Peter Handke - The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

LUTZ

Von Wullnow, your language is so elevated it makes me hesitate to tell my joke now.

VON WULLNOW

I order you to. You’ve been looking all this time as if you had something to get off your chest.

LUTZ

Two people love each other. They make love so rapidly, the way you sometimes devour a slice of bread with honey on it. When they are finished — ( Glances at PAULA.) Oh, pardon me.

VON WULLNOW

Mrs. Tax isn’t listening anyway. And besides, she’s above that sort of thing. She’d probably consider our dirty jokes as proof of our commercialized sexuality, wouldn’t you? Go on.

LUTZ

— the man gets up at once. Oh, says the woman, you’ve scarcely finished and you’re already leaving? And that’s supposed to be love? Look, the man replies, I counted to ten, didn’t I?

( There’s either brief laughter or there isn’t. VON WULLNOW is already in the process of departing with LUTZ and KOERBER KENT — only HANS , who is still sweeping up broken glass, giggles, kneeling on the floor. The gentlemen turn around toward him; he gets up and proceeds out in front of them, giggling .)

VON WULLNOW

Quitt, we trust you as you trust us. Forget your superannuated sensitivity. Sensitive for me is a word I only associate with condoms.

QUITT

( To PAULA) Aren’t you leaving?

PAULA

I was to remind you that you still wanted to explain something to me.

QUITT

I merely wished you would stay, now you can go. ( Pause . PAULA sits down again. Pause. ) I noticed how I happened to think of you disgustingly by chance. One minute before and all I could have attached to you was your name. Suddenly there was something conspicuous about you. I wanted to get up and grab you between the legs.

PAULA

Are you speaking about me or about a thing?

QUITT

( Laughs briefly. Pause .) Just now I almost said: About you, you thing. Something seems to want to slip out of me today, something I’m afraid of but which still tantalizes me. You know the stories about laughing at funerals. Once I sat opposite a woman I didn’t know. We looked into each other’s eyes until I felt hot. Suddenly she stuck out her tongue at me, not just mockingly, a little between her lips, but all the way to the root, with the whole face a gruesome grimace — as though she wanted to stick herself out at me. Ever since then I’ve felt like doing something like that myself. Usually I manage to do it only in my head, for just a moment. It starts with my wanting to undo someone’s shoelaces who’s walking by or pulling a hair out of his nose, and stops with the urge to unzip my fly in company.

PAULA

Shouldn’t we talk about our arrangement instead?

QUITT

But I’m finally beginning to enjoy talking. I am speaking now. Before, my lips just moved. I had to strain my muscles to enunciate properly. My whole chin ached, the cheeks became numb. Now I know what I am saying.

PAULA

Are you Catholic?

QUITT

Why! You’re actually listening to me!

PAULA

Because you’re talking about yourself like the deputy of universal truth. What you experience personally you want to experience for all of us. The blood you sweat in private you bring as a sacrifice to us, the impenitent ones. Your ego wants to be more than itself, your sentimentality appeals to my inability to feel, your urge to confess merely has the effect of demonstrating to me that I’m still unawakened. You behave as though your time had finally come. Actually, your time as Quitt who suffers his life in exemplary bourgeois fashion has long since passed. Your suffering is over. The fact that you insist so much on yourself makes you suspect. You lack a sense of history, you’re much too much of an example of Western civilization for me.

QUITT

But even if it is for the last time, I’d like to be at the center of things, just by myself. Otherwise I would feel written off once and for all, like a machine, wouldn’t be able to utter a single word meant for someone else. Once when I stepped out of the house the children yelled after me: I know who you are! I know who you are! Tauntingly, as though the fact that I could be identified was something bad. Besides, it seemed inappropriate to me just now to tell something like a story after you thought about me in such abstract terms.

( Pause .)

PAULA

Sit down. (QUITT does so. Pause. They look at each other. PAULA looks away .) Yes, my outfit bothers me too now. And I can’t think of anything I’d like to say to you. But I would like to say something to you. ( Pause .) It’s pleasant to sit here in the twilight. I wasn’t thinking of anything just now. That was nice too. ( Pause. ) Do you like evaporated milk? I suddenly feel like having evaporated milk. ( Pause. She speaks as if she wants to avoid speaking of something else .) My workers should never see me like this. Normally, I buy my clothes ready-to-wear, I even feel good in them. By the way, it occurred to me before that we should also plan our advertising together from now on. I would like to go on the basis that we don’t generate any artificial needs but only awaken the natural ones of which people aren’t conscious yet. Most people don’t even know their needs. Advertising, insofar as it describes a product, is only another word for consciousness-raising. What we should avoid is advertising which is inappropriate to its product because it creates misconceptions among the consumers about the nature of the product. That would be the very deception or simulation of something that isn’t there which we are always accused of. But our products exist and their very existence makes them rational — otherwise we, as rational beings, would not have had them produced in a rational manner from rational raw materials by rational people. And if our advertisements don’t lie but only provide an exact description of our rational products, then the advertising will be just as rational. Take a look at the socialist states. They have no irrational products — and still they advertise, because the rational needs advertising most of all. That’s what transmits the idea of what is rational. For me advertising is the only materialistic poetry. As an anthropomorphic system it endears us to the objects from which we have been alienated by ideology. It animates the world of goods and humanizes them, so that we can feel at home with them. I can’t tell you how deeply touched I am when I read on an old fire wall in giant letters PEPSI–COLA HITS THE SPOT. When I see a detergent container in front of a rising sun, it blows my mind. Today, twenty years later, they simply gave the same product the sappy designation IT’S THE PEPSI GENERATION, and my mind goes blank. When I’m feeling unproductive, I look at ads in magazines, it makes my mood seem ridiculous; so advertising is also a form of consolation, but of a concrete, rational kind, as distinct from bourgeois obscurantist poetry. And think with how much more dignity and how much more progressively the copywriters can work than the poets! While the poets in their isolation conjure up something vague, the copywriters, working as an efficient team, describe the definite. Indeed, they are the only truly creative ones — they think something they had no idea about beforehand. Incidentally, we noticed recently what was wrong with the slogan for one of our products. It contained the phrase “a level tablespoon” and the product didn’t sell. Finally it occurred to one member of the team to substitute the word “heaping” for small. Instead of “level tablespoon” we used “a heaping teaspoon,” and suddenly sales increased by almost 100 percent.

(HANS enters during the last sentence and turns on the light. )