Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Over time the lightning flashes of images had become sparser. In this barren countryside all one saw, as far as the horizon, was this barren countryside. The cloud behind her had dissipated, as clouds sometimes do over the ocean. Oh (in Arabic, ja ), how fruitful this interlude had been: it was right that now the images dwindled and finally disappeared altogether. Although outwardly nothing was happening — which, given the rocky baldness of the mesa, perhaps contributed to the hail of images? — , the lone driver felt like someone who had just crossed a newly discovered and at the same time tranquil, strangely familiar continent. This had been the time for images, and now there would come a time without. Yet she could have spent an entire day, even an entire month, alone in their company. And hadn’t she just experienced an entire month, an entire year?

But at the end she pursued a final image, one that had filled her with particular astonishment. With it came the idiot from the riverport city at home, the “idiot of the outskirts.” He was perched on the site of the weekly fish market. As befitted such an image, she had actually once seen him sitting there in just this way. She walked past him, and he looked at her. He was bald and barefoot. The day was windy and cold — even if in the image now neither wind nor cold played a role. Or, rather, yes, at least the wind did. For between the woman walking past and the idiot, papers and plastic bags are swirling around, intermingled with the gleaming of fish scales. The market is closed. The stands are dismantled; the square is empty, although not yet cleaned up. Fish heads and lemon slices in wooden crates, or littering the ground. The idiot not perched as usual by the side of the road or on the curb, but on one of the hydrants that will be used to wash the trash out of the marketplace. He sits there as on a throne, at eye level with her, the passerby, who has known him, as he knows her, for a long time.

And one day the idiot had been standing beside her in the narrow little Armenian church on the outskirts, both of them equally strangers there, or perhaps not? the others at the mass not any less strangers, only less noticeably so? More than once they had crossed each other’s paths on the way to the forest, he meanwhile riding a motor scooter without a muffler, and now and then with a woman, a different one each time, all of them appearing normal, so to speak, at least in comparison to him, who was constantly throwing his arms in the air and babbling in fits and starts, either in a deep guttural voice or a falsetto — normal, and, in the idiot’s company, in such high spirits that one would not have recognized them if earlier one had happened to run into these particular women or girls alone. And one time he had shouted enthusiastically into her car, from one of his favorite spots, a coach’s brake-chock inscribed with a king’s crown, left centuries earlier along the road leading out of the city: “I know everything about you. I’ve read all about you, everything!”

Now there/here on the market hydrant the idiot is trembling. He is freezing. His teeth are chattering. In a moment he will be shooed from his perch and soaked through, which will make him freeze even more. Far and wide no female companion in sight. And his elderly parents, who have taken care of him for decades, have both died, she the day before yesterday, he yesterday, or at least, mortally ill, were taken away, and now the idiot is living in the house all by himself, an excessively spacious old building with espaliered fruit trees out in front, and many paths through the rear garden, where one sometimes saw him strolling with a small book in hand, like a priest praying from a breviary in earlier times — though merely pretending to read, or perhaps not?

The square smells of fish, the often rather oily kinds from the rivers. The sky northwest-gray. The idiot hungry. And without any money either, except for the two coins he has always jingled in his pocket; which he lays on the counter in the suburban bars; and which would not pay even for the sugar in the coffee to which they always treat him, which he sweetens with so many cubes that the cup almost overflows. And how strange that outside of the office she almost always ran into people who had no money and, stranger still, had no interest in money, and that this suited her, strange or not?

In contrast to the others, that shower of images with the idiot as its central figure was not set in peacetime. The figure on the hydrant there was suffering. Not merely that he was cold, and so on; there was also a terminal hopelessness; the imminent prospect of being dragged away from his house and from the region where he had spent his entire life; of being removed, perhaps in an hour, from the only sphere of existence halfway possible for the idiot.

And yet, also in contrast to the rest of the current image series, not a trace of grief in his face; no sorrow at parting; no hint of fear of dying or perishing. In the midst of the swirling market debris, and his dire straits, the idiot remains untouched, and untouchable. On his temporary perch there, he is the essence of untouchability, beyond peace and war, heaven and hell. He crouches — no, sits “enthroned”—there, defying death — and life as well? no, transcending all our stupid thoughts of imperfect continuity, transitoriness, and irrevocability; the epitome of presentness, beyond my sorrows and joys; the embodiment of the current moment; simply there, and above all, as only an idiot can be, there and then.

And thus one sees oneself perceived by that figure on the cistern in a manner unlike any other; a form of perception that accompanies one, step for step, and meanwhile registers one, word for word, or sentence for sentence — note the movements of the idiot’s lips; if not narrating one, then enumerating one, in an impartial, merciless, seemingly inhuman manner; precisely the kind of enumeration specific to an idiot, which, however, can occasionally validate and acknowledge one like a particular kind of narration; a registering that does not categorize — a blessing. How affirming such enumeration by the idiot is, in that it challenges one to do a better job at anything one does in his field of vision, or at least to do it more clearly, which means more rhythmically! And so, as she passed him back then, she set her feet down more firmly and let her shoulders roll back a bit more. And now on the highway she does nothing for the time being but drive.

She drives on. Dust flies up. The sun shines in her face. She does not squint. It is possible she will be dead soon. She is wearing a ring. Her belt is broader. Her mouth is the broadest. I caress her. She does not notice. Maybe she is a man? In her heart a white lily blooms. Her ribs are sharp as a knife. You stink. She turns the wheel. The road is straight. By the side of the road lies a skull. Another over there. The fields are gray and yellow. There stands a tree, full of dried-up leaves. The leaves tinkle. From that tree hung a black boar. It was slit open. The intestines were spilling out. Who will wash them? On a pole sits an owl in the bright sun. My girlfriend has a small mole in the hollow above her collarbone. Now she drives faster. My mother smoked, one cigarette after the other. One time I beat her because of that, in a dream. Another time she had an operation, but thirteen nurses blocked my way to her. Where will she turn in to spend the night? An empty bed is already waiting for her somewhere, or perhaps not. She is hungry. There is a line of dust around her nostrils. She is alone. I have never seen her not alone, except in photos. In the company of others she is unrecognizable. She plays at being sociable. And she does not play very well. She would play better with me. And in the pictures she plays particularly badly when she is in the company of a woman. She looks disfigured to me then, and ugly. Or no, not ugly, worse than that, a beautiful caricature. And her gestures and body language toward the other woman. She seems to be waving five hands in the air, jerking two heads, shifting from one foot to the other, jiggling like a millipede, her hips constantly bent like a tailor’s dummy. My father was a tailor, down in New Orleans, and in his deserted shop still hang a couple of suits and garments dropped off for alterations. And nevertheless, nonetheless, despite everything, and even so, I would like to see her in her story with someone else, at long last. Perhaps she just cannot stand being photographed? Even though she was a film star in her youth? Although or precisely for that reason? (This expression I picked up during the time when my parents listened to “Radio New Europe.”) To see her with someone, where she would be more, by a factor of one, by a factor of one hundred, than she is by herself.