Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (23 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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And another such background forms precisely in conjunction with these other images, the prevailing, conspicuous ones—from which one pushes off or allows one's gaze to be propelled like an arrow from a special bow: for instance (there it is again, “for instance”), up high, on the seventh and top floor, the attic of a bookstore, all of whose floors up to that one are chock-full of piles, in the form of temples, pyramids, pile dwellings, from level two to level seven the same title, all the millions of copies equally thick, with the same colors on the dust jackets, with identical spines; but under the roof one book that apparently slipped through the cracks and was hung, facedown, its pages open, on some rope or in a fishnet used as decoration, of a thickness different from the others',
without its dust jacket, obviously already partially read, so that, if one had a good telescope handy—which one does—in whose sight the book and its individual lines could be brought as close as certain figures on the cornice of a medieval tower could be brought to an observer on the ground, from whose naked eye they were far, far away, they would allow themselves to be deciphered thus: “In a village in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall, there lived not long ago …”
Despite the winter night and the icy cold, which blew in all the more piercingly because the settlement itself was heated by the banks of electrical coils, for a long time you could not see anyone's breath in the crowd; but suddenly there was one breath cloud here, and then another there, literal billows of fog in front of their faces; and finally one of the nocturnal passersby completely shrouded in a ball of white vapor, having just stepped out of a walk-in refrigerator? or from out there on the crackling-cold dark steppe on the mesa?
And now the lone farmer's vehicle on the diagonal street, a small delivery van, the back filled with sacks of potatoes and fruit, the vehicle and its load evenly covered with a thin layer of snow, which, regardless of the heaters, remains frozen solid, the snow reproducing the wind out on the savannah, in ridges, ripples, small mounds like dunes.
And the lone pedestrian now, who surprisingly looks unlike the others, otherwise so similar to one another, and in general stands out, more staggering than walking, not because he is drunk, but rather out of seemingly terminal despair, his eyes crisscrossed by it as if by ceaselessly scratching and scraping razor blades, in his hands on either side two knives at the ready, no, not yet at the ready, not yet snapped open, and why not? why not yet? when will he brandish them? what is holding him back?, and how does he even manage to place one foot in front of the other, to hold himself halfway upright, to avoid collisions?; extraordinary that he can make his way alive from one curb to the other without being torn apart halfway across by wretchedness and howling misery, which dribbles from his lips in the form of thick spittle and from his nose as snot, and bursts from his thorax as a howl (mistaken by the passersby for the roar of a distant Formula One engine as it accelerates on the final lap). Yes, when and where will this kind of despair finally tear this citizen of Nuevo Bazar to pieces? with a violence so terrible that it will have to tear each and every one of his fellow citizens and neighbors to pieces as well?
And if the crowd of people along the diagonal, gradually thinning out and becoming sparse and no longer constituting a
corso
for quite a while now, moves along in procession as if on an invisible line, this happens out of uncertainty and fear: stay out of the wind and in the shadow of the person ahead of you at all costs! shielded by him as much as possible, as by the person behind you; eyes on the ground, so that you will be able to say with a clear conscience that you saw nothing of the explosions, the flames, the bloody tangles; and likewise blocking out the sound of the bombers droning high above this dome of artificial and warming daylight at midnight; talking at the very top of your voice, to yourself? on a satellite phone?; each person in the single-file procession uttering sounds with wide-open mouth that are neither Catalan nor Asturian nor Navarrian: a new language that has no adjectives, and especially no verbs, but only nouns; and these exclusively in abbreviations, such as MZ for
manzana
, apple; SDD for
soledad
, solitude; DS for
dolores
, pain; MC for
merced
, mercy; GRR for
guerra
, war; CBL for
caballo
, horse; SRR for
sierra
; CHN for
chesnia
, longing; and so forth; almost exclusively consonants; a vowel a rarity, a chance to take a breath; and all of these abbreviations or chopped-off words following each other in crazily quick succession, at the same time issuing from the throats as drawlingly, sloppily, and indistinctly as if this language were not being spoken by local residents, Spaniards or speakers of Romance languages; as if it were not a language at all but a mere intonation; and that of a very different language, borrowed from another language family entirely; outdoing even that people's exaggerations and puffed-up, self-assured way of speaking, including the use of abbreviations and consonants, as if this ostentatious style helped them, in their solitary rushing along behind one another, banish their nocturnal fears by stalking along boastfully and giving them additional cover and protection.
And not every building on the diagonal artery is exclusively a store or a warehouse; at least here and there some floors are occupied, especially basements, with awning windows high up on the walls, at street level; and every two dozen or so paces one hears a kind of music issuing from these semicellars into the loop being constantly repeated along the entire diagonal, always solitary drumming; but this, too, always the same from basement to basement, the same rhythm, the same volume; the drum always tuned to the same note, struck as if by the same youngster home alone—his parents gone, on vacation, or vanished, never to be seen again; all the
boys, and not a few girls among them, pounding on their instruments in the same monotone, whether with their fists or drumsticks, in a devil-, or whoever-, may-care fashion.
And once, for a moment, for hardly as much as a measure, a third kind of music: suddenly chiming in and then immediately inaudible again; darting in from an unidentifiable direction, the instrument also hard to identify, a guitar? perhaps a lute? a gusla? a Jew's harp? or maybe just a voice, after all? or, yes! a voice and an instrument, hovering in the air for a measure before falling silent, coming together, merging, melding; a single moment during the night along the diagonal line, when, out of the very meager backgrounds, instead of hopelessness and blind indignation, that sheltered preserve of the grander time came into focus, if only to the ear? precisely to the ear! insistently audible; two or three notes from afar and at the same time from just around the corner and heart-piercing, like a stiletto or a scalpel; stabbing as deep as possible, but not lethally.
At last she turned off, to the side, to the outside. What? in Nuevo Bazar, where any and every spot represented the center, there was an outside? Yes, in the sense that all her life, whenever she had been in a place where she could not find her way out of the center, but was trapped there, encircled by foregrounds, superficial images, and other such provocations, she had made a point of hurling herself at the center; instead of darting to the side to escape, she had headed straight for the middle of the center; just as in a bazaar (and not only an Oriental one), assailed on all sides (and not merely by hissing Oriental voices), one could find peace and a space of one's own by resolutely heading in the direction of the (not only Oriental) disturbers of the peace and taking a seat in their midst, as if one were one of them—which one was, after all, wasn't one?
And in this spirit, my, our, adventurer suddenly turned aside, that is to say strode straight toward a tent-shaped structure, the same height as the others, which, according to its neon sign, was apparently called LSC, or “Lone Star Café,” and took a seat at a small round table that seemed to be waiting for her in the middle of the tent. But why did she not go home to her
venta
, where the bunk was waiting for her in the same way, yet entirely differently?—First of all, she had forgotten how to get to the hostel, and in particular it was out of the question for her to capitulate in the face of such centrality, all-encompassing and devastating to any alternative sense of place and time. There was an adventure to undergo here. Even here, in this off-putting realm, there had to be something worth telling.
But do the things that happened subsequently in the Lone Star Café fit the spirit of our book? “They do.” (She to the author.)
In the middle of the night, on the tent site at the heart of the center of Nuevo Bazar, a familiar face finally crossed her path (though hadn't it been the morning of that same day that she had been in the company of the businessman she had ruined and the cook?).
It was as if all those who had not yet found their way home, local residents and new arrivals, had gathered in the Lone Star Café. Much jostling at the hundreds of glass-topped tables, even among those who were already seated. If one was not at home—wherever that might be—at least here in the tent, which, like the tables, chairs, and counters, was of glass, one had to stake a claim to one's place and one's seat.
And amid the pushing and shoving (especially when a seat became free, as in the subway during rush hour), suddenly at a distant table she saw the face of a woman with whom she was almost friends—“almost”; for she did not have any women friends; and the situation with her vanished daughter entailed something altogether different.
The other woman was in the same profession as hers, in a similar key position, but less visible. At the global “monetary experts' conferences,” at that time not yet and no longer held under police protection, the two of them had repeatedly interacted and had grown closer. Why? Because they had both studied economics (to the extent this subject could be taught and learned)?—No. There was no more bitter rivalry, despite their putting a good face on a bad situation, than between businessmen, and especially businesswomen. Each expected to be stabbed in the back by the other man, and especially the other woman. Why, then? Because both of them had found their way into banking and finance more or less by accident, because it had just “turned out” that way, and both of them, the minute they left their workplaces and business hours, at the drop of a hat, in the twinkling of an eye, when the lock snapped shut behind them, forgot their jobs: not merely refraining for the time being from mentioning the money markets and the power of money, but also not giving the matter a second thought, and each time setting out for a completely different life?
Almost all our tycoons—and this has been confirmed by more or less thorough surveys conducted by the author—landed in their profession without plan or purpose; when they were students, if they had any goal in mind, it was certainly not “that kind of thing.” And once in the profession,
they had no sooner stepped out of their temples than they metamorphosed in a fraction of a second into carefree mountain climbers, kayakers, gardeners, lovers (source: the author).
Because both women's ancestors had had nothing to do with the business in which their descendants were now involved, because they were both descended from villagers, though from different countries, and both had been born and had grown up in a transitional period, when, at least in a village, goods and barter played a greater role than money, and in the villages “money” was not yet automatically associated with “bank”? Because both of them had lost their parents early? Because both of them, without otherwise resembling each other in figure or facial features, radiated a similar beauty, when the moment was right?: a twinlike beauty, that of a very rare type of twins, able to be mistaken for each other only at certain moments, but then what a beauty! a rustic beauty, which was certainly quietly aware of itself yet did not thrust itself into the foreground or make much of itself, and could, in the next moment, turn into homeliness or even repulsiveness, or simpleminded, idiotic, no, moronic, ugliness—because both of them were in every sense noncompetitively beautiful, also of an “old-fashioned,” no, “timeless,” beauty, no, of a beauty belonging to a different time—which did not mean, did it, that the two women stood outside of current reality; did not help shape this reality; had no power?
Because that other woman, before she landed by accident in her current field, had, in her youth, just like the woman here, been a star for a year or so, the woman here by playing the lead in a film, her only one, the woman there on the strength of a song, a soft ballad, which in the middle suddenly erupted in cries for help and cries of rage and then returned to its starting point: a song still often broadcast today, at least in her country (portions of it also used in tourism promotions), which had been imitated, in contrast to the film role of her current “colleague,” by several other songs, performed in a provocatively similar style, in the same rhythm, and with a melodic line that hardly differed from hers?
Or, on the contrary, had it not contributed to the vague attraction between the two of them that our heroine, often without identifiable reasons, found herself suddenly confronted by people with hostile intentions toward her: acquaintances, who up to then had been the soul of considerateness, or at least had displayed unfeigned respect, and now suddenly bared their teeth, and likewise strangers, men as well as women, repeatedly smearing
her out of the blue, as the one person responsible for all misfortune, including their own—while the other woman, her occasional twin, had the reputation of having never had an enemy; of being incapable of speaking a single unkind word or making a face; of being unable to raise her voice, let alone utter a scream as in her hit song long ago (indeed, so her almost-friend told the author later, “I never heard anyone with a gentler voice, a voice that came more from the heart, and consistently so, without fluctuation, in the work setting as well as outside, and no contradiction between her business dealings and her voice”)?

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