Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

It was likewise still January that time I stepped barefoot into the grass outside my garden-level study to sharpen my pencils and then spent a good hour walking back and forth between the pear tree and the cherry tree, the ground was so warm under my soles. But it was probably only my imagination that at the same time crickets were chirping from the forest preserve, the result of the great winter silence there sometimes. (More later about the sounds of the crickets here and their connection with the silence.)

No hallucination — although I took it for one at first — was seeing a little snake creeping along the sidewalk at the foot of the Bordeaux bank on the bay’s main street, on a winter night that was damp and cold after all, no, not an earthworm or a novelty store item, and it really moved, though in very slow serpentines, and when I crouched down beside it, it raised its head weakly in the lamplight, flicking its tongue with its last strength, or not at all. The lone late passerby to whom I pointed out the snake was not surprised for a moment to see the animal at this time of year, and altogether the people of the area seemed to find hardly anything astonishing. And as several boys approached from the floodlit athletic field, I pushed the dying snake over the bank into the thick-layered fallen leaves of the forest.

And it was also in the depths of winter that I became a witness to the removal of a ninety-year-old woman, who, alone in her house up on the plateau (part of the bay on that particular day), had caught on fire from her gas stove and had burned up in her living room: when I passed again later that afternoon, pelt-black smoke was still puffing from a smashed windowpane, being photographed by the chronicler of The Hauts-de-Seine News, too late on the scene as usual, and a village expression acquired new meaning for me: “Your place is as cold as a burned-out house!”

And even before the onset of spring something unprecedented happened in the bay and the surrounding area, an earthquake, still inexplicable even to the geologists, also, these say, because so little research has been done on the area: only a small one, to be sure — the rattling of glasses was mistaken by most people for the doing of one of the bombers from the air base again — and yet, in the gypsum-rich part of the circle of hills, the underground tunnel of a former quarry is said to have collapsed, putting an end to mushroom-raising there.

If the earthquake hardly jostled my handwriting in my study, something else did so all the more. I, so dependent on consistency and daily routine, was threatened with being brought to a standstill and almost compelled to give up my undertaking, as yet so up in the air, also because I was still only at the beginning. (And where am I now?)

The woman from Catalonia, my wife, who had vanished long since, suddenly reappeared, but not to live with me again, for a third time, but to forestall my, our, book. At least that appeared to me to be her intention during those winter weeks when time and again but never regularly, and also at no particular hour, she would block my path in unexpected places.

It did not solve anything that I fled in between to Salamanca in the Spanish highlands and continued my work there, the Plaza Mayor, seen below in bird’s-eye view from my attic room in a pension, merely pretending to be the view from my study (those weeks seem so distant that I am not clear as to whether the dying snake here wasn’t actually dragging itself through the wet leaves down there on the bank of the Tormes River, and altogether whether the person squatting by the animal isn’t actually my friend the painter): I had to go home to the bay; without my presence there throughout the year the book would lose its locale and its basis.

And on my very first morning back, as I continued my work, “that woman” descended on me again. Actually I merely saw her running away down a side street when I went to my mailbox, located at the end of the lane, as if for a farm, fastened to the lamppost there, and then found, my only mail, a picture postcard of the medieval bridge over the Tormes in Salamanca, the back side left blank.

Ana had keys to the house, and some days I heard her banging around above me. Later she also came downstairs to the study and sat in a corner. I avoided speaking to her, recalling the phrase an almost-friend had used: Let the will-o’-the-wisp have its way; otherwise all that will be left to it will be its substratum, melancholy. (Earlier, when I had repeated that to her, the woman from Catalonia had replied, “But beneath my melancholy my joy may be waiting!”) And she spoke no more than I did, merely watched me in silence, hour after hour, and hadn’t there once been a time when I had wished that of her for my work? Then, as if she sensed that the day’s quota would soon be polished off, she would get up and leave. But on occasion she would come storming in, especially when, increasingly exhausted by the situation, I would be trying to sleep in the next room; she would shake me, still without saying a word, and then be gone again.

And on a spring day she appeared in the backyard and pounded with her fists on the study door. I went out to her. She had the ability to acquire tremendously broad shoulders all of a sudden, and with these she rammed me to the ground. I stood up, and she rammed me again, except that this time I was ready and stayed on my feet. I would have defended myself, but then I would have lost the sentence in the middle of which she had interrupted me, and with it my ability to continue the book. And so, with the woman from Catalonia one fingertip away from me, eye to eye with my enemy, I silently spelled out the next sentence, and likewise the one after that, and at the same time was close to seizing this giant dwarf and spiking her on the fence pickets, longing at the same time to unite instantly with this female body and give Ana a child, wanting at the same time nothing but to put my arms around my wife, and fearing at the same time that one of the neighbors might see us like this.

And what finally did happen: as old as I was, I began to cry, and in the process became as old as I was. And it seemed to me that her hatred was now being transformed into scorn. Yet as I then looked at her, she had disappeared again. And I squatted down on the spot where we had just almost killed each other, became lost in contemplation of the overlapping traces of wallowing and stomping, along with the uprooted grass and clumps of earth, thought that no human race was foreign to me except sometimes my own white one, and even more that of women; thought, “One day we will kill each other”; thought, “I shall find us once more,” and then continued on with this year of mine in the no-man’s — bay.

Since that day my wife has not appeared again. Instead, when summer came there were other threats and hindrances. But don’t you need those, too, for your writing, as the outward calls to order, without which you would inwardly let yourself go?

From time to time, yes, from time to time.

It is the moment for focusing on the houses in the bay, which in the beginning looked so odd to me, and meanwhile stand there so naturally.

Only in this process of writing things down, which sharpened my senses, did I become more attentive to the buildings here. That happened in an almost time-tested way: since I am incapable of forcing myself to perceive something, I would first note down at home at my desk what, without specific observation, had caught my attention about one house or another as I passed it. This allowed me to get away from my little memory trail; I became concrete, described as completely as possible, made up details at random, drifted into make-believe.

With such descriptions of a house and its surroundings in black and white in my mind, actually more like guesses, I would set out a second time in that direction. And only in this fashion did I become capable of seeing how it really was. And far more powerfully than what I had got right my mistakes impressed upon me the real character of the place. Except that in order to achieve that I had to have interjected something in writing between the object in question and my senses, if not something wrong, then something half cloudy, and in any case something in writing. Then all I had to do was go home again and correct this where necessary.