Later in the summer he then turned away from the water of the river, as if he did not want to see himself comforted by it anymore: it was comfort, in fact, which seemed to awaken in him that sorrow he had always resisted, out of the experience that it was almost certain to be followed by bad temper and even world-weariness. He swerved off to the south and all fall roamed back and forth across La Mancha, that almost shadowless rump and residual landscape, so easy to recapitulate with every glance, where the few watercourses had been dried out for years now, and as if forever.
He also ended up there farther away from the parts of Spain “behind the mirror,” Vigo, La Coruña, Pontevedra, the fjords deep in the interior of Galicia, where he had shot his film and which, it seemed to him in retrospect, had been damaged by the picture making, the spotlighting. Although the camera had always remained at a distance, it was as if the areas had been plundered by the process. And only now, with time, and also with his, the responsible party’s, distancing himself, did these areas gradually return to their senses and go back, recovered, like grass that bounces back after being trampled down, to their place behind the mirror, into the very special light there, which arrayed them as if nothing had happened.
And he, as far from the sea as also from a source, now became in barren La Mancha — the end of sorrow and of guilt, and no one left who recognized him — entirely free for his love of fate, a love that more than anything else drove him to create, but what? For the time being at any rate Francisco simply kept on reading that kindly master, Horace, who taught him that a god did not have to intervene in a situation until “the knot is worthy of such a savior.”
And now, yesterday, on a winter evening in Albacete, the city of knives, seemingly only recently bombed to pieces in the civil war, after one of his daily trips to the movies — the latest Hollywood him — mothered by the movies as in his childhood, the painter stumbled upon something in a corner of the open projection booth, without a projectionist: the copy of his As I Lay Dying that had disappeared from Madrid, six reels, too heavy for a man, but not for him: already they were stowed in his camper, ready to be shown when all his friends were gathered here in the no-man’s-bay. And last night there appeared to him Horace, son of a freedman, with a little paunch, and instructed him to go out and simply ask a young person: “What should I paint?” Upon awakening, Francisco resolved to pose this question to Valentin, Gregor Keuschnig’s son. He would have an answer for him, and he would act upon it. And the following morning the few paintings by the painter that had been spared by the iconoclasts revealed changes; for instance, mine here, the only piece of art in the house, had acquired a black rocky mountain hovering in the air, a hole, or rather a place where one could see through, while the other undamaged pictures changed their coloration.
And soon after setting out for the north he drove on the high plateau past a shallow depression, apparently dug out centuries earlier, an empty square a little lower than the plowed fields already sown with winter rye, a former livestock pen, overgrown, with bristly grass, the remains of a wooden fence, also of a shed, with shreds of horse tethers, on the ground a donkey’s hoof, a bird skeleton, and he thought: “This is Cervantes’ world! This is Spain!” and then: “This is what my next film will begin with,” and then: “How the human race needs such ridiculous, pointless, and one-sided heroes as Don Quixote from time to time!”
The reader, on his tour of Germany, long after the end of the hostilities there, sparked his own civil war — to be precise, one day in some small city he took an iron rod and hurled himself at the tribe of automobile drivers lined up at a traffic light as if at a starting line, revving their engines and honking at each other. As a result of this violent act, which was leniently punished, to be sure — as an extenuating circumstance the “nosogenous” or illness-generating glitter of the thousands of chrome auto parts was cited — he had once again become incapable of doing his reading, and to this day has not recovered, and the reading policewoman from Jade Bay was far away.
In this state of deprivation, however, he gained the ability to articulate what reading had meant to him, and would mean again. “When I could still read, I looked at the individual words until I saw them in stone or on bark — except that the words had to be the right ones. Heart of the world, writing: a secret matched only by the wheel and the eyes of children. I must read again. Reading would be a passion, a wondrous one, if it is a passionate desire for understanding; I feel compelled to read because I want to understand. Not simply to plunge into reading: you must be receptive to a particular story or book. Are you receptive?”
In compensation for having forfeited his reading for the time being, he had become capable — again as a result of loss? — of a kind of looking fundamentally different from contemplating: an accomplishment, a very rare and precious one. The object looked at, however inconspicuous, could expand into the entire world. Looking in this way, he had the paradigm of the world before his eyes — only he could no longer say it. “So I simply have to say it anew!” And in looking at an object until he had become part of the object (just as during his reading period he had looked at many a word until he became the word), he became disarming, of himself first of all, and had a contagious effect.
And for this period, for the summer, for the fall, and up to this day, in winter! objects in his Germany, previously inexplicably abstract and downright nauseating — an old phenomenon, not merely since the last Reich — finally also became concrete, just as, from time immemorial, so many, so wonderfully many German words had been. After the civil war, a clothes hanger in a German hotel room, a lamp, a chair, a wheelbarrow up on a German railroad platform took on — an unprecedented occurrence — shape, were nothing to be ashamed of, O peace! the sight of them no longer pierced one to the heart. During this autumn they filled out and actually acquired color, even “apples from German orchards,” and then, when on the same day the first postwar snow fell, from the Kiel Canal down to the Saarland, there was a new generation of children, who, unlike the previous ones, upon seeing snowflakes when they woke up, no longer merely stared at them dully.
To get beyond individual objects: in the months following the domestic blitzkrieg, all of Germany seemed liberated from whatever had been weighing on it (for how long?), as a massif is said to have become lighter as a result of erosion and could even grow higher, or as the melting of a vast expanse of glacier freed the earth’s crust underneath to heave upward. In fact, even German landscapes had taken on different features, in that, for instance, between skyscrapers vistas suddenly revealed themselves in the sky where none had been since Hölderlin, or the Spree River in Berlin, until then puddlelike and sluggish, unexpectedly began to rush, and thundered again over cataracts and waterfalls through an ancient river valley.
Understanding was so powerfully abroad in the land that for the time being the opinion molders in the newspapers of Germany remained alone behind their office windows with their brain-swelling language, and my former enemy, still active with his book interrogations and sniffing-out, no longer found gawkers for his word-spectacles and for the first time was forced to leave his ghetto, condemned to take walks out in nature, which he heartily despised, where from every flower and every bush nothing but his own mug stared back at him.