Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“Not even for a brief second were you free of suspicion. The suspicion implicit in your questions was the very foundation, the basis of your profession, and once your suspicions were confirmed in one way or another, you stripped me, and all the others, of my, and their, little and not-so-little secrets and then left us there, the way a pickpocket, or rather a nest-robber, leaves his victims, even if the word ‘victim’ is not entirely appropriate? No, it is. And what are you living on these days? How are you earning your living now that you have given up describing people?”

The fellow passenger: “For a while it was an important piece of information in a story whether a person had money, and where it came from, and so on. But for this story of ours, this evening’s story, that has become irrelevant.” Did that mean that she was in on the undertaking?

And the lady banker, replying only now to the question posed at the beginning and showing her hand: “It is true. Or at least it is likely that my banking days are over, and not only since this evening. It seems to me that all of banking is in a bad way, and not only since today. Yet I know that the core of my profession remains sound. It embodies, and continues to be, an idea that is not merely useful but essential. And this idea is almost unique, in that it pertains entirely to others, my contemporaries, and it can be summed up thus: being a big wheel. Wheeling and dealing. The banker as a trustworthy driver, with both hands on the wheel, moving other people’s money. Showing forethought, foreseeing, forecasting, forestalling. Launching initiatives. Managing. And primarily seeing to it that you, my contemporaries, have time; that you do not waste your time worrying about money, hoping for profits and dreading losses.

“At present, however, a person in my profession manages less than he gambles. We gamble, and we gamble whether we want to or not. We are forced to gamble with money, with numbers, with products, with the markets. If our activity previously may have included an enjoyable element of play, in the form of an element of adventure — no, not of adventure, simply of entertainment — our work now consists of an excess of gaming; of gambling for profits, a compulsion to gamble for profits.

“And I reject this game. It is a misuse of the hands on the wheel, of the trusty driver’s role. It should be prohibited. But who would prohibit it — when it is entire countries and the powerful who are most deeply involved? It has become a game that not only does not get things moving or move things in the right direction, but actually destroys them. I myself do not enjoy playing games, have never really learned to play. Yet the form of play that has been required of me recently is even more evil, cold, and lethal than chess: it is true that its main moves continue to consist of exercising forethought, foreseeing, forecasting, and forestalling, but all this has acquired a profoundly different significance. Banking and the stock exchange have come to consist almost exclusively of a cold, ruthless gambling for profit that has nothing to do with my idea of how I should be working.

“Being forced to play the game leaves me hardly any room for free play. And those who have recently entered our profession, because, as natural gamblers, or whatever they are, they have come to expect of it, and rightly so, a life like a game, now live in constant fear, even when they assert the opposite to their paying public. For this game cannot be mastered by even the most skillful players. In their dreams, and perhaps all too soon in reality, they are devoured by it from head to toe. They do not want to play anymore. But once started …

“Anyone who starts this game has to play it through to the end, and that is its most damaging feature. Luckily for me, in this case at least, I do not know how to play, and thus never began …”

The former magazine writer: “In our interview you did not so much as hint at any of this. Nor did you want to answer any questions about your brother in prison, your vanished child, the child’s unknown father, and/or your lover at the time / at present. The only things you agreed to discuss were sturdy shoes, fruit trees — you favored me with a complete lecture on the particular white of quince blossoms—, chefs, seasonings (O saffron, O coriander), mountain-climbing techniques, the most remote island in the Atlantic, children’s toys in the Middle Ages, weight distribution while one is ascending and descending mountains, the fragrance of linden blossoms in June—‘the fragrance that seems to come from farthest away’— My Darling Clementine , and Westerns in general, hedgehogs, the beauties of night hiking, the best pencils, and so on, for days and nights on end.

“And now this brutal frankness — which would not have been suitable for the magazine anyway, or would it? And what will you do without your profession, without your wheeling and dealing? Establish a different kind of bank? An anti-gambling bank? Make a second film? Write a story about different types of pencils?”

She: “What I plan to do? Practice even more forethought. Do even more foreseeing and forecasting. Forestall even more usefully and necessarily. Make even more sure that along with me, now that I myself have time, plenty of time, this person or that also has time, plenty of time, time and more time. And perhaps learn to play at last. Not the profit game but a finder’s game. Or simply become playful. And find my daughter again, here in the Sierra de Gredos. And find, here or elsewhere, my unknown lover. For he is alive, and he exists, just so you know, just so all of you know. And speak with my brother, not as I did during the last few years from the visitors’ perch in the prison behind the dunes, where a dozen of us had to shout, and could not hear our own voices, let alone those of the people we were visiting. And perhaps also find the various small items I have lost here in the Sierra over the years, a scarf one time, a hair comb another time, a cap, a shawl — especially the shawl. Each time I was sure when I set out that along the road one of the objects from the previous year or the year before would gleam up at me, unharmed, in spite of storms, rain, and snow, and each time I ended up losing something else. But this time, just wait!

“And how in each of you here I see one of my near and dear. In you, dear interviewer, I see my daughter, whom I actually so often failed to recognize as my own child, even when she came through the door and stood before me. Ah, even on the day she was born, when she was brought to my room, I said to myself in that first moment: So who is this splendid newborn with this self-confident, seemingly cocky face, at the same time so vulnerable, looking ready to play? And later, when I was visiting a strange house with her, an unknown child unexpectedly came in the door from the garden or somewhere else, making not a sound, very pale — the pallor that you now display as well — and I thought to myself: Who in the world is this solemn, quiet child; never have I seen anyone so solemn, pale, and quiet in all my life — until it struck me that this was my own child, from whom I had been separated for less than a day. And even later, after her first disappearance — now that you are not interrogating me, I can reveal this to you — when I had hunted all summer, fall, and winter, always with her image in my head, and finally found her on the last island in the Atlantic, near the village of Los Llanos de Aridane, I want you all to know, and we were celebrating that evening, the two of us in the San Petronio restaurant — if you need these details — where I told her for the first time who her father was and that her father was alive: toward midnight, then, as today in the Milano Real Dos of Pedrada, when she had gone off for a little while, perhaps out to the street, to a boyfriend or someone, suddenly there was a young woman next to me, just as you are now, in profile, and I wondered, and not just for a moment, what this beautiful stranger was doing at my table; from what country she had washed up on this remote island; and how it happened that the stranger seemed so motherless and fatherless, or without any need of parents? And why, although it was not cold in the restaurant, a shiver kept running over her forearms, making the little hairs there stand on end?