...of tearfulness

Yet this woman was the first person by whom I felt appreciated as well as recognised. In the eyes of my parents, I was always “too serious” (my mother) or “too dreamy” (my father); my sister, it is true, regarded me as the secret ally of her craziness; my girlfriend’s gaze when we met was often rigid with an embarassment that melted only when at last - and I didn’t always succeed - I smiled at her from deep inside me; and even my teacher, who understood everything, once said - when in the course of a class excursion I had suddenly run off across the fields and into a thicket, just to get away! to be alone! - well, when I came back, he said with an undertone of irrevocable judgement: “Filip, you’re not right in the head.” The squaw of the Karst, on the other hand, gave me, heartwarmingly, the trust at first sight which, after a few days in her house, became an expectation, a wordless refutation of my constant self-disparagement (“I’ll never amount to anything”); an acquittal as surprising as it was reasonable; encouraging and protective; and so it has remained. And it was she who, before I had even opened my mouth, gave me credit for a sense of humour. At home I had often forbidden my mother to laug, because her laugh reminded me of the way women guffawed when men were telling dirty jokes, and my school friends thought I was a killjoy, because when someone was telling a joke I’d point out a scratch in the tabletop or a loose button on his jacket just as he was coming up to the punch line. Only my girlfriend, when we had been alone for a while, would sometimes manage - addressing me in the third person as in eighteenth-century dialogues - to cry out in astonishment: “Why, he is an amusing fellow!” But whereas she had reacted to some little random remark of mine, my way of looking and listening was enough for my present hostess, and whatever she showed me or told me, she did it with the joyful gusto that an actor absorbs from an alert audience - so perhaps the so-called sense of humour is nothing other than a happy alertness. Though once, toward the end of my stay - the two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and I was just looking silently out into the yard - she said something different. Something contradictory? Or complementary? She said that I had inside me a great, silent, passionate tearfulness; it wasn’t just there, it was raging to get out, and that was my strength. She went on to tell me that once in Lipa, when it was almost dark in the church, a man had stood there alone and erect, and sung the Psalms in a firm yet delicate voice. What had struck her most was that he had held his eyes shut with the fingers of one hand. She stood up to act out the scene for me, and we both burst into tears over that absent man.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]