Now, in the hour before her flight, a voice became audible, close to her ear, the voice of a woman, not soft, just shaking, with rage? with age?: “You should be ashamed of yourself. You have brought shame on your father and your mother and your country. Shame on you!” Beauty as provocation? It seemed that in this transitional era it had become a wicked provocation — her kind of beauty made people turn wicked? And how did the woman react to this contempt? On the one hand, it left her unscathed, this woman who was happy to have no parents and no home. But on the other hand, as a mere rebuke, it awakened and deepened her awareness of guilt — no hour passed when that did not suddenly intervene in her life, between one step and the next. And yet on the other hand: an ants’ trail there beside the moving walkway! The dead pigeon, skeletal, way up on top of the glass dome, where it had lain for years. The rustling of the palms of Jericho. Or are, and were, those the equally towering palms of Nablus? She had sat, was sitting, is sitting, will have sat, all alone in the sun on a deserted terrace with a view of the desert. The dog half rolled in the sand; next to his stomach, the much smaller cat, likewise.
With these images she did more than keep her attackers at bay. She struck back at them. The image of the moment served not only as armor but also, whenever more was called for than peaceable disarming, as a weapon. With the images she had the power literally to do the other person in and “eliminate” him. Without his knowing what had hit him, and without his registering the image, it struck him, launched from her eyebrows or shoulder blades, catching him with the force of an electric shock that darted through him from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.
So now the metal attaché case belonging to her enemy from work was knocked out of his hand and went flying across the terminal, and he staggered after it. Now the old woman’s voice that kept hissing at her from behind became a choking sound, and a moment later the ghostly figure was swept from the scene by one of the needle-sharp palm fronds from Nablus or Jericho. At any rate she wanted the author to slip these incidents into her story. The author: “So they are invented?”—She: “No. Actually happened, for the retelling.”
During takeoff, it seemed as if it were no longer early January, as it had been just that morning; as if the onset of winter were long since behind one, and as if, with dark clouds overhead threatening rain, one were somewhere in the middle of the year, or the action were being resumed at least a month later. A thistle poked out of the concrete runway. Then the bunches of fox grapes down below along the edge of the runway had faded; no more silvery sheen in the gray; and their wintry garlands hanging there limp. And as the plane gathered speed, one of these withered garlands swirling up toward her window, beating against the glass with an otherworldly sound, as on the door of a stagecoach. And moments before, the rumbling of the landing gear like the rumbling of a bus on a potholed road through the Pyrenees. And outside on the tarmac, bouncing and tumbling along, the burrs ripped from the prairie thornbushes, in clouds of desert dust, the image precisely prefiguring a sequence, an hour later, or how much later? in the film playing above the passengers’ heads, obviously shot against the bare brown of the Iberian plateau, seemingly final and unchanging, to which the green of the northwest will long since have given way.
“Love quest!” she had thought, with one eye on the film above her head, the other on the landscape far below, feeling simultaneously stared at from the air, from the film, quietly, fixedly, from a distance, unapproachably, from as close as anyone or anything could possibly be. Desire set in, or intensified, took center stage. For her desire was always present, was constant. “Not a moment in which I do not feel desire,” she told the author, and she said it matter-of-factly, as if it were something to take for granted. “Desire or longing?” (the author). — “Desire and longing.”
Except that her desire was such that hardly any person in her presence could recognize it (and presumably it was not directed at him in any case?). Anyone who did perceive it was more likely to be filled with alarm. Never mind whether I am the object or not: Get me out of here! She has gone mad. What a rough voice she has. What faces she makes. She will tear my head off. She will plunge her sword into my heart. Or she will simply spit on me and show me her nine tongues. Or she will wring the neck of the child in the seat next to her. Or she will hurl the child and herself out the emergency exit, above the río Ebro now, over the río Duero now, onto the cathedral coming into sight down below, no bigger than a child’s block, dedicated to “Our Lady of the Pillar,” of Saragossa, not the northwestern but the southwestern riverport city already: without exception, men as well as women, even children, even animals, we promptly turn tail and flee from this wild woman’s longing, desire, fulfillment, helplessness — all in one. On the kitchen table in her deserted house the passion fruit, or pomegranate? or lemon? and laid out next to it the knife, clouded by the exhalations of fruit flesh forcing their way through the peel.
A love quest? Love? At the time the word “love” was all the rage. (She had urged the author to use tasteless or clichéd expressions like “all the rage” now and then in her story so as to “muddy” and wrinkle it a bit.) Not only was there no longer any hesitation to utter the word “love,” and then why not several times a day. It also blared constantly from microphones and loudspeakers, in churches as well as in railroad stations, in concert halls, stadiums, courtrooms, even at press conferences; you could see it, red on white, and not in fine print, either, on every other election and advertising poster, see it flashing in every third neon sign.
“Loving punctuality” was a slogan for the railways: which meant that instead of departing late, the trains departed early, so that one was always missing them. At the executions now being carried out daily, in Texas or elsewhere, as the convict lay there with the lethal injection already dripping into his vein, there was routinely a reading from the Epistle to the Corinthians, “ … but the greatest of these is love.” Nothing but love songs, broadcast by Radio “Longing” or “Seventh Heaven” Channel, echoed through the subway and suburban railroad stations, where, likewise day and night, heavily armed soldiers patrolled, and the towering metal barriers, long since far too high to be jumped, and not only for children and old people (who in any case were banned from the premises), clanged shut on the heels of the lucky holders of luckily valid tickets who had slipped through in the nick of time, shut behind the “beloved passengers” with a thunderous crash that echoed through all the subway and suburban tunnels, repeated and amplified a thousandfold, to the accompaniment of Elvis singing “Love Me Tender” and Connie Francis singing in German “Die Liebe ist ein seltsames Spiel,” on Radio Paradiso or Radio Nostalgia.
After an era of peace, not phony but healthy, robust, confident peace, when many of us felt happy about their era, “our era,” the present, the darkness of a prewar period had closed in again. But this was a prewar era such as had perhaps never been experienced before. Peace continued to dominate the picture, the word “peace” written everywhere in the sky by planes, traced in the night by torchbearers, just like “love.”