Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (12 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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And yet this was the airport of Valladolid, formerly the capital of the plateau region, the city of princes and kings, and today a city of half a million?! For almost every crossing of the Sierra de Gredos she had landed here rather than in Madrid. But the last time was now several years in the past. And as if in keeping with the topsy-turvy new world: the Valladolid airport had not been expanded but instead been reduced considerably in size—just as the local soccer team (of which she was fond, for no particular reason, and whose fortunes she followed on the Internet) had meanwhile slipped from the top league to the third, and any local princes and kings one approached would have been transformed instantly into frogs if one had kissed them.
Ceremonial taxiing around the steppe airport, as if to salute every side. Meanwhile the child next to her was reading a comic book. He had already read these pictorial stories at the beginning of the trip, and now he was rereading them. He flipped the pages rapidly, yet it was clear that he was absorbing each frame completely. He swallowed image after image with his eyes, blinking after each narrated event. Only toward the end of each story did he slow down. And once the story was finished, the child did not go right on to the next, as one might have expected, but paused for a while, motionless, his eyeballs protruding as if made of glass, even holding his breath, which he released late, audibly even, amid the plane's taxiing roar, a prolonged sigh. (And she noticed that she involuntarily sighed with him, almost silently.) Before the child reader finished the last story, the aircraft came to a stop and the signal for deplaning sounded. Out on the airfield, there were hares and foxes in the high grass, a sight that had vanished from airfields everywhere else.
Along with the few other passengers, the child stood up, having promptly closed the comic book. But in the moment immediately before that, he had glanced from the page he had just read to the next and read it, skimmed it, as if he wanted to soak it up like a map showing the direction in which he was to strike out.
“Vladimir!” she said, and that indeed turned out to be one of his several names, as Ablaha, Aruba, and Ahada were hers. And suddenly a dream from the previous night came to her, in which she had set fire to a child, first hesitantly, then mechanically, carrying out an order—“It is the law”—until the child and its little animal were in flames. How violent her dreams had become of late, and not only hers? With other people, was it not merely their dreams? And now at least this child here was as unharmed and healthy as a child can be, and as only a child can look. And they were seeing each other at this moment for the last time. I, on the other hand, have seen them forever.
It was almost night on the great plain of Valladolid. In the airport, the conveyor belt had clattered like a mill wheel. Next to the airfield a bonfire was burning. Tree roots from the steppe were being burned. The flames were small, whitish blue, and very hot. This fire had been going for several days. Soldiers were standing nearby, warming themselves. It was winter on the plateau, too. Valladolid: seven hundred meters above sea level. Other soldiers were standing in the small arrival lounge, which was also the departure lounge, keeping in the background, half in the shadows, and unarmed. She was the first to set foot outside the terminal; all the other passengers were still waiting for their luggage. There was no wind. A single bush,
shudjaira
in Arabic, was swaying violently next to several other bushes that were not moving at all. A very large, heavy bird had flown out of it just moments before. And the bush is still shaking and quaking.
And the stranger did not strike out in the direction of Valladolid. She is walking along the highway,
tariq hamm
, which branches off just past the airport into the desert,
sahra
, no, the steppe, into the grassland. And then someone ran after her, a man with a suitcase, one of the people from the plane. And she turned and smiled, but the smile was not meant for him. And she unlocked a vehicle parked, or standing, in the tall grass among a hundred and twelve wrecks, apparently ready to drive, a Landrover built in the year such-and-such, from the Santana Works in Linares, mud-colored like a military vehicle, but without any lettering.
And she had the man climb in next to her with his suitcase and drove off, heading almost due southwest, in the direction of Salamanca, Piedrahita, Milesevo, Sopochana, Nuevo Bazar, Sierra de Gredos. Above her the first stars were out. And next to her flowed the río Pisuerga, which soon merged with the great río Duero. And the road was increasingly free
of traffic, because of a war?
harb
in Arabic, don't know, don't know what that is, either, a “war.” And the Arabic book in her knapsack did not smell of her, the stranger, not in the slightest.
All during the flight the heroine had expected that when she left the plane she would suddenly see her brother behind her. In her mind's eye she pictured him initially striking out in the same direction as she had taken and sitting in the same aircraft, after changing planes. This image was so powerful that she assumed the shouting behind her was part of it, and only much later, when the shout was repeated over and over, did she turn to look. No, it did not come from her brother.
But the man who was calling to her was also no stranger. It was one of her former clients, once a major entrepreneur who had then gone bankrupt. (In the meantime there were hardly any entrepreneurs left, at most manufacturers and vendors of toys of all kinds—with almost every item, every product, the main selling point was no longer its usefulness or nutritional or some other value, but its value as a plaything, or as a brand, or as a pastime—and swarming around the leaders in the toy business were the hordes of game players and speculators.)
From a certain moment on, she had refused to extend him credit. And besides, he was already so deeply in debt to her bank that the bank seized all his company's assets and then almost all his personal property. He viewed her, the head of the bank, as responsible for his failure. Against the background of all his faceless competitors, who had in fact collapsed even before he did, and more wretchedly, the victims of impersonal market forces, of an economic situation to which one could not attribute blame or malice, this woman was the only person, the only individual who now, embodying these incomprehensible forces, but also as a particular being, or beast, of flesh and blood, represented something he could identify as his adversary, his destroyer, his executioner. He hounded her for years, and not only with letters. He had to get revenge, but did not know exactly how. Revenge, that was almost his only thought during that entire time.
But no action to match the thought occurred to him. With this woman, there could be no question of killing or beating or rape, of setting her house on fire or—the only thing he had briefly considered—kidnapping her child. All that remained was to wait for her punishment to be carried out by someone else, someone who had also been plunged into misery, or perhaps by the gods, or, best of all, by her herself, for with the passage of time her guilt
vis-à-vis him had to become unbearable; at the thought of the injustice she had done him, one day, and he hoped it would be soon, she would throw herself off the roof of her office building into the confluence of the two rivers or, an even more delicious prospect, go stark, raving mad.
For the time being he took satisfaction in seeing her—this woman who could sometimes be remarkably clumsy—stumble, lose a shoe, bump into a door frame, try to open a door by pulling it instead of pushing, or, conversely, pushing instead of pulling; he witnessed such incidents from time to time, if only from a distance, or even only on television. Village bumpkin! A village bumpkin has me on her conscience! And upon hearing the news of her (almost grown-up) daughter's going missing and then disappearing altogether, he had had no thought at all, or at least none that he put in words. Everything had gone very still inside him, and from that moment on had remained so, as far as that “evil woman” was concerned. No more letters. Once, in the company of a former competitor, who had also been dropped by her and then began to spew hate and threats, the silence in which he listened to the other man was such that the latter felt compelled to interrupt his tirade and say, “But let us speak of something more pleasant!” In the meantime, however, he had finally launched a new company, producing toys for all ages, from the youngest to the most doddering.
Outside the Valladolid airport, the once and future business leader called after her, not because he was sure of having recognized her but because he was not sure it was she. Just as she was probably preoccupied at the moment with her recently released brother, he was preoccupied with her, and not only at that moment, but so much so that if she were to be suddenly standing before him, he would most likely assume she was a look-alike or a mere apparition. And indeed, each time one saw her, she looked so different that at first one took her for someone else altogether, someone completely unfamiliar; and each time, her appearance of the moment made such a deep impression that the next time, one again could not (and did not) associate her appearance with the earlier one.
She, however, had recognized him at once. And he identified her from the uncomplicated way she behaved toward him after that glance of recognition: as if he were still her client, and a good one, an important one actually. The friendly manner in which she invited him into the Landrover was not that of a powerful person or one of higher station but of one who was at his service; as if she still cared about managing his money,
and, as his money manager, famous banker or not, were of course at his service as no one else was; as if this service were second nature to her by now, or had always been.
And of course she then proved to be fully informed about him and his business; she knew that he had a meeting the next day in Tordesillas, which was more or less on her route. If they had met anywhere else, at home in the riverport city, in an international airport, or in one of the well-known metropolises, he would have avoided her, even hidden from her, and, if forced to be in her presence, would have preserved an obstinate silence. But in this environment, far from the beaten path, it seemed curiously easy for them to deal with each other. And his speaking seemed to come of its own accord. It may be that the war impending not far from here did its part. (Except that by this time there were so many reports and such contradictory ones every day, and from all over the world, that we could hardly lend credence to yet another.)
He talked and talked, and almost all the while she listened in silence, as she chauffeured her once and perhaps future client across the plateau, deserted now that it was evening. Especially at this hour it became obvious, as at hardly any other, how ancient this region was; one could see it in the residual mountains, silhouetted against the very distant horizon and without exception bare of trees, in the residual hills, in the remnants of cliffs poking up from the earth, worn down and eroded over millions of years. And yet precisely this ancient land here seemed to have the strength to rejuvenate one. At least it rejuvenated them, the two new arrivals. At least it rejuvenated him.
His speaking was lighthearted, and in the course of the drive, over which night soon fell, it grew more lighthearted still. This was a period in which the atmosphere, the “ether,” was buzzing, humming, reverberating with dialogues. The word “dialogue” itself constantly crackled from all channels. According to the most cutting-edge dialogue research, a newly established scholarly discipline that promptly boasted of attracting a huge groundswell of interest, the term “dialogue” by now occurred more frequently—and not merely in the media, the interfaith synods, and philosophical treatises—than “I am,” “today,” “life” (or, alternately, “death”), “eye” (or “ear”), “mountain” (or “valley”), “bread” (or “wine”). Even among prisoners in the exercise yard, “dialogue” was registered with greater frequency than, for instance, “motherfucker,” “scumbag,” or “bitch”; and likewise “dialogue” was recorded ten times more often among the insane and
the mentally retarded taking supervised walks in town or in the woods than expressions like “the man in the moon,” “apple” (or “pear”), “God” (or “Satan”), “fear” (or “meds”). Even the few remaining farmers, located at least a day's journey from each other, were understood to be involved in ongoing dialogue, or at least they were shown again and again engaged in dialogue, and children were also shown dialoguing, even in the last picture in the children's books approved for adoption as school texts.
But here and there a voice made itself heard, without being raised or seeking a public forum, asserting that in the meantime the truly authentic conversations were taking quite a different form, for instance that of the monologue—while the partner, who could also be many in number, an actual audience, was all eyes and ears—the form of telling a story and listening, listening and passing the story on, listening some more, and passing the story on and on. And the most intense conversation (which, to be sure, was not suitable, not suitable at all, for just any old audience) occurred nowadays, especially nowadays! without words, not in the silent exchange of glances but in the interplay of your sex and mine, not merely without words but if possible also almost without sound, but all the more eloquent and emphatic, in the course of which I transmit to you each of my conversational fragments with even more than all my senses, and in turn absorb each of your conversational fragments with more than all my senses? yes, absorb, and inscribe them on myself from A to Z: a conversation, or dialogue, if you will, more enduring than almost any other nowadays, or at the time when this adventure took place; a dialogue-narrative of which not one of the exchanges, however minute—toward the end of the telling, more and more intense in the pattern of question-response-response-question-response-response—will ever be forgotten; the most unforgettable of all the conversations in our lives; ineradicable from your and my memory; even if later we will become strangers to one another, or even enemies.
“When I was young, I was full of enthusiasm,” the entrepreneur told her during that drive, on which after a while they were the only ones on the road. In the fallow fields, nocturnal bonfires were burning here and there, with the silhouettes of feral dogs flitting by, no humans in sight. She drove very fast, as if through enemy territory (but she always drove that way).
“In all the pictures of me as a boy I have glowing eyes. My enthusiasm mystified children of my own age. It even put them off and made me an outsider, also a figure of fun. But older children appreciated me all the more, and adults still more—some of them, not all. Even as a very small
child I was always bouncing with enthusiasm; in my baby pictures I already had that glowing look, always turned toward a sun and not blinded by it. My original enthusiasm was completely unfocused, it seems to me. And at the same time I—or how should I refer to that earlier being—was completely caught up in my enthusiasm; possessed by it as by a demon, though a thoroughly benevolent and lovable one; that entire newborn body a bundle of unfocused enthusiasm.
“As I got older, it remained unfocused for a long time. Except that after a while it no longer emanated from the center of my body, radiating from there to all my limbs—making it seem as if I had nine times nine arms—but became concentrated in my head: my eyes, my ears, and especially my tongue. I would talk a blue streak, until there was a rushing in my ears, my eyes bugged out, and my skull felt as if it were about to burst (as is happening again now, by the way).
“On other occasions, when my enthusiasm did have a focal point for a change, it was always a human being, always an adult, to be specific. I felt enthusiasm for some adult or other. How I could venerate him then, send my thoughts in his direction, summon him in a dream, believe in this person, yes, believe in him! An adult who could elicit my enthusiasm in this fashion was never my father or my mother—or was it? search your heart—but rather, for instance, a distant relative or a teacher (usually in a so-called minor subject, who perhaps came to our classroom only once a week), but it could also be a businessman, a soccer player (perhaps merely a local celebrity, or precisely such a person), and, strange to say, especially a person who, according to hearsay, for instance my parents' stories, had been stricken with misfortune. Ah, once you were filled with enthusiasm for the unfortunate—not the unfortunate of your own age, but the unfortunate adults! And then you yourself became an adult, neither unfortunate nor fortunate, but bent on success, and very soon successful, and how.

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