Crossing the Sierra De Gredos by Peter Handke Page B

outskirts, where they belonged—would be crouching nearby, as her protector, and indeed everyone’s, listening in silence, eyes wide open, and thus assisting her.
    Only the suitor spoke. And onlookers would never have guessed that every time he spoke exclusively of her. Viewed from the street or from the kitchen pass-through, he sat there looking like someone who was revealing his innermost feelings to a chance acquaintance. And she seemed to be all ears, saying nothing, as could hardly be otherwise in such a case. His many gestures, flowing one into the other, seemed to refer only to him. They underlined what he was saying. Would the woman listening have followed them so attentively otherwise, even the smallest of them, her attentiveness concentrated in the corners of her eyes, as she read his words from his lips?
    From the outside, a passerby one time could see him talking and talking at her, making an expansive gesture, pointing outward and upward to the outdoors. He swung his arm so vigorously that his sleeve slipped back. And she followed his index finger without specifically focusing on it, simply by widening her eyes and face somewhat. And in fact there was something to see in the direction in which he was pointing: it was summer, a thunderstorm broke out, from one minute to the next, and over there, on the far side of the plaza outside the restaurant, a mighty old cedar suddenly toppled over, coming to rest at an angle, then a jerk, and another; and then, as its roots were ripped from the ground, it came crashing down on the plaza, just missing a family running to take cover; the two children laughed out loud at the fallen tree, while the parents …

    But the man talking and talking in the window had not noticed the tree coming down, and had gone on talking without a moment’s pause, his apparent pointing giving way to a plucking and tearing at his own hair, while the woman took in the tree’s fall but at the same time maintained her listener’s pose—as if that were the way to bring the stranger to his senses? to placate him?
    For his gesticulating directly contradicted what he was saying. Every time they met, she was his exclusive topic. Yet he never pointed at or indicated the woman he was wooing; he even avoided looking at her as his eloquence poured forth. He squeezed his own throat with both hands and said, “Everything about you is ugly. Your house is ugly. Your car is ugly. Your toes are ugly.” He poked his fingers in his eyes and said, “The one who will be the loser is you. You have already lost. Just as your parents were losers and your daughter is a loser, you must become a loser, too.”
    Each of his meetings with her ended with his reviling her; predicting or asserting the worst possible outcomes for her. Sometimes he began with compliments or pleasantries: “This morning the wind carried your name to me …”—“Today I would like to intone a gentle psalm …” —“Only you know your secret, evasive companion …”—“It was on a morning in April, O woman with the warlike eyes …” But after a few such sentences he invariably began to scold her, which just as invariably gave way to swearing and cursing, during which he might box his own ears, strike his chest, or bite off his fingertips. Yet the scolding and cursing was never completely devoid of meaning. Among the empty phrases he stammered out, there was always one combination that hit home, revealing unsuspected acts and omissions, committed, she had thought until then, only in a dream. An act of cruelty, of forgetting, of malicious desertion—had actually occurred.
    In the period just before her departure, the suitor/neighbor’s vilification of her had applied exclusively to the future. Not that he threatened her—threats were out of the question with her—he spat out imprecations. What began like a poetic traveler’s blessing