Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

As I fought thus for life, in my own way, day after day, I came to accept myself as never before. I discovered something like a fondness for myself, a kind of brotherliness or friendship with myself.

It seemed to me that I was no I, no body anymore — which at the same time was uncanny — and had finally received, as one in need of salvation, what I lacked: a culture; precisely in my near-helplessness a spirit.

In this way much that was unthinkable became possible and playable, such that I once even let an itinerant soothsayer tell my fortune. She did not manage to lie in my presence, and foretold for me, holding my unabashedly needy hand in her own warming one, even worse and more worrisome experiences.

And once I sat all day at my desk imagining that at my back a camera for a blockbuster film was set up, and each of the letters I was to type would be projected onto a gigantic screen, before the eyes of a mass audience on all continents. I felt the suspense with which the completion of a word was awaited, groaned in relief with the entire theater when finally the connecting word came, and then, when long after midnight the sentence was concluded with a period the size of a planet, I jumped up from my seat, together with the rest of the world. Nothing could be quieter than another sentence after that, a transition, a ford: no sweeter silence.

I simply had to follow this method of finally forgetting any audience, nodding and rocking my head, so that at the first light of day a page was covered, as had not been the case for weeks, an image in writing. I washed myself in the water of the Pyrenees, full of enthusiasm for this me-without-me, and animated by love for my lot, which was something fundamentally different from acceptance of fate or inner tranquillity. (The peace so indispensable to my work was not foreign to me; yet I have not learned to this day to hold on to it, once achieved.)

Occupied with writing, I shuddered at the thought of going out into nature. The clanging of the river against the granite sills made me anxious, then even snowflakes bumping against my ear.

The very isolation of my study, with its view of the Sierra blue in the distance and the red earthen pyramids in the foreground, also became threatening to me. I moved to a room overlooking the highway, and opened the window, no matter how cold the weather, to the sound of the — unfortunately too infrequent — trucks and buses, preferably with the rattle of snow chains.

My daily walk, by roundabout routes through the enclave to make it longer, took me not out into nature but instead into the church of Llivia and even more often into the enclave’s little museum next door. It was as if I expected to find a sort of way out through contemplation of the objects, for instance the centuries-old apothecary’s cabinet displayed there. At least these handcrafted objects made me forget how things stood with me.

And likewise I wanted only light-colored foods; I had a horror of dark ones, for instance venison. For a time my only beverage was milk, with the thought that the viper-blood black would be forced out by the milk white.

But all that worked for only a day, and not even for that. I was cradled by the world, and went to hell. I conjured up a god ex nihilo, and then could not find the right word and the consecutive clause for him. I expected help to arrive, kept my eyes peeled for anyone, on earth, in the sky, around the corner, and then I was again the one who said to himself, “Look here, there goes someone who doesn’t need anyone!” I wanted to be taken away by one of the airplanes flying over the highlands, then found myself, in order to get another paragraph done, as I had wished, in the cockpit, which, the next time I got stuck, turned out to have no pilot and no instruments. During a storm I placed the manuscript pages by the open window and went off, hoping they would be blown away forever, then rushed back in a panic. At the sight of a butterfly I felt the fluttering of the wings all the way into my heart, at the sight of the next one, the dusty body between the wings appeared to me as that of the perished caterpillar. Who or what was chimerical: the world? the era? I?

Then a clarification was achieved after all. (If not, I either would still be sitting there at the scratched hotel table, having just reached the place where the first black-water tributary flowed into the Orinoco, or would be part of the musty air up in the crevasses of the Puigmal, the “Evil Peak.”)

It was the fault of a day after which I thought I was finally out of danger with my book. After over a hundred days, often spent from morning until late at night at my table, I decided to let the writing go the following day, and merely polish my shoes in my room and then immediately set out across country.

It was a clear day in early spring at thirteen hundred meters above the level of the sea at Alicante, which is how the altitude is measured everywhere in Spain, and soon the high plateau of the Pyrenees stretched at my feet, a sparsely populated scene in a natural amphitheater, whose terraces I mounted, going up the mountainside from one granite block to the next. I moved in a daze, as if released suddenly from intensive care directly into the sunshine.

Yet I could not achieve high spirits or pleasure. And with every step it grew worse. It was far too late to return to my writing table, and not merely for today. The deferment had run out. I would not even make it into the evening on this day.

Although I pushed on, with the world panorama below me, it was a mere wandering in circles. My pencil fell from my hand. My story did not continue. In just this way a person I had seen die was still moving his lips to draw in air long after he had died, or kicked the bucket.

I, who knew of nothing more worthwhile to strive for than to become a part of the world, to see through the eyes of another person, to land with a drop of rain on the dust in the road, now experienced myself, no matter where I turned, as such a part, but in a completely opposite sense. How sweet and kind the planet showed itself to be, and at the same time I gagged at any phenomenon. And it gave me not the slightest relief to tell myself that this was nothing compared to the children dying at this moment around the world. I saw down below in the distance, from the city of Puigcerda, the smoke rising from the highlands hospital, found myself transplanted into the bone-hard suffering there, and even so would much rather have been lying there myself.

And just as little was achieved by the rebuke: in view of the millions of years represented by the granite cliffs at my back, what did I count for? And I also knew that even in a merry crowd, even among all my friends, I would not be any less on the brink than alone here by the garbage dump on the mountainous steppe of the enclave of Llivia.

Twice in the past months I had been thrown to the ground. Now I threw myself down, face to the ground, and experienced a previously unknown masculinity. But the earth did not help me. She did not take me in. She even pushed me away. She had nothing for me.

Eyes open, look, straight ahead! And I had no choice but to look straight ahead from where I was lying on the ground, at eye level the ruins of a house of the steppe. And my gaze did not let go, and did not let go, and did not let go, and surrendered all hope, and was no longer waiting for any sign.

A rusty stove was lying among the ruins, with an oven from which old newspapers and books stuck out. I eyed the book on top, actually more a large brochure with a picture on the cover that still had some faded color, a princess surrounded by dwarfs, with the Spanish words “Los cuentos de los Hermanos Grimm,” The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.