Like a horse the woman tugs at her reins. Embarrassed, In their Sunday best, the strangers brought together by an ad in the personal column used to sit on her sofa, mostly two by two. Dejected, the woman giggled, toying with the glasses on the coasters, and the men, the members of the club, were out coasting, their members wanting new toys. Unbuttoned, unbraced. Wanting to change to a new feed bag once every so often. Standing poised at the living room table, slinging the women's legs to left and right about their shoulders. When you're on your travels it's nice to leave your old familiar ways behind; and then, when you return home, how com-forting it is to go back to those old ways. At home the bed is a four-square thing on solid ground. The women, who go to the hairdresser every week, are properly put through their paces, because that's what they thrive on. Well-upholstered bodies, well-upholstered suites, an orgy of fleshy padding, as if we'd won an unlimited suplly of experience in a lottery. Intimate lingerie is sold, so that experience – the kind of experience we women hopefully and vainly long for – will look different when it comes to call and we are asleep and turn over and store it up.

My the pricking of his flesh, and the liberties taken by the press, the Direktor is unceasingly goaded onward. He takes liberties himself, e.g. he pees on his wife as dogs do. Having first made a little mountain of her person and clothes so that it's downhill all the way. The scale of desire is open-ended, what Richter would presume to judge? The Man uses and dirties the woman as if she were the paper he manufactures. He is responsible for the well-being or otherwise of this household, greedily he yanks his tail out of the bag before he has even shut the door and stuffs it, still warm from the butcher's, into the woman's mouth, setting her teeth on edge. Even if they have company for dinner, bearing their light into his darkest recesses, he still manages to whisper sweet nothings about her genitals in his wife's ear. Uncouthly his mitt gropes her under the table, burrowing into her furrow, taking her fear, which strains at the lead, for a walk in front of his business associates. The woman has to be kept on a short leash so that she knows what's what. She has to be ever mindful of the pungent solution he could steep her in. Man and wife must cleave together, so he laughs and reaches into her cleavage before their guests. Which one among you has no need of paper? A satisfied customer is king. And which of you has no sense of humour?

The woman goes on. For a while a big strange dog joins her, hoping to be able to bite her foot, since she isn't wearing proper shoes. The Alpine Association has issued its warning: there's death in the mountains. The woman kicks the dog. She doesn't want anyone or anything expecting anything of her. The lights will soon be switched on in the houses, and every hearth will then be a place of truth and warmth, and the hammering and chiselling will be starting up inside the women.

The valley is peopled with the wishes of part-time farmers. The children of God. Not of the personnel manager. The valley shoves up closer, like an excavator digging up the woman's footsteps. She walks by the immortal souls of the unemployed, whose number increaseth year by year as the Pope commanded. Youngsters flee their fathers and are chased by curses sharp as axes through the empty sheds and barns. The factory kisses the good earth from which it has taken the all too acquisitive people. We have to find ways of rationalizing our approach to the federal forests and federal funds. Paper is always needed. Now look: without a map, we would be headed straight for the abyss. Somewhat embarrassed, the woman thrusts her hands in the pockets of her dressing-gown. Her husband does take an interest in the unemployed, believe me: even if they are not kept busy, the thought of them keeps him busy, he never stops, never a moment's rest.

In the mountain stream there are no chemicals learning to swim at this upper reach, just the occasional human faeces. The stream tosses restlessly in its bed beside the woman. The slopes are steeper now. Over there, round the bend, the sundered landscape is growing back together again. The wind is growing colder. The woman doubles over. Her husband has already kick-started her t wice today. Then at last his battery seemed to be flat. So off he drove to the factory, taking the hurdles on the way in massive voracious leaps, leaving them under his tyres. The ground crunches underfoot, a grinding sound, but It's not the grinding of teeth, they're hidden underneath. At this height there's little but rocks and mud off the scree. The woman has long since lost all feeling in her feet. This path can't be leading anywhere but a small sawmill at best, the grinding of teeth has ceased there too, it's silent most of the time, how can you say anything anyway without your teeth in. We are on our own. The occasional crofts and cottages by the wayside are equal, they have similarities. Old smoke rises from the rooftops. The occupants are drying out their floods of tears by the stove. Garbage is heaped by the outside toilets. Battered enamel buckets that have served for fifty weary years or more. Stacks of wood. Old crates. Rabbit hutches from which run rivers of blood. If Man can kill, so too can the wolf and the fox, his great role models. Slyly they slink by the chicken runs. Nighttime visitors. Domestic pets get rabies from them and pass it on to Man, their lordandmaster. Eat and be eaten. Take a good hard look. Like what you see?

There she is, tiny when seen from our vantage point: the woman, at the end of the path, passing by, like time. Already the sun is very low. Clumsily it is sinking towards the crags. The child's heart is beating elsewhere.

For sport. This Son of Man, this woman's child, is a coward, to tell the truth. Away onto the flat he steers his toboggan and he's out of earshot. Now, at the latest, the woman ought to turn back. Up ahead there is only some character on a cross, magnificently out-suffering all who have ever suffered since. Given this beautiful view it's hard to decide if we should have this moment last forever, and forgo the rest of the time that we're entitled to. Photographs often record this dilemma; but afterwards we're glad we're still alive and can look at the photos. It's not as if we could send in that remainder of time and receive a free gift in return. Still, we always want things to be beginning and never ending. Out into Nature go the people, hoping to return with an impression which their weary feet have made on the earth. Even the children want only to exist. As quickly as possible. On the slope with the ski lift. The moment they've tumbled out of the car. And we take a deep and innocent breath.

This woman's child still can't see further than the end of his nose. His parents have to do that, they even have to clean the nose, and they offer prayers unto heaven that their offspring will beat everyone else's by a nose. Wetly, he sometimes offers his mother his mouth, his face half free of its halter, the horse collar of the violin already off. And as for his father. In the hotel bars of the county town he talks of his wife's body as he might talk of the founding of an association sponsored by his factory, though soon he'll be relegated to a lower division. The words that come from Father's lips have a pungent odour. You wouldn't find them in a book. To leave a living human being dog-eared and tattered like that and not even read her! Centuries will come and centuries will go and still this Man will bounce back. Jesus: you can't keep a good man down.

This morning the woman was in a waking dream, a waiting dream, at the house, aimless, waiting for her husband, waiting on her husband, orange juice or grapefruit juice? So that he would catch her scent. Lick her off. Angrily, on the wing, he points at the jam. For it is written that she shall wait for him till evening when he cometh to bed down in her lap. Every day he uses his appliance as he has done for many a year. And what an impressive score he's run up. Men like scoring, one way or another. They're born with a target in their breast, their fathers send them over the hills and far away, just to shoot at other men's targets.