Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (52 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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When the author in his spot in La Mancha (and
mancha
already meant “spot”), far from the world but not world-forsaken, set to work later on her, and his, book, several versions of her crossing the Sierra de Gredos had already reached his ears, and they all had to do with the sojourn of that roaming woman,
andariega
, in the Hondareda-Camarca region.
Although by nature, or for whatever reason, he was a gullible person, it seemed to him that what was “attested to” and “recounted”—such things were always particularly emphasized in the preambles—was not merely false but also falsified. For these falsifying narrators, who furthermore never identified themselves and claimed to “require anonymity as a shield against predictable acts of revenge,” were plainly intent, and this was revealed by their very first sentence, in the choice of words and even more in the grammar and sentence rhythm, on first selling their story and second maligning their subject, with the latter motive, at least in their opinion, the absolute prerequisite for the former.
But actually they were attempting, in content as well as in form, to accomplish something far worse than mere character assassination, which could have produced exactly the opposite effect on various people in the market they were targeting: the little folks of Hondareda had to be portrayed from A to Z, and from the first adjective to the last verb, as the new Gothamites, dragging sunlight in bushel baskets from outside into their windowless houses or cellar holes, and so on. By treating the life of these settlers, who had made their way to the mountain basin from all over the world, as the stuff of fables and legends, they meant to render it harmless and, yes, unreal.
And these anonymous and apocryphal narrators thought that a particularly clever way to undermine the Hondarederos and those enthusiastic
about their existential experiment, to render them ridiculous and insignificant, was to ascribe to them a belief in utopia, which everywhere else on the planet had become the butt of ridicule, and thus had great commercial potential as a humor-product.
The basic feature of all the apocryphal stories: that a first commandment of the H-people was “to be good and nothing but good.” Which suggested never doing good intentionally; it was enough to be good, with whatever flowed from that. And a variation on such a first commandment in that remote world was allegedly “not to do good but to behave well.”
What followed in the individual false fables, narrated in an exaggerated pseudo-legend style, was, for instance, that one of the new settlers, intent only on being good and behaving well, out of the clear blue sky fell upon a fellow citizen he happened to encounter and almost killed him, with the explanation that those responsible for the misery and wretchedness of the current era, his own as well as everyone else's—and they existed in the flesh, if also hardly in blood—were so inaccessible and so beyond his reach, and anyone's, that he, “good as he was” (apocryphal irony), could not help taking out his impotent rage against all those absentees on the next person who crossed his path … (Typical also of the apocryphal narrators: that they suggested to the imagined reader simply by means of those three dots what he was supposed to think about a subject.)
The local residents were also shunted off into the nonserious realm of the fable by these narrators, under the guise of seriousness, when they asserted that “the citizens of Hondareda” had, by their own testimony, revived a long-dormant tradition of the region, according to which, if one of them had to be the decision-maker—“for heaven's sake, not a leader or master”—he had to exercise this authority not like an Old Testament or even cannibalistic father but “as a brother” (this was the resurrected traditional phrase)—which gave rise to tall tales describing a series of “brother presidents,” whose despotic regimes were not so much intentionally brutal as clumsy, but, because they appeared in “brotherly” guise, turned out to be especially brutal.
And then the author found at least partially believable what he learned from the apocryphal legends: that many of those who had moved to Hondareda from the most distant parts of the globe had gone well beyond borrowing for their new houses here just a few features from the indigenous architecture of their lands of origin: the multiracial person from
Colorado who had returned here to the land of his distant ancestors had added onto the existing cavern in a granite cliff a perfect replica of one of the sandstone dwellings familiar to him from the Navajos back in Colorado (he himself also their descendant … ); another had built on a ledge extending far into the mountain lagoon the spitting image of one of the limestone saltworks houses from the distant land of his birth, such as he had inhabited in Dubrovnik, in the former Yugoslavia, with mounds of raw salt stored in the windowless ground floor; a third had used boards and sticks and broom branches to hammer together a lean-to that represented a copy, if a poor one, of a field hut in his “motherland, Styria, New Austria” …
What made these versions credible in the author's eyes: one detail or another was indubitably true, a date here, a place description there, even an occasional rhythm—which he dubbed “oscillating truth”—: many individual elements were true and effective—had the effect of making the whole thing, the whole story, ring true. But what was ultimately false and falsified, the essence of falsification, was the way in which the apocryphal narrators strung together the accurate details—the swindle resided in the linkages; denying the Hondareda folk any right to exist in the present by transporting their lives into the realm of legend, and thereby reducing them—who was being despotic here?—to manifestations of infantile, self-pitying homesickness. “Does no one notice?” the author shouted (and in his writing shed alternately pounded the table and struck himself on the head).
And at the same time it was precisely the circumstance that he had already heard the story told numerous times, one way or the other—was familiar with it from hearsay and still more hearsay, and discovered that it was constantly being offered to him again—that tempted him to commit it finally to paper in his own way.
Precisely the fact that many versions of a story already existed had always motivated him to become its author far more than anything else, whether tragedy, comedy, unique occurrence, or whatever, and to him it was no contradiction that “author” means “originator”; when so much and so many different things were told about a topic, there must be something to it, something to mine from its “original” form.
And now every day there was a sort of Hondareda story in installments again—to the author the clearest indication that what was taking place, or had taken place, there represented a problem, in the sense that
it gave him a push or rather got him moving, a subject, one that lit a fire under him. What troubled him this time was only that the story had been commissioned. But was the initial assignment still in force? When the once powerful woman from the northwestern riverport city arrived in his house on the edge of the steppe in La Mancha, after crossing the Sierra de Gredos, was she merely pretending to be his client, and then? not even pretending anymore?
Yes, it was true—thus her reply, which for a long time consisted only of a silent play of expressions, to the reporter from abroad up there on the granite outcropping—each of the new settlers of Hondareda lived primarily in isolation, at most sharing his time in the morning and evening with his young housemate, usually a grandson, often still a child.
And, yes, except for particular occasions, people there seemed to go out of their way to avoid each other. How skinny, how exaggeratedly skinny, they made themselves when they passed each other in the rocky alleys. What glassy eyes, almost rigid with fear, they had when they looked at each other, only at each other? no, also when they were walking by themselves, and the fear in that case was decidedly more noticeable, though at the same time related less to something in the present than to the lingering effect of an earlier experience, actually mitigated a bit by the encounter with a neighbor.
Yes, the way they had of giving each other the widest berth possible—even out on the open mountain tundra, even while swimming in the lake, with its patches of bog-warm water—a way of backing off and wheeling to go in the opposite direction, and if a person turned to look at another after all, he would then walk backward, backward as if rigid with fear.
And there was some truth to the observation, made in Hondareda by her opposite number up there on the rock outcropping, that the neighbors spied on one another. True: the extraordinary technical skills the new settlers all possessed were used primarily for finding out what the neighbors were up to. Yes, they had things like peri-periscopes, more sophisticated than those in submarines, in every one of their dwellings, which from the outside seemed to be shielded, or, you could say, armored, and with these devices one person could see around a thousand and one corners into another's cooking pots and books, under lamps and cap visors, even under eyelids, could see the top of another's head, his hands, his mouth.
But, no, it is not that they want to spy on their neighbors so as to catch them doing something or corner them. Rather, they hope this spying will allow them to be in the company of others—to feel at one with them—to be with them. Ah, now my neighbor over there is running a bath for his grandchild. And now the other neighbor is sweeping out his workshop. And now my third neighbor is finally coming home, turning on the light in his glassed-in veranda—in the Hondareda enclave they have generally reintroduced rotary switches, likewise rotary dials on the telephones—and is pacing up and down, up and down—is he not feeling well?—is turning the light off again, sitting down, bowing his head, holding his head in his hands, rocking it, moving his lips, singing, yes, the grandfather over there is singing, and even though I cannot hear the song, I recognize it, I know it, and I am singing along over here.
And it is also correct that the Hondarederos, whenever they have time—and they almost always have time—post themselves on their property lines, each on the edge of his fairly narrow lot, and lie in wait for one another. But what we are lying in wait for, with ears cocked, hands poised, and knees and feet ready to break into a dash, perhaps for instance toward a shirt blown by the wind over the wall marking the property line, a dress, a handkerchief: so that we can promptly hand it back to our neighbor, ladder to ladder against the wall, or it is a ball: if only it would fly by accident again onto my land, and I, in an elegant, utterly natural gesture, could kick it back, without a word, with sleight of foot, as if the child next door had sent it my way on purpose.
Or we intentionally lob our own ball over the property line and wait to see what will happen next. Or we lie in wait, with our whole body pressed against the wall, the impenetrable fence, the barrier of broom berries and intertwined roots, for a call for help from across the way, for sobs, for whimpers, not out of ordinary curiosity or malice, but in the sense in which we also lie in wait for a singing or humming—not random singing or humming—and also for simply a kind and gentle voice from next door.
We watch our neighbors from all sides in this fashion because we wish them only well, and because, for our part, we feel protected and reassured by whatever we see and hear them doing, just as we, for our part, allow something to blow, or throw something, over to their side, in the hope that it will be brought or thrown back.
Or we engage in small, tolerated violations of each other's boundaries, and also of each other's property, and thereby show that our neighbor's land, what grows on it, and thus also our neighbor himself, attracts us and is dear to our hearts. There is no greater proof of our respect for him than for us to let him catch us—to make a point of letting him see us—as we enter his greenhouse (neither dwellings nor other buildings are locked here) and, as calmly as you please, go over to his apple, pear, or orange tree and let one, never more than one, fruit, just for our own consumption, drop into our hand, and promptly bite into it. (In Hondareda the word “let” is one of the most frequently used verbs.) And I am flattered and appeased in turn when my neighbor clambers into my yard.
And thus a saying has come into use among us: even though we give each other a wide berth when we happen to meet, etc.—which does not mean the same thing it means elsewhere—sometimes the other person calls out to me, “I saw you!” which implies, however, neither a warning nor a threat, but the opposite, and along with “Not to worry!” and “Who's counting!” is one of the greeting formulas regularly heard in the Hondareda region.
And besides, it is only superficially accurate to say that the immigrants hardly communicate with each other and at most utter a few empty phrases: precisely by means of these empty or coded formulas, which sound strange to an outsider, they convey a number of things to the other person, even beyond ordinary communication; in which case it is always the voice, yes, the voice of the fellow resident, that provides this additional element.
Nowhere else in the world had she, the adventurer, the roamer, heard voices like these here. They were not trained voices, not those of announcers or actors, such as various members of the observation team had. These immigrants' voices took one by surprise. She understood the observer when he was put off by the inhabitants' appearance, more vagabondish than hers by
x
rips in their clothing and
y
tangles in their hair and
z
scaly patches on their faces. Yes, they resembled a peculiar cross between knights and beggars.

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