Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (37 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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“No doubt about it: you all live in a state of inexpressible deprivation. You doubtless lack most of the basic things that create social bonds between people of today and make them contemporaries of the rest of us. You convey to us the image not merely of cardsharps but of possible criminals, capable of an appalling act of violence, which you perhaps committed long ago and keep secret here: which is no doubt also the reason for your non-stories, consisting primarily of evasions, distractions, avoidances, and deflections.”
The postmidnight speaker had delivered these remarks with that unwavering, pasted-on smile for which he was known throughout the civilized world at the time of this story, known from newspapers and even more from television, the smile that viewers of the day found “simpatico,” to use one of the terms fashionable at the time: according to contemporary viewers, his lips were always drawn back in a friendly expression, which created “dimples” in his cheeks and a steady “warm glow” in his “fawn-colored” eyes, or, as others would have it, “tawny eyes.”
And while speaking he had propped his legs on the table, “not as a provocation, but to show that in spite of everything he felt at home even here among them, even in the notorious region of Petrada, and to make the others less shy.” For the same reason he had slipped in the two little words in their native language mentioned above, even though
nosotros
and
vosotros
were all the Spanish, or Iberian, or whatever, that he knew.
Now he stood up and prepared to leave, still with his tried-and-true smile. Of course he did not pay: that would presumably be taken care of by the organization by which he had allowed himself to be sent out, since early in life, as an observer and reporter, and, after missions here and there, now into the Sierra? Unlike the other supper guests, he would not be spending the night in The Red Kite but “in modest private lodgings,” in one of the infinitely smaller and less comfortably appointed tent huts with a local family, as he always did, “to be as up-close and personal as possible to the pulse of the local happenings.” And according to his fellow observers, as he made his way out of the hall, in the flickering of the lightbulbs, his “boyish freckles and chubby cheeks” and his “eternally rebellious Irish-red hair” showed all the more distinctly.
Other eyewitnesses, however, did not see him leave on foot but rather on a low-slung wheeled chassis, as if drawn by invisible spirits, while he looked straight into a camera being pulled a slight distance ahead of him, whereupon his presence in the half-barbarian mountain hamlet was beamed simultaneously to all the civilized channels. The way in which he moved along just above the ground: was that not in fact a form of being driven, pushed, and pulled, in which he bestirred neither knees nor arms nor shoulders, unlike a person walking?
And now, when he had already reached the door, and stood there for a few seconds, as if expecting the door to the clay tent structure to open automatically, a woman got up from among the crowd of those other
eyewitnesses, approached him with giant steps, and, forgetting her image, her office, and her feminine dignity, gave him a kick, only one, but a powerful one, sufficient to propel the reporter through the door, which, before it closed, briefly swung out again, like the door to a saloon.
The report on his stay among the people of Pedrada that he later published all over the world claimed not to be influenced in any way by this incident. Some of the observations captured in the report are supposed to be incorporated later by the book's heroine into the book on the loss of images and on crossing the Sierra de Gredos; but this is not yet the place for that.
She stayed up all night.
The others were sleeping in their tent compartments at the back of the big tent, or at least were lying there in their beds. She cleared the table as usual, washed up, put things in order, stacked the dishes. Then she sat alone for a while at the bare table—the lightbulbs out at last; no more roaring of the generators—in a shimmer of light that came from the mica cliffs outside.
Later she sat in her tent, almost without light, and later still she made the rounds of the other tents, going from one to the other. She kept watch. But it is also possible that as she sat there, her eyes open, she occasionally dozed off.
And all night long, whether she was awake or dozing for a moment, a pain was gnawing inside her (“an ache,” she told the author), which, if it were to continue, would break her heart. Not only her more or less random entourage, but all of Pedrada, the entire population of the innermost Sierra, was asleep or lying in bed.
At one point she felt cold, in a way that otherwise only a person abandoned by God and the world can feel cold. She was freezing, wretchedly, from inside out. Had she been abandoned by God and the world? “No.” Little by little, the inhabitants of the village came to mind. Although she had seen them for only a few seconds, upon the bus's nighttime arrival, on the way to the parking lot in the orchard and to the Milano Real, an image had remained with her. And as she thought of the images, she felt warm again.
She had been in Pedrada several times before. Each time there had been some small change or other. But this time almost everything seemed new, and not merely the tent colony at the confluence of the
various tributaries of the Tormes. In the crowd of nocturnal roamers outdoors, the natives were clearly in the minority. For one thing, most of them, as quasi-mountain-dwellers, were unaccustomed to a
corso
and had long since withdrawn into the few ancestral stone houses. And then, since her last sojourn here, the last stop before any crossing of the Sierra, the population had evidently increased considerably. A mighty influx had occurred.
And the new residents were apparently all still up and about, despite the lateness of the hour, outside the tents, which in general had long since ceased to be provisional housing. And what was special about all this bustle: though elbow to elbow, cheek by jowl with the others, each person seemed entirely alone. This movement also no longer had anything in common with a
corso
. Not that those walking side by side and those coming toward them paid each other no mind: it was a given that for all the individuals, there were no others, or, rather, he or she, that particular man or this particular woman, existed for and mattered to no one but him- or herself (and even that was questionable).
Each person in the crowd was making his own circuit?—and at the same time followed attentively in the tracks of the person just ahead of him; paid attention to the space between those next to him and behind him. Every one of them must have moved to Pedrada from a different place, an entirely different place. And every one of them was afraid of all the others who had moved there from entirely different places. Here he was far more foreign to them than they to him. He could not allow himself, or could not allow himself yet, to be intimate with any of them, no matter whom.
And so each person, when it happened, as it repeatedly did, that someone made eye contact, would instantly look away from the other, as if he had just done something improper, something that he, of all people, had no right to do. So when one person bumped into another, as was inevitable with all the shuffling and shoving, each jerked back as if a crime had been committed, by him, one of the untouchables. Yet no one in the hordes of people who had moved to Pedrada since her last time here resembled in the slightest a pariah, or a refugee, or an expellee. Each had come voluntarily to this area, and also to the new groups of people here, and more than merely voluntarily: of his own free will; had made the decision almost confidently or proudly.
The tents were no refugee tents. (So what was the source of the mutual timidity?) The garment of each of the new arrivals was not merely appropriate, without defects, neither too new nor threadbare, but also seemingly made to measure, his alone, so that it was less his suit that seemed elegant than the person. And they were all dressed very differently, by no means in the latest styles, their clothes suggesting ever so subtly, almost imperceptibly, all the parts of the world from which they might have set out for this region: America, Africa, Arabia, Israel, China, India, Russia, but neither were they wearing the traditional dress or costumes of those places.
And although each of them moved through the mountain village completely alone, by himself, stumbling, shyly brushing past the others, and although each of them looked so unique, in his clothing as well as his hair color, the form of his eyes and skull, and although each of them obviously also thought of himself as infinitely alone and unbridgeably different from all the others, nonetheless in that crowd they all expressed the same thing, both in the gestures and grimaces with which one and all talked to themselves or to some invisible, absent third person, and in their actual subdued, constant conversations with themselves, which often coincided word for word—for by now they all spoke the Sierra vernacular—with the murmuring of those in front of and behind them: “Never to be alone again, never to lock a door behind oneself,” and so on. So in the image these newcomers generated they belonged together as much as any of the established residents. (But how did they get themselves into the image?)
Yet they also came together now and then outside of the image: it happened whenever something like a transaction, an offer, an inquiry, an exchange, a purchase developed between two of them, serendipitously, as they were pushing past each other: they would then stand still for a moment, and although they hardly opened their mouths to negotiate, for that moment things were pretty lively between the seller and the buyer. And only then the actual exchanging, step by step, of wares and money (for anything but cash was out of the question here): a relieved smile on both sides, without reservations and suspicion, openhearted and at the same time with a reserved ceremoniousness, with almost more pleasure at handing over the money than at receiving it, mutual agreement and affection brought about by the money, the bills and coins, which made
her recall why she, of all people, with her village childhood, had once wanted to study the manifestations—rather than the so-called laws—of commerce and economic activity.
And she, too, wanted to lay in cash for the following day and the rest of the journey. Was the way in which the new people of Pedrada had revealed themselves to her that night in the Sierra a fact, or was it only her gaze that made them appear so? Only? Only her gaze? A gaze could create (and destroy, and declare null and void). The gaze, hers—that was how she wanted it to be for the book—created something.
She kept watch until daybreak. Or did she merely stay awake? No, she kept watch. She kept watch over the whole area, over those who were sleeping there. Although she remained alone, she felt as though someone were watching with her and keeping her company, invisible but no less palpable, all night long.
For a while she also read again, in the glow of her flashlight, in her vanished daughter's Arabic book. “It is all right to read,” she told herself, “all right to read on.” And then, in the middle of reading: “She is alive. My child is alive! And tomorrow I will inquire about her here. And I will receive information.”
She also watched over herself. If she were to lie down—this was her thought—she would die then and there.
Not until she made her rounds through the hostel did she enter the sleeping tent of the youthful parents. The infant was sleeping quietly between the two of them. They were turned toward him, and each had placed a hand on him, one on top of the other. At the same time they were talking to the sleeping baby, their eyes closed, an almost incomprehensible murmuring and muttering that merged into a stammered duet, without a single distinct word, and finally into a twofold whimpering, as when in a dream one is supposed to speak a magic word and cannot get it out, no matter how one tries.
The one who was sleeping deeply and peacefully was the infant. His sleeping penetrated the dream lamentations of his adolescent parents and finally silenced them. The entire tent filled with the breathing of the three sleepers, peaceful at last, and a scent wafted forth, only from the tiny child, the
niño
, the
tifl
(without any effort on her part the Arabic word came to her): the child's unique, intensified sleep scent. A perfume unlike any that had been produced and marketed anywhere. What a coup that would
be. How such a perfume would stimulate the senses—she told herself—sharpening all the senses into one; into the most sensual of the sensual.
She kept watch out of love, or the urge or thirst for love, and that was why, if she lay down now, she would not be able to avoid expiring at that very moment? How great, how enormous was her longing, almost always—no, not that “almost” again. “Is my longing too great for my time? Is my longing too great for all time?”—Where was the one she loved? Why did that wretch not realize of his own accord where she was, and come looking for her? Why was that no-good wandering far away along the main road, his trousers eternally flapping in the breeze, not away from her, but also not “back this way”? “Clueless idiot! Phony adventurer? Lazybones!” And the sounds of the tributaries of the río Tormes rushed into the sleeping tent, each of them audible discretely, as an undertone, overtone, background tone, with only the dominant missing; or was it missing?
In the next tent-room—“Guess its color!” she said at the end of the journey to the author—lay her brother, lay the stonemason or building-smasher, or whatever he was, and the Mexican or Armenian woman, or whatever she was, the one who did not want to collect any more strangers' stories. They lay in each other's arms, utterly motionless, even their half-open eyes motionless. No sound either, not a peep from these two, holding their breath and completely united, motionlessly united, and that for a long, long time.
Instead, sounds from outside, most noticeable again those of the mountain torrents, which here in the love tent sounded as though they were coming from above; as if they were all cascading with a pounding noise right over the tent peak, rushing down the sides in all directions, streaming around the tent with a crackling sound, and sounds from much farther off entered as well, from the mountains, from the summit plain, the peak “cirque”—the local expression—way up in the Sierra, of the Mira, of the Galana, of the Galayos, of the Almanzor: a rockslide there; the crossing of a ridge by a heavy-bodied ibex, the fabled animal of the Sierra de Gredos, actually not extinct, not even rare, bursting with life for the moment—in the villages there statues of the ibex instead of famous human historical figures—a dull sound that carried far; the crash of stags' antlers colliding, as if in a dream; a sound now like a whip, then like pizzicato on a gigantic bass string, caused by the expanding and contracting of the ice layer on the lake up there, on the arena floor, so to speak, of
the cirque at the peak, called La Laguna Grande de Gredos—each sound of this sort, also those from the most distant background, drawn into the play or the sleep of the couple here in the tent, its walls serving to amplify and deepen each of the far-off spatial sounds, a membrane being made to resonate and vibrate—here, where the two bodies lie interlocked even more soundlessly, as if listening; and with each sound, no matter how reedy, penetrating and resonating from the nocturnal Sierra like a gong, a shared (“Is the word ‘conjoint' still in use?”), an increasing shuddering, “or, more precisely, shudder going through them,” a boundless one, in the last analysis (was that expression still in use?). And will these two who once went astray have wept as a twosome then, silently?
Next she looked in on the litter-bearers, or whatever they were just then, of the abdicated emperor, or whatever he was just then, the four of them sleeping in the same tent-room, one in a child's bed, one on the floor. They were all lying on their backs, probably because they were so exhausted from hauling their burden for days. And they were all sleeping in their clothes. Although they seemed to be wearing costumes from a bygone century, their faces, all pointing toward the roof, were thoroughly of the present time, part of this night; as only human faces, and particularly faces plunged so deeply and soundly into sleep, could be of the current time, the present, the embodied, tangible present.
Laila
, night;
bil-lail
, at night; tonight,
hadjihil-laila
; present,
hadjir
; now,
al-aana
; face,
wadj
. Each of these words, spoken out loud, was a breath that brought the four sleepers closer to her and confirmed their presence. Now!—and she leaned over each one in turn and stroked their faces, swollen from exhaustion—not merely the lips, nose, and eyes beneath the visibly heavy lids swollen, but also their temples and their ears, even the earlobes. She kneaded the swellings without waking even one of the four. One bearer had a checkered skin, almost a chessboard pattern. A second had had a nosebleed before falling asleep—his nostrils darkly encrusted—and a handkerchief lay next to him, white, with the blood spots inscribed on it, little blackish-red, slightly indented circles evenly distributed over the cloth (where he had stuck one corner after the other into his bleeding nostril), the circles forming a pattern on the white surface like those on a die.

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