Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (47 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

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The eating and drinking had had an effect on those confused folk and their jumbled senses, thoughts, and words, an effect similar to that which a certain kind of reading had on other survivors, a reading that was neither skimming nor poking around nor devouring, but a reflective tracing, in places also spelling out and deciphering, and if ultimately it was a form of consuming after all, it was a kind of inhaling, a breathing in (and out). Such meals represented time saved in two ways, much as reading did, and also rhythmic (recreational) walking.
Like those survivor-readers glancing into a book, the survivor-eaters there had been impelled by tasting to look up and raise their heads for contemplation, some for release from themselves, some for relaxation, some for excitement, and finally some for the pleasure of communicating and sharing—as among the previously mentioned readers out of the desire to read aloud or even to act on something they had long ago resolved to do, an action postponed almost past the time for it—which only now, with reading, with tasting, became possible and accessible—even if such an action, in the presence of food, just as in the presence of books, should express itself merely in a seemingly meaningless hug given to a random stranger.
The reporter presumably replied to her as follows: “The Deep Enclosure? The Pleasant Plantation? We outside observers have another name for the basin of Hondareda: The Dark Clearing. And this is no paradox or play on words now; I do not want you to have sawn off my ponytail in vain. The term ‘Dark Clearing' actually stems from an observation shared by all who were dispatched here: as a result of the belt of trees planted around the bottom of the basin or arena, the area it encircles has taken on the character of a classic clearing, a
clarière
, a
tschistina
, a
claro
—the expressions in all languages have to do with brightness. But in Hondareda, darkness mixes in with the brightness that remains trapped in the light, smooth rocks and rock dwellings, evident each time one looks, a gloom specific to the place. Contrary to the assertion that they live in a clearing, darkness prevails there. The interior of the surrounding dense conifer forests is an opaque black. And this black does not remain confined to the forest. It is constantly reaching for the open area. True: the mountain sun, together with its reflection in the glacial lake and its more colorful, varied, warm reflection in the indeed wondrously smooth granite hilltops—you see, I am not merely an observer!—provides a heightened light to the circle of the settlement, light such as I have never encountered in any other clearing in the world.
“This much is also true: when one sets foot in this space for the first time, one involuntarily says to oneself: How beautiful this is. What beauty. Where am I? One does not want to leave. One? I. Something has begun to happen. Something is beginning to happen. Something will begin to happen. I will begin to do something. My thinking will change—will become larger, wider—and correspondingly brighter. Warmhearted. Moved by love and intent on love.
“And on all subsequent occasions as well, when, after the long climb from the Tormes valley below and the descent to the bottom of the basin, I had the clearing before me, in the first tenth of a second something surged up in me—something like a moment of being airborne (which, now that we come here by helicopter rather than on foot, no longer happens—peace at last, thanks to objectivity).
“But even that first time, upon my stepping into the clearing, after five to eight paces toward its center, it became obvious that the special light there is an illusion. It is only a feeling. It does not count. What does count, and what in fact prevails, is the pitch blackness that confronts one in the middle of this allegedly new land, as it glows in the sun and all the colors of midday, the blackness emanating from the surrounding stand of trees, which has the character of a jungle-like primeval forest, although it was planted only a short while ago. The blackness, instead of perhaps softening the brightness, relativizing it, or, if you will, grounding it, cancels out the promise or the prophecy that seems initially to radiate from the local light, and makes my feeling null and void, and properly so. Dark Clearing.
“And as befits this kind of a dark clearing, those who have immigrated there, the objects of my observation, exist and conduct themselves according to its standards, under the spell of its darkness. In settling there they have certainly not struck out to find the light and the air of a different era, but are lying in wait, which is what the hunters and gatherers did in dark prehistoric times, and gloomily—more gloomy and numb than prehistoric people can possibly have been—otherwise they would hardly have evolved.
“I am speaking in paradoxes? This tribe of bumblers
lives
them. These folks produce nothing, not even contradictions, which would be a kind of productivity: they cling to the unproductive dream of an upside-down world. Even in their shadowy hunter-gatherer ways the signs have been reversed: gathering—listen to this!—is considered, and not only officially, by my dear Hondareda idiots, to be an activity that brutalizes the individual as well as the group and carries with it the danger of spiritual decadence, while hunting, on the other hand, is seen as an opportunity for achieving greater humanity.
“It, yes, hunting, first of all, hones one's attention, and in a fundamentally different way from gathering: in contrast to the latter, hunting does not narrow one's field of vision but rather widens it, literally to infinity.
According to them, hunting, tracking, and the like involves the entire body, increases circumspection, makes one aware of the terrain—in distinction to the gatherer's mere knowledge of the best places to find things—and in particular develops in those who practice it endless patience.
“But gathering threatens to cripple the body and the soul. It even interferes with and distorts the erect posture. And altogether, collecting is the province of impure ulterior motives and top-heaviness, the province of envy, greed, avarice, and other cardinal sins. More than hunting, gathering can degenerate into hostility, not so much the activity itself as the motives and sidelong looks associated with it. Gathering makes people small, in particular by shrinking all the others with and around the gatherer, not only because of his gaze, which is constantly focused on the ground, on crevices, on the underbrush, instead of scanning the sky or staying at normal eye level, and eventually makes them disappear and/or magnifies them into seeking-and-gathering rivals.
“And thus those who populate the dark clearing live in other respects, too, as prisoners of their paradoxes and of their upside-down and constantly backpedaling worlds. Listen to me. Not only do they live in shacks, caves, and dugouts like the first and last human beings. They speak more to their cattle than to each other, even to the most puny animals, and to objects. And they treat the objects and the livestock more attentively and tenderly than I ever observed them treating their next-door neighbor.
“Time and again during the year I have spent up here I have witnessed some person or other waving to an eagle swooping around the peak of the Almanzor, also to a mountain raven, a vulture, a marmot—whose whistling elicited a response,—an Alpine hare. Like certain mentally retarded people, they have the ability to find something that pleases them in literally everything, the most nondescript plant, the most shapeless and useless stone. And they show their true colors perhaps most distinctly in one custom they all share—although each goes his own way, they have developed what an outsider can recognize as shared customs—of tracing in the air with their hands or fingers the living beings and also the inanimate objects to which they address themselves all day long—that almost seems to be their chief occupation—while they are talking to them.
“As they pass by a rocky hummock, a silver thistle, an ant heap, they one and all sketch the essential outlines of these things in the air and even run their fingertips over them, probably to regain their almost lost
sense of touch. They draw a fish that has leaped out of the laguna or a bird that has whirred over them, following its lines in the air until they have registered them accurately; only then, according to the custom that in the meantime has acquired the force of law, are they allowed to turn their attention to something else.
“The astonishing part, however, is that the following happens with some of the animals they have thus portrayed in the air: the animals turn up again; the salmon or the trout leaps out of the water a second time, the kite that had whizzed behind a towering rock comes back and circles again, and so on. It is as if the creatures of the earth, water, and air now wanted to salute in turn the person who has just reproduced their structure, along with their specific leaping or flying motion, with his tender, yes, loving air-sketching.
“This salutation-like copying or modeling in the wind can, admittedly, even prove useful from time to time and have its good side. More than once I have observed an otherwise dangerous animal being calmed in this fashion, or at least stopped in its tracks for a few seconds, which, however, were life-saving seconds. A raging mountain bull, a wild sow hurtling toward a Hondaredero who has unintentionally cut her off from her young: the form of the bull or the sow drawn in large strokes—yes, always in large, swirling, harmonious strokes!—and at once the sow and bull stopped for an interval, shorter or longer, as if spellbound, and let the human being pass. Instead of cliff drawings, air drawings. The Dark Clearing.
“And besides, what hunters these people up here claim to be! To be sure, they lie in wait in the strip of forest from dawn till dusk with their thoroughly modern shotguns, and occasionally take aim and fire, too. But to this day I have not been able to discover what animals they are hunting. I think, no, I do not think, I am sure, that they have no intention of hunting down and killing anything. They are merely practicing. They are practicing hunting and being hunters for its own sake, not for some future emergency or for putting their skill to work. Practicing is enough for them.
“But what are they practicing? When I tried to research this question, I received the same answer, verbatim, from every single practice hunter, although they never compare notes with each other: I am practicing so as to become composed.—Composed for what? And here again all the answers were identical, though in all the different languages: Composed, without any why or wherefore. To gain composure. To acquire
composure, not for any particular purpose, for everything and nothing. Composure is all.
“And not merely because this last dictum, spoken, what is more, in unison, has a sinister after-tone: talk like this again points to the regression syndrome of my new settlers, in the sense that in positing a vague, undefined, undefinable composure that defies rational documentation, it aims to smuggle back myth into this world of ours, which for centuries has had nothing more to say, interpret, and convey in this genre—the myth of one who went forth to gain composure, thereby propagating a new knighthood, one that in reality had long since become obsolete.
“The knights of the Dark Clearing! The world has never seen more unsightly knights, and that, now, is my last play on words (speaking to you, I realize that in my previous life I spent too much time as a headline-writer). They are a cross between would-be knights, clay-pit dwellers, and vagabonds, the ugliest cross possible.
“By birth they are all crossbreeds. Did you know that your ancestors all came from here in the Sierra de Gredos, from the mountain valleys and gullies along the río Tormes in the north, from the villages and towns down there at the southern base of the range, between the steep drop and the lowland of the río Tiétar, from San Martín de la Vega del Alberque, from Aliseda, from San Esteban del Valle, from Santa Cruz del Valle, from Mombeltrán, from Arenas de San Pedro, from Jarandilla de la Vera, from Jaraiz de la Vera, and, yes, from Candeleda? That your ancestors departed from the Sierra region centuries ago and emigrated, leaving Europe for all continents, often venturing to the borders of the known world of the time, which their travels then expanded?
“One such ancestor, for instance, comes from the town of El Barco de Ávila, the bark of Ávila, in the west, where the río Tormes flows out of the central massif, and he was the helmsman,
el tripulante
, of the ship on which Christopher Columbus discovered America, no, plural, the Americas, just as in those days it was not yet called ‘Spain,' in the singular,
La España
, but
Las Españas
, and similarly not
La Italia
but
Las Italias
.
“A century later, another ancestor traveled as a missionary to China, there dropped out of his order, married a native, and established his crossbreed family. A third, long before that, at the time of the Crusades, fathered a child with an Arab woman, with whom he stayed. A forebear of yours settled at the far end of each of the gold, silver, platinum, silk, and spice routes and intermarried with Mongols, Indians, Jews, Slavs, blacks.
“And today, as if by prior arrangement, their descendants have come here from the most distant continents and islands to be together in this place, which they regard as their ancestral land, and not without justification—but for what purpose? to regain composure? and have they really come together when each keeps strictly to himself?
“That, too, presumably forms part of their would-be myth: a return to their ancestral land; even though, when asked, each one of them, all of them again in complete agreement, will insist that the Hondareda basin is neither the land of his fathers nor a homeland; the Pleasant Plantation—in truth, an almost felicitous expression, at least at times—remains foreign territory to them, so foreign that it could not appear more so to any human being, foreign root, branch, and sky—but not the kind of foreign territory described in a saying common in these parts, passed down from those ancestors who emigrated—not the foreign territory, not at all the kind of foreign territory ‘where the doors slam shut on your heels.'
“This place where they are living, as each of them asserts, uninfluenced by neighbors and houses next door, is the foreign place visualized and reserved by them for the duration and for good—though precisely not the kind of foreign place of which a poet's description was passed down from their forefathers: a foreign place where, when music from afar reached a person's ears, the sound rent his heart, because it made him realize: Never shall I return to my home. But if music from afar was heard here in the Pleasant Plantation, it ‘heartened' one and strengthened one in one's resolve to stick it out in these foreign parts and never to reinterpret them or transform them into something other than what they essentially were and—another of those unwritten laws—should remain: foreign, foreign, foreign.

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