I remained without a permanent residence and accompanied the architect on one of his observation excursions, in the course of which he now and then earned some money as a carpenter, or even just as a day laborer.
With the singer I went over my first song lyrics, which he wanted to try to make singable (the phrases were too short for him, or, I am no longer sure which, too long; the song did not suit him).
With my priest I parsed the epistles of the Apostle Paul, who according to his own words was a difficult writer, his clauses more complex than those of the Greek Thucydides and even the Roman Livy, and in contrast to the two historians, he did not even have anything to narrate, only something to preach, and that had never been my thing, had it?
I stayed away from my woman friend, as indeed from every woman.
From the reader, who could often go for days on nothing but air, I received his “Survival Catalogue”: showing how I had to make my way alone, at war with the world.
And with my painter I went out drawing in his various regions, but spent more time sitting in his studios, especially during his protracted periods of getting ready to work, also during his periods of distracting himself, very thoroughly, by dint of shining his shoes, sweeping the floor, trimming his toenails, carving a walking stick, until suddenly he would pick up a brush and start painting, undeterred by chain saws, jackhammers, and bluebottle flies.
Likewise I conditioned myself physically, convinced that to design the New World I also had to be armed in this way.
In the European countries that were still Communist at the time, there were already Western-type fitness courses, on which you could have seen me running and jumping with the best of them. I, who as a child had never got beyond clinging to the broad back of a draft horse, now even tried to learn to ride, but appeared to myself so odd up there that I felt as though I should dismount for every pedestrian, and at least, if one came toward me on the path, always greeted him first (the same thing happens to me now with horseback riders here in the forest). And for the first time since the Gobi Desert I drove a car, across the summery tundra, and after a few days skidded off the crushed-rock track into a swamp, my head striking the windshield, which cracked in the shape of a star, while I merely bled a bit on my forehead, yet immediately had a thick furry covering over the blood from the mosquitoes. And while hiking in a ravine on the karst I looked for a shortcut, went in the wrong direction, and could get out only by climbing, increasingly enjoying the necessity of keeping my wits about me, and since then I have not actually taken up mountain climbing, but when I am out walking immediately feel myself becoming completely alert in unanticipated tight spots where, in order to get to safety, I have to rely for the moment entirely on my sense of touch, my body vitally connected from my toes to my fingertips as in no other situation.
When I swam upstream in the bright, clear upper reaches of the Alpine rivers, occasionally poked by the cartilaginous mouths of fish, the mountains and the sky moved in very close and seemed, together with the waters, which streamed, like Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Tigris and Euphrates, “from Paradise,” elemental and epic as they could hardly be in a dream. Once summer snowflakes swirled around the swimmer. Once perpendicular arrows of hail plunged into the river next to him, making fountains spurt sky-high (the former in the Inn River in the Engadine, the latter in the Tagliamento near Tolmezzo). In the Val Rosandra, surrounded by the limestone mountains of Trieste, I stood and stood under the waterfall there and let the stream of water, not great in volume but falling all the harder, drum my brain clear. Back there soon!
And one late afternoon beyond Tamsweg, when I was making my way uphill on skis, in my exhaustion I saw the white of the snowdrifts as that brilliant reflection in which Faust tells us we capture the world, and over my shoulder, the Austrian town far below in the dusky valley, with its oversettled outskirts, seemed to have levitated to my eye level, and both of these sights were not hallucinations.
And most of all perhaps, and everywhere, I practiced for my epic outdoors in the night, pitch-dark if possible, unknown, confining, through which I moved as if nothing were wrong.
And finally I had my teeth taken care of, had new heels put on my trusty shoes, had my hair cut to a stubble, celebrated at a little farewell party with my friends in Rinkolach, and in the fall withdrew to the place I had long ago chosen for my work, the Spanish (Catalonian) enclave of Llivia in the highlands of the eastern French Pyrenees.
I took a room in what at that time was still the only hotel there.
My room was the highest in a large new building on the edge of the settlement, which had called itself a city since the seventeenth-century Treaty of the Pyrenees, and was both more and less. Against my better judgment, I had once again chosen a view, without streets and houses, a view of the open highland countryside, with the meadows and trees along the Río Segre, and beyond them the desertlike faded reddish-brown badland cliffs of Santa Leocadia, and beyond that, as if in another world, the jagged Sierra del Cadi as the vanishing point.
Not until I was there did I buy myself a typewriter, for which I had to leave the enclave again and go over the border to Puigcerda, the only real city in the Cerdagne or Cerdanya: a machine with the Spanish arrangement of keys, on which, since some letters were not in the accustomed place, I constantly made typing errors. The foreign accents also disrupted my rhythm, likewise the upside-down Spanish exclamation points and question marks.
What did not merely trip me up but threw me off track, after the very first sentence, which I had written down, reaching in all directions, with the stored-up elan of the past months, was something else entirely. I should never ever have been allowed to know the first sentence of my epic project in advance and carry it around with me for so long. This sentence made a continuation, of whatever kind, impossible.
You have seen this, no doubt: I cut a figure like that slalom skier in an international competition who goes shooting out of the starting posts with total concentration and in that very moment wipes out at the first pole and is out of the race — yet remains on the screen.
But this analogy does not work (and it seems to me there are simply no even moderately accurate analogies for the vicissitudes of writing): for I did not want to admit defeat. First came a dazed feeling, then alarm, then a new start, although, according to the prevailing rules of the game, this seemed impermissible.
I crept out of the light and tried to continue in the dark, just as in childhood, when I had failed in front of others, I would imagine that off somewhere by myself I could cancel out my failure by starting over (and this analogy, too, is wrong).
At any rate, I started again and again in the days that followed, absolutely without hope and equally stubborn, and with the tenaciousness of a descendant of small farmers.
And yet I never got beyond my preconceived first sentence, which I could not or would not give up. This sentence, at first a simple main clause — subject, verb, object — now grew from day to day, called for additions, concessions, boxed itself in, bulged out, sought to break out into the open with a consecutive clause, came to a head, sharpened its focus, strove for lightness, also for fading, for inarticulateness, demanded, above and beyond narration, to address itself to someone (no one in particular), in a little twist to one side, then already in a subordinate clause, until the entire sentence looked like something between the onset of the long story I had planned and the convoluted salutation of a Pauline epistle, although certainly not addressed to a community, or even to an individual, and I, unlike the apostle, had not the slightest awareness of having been sent forth by anyone.