Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

But here and there a voice made itself heard, without being raised or seeking a public forum, asserting that in the meantime the truly authentic conversations were taking quite a different form, for instance that of the monologue — while the partner, who could also be many in number, an actual audience, was all eyes and ears — the form of telling a story and listening, listening and passing the story on, listening some more, and passing the story on and on. And the most intense conversation (which, to be sure, was not suitable, not suitable at all, for just any old audience) occurred nowadays, especially nowadays! without words, not in the silent exchange of glances but in the interplay of your sex and mine, not merely without words but if possible also almost without sound, but all the more eloquent and emphatic, in the course of which I transmit to you each of my conversational fragments with even more than all my senses, and in turn absorb each of your conversational fragments with more than all my senses? yes, absorb, and inscribe them on myself from A to Z: a conversation, or dialogue, if you will, more enduring than almost any other nowadays, or at the time when this adventure took place; a dialogue-narrative of which not one of the exchanges, however minute — toward the end of the telling, more and more intense in the pattern of question-response-response-question-response-response — will ever be forgotten; the most unforgettable of all the conversations in our lives; ineradicable from your and my memory; even if later we will become strangers to one another, or even enemies.

“When I was young, I was full of enthusiasm,” the entrepreneur told her during that drive, on which after a while they were the only ones on the road. In the fallow fields, nocturnal bonfires were burning here and there, with the silhouettes of feral dogs flitting by, no humans in sight. She drove very fast, as if through enemy territory (but she always drove that way).

“In all the pictures of me as a boy I have glowing eyes. My enthusiasm mystified children of my own age. It even put them off and made me an outsider, also a figure of fun. But older children appreciated me all the more, and adults still more — some of them, not all. Even as a very small child I was always bouncing with enthusiasm; in my baby pictures I already had that glowing look, always turned toward a sun and not blinded by it. My original enthusiasm was completely unfocused, it seems to me. And at the same time I — or how should I refer to that earlier being — was completely caught up in my enthusiasm; possessed by it as by a demon, though a thoroughly benevolent and lovable one; that entire newborn body a bundle of unfocused enthusiasm.

“As I got older, it remained unfocused for a long time. Except that after a while it no longer emanated from the center of my body, radiating from there to all my limbs — making it seem as if I had nine times nine arms — but became concentrated in my head: my eyes, my ears, and especially my tongue. I would talk a blue streak, until there was a rushing in my ears, my eyes bugged out, and my skull felt as if it were about to burst (as is happening again now, by the way).

“On other occasions, when my enthusiasm did have a focal point for a change, it was always a human being, always an adult, to be specific. I felt enthusiasm for some adult or other. How I could venerate him then, send my thoughts in his direction, summon him in a dream, believe in this person, yes, believe in him! An adult who could elicit my enthusiasm in this fashion was never my father or my mother — or was it? search your heart — but rather, for instance, a distant relative or a teacher (usually in a so-called minor subject, who perhaps came to our classroom only once a week), but it could also be a businessman, a soccer player (perhaps merely a local celebrity, or precisely such a person), and, strange to say, especially a person who, according to hearsay, for instance my parents’ stories, had been stricken with misfortune. Ah, once you were filled with enthusiasm for the unfortunate — not the unfortunate of your own age, but the unfortunate adults! And then you yourself became an adult, neither unfortunate nor fortunate, but bent on success, and very soon successful, and how.

“If only I could recall when I lost my enthusiasm, and why. The energy remained, or a sort of thrust, always stirring, or ready to leap into action. Yet you no longer radiated light. Instead of your head’s glowing and your tongue’s shooting sparks, after a while all your doings, your entire existence, came more and more only from the back of your head, and finally withered into mere calculation. Instead of enthusiasm, nothing but alertness, and alertness was eventually crowded out by hypervigilance. Instead of your childlike enthusiasm, drives and a sense of being driven.

“And with your business failure, signed and sealed by the beautiful lady banker, came hate, your period of enthusiastic hate. Does such a thing exist, my friend, enthusiastic hate? No, it does not exist. Hate is no form of enthusiasm. This hate, in any case, insinuated itself into my days even before my collapse. Time and again, even in the period of hypervigilance, you would wake up in the morning under a vast, clear sky feeling inspired, inspired? yes, inspired with your indeterminate enthusiasm. Only it usually became twisted, with the first wave of thought, into a quiver of at least a dozen arrows of hate, ready to be shot at this man or that, at this woman or that. You wanted to kill? Perhaps even worse: see someone dead. You wanted to destroy? See someone destroyed. Force someone to the ground? See him on the ground.

“And suddenly you yourself were on the ground, primarily thanks to her. Thanks? Yes. For after the period of sheer hate came my period of gratitude; and with it my enthusiasm returned, now no longer childlike but mature, and this period continues to this day and will not end until my life does. Gratitude and ideas: only ideas of this sort deserve the name. She who caused your ruin reminded you. Reminded you of what? Just reminded, without a whom or a what. Reminded you unspecifically and all the more tellingly. And thus, thanks to her, you also discovered for the first time, after an interlude of impotent and inactive hate (more and more directed against yourself), what it means to work.

“Yes, I realized that up to my fall I had never worked, had merely made money. Thanks to her, I learned to work, first under duress, later voluntarily. And eventually you worked enthusiastically, as a baker, a stonemason, a truck driver on the narrowest and most winding dirt roads through the mountains. And not once were you out for profit, old boy. Yes, I wanted nothing but to do my work, slowly and methodically, as well as possible, and that now became my kind of success.

“So you’ve become an entrepreneur again? Yes, but without intending to and without ulterior motives. As an entrepreneur, now, I have come to see myself not as a moneymaker but as someone who works, slowly and methodically, one step at a time, one word at a time, as carefully as possible. And thus I live as if my losses were profits, and am certain of this much: when I lose, I win; when I am enthusiastic or happy, I am enriched and loved. Just as one of the ancient cities here on the plateau has the motto Sueño y trabajo , dream and work, the logo of my new enterprise bears the motto: ‘Enthusiasm and Work.’

“But then, too — oh, dear, we enthusiasts of today! In contrast to the enthusiasts of earlier times, each enthusiast today remains solitary, no longer joins forces with the others. — Yet, for the time being, for this transitional period, isn’t that the way it ought to be?”

At this point in his speech he is supposed to have suddenly bent over his chauffeuse’s hand on the wheel, which she held like reins, and brushed it with his lips, or even touched it? if so, even more softly than with a veil, and he allegedly added, “Your child will turn out not to have vanished for good; your sweetheart will not be absent for many more years; your brother will not have been detained long at the border.”