“And with your business failure, signed and sealed by the beautiful lady banker, came hate, your period of enthusiastic hate. Does such a thing exist, my friend, enthusiastic hate? No, it does not exist. Hate is no form of enthusiasm. This hate, in any case, insinuated itself into my days even before my collapse. Time and again, even in the period of hypervigilance, you would wake up in the morning under a vast, clear sky feeling inspired, inspired? yes, inspired with your indeterminate enthusiasm. Only it usually became twisted, with the first wave of thought, into a quiver of at least a dozen arrows of hate, ready to be shot at this man or that, at this woman or that. You wanted to kill? Perhaps even worse: see someone dead. You wanted to destroy? See someone destroyed. Force someone to the ground? See him on the ground.
“And suddenly you yourself were on the ground, primarily thanks to her. Thanks? Yes. For after the period of sheer hate came my period of gratitude; and with it my enthusiasm returned, now no longer childlike but mature, and this period continues to this day and will not end until my life does. Gratitude and ideas: only ideas of this sort deserve the name. She who caused your ruin reminded you. Reminded you of what? Just reminded, without a whom or a what. Reminded you unspecifically and all the more tellingly. And thus, thanks to her, you also discovered for the first time, after an interlude of impotent and inactive hate (more and more directed against yourself), what it means to work.
“Yes, I realized that up to my fall I had never worked, had merely made money. Thanks to her, I learned to work, first under duress, later voluntarily. And eventually you worked enthusiastically, as a baker, a stonemason, a truck driver on the narrowest and most winding dirt roads through the mountains. And not once were you out for profit, old boy. Yes, I wanted nothing but to do my work, slowly and methodically, as well as possible, and that now became my kind of success.
“So you’ve become an entrepreneur again? Yes, but without intending to and without ulterior motives. As an entrepreneur, now, I have come to see myself not as a moneymaker but as someone who works, slowly and methodically, one step at a time, one word at a time, as carefully as possible. And thus I live as if my losses were profits, and am certain of this much: when I lose, I win; when I am enthusiastic or happy, I am enriched and loved. Just as one of the ancient cities here on the plateau has the motto Sueño y trabajo, dream and work, the logo of my new enterprise bears the motto: ‘Enthusiasm and Work.’
“But then, too — oh, dear, we enthusiasts of today! In contrast to the enthusiasts of earlier times, each enthusiast today remains solitary, no longer joins forces with the others. — Yet, for the time being, for this transitional period, isn’t that the way it ought to be?”
At this point in his speech he is supposed to have suddenly bent over his chauffeuse’s hand on the wheel, which she held like reins, and brushed it with his lips, or even touched it? if so, even more softly than with a veil, and he allegedly added, “Your child will turn out not to have vanished for good; your sweetheart will not be absent for many more years; your brother will not have been detained long at the border.”
During this drive she toyed with an inexplicable notion, and not for the first time, a notion somewhat reminiscent of her sensation in the airplane of being filmed: what was taking place just then in the present, as the present moment, was being narrated at the same time as something long since past, or perhaps not long since past but certainly not of the present moment. And besides, it was not she who toyed with the notion that the two of them were traveling — no, not simultaneously, but rather exclusively, in a narrative: the notion acted itself out for her, without any involvement on her part. And since she had been on the lookout for signs from the time she set out, she took this, too, as a sign. And to see and feel herself being narrated was something she considered a good sign. It gave her a sense of security. In the notion of being narrated she felt protected, along with her passenger.
A sort of shelteredness had already made itself felt simply in the act of listening. The man had conducted his monologue in the form of a conversation with himself, instead of directing it at her. And pricking up her ears for such conversations turned out to be much easier than having to play the role of the person being addressed. Long ago, in the village schoolhouse, she had absorbed her teacher’s lessons most effortlessly when he stood by the window, for instance, and murmured into space, or seemed to confide the material casually to a treetop. Being addressed head-on, however, often rendered her deaf, even when she was an anonymous member of a large audience, and thus shielded from the speaker’s direct gaze.
The road shrouded in darkness. By now she must have long since passed the village of Simancas, located on a river, where the archives of the old kingdom and sometime empire were housed; archives with holdings richer than those of Naples or Palermo, archives that even held the records of the 1532 grain harvest in her Sorbian village and the rate of infant mortality between 1550 and 1570. All that had been visible of Simancas as they drove by was a tent city near the mouth of the río Pisuerga, where it flowed into the río Duero, domed tents, all the same size, reddish in the light of the rising moon above this residual territory, in her daughter’s Arabic book a fragment of text pertaining to this phenomenon, “red tents, love tents.” The one hitchhiker on the carretera had not been her brother.
And shortly before Tordesillas, with mad Queen Juana de Castilla in her tower, a dialogue had sprung up between the two travelers after all. The passenger pointed to a medallion attached to the windshield and asked, “Who is the white figure in that image?”—She: “The white angel.” —The passenger: “Which white angel?”—She: “The white angel of Milesevo.”—The passenger: “Where is Milesevo?”—She: “Milesevo is a village in the Sierra de Gredos. And the white angel is all that is left of a medieval fresco there.”—He: “What is the angel pointing to?”—She: “The angel is pointing to an empty grave.”—He: “What confident pointing. Never have I seen a finger extended so energetically.”
They were not expecting him in Tordesillas on this particular evening. He had not reserved a hotel room. Since his first business failure he had given up making special preparations for the future. For his trips, including business trips, he planned only what was absolutely necessary. More than one appointment was out of the question. And this appointment he did not allow others to schedule. He was the one who decided on the time; and it was never to last more than an hour. For the time beforehand and afterward he remained in charge.
If he planned anything else for his travels, it was the uncertainties, and any number of them: missing this connection or that, failing to meet a possible business partner, or perhaps not recognizing him, or better stilclass="underline" not revealing himself to him, remaining unseen as he watched the other person scan the restaurant, the hotel lobby, the railroad platform, for the important stranger; and more than once he had let the person he was supposed to meet simply depart again, and not out of dislike or distaste but for some reason he could not explain to himself — held spellbound in his hiding place by a sort of magnetic effect, yet all the while filled with pleasure and a sense of adventure — and afterward he would spend an enjoyable day or evening alone.
And now the time had come to look for a place for the night. And besides, he was hungry. She, too? Yes. She knew the area and turned off the dark highway onto an even darker side road. Branches scraped the car windows. They had not seen the large city of Valladolid; almost nothing of little Simancas; and now there was nothing to see of medium-size or small Tordesillas but a glow on the underside of a single low-hanging cloud, or was that already another town, farther to the west, Toro or Zamora, or did it come from a wildfire?