If they had been somewhat on edge earlier, the evening meal had calmed them. And if they had been calm earlier, it had calmed them still more. And if they had been fighting fatigue before, now they let it have its way with them, and at the same time part of them became wide awake. And at the same time they were porous, unusual nowadays during a meal? porous in the direction of both day and night, as porous as sometimes on the borderline between the clarity of being awake and the very different clarity of a dream.
She looked through the key bow at the lord of the manor / chef. The wrought-iron bow was so wide that it could accommodate both of her eyes. Behind the interwoven Oriental motifs they appeared as if behind a grating. And she said he had not yet learned to stand at the stove as a whole person. The way he cooked left part of his body disengaged. The idea that one should be completely involved in any process and any activity—“The whole person must take part”—applied especially to food preparation. One’s toes, knees, thighs, hips, shoulders, all had to pitch in. In his case, only the hands and eyes were active. And the result?: despite all the seasonings he had obviously tracked down for his kitchen, didn’t one seasoning seem to be missing, or rather a rhythm, from the individual dishes as well as from the sequence of dishes?; didn’t rhythm have to be the main seasoning for a chef?
The chef replied, which means that he did open his mouth after all in the course of this night, with this story (“Do not be afraid to let something contradictory appear now and then in these pages!”), and commented that “The whole person must take part” probably applied as much to a baker or a hermit or a lover as to a chef. And, he said, he had just cooked for them as a “whole person,” and then he had tasted the difference himself. Except that occasional breaks in his rhythm had been caused by this dear visitor’s presence. He did not mean her in particular, he added, but the presence of a stranger in general, no, not a stranger — but anyone. The minute someone watched him cooking, he lost his rhythm, even when the observer was kindly disposed toward him or truly enthusiastic about what he was doing — especially then. In his profession he could not stand observers of any kind.
And that was also true of actions that had nothing whatever to do with food preparation. If someone stood beside him while he was hammering in a nail, he was “guaranteed” to bend it. Even if someone watched him simply tying his shoelaces — and the person in question did not have to be looking straight at him; the mere presence was enough—: the laces were bound to end up all knotted.
As a child he had already feared any kind of observer, he continued. He had learned early to ride a horse, in secret. But the first time someone watched him ride, he had promptly fallen off. When he and others had shown off how well they could shinny up an oak tree, he had been the only one to get stuck halfway up the thick trunk (he could still see himself hanging there, on the lone tree in the middle of the cow pasture, and slowly sliding back down the trunk) — and when he had tried it again alone, he had reached the top faster than the fastest one in the group. And his fear of observers had then become a sort of hatred of them. Yes, he hated observers — of whatever sort. Even love was in danger of turning to hate, or to irritation, which was just as bad, when the loved one stood watching him do something he could do only when he was alone. And (here he laughed once) almost everything that mattered to him, and particularly his cooking, was something he could do only completely alone and unobserved.
Here his second guest chimed in briefly. The entrepreneur — or whatever he was on this evening — said that precisely a rhythm that was broken here and there, the interruption at some stages, the loss of all rhythm at certain moments while the food was cooking, the cook’s palpable state of intimidation and his hesitation during individual transitions in the complicated preparation process, made the phases that came before and after — when he was working alone in the kitchen, undisturbed by her, the other person — all the more significant, accounting ultimately for the lasting impression, the “fabulous” aftertaste, which was no less “real” than the first direct impression this evening meal made on the palate, “which I — and this is no mere turn of phrase — will never forget. O infinite alphabet of taste.” Hadn’t the tasting they had all done been a form of spelling-out and also memorizing or recollecting?
The last word in their dinner-table conversation belonged to the banker (or whatever she was, and not only on this night). She remarked that it had not been her intention at all to call the meal into question. On the subject of “my lord chef” as a person, she had also meant something else entirely. In contrasting his way of doing things with the notion of “the whole person must take part,” she had been intent on working through a problem, “which in turn is part of my profession.” And now as a threesome they had just worked through this problem.
As far as she herself was concerned, she had recognized during the working-through that she was exactly the opposite. She could undertake a task as a “whole person” only in the presence of someone else, a “third party,” even if the third party existed only in her imagination. So as “to walk,” or “merely to take one step,” “to calculate,” or “merely to type up numbers,” “to draft a plan,” or “merely to fiddle with possible combinations” as a whole person, she had to be able to picture observers, and beyond that inspectors, “judges,” so to speak, as if she were “in a contest, no, a competition!” “onstage, no, in an arena!” Even when looking at something as simple as a spoon or a piece of string, for instance, she felt a sort of obligation to view the string “as a whole person,” “or vice versa, when being looked at, to allow myself to be looked at by the other person, or animal, as a whole person!”
Yet as she sat there now: no one else’s gaze could get to her, and not only because of her eyes behind the giant key. There nothing was looking at me, let alone a whole person. And above all nothing allowed itself to be looked at by us, let alone … “In her way of not letting herself be looked at from time to time she resembled less an actress on the screen and definitely more a policeman on the street. He may look at me — if by no means as a whole person—, but does not allow himself to be looked at, not in the slightest, even when he is standing a hand’s breadth from me.” So that night she did not have the last word after all?
Who said that? — The author in La Mancha, in his village, much later. And he will have added, “The whole person must tell the story!” And she will have replied, beaten and battered as she will be by then, and still shaky from her time in the Sierra de Gredos: “What you call the policeman’s gaze has in reality been my defense and my armor. And if I positioned myself time and again this close to another person, it was to leave that person no room for killing, and likewise no room for any kind of embrace. I moved in so close simply in order to become unapproachable. During a long period in my life I crowded in close, body to body, so that my enemies or adversaries could not lift their little finger against me. It has finally become clear to me: I acted this way — it was a constant, uninterrupted acting, and woe to me if I ever shrank back — because I feared death.”—The author: “And feared love?”—She: “For a long time that, too, was a kind of fear of death, a particularly bad, acute form.”