Peter Handke - The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

QUITT

This sounds familiar. (HANS laughs. ) So you’re just making fun of me. I should have known that someone with your history would never change. But you’re not the one who matters. It’s the others that count.

HANS

Do you actually despise yourself, Mr. Quitt? — Now that you’ve screwed them all?

QUITT

Myself? No. But I might despise someone like me. ( Long pause .) Why don’t you react? Just now when you weren’t answering me, what I said began to crawl back into me and wanted to make itself unsaid, and me too, by shriveling me deep inside. ( Pause .) You’re making fun of my language. I would much prefer to express myself inarticulately like the little people in the play recently, do you remember? Then you would finally pity me. This way I suffer my articulateness as part of my suffering. The only ones that you and your kind pity are those who can’t speak about their suffering.

HANS

How do you want to be pitied? Even if you became speechless with suffering your money would speak for you, and the money is a fact and you — you’re nothing but a consciousness.

QUITT

( Derisively ) Pity only occurred to me because the characters in the play moved me so — not that they were speechless, but that despite their seemingly dehumanized demeanor they wanted really to be as kind to each other as we spectators who all live in more human surroundings are already with each other. They, too, wanted tenderness, a life together, et cetera — they just can’t express it, and that is why they rape and murder each other. Those who live in inhuman conditions represent the last humans on stage. I like that paradox. I like to see human beings on the stage, not monsters. Human beings, gnarled with suffering, unsche-matic, drenched with pain and joy. The animalistic attracts me, the defenseless, the abused and insulted. Simple people, do you understand? Real people whom I can feel and taste, living people. Do you know what I mean? People! Simply … people! Do you know what I mean? Not fakes but … ( He thinks for quite a while .) people. You understand: people. I hope you know what I mean.

HANS

I can’t take your jokes so soon after waking up. But let’s suppose you’re being serious. There must be another possibility which makes your dichotomy — here fakes, there human beings — look ridiculous.

QUITT

Which?

HANS

I don’t know.

QUITT

Why not?

HANS

That I don’t know is the very thing that lends me hope. Besides, as one of those whom you have in mind: I can say it: every time when the curtain rises I become discouraged at the prospect that things will be human again up there any moment now. Let’s further assume that you mean what you say: perhaps the people on stage moved you — not because they were people, but because everything was shown as it is. For example, if you recognize a portrait as true to life, you frequently develop a peculiar sympathy for the person in the portrait without necessarily having any feeling for the real person. Couldn’t the same thing have happened to you when you saw the play? That you empathized with the inarticulate people represented there on the stage and think, therefore, that you have done with the real ones? And why do you want to see real characters on stage at all, who belong in the past and are alien to you?

QUITT

Because I like to think back to the days when I was poor too, and couldn’t express myself, and primarily because the painted grimaces from my own class sit in the audience anyway. On stage I want to see the other class, as crude and as unadorned as possible. After all, I go to the theater to relax.

HANS

( Laughs .) So, you are being derisive.

QUITT

I meant that seriously. ( He laughs. Both of them laugh .)

(WIFE enters .)

HANS

Here comes one of your real people.

WIFE

Are you laughing at me?

QUITT

Who else?

WIFE

And what were you saying about me?

HANS

Nothing. We were only laughing about you.

(WIFE laughs too; she slaps QUITT on the shoulder, nudges him in the ribs. )

QUITT

We’re all merry for once, right?

HANS

Since business is so good, Mr. Quitt — why don’t you cross my palm with silver?

QUITT

You’re welcome.

( He wants to put the coin into HANS’s outstretched hand but HANS pulls back the hand and stretches out the other. Now QUITT wants to put the coin into that hand, but HANS, so as to adjust to QUITT , has already stretched out his first hand again. When he notices that QUITT … he stretches out his second hand again. But QUITT tries to put the coin into HANS’s first hand again and in the meantime, etc. Until QUITT puts the coin away again, walks to the piano, and plays a boogie. WIFE takes HANS and dances with him … Then QUITT suddenly plays a slow, sad blues and sings along with it.)

QUITT

Sometimes I wake up at night

and everything I want to do next day

suddenly seems silly,

how silly to button your shirt,

how silly to look in your eyes,

how silly the foam on the glass of beer,

how silly to be loved by you.

Sometimes I lie awake

and everything I imagine

makes everything that much more inconceivable—

inconceivable the pleasure of standing at a hot-dog stand,

inconceivable New Zealand,

inconceivable thinking of sooner or later,

inconceivable to be alive or dead

I want to hate you and hate plastic,

you want to hate me and hate the fog.

I want to love you and love hilly countrysides,

you would like to love me

and have a lovely city, a lovely color, a lovely animal.

Everyone stay away from me,

it is the time after my death

and what I just imagined, with a sigh, as my life

are only blisters on my body

which sigh when they burst

( He stops singing .) But things are going well for us right now, aren’t they? I saw a woman walking in the sun with a full shopping bag and I knew at once: Nothing more can happen to me now! I hear an old lady say: “Parsley on the stalk? I’ve never eaten that.” And then she says: “Well, and I don’t think I’ll indulge in it now.” Nothing can happen to me any more! Nothing can happen to me any more! ( He continues to sing.)

No dream

could make anything seem stranger

than what I’ve already experienced

and there’s no cure

for the peace and quiet

( He speaks again. ) … with which every morning I let the dingaling out from behind my fly to fidget in the peep show to relieve the pressure which I could no longer imagine during the sleepless night. (VON WULLNOW, KOERBER-KENT, and LUTZ appear silently. WIFE wants to leave. ) Stay here. ( She leaves. HANS leaves too. Pause. ) So you still exist. ( Pause .) Why don’t we make ourselves comfortable? ( Pause. ) What can I offer you? Schnapps? Cognac?

KOERBER-KENT

No, thank you. It’s still too early for that.

QUITT

Or juice, freshly squeezed.

KOERBER-KENT

That doesn’t agree with my stomach. Hyperacidity.

QUITT

Then a few breadsticks. Or would you prefer some other snack?

LUTZ

Thank you, we really don’t want anything. Seriously, don’t go to any trouble.

QUITT

You’ve got a frog in your throat. Hans will make you a camomile tea. (LUTZ shakes his head .) Camomile which we picked ourselves at the Mediterranean. The blossoms are intact!

LUTZ

( Clears his throat .) I’m over it already. I don’t need anything.