Free My Year in No Man's Bay by Peter Handke Page B

became fond of him. From each adventure he survived—the coiled snake he encountered when coming down from the Andes and chopped in five pieces with one blow of his machete; the skeletons he stumbled upon in the water at the bottom of a gorge as he let himself down on a rope in the sacred Cenote of the Yucatán Peninsula, victims of the Mayas or recent?—he returned more lost and confused to his Central European wife and his meanwhile grown-up children: Where am I? And what now? And at the same time his stories were much too carefully constructed around a climax for my taste, not that he ever bragged—as though he himself were not really experiencing anything in telling them—and also too matter-of-fact and unamazed: a sweeping gesture, and he was the shaman himself, acted out the dervish. After an evening with him, chock full of perils he had miraculously survived and fluently rattled-off secrets of the bush, from Tierra del Fuego to Hokkaido, I took leave of my nomadic friend with a certain ennui, and found myself longing for a place where there was nothing, yearning for nothingness, nothingness upon nothingness, right around the corner (and half a year later was looking forward to his next visit).
    More worrisome were the new nomads, who had no sooner tracked down what remained of the aboriginals anywhere in the world than they put them in a book. These books all shared the characteristic of presenting the most intimate portraits of a people-outside-of-civilization as something that existed in only one place, and then, in the same breath, exposing these portraits to the entire world, with the result that all the fuss about protecting and supporting these peoples ended up by wiping them out once and for all by means of facile stories in which the narrator from distant parts pushed his natives back and forth like pawns and mucked around in their dream as if it were his special property. And perhaps it actually did belong to him, and in the traditions of various
obscure tribes he was seeing the cosmos of his childhood, spent in Friuli or in Glastonbury. Except that these journeyers to the ends of the earth never told us that. Their own half-vanished notions, of time, the cosmos, nonbeing, ancestors, doubles, were of no interest to them. To them only the dreams of the last more or less aboriginal human beings constituted a valid book.
    But perhaps I was merely envious, as the woman from Catalonia expressed it one time when I was raging against the “plunderers.” Their stories, she said, were more worldly than mine, and also more dialogic. I got in my own way, she said, with my endless brooding over form; I lacked narrative technique, while they deployed such technique effortlessly and wrote now like nineteenth-century Russian novelists, now like American novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. And when I continued to rant about these books that had no narrator any longer but instead a master of ceremonies, about those purveyors of reading fodder whose material was so thoroughly processed that nothing was left to read, she commented that I was also jealous because they had caught on. They had a following—and I? A year ago, that crazed woman standing at my garden gate every morning; and that man dying in the local hospital; and that travel-agency courier; and that farmer’s son in Ontario, Canada.
    Â 
    Â 
    O ne way or the other, I continued to be guided during those three Mongolian summers and winters by the idea of a book, and then I did write one, my first, the “Drowsy Story,” which dealt not with the local population but with my village ancestors, long since dead, in Carinthia along the Yugoslav border.
    I did that during my day job, which consisted of teaching German or English, or handling correspondence, or giving typing lessons. In the summer I put my table outside, by the edge of the road. Neither dust nor sun nor people bothered me. And from those days I