Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

The place always gained the upper hand. My near and dear and my places always failed to coincide except, in particular moments and in a nowhereland, with a friend, and that time with the woman from Catalonia — when she, to be sure, did not substitute for the place but rather potentiated the existing place and gave it elan. For the first time in my life I came home to a person, to my wife. For this period the house and wife belonged together. In her I came home to my house-within-the-house.

As far apart as we were in years, we became the same age. For the first time ever I saw myself as young, as I had not for a moment seen myself in my youth. And being faithful became a source of pleasure, and at the same time was nothing special.

Didn’t our spontaneity and complete absorption in one another also result from the setting of the house and grounds in that gentle hollow, as if at the bottom of an abandoned quarry, or in the so-called depression of the Dead Sea, where we had begotten the child? Now the two of us lay together like two long before a child; and as if we still did not have one. Would anything similar have happened between us on raised ground? Has anyone heard of a couple who were flooded with desire in a storm on a mountaintop? And as we lay there, one floor above us our child talked in his sleep, the pedestrian cycle switched on and off at the night-shrouded railroad station across the way, the chains of hills huddled behind us, and there was a rustling of leaves outside our window.

That was the time when I could touch another person, when I felt a powerful urge to do so, and simply for the sake of touching her. For hours I wanted nothing else but to feel every part of this woman. I wanted to grab her from the top of her head to her heels and take her between my fingertips. In bending her, tapping her, plucking at her I convinced myself of the two of us. And on the other hand it was as if I were supposed to measure her for something, an additional, very special, amazing dress. And even in my dreams, as I slept at her side, this fingering, tying, hooking, cutting out, continued. I felt fulfilled by it: that was it. And I saw myself smiling secretly and silently to myself, turned away, in profile, like my son in his hiding place when he was very small. And rested against her rib like a mountain climber in a trackless waste.

For the continuation of the story a flesh-and-blood third party would be appropriate here, a person who would not merely make a pretense of distance, a chronicler: “In the first days of winter the woman left the house in the suburb.”

I have my own opinions on the matter, as on more and more subjects (O harbor of Piran, and me at twenty, with no opinions on anything), yet what I think resists taking written form, or, for me, being written excludes the former. And I have the same problem with all rational explanations, deductions, and parallel examples, however clever, even if for a moment they made sense to me orally, and occasionally even do me good. Faced with being written down — with authority — even the most profound understandings have gone up in a puff of smoke every time, leaving me temporarily at a loss for words. I could then make a fresh start only if I had no idea how the few remaining fragments fit together, if at all. From the moment I set out to write, the path I took was different from the previous one, fundamentally so, a stumbling path.

And so I feel the urge here, too, to have no context, and to remain that way to the end of the following paragraph.

The woman from Catalonia was divinely carefree, in the sense I once found in an epistle of Horace, seemingly directed at me, where he says I should shake off the cold compress of cares in order to achieve divine wisdom. And when she was delighted she delighted an entire circle; a sort of cordiality communicated itself then to almost all the others, whereas I remained alone with my delight, shut it up inside me and brooded over it. And likewise her happiness shone forth and disarmed others; put to shame my occasional incredulity, healed my disintegration; beautified along with her also the person near her. I, on the other hand, did not know what to do with my happiness, or, overcome with awkwardness, at least did nothing good with it; seemed to lack an instinct for happiness, came across as abrupt and unloving.

And then things would change drastically again. She trusted no one, distrusted every moment. Even in her radiance there was a constant checking to see whether the person on whom it shone was actually receptive to it and was in agreement with her; if she observed the slightest contradiction or even a momentary distractedness, her face became an evil mask, without any change except the loss of its characteristic soulfulness, perhaps in a single quick glance over her shoulder, with which she thought to trap the other in not being in agreement with her. Nothing about her startled me more; with the passing years I feared nothing more, and in the end nothing sent me into more of a rage than this ever-ready suspicion in the midst of her glowing, followed by sudden mood swings, when a huge tongue would be stuck out at me, while her lips remained tightly closed. Often all I had to do was leave her alone when I went to do an errand, and on my return she, who had just been rejoicing in our closeness, would be staring hostilely at a spot on the wall, feeling let down, indeed betrayed. And every time I had a sense that she was right. Although I came to her without ulterior motives, captivated by her cheeriness and also her cordiality, at such moments of sudden reversal our relationship appeared as unfounded and meaningless to me as to her. I was the wrong person. I was not the one she had been waiting for; I was a surrogate husband. To be sure, I was not yet unfaithful to her, and nevertheless I understood why I was suspect to her, just as I have always understood why, wherever I go, a patrolman eyes me and then detains me as a possible thief, terrorist, child murderer: I have never done or planned anything truly evil, and yet from the time I was very small I have felt worthy of suspicion — for what? For whatever the case of the moment might be, the current outrage. Even when things were this way between the woman and me, I still considered every other man wrong for her. Strangely enough, the hours, and, in that period, days and weeks, of harmony merely heightened her expectations and at the same time her fear: just as she trusted no one, she also did not believe anything could last. A dream could separate her from her lover; our merely sleeping side by side, without any particular incident, after an evening of fulfillment, could spark dissension overnight.

And then, when, like the previous times, something not worth mentioning had happened and she again lost her “belief” (her last word to me) in me, but this time as if in a gush, and from then on just went in circles, alternating between staring at me contemptuously and making imploring gestures to some unknown being, it came to me that the right person for this woman could only be a god. But what kind of god, and where was he? Certainly he would not come from heaven, or in the shape of a cloud or a rainstorm, but rather in human form, like you or me, only more radiant, and he would blow away her primeval distrust by finding it amusing.

But as it was, both of us, one as stubborn as the other, allowed our relationship to go to pieces, and without consideration for our child, who at the beginning silently stepped between us as a mediator and then just as silently retreated from the field of battle. Without her belief in us two, I also lost mine. Just a moment ago I had been carrying around her image within me for life, and now: the image was gone.

And as was almost the rule whenever I broke up with someone: the separation seemed to me, in contrast to our being together, the higher reality, likewise the struggle, fierce, body against body, that preceded it.