Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

I turned off all the lights in the house. Valentin went up to his room. I sat at some distance from Ana, on the floor by a window. I had forgotten those entrusted to me. They did not exist.

From the darkness outside the silence spoke to me, on and on, and breathed in, from room to room. That was how it should go on speaking forever. And my house should continue to be as empty as this. And on this night I would not touch that beautiful strange woman somewhere over there.

It did not work out this way, however, and even before winter the house had lost its initial emptiness. If during those first weeks my only connection with the everyday world had come from listening to that transistor radio no bigger than my hand, and then almost exclusively Arab music from Radio Beur, from the metropolitan nowhereland beyond the hills, from time to time we came together of an evening in front of a television set; the turning of the pages of a newspaper, even if it was my own doing, sounded to me like the crack of a whip; books piled up wall-high, when I had wanted to have an armful of them at most in the house, and those as much out of sight as possible, in the closet under the stairs or in one of the many wall niches, of which I still cannot keep track; my wife’s things spread from one bare spot to the next; on the table the tiny little garden flowers and wildflowers were elbowed out by florists’ bouquets, which, furthermore, against my intentions, were purchased not here in the suburb but in the metropolis; and the lamps, hardly larger than clothespins, and also like them clipped on here and there — a temporary arrangement that I as usual had thought of as permanent — were replaced by lanterns, “remember the ones on the bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez?” and a chandelier from a plantation house in the American South.

A friend (the carpenter, the painter, the reader?) on his second visit praised the improvement in livability; one could feel a woman’s hand at work. Yes, I had not kept to my resolution not to let anyone in here, or into my new region at all.

And it was not only my friends who came, who were shown around the house by me, who slept in a guest bed (which, now that I am living alone, is mine, because right next to my study), who gave advice, who also blocked out the emptiness round about in bars and on wood roads, but also people with whom I had nothing to do except to let them interrogate me, persuaded to do so by the woman from Catalonia, who decreed that my concerns were public, and it was my duty to behave accordingly.

What about that metamorphosis? Was it even still in effect? (Luckily most of those who made their way here had eyes neither for the house nor for the surrounding area — which on the other hand annoyed me: I wanted even them, the strangers, now that they were here, to be pulled up short at least now and then, to look and listen and then perhaps to let me tell them something about the place.)

No, after the first quiet summer nothing about my life in the remote bay remained the way I had sketched it out for myself. A new publisher stopped by, coming from the funeral of one of his authors, the twelfth in the current year, and on his way to the University of Montana in Missoula, where he was to receive an honorary degree, and sat facing me with barely contained disapproval, directed if not at me then at the too small chair, which squeaked and creaked under his weight. All my Catalan in-laws gave the property the once-over, and Ana’s mother was convinced the balcony was about to collapse, while her father would not want even to be buried in such a poorly lit suburb, indistinguishable at night from a Transylvanian forest, and with the strangest bunch of hut dwellers swept together from all over the world, and sang the praises of his Gerona and the Catalan nation.

I just barely managed to avoid being talked into a wine cellar, and remained true to my idea that the birds flying past should suffice as pets (though the house was invaded by the barking of a wolfhound right next door, which my new publisher said he would buy himself, too, if he lived in such an area).

Whereas one favorite saying of the woman from Catalonia was “No, no, no!” I myself could hardly ever get out a single no. I never really resisted that, and in the first couple of years in the bay, with the monthly and then also weekly interruptions by visitors, often from far away, of the invisibility I had promised myself, I took satisfaction in this peculiarity for a time. There were moments when I harbored the thought of creating a center in this area, without a groundbreaking or public announcement, simply by regularly inviting one person or another, whose work or style of idleness appealed to me, to come here over the hills and be put up in my house or one of the hard-to-find inns in the bay, preferably in whichever one was being operated just then by the prophet and bankrupt restaurateur, at that time still a station away from Porchefontaine, who could be counted on to contradict my guests, with me as a mere listener. Even if they happened to be very famous, my visitors would have no need to worry that they might attract attention in this area, and that alone had to yield something positive. No face from film or television would be recognized here. At the very most one of the local residents would be taken aback for a moment, but would promptly calm down, thinking it impossible that the person over there could be Michelangelo Antonioni, or, let us say, Eric Cantona, P. Zaroh, Pedro Delgado, Pane Secundo, or Ama Nemus — for never would such celebrities come to our remote corner of the world, even to drop in. I conceived of this center as neither an academy nor a school, though perhaps Pythagoras’ rule about mulling over with others the day before yesterday influenced me, to the extent that I imagined that by retracing our steps this way in our minds, instead of changing fundamentally, which was probably what the philosopher had had in mind, we would see what we were made of. Thanks to my argumentative prophet and even more thanks to his cuisine, this project actually got off the ground, but it soon fell apart, for one thing because by myself I was not enough of an audience for those celebrities, for another because it turned out that strangely enough those who were invited felt a need to be recognized out here after all, and by more than just a few. When they went unrecognized, almost all these famous folk remained silent, actually seeming offended. Or at any rate they were not generous with themselves. Or did none of these people, so dear to me from afar, ever want to let down their guard? That, to be sure, was what I would have wished for, among other things.

Thus during my entire decade here, to the present day, I have never been able to give a party either in my house or in the region for a single visitor — and in the meantime almost none come anymore. That, too, I have not stopped wishing for, if only for just one time.

Never would I have believed that it could be a source of pleasure to live in a house and have the title, the legal title, of owner. Yet that was what it turned out to be in those days, even beyond that first period with the almost empty rooms, and more than that — a joy.

I felt impelled to live in accordance with it, this joy, and that meant more attentively. I resolved to treat my house, just as it was, more carefully than anything previously. I decided not just to treat it gently, but also to give it the benefit of constant observation, including the inconsistent shapes and ill-chosen colors left by the succession of previous owners, along with the harmless peeling and weathering. I then felt annoyed with myself for so much as letting a door slam or pressing a latch without thinking.

My property made me pull myself together in my dealings with it. At the same time, I wanted to use it and make it fruitful (and not only the kitchen and the orchard section of the grounds), and that without adding anything; everything had to remain the same, except perhaps for a fresh coat of paint and a new shrub here and there.