As a result of the prominent yellow, all these façades could give an appearance of sunshine, even on a rainy morning, a very odd sunshine, coming up from below, which is otherwise a peculiarity of clay landscapes, deserts, badlands. (The woman from Catalonia, on the other hand, felt mocked by this phenomenon: for what stretched before one out in nature in the similarly colored familiar Spanish meseta here flickered before her as a structure.) The closer I came to the stones in the suburban house, often bumping them with my nose, and examined them, the more I had an entire planet within my grasp, embodied in this one thing, as once before, very long ago in childhood, the sight of a drop of rain in a yellow-brown-gray-white bit of dust on the path had made the world open up to me for the first time. And it was not some strange planet but here, the earth, and one that was peaceful through and through.
In similar fashion a crater now opened up in the building stone, fresh for the touching with the tip of a finger; ridges formed, and the observer, moving above this scene at barely an eyelash’s distance, was showered with a sense of shelteredness brought on by the barely perceptible crumbling of the tiny weathered bits, which recalled the strangely meaningful glow along the eroded edges of the sunken roads back home.
Another feature of this world in miniature was that when you looked closely it turned out to be inhabited, if only by a tiny creature, the size of a pinhead, dangling here on a thread from a cliff, and a shimmering something like a one-celled animal on the opposite slope, beyond the seven mountain ranges, the two of them reminiscent of Robinson and Friday.
All my life the unapproachability of the world, its incomprehensibility and its inaccessibility, my exclusion from it, has been terribly painful to me. That has been my fundamental problem. Belonging, participating, being involved was so rare that each time it became a great occasion for me, worthy of being recorded. Every time the world, the peaceable one, became a world, nature’s and civilization’s bending, extending, taking on color, was not only an event but a moment of recognition: with this recognition there would be no war.
There, during my first stay in the suburban region, at the midpoint of my life, for a good two years, such events fell into my lap almost constantly, on some days there for the plucking every other moment like the cherries in the treetop in Arcueil. The planet took on shape and became good to the touch. During that period it seemed erotic.
That applied also to eating, which began, along with the walk, drawn out as much as possible, to the restaurant, together with its spaces and vistas, to awaken a barely discovered pleasure (though immediately attenuated when the dinner table was not located in my new region). And of course I had drunk previously, primarily to be a part of things — see above — but it was here that I first realized what it meant for wine to be delicious. I often withdrew to the most remote corner of the house with a glass, after midnight, turned out the light, took a sip in the pitch darkness, and then, when I could feel the first sip actually rising to the tips of my hair, another.
And in their first years the woman from Catalonian Gerona and the man from the Jaunfeld Plain in southern Carinthia had certainly found their way to each other quite often, in passing, in brushing by each other, like sleepwalkers, as if the exciting element were more the air between them, each other’s presence, their mutual strangeness. But not until we were here did we have each other personally in mind, and this marriage, although it may have lasted only through one late summer and a fall, appears to my memory more complete and eventful than all that had gone before — of epic proportions; with a horizon.
Always in the same spot, always in the same corner, with the same gestures, in a never varied tempo, a sort of spaciousness emerged, different from that of all the countries and continents from earlier: we created this space and were its center (and likewise felt stronger there than ever before, two who were lost for all eternity, as if we were coupling far off on the moon). “I think this region is good for love,” she said one time, her words as usual spoken more to herself than directed at me.
Only a third party could do justice to our history as a couple, and, since no such person is at hand, I must play the role myself, or at least take a stab at it.
So this was the only era in which a person and a place became identical for me, or in which a person meant a place, took me in. Even the most intimate connectedness with another person — this or that ancestor, my son — did no good when the place we inhabited together was fundamentally unhomelike to me. All the love in the world could not achieve anything if I did not have the place.
This existed independently of my family. At home I felt like myself the minute I set foot in my region, but not, however, with my mother or my grandparents. And later, when Valentin and I were living alone together, if I returned with him after a long absence to a place that was not my own, even on the approach I could try to persuade myself as much as I liked that the person at my side meant more to me than anything else in the world, and, and — still, all the blood would drain from my heart. And even now, when I have the urge to visit him, my repulsion at having to go to Vienna to do so is even greater.
The place always gained the upper hand. My near and dear and my places always failed to coincide except, in particular moments and in a nowhereland, with a friend, and that time with the woman from Catalonia — when she, to be sure, did not substitute for the place but rather potentiated the existing place and gave it elan. For the first time in my life I came home to a person, to my wife. For this period the house and wife belonged together. In her I came home to my house-within-the-house.
As far apart as we were in years, we became the same age. For the first time ever I saw myself as young, as I had not for a moment seen myself in my youth. And being faithful became a source of pleasure, and at the same time was nothing special.
Didn’t our spontaneity and complete absorption in one another also result from the setting of the house and grounds in that gentle hollow, as if at the bottom of an abandoned quarry, or in the so-called depression of the Dead Sea, where we had begotten the child? Now the two of us lay together like two long before a child; and as if we still did not have one. Would anything similar have happened between us on raised ground? Has anyone heard of a couple who were flooded with desire in a storm on a mountaintop? And as we lay there, one floor above us our child talked in his sleep, the pedestrian cycle switched on and off at the night-shrouded railroad station across the way, the chains of hills huddled behind us, and there was a rustling of leaves outside our window.
That was the time when I could touch another person, when I felt a powerful urge to do so, and simply for the sake of touching her. For hours I wanted nothing else but to feel every part of this woman. I wanted to grab her from the top of her head to her heels and take her between my fingertips. In bending her, tapping her, plucking at her I convinced myself of the two of us. And on the other hand it was as if I were supposed to measure her for something, an additional, very special, amazing dress. And even in my dreams, as I slept at her side, this fingering, tying, hooking, cutting out, continued. I felt fulfilled by it: that was it. And I saw myself smiling secretly and silently to myself, turned away, in profile, like my son in his hiding place when he was very small. And rested against her rib like a mountain climber in a trackless waste.