Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

That he had formed the habit of stretching out on the ground in the course of the day was not merely the result of his great tiredness. Had that been the case, he would have changed his position and would not have lain facedown the entire time, motionless, his eyes open. He lay this way on purpose, somewhat like one of his forerunners, the American Sam Francis, who, when he was sick once for a long time, was supposed to have looked for several months at nothing but the floor under his bed, through a hole in the mattress — or had he pushed the mattress off the bedspring? Except that at that time Sam Francis had not yet been a painter, and he himself now?

He sprawled there on the river-bend pebbles, these so close to his eyes that when he blinked, his eyelashes grazed them. The flint bulges appeared dark, with a shimmer of light only around the edges. To think that he expected to be strengthened less by looking up into the heavens than by looking down at the ground! And who else would have been able to give himself over to lying down this way? Not Picasso, not Max Ernst, but probably Matisse when very old, Cézanne obviously, Poussin, especially in his in-between period, when he was unhappily painter to the king, and even persnickety Braque.

Except that this grouping no longer had anything to do with him. None of what he had produced out of himself previously in his life could he now claim as his work. What he was trying out at the moment was amateurish drawing after nature, and on every sheet only one thing, a flintstone, a shrub, a pyramid of earth, a wave in the river. With determination he set himself up as a Sunday painter (daily), working with ordinary pencils on writing paper, and their little sound meanwhile meant as much to him as his earlier stroking, rubbing, scratching, scraping.

And thus he wanted to continue wandering and hiking into wintertime, going upriver from one drawing station to the next; he had started out in Portugal, behind Pôrto, where the Río Duero flowed steeply downhill into the Atlantic, had then crossed the border and continued on until he was below Zamora, in front of the ruins of the church on the little island in the river that had almost been washed away, while on the other island, around which the current swirled, a dog that had been abandoned there in the wilderness or had found its way there barked and barked for a week — then nothing more.

The feelings on this trip were new to him. Although they resulted from tiredness and were called sorrow or desolation, he experienced them more deeply and lastingly than those from his glory days. Weakness and defenselessness conferred a strength all their own, or so it seemed to the former prince. He felt compelled to see, precisely because of his repudiation; to take things in; to act. And thus he might shake his fist in space or spaces and say, “A new kind of painting must come! For which the peoples will mobilize. In the face of which they will fall silent and then go away, go and go. A kind of painting as festive as life. No more pictures hidden away in museums. Cliff painting.”

The sketcher on the field of rocky rubble at the foot of the great Duero terrace sees above his sheet of paper a flash of lightning from a cloudless sky. It has already gone out of his mind when a peal of thunder follows. Or does this come from a shot fired by the two hunters, father and son, who for hours have been lying on the other side of the tracks, their sights trained on the badlands with all the rabbit holes?

No, it thundered and lightened, again and again. The hunters disappeared, running. The frogs jumped into the river, the wind died down, and autumn leaves fell, straight down and heavy. The lightning could be seen not in the bright blue sky but rather only in its reflection on the scree; each new bolt seemed to shoot out of the hummocks there.

In the confusion my friend sniffed his pencils — the scent of thyme — and continued sketching his object, a single pebble, shaped like a viper’s head. The drawing done, he set out for his camper, up on the chamomile-covered steppe just beyond the town. But first, after traversing a stretch in a sandstorm, with hares, storks, and rats scurrying back and forth across his path, and a sense of well-being from the grains of sand striking his cheeks like sharp blows, he stopped in at the barrack bar, where all the river fishermen and hunters were crammed in together, and there he stayed until the other express roared by, the last of the day, from La Corun a to Madrid, announced long before between the river terraces with a bull-like bellow.

As he continued on up the mountain, the first drops fell from the still-blue sky, and on the entire stretch such first drops again and again. The old cobblestone pavement on the serpentine road was darkened by them to a fresh black and wafted a fragrance up at him. If he painted again, he thought, it would be in camouflage colors like this.

If anyone was out in the open, it was alone on each of the slopes separated by precipices, searching for mushrooms or simply out there, the old men, “like me,” he thought. But he had not even entered school when they were fighting the civil war, that man there against that other one? And now? Tomorrow on up the river to Tordesillas.

But for today to the clay-yellow church of Toro, where with his eyes he traced the masons’ arrows, keys, and circles etched into the blocks of stone. Then to the Alegría Bar on the Plaza Mayor, where at the moment of his entering the glass of fino was already waiting for him, and on the television, just before the coup de grace, torero and bull began playing with one another, seemingly cheerfully. Then on to the Imperio movie theater, where he was alone with the lighting strips along the aisles, like those on a runway. After the film, which he did not watch to the end, it was already night, with the rushing of the Rio Duero in its deep chasm echoing through the town, and up here almost no other sound than the din from the pool halls, as if people tended to disappear into their houses more in Toro than elsewhere in Spain. Then for the late evening meal alone again in the innermost room of a little inn, with a view of a trompe l’oeil window, including curtains over the opaque glass, lit up from behind. Then, after the proprietor’s hand on his shoulder in farewell, lying, no longer on his stomach, at some distance from town, in his camper on the savanna, and reading Horatius Flaccus by the oil lamp: “What? A criminal gets up at night to strangle someone. And you, to save your skin, remain at home?” While turning down the light, brooding over the masons’ marks, and the thought: “Arrows in those days still had feathers! And ours today still have them?” And in the dark then a woman singing on the radio, “¿Quieres un lugar? ”

She had always wanted to return from her solitary journeys with a treasure. Yet every time she came back empty-handed again, and not because her searching had been without success. Each time she stumbled upon amazing things and took them, bargained for them, or, more often, stole them. She was capable of dragging them around with her on hikes that lasted for weeks, and then leaving them behind somewhere, one after the other, at the latest on the final leg of her journey, the last item perhaps just around the corner from her house.

These found objects did not lose any of their specialness in her eyes; they merely revealed themselves toward the end of the journey as something other than the treasure she had had in mind. Over the years they were then brought back to their original place if possible, as now, on her southern Turkish excursion, the old milestone or marker from near Ephesus, which she had laboriously dug out and then rolled for hours with her hands and feet, with a Greek inscription of a fragment from Heraclitus: “The nature of each and every day is one and the same.” Once she had it in a different setting, this object had come to seem like a mere theatrical prop.