The Jukebox And Other Essays On Storytelling

ESSAY ON THE JUKEBOX

Dar tiempo al tiempo.

— SPANISH SAYING

And I saw her standing there.

— LENNON / MCCARTNEY

Intending to make a start at last on a long-planned essay on the jukebox, he bought a ticket to Soria at the bus station in Burgos. The departure gates were in a roofed inner courtyard; that morning, when several buses were leaving at the same time for Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, they had been thronged; now, in early afternoon, only the bus for Soria was parked there in the semicircle with a couple of passengers, presumably traveling alone, its baggage compartment open and almost empty. When he turned over his suitcase to the driver — or was it the conductor? — standing outside, the man said “Soria!” and touched him lightly on the shoulder. The traveler wanted to take in a bit more of the locale, and walked back and forth on the platform until the engine was started. The woman selling lottery tickets, who that morning had been working the crowd like a gypsy, was no longer to be seen in the deserted station. He pictured her having a meal somewhere near the indoor market of Burgos, on the table a glass of dark-red wine and the bundle of tickets for the Christmas lottery. On the asphalt of the platform was a large sooty spot; the tailpipe of a since vanished bus must have puffed exhaust there for a long time, so thick was the black layer crisscrossed by the prints of many different shoe soles and suitcase wheels. He, too, now crossed this spot, for the specific purpose of adding his own shoe prints to the others, as if by so doing he could produce a good omen for his proposed undertaking. The strange thing was that on the one hand he was trying to convince himself that this “Essay on the Jukebox” was something inconsequential or casual, while on the other hand he was feeling the usual apprehension that overcame him before writing, and involuntarily sought refuge in favorable signs and portents — even though he did not trust them for a moment, but rather, as now, promptly forbade himself to do so, reminding himself of a comment on superstition in the Characters of Theophrastus, which he was reading on this trip: superstition was a sort of cowardice in the face of the divine. But, even so, the prints of these many and different shoes, including their various trademarks, layered on top of each other, white on black, and disappearing outside the circle of soot, were an image he could take with him as he continued his journey.

That he would buckle down to the “Essay on the Jukebox” in Soria had been planned for some time. It was now the beginning of December, and the previous spring, while flying over Spain, he had come upon an article in the airline magazine that featured this remote town in the Castilian highlands. Because of its location, far from any major routes, and almost bypassed by history for nearly a millennium, Soria was the quietest and most secluded town on the entire peninsula; in the center of town and also outside of town, standing by themselves in a desolate area, were several Romanesque structures, complete with well-preserved sculptures. Despite its smallness, the town of Soria was the capital of the province of the same name. In the early twentieth century Soria had been home to a man who, as a French teacher, then as a young husband, then almost immediately as a widower, had captured the region in his poems with a wealth of precise detail, the poet Antonio Machado. Soria, at an altitude of more than a thousand meters above sea level, was lapped at its foundations by the headwaters of the Duero, here very slow-moving, along whose banks — past the poplars that Machado called “singing” (álamos cantadores) because of the nightingales, ruiseñores, in their dense branches, and between cliffs that repeatedly narrowed to form canyons — according to the appropriately illustrated article, paths led far out into the untouched countryside …

With this “Essay on the Jukebox” he intended to articulate the significance this object had had in the different phases of his life, now that he was no longer young. Yet hardly any of his acquaintances had had anything to say when, in the last few months, he had embarked on a sort of playful market research and had asked them what they knew about this piece of machinery. Some, including, to be sure, a priest, had merely shrugged their shoulders and shaken their heads at the suggestion that such a thing could be of any interest. Others thought the jukebox was a kind of pinball machine, while still others were not even familiar with the word and had no idea what was meant until it was described as a “music box” or “music cabinet.” Precisely such ignorance, such indifference stimulated him all the more — after the initial disappointment at finding, yet again, that not everyone shared his experiences — to take on this object, or this subject matter, especially since it seemed that in most countries and places the time of jukeboxes was pretty much past (he, too, was perhaps gradually getting beyond the age for standing in front of these machines and pushing the buttons).

Of course he had also read the so-called literature on jukeboxes, though intending to forget most of it on the spot; what would count when he began writing was primarily his own observations. In any case, there was little written on the topic. The authoritative work, at least up to now, was probably the Complete Identification Guide to the Wurlitzer Jukeboxes, published in 1984 in Des Moines, far off in the American Midwest. Author: Rick Botts. This is more or less what the reader recalled of the history of the jukebox: it was during Prohibition in the United States, in the twenties, that in the back-door taverns, the “speakeasies,” automatic music players were first installed. The derivation of the term “jukebox” was uncertain, whether from “jute” or from the verb “to jook,” which was supposed to be African in origin and meant “to dance.” In any case, the blacks used to gather after working in the jute fields of the South at so-called jute joints or juke joints, where they could put a nickel in the slot of the automatic music player and hear Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, or Louis Armstrong, musicians whom the radio stations, all owned by whites, did not play. The golden age of the jukebox began when Prohibition was lifted in the thirties, and bars sprang up everywhere; even in establishments like tobacco stores and beauty parlors there were automatic record players, because of space limitations no larger than the cash register and located next to it on the counter. This flowering ended, for the time being, with the Second World War, when the materials used to make jukeboxes were rationed — primarily plastic and steel. Wood replaced the metal parts, and then, in the middle of the war, all production was converted to armaments. The leading manufacturers of jukeboxes, Wurlitzer and Seeburg, now produced de-icing units for airplanes and electromechanical components.

The form of the music boxes was a story in itself. Through its form, the jukebox was supposed to stand out “from its not always very colorful surroundings.” The most important man in the company was therefore the designer; while the basic structure for a Wurlitzer was a rounded arch, Seeburg as a rule used rectangular cases with domes on top. The principle seemed to be that each new model could deviate from the previous one only so much, so that it was still recognizable. This principle was so firmly established that a particularly innovative jukebox, shaped like an obelisk, topped not by a head or a flame but by a dish containing the speaker, which propelled the music up toward the ceiling, proved a complete failure. Accordingly, variation was confined almost exclusively to the lighting effects or to components of the frame: a peacock in the middle of the box, in constantly changing colors; plastic surfaces, previously simply colored, now marbled; decorative moldings, once fake bronze, now chromed; arched frames, now in the form of transparent neon tubes, filled with large and small bubbles in constant motion, “signed Paul Fuller”—at this point the reader and observer of this history of design finally learned the name of its main hero and realized that he had always unconsciously wanted to know it, ever since he had first been overcome with amazement at encountering one of these mighty objects glowing in all the colors of the rainbow in some dim back room.

The bus ride from Burgos to Soria went east across the almost deserted meseta. Even with all the empty seats, it seemed as though there were more people together on the bus than anywhere outside in those barren highlands. The sky was gray and drizzly, the few fields between cliffs and clay lay fallow. With a solemn face and dreamy, wide-open eyes, a young girl ceaselessly cracked and chewed sunflower seeds, something often seen in Spanish movie theaters or on promenades; the husks rained to the floor. A group of boys with sports bags kept bringing new cassettes to the driver, who willingly broadcast their music over the loudspeakers mounted above every pair of seats, instead of the afternoon radio program. The one elderly couple on the bus sat silent and motionless. The husband seemed not to notice when one of the boys unintentionally jostled him every time he went up front; he put up with it even when one of the young fellows stood up while talking and stepped into the aisle, leaned on the back of the old man’s seat, and gesticulated right in his face. He did not stir, did not even shift his newspaper to one side when the edges of the pages curled in the breeze created by the boy’s gestures. The girl got off the bus and set out alone over a bleak knoll, her coat drawn close around her as she headed across a seemingly trackless steppe without a house in sight; on the floor beneath her vacated seat lay a heap of husks, not as big as one would have expected.

Later the plateau was punctuated by sparse oak groves, the trees small like shrubs, the withered leaves trembling grayish in the branches, and, after an almost unnoticeable pass — in Spanish the word was the same as for harbor, as the traveler learned from his pocket dictionary — which formed the border between the provinces of Burgos and Soria, came plantations of gleaming brown pines rooted atop cliffs, many of the trees also torn from their bit of soil and split, as after a storm, whereupon this closeness on either side of the road immediately gave way again to the prevailing barren landscape. At intervals the road was crossed by the rusted tracks of the abandoned rail line between the two cities, in many places tarred over, the ties overgrown or completely invisible. In one of the villages, out of sight of the road beyond rocky outcroppings — which the bus turned onto and from which, now even emptier, it had to return to the road — a loose street sign banged against the wall of a house; through the window of the village bar, the only thing visible, the hands of cardplayers.

In Soria it was cold, even colder than in Burgos, and bitter cold in comparison to San Sebastián down there by the sea, where he had come into Spain the previous day. But the snow he had been hoping for as a sort of companion to his undertaking did not fall; there was drizzle instead. In the drafty bus station he immediately noted down the times of departure for Madrid, or at least Zaragoza. Outside, on the main road at the edge of the town, between smaller tumbledown houses, shells of high-rises, and the rock-strewn steppe (which otherwise appealed to him), tractor-trailer trucks that seemed coupled together, all with Spanish license plates, thundered past, their wheels splattering a film of mud. When he caught sight of an English marker among them, and then the slogan on the canvas cover that he could understand at a glance, without having to translate it first, he felt for a moment almost at home. Similarly, during a longish stay in just such a foreign Spanish town, where no one knew any other language and there were no foreign newspapers, he had sometimes taken refuge in the only Chinese restaurant, where he actually understood even less of the language but felt safe from all that concentrated Spanish.

It was beginning to get dark, and outlines were blurring. The only highway signs pointed to distant capitals such as Barcelona and Valladolid. So he set out down the street with his heavy suitcase — he had been traveling a long time and had intended to stay in Soria into the New Year. He had found several times that the centers of these Spanish towns, which at first glance seemed almost invisible, were somewhere down below, beyond steppe-like stretches without houses, hidden in the valleys of dried-up rivers. He would stay here at least for the night; this once — he actually felt it as a sort of obligation — he had to get to know the place, now that he was here, and also do it justice (although at the moment, shifting his suitcase from one hand to the other every few steps and trying to avoid bumping into the natives, just beginning their evening ritual of strutting along, straight ahead, he did not succeed), and besides, as far as his “Essay on the Jukebox” was concerned, and in general, he had time, as he told himself now, as often before, in this instance using a verb from the Greek, borrowed from his reading of Theophrastus: s-cholazo, s-cholazo.

Yet all he could think of was running away. For his project, one friend or another had offered him, who for some years now had been roaming about without a home, his second apartment or third house, standing empty as winter came on, with silence all around, at the same time in a familiar culture, above all with the language of his childhood, which stimulated (and at the same time soothed) him right there on the horizon, to be reached at any time on foot. Yet his thought of running away did not include going back to where he came from. German-speaking surroundings were out of the question for him now, as was, for example, La Rochelle, with French, which was like second nature to him, where a few days ago he had felt like a stranger in the face of the wide Atlantic, the squat, pastel houses, the many movie theaters, the depopulated side streets, the clock tower by the old harbor that reminded him of Georges Simenon and those of his books that were set there. Not even San Sebastian with its much warmer air and clearly visible semicircular bay on the often turbulent Bay of Biscay, where just a short while ago, before his eyes, the floodwaters had surged upstream at night along the banks of the Basque Urumea River — while in the middle the current had flowed toward the sea — and in a bar, unlit and cold, as if it had been out of operation for years, stood a jukebox, made in Spain, clumsy, almost without design. Perhaps it was a compulsion in him that he forbade himself to run away, to retrace any of his steps, permitting himself only to move on, ever onward across the continent — and perhaps also a compulsion that now that he found himself without obligations and commitments, after a period of being much in demand, he felt that to get started on writing he had to subject himself, if writing was to have any justification at all, to barely tolerable, inhospitable conditions, to a marginal situation that threatened the very basis of daily life, with the added factor that, along with the project of writing, a second project had to be essayed: a sort of investigation or sounding out of each foreign place, and exposure of himself, alone, without benefit of teachers, to a language that at first had to be as unfamiliar as possible.

Yet now he wanted to run away, not only from this town but also from his topic. The closer he had come to Soria, the intended site for writing, the more insignificant his subject, the “jukebox,” had appeared. The year 1989 was just coming to an end, a year in which in Europe, from day to day and from country to country, so many things seemed to be changing, and with such miraculous ease, that he imagined that someone who had gone for a while without hearing the news, for instance voluntarily shut up in a research station or having spent months in a coma after an accident, would, upon reading his first newspaper, think it was a special joke edition pretending that the wish dreams of the subjugated and separated peoples of the continent had overnight become reality. This year, even for him, who had a background devoid of history and a childhood and youth scarcely enlivened, at most hindered, by historic events (and their neck-craning celebrations), was the year of history: suddenly it seemed as if history, in addition to all its other forms, could be a self-narrating fairy tale, the most real and realistic, the most heavenly and earthly of fairy tales. A few weeks earlier, in Germany, an acquaintance, about to set out to see the Wall, now suddenly open, where he was “determined to be a witness to history,” had urged him to come along so that these events could be “witnessed by a person good with imagery and language.” And he? He had used the excuse of “work, gathering material, preparations”—immediately, instinctively, actually shrinking from the experience, without thinking (though picturing how the very next morning the leading national newspaper would carry, properly framed, the first batch of poems produced by the poetic witnesses to history, and the following morning, likewise, the first song lyrics). And now that history was apparently moving along, day after day, in the guise of the great fairy tale of the world, of humanity, weaving its magic (or was it merely a variation on the old ghost story?), he wanted to be here, far away, in this city surrounded by steppes and bleak cliffs and deaf to history, where, in front of the televisions that blared everywhere, all the people fell silent only once, during a local news item about a man killed by collapsing scaffolding — and here he wanted to essay the unworldly topic of the jukebox, suitable for “refugees from the world,” as he told himself now; a mere plaything, according to the literature, to be sure, “the Americans’ favorite,” but only for the short span of that “Saturday-night fever” after the end of the war. Was there anyone in the present time, when every day was a new historic date, more ridiculous, more perverse than himself?

He did not really take this thought seriously. Of far greater concern was the realization that his little project seemed to contradict what was occurring, more and more powerfully and urgently with the passing years, in the deepest of his nocturnal dreams. There, in the dream depths, his inner pattern revealed itself to him as an image, as image upon image: this he experienced with great force in his sleep, and he continued to dwell on it after awakening. Those dreams insistently told him a story; they told, though only in monumental fragments, which often degenerated into the usual dream nonsense, a world-encompassing epic of war and peace, heaven and earth, West and East, bloody murder, oppression, rebellion and reconciliation, castles and hovels, jungles and sports arenas, going astray and coming home, triumphal unions between total strangers and sacramental marital love, with innumerable, sharply delineated characters: familiar strangers, neighbors who came and went over the decades, distant siblings, film stars and politicians, saints and sinners, ancestors who lived on in these dreams transformed (as they had been in reality), and always new to the children, to the child of the children, who was one of the main characters.

As a rule he himself did not appear, was merely a spectator and listener. As forceful as the images were the feelings this person had; some of them he never experienced while awake, for instance reverence for a simple human face, or ecstasy at the dream blue of a mountain, or even piety (this, too, a feeling) in the face of nothing but the realization “I’m here”; he was acquainted with other feelings as well, but they did not become pure and incarnate to him except in the sensuous intensity of his epic dreaming, where he now experienced not gratitude but the very essence of gratitude, likewise the essence of compassion, the essence of childlikeness, the essence of hatred, the essence of amazement, the essence of friendship, of grief, of abandonment, of fear in the face of death.

Awakening, as if aired out and leavened by such dreams, he felt spreading in waves far beyond him the rhythm he would have to follow with his writing. And again, not for the first time, he was postponing this task, in favor of something inconsequential? (It was those dreams that engendered such thoughts; no one else had authority over him.) And his habit of thinking that, transient as he was, he could commit himself only to occasional pieces — after all, Simenon’s short novels, most of them written abroad, in hotel rooms, could hardly be said to have epic breadth — wasn’t that again, as his dream reproached him, one of those excuses he had been using for too long now? Why didn’t he settle down, no matter where? Didn’t he notice that his travels were more and more just a kind of aimless wandering?

When the “Essay on the Jukebox” had been merely a glimmer, he had had in mind as a possible motto something Picasso had said: One made pictures the way princes made their children — with shepherdesses. One never portrayed the Pantheon, one never painted a Louis XV fauteuil, but one made pictures with a cottage in the Midi, with a packet of tobacco, with an old chair. But the closer he came to carrying out his plan, the less applicable this painter’s saying seemed to a writer’s subject matter. The epic dreams manifested themselves too powerfully, too exclusively, and also too contagiously (infecting him with a yearning to translate them into the appropriate language). He was familiar with the phenomenon from his youth, yet always amazed at how, toward the winter solstice, night after night these dreams turned up, predictably, so to speak; with the first image of half sleep the gate to narrative swung open, and narrative chanted to him all night long. And besides: what did an object like the jukebox, made of plastic, colored glass, and chromed metal, have to do with a chair or a cottage? — Nothing. — Or perhaps something, after all?

He knew of no painter in whose work there was a jukebox, even as an accessory. Not even the Pop artists, with their magnifying view of everything mass-produced, non-original, derivative, seemed to find the jukebox worth bringing into focus. Standing in front of a few paintings by Edward Hopper, with isolated figures in the dim bars of an urban no-man’s-land, he almost had a hallucination, as if the objects were there, but painted over, as it were, an empty, glowing spot. Only one singer came to mind, Van Morrison, to whom the “roar of the jukebox” had remained significant forever, but that was “long gone,” a folk expression for “long ago.”

And besides: why did his picture of what there was to say of this object immediately take the form of a book, even if only a very small one? After all, wasn’t this thing called a book intended, as he conceived it, for the reflection, sentence by sentence, of natural light, of the sun, above all, but not for the description of the dimming artificial light produced by the revolving cylinders of an electrical device. (At least this was the traditional image of a book that he could not shake off.) So wasn’t a small piece of writing like this more suitable for a newspaper, preferably for the weekend magazine, on the nostalgia pages, with color photographs of jukebox models from the earliest times to the present?

Having reached this point in his ruminations, ready simply to drop everything toward which his thoughts had pointed in recent months (“Be silent about what is dear to you, and write about what angers and provokes you!”), resolved to enjoy his time for a while, doing nothing and continuing to be a sightseer on the Continent, he suddenly experienced a remarkable pleasure in the possible meaninglessness of his project — freedom! — and at the same time the energy to get to work on this little nothing, though if possible somewhere other than in this world-forsaken town of Soria.

For the night he found a room in a hotel named after a medieval Spanish king. Almost every strange place he had encountered on his travels that had seemed at first sight insignificant and isolated had revealed itself to him, when he set out to walk it, as unexpectedly spread out, as part of the world; “What a big city!” he had marveled again and again, and even “What a big town!” But Soria, to whose narrow streets he entrusted himself on that rainy evening, did not expand, even when he groped his way in the dark out of town and uphill to where the ruined citadel stood; no glittering avenida; the town, nothing but a few faded boxlike walls at the bend in the narrow streets, revealed itself to him, as he then wandered from bar to bar, all of them almost empty already, enlivened now by the repetitious siren songs of the slot machines, as an all-too-familiar Central European town, only with more blackness within the city limits — the winter-deserted oval of the bullfighting ring — and surrounded by blackness. He had already concluded that nothing remained to be discovered and generated there. But for now it was nice to be walking without luggage. The front row of a bookstore’s display consisted exclusively of books by Harold Robbins — and why not? And in a small square toward midnight the damp, jagged leaves of the plane trees glittered and beckoned. And the ticket booths of the two movie houses, the Rex and the Avenida, had their windows, almost invisible, as only in Spain, next to the wide entrances, looking directly out on the street, and inside, half cut off by the frames, showed the face of what seemed the identical old woman. And the wine did not have a small-town taste. And the pattern on the sidewalk tiles in the town of Soria consisted of interlocking squares, rounded at the edges, while the corresponding pattern in the city of Burgos had been battlements? And the Spanish word for equanimity was ecuanimidad. He made up a litany with this word, alternating it with that Greek word for having time.

In his dream, a hundred people appeared. A general, at the same time an epigone of Shakespeare, shot himself out of sorrow at the state of the world. A hare fled across a field, a duck swam downriver. A child disappeared without a trace, before everyone’s eyes. The villagers, according to hearsay, were dying from one hour to the next, and the priest was completely taken up with burials. (Strange, the role of hearsay in dreams — it was neither said nor heard, but simply moved silently through the air.) Grandfather’s nosebleeds smelled of damp dog hair. Another child had the first name “Soul.” Someone proclaimed, loudly this time, the importance of hearing in these times.

The next day — it remained rainy, and according to the newspaper, Soria was again the coldest province in Spain — he set out for a farewell stroll through town. Without having intended it, he suddenly found himself standing before the façade of Santo Domingo, its age immediately revealed by its dimensions and the light sandstone, worn smooth in many places by the wind. What a jolt he always received from Romanesque structures; he at once felt their proportions in himself, in his shoulders, his hips, the soles of his feet, like his actual, hidden body. Yes, corporeality: that was the sensation with which he now approached, as slowly as possible, this church shaped like a grain box, in a wide arc. In the very first moment, taking in the delicacy of the surface with its rounded arches and figures, he had thought of a phrase used by Borges, “the brotherliness of the beautiful,” yet at the same time he was overcome with reluctance to absorb the whole thing at once, and he decided to postpone until evening departing for who knows where, and before leaving to come back again, when the daylight on the stone carvings would have changed. For the time being, he merely tried to identify variations in the groups of figures, already dear and familiar to him. And variations there were (without his having to look for them very long), as always in Romanesque sculpture, and they appeared to him again as the secret emblems of the place. Here in Soria they were visible as far as the eye could see: the solicitous way God the Father bent at the hips as he helped the newly created Adam to his feet; the blanket, almost smooth in one representation, in other portrayals consistently lumpy, under which the Three Kings slumbered; the acanthus leaf, shell-shaped, the size of a tree, that rose behind the empty tomb after the Resurrection; in a semicircle above the portal (in almond form the outline of the smiling father with the likewise smiling son on his knees, balancing the thick stone book), the allegorical animals representing the Evangelists, crouching not on the ground but on the laps of angels, and not just the apparently newborn lion cub and the bull calf, but even the mighty eagle …

As he hurried away, he looked back over his shoulder and saw the delicately carved housing — all the more clearly its emptiness — standing, in the expression used by the cabaret artist Karl Valentin, “out in the open”: from this vantage point, the structure, as broad as it was squat (all the apartment buildings around it were taller), with the sky above, in spite of the trucks roaring by, offered a positively ideal image: the building, so utterly different from the rigid façades surrounding it, appeared playful, active precisely in its tranquillity — it was playing. And the thought came to him that back then, eight hundred years ago, at least in Europe, for the duration of one stylistic period, human history, individual as well as collective, had been wonderfully clear. Or was that only the illusion conveyed by this absolutely consistent form (not a mere style)? But how had such a form, at once majestic and childlike, and so readily comprehended, emerged?

Soria, as became apparent now by day, lay between two hills, one wooded and one bare, in a valley sloping down to the Duero. The river flowed past the last, scattered houses, on the other side a vast expanse of craggy land. A stone bridge spanned the river, bearing the road to Zaragoza. At the same time as the arches, the newly arrived observer noted their number. A gentle wind was blowing, and the clouds were in motion. Down there, among the leafless poplars along the bank, an excited dog was chasing the leaves that swirled up now here, now there. The reeds were flattened into the dark water; only a few cattails stuck out. The stranger — strange? — given access here by the locale — struck out in the opposite direction toward the well-known promenade of the poet Machado and went upriver, following a dirt path crisscrossed by the roots of the pines. Silence; a current of air at his temples (he had once imagined that one of the manufacturers responsible for such things might offer for these parts of the face a special moisturizer, so that even the slightest puff of air would be felt by the skin, as the epitome of — what should one call it? — the here-and-now).

Back from the wide-open spaces, he had a cup of coffee in a bar down by the river called Río, a young gypsy behind the counter. A few retired men — the Spanish word, according to the dictionary, was jubilados—were without exception watching the morning TV program with utter concentration and enthusiasm. From the incessant traffic passing on the highway, glasses and cups shook in the hands of all those present. In one corner stood a barely knee-high cylindrical cast-iron stove, tapered toward the top, with vertical fluting and in the middle an ornament like a scallop shell; in the grate down below the fire glowed red-hot. From the tiled floor rose the scent of the fresh sawdust that had been strewn that morning.

Out on the street, as he was climbing the hill, he came upon an elder, its trunk as thick as a sequoia, its short, bright branches forming a myriad of interwoven and crisscrossed arches. No superstition, even without such signs and portents: he would stay in Soria and, as planned, get to work on his “essay.” In between he intended to soak up as much as possible of the mornings and evenings of this easily read little city. “No, I’m not leaving until the thing is done!” In Soria he would watch the last leaves sail off the plane trees. And now the landscape was bathed in that dark, clear light, as if streaming from the earth below, that had always encouraged him to go off at once and write, write, write — without a subject, or for that matter on something like the jukebox. And out into the wide-open spaces, with which here, scarcely out of town, one was promptly surrounded — in which major cities was that the case? — was where he would go every day before sitting down to work, to find the peace and quiet his head required more and more as he got older; once tuned to the silence, the sentences were supposed to take shape on their own; but afterwards he would expose himself to the racket, as well as the quieter corners, of the city; no passageway, no cemetery, no bar, no playing field could be left unnoticed in its respective uniqueness.

But it turned out that just now several Spanish holidays fell at the same time — travel time — and so there would be no rooms available in Soria until the beginning of the following week. That was all right with him; it meant he could again postpone getting started, his usual pattern. And besides, forced to decamp temporarily to another city, he could, upon his departure and return, form a picture of Soria’s location, remote on the high plateau, also from other directions, not only the westerly one from Burgos; he imagined that would be useful for what lay ahead. So he had two days, and he decided to spend the first in the north, the second in the south, both in places that lay outside Castile, first Logroño in the wine-growing region of La Rioja, then in Zaragoza in Aragon; this plan emerged mainly from his study of the bus schedules. But for the time being he sat down in one of those Spanish back-room restaurants where he felt sheltered because there one could be by oneself and yet, through walls no thicker than planks and the frequently open sliding door, follow what was going on out in the bar, where, what with a television set and pinball machines, things were almost always pretty lively.

In mid-afternoon a nun was the only other passenger on the bus to Logrono. It was raining, and in the mountain pass between the two provinces the route seemed to lead through the middle of the main rain cloud; other than its billowing grayness, there was nothing to be seen through the windows. From the bus’s radio came “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, a song that more than any other stood for that “roar of the jukebox,” and was one of very few that had held their own in jukeboxes all over the world (had not been replaced), a “classic,” one of the passengers thought to himself — while the other, in her black monastic garb, talked with the driver, to the accompaniment of the space-filling sonority of Bill Wyman’s guitar, which seemed to command respect, about the construction accident that had occurred in a side street nearby while he was eating in his sheltered back-room restaurant: two men crushed under reinforcing rods and freshly poured concrete. Next came Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas” on the radio, that song pleading with the beloved not to leave him, another of those few songs that constituted what might be called the classics of the jukebox, at least according to his inquiries in French-speaking countries, and listed as a rule on the far right in the sacrosanct column (where in Austrian music boxes, for example, one found so-called folk music, and in Italian ones operatic arias and choruses, above all “Celeste Aïda” and the prisoners’ chorus from Nabucco). But it was strange, the traveler thought, that the Belgian singer’s psalm, rising out of the depths, the human voice almost alone, holding nothing back, searingly personal—“I tell you this, and you alone!”—did not seem at all suitable for an automatic record player set up in a public place, coin-operated, yet did seem suitable here, in this almost empty bus taking the curves of a pass almost two thousand meters above sea level, crossing a gray no-man’s-land of dreary drizzle and fog.

The pattern of the sidewalk tiles in Logroño was bunches of grapes and grape leaves, and the town had an official chronicler with a daily page to himself in the newspaper, La Rioja. Instead of the Duero, the river here was the headwaters of the Ebro, and instead of being on the edge of town, it ran straight through the middle, with the newer part of the city as usual on the opposite bank. High snowbanks lined the wide river; on closer inspection, they turned out to be industrial effluent rocking in the current, and against the façades of the tall buildings on both sides of the river, laundry flapped in the dusky rain. Although he had observed a similar sight in Soria, and although Logroño, down here in the wine-growing plains with a noticeably milder climate, showed itself in its holiday illumination to be an expansive, elegant city with avenidas and arcades, he felt something like the tug of homesickness at the prospect of settling in for the winter up there on the meseta, where he had spent barely a night and half a day.

Zaragoza on the following day, to the southeast and even farther down in the broad Ebro Valley, had its sidewalks decorated with looping serpentines, which, he thought, represented the meanders of the river, and in fact the town appeared to him, after his first fruitless wanderings in search of the center, a pattern by now familiar to him in Spain, as a royal city, as indicated by the name of the soccer club. Here he could have read foreign newspapers every day, seen all the latest films in the original language, as only in a metropolis, and been there on the weekends when one royal team played against another from Madrid, with Emilio Butragueño himself on the ball — he had a pair of small binoculars in his luggage. Butragueño’s uniform was always clean, even in the mud, and one felt one could believe him when he once replied to a reporter who asked whether soccer was an art form: “Yes, for seconds at a time.” In the city’s theater Beckett was being performed, and people were buying tickets as they did at movie box offices, and in the art museum, looking at the paintings of Goya, who had served his apprenticeship here in Zaragoza, he could have acquired the same receptivity of the senses for work as out there in the stillness around Soria, as well as the agreeable impertinence with which this painter infected one. Yet now only the other town could be considered, where, on the rock-strewn slopes adjacent to the new construction, flocks of sheep had already worn paths and where, despite the altitude, sparrows flew straight up in the wind — he would have missed them. (Someone had once observed that something you could always count on seeing on the television news, in an on-location report, whether from Tokyo or Johannesburg, was the sparrows: in the foreground a group of statesmen lined up for the camera, or smoking ruins; in the background the sparrows.)

What he undertook to do instead in these two cities was to look casually for a jukebox; there had to be at least one in Logroño as in Zaragoza, from earlier times and still in operation (a newly installed one was unlikely; in the Spanish bars the least bit of free space belonged to the slot machines that were squeezed in, one on top of the other). He thought that in the course of time he had developed a sort of instinct for possible jukebox locations. There was little hope downtown, or in urban renewal areas, or near historic monuments, churches, parks, avenues (not to mention the fancy residential sections). He had almost never come upon a music box in a spa or winter resort (although the usually unknown, out-of-the-way neighboring communities were under suspicion, so to speak — O Samedan near Saint Moritz), almost never in yacht harbors or seaside resorts (but certainly in fishing harbors and, even more frequently, in ferry stations: O Dover, 0 Ostende, 0 Reggio di Calabria, 0 Piraeus, 0 Kyle of Lochalsh with the ferry across to the Inner Hebrides, 0 Aomori far in the north of the Japanese main island of Hondo, with the meanwhile discontinued ferry over to Hokkaido), less frequently in bars on the mainland and in the interior than on islands and near borders. In his experience, the following locations were especially hot: housing developments along highways, too sprawling to be villages, yet without a downtown, off the beaten track for any kind of tourist traffic, in almost uncontoured plains without lakes nearby (and if there was a river, far outside of town and dried up during most of the year), inhabited by unusual numbers of foreigners, foreign workers and/or soldiers (garrisons), and even there jukeboxes could be ferreted out neither in the middle — this often marked by nothing more than a larger rain puddle — nor on the outskirts (there, or even farther out, along the highways, one found at most a discotheque), but in between, most likely next to the barracks, by the railroad station, in the gas-station bar, or in an isolated saloon along a canal (of course in a bad neighborhood, “on the other side of the freight tracks,” for instance, the face of the most faceless conglomerations). Such a prime location for a jukebox, aside from the one of his birth, he had once found on the Friuli plain, in Casarza, which has given itself the epithet “della Delizia” because of the type of grapes harvested in the region. From the pleasant, wealthy, jukebox-purged capital of Udine he had arrived there one summer evening, “behind the Tagliamento,” going on only six words from a poem by Pasolini, who had spent part of his youth in this small town and later had castigated the jukeboxes of Rome, together with the pinball machines, as an American continuation of the war by other means: “in the desperate void of Casarza.” After an attempted walking tour that would include the outskirts of town, soon broken off because of the traffic on all the arterial roads, he turned around, went at random into the bars, of which there were not a few, and in almost every one he could see from the entrance a jukebox glowing at him (one fancy one had a VCR with a screen above it, from which the sound also emanated). And all these variously shaped old and new boxes were in operation, playing not background music, as was often the case elsewhere, but loud, insistent music; they were blaring. It was a Sunday evening, and in the bars — the closer he got to the railroad station, the more so — farewells were taking place or recruits were already waiting out the last hours before having to report for duty at midnight, most of them apparently having just returned by train from a short furlough. As it got later, most of them no longer formed groups but sat there by themselves. They gathered around a Wurlitzer, a reproduction of the classic rainbow-shaped type, with bubbles pulsing around the rainbow. The soldiers were clustered so thickly that the blinking lights of the machine peeked through their bodies here and there, and their faces and necks, bent toward the record arm, were bathed alternately in blue, red, and yellow. The street across from the station formed a wide curve behind them and immediately disappeared into the darkness. In the station bar itself, the surfaces were already being washed down. But a couple of the fellows in gray-and-brown uniforms were still hovering near the jukebox, some of them with their duffel bags already on their shoulders. Here, to match the neon lighting, the jukebox was a newer, no-nonsense model in bright metal. Each man stood there by himself, and at the same time as if in formation around the apparatus, which, in the otherwise empty room, with the tables shoved against the wall and a chair here and there, boomed out at a higher volume over the damp tiled floor. While one of the soldiers stepped aside as the mop approached, his eyes, wide open, unblinking, remained fixed in one direction; another lingered, his head turned back over his shoulder, on the threshold. It was full moon, in the glass door the shaking, rattling, pounding, long-drawn-out, of a dark freight passing, which blocked the corn fields beyond the tracks. At the bar the young woman with even, fine features and a gap between her teeth.

But in these Spanish towns his instinct betrayed him every time. Even in bars in the poorer parts of town, behind piles of debris, at the end of a cul-de-sac, with that dim lighting that here and there made him hasten his steps even at a distance, he did not find so much as the coldest trail, even in the form of a paler outline on a sooty wall, of the object he sought. The music played there came — standing outside, he sometimes let himself be deceived through the walls — from radios, cassette players, or, in special cases, from a record player. The Spanish street bars, and there seemed to be more of them in every town than anywhere else in the world, were perhaps either too new for such an almost ancient object (and all lacked the back rooms suitable for it), or too old, and intended mainly for old people, who sat there seriously playing cards — jukebox and cardplaying, yes, but only in the less serious establishments — or sat with their heads propped in their hands, alone. And he imagined that in their heyday jukeboxes had been banned by the dictatorship here, and after that had simply not been in demand. To be sure, he made not a few discoveries in the course of his futile searching, taking a certain pleasure in the almost sure fruitlessness of it, about the special corners, the variations in the seemingly so similar cities.

Back from Zaragoza in Soria, of whose eastern province he had seen hardly anything, traveling at night on a railroad line that ran far from any roads, he now needed a room suitable for his essay; he wanted to get started — finally — the very next day. Up high on one of the two hills, or down below in the midst of the town? Up high, and by definition outside of town, he would perhaps feel too cut off again, and surrounded by streets and houses too confined. A room looking out on an inner courtyard made him too melancholy, one looking out on a square distracted him too much, one facing north would have too little sun for writing, in one facing south the paper would blind him when the sun was shining, on the bare hill the wind would blow in, on the wooded one dogs being walked would be barking all day, in the pensions — he checked out all of them — the other guests would be too near, in the hotels, which he also circled, he would probably be alone too much in winter for a good writing mood. For the night he took a room in the hotel on the bare hill. The street leading up to it ended in front of the stone building in a muddy square; the footpath into town — he tried it out at once — led through a steppe covered with moss and thistles, then past the façade of Santo Domingo, its very existence stimulating when he looked at it, and straight to the small squares, whose dimensions included plane trees, evocative of the mountains, the remaining leaves swaying in the breeze, curiously full at the tips of the highest branches, glittering star-shaped against the night-black sky. The room up there appealed to him also: not too confining and not too spacious — as a rule, he did not feel as if he was in the right place when there was too much space. The city, not too close and not too far, also not too far below, shone into the neither too large-paned nor too small-paned window, toward which he shoved the table, away from the mirror, experimenting further: a tiny table, to be sure, but enough of a surface for a piece of paper, pencils, and an eraser. He felt well taken care of here; this was his place for the time being.

When the next morning came, he experimented with sitting at the right hour, testing the light as it would really be, the temperature as it should be for the essay: now the room was too noisy for him (yet he should have known that precisely in so-called quiet locations the noises posed far more of a risk to collecting one’s thoughts than on the loudest streets, for they came abruptly instead of steadily — suddenly the radio, laughter, echoes, a chair scraping, something popping, hissing, and, to make it worse, from close by and inside the building, from corridors, neighboring rooms, the ceiling; once the writer’s concentration was lost, the image got away from him, and without that, no language). Then it was strange that the next room was not only too cold for sitting hour after hour (didn’t he know that only luxury hotels kept the heat on during the day, and that, besides, when the writing was going well, he involuntarily always breathed in such a way that he didn’t feel the cold?), but this time also too quiet, as if the enclosed spaces meant being locked in and a sense of openness were available only outdoors in nature, and how to let this kind of quiet in the window in December?

The third room had two beds — one too many for him. The fourth room had only one door separating it from the next room — at least one too few for him … In this way he learned the Spanish word for “too much,” a very long word, demasiado. Wasn’t one of Theophrastus’ “characters” or types that man “dissatisfied with the given,” who, upon being kissed by his sweetheart, says he wonders whether she also loves him with her soul, and who is angry with Zeus, not because he makes it rain but because the rain comes too late, and who, finding a money purse on the path, says, “But I’ve never found a treasure!”? And a child’s rhyme also came to mind, about someone who was never happy anywhere, and he changed the words a little: “A little man I knew was puzzled what to do. / At home it was too cold, so he went into the wood. / In the wood it was too moist — soft grass was his next choice. / Finding the grass too green, he went next to Berlin. / Berlin was far too large, so he bought himself a barge. /The barge proved far too small, so he went home after all. / At home …” Wasn’t this the recognition that he wasn’t in the right place anywhere? On the contrary, he had always been in the right place somewhere — for instance? — in locations where he had got down to writing — or where a jukebox stood (though not in private dwellings!). So he had been in the right place wherever, in any case and from the outset, it was clear that in the long run he couldn’t stay?

Finally he took the room that turned up next, and it was good; whatever challenges came his way — he would accept them. “Who will win out — the noise or us?” He sharpened his bundle of pencils out the window, pencils he had bought in all different countries during his years of traveling, and then again often German brands: how small one of them had become since that January in Edinburgh — was it already that long ago? As the pencil curls swirled away in the wind, they mixed with ash from the smoke of a wood fire, as down below, in front of the building, by the kitchen door, which gave directly on the thistle-, rock-, and moss-steppe, an apprentice with a knife as long as his arm was cleaning a pile of even longer fish, the gleaming scales of the fish shooting sparkling into the air. “A good sign or not?”—But now, after all this, it was too late in the day to get started. Accustomed to postponing his form of play, he felt once again actually relieved and used the delay for a walk out onto the steppe, in order to check out a few possible paths for the quality of their soil — not too hard, not too soft — and for the atmospheric conditions: not too exposed to westerly storms, but also not too sheltered.

Meanwhile something was happening to him. When he first had the inspiration — that’s what it was — which at once made sense to him — of writing an “essay on the jukebox,” he had pictured it as a dialogue onstage: this object, and what it could mean to an individual, was for most people so bizarre that an idea presented itself: having one person, a sort of audience representative, assume the role of interrogator, and a second appear as an “expert” on the subject, in contrast to Platonic dialogues, where the one who asked the questions, Socrates, secretly knew more about the problem than the other, who, puffed up with preconceptions, at least at the beginning, claimed to know the answer; perhaps it would be most effective if the expert, too, discovered only when he had to field the other’s questions what the relative “place value” of these props had been in the drama of his life. In the course of time the stage dialogue faded from his mind, and the “essay” hovered before him as an unconnected composite of many different forms of writing, corresponding to the — what should he call it — uneven? arrhythmic? ways in which he had experienced a jukebox and remembered it: momentary images should alternate with blow-by-blow narratives, suddenly broken off; mere jottings would be followed by a detailed reportage about a single music box, together with a specific locale; from a pad of notes would come, without transition, a leap to one with quotations, which, again without transition, without harmonizing linkage, would make way perhaps to a litany-like recitation of the titles and singers listed on a particular find — he pictured, as the underlying form that would give the whole thing a sort of coherence, the question-and-answer play recurring periodically, though in fragmentary fashion, and receding again, joined by similarly fragmentary filmed scenes, each organized around a different jukebox, from which would emanate all sorts of happenings or a still life, in ever widening circles — which could extend as far as a different country, or only to the beech at the end of a railroad platform. He hoped he could have his “essay” fade out with a “Ballad of the Jukebox,” a singable, so to speak “rounded” song about this thing, though only if, after all the leaps in imagery, it emerged on its own.

It had seemed to him that such a writing process was appropriate not merely to the particular subject matter but also to the times themselves. Didn’t the narrative forms of previous eras — their consistency, their gestures of conjuring up and mastering (strangers’ destinies), their claim to totality, as amateurish as it was naïve — when employed in modern books strike him nowadays as mere bluster? Varied approximations, some minor, some major, and in permeable forms, instead of the standard imprisoning forms, were what he felt books should be now, precisely because of his most complete, intense, unifying experiences with objects: preserving distance; circumscribing; sketching in; flirting around — giving your subject a protective escort from the sidelines. And now, as he aimlessly checked out trails in the savanna, suddenly an entirely new rhythm sprang up in him, not an alternating, sporadic one, but a single, steady one, and, above all, one that, instead of circling and flirting around, went straight and with complete seriousness in medias res: the rhythm of narrative. At first he experienced everything he encountered as he went along as a component of the narrative; whatever he took in was promptly narrated inside him; moments in the present took place in the narrative past, and not as in dreams but, without any fuss, as mere assertions, short and sweet as the moment itself: “Thistles had blown into the wire fence. An older man with a plastic bag bent down for a mushroom. A dog hopped by on three legs and made one think of a deer; its coat was yellow, its face white; gray-blue smoke wafted over the scene from a stone cottage. The seedpods rustling in the only tree standing sounded like matchboxes being shaken. From the Duero leaped fish, the wind-blown waves upstream had caps of foam, and on the other bank the water lapped the foot of the cliffs. In the train from Zaragoza the lights were already lit, and a handful of people sat in the carriages …”

But then this quiet narration of the present also carried over into his impending “essay,” conceived as varied and playful; it became transformed, even before the first sentence was written, into a narrative so compelling and powerful that all other forms promptly faded to insignificance. That did not seem terrible to him, but overwhelmingly splendid; for in the rhythm of this narration he heard the voice of warmth-giving imagination, in which he had continued to believe, though it all too seldom touched his inner heart: he believed in it precisely because of the stillness it brought, even in the midst of deafening racket; the stillness of nature, however far outside, was then nothing by comparison. And the characteristic feature of imagination was that in conjunction with its images the place and the locale where he would write his narrative appeared. True, there had been times in the past when he had felt a similar urge, but at such times he had relocated a birch in Cologne to Indianapolis as a cypress, or a cow path in Salzburg to Yugoslavia, or the place where he was writing had been consigned to the background as something unimportant; but this time Soria was to appear as Soria (perhaps also with Burgos, and also with Vitoria, where an old native had greeted him before he said anything), and would be as much the subject matter of the narrative as the jukebox.

Until far into the night he continued his observations in narrative form, though by now it had become a form of torture — literally every petty detail (the passerby with a toothpick in his mouth, the name Benita Soria Verde on a gravestone, the poet’s elm, weighted with stones and concrete in honor of Antonio Machado, the missing letters in the HOTEL sign) imposed itself on him and wanted to be narrated. This was no longer the compelling, warming power of imagery carrying him along, but clearly a cold compulsion, ascending from his heart to his head, a senseless, repeated hurling of himself against a gate long since closed, and he wondered whether narration, which had first seemed divine, hadn’t been a snare and a delusion — an expression of his fear in the face of all the isolated, unconnected phenomena? An escape? The result of cowardice? — But was a man walking along with a toothpick between his lips, in the winter, on the meseta of Castile, his nodded response to a greeting, really so insignificant? — Be that as it might: he did not want to know in advance the first sentence with which he would begin on the morrow; in the past, whenever he had hammered out the first sentence, he had promptly found himself blocked when it came to the second. — On the other hand: away with all such patterns! — And so on …

The morning of the following day. The table at the window of the hotel room. Empty plastic bags blowing across the rock-strewn landscape, catching here and there on the thistles. On the horizon, an escarpment shaped like a ski jump, with a rain-bearing mushroom cloud over the approach ramp. Closing his eyes. Jamming a wad of paper into the cracks around the window through which the wind whistles its worst. Closing his eyes again. Pulling out the table drawer whose handle rattles as soon as he begins to write. Closing his eyes for the third time. Howls of distress. Opening the window: a small black dog right beneath it, hitched to the foundation, drenched with rain as only a dog can be drenched; its wails, which briefly fall silent now and then, accompanied by clouds of breath visibly puffed out into the steppe. Aullar was the Spanish word for “howl.” Closing his eyes for the fourth time.

On the ride from Logroño to Zaragoza he had seen the stone cubes of the vintners’ huts out in the winter-deserted vineyards of the Ebro Valley. In the region he came from, one could also see such huts along the paths that led through the grain fields, though built of wood, and the size of a plank shed. On the inside they also looked like a shed, with the light coming only through the chinks between the boards and the knotholes, clumps of grass on the floor, stinging nettles in the corners, growing luxuriantly between the harvest tools leaning there. And yet each of the huts on the few acres his grandfather tenant-farmed felt to him like a realm unto itself. As a rule, an elder grew nearby, its crown providing shade for this thing set out in the middle of the field, and its arching branches forcing their way into the interior of the hut. And there was just room enough for a small table and a bench, which could also be set outside by the elder. Wrapped in cloths to keep fresh and be protected from insects, the jug of cider and some cake for a snack. In the domain of these sheds he had felt more at home than ever in solidly built houses. (In such houses, a comparable sense of being in the right place had come over him at most when he glanced into a windowless storage room or stood on the threshold between inside and outside, where one was still safe indoors while snow and rain from outside blew lightly against one.) Yet he viewed the field huts less as refuges than as places of rest or peace. Later it was enough simply to glimpse in his region a light gray, weathered storage shed, blown crooked by the wind, off in the distance by a fallow field, in passing; he would feel his heart leap up and dash to it and be at home in the hut for a moment, along with the flies of summer, the wasps of autumn, and the coldness of rusting chains in winter.

The huts back home had been gone for a long time. Only the much larger barns, used exclusively for hay storage, still existed. But long ago, at a time when the huts were still there, the domestic or localized magic they held for him had been transferred to jukeboxes. Even as an adolescent, with his parents, he didn’t go to the inn or to have a soda, but to the “Wurlitzer” (“Wurlitzer is Jukebox” was the advertising slogan), to listen to records. What he had described as his sense of having arrived and feeling sheltered, each time only fleetingly, in the realm of the field huts was literally true of the music boxes as well. Yet the external form of the various devices and even the selections they offered meant at first less than the particular sound emanating from them. This sound did not come from above, as from the radio that stood at home in the corner with the shrine, but from underground, and also, although the volume might be the same, instead of from the usual tinny box, from an inner space whose vibrations filled the room. It was as if it were not an automatic device but rather an additional instrument that imbued the music — though only a certain kind of music, as he realized in retrospect — with its underlying sound, comparable perhaps to the rattling of a train, when it suddenly becomes, as the train passes over an iron bridge, a primeval thunder. Much later, a child was standing one time by such a jukebox (it was playing Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” his own selection), the child still so small that the entire force of the loudspeaker down below was directed at his body. The child was listening, all ears, all solemn, all absorbed, while his parents had already reached the door, were ready to leave, calling to the child again and again, in between smiling at his behavior, as if to apologize for their offspring to the other patrons, until the song had died away and the child, still solemn and reverent, walked past his father and mother onto the street. (Did this suggest that the obelisk-shaped jukeboxes’ lack of success had less to do with their unusual appearance than with the fact that the music was directed upward, toward the ceiling?)

Unlike with the field huts, he was not satisfied to have the jukeboxes simply stand there; they had to be ready to play, quietly humming — even better than having just been set in motion by a stranger’s hand — lit up as brightly as possible, as if from their inner depths; there was nothing more mournful than a dark, cold, obsolete metal box, possibly even shamefacedly hidden from view under a crocheted Alpine throw. Yet that did not quite correspond to the facts, for he now recalled a defective jukebox in the Japanese temple site of Nikko, the first one encountered in that country after a long journey between south and north, hidden under bundles of magazines, the coin slot covered over with a strip of tape and promptly uncovered by him — but at any rate there, at last. To celebrate this find he had drunk another sake and let the train to Tokyo out there in the darkness depart without him. Before that, at an abandoned temple site way up in the woods, he had passed a still smoldering peat fire, next to it a birch broom and a mound of snow, and farther along in the mountainous terrain a boulder had poked out of a brook, and as the water shot over it, it had sounded just like the water in a certain other rocky-mountain brook — as if one were receiving, if one’s ears were open to it, the broadcast of a half-sung, half-drummed speech before the plenary session of the united nations of a planet far off in the universe. Then, at night in Tokyo, people had stepped over others lying every which way on the railroad steps, and even later, again in a temple precinct, a drunk had stopped before the incense burner, had prayed, and then staggered off into the darkness.

It was not only the belly resonance: the “American hits” had also sounded entirely different to him back then on the jukeboxes of his native land than on the radio in his house. He always wanted the radio volume turned up when Paul Anka sang his “Diana,” Dion his “Sweet Little Sheila,” and Ricky Nelson his “Gypsy Woman,” but at the same time he felt guilty that such non-music appealed to him (later, when he was at the university and finally had a record player in his room, with the radio as an amplifier, for the first few years it was reserved for what was conventionally felt to deserve the name of music). But from the jukebox he boldly unleashed the trills, howls, shouts, rattling, and booming that not merely gave him pleasure but filled him with shudders of rapture, warmth, and fellowship. In the reverberating steel-guitar ride of “Apache,” the cold, stale, and belch-filled Espresso Bar on the highway from the “City of the Plebiscite of 1920” to the”City of the Popular Uprising of 1938” got plugged into an entirely different kind of electricity, with which one could choose, on the glowing scale at hip-level, numbers from “Memphis, Tennessee,” felt oneself turning into the mysterious “handsome stranger,” and heard the rumbling and squeaking of the trucks outside transformed into the steady roar of a convoy on “Route 66,” with the thought: No matter where to — just out of here!

Although back home the music boxes had also been a gathering point for Saturday-night dances — a large semicircle around them was usually left clear — he himself would never have thought of joining in. He did enjoy watching the dancers, who in the dimness of the cafés became mere outlines around the massive illuminated case whose rumble seemed to come out of the ground — but for him a jukebox, like the field huts earlier, was a source of peace, or something that made one feel peaceful, made one sit still, in relative motionlessness or breathlessness, interrupted only by the measured, positively ceremonial act of “going to push the buttons.” And in listening to a jukebox he was never beside himself, or feverish, or dreamy, as he otherwise was with music that affected him — even strictly classical music, and the seemingly rapturous music of earlier, preceding eras. The dangerous part about listening to music, someone had once told him, was the propensity it had to make one perceive something that remained to be done as already done. The jukebox sound of his early years, on the other hand, literally caused him to collect himself, and awakened, or activated, his images of what might be possible and encouraged him to contemplate them.

The places where one could mull things over as nowhere else sometimes became, during his years at the university, places of evasion, comparable to movie theaters; yet, while he tended to sneak into the latter, he would enter his various jukebox cafés in a more carefree manner, telling himself that these proven places of self-reflection were also the right places for studying. This turned out to be a delusion, for once he was alone again, for instance before bedtime, and tried to review the material he had gone over in such a public setting, as a rule he had not retained much. What he owed to those niches or hideouts during the cold years of his university studies were experiences that he now, in the process of writing about them, could only characterize as “wonderful.” One evening in late winter he was sitting in one of his trusty jukebox cafés, underlining a text all the more heavily the less he was taking it in. This café was in a rather untypical location for such places, at the edge of the city park, and its glass display cases with pastries and its marble-topped tables were also incongruous. The box was playing, but he was waiting as usual for the songs he had selected; only then was it right. Suddenly, after the pause between records, which, along with those noises — clicking, a whirring sound of searching back and forth through the belly of the device, snapping, swinging into place, a crackle before the first measure — constituted the essence of the jukebox, as it were, a kind of music came swelling out of the depths that made him experience, for the first time in his life, as later only in moments of love, what is technically referred to as “levitation,” and which he himself, more than a quarter of a century later, would call — what? “epiphany”? “ecstasy”? “fusing with the world”? Or thus: “That — this song, this sound — is now me; with these voices; these harmonies, I have become, as never before in life, who I am: as this song is, so am I, complete!”? (As usual there was an expression for it, but as usual it was not quite the same thing: “He became one with the music.”)

Without at first wanting to know the identity of the group whose voices, carried by the guitars, streamed forth singly, in counterpoint, and finally in unison — previously he had preferred soloists on jukeboxes — he was simply filled with amazement. In the following weeks, too, when he went to the place every day for hours, to sit surrounded by this big yet so frivolous sound that he let the other patrons offer him, he remained in a state of amazement devoid of name-curiosity. (Imperceptibly the music box had become the hub of the Park Café, where previously the most prominent sound had been the rattle of newspaper holders, and the only records that were played, over and over, were the two by that no-name group.) But then, when he discovered one day, during his now infrequent listening to the radio, what that choir of sassy angelic tongues was called, who, with their devil-may-care bellowing of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Love Me Do,” “Roll Over, Beethoven,” lifted all the weight in the world from his shoulders, these became the first “non-serious” records he bought (subsequently he bought hardly any other kind), and then in the café with columns he was the one who kept pushing the same buttons for “I Saw Her Standing There” (on the jukebox, of course) and “Things We Said Today” (by now without looking, the numbers and letters more firmly fixed in his head than the Ten Commandments), until one day the wrong songs, spurious voices, came nattering out: the management had left the old label and slipped in the “current hit,” in German … And to this day, he thought, with the sound of the early Beatles in his ear, coming from that Wurlitzer surrounded by the trees in the park: when would the world see such loveliness again?

In the years that followed, jukeboxes lost some of their magnetic attraction for him — perhaps less because he now was more likely to listen to music at home, and surely not because he was getting older, but — as he thought he recognized when he got down to work on the “essay”—because he had meanwhile been living abroad. Of course he always popped in a coin whenever he encountered — in Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, Cockfosters, Santa Teresa Gallura — one of these old friends, eager to be of service, humming and sparkling with color, but it was more out of habit or tradition, and he tended to listen with only half an ear. But its significance promptly returned during his brief stopovers in what should have been his ancestral region. Whereas some people on a trip home go first “to the cemetery,” “down to the lake,” or “to their favorite café,” he not infrequently made his way straight from the bus station to a music box, in hopes that, properly permeated with its roar, he could set out on his other visits, seeming less foreign and maladroit.

Yet there were also stories to tell of jukeboxes abroad that had played not only their records but also a role at the heart of larger events. Each of these events had occurred not just abroad but at a border: at the end of a familiar sort of world. If America was, so to speak, the “home of the jukebox,” when he was there none had made much of an impression on him — except, and there time and again, in Alaska. But: did he consider Alaska part of the “United States”?—One Christmas Eve he had arrived in Anchorage, and after midnight Mass, when outside the door of the little wooden church, amid all the strangers, him included, a rare cheerfulness had taken hold, he had gone to a bar. There, in the dimness and confusion of the drunken patrons, he saw, by the glowing jukebox, the only calm figure, an Indian woman. She had turned toward him, a large, proud yet mocking face, and this would be the only time he ever danced with someone to the pounding of a jukebox. Even those patrons who were looking for a fight made way for them, as if this woman, young, or rather ageless, as she was, were the elder in that setting. Later the two of them had gone out together through a back door, where, in an icy lot, her Land Cruiser was parked, the side windows painted with Alaska pines silhouetted on the shores of an empty lake. It was snowing. From a distance, without their having touched each other except in the light-handedness of dancing, she invited him to come with her; she and her parents had a fishing business in a village beyond Cook Inlet. And in this moment it became clear to him that for once in his life there was a decision imagined not by him alone but by someone else; and at once he could imagine moving with the strange woman beyond the border out there in the snow, in complete seriousness, for good, without return, and giving up his name, his type of work, every one of his habits; those eyes there, that place, often dreamed of, far from all that was familiar — it was the moment when Percival hovered on the verge of the question that would prove his salvation, and he? on the verge of the corresponding Yes. And like Percival, and not because he was uncertain — he had that image, after all — but as if it were innate and quite proper, he hesitated, and in the next moment the image, the woman, had literally vanished into the snowy night. For the next few evenings he kept going back to the place again and again, and waited for her by the jukebox, then even made inquiries and tried to track her down, but although many remembered her, no one could tell him where she lived. Even a decade later, this experience was one of the reasons he made a point of standing in line all morning for an American visa before flying back from Japan, then actually got off the plane in the wintry darkness of Anchorage and spent several days wandering through the blowing snow in this city to whose clear air and broad horizons his heart was attached. In the meantime, nouvelle cuisine had even reached Alaska, and the “saloon” had turned into a “bistro,” with the appropriate menu, a rise in status that naturally, and this was to be observed not only in Anchorage, left no room for a heavy, old-fashioned music machine amid all the bright, light furniture. But an indication that one might be present were the figures — of all races — staggering onto the sidewalk from a tubelike barracks, as if from its most remote corner, or outside, among hunks of ice, a person surrounded by a police patrol and flailing around — as a rule, a white male — who then, lying on his stomach on the ground, his shoulders and his shins, bent back against his thighs, tightly tied, his hands cuffed behind his back, was slid like a sled along the ice and snow to the waiting police van. Inside the barracks, one could count on being greeted right up front at the bar, on which rested the heads of dribbling and vomiting sleepers (men and women, mostly Eskimos), by a classic jukebox, dominating the long tube of a room, with the corresponding old faithfuls — one would find all the singles of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and then hear John Fogerty’s piercing, gloomy laments cut through the clouds of smoke — somewhere in the course of his minstrel’s wandering, he had “lost the connection,” and “If I at least had a dollar for every song I’ve sung!” while from down at the railroad station, open in winter only for freight, the whistle of a locomotive, with the odd name for the far north of Southern Pacific Railway, sends its single, prolonged organ note through the whole city, and from a wire in front of the bridge to the boat harbor, open only in summer, dangles a strangled crow.

Did this suggest that music boxes were something for idlers, for those who loafed around cities, and, in their more modern form, around the world? — No. He, at any rate, sought out jukeboxes less in times of idleness than when he had work, or plans, and particularly after returning from all sorts of foreign parts to the place he came from. The equivalent of walking out to find silence before the hours spent writing was, afterwards, almost as regularly, going to a jukebox. — For distraction? — No. When he was on the track of something, the last thing in the world he wanted was to be distracted from it. Over time his house had in fact become a house without music, without a record player and the like; whenever the news on the radio was followed by music, of whatever kind, he would turn it off; also, when time hung heavy, in hours of emptiness and dulled senses, he had only to imagine sitting in front of the television instead of alone, and he would prefer his present state. Even movie theaters, which in earlier days had been a sort of shelter after work, he now avoided more and more. By now he was too often overcome, especially in them, by a sense of being lost to the world, from which he feared he would never emerge and never find his way back to his own concerns, and that he left in the middle of the film was simply running away from such afternoon nightmares. — So he went to jukeboxes in order to collect himself, as at the beginning? — That wasn’t it anymore, either. Perhaps he, who in the course of the weeks in Soria had tried to puzzle out the writings of Teresa of Avila, could explain “going to sit” with these objects after sitting at his desk by a somewhat cocky comparison: the saint had been influenced by a religious controversy of her times, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, between two groups, having to do with the best way to move closer to God. One group — the so-called recogidos-believed they were supposed to “collect” themselves by contracting their muscles and such, and the others—dejados, “leavers,” or “relaxers”—simply opened themselves up passively to whatever God wanted to work in their soul, their alma. And Teresa of Avila seemed to be closer to the leavers than to the collectors, for she said that when someone set out to give himself more to God, he could be overwhelmed by the evil spirit — and so he sat by his jukeboxes, so to speak, not to gather concentration for going back to work, but to relax for it. Without his doing anything but keeping an ear open for the special jukebox chords—“special,” too, because here, in a public place, he was not exposed to them but had chosen them, was “playing” them himself, as it were — the continuation took shape in him, as he let himself go: images that had long since become lifeless now began to move, needed only to be written down, as next to (in Spanish junto, attached to) the music box he was listening to Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” And from Alice’s “Una notte speciale,” played day after day, among other things, an entirely unplanned woman character entered the story on which he was working, and developed in all directions. And unlike after having too much to drink, the things he noted down after such listening still had substance the next day. So in those periods of reflection (which never proved fertile at home, when he tried, at his desk, to force them; he was acquainted with intentional thinking only in the form of making comparisons and distinctions), he would set out not only to walk as far as possible but also out to the jukebox joints. When he was sitting in the pimps’ hangout, whose box had once been shot at, or in the café of the unemployed, with its table for patients out on passes from the nearby mental hospital — silent, expressionless palefaces, in motion only for swallowing pills with beer — no one wanted to believe him that he had come not for the atmosphere but to hear “Hey Joe” and “Me and Bobby McGee” again. — But didn’t that mean that he sought out jukeboxes in order to, as people said, sneak away from the present? — Perhaps. Yet as a rule the opposite was true: with his favorite object there, anything else around acquired a presentness all its own. Whenever possible, he would find a seat in such joints from which he could see the entire room and a bit of the outside. Here he would often achieve, in consort with the jukebox, along with letting his imagination roam, and without engaging in the observing he found so distasteful, a strengthening of himself, or an immersion in the present, which applied to the other sights as well. And what became present about them was not so much their striking features or their particular attractions as their ordinary aspects, even just the familiar forms or colors, and such enhanced presentness seemed valuable to him — nothing more precious or more worthy of being passed on than this; a sort of heightened awareness such as otherwise occurs only with a book that stimulates reflection. So it meant something, quite simply, when a man left, a branch stirred, the bus was yellow and turned off at the station, the intersection formed a triangle, the chalk was lying at the edge of the pool table, it was raining, and, and, and. Yes, that was it: the present was equipped with flexible joints! Thus, even the little habits of “us jukebox players” deserved attention, along with the few variations. While he himself usually propped one hand on his hip while he pushed the buttons, and leaned forward a little, almost touching the thing, another person stood some distance away, legs spread, arms outstretched like a technician; and a third let his fingers rebound from the buttons like a pianist, then immediately went away, sure of the result, or remained, as if waiting for the outcome of an experiment, until the sound came (and then perhaps disappeared without listening to any more, out onto the street), or as a matter of principle had all his songs selected by others, to whom he called out from his table the codes, which he knew by heart. What they all had in common was that they seemed to see the jukebox as a sort of living thing, a pet: “Since yesterday she hasn’t been quite right.” “I dunno what’s wrong with her today; she’s acting crazy.”—So was one of these devices just like any other, as far as he was concerned? — No. There were telling differences, ranging from clear aversion to downright tenderness or actual reverence. — Toward a mass-produced object? — Toward the human touches in it. The form of the device itself mattered less and less for him as time went on. As far as he was concerned, the jukebox could be a wartime product made of wood, or could be called — instead of Wurlitzer — Music Chest, or Symphony, or Fanfare, and such a product of the German economic miracle could look like a small box, even have no lights at all, be made of dark, opaque glass, silent and to all appearances out of commission, but then the list of selections would light up once you put the coin in, and after you pushed the buttons that internal whirring would begin, accompanied by the selector light on the black glass front. Not even the characteristic jukebox sound was so decisive for him anymore, emanating from the depths as from under many soundless layers, the unique roaring that could often be heard only if one listened for it, similar, he thought one time, to the way the “river” in William Faulkner’s story can be heard far below the silent, standing ocean waters in the land the river has flooded from horizon to horizon, as the “roaring of the Mississippi.” In a pinch, he could make do with a wall box, where the sound came out flatter, or more tinny, than it ever had from a transistor radio, and if absolutely necessary, if there was so much noise in the place that the actual sound of the music became inaudible, even a certain rhythmic vibration sufficed; he could then make out the chorus or even just one measure — his only requirement — of the music he had selected, from which the whole song would play in his ear, from vibration to vibration. But he disliked those music boxes where the choice of songs, instead of being unique and “personally” put together at that location, was itself mass-produced, the same from one place to the next throughout an entire country, without variation, and made available to the individual establishments, indeed forced on them, by an anonymous central authority, which he could picture as a sort of Mafia, the jukebox Mafia. Such unvarying, lockstep programs, with choices among only current hits, even in a fine old Wurlitzer — by now there was hardly anything else in all countries — could be recognized by the fact that there was no longer a typed list; it was printed, completely covering the slots for individual song titles and performers’ names. But, strangely enough, he also avoided those jukeboxes whose list of offerings, like the menu in certain restaurants, was done in a uniform handwriting from top to bottom, from left to right, although, as a rule, precisely there every single record seemed intended for him alone; he did not like a jukebox’s program to embody any plan, no matter how noble, any connoisseurship, any secret knowledge, any harmony; he wanted it to represent confusion, with an admixture of the unfamiliar (more and more as the years went by), and also plenty of pieces for escape, among them, to be sure, and all the more precious, the very songs (just a few, to be hunted down among all the chaotic possibilities, were enough) that met his needs at the moment. Such music boxes also made themselves known in their menu of choices; with a hodgepodge of machine-and handwritten notations, and, above all, handwriting that changed from title to title, one in block letters, in ink, the next in flowing, almost stenographic secretary style, but most, even with the most dissimilar loops and slants of the letters, showing signs of particular care and seriousness, some, like children’s handwriting, as if painted, and, time and again, among all the mistakes, correctly written ones (with proper accents and hyphens), song titles that must have struck the waitress in question as very foreign, the paper here and there already yellowed, the writing faded and hard to make out, perhaps also taped over with freshly written labels with different titles, but where it showed through, even if illegible, still powerfully suggestive. In time, his first glance more and more sought out those records in a jukebox’s table of choices that were indicated in such handwriting, rather than “his” records, even if there was only one such. And sometimes that was the only one he listened to, even if it had been unfamiliar or completely unknown to him beforehand. Thus, in a North African bar in a Paris suburb, standing in front of a jukebox (whose list of exclusively French selections immediately made it recognizable as a Mafia product), he had discovered on the edge a label, handwritten, in very large, irregular letters, each as emphatic as an exclamation point, and had selected that smuggled-in Arab song, then again and again, and even now he was still haunted by that far-resonating SIDI MANSUR, which the bartender, rousing himself from his silence, told him was the name of “a special, out-of-the-ordinary place” (“You can’t just go there!”).

Was that supposed to mean that he regretted the disappearance of his jukeboxes, these objects of yesteryear, unlikely to have a second future?

No. He merely wanted to capture and acknowledge, before even he lost sight of it, what an object could mean to a person, above all what could emanate from a mere object. — An eating place by a playing field on the outskirts of Salzburg. Outdoors. A bright summer evening. The jukebox is outside, next to the open door. On the terrace, different patrons at every table, Dutch, English, Spanish, speaking their own languages, for the place also serves the adjacent campgrounds, by the airfield. It is the early eighties, the airfield has not yet become “Salzburg airport,” the last plane lands at sundown. The trees between the terrace and the playing field are birches and poplars, in the warm air constant fluttering of leaves against the deep yellow sky. At one table the locals are sitting, members of the Maxglan Working Man’s Athletic Club with their wives. The soccer team, at that time still a second-division club, has just lost another game that afternoon, and will probably be dropped from the league. But now, in the evening, those affected are talking about the trees for a change, while there is a constant coming and going at the window where beer is dispensed — from the tents and back. They look at the trees: how big they’ve gotten and how straight they’ve grown, since they, the club members, went out and with their own hands dug them up as seedlings from the black mossy soil and planted them here in rows in the brown clay! The song the jukebox sends out again and again that evening into the gradually oncoming darkness, in the pauses between the rustling and rasping of the leaves and the even buzz of voices, is sung in an enterprising voice by Helene Schneider, and is called “Hot Summer Nites.” The place is completely empty, and the white curtains billow in at the open windows. Then at some point someone is sitting inside, in a corner, a young woman, silently weeping.

— Years later. A restaurant, a gostilna, on the crown of the Yugoslavian karst, at some remove from the highway from Stanjel (or San Daniele del Carso). Indoors. A mighty old-fashioned jukebox next to a cupboard, on the way to the restroom. Visible behind ornamental glass, the record carousel and turntable. To operate it, one uses tokens instead of coins, and then it is not enough to push a button, of which there is only one; first, one has to turn a dial until the desired selection lines up with the indicator arrow. The mechanical arm then places the record on the turntable with an elegance comparable to the elbow flourish with which an impeccably trained waiter presents a dish. The gostilna is large, with several dining rooms, which on this evening in early fall — while outside the burja, or bora, blasts without relief over the highland, coming from the mountains in the north — are full, mostly with young people: an end-of-term party for several classes from all the republics of Yugoslavia; they have met one another for the first time here, over several days. Once the wind carries the distinctive signal of the karst train down from the cliffs, with the dark sound of a mountain ferry. On the wall, across from the customary picture of Tito, hangs an equally colorful but much larger portrait of an unknown: it is the former proprietor, who took his own life. His wife says he was not from around here (even if only from the village in the next valley). The song, selected this evening by one student after another, that wafts through the dining rooms over and over again is sung in a self-conscious and at the same time childishly merry unison, even, as an expression of a people, dance able, and has one word as its refrain: “Jugoslavija!”

— Again years later. Again a summer evening, before dusk, this time on the Italian side of the karst, or, to be precise, the border of the limestone base, once heaved out of the sea, of the cliffless lowlands, here marked by the tracks of the railroad station of Monfalcone. Just beyond it, the desert of stones that rises toward the plateau, concealed along this section of track by a small pine forest — on this side the station, surrounded by the abruptly different vegetation of cedars, palms, plane trees, rhododendron, along with the requisite water, pouring plentifully from the station fountain, whose spigot no one has bothered to turn off. The jukebox stands in the bar, under the window, which is wide open after the heat of the day; likewise open, the door leading out to the tracks. Otherwise, the place is almost entirely without furniture; what little there is has been shoved to one side, and they are mopping up already. The lights of the jukebox are reflected in the wet terrazzo floor, a glow that gradually disappears as the floor dries. The face of the barmaid appears very pale at the window, in contrast to those of the few passengers waiting outside, which are tanned. After the departure of the Trieste-Venice Express, the building appears empty, except that on a bench two adolescent boys are tussling, yelling at the top of their voices; the railroad station is their playground at the moment. From the darkness of the pines of the karst, swarms of moths are issuing forth. A long, sealed freight train rattle-pounds by, the only bright spot against the outside of the cars being the little lead seals blowing behind on their cords. In the stillness that follows — it is the time between the last swallows and the first bats — the sound of the jukebox is heard. The boys tussle a bit longer. Not to listen, but probably quite by chance, two railroad officials come out of their offices to the platform, and from the waiting room comes a cleaning woman. Suddenly figures, previously overlooked, appear all over the scene. On the bench by the beech, a man is sleeping. On the grass behind the restrooms, soldiers are stretched out, a whole group, without a trace of luggage. On the platform to Udine, leaning against a pillar, a huge black man, likewise without luggage, just in shirt and pants, engrossed in a book. From the thicket of pines behind the station swoop again and again, one following close upon the other, a pair of doves. It is as if all of them were not travelers but inhabitants or settlers in the area around the railroad station. Its midpoint is the fountain, with its foaming drinking water, blown and spattered by the breeze, and tracks on the asphalt from many wet soles, to which the last drinker now intentionally adds his own. A bit farther down the tracks, accessible on foot, the subterranean karst river, the Timavo, comes to the surface, with three branches, which in Virgil’s time, according to the Æneid, were still nine; it immediately broadens out and empties into the Mediterranean. The song the jukebox is playing tells of a letter written by a young woman who has ended up far away from her home and from everything she ever knew or dreamed of, and is now full of brave and perhaps also sorrowful astonishment; it floats out into the dusky railroad land of Monfalcone in the friendly voice of Michelle Shocked, and is called “Anchorage, Alaska.”

During the weeks in Soria he sometimes managed to think this about what he was doing: “I’m doing my work. It agrees with me.” Once he found himself thinking, “I have time,” without the usual ulterior motives, just that one, big thought. It rained and stormed over the Castilian highland almost every day, and he used his pencils to jam the curtain into the cracks around the window. The noise still bothered him more. The fish-scaling down below, outside the kitchen door, became a daily dismembering, with a meat ax, of altogether different animals, and the agreeably looping paths out on the steppe turned out to be a motocross course. (Soria was even competing, he discovered, for the European cup.) Seen on television, this sport, with its heroes bouncing into the air like video-game figures, had something admirable about it, but now, sitting at his table, he found the buzzing of a hornet around his head a blessing by comparison. Again and again he came back from his walk filled with strength — his own kind of strength — for work, and promptly lost it in the racket. The noise destroyed something not only for the moment but for good. The worrisome thing was that it put him at risk of disparaging an activity like his conjuring up of images and then putting them into words, which required so much solitude. On the other hand, in silence he had in fact occasionally gone astray, and now actually drew strength precisely from his weakness — his doubts, even more his hopelessness — going to work in defiance of his surroundings. Every day he traced his arc past the façade of Santo Domingo — no, in contrast to the new buildings behind it, that was no façade. Peace emanated from it; all he had to do was take it in. Amazing how the sculptures told their stories: Eve, being led to Adam by God, was already standing back-to-back with her husband in the next scene, where he gazed up at the Tree of Knowledge, and word of Christ’s Resurrection, given by one of the women to the first in the long line of Apostles, was immediately passed down the row to the end, as one could see from the body language; only the last in line, motionless, seemed not to have heard yet.

Before work he walked with short steps, afterwards with longer ones, not out of a sense of triumph, but because he was dizzy. Going up the mountainside made him breathe more deeply and think more clearly, but it could not be too steep, or his thoughts would grow too agitated. Likewise, he preferred going upstream to the other direction; there was an element of forging one’s way, with the energy that produced. If he wanted to keep from brooding, he walked along the ties of the abandoned rail line that had linked Soria and Burgos, or went even farther out of town into the darkness, where he had to watch where he put his feet. When he returned from the darkness of the steppe to town, he was so tense from groping his way along that he felt like having the playful figures of Santo Domingo loosen him up and smooth the tightness from his face. He repeated the same routes, just adding a variation every day; yet it seemed to him as if all the other paths were waiting to be taken. Along Antonio Machados’s promenade lay years’ worth of tissues and condoms. During the day there were, besides him, almost exclusively old men out in the steppes, usually alone, with worn shoes; before they blew their noses, they ceremoniously pulled out their handkerchiefs and shook them. Before work, he made a point of saying hello to at least one of them, intending to be greeted in turn; he did not want to go back to his room without having experienced this moment of smiling; sometimes he even stopped just for that purpose and let one of them catch up with him, so as to get in the “Hola!” and the jerk of the head. Before that, he read the paper every day, by a large window in Soria’s Central Bar, with the help of a dictionary. Llavero meant a “bunch of keys”: with a raised bunch of keys a woman took part in a demonstration in Prague; dedo pulgar meant thumb: the American President gave the thumbs-up sign to indicate the successful bloodletting in Panama; puerta giratoria meant a revolving door (through which Samuel Beckett in his time had entered the Closerie des Lilas in Paris). The news of the execution of the Ceauçescu couple he read not with satisfaction but with an old, newly reawakened horror of history. When time allowed, he continued to decipher the characters of Theophrastus, and came to feel fond of many of them, at least in some of their traits — which he perhaps recognized as his own. It seemed to him that their weaknesses and foolishness were indications of lonely people who could not fit in with society, in this case the Greek polis, and in order to be part of it in some way played their ludicrous game with the courage born of desperation; if they were overzealous, unsuitably youthful, boastful, or, more revealingly, always “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the explanation was often simply that they could not find their niche among the others, even their children and slaves. Occasionally he would look up and gaze out the window at a plane tree — still with its withered foliage — and next to it an already completely bare mountain maple, in which, almost predictably, except in a violent storm, the sparrows would be perched like buds, so quiet that the whipping, flapping, swirling jagged leaves next to them were more like birds than they were. He experienced his most powerful sense of place down by the bridge that spanned the river, less at the sight of the stone arches and the dark winter water flowing past than of the sign at the highest point of the bridge: RIO DUERO. One of the bars down by the water was called Alegría del Puente, Joy of the Bridge, and when he read the sign he immediately took the detour, the rodeo, to go in. Along the riverbanks, where they were not sheer cliffs, smooth-polished glacial boulders protruded from the earth, and on the remains of the city walls, far out in the steppe, the wind of the centuries had ridged, striped, pitted, patterned the yellow sandstone, and he saw several old palaces on the Plaza Mayor built on foundations of pebbles naturally cemented at the bottom of glacial lakes. To be able to read the landscape a little in passing grounded one, and he learned that in Spain geography had always been subservient to history, to conquests and border drawings, and only now was more attention being paid to the “messages of places.” Sometimes colors were particularly alive in winter. While the sky looked sulfurous, a fallow field down below was greening up, and the paths through the rock-strewn fields also showed mossy green. Where everything else had long since faded, a rosebush covered with hips formed a glowing red arch. A pair of magpies fluttered up, their wings brightening the air like rapidly turning wheels. On a day when it was not raining, little puffs of dust sprang up around the town, and he got a feel for summer in these parts. The shadows of clouds passed over the bare highland, as if pulled from underground — as if there were cloud shadows everywhere, but their home was here in Castile. One morning there was an hour without wind for a change, and in the clear sun both the northern and the eastern sierra could be seen with snow cover for the first time, and although both mountain chains were a small airplane journey away, he saw the sparkling slopes checkered by cloud shadows, motionless, for the duration of that hour without wind. In his thoughts he was so preoccupied with the snow that he involuntarily stamped it off his shoes when he reached his door. A few times, when he was groping his way across the deserted area outside town (he sent himself there for this very purpose), the night sky cleared up briefly, and the effect was all the more amazing when Castor and Pollux showed their fraternal distance, Venus glittered, Aldebaran sparkled in Arabic fashion, the W of Cassiopeia formed wide thighs, the Big Dipper bent its handle, and Lepus, the hare, in flight from the hunter Orion, dashed horizontally across the firmament. The Milky Way with its numerous Delta branches was a pale reflection of the universe’s initial explosion. Strange, the feeling of having a “long time” during this December in Soria: already, after the first day spent writing, when he caught sight of the river down there, he found himself thinking, “There he is, the good old Duero!” When one weekend he had not made his rounds past the Rio Bar, he felt, back by its little cast-iron stove, as if he had not visited this gray cylinder “in ages.” Scarcely a week after his arrival, he thought, as he wandered past the bus station: “This is where I stepped out into the rain with my suitcase that time!” In the midst of a roaring gale, a toad lurching through the steppe grass. Before the plane tree’s leaves dropped, their stems broke, became fringed, spun on the fringes. When the cock was in the muddy garden where the unripe tomatoes were left as feed, did his tail feathers move of their own accord, or was that the wind? But his true heraldic animals were those dogs he saw wandering around in the evening, limping on three legs: at the end of his day’s journey, one of his knees usually gave out, too. Once, when according to the paper Soria was not the coldest town in Spain, he felt disappointed. Once, on the main street, a pot with a red poinsettia was carried along, beneath the green, still not fallen, always wet leaves of the plane trees; not once in those weeks did the puddles in the hollows around the roots evaporate. The fog was dark gray, and against that background the many white cocoons of the needle-eating processionary moths stood out all the more menacingly in the mountain pines. On Christmas Day it rained so hard that, during his usual walk through town, besides him only a solitary sparrow seemed to be on the street. Then, from the county jail, without an umbrella, emerged a very small woman and her big son and crossed the sea of mud to a temporary barracks set up there, and he imagined that behind the high walls they had just visited a relative, one of the Basques on a hunger strike, and were camping out here until he was freed. In the evening there was a sudden flash of light between torrents of rain, and something hit him on his forehead and chin, and when he looked around, he saw a car with its roof all white coming from out of town, and way up in the black of night a few flakes began to float as they fell: “Nieve!” he thought, his first spontaneous word in Spanish. In a bar they struck up a flamenco song, for once without the usual gypsy-like note of futility, but cheerful, confident, with the air of a herald, and a notion ran through his mind: here, finally, was the appropriate way to sing for — not Christmas, but Navidad, the birth; this was how one of the shepherds would describe what he had seen in that holy night, and his description was of course also a dance. Here, as everywhere in the world, he saw passersby who, at the first drops of rain, put up the umbrellas they always had with them, and even here on the meseta it was the fashion for young girls, when they entered a restaurant, to blow their bangs off their foreheads. Thunderous wind, like an airplane taking off (actually, something one almost never heard over the city), in the poplars along the Duero. A large hen tenderly groomed the comb of a little rooster, standing on one leg in the muck. In a bare almond tree there was already one branch with white flower buds. Most of the evils with which he was familiar from his accustomed surroundings, including those within him, remained at a distance here, housed as he was once again by his work, and yet, in the long run, a sense of life — this he recognized in Soria — could not come from what was absent. Hoarfrost lay on the tree roots that terraced steps into a path. One time, as he sat at his table, something outside detonated and he heard it as a temple bell.

In the end he believed he had explored almost every corner of the city (he memorized these rincones as if they were vocabulary words). He entered almost a hundred buildings, for, as he discovered in the course of his conscientious wanderings, little Soria had well over a hundred bars, off the beaten track, in alleys between buildings, often without signs, hidden, like so many things in Spanish towns, from casual glances and known only to those who lived there — as if reserved for them alone. Again and again he found on walls, along with the announcements about hunting times and the pictures of toreros, poems by Antonio Machado, also as wall calendars, some with graffiti on them, one even with a swastika, yet, it seemed to him, not for the usual reasons, but because the poems, at least those chosen as wall decorations, had to do with nature. Amazing how in many establishments there were only young people, and how there were even more bars for older people exclusively and explicitly closed to anyone else (with a table in the corner for the old women): to all appearances, a stricter separation than any political one. Most of the retirees in the province spent their “golden” years here in the capital, and when they were not playing cards in their bars, they sat quietly by themselves at a table or fumbled and poked around incessantly, searching for something. Young and old and he, the stranger in the land, in addition: all their wintry hands lay equally pale on the counters, while the glow of the streetlights outside showed up, for example, the scars on a concrete wall left by a falling metal scaffolding that had killed two pedestrians back when he arrived.

Besides his pleasure in the variations in these places that appeared so similar, he also felt particularly driven to find a jukebox in Soria, first probably out of the old compulsion, but later more and more because this would have been the proper time for it: work, winter, the evenings after the long walks in the pouring rain. Once, already far out along the carretera to Valladolid, he heard from a bar along the highway a deep sound that then turned out to belong to a pinball machine decorated like a chamber of horrors; in a gas-station bar he saw the sign WURLITZER — on a cigarette machine; in a building being torn down in the casco, the center of Soria, surrounded by craters of rubble, he caught sight, in the Andalusian-style tiled bar there, of the selection chart from an ancient Marconi apparatus, a forerunner of the jukebox, used as wall decoration. The only time he laid eyes on his object in Soria was in the Rex movie theater, in an English film set in the early sixties: there it stood, in a back room, waiting for the moment when the hero went by on his way to the men’s room. The only living jukebox in Spain, so to speak, remained for him the one from Linares, in Andalusia. At that time, too, in the spring, he had needed it: work, the commotion of Easter Week. That jukebox, which he had come upon only shortly before leaving, the search long since abandoned, greeted him in a cellar off a side street. A place the size of a storeroom, no windows, only the door. Open at irregular times, and, when open, only in the evening, but then the sign was often not lit — you had to try the door to see if anything was going on there. The proprietor, an old man (turning on the ceiling light only when a guest arrived), usually alone with the jukebox. This one had the unusual feature that all the selection tabs were blank, like nameplates in a high-rise apartment house with all the names missing; like the entire place, it seemed to be out of service; only the alphanumeric codes at the beginning of the blank tabs. But all over the wall, in every direction, up to the ceiling, record covers were tacked, with the proper codes written on them by hand, and thus, after the machine had been switched on, each time only on request, the desired record — the belly of the seemingly disemboweled object turned out to be chock-full of them — could be set in motion. Suddenly there was so much space in that little hovel from the monotonous thumping deep inside the steel, so much peace emanated from that place, in the midst of the hectic Spanish pace and his own. That was on the Calle Cervantes of Linares, with the abandoned movie theater across the street, with remains of a sign reading Estreno, premiere, and bundles of newspapers and rats in the barred lobby, at a time when on the steppes outside the city the hard-headed steppe chamomile was in bloom, and more than thirty years after Manuel Rodriguez, called Manolete, was gored to death by a bull in the arena at Linares. A few steps below the bar, which was called El Escudo, the Escutcheon, was Linares’s Chinese restaurant, sometimes a place of peace for a person from elsewhere, like the jukebox. In Soria, too, he discovered, to his surprise, a seemingly hidden Chinese restaurant; it looked closed, yet the door sprang open, and when he stepped inside, the large paper lanterns were switched on. He remained the only diner that evening. In town he had never seen the Asian family that ate here at the long table in the corner and then disappeared into the kitchen. Only the girl stayed behind and served him in silence. On the walls, pictures of the Great Wall, from which the place took its name. Strange, how when he dipped his porcelain spoon into the bowl with the dark soup, the bright heads of the beansprouts popped up, here in the Castilian highlands, like figures in an animated cartoon, while in the nightly storm outside the window the poplar branches clicked. The young girl, otherwise idle, was painting Chinese letters into a notebook at the next table, one close to the other, in a writing far more even than his own during these weeks (not only the storm gusts, the rain, and the darkness when he took notes outdoors, since he had been at work, had ruined it), and as he kept watching her, who had to feel incomparably more foreign than he did in this area, in this Spain, he sensed with amazement that he had only now really set out from the place he came from.