Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (24 page)
Read Crossing the Sierra De Gredos Online
Authors: Peter Handke
And now, in the depths of that night, in the Lone Star Café, she saw her almost-friend make a face, and then another. The other woman, the former singer, was not alone at her table. Across from her sat the man who, it was said, had been the love of her youth, and had then become her husband, and at the same time, at least up to now, had remained all the more the love of her youth. If the woman witnessing the scene had been asked to name one couple among her contemporaries one could have faith in, only these two would have come to mind. To put it more emphatically: to the extent that one could have faith in this couple, no, had to, one could have faith in something else, something that transcended these particular two people and their particular case.
Until that nocturnal hour in Nuevo Bazar, she had thought that their love story had been pretold by the author for her book, if only in passing and as a prelude, and above all as a contrast to her own “harebrained and hair-raising” story (her words): how, even when separated, each of them remained so present to the other that when they came together again in person, after no matter how long a time, even after a month, a year, they without ado resumed a conversation from time out of mind, in the same tone, the most amiable tone imaginable, usually beginning with “And ⦔ (“ ⦠and how the ravens cawed ⦠,” “ ⦠and the plate is still warm ⦠,”
“ ⦠and then you clean my glasses for me ⦠,” “ ⦠and at Whitsuntide you eat the first strawberries from my palm ⦔; how, sitting across from one another, after a long silence they began without transition to speak again, and again in the most amiable of tones, and were promptly in the middle of the dialogue they had already been conducting in silence (“just as you say ⦠,” “I see it the same way ⦠,” “and where were you after that?” “and I you, too!” “and I you, since that day when you are sitting in the bus and are about to leave for boarding school, while I remain behind at the bus stop!”).
Altogether, up to then their entire life had been an unbroken conversation, continued during the intervals, often lasting for days, when they did not open their mouths, as well as during the even longer separations occasioned by their work; continued in their sleep, whether with dreams or without, and, so to speakâno, not “so to speak”âconfirmed each time in the sexual union of their bodies, the eternal conversation, as it wereâno, not “as it were”âraised in complete silence to the acme of physical and mental awareness, impressing itself on the memory with primeval force, so to speakâno, without “so to speak” and yes, “primeval force”âand utterly independent of time. (How does the witness know this? Or isn't this a case of an author's letting himself goânot the certified, authentic, legitimate author but rather one of those would-be authors, who hardly miss an opportunity to elbow their way into our joint story?)
It is true: the couple's conversation took place outside of any time and remained unaffected by any ordinary sequence of time involving past, future, present; with their dialogue, the two of them had each other constantly present, in the past as well as in the future, from alpha to omega; for them there was no passage of time, and thus neither a beginning nor an end, no “Once upon a time” and no “It will come to pass,” only “You are,” “I have,” or vice versa; like children, perhaps, who, when one tells them that in the summer they will go swimming in the ocean, point out the window and reply, “But it's snowing!” or, when an adult tells them that he was a child once, can laugh out loud at such an obviously nonsensical notion.
And now, in that midnight hour, the witness saw her almost-friend, after making a face at her husband, open her mouth and sayâshe read the words from her lips at a distance: “And I hate you. And I have always hated you. And I will hate you until after you are dead.” And having said that, she turned her head away from the man sitting across from her and looked up at one of the televisions playing everywhere in the place, each tuned to a different program. On the screen she looked up at, a squad of soldiers was just storming an enemy position, shooting everything in sight, including dogs, hens, and, with particular gusto, pigs. And then the former ballad-singer stood up, pulled out a knife, not a very long one, and plunged it straight into the heart of her husband and lover of many years. He did not even have a chance to close his eyes, and did not slump to one side, but remained seated right where he was, at first with wide-open, then with still half-open, eyes.
Why this murder? For in a contemporary book reasons must be given? there must be no unexplained elements?âOne possible explanation can be found in the descriptions offered by the historian of the Zone. He expresses the opinion that the Zone creates states of mind, and compels them to manifest themselves in deeds, that never existed before, not even in secret, and not even unconsciously. According to him, the new arrivals in particular suffer from this phenomenon and make others suffer terribly in turn; and precisely those among the new people who are the soul of gentleness and never raised a finger to hurt anyone before.
He thought he could provide a graphic image of this mechanism with the example of the oxenâas if the word “gentle” were appropriate to themâwho, no sooner than they had been driven from the open steppe of the mesa into the Zone, rushed at everything that moved, like fighting bulls. In the Zone, the sheepâwho actually were more or less “gentle”âalso knocked down children and even adults, and the sparrows dive-bombed passersby, bloodying their foreheads. In Nuevo Bazar, a sort of arch-enmity, arch-disgust, arch-rage, flared up out of the clear blue sky, directed at everything and everybody, more virulently at the familiar than the unfamiliar, without any particular cause, insisting on expression through violence; and directed primarily at the people closest to one, and most nakedly and fiercely at the person one loved most intimately: the Zone, at least in this initial and transitional period, could be fatal to love and conjugal life. In Nuevo Bazar, he said, one was two thousand light-years away from home and from love.
And since here, too, the historian had merely made assertions rather than providing explanations, at the end of his insinuations he threw in just one explanation, a single one, and one that seemed deliberately shoddy: a reason for the sudden switch from nonviolence to often lethal violence was the artificial daylight in the Zone. “Murder and manslaughter can be attributed to the light.” Yet he said not a word about the properties of this light or what there was about it that produced such effects. Only this: “Toward midnight the light suddenly begins to be too much, especially for those who are not accustomed to it.”
There was some truth to this, according to my heroine: the artificial light around the glass tent of the Lone Star Café seemed even a few degrees harsher, also more palpable, than the light elsewhere in Nuevo Bazar. Besides, it had a different coloration from the rest of the light, which was a hazy yellowish gray; it was pale violet, similar to the light
after sunset over an ice-smooth glacier, and in this light, the bodies of objects, of the cars parking outside (apart from which there were no other objects there), and of people (only those sitting inside, no more pedestrians) acquired even sharper contours, yes, sharp edges, like sliced laboratory sections.
after sunset over an ice-smooth glacier, and in this light, the bodies of objects, of the cars parking outside (apart from which there were no other objects there), and of people (only those sitting inside, no more pedestrians) acquired even sharper contours, yes, sharp edges, like sliced laboratory sections.
Midnight around the bar lit up by an ambulance and a police car? Perhaps: if the lights have stopped flashing and merely illuminate the space. But that, too, was not accurate, for the impression was deceptively like that of “day,” of a day that should long since have turned to night, and which simply refused to become night, “come hell or high water.”
And in this light the witness saw her almost-friend continue plunging in the knife, no longer into her husband and best beloved, who was long since dead, but indiscriminately into those seated at the next tables, with screams like those that had occurred in the middle of her successful ballad (or was I merely imagining this? Wasn't she silent as she wielded the knife?): a woman's attempt at running amok; as if she had jumped in to take the place of the person staggering along the diagonal street earlierâand now she was promptly stopped by a couple of policemen, or members of a military patrol?, in plainclothes, with whom, as it now turned out, the glass tent was packed.
The moment in which the woman stood there handcuffed, waiting to be taken away (the image instantly appearing live on all the television screens): the essence of gentle beauty, as if transfigured. Next to her, in place of her husband, who had been taken away even faster, in a different way, sawdust strewn on the ground. And only now can one see: she is dressed like a woman wayfarer from a much earlier century, riding in a coach to one of the kings of the time, Charles the Fifth, Philip the Second, with a shipment of money to deliver, and she, the donor of the money, is equal in station to the queen. And aren't the other guests also in costume? A midnight costume ball at the Lone Star Café in the center of Nuevo Bazar on the mesa? An incident or scenario that was actually a sort of placeholder for a prologue, such as she had in mind for her book?
Television off. Music off. Lights out, not only in the bar but also in the entire settlement. No more artificial day: a pitch-dark postmidnight hour; then the night light gradually creeping in, the night sky arching overhead. Everyone leaving, including her. And, now, in the night, no problem finding her way home to the hostel. With the flood heaters in the air over Nuevo Bazar turned off, the cold of the wintry steppe streaming
in from all directions. A rushing in one's ears, as if in the barrenness high overhead, in the pitch darkness, the crowns of trees were stirring. A return of the sense of taste, tasting of the air and the icy wind.
in from all directions. A rushing in one's ears, as if in the barrenness high overhead, in the pitch darkness, the crowns of trees were stirring. A return of the sense of taste, tasting of the air and the icy wind.
Not another person out and about, from one minute to the next, as was almost the rule in this southern part of Europe (although the region had nothing southerly about it). Only an idiot, astonishingly old, by the way, almost a graybeard, with a harelip, making his nocturnal rounds, seemingly as always, with a flashlight, shining it first on her, then on himself, and doffing his knitted cap as he passed: “Buenas noches, señora andante!; Buenas noches, señora de mi alma!” (Good night, lady out walking ⦠lady of my soul!).
Back at the hostel, with the help of a tiny light attached to the front-door key, she lit her way up to her compartment in the gallery off the interior courtyard. The curtains to all the sleeping compartments were drawn and hooked from the inside. If there was a light on in any compartment, it did not show.
On the other hand, at considerable intervals, and each time from farapart sections of the patio, came a variety of noises and sounds; yet hardly the usual, more-or-less regular sounds made by sleepers; rather almost inaudible ones here, more distinct ones there, and in particular sudden sounds that ceased abruptly, like voices responding to each other, or like certain voices involuntarily led by others, amid the all-the-more-powerful silence that enveloped the hostel from top to bottom; a silence as physical as only the deep sleep of a very disparate crowd can generate; a crowd in which each person is not at home in this place, having found his way there from quite distant parts, by difficult, if not life-threatening, paths, and, in his sleeping compartment at last, and safe for this night at least, has tossed and turned for hours before finally falling asleep; but then from sleeping berth to sleeping berth; and one person right after the other, the first as a sort of sleep-leader among maybe a hundred, drawing the rest along into the now general deep sleep; and as if this sleep had come only with the arrival of the woman, the last guest to turn in.
Yes, not until their numbers were complete was it permissible for this little band of lost, dispersed, and asylum-seeking folks, united by nothing but their restlessness, to give themselves up to rest (a palpably only temporary rest). A great breath of relief sweeping through the
venta
, now in the form of a soft whimpering, now in the form of a sighing that expressed itself only in the moment of falling asleep; here as a giggling, a release
from the earlier daylong stress, even a burst of laughter, such as the man or woman in question could never have uttered while awake; then over there as a cry, so brief that one cannot believe one's ears and thinks one must have been mistaken, but on the other hand so piercing that one still recalls it decades later and wonders whether it was not a death cryâso shrill and at the same time broken off in the middle: that could not have been a cry of sexual pleasure, or at least not only that? Or: a cry of pleasure, long held back, welling up, and at the same time a death cry? And thus she made her way to her own sleeping berthânow and then jingling her key on the stairs and in the gallery, as if to provide additional reassurance to those who had had such a hard time finding rest.
venta
, now in the form of a soft whimpering, now in the form of a sighing that expressed itself only in the moment of falling asleep; here as a giggling, a release
from the earlier daylong stress, even a burst of laughter, such as the man or woman in question could never have uttered while awake; then over there as a cry, so brief that one cannot believe one's ears and thinks one must have been mistaken, but on the other hand so piercing that one still recalls it decades later and wonders whether it was not a death cryâso shrill and at the same time broken off in the middle: that could not have been a cry of sexual pleasure, or at least not only that? Or: a cry of pleasure, long held back, welling up, and at the same time a death cry? And thus she made her way to her own sleeping berthânow and then jingling her key on the stairs and in the gallery, as if to provide additional reassurance to those who had had such a hard time finding rest.
The curtain to the compartment drawn back. But the space was not unoccupied. In the glow of the lamp affixed to the wall sat a lovely young girl with an overly serious mien, playing chess with herself in her nightgown. Glancing up, she said only, “Too earlyâ,” and pulled the curtain to. The chess pieces had been of transparent rock crystal, powerful, almost lumpy shapes, such as once upon a time the caliphs, and in particular King Almanzor in Andalusia, had taken along to pass the time during their campaigns against the Christendoms.
The next compartment over was the right one (her mistake). Here she now sat, like the girl next door, with her back to the walnut partition, as thin as it was solid. “For those of our tribe, it is more fitting to keep watch than to sleep.” Calling to mind the few people who were the point of her story. But for that she had to read first. Immerse herself in the Arabic booklet belonging to her faraway daughter. “Time to read!” Upon her opening the book, a sound as if of lips parting, very soft and gentle.
She pronounced the individual words and phrases over and over under her breath. The Arabic script looked to her like the tracks of wild animals running through a field of grain: loops, leaps, circles, and, at the end, in the middle of the wheat field, a large rest-circle. Intermittently she switched on her hand telephone and spoke to the answering machine in the office of her temporary replacement, back home in the banking citadel in the riverport city; made suggestions, gave instructions; analyzed and predicted. In one breath she recited an ancient Arabic sentence from the fifth or the sixth, the Christian eleventh or twelfth, century, in the translation written in the margin by her daughter. “I departed from the paved ground, away from the teeming throng, and strolled in the sand.” And in the next breath she murmured into the speaking device that fit
into the palm of her hand phrases like “clear strategy,” “aggressively implement the new technologies,” “warning on profits,” “additional earnings impetus,” “stagnant employment picture,” “remain on the road to growth,” “bull market.” And turning in the twinkling of an eye back to the book, she deciphered and spelled out, “I turned my cheek to the dust and felt nothing more than affection.” And then, again switching on the telephone nestled in her fist: “The inflation horizon will certainly brighten soon,” “gratifying market trends,” “a very attractive investmentâshows imagination!” “In the coming months the growth rate could explode in a war of âfundamentals versus growth,' and certain fundamentals will have to be given a timely burial.” And continuing in the other text: “Love possessed me in such a fashion that I neglected myself as well as my beloved ⦠my innermost heart was burning to know what path he took through the mountains ⦠when in the year 532 I stood on the inland dune outside Fez ⦠said the bird on the edge of the desert, the lovers spoke a language used otherwise only by madmen ⦠the word for âtears' had the same root as the word for âto cross' ⦠and the breath of mercy came from Yemen (or from âthe right'ââYemen' was the word for âright') ⦔
into the palm of her hand phrases like “clear strategy,” “aggressively implement the new technologies,” “warning on profits,” “additional earnings impetus,” “stagnant employment picture,” “remain on the road to growth,” “bull market.” And turning in the twinkling of an eye back to the book, she deciphered and spelled out, “I turned my cheek to the dust and felt nothing more than affection.” And then, again switching on the telephone nestled in her fist: “The inflation horizon will certainly brighten soon,” “gratifying market trends,” “a very attractive investmentâshows imagination!” “In the coming months the growth rate could explode in a war of âfundamentals versus growth,' and certain fundamentals will have to be given a timely burial.” And continuing in the other text: “Love possessed me in such a fashion that I neglected myself as well as my beloved ⦠my innermost heart was burning to know what path he took through the mountains ⦠when in the year 532 I stood on the inland dune outside Fez ⦠said the bird on the edge of the desert, the lovers spoke a language used otherwise only by madmen ⦠the word for âtears' had the same root as the word for âto cross' ⦠and the breath of mercy came from Yemen (or from âthe right'ââYemen' was the word for âright') ⦔
And so on, turning from one of these locutions to the others and back again, back and forth, back and forth. Was this really possible? Could it be done? Yes, it could be done. And as time passed, the dictating came to resemble the murmured reading, as if all the banking formulas and stock-market clichés were part of the desert tales from bygone times. “The earnings potential of the traditional blue-chip stocks when I disappeared amid the stirring tamarisk branches close by the main tent before the ascent into the mountains, where we tugged at the camels' nose rings in the shadow of the world financial markets and trade deficits.” Her professional language eventually interwoven with the other language and recited by her in the same soft incantatory tone, yet also with a peculiar urgency, as if she were using it here and in the present hour for the last time, for now or for good.
And then in the booklet a word in Arabic script, which, without any effort on her part, spelled itself out, deciphered itself, illuminated itselfâread itself, lent itself to reading; the first word she recognized without needing to focus on it or follow it with her eyes from right to left. It was no longer “she” reading the foreign script; “it” read, and this “it read” surpassed for that one word-moment all the previous instances of “she (or I) read.” Such reading-recognition was accompanied by something different
from the writing on the wall by an invisible hand that prophesied my, the despot's, demise, the handwriting that could not be deciphered by me and would be interpreted only by one versed in such things, a third party.
from the writing on the wall by an invisible hand that prophesied my, the despot's, demise, the handwriting that could not be deciphered by me and would be interpreted only by one versed in such things, a third party.
And although the unexpectedly legible wordâand then another, and then a few moreâmight simply mean “wood,”
chasch(a)b
, or “hornet,”
zunbur
, “mustard,”
chardal
, a window now opened up, or a prospect. To the reader, curled up in her narrow sleeping berth with the book resting on her raised knees, the characters began to resemble monumental writing outdoors in a landscape, painted on a mountainside or formed of stones. Except that they did not express anything monumental, anything resembling propaganda or advertising. Rather the signs inched along like a small, exceptionally delicate caravan on the most distant horizon, beneath a sky that they rendered material and tangible; to the sound of an inaudible music, snatches of which she sang along with, with the recurring word she knew by heart,
murranim
, singer.
chasch(a)b
, or “hornet,”
zunbur
, “mustard,”
chardal
, a window now opened up, or a prospect. To the reader, curled up in her narrow sleeping berth with the book resting on her raised knees, the characters began to resemble monumental writing outdoors in a landscape, painted on a mountainside or formed of stones. Except that they did not express anything monumental, anything resembling propaganda or advertising. Rather the signs inched along like a small, exceptionally delicate caravan on the most distant horizon, beneath a sky that they rendered material and tangible; to the sound of an inaudible music, snatches of which she sang along with, with the recurring word she knew by heart,
murranim
, singer.
And she drew back the compartment's fleece-thick curtain, just a crack; but that was enough to allow the postmidnight air to waft in, and with it a cry issuing from one of the dozens of other sleeping berths in this hostel of the dispersed, a hollow gurgling from the bottom of a well shaft going way down into the bowels of the earth. From the neighboring berth the clicking of chess pieces battling each other.
It had not been the first time that her daughter, her child, vanished. As an adolescent she had already left the house several years earlier; also the riverport city; also the country. And even then she had gone without news of her child. Now, with the book meanwhile laid aside, she began to talk to herself. (Author's observation: that at the time of this story, more and more people, especially the most beautiful women, carried on conversations with themselves.) A person standing outside would not have believed that the speaker was alone: she must be sitting or lying there with someone else; a man or a woman who kept as still as a mouse, all ears, as the woman's soft yet clearly audible voice addressed itself to him or her, calmly, quietly, with many a pause, borne on the nocturnal stillness.
She spoke of herself there and then in the third person; almost in the tone of a chronicle. At intervals she addressed a “you”; and that, too, gave the impression that she had company. And the adventurer could be heard saying the following: “You know, her love for her child expressed itself from the beginning in her always wanting to rescue her. Merely to be there and to protect her was not enough. The mother had to be prepared
at any moment to provide first aid and rescue. And thus the lives of the two women, with the father absent, teetered constantly on the edge of drama. And listen, she often rescued her child when there was hardly a need for rescue. She jumped forward and snatched her out of the path of a car that had long since turned off in another direction. She pulled her back from an abyss that was either miles away or only two feet deep.” If this were a film, her daughter would have got hooked on drugs, and she, the mother, would have been jealous of her youth. But this was no film plot.
at any moment to provide first aid and rescue. And thus the lives of the two women, with the father absent, teetered constantly on the edge of drama. And listen, she often rescued her child when there was hardly a need for rescue. She jumped forward and snatched her out of the path of a car that had long since turned off in another direction. She pulled her back from an abyss that was either miles away or only two feet deep.” If this were a film, her daughter would have got hooked on drugs, and she, the mother, would have been jealous of her youth. But this was no film plot.
“And let me tell you: at the school gate, this mother knocked a man to the ground who was actually another girl's father, not a kidnapper. And time and again she rescued her child from bad company, male and female. And one day she pried her out of the embrace of a boy she had never seen before. And then one day the adolescent girl disappeared without a trace.
“And the mother promptly set out to find her child and rescue her, to fetch her home from hell, or from the land behind the looking glass, or from the bottom of an enchanted lake. For months and months she searched, from country to country, continent to continent, from new moon to full moon to new moon. And when she found her child at last, it was indeed not in a hellhole, but behind an invisible looking glass or in a second reality at the bottom of a lake. I tell you: after four or five months she came upon her vanished daughter on an island in the southern Atlanticâyou need not know its name, let's say beyond Lanzarote. The girl was living on the western coast in a shepherd's hutâwith nothing but ocean between there and Brazilâseveral miles from a town whose name I do want to mention to you, Los Llanos de Aridane (not Ariadne).
“This time the mother undertook the rescue operation differently from the previous times. She did not rush to the spot and come storming into the situation, but sneaked up on the rescuee, crept on all fours across rocky pastureland toward the cliff with the hut, crawling from bush to bush. From afar she then saw the girl with her back turned toward her, standing tallâshe was no longer half-grownâin the flower border she had planted herself. The woman sneaked around her child in an arc; she did not want to call out to her, not from behind. Having reached the bluff, she had to scramble down the cliff a bit and work her way back up in a zigzag. And look: when she was only a few steps away from her lost daughter, she stood up straight behind the last shrubbery before the Atlantic
Ocean, one of those briar bushes that send clouds of loose seedpods rolling in balls across the high plateaus.
Ocean, one of those briar bushes that send clouds of loose seedpods rolling in balls across the high plateaus.
“Can you explain to me why I seem to recall that all this happened at Eastertime? Because of the white cloths hung up to dry in the sun in front of the stone hut? Because of the little garden so glowingly, so intensely green in the rolling landscape? Because of the barefootedness, those very white feet of hers (they, too, seemed to have grown in the meantime)? And would you believe it: even though her daughter again had no need of being rescuedâmother and child were both overjoyed to see each other; and this one time, an exception in their relationship, they were happy in each other's presence at the same moment. And as they then celebrated this moment, without any special extras, you can really speak of a festive occasion. And the woman subsequently stayed on the island for a while, in the hut, close to the town. (During the first night the daughter put her mother to bed, in her own bed, and exhausted though the woman was from the search, when she awoke, she had recovered completely.) And in the end mother and daughter did not leave the island together; the girl did not rejoin the mother in the northwestern riverport city until a month later.
“In the years that followed, together again in the house, they found their relationship reversed, just imagine! Now it was the child, long since grown up, who wanted to be rescued by her mother, only by her. And if perhaps not rescued, at least constantly cared for, hovered over, spoken to, interrogated, advised by her; not simply mothered but rather challenged, and indeed as sternly as possible; evaluated, judged, and without maternal indulgence, please.
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