Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Here his second guest chimed in briefly. The entrepreneur — or whatever he was on this evening — said that precisely a rhythm that was broken here and there, the interruption at some stages, the loss of all rhythm at certain moments while the food was cooking, the cook’s palpable state of intimidation and his hesitation during individual transitions in the complicated preparation process, made the phases that came before and after — when he was working alone in the kitchen, undisturbed by her, the other person — all the more significant, accounting ultimately for the lasting impression, the “fabulous” aftertaste, which was no less “real” than the first direct impression this evening meal made on the palate, “which I — and this is no mere turn of phrase — will never forget. O infinite alphabet of taste.” Hadn’t the tasting they had all done been a form of spelling-out and also memorizing or recollecting?

The last word in their dinner-table conversation belonged to the banker (or whatever she was, and not only on this night). She remarked that it had not been her intention at all to call the meal into question. On the subject of “my lord chef” as a person, she had also meant something else entirely. In contrasting his way of doing things with the notion of “the whole person must take part,” she had been intent on working through a problem, “which in turn is part of my profession.” And now as a threesome they had just worked through this problem.

As far as she herself was concerned, she had recognized during the working-through that she was exactly the opposite. She could undertake a task as a “whole person” only in the presence of someone else, a “third party,” even if the third party existed only in her imagination. So as “to walk,” or “merely to take one step,” “to calculate,” or “merely to type up numbers,” “to draft a plan,” or “merely to fiddle with possible combinations” as a whole person, she had to be able to picture observers, and beyond that inspectors, “judges,” so to speak, as if she were “in a contest, no, a competition!” “onstage, no, in an arena!” Even when looking at something as simple as a spoon or a piece of string, for instance, she felt a sort of obligation to view the string “as a whole person,” “or vice versa, when being looked at, to allow myself to be looked at by the other person, or animal, as a whole person!”

Yet as she sat there now: no one else’s gaze could get to her, and not only because of her eyes behind the giant key. There nothing was looking at me, let alone a whole person. And above all nothing allowed itself to be looked at by us, let alone … “In her way of not letting herself be looked at from time to time she resembled less an actress on the screen and definitely more a policeman on the street. He may look at me — if by no means as a whole person—, but does not allow himself to be looked at, not in the slightest, even when he is standing a hand’s breadth from me.” So that night she did not have the last word after all?

Who said that? — The author in La Mancha, in his village, much later. And he will have added, “The whole person must tell the story!” And she will have replied, beaten and battered as she will be by then, and still shaky from her time in the Sierra de Gredos: “What you call the policeman’s gaze has in reality been my defense and my armor. And if I positioned myself time and again this close to another person, it was to leave that person no room for killing, and likewise no room for any kind of embrace. I moved in so close simply in order to become unapproachable. During a long period in my life I crowded in close, body to body, so that my enemies or adversaries could not lift their little finger against me. It has finally become clear to me: I acted this way — it was a constant, uninterrupted acting, and woe to me if I ever shrank back — because I feared death.”—The author: “And feared love?”—She: “For a long time that, too, was a kind of fear of death, a particularly bad, acute form.”

There are insinuations that my heroine spent that night near Tordesillas with a lover. In one version it was the chef and lord of the manor, in another the failed entrepreneur, in yet another an unnamed third person. But whatever the source: he is the false narrator. And the fellow is a false narrator not only because he offers false information, because he lies — and he is lying, in fact; he lies the gray slime out of the cracks in the ground — but the apocryphal swindler and slippery speculator is a false narrator furthermore because he is telling something that in my view ought not to be told — that in my view does not belong in a story, certainly not in this one here.

Our story here, even on the darkest night, and, I would hope, at some point also the hottest night, must take place beneath the sky, the most spacious of skies. The aforementioned insinuations, however, do not take place under any sky. And besides, they do not take place; they are merely insinuated. And insinuations and ulterior motives are the very opposite of the sky, the one that arches above our heads, as well as that of storytelling — the antithesis of anything remotely connected with the heavens, including your heavenly body. The scoundrels who want to sneak into my book are merely pretending to tell a story. They are feinting, as in fencing. The minute they open their mouths, or rather their traps, they lie — and at the same time they lie like a book, and that is what is special about these literary liars, and what makes this old expression so appropriate again nowadays. But the problem is not that these no-goods and would-be competitors lie. If only it really were a problem; problems, as we know, are productive.

I, too, lie, when the moment is ripe; I can lie the blue out of the sky and even more out of the darkest cracks in the ground. Yet the lies you false storytellers dish up — just to finish with this topic — are not exactly fiendish (you’re all too dodgy and at the same time too stodgy, abandoned one and all by any kind of spirit, including the evil ones), but exactly the opposite. How, for instance, can my heroine spend a night with a toy merchant? And what serious reader would not shake his head at the suggestion that she lay that night in the arms of a chef (even if, on the evening in question, he may have had a golden touch in the kitchen for a change and is perhaps in fact a master of his métier — a métier grievously overvalued these days, in my humble opinion, by the way)?

The most likely scenario I could imagine for our woman would be a night of lovemaking with an unknown and invisible third person. Not a night of love but a night of struggle. A life-and-death struggle. In which she remained victorious in the end. Will have remained. Luckily for me. This way our story can continue.

But such a third person would also be counterfeit. He must not exist. He does not belong here. He does not come to my mind. He does not enter my mind. First of all, this story of ours takes place in a time when for not a few people physical union had come to represent something wonderful again, and accordingly something rare. And then, too, the moment for that, and especially the place for that, had not yet come in the story. A night of love in a castle was out of the question, even in the vicinity of the Sierra de Gredos.

The only touching that took place: she placed her hand on someone’s shoulder before going to bed. She did not say whose. And when it came to the next touch she was already alone: having stepped into her room and closed the door behind her, she leaned against the door frame. As for the chef, he had already almost fallen asleep at the table; all his strength and sense of urgency had gone into the preparation of the meal. And as for the traveling entrepreneur, as he himself reported, he had been positively relieved to trot off to his solitary bed: ever since his collision with the lady banker, but not only because of that, he saw only danger in any encounter with a woman, and left the scene afterward with the thought: Scraped by again! Got out alive again!