Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

The person who did something after all was my son. Valentin, in defiance of the usual expression, did not “come” to me. He ran, galloped, flitted, leaped, stumbled, dashed. That usually happened after periods of separation, which had meanwhile become infrequent. Previously, even if he had caught sight of me the moment I appeared, his first movement had been a looking away, almost a violent swiveling of his head, as if he had been waiting for anyone but me. But now, picking me out without any particular peering around, even from among a crowd of people in a railroad station or airport, he would promptly break into a run, looking straight at me from way across the building. I did not see the need for help and the pleading quality that later replaced distrust in his eyes and can still appear there, even now that he has come of age; rather, it was an instance of uninhibited pleasure, never preceded by the slightest surprise, even when he could not know I was going to turn up. For he took it as a matter of course that when he had climbed the lighthouse at the end of the earth with his grandparents, in La Coruña (or somewhere else), on the platform at the top I would appear around the corner. And he did not even need to be separated from me to run toward me that way. Once we had just spoken with each other and then met by chance on the street, on opposite sides — he surrounded by friends — and he immediately slipped away and came flying and leaping toward me, a glow on his face that embarrassed me and at the same time made my heart bleed.

For an entire decade the child and for a while also the adolescent and I lived together this way in harmony; or we were of one mind, without words, each of us, wherever he happened to be just then, equally preoccupied with nothing of moment, like two idiots.

Only when we walked together did this boy otherwise so silent — to his teachers “silent Val”—begin to speak, the first speaking in tongues I ever witnessed. As a rule, it occurs to me, this happened when we were going gradually downhill, after a longish ascent, and if I still feel drawn today to places from the past, it is to those nameless stretches where my son did nothing but enumerate the world for me.

One time, after we had gone up and down in the Seine hills, we descended to the Métro station in Issy-les-Moulineaux, located in one of those suburban streets for which the dictionary of commonplaces would offer the word “gray,” and he began to speak about the colors of the houses, and by the end of the street each house had its own color, shading, and nuance; yet he was not inventing or adding anything, simply comparing what was there, making distinctions, emphasizing, and when a building remained gray, which was the exception, it became dove gray, beech-trunk gray, slate gray, so that when we looked back over our shoulders the row of houses stood there as a strip of colors, more varied than any human being could dream up, and even the asphalt of the sidewalks displayed that tinge of red that is a fact in this region on the outskirts of Paris and takes on the deep red of animal blood in the lightest showers.

Iwas always threatened by a kind of numbness: losing any sense of coherence, whereupon the world continued to move along without me; instead of conceptual bewilderment, which I welcomed, I was struck with something like a visual bewilderment, for which in the area where I grew up they had an expression—“to stare into the idiot box”—comical only to those who watched someone actually doing it. In the meantime I have been trying to avoid this condition with the help of an aphorism from Goethe’s later years: he says we have an obligation to keep ourselves alive and impressionable, following the example nature gives us. And accordingly, my decade of association with the child seems to have brought this notion of impressionability to my attention — a word I am now writing for the first time, although it has accompanied me since the beginning of this undertaking and actually showed me the direction in which it should be going, far in advance; a multisyllabic word, uncommon in this usage, that set me on the path for an entire book.

I learned that a child could make one impressionable, much as nature does, simply in its way of being there before one’s eyes, to be perceived without Goethe’s microscope or magnifying glass, for instance with that cowlick, from which the eye moved on to the bracken, the door, the pebbles, the rusty key.

Then my son and I had a falling-out. It was never put into words. Had that happened — and how close I was to blurting it out, and probably he as well — there would have been no going back. By holding back the final word, each of us made a fresh start possible.

And yet our falling-out was a fact, and no mere growing apart such as they say is usual for parents and children in a transitional era.

I see its origin in myself. Even when we were of one mind, I had an ulterior thought: to be alone and on my own again. Back in my family period I was already leading a double life. In hours of harmony I was still on the lookout for something else — the wind in the leaves over there, the quivering rain puddle far off in the light of night — and considered my being with the others a mere episode, though it might last for decades; afterward I would be able to go my way as never before. I lived with those who had been entrusted to me and recognized that inside me something was turning in a different direction, away from closeness, away from fulfillment, away from the present. That counter-direction within me often became so powerful, even during the day and when things were outwardly tranquil, that I could not stand being touched by a child, not even my own, although I was happy with him, in harmony.

And then came the time when he did not believe in my affection anymore. He did not expressly avoid me; I simply did not exist. At our morning encounters he took cognizance of me without really seeing me. I, who with the passing years had come to need a greeting at least once a day, greeted my son myself, often through a door behind which he had locked himself, usually greeted him two or three times, hardly ever receiving a response. Upon occasion he looked right past me, jostled me, and did not even notice. Although Valentin and I continued to live in the house, more and more rooms, corners, even stair treads, door handles, and dishes seemed to become orphaned.

In the evenings he came home later and later, and I never knew where he was. Although I asked him to, he never once telephoned; I had simply dropped out of his consciousness. When he did call one time, the people he was with had reminded him of me.

Finally, while still a child in age, he began staying out all night, and I could not help waiting up for him. I got dressed and went out. In the suburbs, shortly after midnight, neither trains nor buses are running, and the headlights, shining, of a car, moving, become an unusual sight, and someone there, waiting in the house or in front of it, on the street, as I did time and again in those days, until that hour of night when only a barely audible, but all the more penetrating, hissing comes through the air, as if from all the electrical and gas conduits in the area, and still waiting when the first birds begin to sing and the racket of the day begins again — this person will perceive such a place, and with it the isolation, the silence, the ponds, the forests, only as his enemy. And on just such a night, a bitter cold one, with the glory of the sparkling winter constellations in the sky above the hills of the Seine, fresh snow was on the ground, and every time I walked down the white street in the direction from which I expected my son to come, and each time saw only my own tracks ahead of me, not those of any other pedestrian or any vehicle, I cursed the bay, together with its bamboo, palms, stars, and snow.