stayed closed. The Indian woman went out through the doors and came in again with the child. And so, little by little, everything calmed down.

  That first day in Tucson I didn’t leave the hotel. I took a long bath and dragged out the process of dressing as long as possible; day turned to night while I was buttoning my shirt, pulling up zippers, and lacing my shoes. In St. Louis I had become so unused to being alone that now I didn’t know what to do with myself. Alone, I felt superfluous. It was ridiculous to be so alone. I was so bored with myself that I could have hit my head against the wall. It wasn’t company I wanted, I only wanted to be rid of myself. The slightest contact with myself was disagreeable; I kept my arms as far away from me as possible. The moment I felt my body heat in a chair, I moved to another. After a while I had the impression that I had warmed all the chairs, so I just stood. It shook me to think that I had ever masturbated. I went about with my legs far apart, so as not to hear the rubbing of my trouser legs. Don’t touch anything! Don’t see anything! Can’t somebody knock at the door! A horrible thought: to turn on the TV and hear voices, see images! I went to the mirror and made faces at myself. I wanted to stick my finger down my throat and vomit until there was nothing left of me. To hurt myself, maim myself! I paced the floor, forward and backward. Or open a book and read some loathsome sentence! Or look out the window and be confronted again with SNACK BAR, TEXACO, ICE CREAM! Shut everything up, cast everything in cement! I lay down on the bed and piled all the pillows on my head. I bit the back of my hand and thrashed around with my feet.

  “The time drags so.”

  That sentence from a story by Adalbert Stifter ran through my head. I sat up and sneezed. It seemed to me that in sneezing I had leaped over a long stretch of time. Then I wished something would happen to me as soon as possible.

  That night I dreamed a good deal. But my dreams were so violent that I remembered only the pain of dreaming them. An Indian waiter brought me my breakfast. In front of him I counted the money I had left—it was a lot more than half—and wondered what I could do with it. The Indian stopped on the way out when he saw me counting, but I went right on. His face was inflamed, there were little black dots on his forehead. A few days before, the Indian told me, the wind had been so strong that the grains of sand had made his face bleed. He lived outside the city with his parents, near the San Xavier del Bac mission, and had to walk several blocks to the bus line. “My parents have never left the reservation,” said the Indian waiter. He had difficulty in speaking; his teeth were covered with saliva. He told me that although the hotel swimming pool was in a sheltered patio, the sand had to be cleaned out of it every other day.

  At noon I took a cab to the airport to make sure that Judith’s doeskin bag wasn’t still circling around on the conveyor. I went to the checkroom too, but didn’t inquire; I only looked at the shelves from a distance. I rode back to town and paced. I kept turning around because I didn’t know which way to go. I waited at red lights; they turned green and still I waited, till they turned red again. I also waited at bus stops and let the bus drive on. I went to a phone booth and stood in a pile of sand that had blown in. I picked up the phone and was about to put a coin in the slot. Then I thought I’d buy something, but left the department store before I had even looked at anything. I went to all sorts of places but lost interest as soon as I was there. I was hungry, but the moment I saw the menu outside a restaurant my hunger was gone. Finally I went to a cafeteria. You walked in through an open door hung with glass beads, there were no formalities, you just plunked something edible on your tray and picke
d up your utensils and paper napkin in passing: this, I felt, was the right place for me. And when I went to the cash desk and the woman didn’t look at me but only counted the plates on my tray, I was at peace with the world again. Forgotten the dining ceremonies which had been becoming a need for me. And not looking at the cashier but only at the check she had put down on my tray, I blindly passed her the money. Then I sat down at a table and without a care in the world ate a chicken leg with french fries and catchup.

  San Xavier del Bac is one of the oldest missions in America. It is south of Tucson, at the edge of an Indian reservation. I had no idea what to do with myself alone and for the first time in my life felt a desire to see sights. It was very bright outside, the hubcaps on the cars were dazzling. I bought a pair of sunglasses and, informed by a poster that this was straw hat week, a straw hat that one could tie under the chin to keep it on in the wind. On Broadway, an Armed Forces Day parade was passing. It was the third Saturday in May, crowds of people were sitting on the curbstones with their legs stretched out, children were licking ice cream cones and running around with American flags, they were all wearing T shirts with legends appropriate to the day: AMERICA—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT; OPTIMIST INTERNATIONAL. Girls in crinolines were walking along beside the parade, selling bumper stickers with similar slogans. Some veterans of the First World War were driven by in a coach, the Second World War veterans followed on foot, among them an Indian, a member of one of the Indian commando teams that had led the way in the Normandy landing. Then came a group of horsemen who were supposed to look like Civil War cavalry; it was hot and there was so much cheering and laughing all around that the horses’ hoofbeats were almost inaudible. The horsemen carried big flags that flapped violently in the wind and made the horses shy from time to time. Then they would cross the freshly painted double line in the middle of the street; when their riders checked them and they crossed back again, they left white hoofprints on the asphalt. On a parallel street I finally found a cab to take me to San Xavier.

  There, after all the noise, it was so still that I thought I was dreaming and rubbed my eyes. Every few feet, I looked around. My double would jump out from behind one of the corrugated-iron shacks and chase me away! One false step would be the end of me, I was an interloper; now he had come back to take his rightful place. I’d topple out of myself and I wouldn’t exist any more. Instead of a chimney, one of the shacks had a black stovepipe sticking out the window, and soot was billowing from it; a dog crawled around a corner on its belly. I was an imposter, I had set myself up in someone’s place. Where was I to go? I was superfluous; I had crept into something, and now I stood there, unmasked. It wasn’t too late; I could still save myself, with a leap. But I stood stock still with clenched fists, hiding behind my straw hat. This feeling of being the wrong man was so brief that a moment later I laughed it off as a whim. Then I remembered how as a child I had longed for a double, someone exactly like myself; and I took it as a good sign that since then the whole idea of a double, of someone just like me, had come to horrify and disgust me. The thought of somebody else with my movements was obscene. The very outline of my own shadow struck me as indecent. Another body like mine, a caricature of myself? No! Then I ran a few steps.

  On the other hand, I had no desire to meet anyone else. I was satisfied to be moving and to look into the Indians’ shacks. No one spoke to me. I stepped into the doorway of a shack; the old woman who was sitting there with a corncob in her lap and a pipe in her mouth only smiled. Despite the heat, a fire was burning on the hearth; there was a stack of tin plates in a dishpan, and water from a faucet was running over them soundlessly. It helped me to look at such things, it crowded out my double feeling of myself. As I went on, a dust mop came out of a door, then disappeared; in the window of the next house, a blond wig was shaken, then put aside. I observed all this with the awe I had once experienced while looking at the saints and holy vessels in church. And in this strange feeling of piety I saw one more indication that it was possible for me to lose myself in objects, but not in people! Had nothing changed in me? I stamped my foot. Childishness! Perplexed but comforted, I arrived at the mission.

  In the church, I removed my sunglasses and straw hat. It was late afternoon, the Rosary was being said. In moments of silence, I could hear the sand beating against the church door. A few women were standing in a row in front of their prie-dieu. When I looked up at the altar, I saw, in memory, a swallow flying around it. Once more I lost myself in everything I looked at. Religion had long been repellent to me, yet I longed to relate to something. It was unbearable to be alone and isolated. It must be possible for two human beings to belong to each other, to establish a relationship that is not personal, fortuitous, and ephemeral, not based on a fraudulent and continually extorted love, but on a necessary, impersonal bond. Why had I never managed to be as unreflectingly loving to Judith as I was now while looking at this church dome or at the drops of wax on the stone floor? It was ghastly to have such feelings and not to be able to get out of myself! To stand there in dull-witt d piety, wholly immersed in objects and movements.

  As I stepped out of the church, a sprinkler on the lawn splashed a few drops of water in my face. I went to the cemetery and sat down on the base of a big Spanish tomb. My eyes burned and I covered my face with my hands. I felt as if my brain were pushing against my forehead. At that moment, the evening bells began to ring, and I looked up. A white-breasted bird flew out of the window of the church and gleamed in the sky. At every stroke of the bells the steeples seemed to recede a little, and then move back into place. I had seen all that before! Covertly, with my hand to one side, I looked at the image, and at the same time listened to a memory. The memory was there, but every time I came near it, my brain shrunk back. The church and myself were giving me the creeps. Enough; I turned away.

  The traffic lights were slung on wires; they were shaking so violently that when they were green you couldn’t tell which direction was meant. Metal spikes stuck out from the black-painted telegraph poles and whistled in the wind. I tied a handkerchief over my face to protect it from the wind. Then I walked north, in the direction of Tucson, as fast as I could.

  An Indian beggar stopped me. I gave him a dollar bill. He followed me and grabbed me by the shoulder. I broke into a run, he ran after me. When I stopped, he grinned and passed me by. I took a cab and got out in a Mexican neighborhood at the edge of the town. The houses were wooden and two-storied. Some had overhanging balconies. There were children on one of the balconies; they trotted along with me as far as they could go. A bell rang; a locomotive emerged almost silently from between two houses and stopped in the middle of the street. The sun had so overheated the metal levers that the engineer was wearing thick gloves. Again I saw the image as though listening to it at the same time. I knew the street I was standing on would begin to tilt; the image would be far below me, and I would fall into it head first. A child ran past the locomotive and disappeared between the houses like someone out of another dream. I turned off into a side street.

  It wasn’t getting dark and the air was still as hot as at noon. Down the street buses passed in the setting sun; I could see the passengers’ shadows on the dusty windowpanes. I stepped into a bar, and just as I was ordering a Coke I noticed that I still had my handkerchief on my face. I shook the sand out of my shoes and trouser cuffs under the table. Even the records in the jukebox had been scratched by the sand. I put in a coin but didn’t press any of the buttons. On the street, people with flags were still drifting home from the parade. I sat there, looking at the clock after every swallow. A child came in, so blond that it wrung my heart.

  I looked at the slice of lemon on the rim of my glass and lost myself. All at once it was night. Irresolutely I went out into the street, crossed over, crossed back again. In among the houses it was pitch-dark, but lifting my head I could see the smoke trail of a jet in the sunlight. Behind me fat began to sizzle. A car came up slowly from behind me with the sound of fat starting to si
zzle. But I forgot the car when some teenagers with the blond child in tow came up to me and asked me for money for a bus ticket. They stood around me and asked what country I was from. From Austria, I told them. They laughed and said the word after me. Except for the blond child, they were Mexicans; one of them was wearing light-colored gym shoes with imitation spurs. He stroked my cheek, I stepped back, bumping into another who was standing behind me. I reached into my pocket for a coin, my hand was held fast, and I saw a knife against my belly. It had a short blade that hardly protruded from the boy’s fist. The blond child stood a little to one side, hopping from foot to foot and shadow-boxing in my direction. One of the Mexicans tripped him and he fell on his knees. I grinned in embarrassment. There were some soldiers across the street, but I was ashamed to cry out. My hat was knocked off. Deftly moving hands turned my pockets inside out without touching me; the blond child crawled around on the ground, picking up what fell out. Someone slapped me; then they all ran to the car behind me. Its doors were already open, they jumped in, and it started up. The doors were slammed one by one; on the windshield I read HERTZ. I had seen Judith at the wheel; her face was pale, her eyes concentrated on the steering gear. A match was dangling from her parted lips; it fell when the car started moving.

  I took a few steps, this way and that. Ridiculous! Pockets were hanging out all over me. I stuffed them in, pulled them out again, as if that would prove something. Then I noticed that my inside pockets had also been pulled out. I looked down; the white lining of my breast pocket looked up at me. My train ticket from New York to Philadelphia was lying on the sidewalk. “A wooden sidewalk!” I thought. Then I said it aloud. I put my hat back on, turned my pockets back in, and withdrew; withdrew.