Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (18 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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And this lightning image, too, was also followed after a few moments' hesitation by an audible conversation with herself: “If I ever return from this journey, I shall open an account for you at my bank, Vladimir. For a boy, that kind of thing can be as important as his first bicycle or motorbike. And for you it will be something else besides. And for your sake I regret that I cannot turn back: if this is not my last journey, at least it is the decisive one. And I would like to bring something back for you. What that
will be, I do not know yet. But it will be right for you. And you will continue to look right through me, though perhaps in a different way.” As she said this, she turned her head, still driving in a southerly direction, and, accelerating now, she glanced as usual along the axis formed by her shoulder, and blew into the air with a breath that would have extinguished a candle from a great distance or would have made a small branch sway.
A different image—an interpolated image, intersecting the others—lit up her vanished daughter like a flash of lightning. It, too, told of peace. It, too, and that was the unusual thing about this wild succession of images, seemed weighed down by dark embellishments. She saw the girl, grown up by now, as a child. (What she saw in this fashion was always something she had also experienced; usually long ago; the images represented a kind of unexpected and astonishing recurrence, an addition to the usual memories.) The child was sitting on a sofa in a corner of the room, playing the guitar. The music was inaudible; the image was silent, like all the others; but in that fraction of a second she saw that her daughter was not playing a proper tune but rather isolated chords: this was evident from the child's eyes, focused more sideways on the hand holding down the strings on the instrument's neck than on the fingers plucking the strings farther down. She was just learning to play. And nonetheless that simple sequence of sounds made the impression of accomplished playing. That had to do with the girl's gaze, now, in the moment between the last chord, its reverberation, and silence: still completely engrossed in playing and already full of enthusiasm for what had just been played, and full of joy at the anticipated praise, and full of eagerness to continue playing—if not the guitar, then another instrument—eagerness to play, play, play, on and on forever. (It was in fact not a guitar but an
oud
, an Arabian lute.)
And again an awareness of guilt came over her, though this time a less unspecific one. For she saw and simultaneously reflected (images of this sort could be counted on to bring about insight) that, when it came to her child's infinite passion for play, she, the mother, had if not betrayed her daughter at least not taken her seriously enough. She had shown no interest in her games, or merely a fleeting one. Even on the occasions when she had played with her, she had rarely given the game her full attention. In contrast to her daughter, who had paid constant and rapt attention to the ball or dice, and likewise to her, her grown-up partner—as witness the little-girl eyes gazing straight at her, with a presence of mind found only in children at play—most of the time she had merely
pretended to be playing. She had hardly ever succeeded, even with the best will in the world, in becoming truly involved in the game.
She felt it would be imperative to tell all this to the author when she reached La Mancha, and she actually began now, during her solitary drive; launched her words with great intensity into the air, into thin air, consistent with the way she wanted her whole book to be, setting the air currents in motion: “Just as one speaks of playing at being serious, people could speak of me as playing at playing with my child. And in doing so, I was not doing her any good. I took care of her. I protected her. I caressed her, yes, caressed her. I hugged her. I loved her. I adored her, yes, adored her. But when she played, I was criminally negligent of my child, in my capacity as spectator and playmate. If you ask me whether that is my secret guilt, I will say no. But there is something to it. Perhaps.
“Listen: my child was the personification of play. Whether she was speaking, studying, eating, or walking, whatever her activities, she could not help playing. For her, as well as for anyone who became her audience and/or playmate, that was a joy and a source—yes, a source—of exhilaration. This ability to play meant, and this I came to recognize too late, a magical gift. To be able to transform anything in life into a game, even simple breathing, or turning one's face into the wind, or blinking, or shivering in the cold: that strengthened the existence and the presence of the player and at the same time that of her playmates and/or observers. It was my child's playing and my being-in-the-game that made us a family in the first place; would have made us a family. How the house, with all its rooms, was aired out by my child's playing—there was no need to throw open the windows. How our property became enlivened. What singing had been to my grandfather, playing was to my child. Even when she talked about something that hurt, she talked excitedly, as if it were a game.
“And thus my daughter's wanting to leave me was also part of her game, part of her inability not to play, as I also recognized too late. Just as she played at shaking her head as a child, as an adolescent she played at being sad, being bored, despising money (and hence my profession), and then wanting to leave. While as a child she was fully aware of my inadequate involvement in her play, yet graciously ignored it—that was how self-sufficient and total her play was at the time—as an adolescent she increasingly needed me not merely to play at joining in, needed me to participate fully as the number-one playmate and/or observer! If that person
had laughed heartily at her wanting-to-leave game, she would have moved on to the next game, and so on, as before. As it was, as a solitary player, she became the prisoner of this one game, increasingly dangerous, and then one day had to play it out—”
As she often did, she broke off the story in the middle and said, now talking to herself again, “If I gave up my child, my vanished daughter, I would also give up the world.—When did I forget how to play? Or was I never able to play? Does that have something to do with one's having been a villager?”(She in particular missed few opportunities to speak of herself in the “one” form. In her story, the moment would not come until later, much later, when it was “she,” the woman, and then what a woman that would be, what a “she.”) “Or one's being the eldest sibling? And yet precisely as a person in banking one really should be a player? No, no. And yet more and more people in banking are players? In a more and more dangerous game?”
And turning anew to the air, to the engine hood, facing in the direction she was driving, heading south, toward the Sierra and La Mancha: “What a mess. And no coherence. No continuity, no continuity. And yet: life. Glorious life. How grand life is. Let's have that book. You must record my story, our story. How lost one is otherwise. Getting to the top, victories, and triumphs: the worst form of lostness! One must make sure something continues.” And again, in the end, nothing but an exclamation, a single word, one that did not exist yet in any language, like a distorted word, or the sound made by an idiot.
She was still far from coming up with the song. Perhaps she would never be able to sing it, she who fell silent after a few notes of any song, whether sung with others or solo. But the song, just one, was hiding, or waiting, inside one, had always been there, always wanting to burst out into the open, and for almost an entire lifetime already. And of course it was a love song, a nonspecific one that included one specific person or other, or rather merely grazed the person. Merely?
“Our book,” she said to the author (she unconsciously used “our” instead of “my”), “should omit my early history if at all possible, including the village, my ancestors, also my work in banking—which I prefer to assign to my early history—except for just a few details. And one such detail is the fact that my grandfather was a singer of songs, known far beyond the immediate region, still giving concerts in half of Europe as an old man. A classic singer of the German
Lied
, who at the same time
maintained his residence in his native village all his life: here the house of the smith and wheelwright, there the sawmill, here the farm, there the schoolteacher's house, here the constable's house, there the tailor's house, here the singer's house, a house of wood, set in an orchard, actually even smaller than the others' houses (only the constable's was equally small). Let that flow into our book, casually, in passing.”
Then the series of flashing images of her brother, who in the meantime was where on his journey, parallel to hers or perhaps not, to his chosen people? Traveling only at night, he was sleeping now during the day, but not in the hay in a barn or a stable, but warm and well cared for in a bed. The correspondences he had conducted daily in prison had resulted in a long list of addresses, all of which represented possible places to spend the night. Not only in the country toward which he was heading but also throughout the world, the released prisoner would have been taken in immediately, here as well as there, with hardly a day's journey between one place and the next. In every town, even small ones, at least one house stood ready to receive him, a sort of network almost like that of a certain sect or a people scattered all over the earth. And should he happen to find one door barred, his sister was certain that one right next to it would immediately be opened to him. Her brother, the enemy of mankind, was at the same time the quintessential social animal. He was aware of thresholds, true, but instead of impeding him, they gave him momentum; he drew the strength from them to open himself up, and others.
Precisely when encountering strangers he was immediately all there, as a matter of course, yet made no assumptions, with the result that he infected every new acquaintance with his attitude, always liberating or refreshing. Women in particular tended to respond to him, and after exchanging two sentences with him began to use the intimate form of address. Accordingly, her brother was at this very moment sleeping, if not at one of his thousands of correspondents' addresses, then under the coverlet of a young or older “motherly” woman he had met only an hour ago at the bus station (or in the next room), who meanwhile was at work somewhere, having pressed the key to her apartment into his hand after the third sentence they exchanged.
But the present image had nothing to do with her sleeping brother. It, too, obedient to the rule or law governing such images, came flying or flashing out of the depths of time, and this one even from a long-ago past: in it her brother appeared to her as a very small child, almost a nursling
still (but nursing from whom? his mother had died in an accident the day before). And this child—like the adult in the present—was sleeping, though not in a bed in a closed room somewhere but rather on a wool blanket outdoors, under an apple tree, back home in their village orchard. Yes, she had seen him this way once, and she had squatted next to him, in the role of the one who was supposed to take care of him, the guardian of his sleep. Her tiny brother lay there on his back, in the light summer shade of the tree, and slept deeply and peacefully, the sleep of the righteous, almost the self-righteous, as only a nursling can sleep, with cheeks puffed out and lips protruding.
This image, like all the rest in the image shower, told of (dealt with) a kind of peace. And this fragment from a very different era likewise contained an element of melancholy, or, worse still, a danger, a threat. And with unabated amazement she recalled that at that moment it had been crucial that her brother not wake up. He was very ill, and this was supposed to be his healing sleep. He had to sleep for a long, long time. If he woke up too soon, or suddenly, it would kill him. And soon the blazing sun would reach his face. Should she pick him up and move his bed? Sit down and shield him? And the tractor sounds growing louder. And the saw blades howling as they sliced into the tree trunk. And now, as she drives steadily southward over the mesa, along the almost always deserted
carretera
, with the image of her endangered brother before her, a small branch hits her windshield with a pop (in reality more a cracking sound), making her jump. Unlike with the previous images, she remains silent; avoids any sudden noise in the car. Not squirming in her seat, which could set a defective spring to humming. Not turning on the windshield wipers (to remove the sight-blocking branch)—risk of squealing. Maintaining a steady speed so as not to shift. Having to brake suddenly now would be the end, once and for all!
Then, even when opening her brother's letter with one hand: no ripping, as little noise as possible. Reading, silently, the single sentence: “That the world is still there—wonderful!” (Not to be taken literally, see “secret code”!) The branch blown onto the windshield: from an acacia, leafless, arrow-shaped; studded with sharp, pointy thorns; arranged in pairs, in the form of bulls' horns.
Then all the image meteors—didn't “meteor” mean “between heaven and earth”?—outdone in brilliance and duration by one whose content she did not want to reveal to the author. The only thing she told him: “It
was just a word.” And then she explained to him: “Even single words can arrive from a distant place and time as images. And perhaps there is no image more penetrating and intense than a pure word image like this.”
Even now, long after the fact, when she spoke of it, the word was present for her as hardly any present could be. Although she kept the word secret, she revealed herself terrifyingly to the author. If he was terrified, it was in this sense: suddenly he viewed her with different eyes; he no longer recognized in her what he thought he knew; he saw before him a total stranger, and at the same time someone familiar; he wanted both to back away and move closer; his terror: not so far from what was at one time called “holy,” at least with a hint of it. And yet she remained unapproachable? Or on the contrary? And he, or one, or whoever, simply did not find the right way to approach her?

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