Don Juan Speaks of himself by Peter Handke - extracts

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Peter Handke Don Juan speaks of himself

Exstracts … Has he come? Did he appear? Actually he thundered and fell into the garden over the wall that was part of the night-inn facing towards the road … Long before Don Juan appeared, I could hear his heavy breathing … But I was even more touched with what stayed from him in my ears … I do not know anymore in which language he spoke to me, the Don Juan of that afternoon, amidst the ruins of Port-Royal-in-the-plains. Be as it may: I understood him, be as it may … While I was cooking for Don Juan I was looking through the window of my kitchen – the tavern had a ground level that was spacious of course – how he was sitting outside in the sun of may …

Don Juan was used to taking flight and was skilled in it. By running away he was in his element or in one of his elements. That did not mean that the flight was without anxiety or fear. It rather meant: that he saw better with fear, more clearly and more spaciously … Did the running away serve Don Juan in some way as gaining time? … Don Juan moved his chair closer to my kitchen window. He said that it inspires him, when he watches how I prepare the food. Inspires? To do what? He sat there as if absorbed. …

As the lonely mushroom-man sometimes stumbles upon a body, Don Juan on his way through the woods stumbled upon a naked couple. He calmly stopped and stood … First by pure instinct Don Juan wanted to silently back away. But then he decided to stay and attend the happening. It was a sober decision. He had to absorbe the coupled couple that was still coupling. Not looking was no option. His duty was to write down and measure. Measure what? Don Juan did not know that. In any case he observed indifferently. The only thing that overtook him was some kind of awe, calm, primal. In time it transformed into a shudder, although different as with the unwanted eavesdropping, for example in a hotel room next door, when your hairs stands on end all over your body. Evidently they did not have the slightest feeling of secrecy or any need to hide … In spite of this the couple disappointed Don Juan. The happening became too foreseeable. They became heard. Then he could hear the woman screaming and some sort of male grunting and grumbling. She exhaled after her scream something that sounded like »I love« and he murmured something similar. Don Juan should have retreated earlier. But he watched out of a feeling of duty on and on and counted the seconds as someone does who stays by force in some place and tries to chase away the boredom. And time was a problem for Don Juan, a Problem. … As he was turning he stepped on a piece of twigs and the couple noticed him. He corrected himself: they did not notice him because of the twig, but because of his sigh. The sigh of disappointment? Enough with the questions. In any case I never heard someone sigh as Don Juan … It was a sigh of a child and an old man. It was all quiet, tender, I would say, and it entered through every noise. The sighs of Don Juan gave me hope and not only hope for this human being … The lovers interpreted this sigh as treason. They weren´t mad because someone was watching. Quickly they slipped into their clothes and thundered towards him, because the observer desecrated with his smile that which they have experienced between them and which maybe was still resonating between them. And as always and in every situation Don Juan did not want to run away. And everytime nothing else was left to do than: run. … When Don Juan after his arrival began to tell his story, he started with the day exactly one week ago. Then he was in Tbilisi, Gruzia. He did not cater his entire life story to me, but only the story of the one week that has just past. … As Don Juan was explaining the seven stations of his week He realized them. And he told his story without any juicy or tickelish details. It was self explanatory that there will not be any word of those. The first day in the week that was behind him he depicted as follows: In the morning he flew in from Moscow over the Caucasus into Tbilisi. He slept on the plane for a short time. When he awoke he saw that all of the passengers were sleeping with their mouths open. As many times he dreamed of his castle inside which there were upon his arrival numerous intruders that where boasting and screaming on top of their lungs regardless of the master. Don Juan did not own a castle or a house and he did not have anything to come back to for a long time. Don Juan became an orphan and not in a metaphorical sense. Years ago he lost his closest being, not his parents, but and so it seemed, his only child. You can become an orphan by losing a child, that is a fact.

He carried his sadness around the world and transmited it to him. He lived off his sadness and from it as it would be some sort of power. It was more than him and it overgrew him. This sadness gave him a weapon- for he knew that he was not immortal, but he was unhurtable. Because of it he became untameble, and in the same instant completely translucent and susceptible for all that was happening around him and if the need arose invisible. His sadness was his companion. It nurtured him in every way. By its merit he did not have any great wishes any more. … For years Don Juan did not hang out with anyone. Sometimes he vaguely met someone, but quickly after their journey he forgot them again. Among these coincidental meetings there were of course not many not unpretty women. (altough it seemed that the true beauties were not on the streets or on the squares of the cities … as if they would stay at home in some distant places or travelled in the middle of the night on bent roads). … When Don Juan appeared before those women, he attracted them above all with his powerfull sadness, that shone from him and was his eminence; after the first small step or word they usually gave him the back. He did not answer them anyway, he was deaf and blind to them, at least as individuals and women … How different did Don Juan behave before he became an orphan! … After his landing in Tbilisi a goal offered itself to him. He intended to go through the lowlands of Caucasus which he just overflew … After a long time he hired himself a servant for the ride. They made a contract without a word. It was made for an indifferent period of time, who knows for how long he would require his services. And the new servant was dressed finer than his master. … The driver was on his way to a wedding and Don Juan will be a guest without an invitation. (I noticed how Don Juan used the word »human« instead of »I«, as if the accuracy of his story was something self evident.) In years past he did not refuse to look at people. But in general he gave his attention to very old or very young children. He generaly overlooked the major croud in between. … He did not start the flirting with the bride. She aimed her look at him first. It happened in the ballroom. Don Juan got the smallest table in a corner of the room. Don Juan told me how he shuddered after receiving the bride´s look. It was not a special look, she just opened her eyes. And what beautiful eyes! Then she flirted with him with those beautiful eyes. When he awoke, it was a sudden and quiet awakening, after a year-long sleep. Silence: when the monologues in his head stopped. A vastness opened before his forehead. He stood up decisively and walked with big steps – towards her? – out of the hall.

He decided instantly. He could not go back. He had to face that stranger, a retreat was not a question for Don Juan. An epoch would complete itself for him that evening. … How good and beautiful was the period of solitary vandering, without friends, without enemies. He did not do anything bad to anyone. He never promised anything. He never owed anything to anybody. Now he had a debt. The moment was dawning when he will have to hurt somebody – destroy someone maybe. Don Juan knew when he was coming closer to a woman that he would have to accept an enemy with her (and he meant the groom or her brother or father) and also himself, at least a part of himself as some sort of enemy, the most cold and cruel enemy imaginable. What should he do? If he would retreat he would become a swindler and imposter; if he would come close to her, she would become unescapably abandoned, sooner or later and – altough only in thought, but what is the more powerfull from a distance – an avenger. How good was his solitude and how eerie and stupid. It shall happen as it will happen. It was true: if he would avoid her, (her that wanted him now!) that would be an abandonment of a special kind – a special cowardly and shamefull kind of abandonment. … Now there was nothing except the stranger. The groom was not there before, maybe only his outline, not even his outline, a shoulder, a white shirt, a moustache. Now he completely disappeared. The groom became exchangeble, an amount that was negligible in an exercise. It was an exercise where only two things were of importance: He, Don Juan and her, the bride, there. Which bride? There was no bride, there sat only a woman. And she, as every other woman that became his in the course of this week, was of course unexplicably beautiful. She did not have to look at him again; if she opened her eyes into him once more the mission would be without merit. She had namely a certain worth, she was worth more at that moment than anything on this world. Don Juan was not a seducer. He never seduced a woman. Altough he met some who assured the later. But these women were lieing or did not know where there head was and wanted to speak about something else … He had power. His power was different. Don Juan feared this power. Maybe he was more daring in the past. He avoided this power of late. He told me straight, without pride or vanity, that women recognize their master in him. They thought of Don Juan as their master, the only one, for ever. Not as a lawgiver, but they wanted to own him that way as some sort of saviour. A saviour from what? Simply a saviour. Or simply: from her, the woman, away from her, from here and here.

Don Juans power was in his eyes. There were no studied looks here. He did not want that and he did not plan it … The way that he avoided the whole of her look for a long time, many vould consider as shyness and cowardice, for it truely was, as he told me, a shyness, but not cowardice! His eye on her, that meant: no more turning back, for both of them, and it was more than just a moment or night. Some philosopher described Don Juan´s longing as »victorious«, because a woman understood it as unconditional. But the story he told me did not have anything to do with victory or longing, at least Don Juan´s longing that is. It was actually the reverse, that he with his look created or awoke the longing in a woman. It was a look that grasped beside her more and many other things and surpassed her and left her as she was, therefore she knew, that he had her in his mind and that he valued her; that look was an action. … The woman, after feeling the eye of Don Juan upon her and in the space around her, began to sense her solitude and knew that she is willing to break it in an instant. (Only these kind of lonely women crossed Don Juan´s path the whole week.) The consciousness of solitude – pure and unconditional energy of desire. In a woman this could be seen as mute and powerfull, and here really a »victorious« black-mail; something that would not work with a man no mather how lonely he would be. In view of this the woman became more and more beautiful because of this blackmail, as beautiful as can be, whilst this kind of blackmail with a man …

Don Juan left it open and never finished how the episode with the bride in the Caucasian mountains ended … It was enough for him to say that he did not approach the young girl when he stood by the entrance hall. And that he did not have his way with her or anything like that. And that they did not disappear together into the next room. And they did not speak a word with one another, no »come!«, no »now!«, not even »it´s time«. And altough they were together without fear or shame, openly in the middle of the day and among everybody, nobody took notice of them; because of the other time-system that began when they were running through each other, anyhow this happened, they were undetectable, maybe like those bodies that swoosh by for which the human eye is not fast enough or not slow enough to see. … Then when he finally stretched his bow to the bride and has revealed himself to her as one does, he walked a few steps backwards and created a magnetic field, which the girl gave over to as to something selfexplanatory. … Favourable to their meeting was an episode, that almost ended with the death of a person. A guest almost choked with a fishbone. Panic ensued all over the ballroom, when screams came from the man that jumped from his place and the screams became mute flutterings of his arms and then came only heavy breathing. The man was rolling around on the floor and his face went from red to oyster black. People gathered around him and gave him advice between their screams. Only the guy that was choking heard nothing and spat out the chunk of bread which they tried to feed him in order to swallow the bone. But Don Juan´s look helped the man to gather himself together. The man was looking all the time for such a glance. It gave a calm to him for a moment and that was enough to let the others help him … It seemed that he did not only save this man but all the people in that room … In an instant death was omnipresent and everyone felt it in their midst, not as how it enters them but how it pukes out of them and there was no one in whom death would not ensure a sentiment of Life. What dancing started suddenly! Also the ones who never danced did dance and everybody spoke to one another also the family members that hated each other for a long time.

Don Juan and the young woman who found each other infront of one another during the ramble, stopped breathing a long time ago. Something else was breathing for them … He took the bride to the groom to a long table, and walked infront of her … The shining and quiet laughing continued, and everything shone, the floor, the old apples … And outside: what a sky! He did not see snow like that for a whole eternity and someone played the harmonica quietly and not folk song but the aria from the Magic Flute. They gave their hands to each other in a sign of farewell, as though they would stay their entire lives in one another. He meditatively parted with her: the paradise of departing.

But when he looked over his shoulder towards her, he saw that she on the contrary to him did not agree with the refusal. Her look was full of black anguish, not for him especially, but of primal anguish. What just happened between them cannot be all. Their time did not run out yet; at least in reference to her, the woman, it would never run out. And he knew by this that he has to get away – well he did not want to run, he resisted – but he had to. He gave her back to her husband, whom he looked from afar as a dear friend as did he towards Don Juan – and away from this place. And so it happened. Only that Don Juan´s run coincited with the getaway of his servant. And the servant´s run did vause atention in comparison to his. Don Juan´s run was followed only by an abandoned woman, only her eyes, and it seemed that he heard her several miles away spitting and sighing. (Don Juan never sighed infront of a woman, it was not polite, it would bring shame to her and to him.) … The servant got a few new scars on his face and they bled for quite a long time. He drove without his jacket, his white shirt was torn, he had long scratches on his back; his lower lip was swollen, amidst the bite-crusts of blood and in the flesh a clear tooth-mark. Right before Tbilisi his ability to speak came back. After the fear of the man choking on the floor, he and an ugly woman stepped aside and threw each other upon each other. In fact she dragged Don Juan´s companion and got onto him in the broom closet and so on … Actually he always liked only those women that very considered unpretty… Every time a woman that he liked appeared he blushed and firstly looked away confused. But he liked those that were in the eyes of others slightly deranged, or if they were squizing themselves in some corner or tried to hide by the walls. He was seeking adventures with them immedietly; but no word of love. … The reason why the whole village wanted to punish him because of it, was the girls status in the village. She was considered weak-minded and the weak-minded ones were untouchable; a great tabu; as a kin he should have known this. But he said to Don Juan that he knew about the tabu, but he insisted that his lover was not »deranged« … Someone with a pair of eyes like that could be at least considered normal, or more, someone who rose to the occasion. On the eve of the next day Don Juan and his servant landed in Damascus. … Don Juan was certain that he would again meet the woman upon his arrival. The future tense, with its unfortellable duration will bring the woman in time, and one woman will give the next. Because he started an affair with the caucasian bride- he did not say »with her« - he fell into the eyes of those special women, about whom this story is about. The reason for this was not some scent as his servant proclaimed in an empty ramble against women: »They smell someone who is still free from miles away«. They received him as someone who they no longer expected, because of his new-born capability or readyness that acted on those women differently than an adventure, combined with the obvious accessibility and carelessness or serenity that infected a woman in an instant, so that she became almost provocative or better, daring. … In Don Juan a woman found her contemporary. But what she did not know and she did not have to know was: that the main and primal reason for the accessibility which Don Juan gave off was his constant mourning. His years of mourning have not yet ended. In connection with women his pain over the loss of someone close seemed as direct as never before. … He waited for a long time. The day before it was bright as the sun, but now it was almost night … It is understandable that Don Juan would be content if the woman would change her mind … He will have to be patient untill she comes. He told himself he would not run, not at this moment. She would have found him anyway, here or somewhere else. In this hour he could not escape her. She came when the approaching sandstorm already covered the moon. … Together they walked here and there in the shelter of a wall, into which the wind was blowing seeds of sand. Don Juan spoke after one week about the iron rods, that projected out of the wall above and about the unheard music that the tempestous wind created from the weeding wires, rods and tubes above their heads … And so from the iron setting that peered into the storm came a constant ringing, and where one could hear the equall motion of the wind only bending, roaring and booming, thoroughly monotonous, there created itself a true melody, something completely differently rythmic. And this melody was harmonious … The passages between the almost unheard heights and barely audiable depths and the exchange between the shortest and longest times, between the increase and decrease of strength never happened suddenly, by chance or willingly, but everytime harmoniously, and in time they connected – and in numerous languages the word for »time« is »tact« - into a melody that ensued from the wires, the partly loose iron rods that boomed into eachother. And what a melody it was! Don Juan sung it to me afterwards, in the beginning with a broken voice, which slowly became stronger; with it he stood up from his chair and walked arms open here and fro around my port-royal garden, and I, someone who is not sure about anything, was convinced, that this song, if he appeared with it in public, would conquer the face of the earth as no music has done before. … The man and the woman lay inbetween behind the piece of the wall and listened. During all of this Don Juan´s heart almost bursted with sorrow. The same sorrow gave him his strength back. Because of it man could overgrow himself. Because of sorrow man became above-personal. Her presence worked magic. In a dark tempestous night colors were born. The black sky became bluer. In this panicy world Don Juan felt right at home. This world if any was his. And here he met with her, the woman. In a world of panic they found each other. … They did not part immediatly. He walked her home. She gave him a necklace with Fatima´s hand of protection. They had breakfast and her child that just awoke had breakfast with them. He sat by the table next to the stranger as if nothing happened. Don Juan´s presence did not disturb him. He watched him silently as if he would be someone he expected. The stranger, if he stayed or left, was a friend. The child in Damascus took the place of the Caucasian groom.

The servant spent the night in the next room. When Don Juan knocked he did not answer. The door was not locked and he entered. It was pitch dark in the room. Then a cigarette lit up and then another one. No sounds except the inhaling and exhaling of smoke, until Don Juan opened the shutters … Be as it may: the servants new mistress stayed in his memory only by her disfigurement and scars which she got from some disease or leprocy and by her shameless smile. The servant was pulling her hair and breasts and puffed smoke with a mixture of rage and pleasure, softness and disgust, boredom and need, longing and guilt (which was not caused by the presence of his master). … Of the woman from Ceuta Don Juan told me a little bit more, as their first meeting happened far away from any sort of mass festivity. She did not follow him into an unpopulated emptiness … He walked behind a citadel and suddenly she was behind him. She walked behind him on the sandy steppe, as man presumably walks after women. But she did not pretend that she came to this road by chance or that she was going somewhere else. She was headed for him. And that is why she did not hide when he looked back, she did not hide herself, not her eyes, not her shoulders, not her body, she followed him with long steps, arms on her hips, head up, and with a look straight inside him. Occasionaly she threw small stones at him that were actually snail houses. Sometimes it seemed that she dissapeared and Don Juan was fine with that. He lay on the naked earth and fell asleep. When he awoke he saw the woman circling him. The circles became smaller and smaller and then she finally stepped over him, not only once, again and again, without a word. And only then Don Juan noticed that the young woman was pregnant and not for a long time. He spent much more time with another woman from Ceuta, with whom also nothing happened … She told him that she was a conquerer and a vagabond, and he only repeated what she said. … Since always, since you were a child? Yes, maybe she wanted to avenge the other sex since childhood. There was no reason for her vengeance, none. Her father did not rape her, nor her grandfather, her lover did not betray or leave her. Early on in her life it was enough that a boy looked at her a certain way or noticed her by the way and she thought: beware! Vengeance. I will avenge myself. And so she did; since childhood. She ambushed another man, she allowed him to get very close, to burn and then as if nothing happened she dismissed him or »sent for a walk«, by chance in front of a crowd of spectators, and probably male spectators, among whom there was someone who thought of himself as the next chosen one. … For her only men counted. Women: the word caused resistance inside her. Only men, now this one, then the other, then another one and another one. And with each and every one she insisted on revenge. A man had to be, whoever he was, caught, weakened and destroyed. … Now she noticed Don Juan in a different way than a moment before; he was the one that revealed himself to her as Don Juan; how he did that he did not tell. She recognized him and felt scared; she jumped back as before some ghost. Away from this man, he is her judge and executioner. Surely she needed someone, but she needed him less of all. Don´t let him gain power over her, not for a moment. No one will stop her revenge, not even this one. And so the departure of an ex-beauty became an escape. She became the one to run from Don Juan, and her escape was in a haste, without thinking, blindly, in a craze. … Don Juan added how he said farewell from the Ceut woman in that same bar in the port. She went by in company of an older man and they mutely said goodbye, but honestly, only that no passer by could notice it … The bodies enjoyed one another, innocently, and enlivened themselves once more in this secret farewell scene, even more innocently. At least he felt, that something was coming on to him from her distant body – when again he realized that something else was happening to her. She did not want a final farewell. Her back with the magic of her naked shoulderblades was saying: beware if you do not come back. It demanded that. At the same time her back humbly begged. And Don Juan, absorbed into the scene, was looking forward to the next country and the next woman and felt powerfully the hunger for the next body. … It would be inappropriate to count the women of that week. Women and counting – this question never posed itself to Don Juan. He experienced the time with women as a giant rest. Not counting but spelling. His time with women was a time where there were no numbers anymore. … About the woman in Norway Don Juan told me only that she waited on him behind a church, after mass, during which they got closer and closer (nothing was more natural and obscene, he explained, than man and woman for whom the holy rite opens their eyes for each other). Besides this woman was sick, deranged or mad. But Don Juan did not want to see any insanity in her and he did not believe it out of spite, even when she told him. He simply wanted to be her´s, for her, and then he was. I imagined it that way, without him telling me the details. …

About the woman in Holland he had even less to say – which in my ears did not seem as a dissapointment or even boredom, on the contrary, Don Juan spoke from day to day more enthusiastically, with shiny eyes, which stared through me into the emptiness, and finally he marvelled about the twists and turns of his story, as someone wonders about something he experienced on his own skin, because during the story-telling it sounds more and more like fiction, which does not mean it is not true. … About her Don Juan wanted me to know only that he met her, he the fugitive, on an artificial sandbank, that was in reality a waste-dump. He met her and she was also a fugitive, with a pimp on her tail, for whom she prostituted herself that day exactly one week ago, altough she does not count herself as an »easy woman« (During the speach Don Juan went more and more into the present and drew for the next, last stations only slight cues). The only other detail about the dutch woman was: she sits with him by the window next to cannal – the pilgrimage of poplar seeds etc. – and the may rain drops on the sleak and dark waters, and the woman suddenly begins to cry and says: »This is Holland.« … Don Juan could have sung about that day, and truly his speach was similar to singing, or I am just imagining it now. And when he suddenly stopped singing: a new escape.

The last land with the last woman was perfectly nameless. Don Juan did not hide her name, because he did not know it, and did not want to know it. He did not even know how he got there … After the tremendous fatigue he opened his eyes: he was there. And the woman was there, above him, under him, infront of him. Again he did not know how they came so close and there was nothing to know anyway.

He could not name anything around him altough there was no chaos in his surroundings, on the contrary … (And they remained together, which was an exception in the whole week, almost the whole day and night.) Don Juan did not know any more: if he was reading to her, or the other way around? Did she eat fish or him? Did he warm her, when she got cold? Did she win in the chess game or him? The one who won in swimming, was it you or me? Did you hide before me or me before you? The one that spoke and spoke: him or her? The one who listened: you? Me? You? And that man did not know: it was right this way. … Don Juan did not have to give any cues anymore. Because he left gaps everywhere, he could see more clearly in time.

Don Juan and women: a story he tells by himself, ended with this. We spend a week in the garden, him and me. Pentecost was nearing … Don Juan stayed in my inn in the Port-Royal-on the-plains after he finished his weekly story. Because he was waiting for his servant or something like that: I did not ask why. … During those seven days Don Juan grew out of the habit of being served to. He helped me. It was a pleasure mixed with envy on my behalf that I could watch him work. Don Juan was not only deliriously agile: with both hands he could perform opposite tasks, something that brought despare to my profession. Also with a simple gesture – he could pull something to himself with his right hand and at the same time push it away with his left – I got helplessly confused. It was no problem for him to cut onions with one hand and roll out the dough with the other. While the right was folding, the left was flattening. While he was pulling, he was hitting. While he was swinging he was squashing. While he was sawing, he was screwing … The seven days went by and the impression slowly faded. Don Juan seemed more and more undexterous. He chopped and missed, things fell from his hands, he got two left hands. … If I would let him leave, nothing would have changed. I did not want to let him go so quickly. Besides he did not want to leave Port-Royal yet. So I took Don Juan a day before Pentecost to the cemetery in Saint-Lambert … He moved like a prisoner under a fat glass bell. He was bumping into trees with every step, tryed to slap a fly, which was really a wild dove above. … In front of the inn in Port Royal there stood his servants car. It was as I imagined it after Don Juan´s story: an old russian model. But the servant did not fit with my image of him, as by a rule no one did, whom I knew only from stories. He was in the middle of a monologue, which was as if he started it in the time immemorial, almost silent as the monologue of a sleepwalker and you could understand something like:

    » … woman and death. Anytime I walked to you I was preparing for my death. And truly you jumped on to me as if you wanted to kill me, but then you hugged me. At least now. The danger of strangulation came afterwards. The impression of your cheek on the window, which I did not clean until now. Even on the the door you anounced yourself with your shadow, that darkened my whole house. Oho, how looked forward to your darkness. As soon as you came, I was not in my own room anymore, and not only because you stuffed everything, again and again, and rearranged everything. Only once in the desert, in Arabia or Chile, we where man and woman. Ah, how your rare hair touched me. By the breathing of your scent I sung, and if I sing it means something. And when you were lying here, you were lying and lying, ha, only a woman can lie like that, and lie and lie, and between me and you your baby lay and squized his wet nappies in my face … »Come!« you said to me and thought: »Die!« Why did I not let you go past? Disappear into the desert again. You live here only in a constant haste and you imagine above all, that your fluttering through the streets from morning till night is something beautiful. You were a master of tiny signs and insinuations – and I need nothing more than those signs – and now you do not have time for the tiniest sign. No notes behind the windscreen, under the doormat; no messages in shoes, that a man feels only on the street, after he left you, no more insinuations – the more enigmatic the longer they lasted … What are you women? Ah, instead of this only offers, cheap offers. Ah, with what hope your asses still fill me when they walk by, with what joy for life. Why was I coming after you every day? That I could cast off my manly wasteland, to discover your secret? And now? I am trapped in an even more sorrowfull wasteland. … Do you want to see me dead, woman, that you can mourn for me? My luxated neck, it was no accident, my head fell down by itself, with a weight of a heavy rock. I look after you, and if you show up, I could say at least, I looked, I turned back. You are a wonderfull inevitability. Die. And tomorrow is Pentecost/Whitsun.« (Here the servant suddenly turned to Don Juan and said in a different tone: »Hey, interrupt me finally! I can speak clearly only if someone interrupts me. And you, who are willfully silent, that I can ramble on.«

… »It´s time!« I heard Don Juan behind me. There was a threefold sigh – the servant sighed and then, yes, I also. … In the course of these seven days in my garden many other Don Juans appeared, on the night programme on television, in the opera, in the theatre and in the so called primal reality from flesh and blood. But with the help of what Don Juan told me about himself, I understood: All of these were wrong Don Juans – also Mollier´s; also Mozart´s. I can tell you: Don Juan is different. I saw him as someone who is loyal – loyalty incarnated. And he seemed something else than only kind – he was mindfull. If I ever met a fatherly person than it was him: a being listened to him and believed him. And during the seven days he kept himself away from me, which was fine with me, because I dream for a long time only about others and about stories of others in which I myself am not present.

The story of Don Juan can not have an ending, and that is, say or write, the final and true story of Don Juan.