Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Until that nocturnal hour in Nuevo Bazar, she had thought that their love story had been pretold by the author for her book, if only in passing and as a prelude, and above all as a contrast to her own “harebrained and hair-raising” story (her words): how, even when separated, each of them remained so present to the other that when they came together again in person, after no matter how long a time, even after a month, a year, they without ado resumed a conversation from time out of mind, in the same tone, the most amiable tone imaginable, usually beginning with “And …” (“ … and how the ravens cawed …,” “ … and the plate is still warm …,”

“ … and then you clean my glasses for me …,” “ … and at Whitsuntide you eat the first strawberries from my palm …”; how, sitting across from one another, after a long silence they began without transition to speak again, and again in the most amiable of tones, and were promptly in the middle of the dialogue they had already been conducting in silence (“just as you say …,” “I see it the same way …,” “and where were you after that?” “and I you, too!” “and I you, since that day when you are sitting in the bus and are about to leave for boarding school, while I remain behind at the bus stop!”).

Altogether, up to then their entire life had been an unbroken conversation, continued during the intervals, often lasting for days, when they did not open their mouths, as well as during the even longer separations occasioned by their work; continued in their sleep, whether with dreams or without, and, so to speak — no, not “so to speak”—confirmed each time in the sexual union of their bodies, the eternal conversation, as it were — no, not “as it were”—raised in complete silence to the acme of physical and mental awareness, impressing itself on the memory with primeval force, so to speak — no, without “so to speak” and yes, “primeval force”—and utterly independent of time. (How does the witness know this? Or isn’t this a case of an author’s letting himself go — not the certified, authentic, legitimate author but rather one of those would-be authors, who hardly miss an opportunity to elbow their way into our joint story?)

It is true: the couple’s conversation took place outside of any time and remained unaffected by any ordinary sequence of time involving past, future, present; with their dialogue, the two of them had each other constantly present, in the past as well as in the future, from alpha to omega; for them there was no passage of time, and thus neither a beginning nor an end, no “Once upon a time” and no “It will come to pass,” only “You are,” “I have,” or vice versa; like children, perhaps, who, when one tells them that in the summer they will go swimming in the ocean, point out the window and reply, “But it’s snowing!” or, when an adult tells them that he was a child once, can laugh out loud at such an obviously nonsensical notion.

And now, in that midnight hour, the witness saw her almost-friend, after making a face at her husband, open her mouth and say — she read the words from her lips at a distance: “And I hate you. And I have always hated you. And I will hate you until after you are dead.” And having said that, she turned her head away from the man sitting across from her and looked up at one of the televisions playing everywhere in the place, each tuned to a different program. On the screen she looked up at, a squad of soldiers was just storming an enemy position, shooting everything in sight, including dogs, hens, and, with particular gusto, pigs. And then the former ballad-singer stood up, pulled out a knife, not a very long one, and plunged it straight into the heart of her husband and lover of many years. He did not even have a chance to close his eyes, and did not slump to one side, but remained seated right where he was, at first with wide-open, then with still half-open, eyes.

Why this murder? For in a contemporary book reasons must be given? there must be no unexplained elements? — One possible explanation can be found in the descriptions offered by the historian of the Zone. He expresses the opinion that the Zone creates states of mind, and compels them to manifest themselves in deeds, that never existed before, not even in secret, and not even unconsciously. According to him, the new arrivals in particular suffer from this phenomenon and make others suffer terribly in turn; and precisely those among the new people who are the soul of gentleness and never raised a finger to hurt anyone before.

He thought he could provide a graphic image of this mechanism with the example of the oxen — as if the word “gentle” were appropriate to them — who, no sooner than they had been driven from the open steppe of the mesa into the Zone, rushed at everything that moved, like fighting bulls. In the Zone, the sheep — who actually were more or less “gentle”—also knocked down children and even adults, and the sparrows dive-bombed passersby, bloodying their foreheads. In Nuevo Bazar, a sort of arch-enmity, arch-disgust, arch-rage, flared up out of the clear blue sky, directed at everything and everybody, more virulently at the familiar than the unfamiliar, without any particular cause, insisting on expression through violence; and directed primarily at the people closest to one, and most nakedly and fiercely at the person one loved most intimately: the Zone, at least in this initial and transitional period, could be fatal to love and conjugal life. In Nuevo Bazar, he said, one was two thousand light-years away from home and from love.

And since here, too, the historian had merely made assertions rather than providing explanations, at the end of his insinuations he threw in just one explanation, a single one, and one that seemed deliberately shoddy: a reason for the sudden switch from nonviolence to often lethal violence was the artificial daylight in the Zone. “Murder and manslaughter can be attributed to the light.” Yet he said not a word about the properties of this light or what there was about it that produced such effects. Only this: “Toward midnight the light suddenly begins to be too much, especially for those who are not accustomed to it.”

There was some truth to this, according to my heroine: the artificial light around the glass tent of the Lone Star Café seemed even a few degrees harsher, also more palpable, than the light elsewhere in Nuevo Bazar. Besides, it had a different coloration from the rest of the light, which was a hazy yellowish gray; it was pale violet, similar to the light after sunset over an ice-smooth glacier, and in this light, the bodies of objects, of the cars parking outside (apart from which there were no other objects there), and of people (only those sitting inside, no more pedestrians) acquired even sharper contours, yes, sharp edges, like sliced laboratory sections.

Midnight around the bar lit up by an ambulance and a police car? Perhaps: if the lights have stopped flashing and merely illuminate the space. But that, too, was not accurate, for the impression was deceptively like that of “day,” of a day that should long since have turned to night, and which simply refused to become night, “come hell or high water.”

And in this light the witness saw her almost-friend continue plunging in the knife, no longer into her husband and best beloved, who was long since dead, but indiscriminately into those seated at the next tables, with screams like those that had occurred in the middle of her successful ballad (or was I merely imagining this? Wasn’t she silent as she wielded the knife?): a woman’s attempt at running amok; as if she had jumped in to take the place of the person staggering along the diagonal street earlier — and now she was promptly stopped by a couple of policemen, or members of a military patrol? in plainclothes, with whom, as it now turned out, the glass tent was packed.