By Peter Handke, from The Moravian Night, which was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Handke is the author of more than a dozen novels. Translated from the German by Krishna Winston.

The symposium on noise was held in a conference center located on the Spanish steppe, at the foot of a round hill. No settlement in the immediate vicinity, only a few farmsteads, long since abandoned. The road leading to the center was passable only in a jeep. And then no trace of a “center.” The building looked more like a small round hill at the…