Crossing the Sierra De Gredos by Peter Handke

one sensed, one of them would reach for the other’s hand now and then. And she? She was clearly without a lover. And yet looked as though she were constantly and intensely loved, glowing from being loved, from having been loved, just moments earlier.
    She chose a playground near the main rail line. In accordance with an odd principle, here, as throughout the river city, two benches stood facing each other, as if for two pairs of knees. An even crazier principle governed the chairs placed around the benches, each at a different angle, as if they had been shoved together or apart, like furniture in an outdoor display—yet when one wanted to straighten them: the chairs refused to budge, cemented in, bolted down, anchored.
    So one day, before noon, they turned up, on two such chairs, almost close enough to touch each other, and yet, because the chairs’ axes were askew, at an unbridgeable distance, while to the left and right of them the playground equipment creaked under the hordes of children, and the express trains roared by, with shreds of paper and white river gulls in their wake, their flight quite different from that behind the keels of ships.
    She began, unconsciously imitating him, with “You listen to me!” and then said something like this: “It is not that I am against you. But for a long time I have had a sweetheart, a partner, someone who belongs to me. And the man I love is infinitely handsomer than you. You are nothing by comparison with my man. I will never abandon him. Only in his arms do I feel arms. His hips are the only ones for me. Only his arousal arouses me. His smell is the only one for me. And he is not merely my lover, but also my co-conspirator and squire. He is my up-hill and down-dale companion,
my rope, steppe, and desert partner. He is my bodyguard, as I am his. He is my slave, as I am his. He is my judge—unfortunately not strict enough. He is my attorney, who wins all my cases. But above all this man is my chef. He is a chef such as you will find nowhere else on earth. Not a swindler like the others, not one of those phony magicians, conjuring up an illusion of ultramodernity with their overly clever dishes, a tart seemingly straight out of the oven, fish on the platter as if just reeled in, colors and forms as if shaken out of their sleeves just that minute—creating the illusion of a present that in reality almost always originated yesterday, the night before, or even the previous week, and thus tasting of anything possible, or rather of anything unreal, anything but the current moment, the present. My beloved, on the other hand, cooks mainly with leftovers. He neither throws leftovers away nor tries to disguise them in the dishes he serves me. He has a masterful way of combining leftovers with fresh ingredients, and the leftovers are the main part of what he prepares for us. On our plates it is the leftovers that create a full sense of the present. Combining what was there earlier with what we have now is his and our secret. You are the wrong man for me. And you are not the only wrong man.”
    â€œWhat was your man’s name?” the unknown neighbor asked after a while.—“Labbayka,” she responded after a while. “That is Arabic, and it means something like ‘I am here for you.’ But why do you say, ‘What was his name?’ instead of, ‘What is his name?’?”—The unknown neighbor: “I ask, ‘What was his name?’ because I think your lover must have disappeared long ago, or is dead, or is imaginary. And if none of those, his name is something else entirely. And I think you, too, actually have a different name. You are living under an assumed name. You have changed your name several times in your life. I know all your fake names. I am on to you. I can smell your guilt. When that comes out, it will be the end of you. Look at the red dress of that girl on the swing!”—She: “The