Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (41 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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Yes, did these most backward inhabitants of the world think they were something special? Did they imagine that their shit was better than his? What were they so proud of? What gave them the right to be so standoffish? Why, whenever he urged them to tell him about themselves and this place, about the suffering, atrocities, murders, storms, catastrophic winters and summers, did each of them simply turn his back on him and not want his story told, absolutely not? At the very most, one of them would spit, as if to say, “All right, I'll tell my story—but not to you. Have my story told, but, by God and all the saints, not by you.”
Yes, didn't the inhabitants of this mountain enclave, the old-timers as well as the new settlers, know that continued resistance was pointless—their current resistance to observing and being observed (objectively) just as much as their earlier resistance to the unfortunately necessary use of arms against them by outsiders? Why couldn't they grasp that they had lost, and, furthermore, were lost, defending here a cause long since lost in what merely seemed to be their own country but in actuality was not a bright mountain summit but a dark crevasse? Why did each of them, confined to the tiny corner that had been graciously left him here, without
the slightest elbow room—instead of looking this fact in the eye—behave as though he were free to roam his kingdom, or a kingdom altogether?
Didn't it move the reporter almost, almost to tears one evening when he was in the main tent, The Red Kite, and observed the people of the Pedrada and Hondareda Region (that was its full official name) engaged in what was, at least at that time, their nightly dancing? How they hopped and stamped, hoofed it and whirled, dressed festively, even splendidly, until the first glint of morning entered the barnlike hall. How they clung, if not to each other, then at least to their dance, which incidentally was a fairly chaotic wheeling, combining elements of American square dance from the Wild West, rock and roll, flamenco, and an old-fashioned round dance that seemed a bit rancid, in which often one dancer or a couple would abruptly move from one figure into the next, with constant backward movements being most characteristic! How clueless these dancers were, in reality despised and shunned by all of modern enlightened civilization—it was not merely as if they still belonged to civilization and had a right to enjoy themselves like the rest of us today; some of them even let out more or less primitive shouts of joy,
tahallul!
in the new settlers' idiom, a variant on “hallelujah”?—but also as if, instead of being the damned and accursed of the earth, they were something like an avant-garde, an elite, the elect, the new and only salt of the earth!
These dancing idiots had not the slightest suspicion (no, not “suspicion,” but “realization”) of how far off the mark they were, how played out and danced out they were, how the scenario had been continuing without them for a long time—how it was all over for them, for good, till the end of time—how their dancing and, accordingly, all their actions, their entire life and their obstinate survival, even their death, had become meaningless, devoid of content, and, along with their rejoicing, foot-stamping, and round-dancing, was headed for the void.
And it was then that tears almost came into the eyes of the traveling observer. As a man trained as a social scientist, whose research specialty was anxiety and fear, he was familiar with the phenomenon whereby an individual who was profoundly frightened by something would later make involuntarily “empty chewing movements,” with nothing in his mouth, so to speak, but the breath that had been dammed up by fear: and, as he now recognized, the dances, like the other manifestations of life among the people of the region, were similar empty chewing movements. Empty chewing movements caused by nothing but terrible fear, which also
explained their recourse, or, more precisely, regression and reversion, to long since faded regional legends, myths, and sagas.
Empty chewing movements: that atavistic fiddling, often merely on an instrument with a single string, and the plucking of a Jew's harp, which he observed with particular frequency. Empty chewing movements: the constant looking away from each other, the abrupt, rude, almost dismissive behavior of the sexes here, the men and women toward each other—in his report he wrote of the “absence of any culture of eroticism,” of the “disheveled art of wooing,” of the “complete lack,” at least in public, “of mutual displays of affection”—and at this he almost, almost jumped up, either to shout at one of the dancers or another, or to take one by the hand, or to throw his arms around one, and only the fact that as a child, when he had run toward others to touch them, to embrace them, he had always been pushed away or ignored, as an intruder, a superfluous and ridiculous extra wheel, restrained him, at the last moment, fortunately for him and his report.
Accursed Pedrada. Confounded Sierra de Gredos y de Caponica.
She had crossed the Sierra de Gredos quite often, in every season, taking all the various passes, including passes that still bore that name but had been out of use for generations, either for the driving of cattle from north to south, the
transhumancia
, or for transports of any kind, and had meanwhile become almost impassable, even on foot.
And now the plan called for her to set out on another crossing, which she wished or wanted to be her last—did she really wish that?—by way of the so-called Puerto de Candeleda, a route from before the war, on today's map merely a name—but wasn't a name something, at least?—and recognizable by the complete absence of any indication of a road or even a footpath down the steep southern flank of the Sierra directly after the “pass,” more like a random spot up on the ridge.
And at the same time she was confident that by evening she would be down in Candeleda, at the foot of the southern flank, over fifteen hundred meters below the out-of-service pass named after the small town that did not belong to any
meseta
or plateau but, rather, lay on the edge of a lowland, surrounded by groves of palms, oranges, olives, and who knew what else. (She instructed the author to insert words like “confidence” and “confident” into her story, from way station to way station, from section to section, but to avoid expressions for “hope,” including the Spanish
esperanza
and even the Arabic
hamal
—“I do not want this word, and I will not learn it—any more than the word for ‘guilt,'
hithm
!”—so she had learned these words after all?)
So in spite of the short winter day she was confident? Yes. Time and again, especially in the morning, as now, in the mountains, one (one?) was seized by the scruff of one's neck, so to speak (so to speak?), by a confidence that was all the more powerful the more baseless and senseless it
was, and hoisted into the air. And although she did not have much time, it seemed to her as if she had plenty of time. It seemed to her? She made up her mind again to have time, and it was so. “Plenty of time!” that was also the farewell used by the people of Pedrada—the farewell used by all those moving out of the region. And she heard another farewell, one introduced since the last time she had passed through, astonishing in light of what had happened in the region since then: “Have no fear!”
Everywhere in the spaces between the granite houses and the clay-and-wood tents, the ridgeline could be seen, and somewhere was the pass or crossing. No, every point was a possible crossing. And it seemed close by. It was a clear day. Or was it? (More than once, just such clear and promising days in the Sierra de Gredos had ended with a life-threatening storm or, if the clear weather persisted, with a no less dangerous loss of all sense of direction or a close call, perhaps simply the result of a slight misstep.)
In spite of the many snowy and icy patches, it was a day outside of any season, windless, and warm from the mountain sun. And it seemed to one as if it would be that way forever. When one placed one's hand on a granite outcropping, on the yellow lichen there, or reached into a tuft of grass by a spring or one of the broom thickets, a quiet warmth, a heating warmth, penetrated one's body to the bone, such as one had never felt so comfortingly in an actual calendrical summer—in the middle of the purported Sierra winter, a fullness of summery warmth experienced previously at most in a dream. “It is summer!”—and as one said that, it became summer, even if it was perhaps still late winter.
And at the same time the adventuress was of course thoroughly aware not of some specific danger or other but of the unidentifiable and yet by no means less serious danger. This danger simply had to be there, as already described, not that she particularly wanted to look for it. One could not manage without it, at least from time to time. This danger, whether connected with the Sierra or with something else, was the be-all and end-all. Without it, no story. Danger and the story were necessities—and again she saw herself in this respect as anything but alone.
Did anyone else intend to cross the Sierra de Gredos from north to south on foot that day? She posed the question not to the people of Pedrada, who were visibly relieved to be staying down below in the settlement, and understandably had no intention of undertaking long journeys into the unknown, but to one of the Internet screens in the village—it
goes without saying that there were locations in the village for them, as for almost everything. No answer, or rather yes, there was one, from someone who wanted to make his way up into the Caucasus that same day, to the Sierra de Armenia there. So no one else was heading for the Puerto de Candeleda? Terrific. Gusto: for walking, climbing, tracking, cutting a trail.
And it occurred to her then that she still lacked something important for the expedition: bread. In the whole of Pedrada she had not come upon a single bakery. How could that be, with the new mills downriver on the Tormes? But there had to be a
panadería
, and hastening up and down the yurt alleys and around corners, she said this word to herself, first under her breath, then out loud, as an exclamation, or merely “Bread!”
“¡Pan!”
and finally, involuntarily, in Arabic,
“Chubs”
: and almost in the same breath she smelled from around the corner the aroma of freshly baked bread, which she then followed—to be sure, it was still quite a distance to the bakery, halfway across the village. The precincts and geography of the bread aroma. Cozy oven fragrance in the midst of the far-flung, deserted rocky mountains.
The bakery was the smallest of the hundred shops in Pedrada, installed in a hut of worked stone that had perhaps once been a rabbit shed. And now it was one of the few buildings there (the tents were also “buildings,” of course) with a glass door and strings of metal beads in front of the opening. And as she entered, the glass door reflected for a moment her vanished child. A glance over her shoulder: no one there.
After the girl's first disappearance, when they had found each other on the island in the Atlantic, after months of searching, near Los Llanos de Aridane, she, the mother, was then received with everything “from soup to nuts” by her daughter in the hut where she had taken refuge, no, her home, and she had been served, among other things, “homemade bread.” And now, buying bread in the Sierra bakery, she asked after the girl she had lost track of for the second time. Except that she did not manage to describe a single feature of the young woman, her own flesh and blood, not a single one. Yet she had an image of her, and such a distinct one. Name? What is the child's name?
And at that she realized that she no longer even knew her name; in the course of their long separation, it had escaped her! So what was the vanished girl's name? Only a moment ago she had felt strong enough to bring a mill wheel to a stop with one finger, and the next moment—
The liturgy of preservation continued as she left the settlement behind and climbed toward the summit plain of the Sierra. For as she departed, she was convinced she was seeing the Pedrada region for the last time. Because she, the visitor, would not be around much longer? Because she would never pass this way again, would never set out again for anywhere? No. It seemed to her rather that in the fairly near future the entire tent- or yurt-town, together with the village's old stone houses, would vanish from the face of the earth, perhaps already after the snowmelt, perhaps with the emergence of the summery swarms of flies.
Back home in the riverport city she would stock up on images from all the possible channels, images of the clean-swept mountain and feeder-brook landscape, aerial photographs of leveled ground, where even the granite outcroppings had been flattened; the former tent sites, like the footprints of the houses, recognizable only from fragmentary dark patches here and there in the churned-up ground, portions of circles and rectangles, as from a plane one can see in a plowed field below the darker lines among the otherwise evenly light-colored furrows that indicate where buildings once stood, decades, centuries, millennia earlier, and were cleared away or sank into the ground, and the meandering courses of brooks and rivers that may have disappeared, dried up, or flowed in entirely different directions as much as a million years ago: thus—and certainly worried about herself, “Do not worry!”—she took leave of Pedrada.
A pregnant little dog with piglike bristles (“dog,”
kalb
in Arabic) and a belly whose teats dragged on the sand and stones accompanied her well beyond the upper limits of the town and then even much farther, deep into the mountain steppe; at times remained standing some distance behind her, as if to turn back, but was then beside her again, gazing up expectantly.
And then who had claimed that in the Pedrada region even the children had forgotten how to play? Not that she saw any of them playing—school was still in session—or any proper toys, but at every step of the way, far up into the wilderness, she saw signs of play. While still in the village, where the bedrock had been eroded, forming sandy patches, she saw rows of little craters, like sand and dust baths for small birds, sparrows? (So there were sparrows after all at this elevation? Yes. And as previously mentioned: it is not necessary to avoid a contradiction here and there in her story.) And these bathing hollows, as was clearly recognizable from the markings, were alternately used by the children, or by whom
else? for shooting marbles. Likewise she came upon signs of ninepin games, with wooden sticks set up as the pins, now fallen every which way, and among them, serving as the bowling balls, more or less round fieldstones.
“Or did I merely imagine these Sierra children's games? Did my Sorbian-Arab village interpose its image again? Or, even more likely, my long-ago film set in the Middle Ages, in which the children had to play typical medieval games, with marbles and ninepins?”
The only person she really saw playing, on an athletic field carved out of a wasteland of stones, actually the mere suggestion of one, was the observer from abroad (she passed him unobserved): he was playing basketball by himself, at his knees a cluster of quite small children, not yet old enough for school. The basket, with mere shreds of a net, was bolted to a cliff, high up, and the reporter repeatedly jumped up to it with the ball for a “slam dunk.” He was playing in the sweat of his brow, cheering himself and the children on. They were supposed to join in and get the ball away from him. They were supposed to participate. They were supposed to play, please, please. He almost pleaded with them to play with him. But it was true after all, they did not play. They did not want to play—they were incapable of playing. All these children of Pedrada knew how to do was look on.
And it was even unclear whether they were watching him or something else altogether, for instance a trail of ants crossing the rocks or an invisible joust taking place behind him, fought with lances and swords by two men on horseback, their faces hidden in their visors; who said that the remote playing field there could not just as well have been the lists? Wasn't this the place and the time to approach the solitary player, so that he could accompany her, at least for part of the way? “Not here yet, not now.”
In the telephone booth, up there way beyond the outskirts of Pedrada, surrounded by brambles and honeysuckle vines that formed a sort of lane, she dialed her own number, that of her property on the edge of the riverport city. She had entered the booth without any particular intention, desire, or decision, and had picked up the receiver. In this region there was still, or permanently, no service for her hand telephone.
The booth was far from everything, she later told the author, but besides, it was the one from which she had always called her daughter when crossing the Sierra de Gredos on foot; usually her daughter had stayed home alone (the girl was independent at an early age, or at least wanted
to be). “Everything all right?”—“Yes.”—“Not too lonely?”—“No, no.” And so on. And now? On the first ring, the telephone was picked up, and she had her child's voice in her ear.
And now she also knew her name; it popped out, her only word. But then the voice said, “I am not your daughter. I am the boy from next door, the son of your neighbor in the porter's lodge. I am taking care of your house until you get back.”
And it remained the voice of her vanished child nonetheless, and it continued: “It is my wish that you not be too lonely on your journey. Here everything is all right. I have set the alarm and turned up the heat. The house is warm. The morning sun is shining in. Ah, behind the quinces there I can see the idiot of the outskirts going by. He is rowing with his arms and whistling. And now a train is blowing its whistle. And a few ship's horns are blaring from down on the two rivers, several, many! When are you coming back? You have been gone so long already, such a long time. At night your admirer still circles the property. And each time he leaves a letter in the box for you. I have burned them all, but read them first and committed them to memory—in case you want to hear them. I am not reading a newspaper anymore—no longer need to. Ah, and now it is starting to snow, even though the sun is shining. One letter had no return address; I did not read it. The stamp had mountain peaks, the Sierra de Gredos. No one has asked for you. A hedgehog is going through the orchard right now, slaloming past the trees; shouldn't he be hibernating? A ladder has tipped over. An outdoor table has collapsed. A statue, the one in back by the beech, is missing its head. Your bed looks used. The toys in Salma's or Lubna's room are lying all over the place. Otherwise everything is fine. Ah, now the fireplace screen is rattling. I have made a fire. And the oak roots in the forest that were ripped out of the ground by the storm are more and more matted, and hard as rock.”

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