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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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At one time she had been a reader. (She still read now, but for her it was not real reading anymore. She did not read properly. Yet she felt orphaned without reading.) And in those days the author, that accursed author—and not only because of this trip he was forcing her to take—had served her less as a hero than as a pilot? No, she did not need a pilot;
served? Yes, served. And although his last few books had appeared quite a while ago, and she had not even got around to reading them, the idea had suddenly occurred to her of having him write her book. Him or no one. And he would get down to work for her right away. No one, not even he, could refuse her offer. Even that he might ask for time to think it over would be inconceivable to her. Once, when she had been in another part of the world, as the guest of a president, a man who placed great importance on his own dignity and whose cooperation was almost a matter of life and death to her bank—“let us say, the president of Singapore”—in the middle of the negotiations she had demanded that a certain document she had left in her hotel room be fetched, not by just anyone, but by the president himself. “And he promptly went to get it!”
The author, without a new book now in a decade, was, at the same time, almost to his own regret—“almost”—by no means forgotten. Without being anywhere near wealthy, he did not suffer from a lack of money. He knew nothing at all about her and her worldwide legendary reputation as a banker and financial expert until her proposal reached him, sped to his garden gate by an authorized courier, and his ignorance was not the result of his isolated life in a village in La Mancha (where did such a thing still exist, a voluntarily isolated life?).
And he, too, an explorer of forms and man of rhythms, and otherwise quite inept socially, or perhaps reluctant, and also growing old, complied with her summons at once. In the village's one
tienda
he purchased a telephone card, and from the village's only phone booth he announced his arrival for the next morning in the riverport city (even though he had half a day's journey to the nearest airport). And then the meeting in her penthouse office: “I will write your book. For as long as I can remember, money has been one of the great mysteries to me. And now I want to get to the bottom of that mystery. And besides, I have always hoped for a commission like this: not a work but a product to deliver. An order.” A man of rhythms? What kind of rhythms? “Above all the rhythm of understanding, that most inclusive of feelings, hand in hand with the rhythm of remaining silent, and leaving things unspoken.”
She had seen photographs of the author when he was much younger. But his face seemed hardly changed. Only his body was smaller than she had imagined, wizened, as if desiccated, prickly, like something blown in from the
meseta
. At the same time, he immediately looked familiar, as only one villager can to another; familiar as one villager could be to another
especially in a different setting, whether in the nearest town, or, as happened more and more often, in a country where they were both strangers: for these days it seemed increasingly common for the inhabitants of villages and towns—these especially—to be scattered all over the world, less as tourists than as residents, working, married into the most faraway places, dragging the children they had had with Japanese natives or blacks down a side street in Osaka or Djibouti.
Yet the sense of familiarity did not persist. As the author stood there before her—he refused to have a seat—he soon became uncanny to her. Uncanny as only a person could be whom one had promptly wanted to take in one's arms, only to encounter an invisible wall of glass with the first step toward him.
There was nothing in her realm—and her realm was wherever she happened to be—to which she paid closer attention than proper distance. But the distance this man preserved toward her (and, as she later observed: not only toward her) was a kind of affront. There were people who positioned themselves practically in your face, no matter what the conversation was about, as if for a film close-up. He, on the other hand, for the duration of their discussion stayed at least one step farther back than was customary for people engaged in negotiations or conferring with each other; if she inadvertently stepped toward him in mid-sentence, he immediately backed away, acting all the while as if nothing had happened. People like this were boors, just as much as those who practically rubbed bellies with you. And at the same time: once he was standing there calmly, he seemed rooted in her office as if in his own soil (farmers had long since ceased to stand that way), legs spread, hands on hips—the picture would have been complete if he had gone into a straddle, the way some soldiers marked their terrain. And all the while he looked past her or gazed at the sky visible above her head through the skylight, or stared at her, or smiled suddenly, or once sighed deeply, or hummed a snatch of an unfamiliar song, or even remained so completely silent for a while that she, assuming that he was not understanding her language (yet didn't they speak the same language?) switched to English, French, Spanish, Russian, and only when he apparently could not understand at all—precisely then!—did he start to listen again or wake up, and the discussion of the contract could continue. He struck her as peaceable and at the same time irritable, or vice versa. Too peaceable? Too irritable?
Nonetheless she had eventually commissioned him to do the project. That same morning the delivery agreement was signed and in force; she had drafted it quickly, and when it came to the final version, he was firm and alert, paying meticulous attention, with something to say about every sentence. She regained a degree of confidence in the author, different from the confidence she had felt at first sight, once she realized that his insistence on constantly enlarging the space between them originated in a sense of guilt. It made sense to her as soon as her instinct saw or smelled it—all the articles claimed that she was “a creature of instinct”—and when she unexpectedly saw and smelled in the man her own guilt; a great guilt; but off-limits so long as one kept one's distance. And how was it with her? She protected herself in a different way. And as long as she was protected, there could be no mention of guilt; instead, she had a secret. And she was proud of her secret. She would defend that secret to the death.
The author probably was the right man for the job. In the meantime, however—now that she had ventured into the story—it seemed as if her book still called for someone else, not a reporter specializing in banking but a third type. What was that question the author had asked? Did she want the book to have a more spoken or literary style? For him the spoken aspect provided the foundation, or rather the subtext, and furthermore a counterexample. Literary style, on the other hand, was the essential additive to the story, its enrichment,
the
enrichment.
Her predawn walk around the house, through the grounds, in the lingering moonlight. One of the increasingly frequent airplanes passing in front of the moon, its moonlit shadow twinkling across the lawn, so different from the shadows of planes or birds in sunlight; owl-like. The countless tiny mounds thrown up by earthworms before the frost came, now frozen hard, an insult to her soles with every step. Newly arrived in Yucatán, she was mounting the steps of the Mayan temple before sunrise.
From the densely intertwined, frost-withered, and tangled ivy that covered the wall at the bottom of the garden, little brownish-blackish berries with a blue haze popped off and flew in an arc, having ripened only now, with the onset of winter; and from inside the hedge she heard a pecking, cracking, smacking. Downstream the Isonzo flowed, where it was not yet murky from the cement works, over white pebbles that also formed the banks—the million dead forgotten (no, not forgotten). The
blackbird—the earliest daytime bird?—came shooting out of the bushes, as always almost grazing the ground, and as always taking the curve with its wings folded, and hurtling with a loud squawk into the open through the escape hatch it had long since had its eye on.
She paused. The coppersmiths' street in Cairo echoed with the sound of hammers on metal; smoke and clouds of metal filings eddied from the workshops, open to the street, and she saw and smelled the billows far more intensely and lastingly than on the day when she had passed through there, although at the time she had been all eyes and ears.
Such images came to her daily, especially in the morning hours. She lived off them, drawing from them her most powerful sense of being alive. They were not memories, either voluntary or involuntary; these images flashed before her too suddenly, like lightning or meteors, and refused to be slowed or brought to a halt, let alone captured. If you wanted to stop them and contemplate them at leisure, they had long since evaporated, and with such interference you would also destroy the lasting effect of the image, which had appeared for a fraction of a second, darted through you, and vanished just as abruptly.
What effect did the images have? They ennobled the day for her. They ratified the present for her. She lived off them, which also meant that she used them and made good use of them. She even employed them for her work; her ventures; her deals. If she had an almost magical (“legendary,” as the articles put it) ability to focus on the matter at hand, to display “supernatural presence of mind at the decisive moment,” not only having all the facts and figures in her head but also dazzling her partner or counterpart in negotiations by serving them up as “a numerical witches' brew,” she owed this talent to something she had not yet revealed to any interviewer—and what words would she have chosen?—namely, to the intervention of these images of hers in her workday.
Does this mean that the images were subject to her will after all, there to be summoned at will or as needed? No. They remained unpredictable. But over time she had discovered various methods of activating her “reserves.” It was not a question of specific techniques, certainly not of tricks, but rather of fundamental attitudes and a whole way of living.
Yes, she had aligned her whole life, not merely her profession and her existence as a “queen of finance,” to accommodate these shooting images. What fundamental attitudes and behaviors were especially productive in this regard? She, who by nature (or by virtue of her profession?) was little
given to shyness, proved shy when it came to speaking of such matters, but she could offer hints: a kind of mindfulness in everyday actions; a willingness to take detours; not avoiding moments of absentmindedness when in the presence of others, but rather letting herself succumb to them; physical effort—not athletic, preferably manual labor—for sustained periods and at a steady pace, to the brink of exhaustion, when the images might begin to glow … (instead of an exercise room in her house she had a workshop).
Just as she lived off the formation of images in every sense, she also lived for it. And she did not deploy her reserves—“Never use this word again!” she instructed the author—for any kind of war. A single image, mobilizing itself and her, was all she needed, and the day would acquire a peaceful aura. These images, although devoid of human beings and happenings, had to do with love, a love, a kind of love. And they had penetrated her since childhood, some days fewer of them, some days whole swarms of these shooting stars—always taking the form of something she had actually experienced in passing—sometimes completely absent, a non-day. And she was convinced that this happened to everyone, to a greater or lesser extent. No doubt the specific image always belonged to the individual's personal world. But the image itself, as an image, was universal. It transcended him, her, it. By virtue of the open and opening image, people belonged together. And the images did not impose anything, unlike every religion or doctrine of salvation. Except that as yet no one had managed to tell the story of these images properly? Had also not found this phenomenon as earthshaking as she had? Had also not found the courage? (She certainly had not?)
To tell the truth, she was not even all that shy or modest when it came to this topic so dear to her heart. Over the years she had often felt the urge to spread the word of her remarkable and memorable encounters with the shooting images, or image showers. Was it possible for a modern woman, not just a woman of the Middle Ages, to have a sense of calling? The idea became more and more compelling: she had to reveal what she knew. And finally the message had appeared in glowing letters before her eyes: Now or never. The moment had come to tell the world! And, strange to say—as if this were part of her calling—it would soon be too late, not only for her but for the world at large. Everywhere under the sun the images were dying out. She had to entrust herself to some author or other—not to lay out everything for him in minute detail, but to hint at this or
that and let him describe the problem as he saw fit. For she was convinced it was a problem, one of epochal proportions, decisive for the future, one that should at last be made productive, but above all a lovely one. And wasn't a lovely problem the ideal basis for an expedition, including a narrative journey like this one?
This urgent sense of a calling was new to her. Some commentators saw it as an outgrowth of her success, which for quite some time had been consistent, unsurpassable, and above all invulnerable: missionary zeal as a result of unequaled success coupled with invulnerability. Others, on the contrary, saw her proud, self-chosen solitude as the cause. And there were still others, for instance the author she finally commissioned to write the story, who suspected, or “had the inspiration,” that her “quest” expressed a “terrible guilt”—he unintentionally turned the tables on her this way during their first conversation. “And you expect to achieve some sort of expiation as a result of expressing these matters?” No reply.

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